Simon had been a Mirror journalist at Canary Wharf. A near-name. Busy, successful. With prospects. Before, as he explained (haltingly, painfully), he had the accident; and flew out of the shattered back window of a car. Simon wasn’t slim or lithe. That’s what stayed in my mind, the horror of being sucked from the window, backwards. Squeezed like a bladder of offal through the tight slit of a letterbox.
He recalls that frozen instant of time so vividly. One minute, a career journalist sitting comfortably – then nothing makes sense. Glass re-seals itself behind him, the road unfurls. His unprotected head strikes a lamppost: with the impact of something fired from a cannon. He spends a hundred days in a coma; fed by his mother with a spoon. That period isn’t lost, it’s always there like a story he’s been told. Deleted, mythical. He quits his damaged shell and inhabits another place. He speaks of it now as a ‘dream’; erotic, slightly saline. He saw a naked girl on a marble slab. There were pale encounters in a nether world. He remembers the moves he made. When and how he decided to return.
After such an experience, what does the bookshop matter? Other people’s words. Cancelled texts. Vanities from which a new life must be forged. The horror and the vision are both replayed: he has to make sense of them. The shop is a cave of random confessions, strangers’ voices. He is its curator. In perpetuity. When I give him his 20p, he mutters: ‘Oh good, now I can have some lunch.’
Eynsford’s famous straight mile, the broad valley floor, made it attractive to planners: an east/west road (achieved) and a new airport for London (outflanked by powerful local interests). Metropolitan greed nibbles at this countryside: flour mills, tall chimney stacks. We pass under one motorway and on towards a railway and a viaduct.
As we cross the Darent at Horton Kirby, we meet with a fishing party that would have delighted Izaak Walton. True Kentish men (under the unimpressed eye of a Romany-dark woman) doing something illegitimate, robbing kingfishers of their prey. The poachers have the characteristic pallor of the interhighway settlements: turnip faces, thicker at base than crown, large ears, lank hair curtaining mercury eyes. The juveniles favour a Beckham fuzz, to save the prison barber work. Both types are stubbled, blue-chinned, it’s a medical condition. Loose mouths, tugged up at one corner, sneer. The teeth, surprisingly, are big and white and strong: the fisherfolk look like Hollywood actors playing backwoods cannibals.
They’re not angling for perch or pike or eel. A spotter crabs his way along a sewage pipe while his mate drops in the bright yellow line: with a large magnet on the end. They’re dipping for coin, or scrap; rings, crash helmets, bicycle wheels. The suspicion is: whatever is down there in the murky stream, they know about it. The fishing party is a none-too-subtle method of recovering swag. The booty from the day’s work, so far, is one hub cab and an empty tin can. The woman spits.
Shamed that our lives lack such commercial acumen, the spirit of self-help promoted by Lord Tebbit, we sidle off to the pub beneath the viaduct. Which turns out to be what passes on this turf for a sophisticated establishment – run by a female bodybuilder and her white T-shirt, gold bracelet, geezer-in-residence. Showbiz and steroids. Good-hearted folk, affable to damp strangers, happy to do a pie and pint. The pub has a gallery of erased celebrities around the walls: character actors who left EastEnders, only to discover that being called a ‘character’ was a euphemism for unemployed. After the motorway blowjobs and the destroyed septa, the tabloid frenzy, you were condemned to the northern clubs, Raquels in Basildon, sing-alongs under the viaduct. The remembered names, for those who watch daytime TV and do the quizzes, were: Gareth Hunt, Tessa Sanderson and magician Fay Presto.
Seated among this exhibition of the reforgotten, Kevin comes into his own; he’s a compulsive list-maker, a print and radio journalist, contriver of profiles, puffer of lost lives. Names, dates, stories. I don’t mean that being on the road, in movement, hobbles his style, or caps the outpouring of anecdote; but, necessarily, his audience is limited. To whoever is alongside him in boggy field-margin, splashing through fords, quizzing gravestones. The pub is a better forum. The small round table. And, beneath this railway viaduct in South Darenth, at the outer limits of Dartford, he has struck lucky: a fabulous display of the unrecognisable, reverse celebrities, unvarying variety acts, body-sculptors, freaks of withdrawn fame.
I love the innocence of these flock-wallpaper albums as much as he does. By such devices, monochrome gods and goddesses (dressed like bouncers), we can recover memory; who we were when the glamorous ghosts first appeared on the (bought-for-the-coronation) TV goldfish bowls of our childhood. Thorn EMI multiples of John Dee’s crystal. The rogues’ gallery in the viaduct pub is a challenge: remember the name and you’ll remember some part of yourself you’d rather let go.
Kevin talks of Epsom. The literary references have been stacking up: William Blake, David Gascoyne. Kevin reminds me that Tommy Butts, son of Blake’s patron Thomas, mentions in his diary (14 August 1809) that ‘Mr. and Mrs. Blake are very well… they intend shortly to pay the promised visit at Epsom.’
Gascoyne, in a memoir called ‘Oahspe’, unravels an episode that seems in a few pages to contain all the elements that distinguish his work: magic, derangement, a sleepwalker’s courage. An Edgar Allan Poe tale comfortably relocated to the English Thirties; polite, grey-brown, lethal. From a dusty shelf in Watkins Occult Bookshop, Cecil Court, Gascoyne acquires OAHSPE: A New Bible – glossed as ‘the most astonishing book in the English language’. It will, so he hopes, lead him to information about a cult called Kosmon.
‘For some years I continued to speculate intermittently about the possible existence of an underground organization concerned with an aberrant fake book of revelations purporting to expound the secrets of the visible universes and their cosmogonies. A time came when my mental state began to deteriorate to such an extent that eventually I underwent a series of nervous breakdowns.’
