Accounts by local historians speak of Harefield as blessed, one of the earth’s bright places. It might be the situation, looking west over the valley of the Colne, but the PR is justified. (We spoke of the name Hare-Field. Of Foucault’s ships of fools, hippie narrow boats on the Grand Union Canal. Of how sailors could never use the word ‘hare’. It was considered an unlucky thing. An ancient prohibition, unexplained, that came with the craft. Hares and boats didn’t mix. Hare was a burrower, a chthonic spirit. Boxer, dancer, trickster. Hare was a companion of witches. His foot was a specific against sorcery. The term ‘hare’ is hidden in ‘heart’. Hare is heart, a lunar spirit. Mad in March. Mad with good heart.)
Harefield holds firm to a particular narrative. The back story has not been deleted, but entrusted to one of their own – Mary Shepherd, former senior thoracic surgical registrar at Harefield and Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons. Shepherd’s Heart of Harefield (The Story of a Hospital) is an insider’s legend: anecdotal, properly sourced and attributed, humane. Copies of the book, approved history, can be purchased on site.
The Harefield tourist pauses to flick through the illustrations, checking monochrome prints against present reality. This publication, while looking like a National Trust calendar, performs a useful service: it tells patients what they can expect, it grounds them in the privilege of place. The journey to Harefield, knowing that some trauma, insults to the immune system, devastation to body chakras, lies ahead, is a time of stress. Shepherd’s narrative prepares future victims, guiding them through the levels of anaesthesia. The expedition to the house on the hill is made in fearful expectation, dread of the consultant’s verdict. The trees of the long avenue become obstacles around which mental anchors are cast, slowing the car, postponing this awful moment.
Harefield Park is mapped with pain. Fifty thousand wounded Australians were treated during the First World War. Many are buried in the village church. The soldiers, walking out, visiting pubs, making friends with local children, left a print on the territory. Convalescence is the slow release of pain-memories, the shifting of horror from sand and hot rock to damp English greenery.
Therapeutic rituals are initiated, to reassert normality, life before war, home life. Cricket, always. Cricket on a rough meadow. Photographs of cricket. A nurse, in full uniform, hands spread wide, is behind the wicket. The batsman, in military cap, heavy serge jacket, keeps his eye on the ball. Playing in the Aussie spirit that marries technical correctness with bloody-minded determination, he does his best to move his front foot into line. But it’s not possible. He doesn’t have a front foot, or leg. It’s been amputated, just below the knee. The man in the bush hat, fielding dangerously close in, at – ouch! – short-leg, is watching the bowler, not the batsman. His right arm is in a sling. No worries, mate, they’ll stuff any eleven Englishmen. By lunchtime on the third day.
Harefield doctors liked their cricket and weren’t too bothered about cars. Cricket was part of the ethos. The Welshman Dr Kenneth Stokes, Medical Director between 1940 and 1959, was quite happy to share his house and his car, a ‘plucky little bus’, with the Matron, Beatrice Shaw. He relaid the cricket square that the Aussies marked out in the First War and he built a pavilion. Matches were arranged, the team travelling by van, against the Uxbridge Electricity Works and the Chalfonts Epileptic Colony.
After the days of Stokes, Harefield was seen as less of a village, more of a suburb, ‘an extension of London’. Sir Thomas Holmes Sellors spoke of the difficulties of a hospital ‘built without the city walls’. Nurses, willing to banish themselves to the countryside, were scarce. Relatives and friends of patients found the journey to Harefield long and difficult. Cars were important. Nurses drove to Ruislip to visit cinemas and restaurants. The sense of Harefield as a private estate, protected by the river valley, cushioned by golf courses (Moor Park, Sandy Lodge, Northwood, Haste Hill) and other Mediparcs (Mount Vernon and the Radium Institute Hospital), was threatened. Everything was changed by the coming of the motorway.
The M25 was a blue-grey pulmonary artery; oxygen and nutrients carried to the cells (cars, units of housing). The liberties of the old park were terminated. The wild cats, a free-ranging tribe with about seventy members, were rationalised: inoculated, neutered, hunted. The last cat was shot in 1986.
