But it’s not suburbia. Suburbia is drift-Hackney (relocated to Chingford). Bethnal Green and Limehouse, once seen as the epitome of urban experience (immigrant, criminous, highly spiced), are now models of Neo-Suburbia: expensive dormitories, Barratt and Laing estates, commuters working elsewhere. The concerned middle classes discussing equity, schools; laying out gardens (even on roofs).
Ballard referred me to a piece he had written, ‘Welcome to the Virtual City’, for Tate magazine:
But Shepperton, for what it’s worth, is not suburbia. If it is a suburb of anywhere, it is of London Airport, not London. And that is the clue to my dislike of cities and my admiration for what most people think of as a faceless dead-land of inter-urban sprawl. Hurrying back from Heathrow or a West Country weekend to their ludicrously priced homes in Fulham or Muswell Hill, they carefully avert their gaze from this nightmare terrain of dual carriageways, police cameras, science parks and executive housing, an uncentred realm bereft of civic identity, tradition or human values, a zone fit only for the alienated and footloose, those without past or future.
And that, of course, is exactly what we like about it… The triangle formed by the M3 and the M4, enclosing Heathrow and the River Thames, is our zone of possibility…
He doesn’t speak badly of anybody, any named individual. It’s almost a superstition, no gossip. The enemy is generic and vague: ‘the literary mob’, ‘cities’, ‘dull furniture’. Like Burroughs, he might not choose to join the club, but he passes very effectively: a voice from another world, good manners. It’s very decent of him to give me this riverside afternoon. He doesn’t take a drink before eight o’clock. I don’t need what Ballard says, I know what he says, I’ve read the books. What I need is the chance to pay homage, in the course of this mad orbital walk, to the man who has defined the psychic climate through which we are travelling. It’s a romantic foible on my part, the impulse that once had De Quincey tramping off to the Lake District, to make a nuisance of himself in Wordsworth’s cottage.
The hair is long and silvery, the skin ivory coloured. Ballard, through his long residence and his riverine hermeticism, has joined the company. He looks and behaves like a magus, like Dr John Dee: modesty of address enlivened by a proper arrogance about how his vision of the world has been confirmed. I show him the Siebel brochure, but it means nothing. He knows. Blake at Lambeth, Dee at Mortlake, Pope at Twickenham, Ballard at Shepperton: the great British tradition of expulsion, indifference. The creation of alternative universes that wrap like Russian dolls around a clapped-out core.
Ballard drove me back to the station. The streets were deserted. We passed some white, flat-roofed, vaguely Thirties properties. ‘I thought of trying one of those,’ he said. The paint was peeling. A failed experiment, a Utopian fantasy that had run out of puff. A warehouse, near the river, was used for shooting TV commercials. I thought of Crash. ‘I aimlessly followed the perimeter roads to the south of the airport, feeling out the unfamiliar controls among the water reservoirs of Stanwell.’
Shepperton was sun-dappled, leafy, bleached. The Asian community, if it existed, were all out at Heathrow. The streets were as white as the Suffolk littoral, as Shenley. Ballard, when I interviewed him in Shepherd’s Bush, spoke of a malaise, the death of affect. ‘Rather than fearing alienation,’ he said, ‘people should embrace it. It may be the doorway to something more interesting. That’s the message of my fiction. We need to explore total alienation and find what lies beyond. The secret module that underpins who we are and our imaginative remaking of ourselves that we all embrace.’
3
I don’t know where we are. None of the landmarks relate to anything in my past. As a motorist, I’ve kept clear of this section of the M25. My world has been turned upside-down: the Thames is now at the back of me, a lost ceiling.
Renchi clips along (tales of a painter friend who offers spirit-guided walks around sacred sites; who paints, under mediumistic instruction, hundreds of canvases). Kevin sheds his jacket and puts away his notebook. We stick with the motorway.
Thorpe is undistinguished. Low-level warehouses, industrial estates: ALPHA WAY, PRIVATE ROAD. Across still-green cereal fields, I notice a spectacular Italianate tower. One of our orbital acupuncture needles. We’re back on track. Through the long lens, I can make out a red brick chateau, crenellated parapets, too many windows. This hilltop fantasy, Renchi tells me, is the Royal Holloway College. The tower isn’t Italian: it’s loosely modelled on the Cloth Hall at Ypres. Belgian Gothic as interpreted by the architect William Crossland, under the patronage of patent medicine magnate Thomas Holloway.
