Some monkey-drumming battery, or Puritan residue, keeps Kevin on the move, an exuberant neurosis of achievement. Been everywhere, read everything, but he hasn’t come up with the right kit for Staines. The leather rucksack hangs too low on his back, it’ll bruise the spine. He’s midway through the photography course; studied the masters, penned the thesis, bought the camera. One small detail overlooked: no film stock. The gleaming jacket, authentically frontier (envelope-pushing, ass-kicking), is too heavy. It will cook him if he wears it; cripple him if he carries it. The greying hair is probably long enough to keep the sun off his scalp, but he’s not hefting any water, or packing plasters. Yellow trailbreaker boots may look great at the timber line (tested in Notting Hill), they’re an overreaction to the Thames path, the lazy villages of Surrey. The preppie striped shirt with button-down collar and pen in pocket is fine, if a little tight fitting for a day of swinging arms and excited conversational semaphore.
Renchi is waiting at Staines station: blue shirt tied into piratical bandanna, loose sweater, rucksack packed with maps, water, spare T-shirts. I pose the two men under the hoarding: the Silk Cut scarecrow has been replaced by a fake US Marine, a black and white BT ad. The affronted sergeant (old-timer with moustache) and jug-eared recruit, muddy from route march. The freshness and bright expectancy of our two strollers play ominously against their oversize counterparts.
From the window of the station café, I see the Marine sergeant, mouth wide in a silent scream. He is both promoting Cellnet and demonstrating how you can live without it: Just Shout. The sky, bad news for Kevin’s body-armour, is an unbroken blue; of a purity that cohabits with the glassy surface of the Formica rectangles on which our plates of poached eggs and thick buttery toast rest, waiting for a break in the chat.
The café, convenient for station, town and river, is so true to itself that we award it the immortality of the unnoticed. The building is twinned with the Slough Electrical repair shop, outside which is parked a Vespa motor scooter. Bodged Bauhaus. Flat roof (with shipboard rails), metal-trim windows, narrow doorways; white paint showing signs of weathering. Light pours in, casting precise shadows across wood-panel walls. Tables are small and set close together to encourage intimacy with other all-day breakfasters. If you want democracy, the free debate of the Levellers and Ranters, this is where you’ll find it. Elbow to elbow with layabouts, semi-urban casuals. Readers of yesterday’s newspapers.
Kevin Jackson’s account of the day’s walk, published in the Independent (as ‘Putting London in Its Place’), is very good on our induction into Staines café society. We noticed the other dilettantes, the early loungers (two skiving, one in permanent residence), but that didn’t stop us pulling out the maps and associated literature. Kevin, I realise, is taking everything down in a neat notebook. Like a proper journalist. Or TV policeman. (I’m with the old-time coppers who always wrote up their notes after the event. Selective memories.)
We might have got away with it – if Renchi had held back on Mary Caine’s The Kingston Zodiac, which he’d picked up on one of his visits to Glastonbury. Advancing from Waltham Abbey to Shenley, by way of Temple Bar, we were in my liminal territory, we ran with my myths: star ceilings, Rodinsky, John Clare in Epping Forest, Hawksmoor’s grave. Now that we were about to cross the river into Surrey, I was adrift. Renchi would act as our guide.
Mary Caine, inspired by Mrs Katharine Maltwood’s A Guide to Glastonbury’s Temple of the Stars, had marked up the country around her base in Kingston in accordance with the configurations of a spiritual zodiac. The blue and gold ceiling of Waltham Abbey church would be reasserted as a metaphor – by a walk that carried us, initially, down the back of the Dog. ‘Huge hounds guard these circles,’ warned Mary Caine.
Glastonbury, mound rising out of the Somerset levels, is easy to map (and read) in terms of gigantic ‘effigies’. Motorways, warehousing, ribbon development and private estates do not complicate the picture. The outlines of ancient field systems are still visible from the air. Mrs Maltwood’s Dog is Gwyn Ab Nudd, ‘the British Pluto’. His pedigree is Celtic and he inhabits The High History of the Holy Graal. The Hound is formed ‘by conducting channels of water between immense artificial earthworks, and by the ancient “path” bounding Aller Wall’. Maltwood quotes a section from The High History. It refers to a river as ‘water royal’.