Now the work force is migratory. ‘Everybody has a car.’ Cars surround the buildings. Twenty-five acres of the north park have to be sold. The cricket-loving Dr Stokes, who doted on his ‘decrepit and bird spattered’ Ruby Austin 7, didn’t indulge in serious commutes. On 9 July 1959, he took a run down to the village. Sitting in his tin box, he suffered a heart attack and died at the wheel.
Recovering heart patients, where it was appropriate, were encouraged to walk, a few steps across the ward, a tottering excursion to the corridor, before the release into the grounds: until they were clocking up fifteen or twenty miles a week (the winter distance of one of our orbital walks).
We are superstitious about major surgery. The place where it happens, this Aztec ripping of a heart from the cavity of the chest, fills us with dread. I wouldn’t say as much to Renchi but the fear clings: they’ll keep us, they won’t let us out. We’ll have to pay, in flesh, for our casual tourism, this unsanctioned stroll around the Tenochtitlán of the Colne Valley.
On a 1542 map, made for the Spanish viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, the city of Tenochtitlán is symbolised by an eagle, wings spread, perched on a cactus. The omen guided the Aztecs to the site of their capital. One of the Harefield photographs I take of Renchi has him standing in front of a building with a one-armed clock. On the roof is an eagle with spread wings. The coach house. The clock never moves, it’s a painting.
The eagle was a significant symbol for the first occupant of The Mansion, Sir George Cooke. The ‘Eagle Room’ was the most important room in the house. If the hare is a lunar creature, the eagle is the sun. In alchemy the eagle is the liberated spirit released from the prima materia. Zeus commands an eagle to devour a portion of the liver of Prometheus, the fire thief. Each night the liver renews itself, so that the torment can recommence on the following day. The outline of the myth is well known but we forget the reason for the withdrawal from humanity of the gift of fire: Prometheus tricked the gods when he divided a sacrificed ox. He arranged flesh, entrails, edible matter to one side and left the bones on the other, under a coat of succulent white fat. Prometheus, chained, suffers his punishment for an eternity, until Hercules slays the eagle and sets him free.
Reading about the procedures that took place in Harefield, the technical advances, doesn’t help. My heart thumps loudly, standing in for the mechanism of the clock that freezes time. As a metaphor the heart is too assertive; several of the Harefield administrators died, at work, of heart attacks. This is not surprising; the layout of the hospital, with its ‘oxygen storage’ sheds, its intricate system of paths and walkways, its sealed chambers, becomes a pictogram of the heart. I think of my father and grandfather dying suddenly, out of the blue, when their hearts gave out. At home, in a chair, after a shopping expedition; on the pavement, outside the house, after an uphill walk.
Because we have come here from the canal, with the motorway as our sound-strip, running at the edge of the frame, we see Harefield in terms of the drowned, of roadkill; a deepfreeze waiting for spare parts. Magdi Yacoub is the Egyptian virtuoso. Fate-defying surgical feats extend life beyond all reasonable expectation. Changes of heart. The ‘Domino Procedure’ during which hearts are shunted, person to person, in a frantic game of pass the parcel. Patients would, under certain circumstances, undergo full heart/lung transplants, even when their hearts were healthy, because combined transplants have proved more successful. The ‘spare’ heart would then be utilised in a second transplant operation.
In 1987 the first ‘triple’ (heart/lung/liver) was carried out at Harefield. A heart/lung transplant in 1983 cost around £25,000. Roughly the sum expended in servicing the empty Millennium Dome for one day (essenti
al maintenance, security, utility bills, insurance, PR). The dead Dome ticks away, New Labour’s tell-tale heart, at £13 a minute, while Harefield fights to stay in the game. Hospitals, it has been declared, must become ‘self-governing’, part of a Trust within the NHS. They are obliged to provide a service that will attract the right clients, the ones who can pay. Income will then rise and hospitals will have ‘the freedom (within limits) to borrow money’.
We don’t know it, but this is another of our obituary circuits; Harefield is doomed. The news-spinners waited for 11 September 2001 before making their announcement: the hospital would close, it would be moved into town. Much more convenient. Valuable real estate could be released on to a market desperate for housing. A done deal.