There was of course a story, an anecdote connected with the college. A relative of Renchi’s had been at Royal Holloway, briefly, studying drama. An end-of-term party. Drink taken in the cloisters. A marble hand broken from the statue of Queen Victoria, removed. This dark token was now buried in a country garden. Should it be located and returned? The college was too much of a detour, we let it go.
In deep lanes you come on parked vans. I assembled, in the course of our walk, quite a collection: men slumped over wheels, sleeping. Away from the science parks, the railside enterprises, drivers take time out: a folded newspaper, a tattooed arm hanging against warm metal, cigarette smouldering in a two-fingered grip. Dashboard as travelling mantelpiece. An indented tray for the tupperware lunchbox. A slot for ciggies and plastic lighter. Family portraits: wife and baby in hospital, girl-child and large doll in bed. Pulling away from the M25, the puff goes out of motorists. On the road there is a communal energy, flight chemicals, petrol fugues. Green lanes are private dormitories, windows wide to birdsong, pesticide; a sewage farm beyond the Junction 12 interchange (‘a two-level cyclic design, close to the 164 feet high St Ann’s Hill’).
In the next village, Kevin flashes his notebook. All sorts of interesting things are happening: a group of chefs in tall hats, white jackets and checkered trousers are hanging out with dangerous looking schoolgirls. Alice in Wonderland revisited. Among rose-red brickwork, white window frames, yew hedges, is an American/Swiss school. With appropriate catering. Three cooks to every pupil. Moneyed Americans and international Swiss, when they get together, look for security, security and security. Exclusion of undesirables. Food that doesn’t knot in your throat, explode in your belly. Thorpe Village, Eastly End, Virginia Water: these places are perfect. Convenient for the airport. They look like Agatha Christie. Behave like Bern or Basel, Orange County (California).
Wild girls, experimentally made up, wearing customised chalet-school outfits, are smoking. They don’t have bike sheds in Thorpe. But they do have the Monk’s Walk, which carries us out among the grey lakes you see from the M3 (as you head out of London, for Winchester and Southampton). Trees, rounded like broccoli crowns, reach to the water’s edge.
The sudden absence of notable features, the quietness of the lake, is very appealing. People take up fishing as an excuse for standing all day in just such a place, doing nothing. Our modest view disguises an important conflux of energies: the M25 beginning to pull to the east, St Ann’s Hill (with ruined chapel), Great Foster’s Hotel (talked up by Mary Caine) – and, on the horizon, another red tower, the Holloway Sanatorium.
The weight of possibility, unsecured narrative taking off in every direction, hits Kevin. He makes no complaint, but he is starting to limp. That jacket drags like a lead poncho designed by Anselm Kiefer. He knows: it’s untellable. Memory is a lace doily, more hole than substance. The nature of any walk is perpetual revision, voice over voice. Get it done, certainly, then go home and read the published authorities; come back later to find whatever has vanished, whatever is in remission, whatever has erupted. Kevin has sunk into the trance state all hikers know: the initial excitement, the yarn-spinning of the Staines station cafe, is over. Books in the rucksack are dead weight, ballast he’d be happy to dump. The theoretical is overwhelmed by the actual. He knows what lies behind him – home, car, breakfast – but he has no idea what lies ahead. How am I
going to get out of this?
Movie references help. Conveyor belts of gravel crunch and moan. We speak of the end of Touch of Evil; a bloated Orson Welles stumbling among derricks and nodding donkeys, bridges and gantries of an oil field. Black water, floating rubbish. Get Carter. That’s closer to home. A rig for sea coal. Rattling stones on a belt. An extraction system that plays into the aerial rides and thrills of Thorpe Park.
Walking beside the perimeter fence, we smell wild animals in their enclosures. They’re too bored and depressed to roar. Water sloshes against glass. Empty carriages trundle around their rickety circuit; a slow ascent, then the plunge through the water chute. Suspended excitement. A sorry piece of engineering that can only be brought to life by the screams of deliriously anxious punters.