With ‘bounding’ moors and ‘water royal’ (the Thames running through Windsor, where pedestrians are turned away from the riverbank), it would be easy to suppose that we were working from Maltwood’s text. Such speculations are energising devices; they help us to respect a landscape. The local is taken into the archetypal: contours and canals construct patterns around churches, monastic ruins, ‘historic’ houses.
‘It might be supposed,’ Mrs Maltwood writes, ‘that one could see such creatures on any map! but it would be impossible to find a circular traditional design of Zodiacal and other constellation figures, arranged in their proper order, and corresponding with their respective stars, unless they had been laid out in sequence, according to plan.’
Fold-out maps, in the 1964 reissue of Maltwood’s influential book, show star-creatures. Cloud shadows drifting over a circular bowl: ‘The Circle of Giant Effigies.’ Why not read the M25 orbit as another such circle – and let Mary Caine’s tightly packed frontispiece act as our guide to the south-west corner? Maltwood’s circle is sparsely inhabited, forms swim free; Caine’s zodiac is an exotic slum, an outstation of Thorpe Park. An orgy of symbols: interspecies collisions. The Lion of Chessington mounting the Doggy of Chobham Common. Rams, bulls, griffins, they’re all at it.
‘Kingston’s Cerberus rears his head at Egham, where Holloway Sanatorium’s tower on his nose is a landmark for miles,’ reads Renchi. Thereby alerting our shaven-headed neighbour. There’s a pair of them; one in a down-stuffed gilet, the other in flowerpot hat and blood-red spectacles. The speaker, the crop-head with scimitar sideburns, has a trace of the rent boy about him (if you were casting a drama for Channel 4). Delicate/tough and pushing it hard, to come on as a wit in Staines station café. He interrogates us, his mate does the local history. ‘Payroll boys’ with time on their hands.
‘What do you do for a living?’
‘We walk.’
‘Walk? They’re fucking tramps,’ shouts the old boy, barnacled to the corner.
It has to be explained: walks, photographs – then, at some future date, a book. Kevin, who is force-feeding his notebook, breaks off to dig out a mound of my back titles from his rucksack. He travels with a portable library. He is approaching this walk (and the rest of life) as a tutorial for which he is inadequately prepared. Keep talking, reminiscing, improvising. Don’t let the buggers stray anywhere near the ostensible subject.
The payroll boys are appeased: we’re nutters with a project, some remote chance of a distant pay day. We need their services. The old man snorts, returns to his Sun.
‘Bloody drug addicts!’
One breakfast under the belt, second teas and more toast on order, the lads are in good humour. A fine bright day. A light breeze from the river. The cosmological fruit machine doesn’t pay out very often, carpe diem.
Mary Caine for the spirit, the payroll boys for the nitty-gritty: our man talks of tunnels, bunkers, mysteries. This is the list. A village, Thorpe, with the longest village green in England. Brooklands racetrack with underground workings and a ghost. St George’s Hill. ‘That’s where Cliff Richard lives. Squatters took over a mansion where Tom Jones used to…’ John Lennon with his white pianos and customised Rollers. St George’s Hill is definitely on the agenda, the place where Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers launched their experiment in rustic tribalism. But we won’t make it, not this time, unless we get going.
Much of Staines is steel–shuttered, MADHOUSE UK: green lettering above an undisclosed business venture. Kevin has film in his camera (no reserve stock) and is blazing away. Renchi, more circumspect, continues his quiet logging: prompts for future paintings.
We cross the bridge, pick up the Thames path, move out in the direction of the M25.
Shadows from overhanging greenery infect the river. The walk is shady, agreeable. Dappled sunlight. Kevin’s dark glasses aren’t strictly necessary. Runnymede Bridge, with its shallow span, emerges from the tree tops. It looks too slender to carry motorway traffic. My sense, when I’m driving, is that the river makes no impact on the road. Unless you know it’s there, you’ll miss it.