Time whirls in tight vortices: ghosts of the big house, rose garden, sun-dial, are slow to decay; they are overwhelmed by the clamour of the Australian convalescents in their huts, the mortal theatre of transplant surgery. Lost lives. There are tales of patients, during that period when consciousness is lost, when they sink into meat-memory, blood forced around the body, functions taken over by machines; reveries of floating, becoming one with the orbital sunstream, the cars on the road. Rib cages split like broken toast-racks. For a short time there is no heart in the cavity. Arteries are outlined with radio-opaque fluid: a night map of the M25. After coronary artery bypass grafts, the graftee is confused, suffering from double vision, speech and thought out of synch. They’ve been given the wrong script. When the recovering patient can speak, when the tube has been removed from the trachea, he admits that several days have been ‘lost’. They’ve gone. They’ve entered the ecosphere of the parkland. Or so, walking slowly across the damp lawns, we imagine.
*
Among the unsolicited items that turned up in Jiffy bags, at the time when I was writing my book about the M25 walks, was a VHS tape with the label The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz. My agent (who sent it) had very little information to impart: ‘German subtitles’. There was no letter of explanation, no production notes. They had been mislaid. I wasn’t in a rush to play this one: an Ashes series was just beginning, there were video logs from my own road trips.
Muggy heat in the centre of London, unconvinced breezes (diesel backdrafts) in West Thurrock. I returned, exhilarated, from a trip to Purfleet. The photographer Effie Paleologou, seven months pregnant, was banged up in a cabin-sized room in the Ibis Hotel. Accompanied by a friend who could help with the hauling of equipment, she was undertaking a twenty-four-hour conceptual project: one minute of tape shot every hour, on the hour. Plus: three exposures (playing safe with F-stops) on her still camera. Behind this exercise, surveillance as art, lay Don DeLillo’s ghost story, The Body Artist.
She spent hours at the computer screen looking at a live-streaming video feed from the edge of a two-lane road in a city in Finland. It was the middle of the night in Kotka, Finland, and she watched the screen. It was interesting to her because it was happening now, as she sat here, and because it happened twenty-four hours a day, facelessly, cars entering and leaving Kotka, or just the empty road in the dead times. The dead times were best.
West Thurrock (the view over the Queen Elizabeth Bridge) was a seductive area to film. Visiting Effie had the added advantage of a run down the A13. The wobbly yellow chips outside McDonald’s at the Warner Centre, Dagenham. The Ford water tower. Container stacking yards, pylons. All my old favourites.
Effie’s high window, double-glazed, looked across a glinting paddock of cars waiting for export, the Purfleet refineries and storage tanks. Purfleet was the fabled site of Dracula’s abbey, Carfax. Distribution of blood has now become distribution of (Esso) petrol.
After watching the afternoon’s video diary – Lakeside, Ibis Hotel, A13 – I was ready to sample at least three of The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz. Katz was a good name, the name of the Brick Lane string shop, the last Hasidic enterprise in Bangla-town; the place where I had first seen the work of Rachel Lichtenstein.
The VHS, with its unexplained German subtitles, is credited, script and direction, to Ben Hopkins. It opens on the M25, a (sha)manic hitchhiker appears from nowhere (a hole in the ground), to wave down a passing London cab. Disbelief dutifully suspended, I let the tape run. There’s a tradition of road crazies, asylum escapees picking up unlikely lifts. Our cabbie is no Ralph Meeker. He’s a fat man. The hitchhiker, dressed in a long coat hung with bones, looks like an English Civil War veteran, a Digger on his way to St George’s Hill, near Wey-bridge. He’s a dream-catcher, a shape-shifter. He summons the cabbie’s recurrent nightmare, a post-operative trauma involving the Happy Eater creature, a giant pink bug dripping the blood of the cabbie’s cannibalised child. The source of the dream, so the visionary explains, is the cabbie’s new heart – which was borrowed from a pig. ‘A baboon,’ the sweating driver insists. ‘It was a baboon.’
On the level of myth, road and heart were always interlinked. The orbital (going nowhere, being everywhere) motorway sweeps up London’s lucid dreaming. Harefield, with its reserve blood stocks, and Purfleet (with its vampiric traces) confirm the heart as metaphor. Blood is an international commodity, the base trade. Drained arms for asylum seekers and junkies, quality stock laid down by the wealthy. Pre-donation is the advised policy. Leaflets are distributed at all luxuriously appointed private hospitals, suggesting that ‘many people who have to undergo major elective surgery… now choose to deposit their own blood. This removes the risk of infection… Blood can be stored in our blood bank.’