A bridge over the M3, looking back to the junction with the M25: Renchi is busy with his camera, but Kevin has moved beyond transcription. Why would he want to prolong, to memorialise this agony? The leather jacket is hooked over a rigidly horizontal left arm, a struck flag. A trophy smuggled out of Saigon. Kevin poses dutifully; a light slick of sweat, smile contracted into a wince of discomfort, eyes on the ground. If he lifted them, he’d see where we are going, the short sharp hill – which, if he knows anything about it, will involve detours, diversions and a horrible, spine-twisting, corkscrew ascent.
‘We walk and walk and walk,’ Kevin wrote in his article for the Independent. ‘By this time almost five hours have passed, and the metaphorical tenderfoot is also a literal tenderfoot. I’ve chosen the wrong kind of boots, the wrong kind of socks; the soles of my feet are blazing, and by the evening will erupt into a gratifyingly spectacular crop of blisters.’
Hoping to postpone the assault on the conical hill, Kevin initiates a discussion of private estates; the sort that flourish unseen among these wooded slopes. We won’t go as far as to align ourselves with Charles Manson’s dune buggy berserkers, but five hours on the hoof has given a certain edge to our argument. The alienation that Ballard, safely bunkered in Shepperton, recommended as a device for firing the imagination, flourishes in territory trapped between motorways (M4, M25, M3).
Look west from St Ann’s Hill, beyond the restless levels of Junction 12 (of the M25), beyond Virginia Water, and you have Wentworth; land drops sharply away, property values climb into the stratosphere. CCTV estates concealed by managed stretches of ancient woodland. Nicholson’s map has nothing to say: white on white, private roads in an ex-directory reservation. A golf course the size of Rutland. Wentworth is a sand trap with satellite housing, Jimmy Tarbuck and Bruce Forsyth. Razor-smooth greens walked by men whose shoes are as bright as their sweaters, men in hair-hats. More rough on their heads than down the edge of the fairway. Superglued Shredded Wheat. White teeth in collapsed mouths. Crinkly tap dancers, rheumy with showbiz nostalgia: Windmill and Winter Gardens. December-tan comics who hack out their rounds, rehearse their schtick, mourning the defeat of Margaret Thatcher. They promise to quit Britain if another Labour government is voted in. And they honour that promise. Went-worth is another country. With its own golfing prince, Andrew. Its Dallas ranches. Winking security. The Wentworth zodiac, should Mary Caine find the time to compute it, is made from lizards, serpents, hammerhead sharks. The divisions of the woodland are militaristic, imperial: General’s Copse, Duke’s Copse, King’s Copse, Wellington Bridge, King George’s Field. And, in any case, Lew Grade’s veterans console themselves, the Conservatives might have been wiped out in successive elections, but the Thatcherite lineage is secure with Tony Blair. All that has happened is some discreet rebranding, less confrontation, better suits. Sex scandals lose their zest. Denials are issued with straighter faces.
One of New Labour’s most unyielding red-tie commissars is the former student leftist Jack Straw. It was Straw who was landed with the hassle of ‘The Dictator on the Golf Course’: the million-pound safe house on the safest estate in the safest county in England. General Augusto Pinochet, butcher of Santiago (funded by the CIA, armed by Margaret Thatcher), liked to do his Christmas shopping in London. He would receive Lady Thatcher and other old cronies, cruise the Knightsbridge bazaars, check into a clinic for a 10,000-mile service. Chauf-feured from hotel suite to Harrods, winter traffic at its busiest, the General was well placed to offer an opinion on the level of courtesy available on English roads. Ian Parker, in ‘Traffic’ (an essay published in Granta), notes that Pinochet ‘praised Britain for its impeccable driving habits’. The verdict of a man who is always driven. The streets Pinochet glimpsed through a tinted window were swept of rubbish. The populace dressed well and didn’t sing or shout or form ugly mobs brandishing photographs of the disappeared. It was Pinochet, after all, who instructed Thatcher in the advantages of a deregulated bus service. ‘Check out downtown Santiago,’ he said. ‘Any time you’re passing.’
It was a terrible shock to be arrested, threatened with extradition, a ‘human rights’ trial in Spain. Old chums, Falklands War colleagues, were outraged. Lord Lamont: ‘Disgraceful!’ Lady Thatcher: ‘His health has been broken, the reputation of our own courts has been tarnished and vast sums of public money have been squandered on a political vendetta – so friends of Britain be warned, the same thing can happen to you.’