It would be better to swim. These are sacred places, where road meets river. Staines and Dartford, very different Thames crossings, are the highlights of any motorway circuit. On the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, road dominates. The tidal Thames is unwalkable, unswimmable; impossible. Literally suspending disbelief, to drive over the broad span of water, as it opens (storage tanks and container ships) to the World Ocean, marks you. You die into what you see. You purchase vision at the expense of mortality. You relish the play of cables as they flick against riverlight. You feel younger, stronger, elevated by a section of motorway that isn’t motorway: the only point in the circuit where imagination overrides the M25’s compulsive reductionism.
Coming on Runnymede Bridge, white stone, is less dramatic: water shimmers, plays with sound. Here is the cathedral of the motorway: an open-sided temple of transformation. Perch on one of the broad ribs, tight under the road, and watch curved concrete sail on green water like a crescent moon. A single arch, mirrored in the dark river, becomes a cave. Light dances on the rough underlay of the M25. Passing craft set up surges that turn the reflections on the far bank into spirals of smoke. You could treat these spaces beneath the motorway as cubicles of incubation; cold bunks in which to dream of fantastic journeys.
This structure, set across the Thames, is discussed in terms of Egypt or Babylon. A water shrine in which to acknowledge and record the passage of the sun. Steps down to the river. Slopes leading up to the road. The bridge is actually two bridges, one for each carriageway of the M25. Arriving from Staines, you see a plain, functional structure, something like Waterloo Bridge; walking east from Runnymede, back towards London, you notice the decorative features, stone balusters that belong in a country park.
The harmonious linking of disparate elements, a symbolic marriage of river and road, has a simple history: in terms of civil engineering. The 1961 bridge, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, was incorporated into ‘a graceful concrete structure’ by Arup Associates and the consultant engineers, Ove Arup and Partners. Genteel Surrey rustification. The Lutyens bridge would carry the northbound traffic of the M25 and the A30; the Arup bridge the southbound carriageways of both. The new bridge was 138 metres long. The tender price was £6.4 million. And the contractor was Bovis Fairclough.
Walking from bright sunlight into this cool darkness – reflections, brilliant bars moving across ruffled water – is always exhilarating. Excursion parties break up: somebody will climb on to the arch, somebody will lounge against a pillar. Renchi, this time, puts himself in the split between the southbound carriageway and the supporting arch. Graffiti (tagged by Blade ’98) is minimalist: a name becomes a labyrinth, with arrows and hearts. Tribes are invited to advance on Stonehenge for the summer solstice.
Kevin, still armoured in his heavy jacket, takes photographs. He thinks he might approach Marc Atkins, make him the subject of a dissertation. He accesses a John Boorman reference; the director mentioning the fact, in an interview, that he used to swim in the Thames near Runnymede Bridge. A Wordsworthian encounter with a shadow on the water, the Green Man.
He remembers a friend, Dr Dylan Francis. ‘We were like Little and Large,’ he says. Kevin is always generous, reaching for books that might help other writers. Thick fingers drum on his head as he tries to fix the wording of the pertinent quotation. Right books into right hands and the world is reconfigured. He sent me a copy of Dylan Francis’s posthumous collection, The Risk of Being Alive (Writings on Medicine, Poetry and Landscape) – for which he had done the introduction. He highlighted: the ‘incomparable conversation’ of his friend, ‘the swift workings of his mind’.
Francis, I discovered, was a scholar with a Double First in English from Cambridge; a philosopher, a poet, a doctor of medicine who worked in neurology and cardiology. He was connected with St Bartholomew’s Hospital in Smithfield. He read voraciously and aggressively, was interested in Robert Fludd and William Harvey. He took off, whenever he could, into the Lake District or the Welsh borders; he walked his demons down: ‘[J.H.] Prynne under one arm & Gray’s Anatomy under the other’. A Romantic sensibility, scrupulous in address, compares and contrasts landscape in terms of his own emotions, with relevant literary asides. Like all Romantics, he pushes it, language; wanting nature to behave with more sensitivity, more intelligence. The responsibility of poetic tone threatens to undo him:
From Hereford through wind and bright sunlit rain resilvering and quenching the day, reflections shivering & amazed across blurred tillage pocked with rain, pleached hedgerows, the sun barely lifting above the churned earth’s rim but to be ploughed under/where outlying rains trace & retrace lines of descent… to Hay.