Surgical procedures affect the way we picture the M25; ‘clotting’ in Harefield is twinned with sluggish traffic, stalled cars in the Heathrow corridor. Emergency lights flash. Cardiac arrest. The heart has its quadrants, dividing London into four unequal quarters. When they opened the skull of Ian Hacking’s mad walker, the man who paced his neurotic circuits, trying to fit ‘heavens and angels’ into the bowl of bone, they were searching for a road map, a physical explanation. Landfill sites in Essex (gunpowder mills, foot-and-mouth burning pits) damage the fragile balance. Road rage in Swanley. Disorientation in Surrey. The man who went blind but kept on driving along the hard shoulder. We have to learn to walk the damage, repair the hurt.
Out on the road a forensic vocabulary is brought into play. Highway patrols talk of ‘foxtrot fatals’. Planners mourn ‘severed communities’, ‘undrained cohesion’. ‘Bypass’ is a term common to both sets of initiates. Artery, flow, circuit. Cardiac teams deal with the heart as a malfunctioning machine. Drivers, enduring the grind between Junctions 10 and 17 of the M25, slide through layers of anaesthesia: from panic to yawning detachment, from waking dreams and hallucinations to blackout. Helicopters that ferry roadkill hearts, urgent meat, are now being proposed as the only solution to motorway jams. A rapid response unit will move in on any ‘blockage’, freeing circulation, bringing respite to coronary candidates in their sweating pods.
Ben Hopkins wrote the script for Thomas Katz in Essex, ‘over a long, hot weekend, in a rather strange mood of delirium’. He saw the M25 as ‘a doughnut’, a cholesterol hoop; the jammy outside of nothing. A sugar tunnel. A caul between motorist and the external (always moving) world.
Looked at from above, traced in red (to represent the paths we have walked), the M25 defines London as a hammered and misshapen heart. Atria and ventricles. The four compartments, divided by the journey from Dome to Waltham Abbey (completed), and Dome to Clacket Lane (still to come). And by the River Thames. The contractions of the city squeeze the muscle, drive the blood on its circuit.
The city is only inhabitable if it exploits (as part of its placement on earth) the notion of circuits, orbits, spirals. The early visions of Utopians called up rational designs, the circle within the circle. ‘One symbol of original perfection is the circle,’ wrote Eric Neumann in The Origins and History of Consciousness. ‘Allied to it are the sphere, the egg and the rotundum – the “round” of alchemy… Circle, sphere, and round are all aspects of the self-contained, which is without beginning and end, i
n its preworldly perfection it is prior to any process, eternal, for in its roundness there is no before and no after, no time, and there is no above and no below, no space.’
It was easy, given the talk of hearts, the labyrinthine wanderings through Harefield Park, to elevate our sweaty stroll into a Blakean pilgrimage: the twisting Mount Pleasant road, from river valley to park, became Blake’s envisioning of Dante, The Ascent of the Mountain of Purgatory. Studying Blake’s drawings in the big Tate Britain exhibition (in November 2000), I couldn’t help reading the Dante spirals as models for a celestial M25. Dante and Virgil, in the second circle of Hell, on a cliff (or motorway bridge), watch the tumbled bodies of the Lustful as they swim, nose-to-tail, up a gridlocked whirlwind.
The problem is that our heart/road metaphors are clogging up: language overload. Blake’s vortex of steroidal sinners (sunlight glinting on a never-ending procession) is a depiction of word-jam, logorrhea; nothing is, everything is a simile. A psychotic condition. Impossible to transcribe: how all the London visionaries insisted on the necessity of a system of concentric circles.
Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford) published an extraordinary essay, ‘The Future in London’, in 1909. Ford recognised that roads were ‘the chief feature of a city’s life’. Without its roads, London was a dry sponge. ‘If I can walk along roads that I like I am happy, alert, energetic, and as much of a man as I can be.’ The wellbeing of the man and the wellbeing of the city were linked, freedom of movement, walks were the key to the good life. Ford looked back to a period when it was not unusual to stroll from Fleet Street to Hampstead, Westminster to Richmond; for dinner, conversation, a moonlit return. Victorian clerks, as Dickens frequently demonstrated, hiked to the City from Camden, Holloway or Walworth.
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