But the health of elderly gentlemen in good standing with the establishment is not like the health of ordinary mortals: when they are faced with public examination, it declines rapidly and demonstrates the most alarming symptoms – premature senility, dodgy ticker, the shakes. No memory and a drooling, but brave smile. Partial blindness. Sight like a one-eyed football manager: ‘Sorry, missed that one. I was unwrapping a fresh stick of gum.’ Released into the bosom of the family, on compassionate grounds, they stage a remarkable recovery. Alzheimer’s disease can be shaken off like the common cold. Malfunctioning hearts regenerate; the miraculously restored patient, cured by love and tender care, is back on the fairway. The boardroom.
Pinochet benefited from the hospital service that is still out there in the north-west quadrant of the M25 – for those who really need it.
A medical report was issued – and leaked. Lamont fumed. The motorcade rolled to Wentworth. The dictator was boarded out in an up-market Barratt home. Newsreel crews were on hand to capture the phone call, expressing support, from Margaret Thatcher. From this point on, footage is real estate promo: wheelchair access to garden, picture windows, double-glazing to neutralise the racket from drummers beating out their protest at the limits of the security cordon.
Wentworth swallows celebrity. And takes its sheen into the immaculate grass, the dazzling windows.
The story retreats into a blizzard of newsreel clips. Police car with flashing sign: KEEP OUT. Pinochet photo-op with Baroness Thatcher.
Thatcher: ‘Senator Pinochet was a staunch friend of Britain throughout the Falklands War. His reward from this government was to be held prisoner for sixteen months.’
Aerial view: convoy of cars taking Pinochet to military airbase in Lincolnshire for flight home to Chile.
Peter Schaard (friend of Pinochet): ‘I have seen a deterioration in his health – more than anything else his mental health. He said that when he was back in Chile he would like to learn to read again.’
Aerial view: RAF Waddington, Lincolnshire. Barbed wire. Plane taxiing on runway. Plane taking off. Protesters drumming, Wentworth. Held back by police.
Voice-over: ‘The former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, has won his fight to go home. He is on his way back to Chile this lunchtime, after attempts to have him extradited finally failed. The Home Secretary, Jack Straw, ruled this morning that he wouldn’t send him to Spain to face trial. The operation to move the General out of the country this morning was quite a cloak and dagger affair. He was finally smuggled out of the Wentworth estate where he’s been staying, in a police convoy, shortly after ten o’clock.’
Cloak and dagger is something we do better than most. If America wants you in the dock, as a redundant Serb, the wrong kind of Afghan, you go down.
If you’ve got previous as a top customer for military hardware, you walk. That seems to be the rule. Noted political thinker Lord Lamont mused: ‘I don’t see how the world can conduct business between states if heads of government do not have immunity from prosecution. Many democratic politicians, who may find themselves held accountable – perhaps Lady Thatcher – for things that happened in their name, will be very uneasy about this.’
Neil Belton, in The Good Listener (his life of Helen Bamber), pointed out that as soon as the Conservatives were elected in 1979, horse-trading between the two heads of state, Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet, began in earnest. Diplomatic ties, damaged under old Labour, were restored in October 1980. ‘Nicholas Ridley at the Foreign Office made no secret of his wish also to resume arms sales,’ Belton wrote. The release of a report on the torture of a young British student, Claire Francis Wilson, was deliberately delayed, ‘in order not to interfere with his [Ridley’s] announcement… ending the ban on arms sales’.
Prince Andrew, the royal most closely associated with golf (and the Sunningdale/Wentworth/Windsor triangulation), would do the state some service, flying helicopters during the Falklands conflict. But the chummy relationship between Britain and Chile would be damaged by Pinochet’s sleepover in Wentworth. What had once been considered, socially, a plumb posting – military attaché (arms rep) at the British Embassy in Santiago – was now a disaster. Retired submarine commanders, instead of being welcomed, fêted, wined and dined, found themselves in purdah at the ragged end of the world.
Winding up St Ann’s Hill, by a spiral path, it became obvious that Kevin was in some discomfort. His blisters had blisters. His eyes were itching. And the leather straps of his rucksack (book bag) were cutting into his armpits. Renchi, who had moved ahead, searching out the chapel (remains of), paused at a gap in the tree line: a beacon had been established, a potential fire-basket to celebrate coronations, Armadas, millennia. Summit linked with summit across England, coast to downland, hill fort to coast. News of invasion would be relayed to the relevant forester.
London Orbital Page 27