Something was wrong and walking couldn’t solve it. Francis speaks frequently of ‘pressure’; pressure to perform, refine, perfect. Pressure of circumstance. Being in London, in the hospital, getting away; roaming, reading, making notes for undefined future projects. ‘I’ve turned this sort of “get-beside-yourself-in-London-then-jump-into-a-car-and-drive-to-some-where-remote-and-walk-around-by-yourself” into something of a genre.’
Francis killed himself in December 1992. The collection edited by Kevin Jackson opens with an essay on ‘William Harvey and the “Motion in a Circle’ ”. This is reprinted from Bart’s Journal (Summer 1982). And what a useful prompt it proves: microcosm and macrocosm, the alchemists of St Bartholomew’s Close, circuits of blood that mimic the passage of the sun. Dr Dylan Francis carrying me straight back to Dr Francis Anthony’s memorial in St Bartholomew’s Church. Nagging away, at the back of our orbital walk, were recurrent themes, unsolved puzzles.
Paracelsus, ‘the Swiss physician, alchemist, mystic and pioneer of chemotherapy’ (as Francis glosses him), is the presiding influence.
He held that:
Man and the universe had the same form and had behind them the same reason. He likened the circle of heaven to man’s skin, and discerned a pulse in the firmament, spirits in the winds, fevers in the motions of the earth, and chiromancy in minerals.
My superstition, sympathetic to Fludd and Paracelsus, persists: the walk around London’s orbital motorway is personal. From Harefield to Purneet, the rushes, surges of excitement, are connected to an imagined – solar powered? – circulation of blood. We can’t resurrect the period when the ‘objective method’ (scientific induction) co-existed with older notions of mystical correspondences; a time (the 1620s) when John Donne was a patient of Harvey, folding the surgeon’s ‘research into the capacity of the heart and other hollow viscera’ into his verse.
Dr Francis concludes his essay with reflections on Robert Fludd’s Anatomiae Amphitheatrum (1623). As with Blake’s cosmological epics, his forcing of humble place names into a mythic structure – and, on a humbler scale, Mary Caine’s zodiacal configurations – Fludd reads topography in terms of the human body. The walk we take, from that first step, progresses by analogy:
Since, as the sun travels around the earth daily in a circle, it impresses on the winds – which contain the breath of God – a similar circular motion, this moving air is breathed by man, reaches the blood, and from the heart the spirit of life is thus carried around the body in an imitation of divine circularity.
The spaces under Runnymede Bridge, cool shadows, flicker of sunlight, wash from passing rivercraft, encourage metaphysical speculation. We should stay here, stretch out on our curved shelves. Dream. Follow the Egyptian script, the journey of the sun boat.
But that’s impossible, without aborting the tour. We labour up a grassy slope, at the side of the bridge, and on to
the M25. For the first time in our half-circuit, we are actually walking the motorway, and also (courtesy of Mary Caine) walking the Dog. After the oracular opulence of the space beneath the bridge, M25 reality has us rocking on our heels. Blamblam-blamblam. Ssssssssss. Grey bitumen (courtesy of Shell): the mantle of choice for Associated Asphalt, French Kier, W.C. French, London Roadstone, Redland Aggregates and Wimpey Asphalt. Blamblam. Ssss. Light is harsh and scouring. Air is filled with stinging particles. We walk towards Egham, inches away from speeding metal projectiles.
Standing on a thin strip of ground in the central reservation, traffic snarling on both sides, I stared through my long-focus lens at a range of facial expressions that would have fitted into a Victorian Bedlam collection: Criminal and Subnormal Physiognomies. V signs. Drooling narcolepsy. Trance. Fugue. Rage. Idiot grins. Nobody signalled their pleasure at the miracle of motoring over the Thames. They were part of a thrashing comet-tail. Mary Caine’s Dog was no guardian of the mysteries. It was a ravening beast, a mastiff on a chain. On Runny-mede Bridge, Cerberus claims his victims for Hades. The line of traffic advancing towards the rising sun looked like a procession of the returning dead. Every one of them, solitaries in clean shirts, smoking, checking mirrors to see if their reflections were still there, wore dark glasses.
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