He notices: spectral messengers on underground platforms, their cheeks daubed by ‘sticks of anthracite’. Conspiracy theories and ‘parousial notions’ interbreed; the cults of Kosmon and Scientology are linked in Gascoyne’s mind. Drawing him towards Surrey, the foothills. As William Burroughs, chasing his own demons, checked into the L. Ron Hubbard franchise at East Grinstead (in the mid-Sixties), so Gascoyne found himself trapped in Epsom.
‘The disorder I was suffering from when admitted to a psychiatric establishment near Epsom was accompanied by a number of vehement convictions. I believed myself to be a vessel containing momentous insights that it was my boundless duty to impart… I believed intensely that there was a worldwide conspiracy going on, the intent of which was to rob us of our minds and souls. Scientology was allied with the adepts of Kosmon at the heart of the conspiracy.’
The conspiracy was rooted in the London suburbs, in parkland, in the Epsom colony. Madness and vision cooked and simmered. (The madness began with that argument between insight and duty. With being a poet. A condition for which there is no known cure.) Gascoyne was convinced that his fellow inmates would be susceptible to his message. Imagine then his horror when he discovered that the old man in the next bed, a silent, sunken ruin, ‘was actually a longstanding Kosmon initiate and official, and even had a copy of OAHSPE in a tin box under his bed’. Gascoyne willed himself to stay awake, to wait until his neighbour was snoring – so that he could liberate this dangerous text. He was, of course, caught in the act and forcibly sedated.
The female bodybuilders, the Magic Circle conjurors, the once-celebrated poets whose works are no longer a part of a shrinking literary consciousness, summoned another Epsom name. Kevin told us about William Hayward, poet, author of a single published novel, It Never Gets Dark All Night. Hayward had been a correspondent of David Jones. He had, at some point, been taken into the Epsom gulag. The novel dealt with the experience.
‘Should we contact him?’ I asked.
‘Dead. I think, suicide. Peter Carpenter has the whole story.’
So it was arranged, that when t
he motorway circuit was completed, Kevin would fix another day in Epsom. His friend Peter Carpenter, poet and publisher, could guide us around town and tell us about William Hayward.
8
‘In this town,’ Peter Carpenter announced, ‘one in ten is mad.’ Our problem, outside Epsom station, was identifying that one. The tour party, assembled on the pavement, you could start there: twitchy, grinning like foxes, clothed from a dressing-up basket. Much too old for this foolishness, a walk around Carpenter’s childhood and adolescence (schools, pubs, asylums). The balding, hook-nosed man in the collarless blue shirt wanted, so badly, to tell his tale: the audience was incidental. Like all poets, and most schoolteachers, he was used to talking to himself; this morning’s drive down the motorway was just enough rehearsal to crank him up to speed. Lay out the past in the right order and it loses its venom.
Wednesday 17 May 2000. Renchi has brought a friend interested in springs and Surrey subterranea, the art of the motorway fringes. Kevin has lined up two of his inner circle: Carpenter (our guide) and Walrus (aka Martin J. Wallen, Associate Professor of English at OSU, Stillwater, Oklahoma). Asked how we’ll recognise Carpenter, if we arrive first at the rendezvous, Kevin says: ‘So high.’ Vague gesture of the arm. ‘Bullish. See him coming through a crowd in London, quite frightening.’
When we steam, mob-handed, down the drive of the old Horton hospital, we are a pack of the dispersed, looking for sanctuary. The townscape, in the months since we paid our last visit, has changed beyond recognition. WELCOME TO HORTON VIEW AND THE PADDOCKS. Fluttering banners: TAYWOOD. A SELECTION OF 2, 3, 4 & 5 BEDROOM HOUSES & APARTMENTS. Three white flag poles mark the border of the captive estate.
The asylum has been replanted, opened to motor vehicles. There is some evidence for the continuing presence of builders, none of civilians, home owners, new suburbanites. The Epsom colonies have been revised into loops and crescents, so that clients can drive effortlessly in and out. Nobody is trapped, coerced, detained. BEAZER HOMES, WAY OUT. THANK YOU FOR OBSERVING SIGNS & DRIVING CAREFULLY.
Behind the improved flagship properties, corrugated sheds hide the last traces of a repressed history. A lick of pink paint on wrinkled tin; recreational facilities with barred windows. The yard where farm produce was once sold still exists, you need a map to find it. Sad vegetables on an unmanned table. WARNING. THESE PREMISES ARE PROTECTED BY A 24HR SECURITY AND CLOSED CIRCUIT TELEVISION SYSTEM. PACKS INFOTEL LTD. Withered beans and knobbly tomatoes covered by CCTV cameras.
Previous inmates wander the new roads, questing for something they recognise. Nobody has found them suitable clothing: one, stiff-backed, twisting as he walks, is barechested; another has a tight white, Sunday-best shirt, buttoned to neck and cuff, inherited jeans. They seem to march, eyes down, where Carpenter’s merry men slouch or spring, cameras primed, constantly swivelling.
During what he calls ‘The Lost Years’ – a period Jackson summarises as ‘lager, vodka, unsuitable girlfriends, takeaways, footy, monotony, despair and nights in the Iron Horse’ – Peter Carpenter worked in an Epsom bookshop. On Saturday afternoons, paroled patients visited town. (They’re called clients now: CLIENTS BACK FOR LUNCH. While there is still lunch, there is still hope.) Horton inmates were given sweetie money to spend. Every week the same kleptos would drift into the bookshop, liberate the same books (Asimov, Heinlein, L. Sprague De Camp); take them home. Without fuss, they would be gathered up and returned. (This may go some way towards explaining the popularity of that school of fiction.)
The visiting academic, Dr Wallen, is getting more of his special subject (‘Romanticism’) than any reasonable Oklahoma resident has the right to expect. He’s got strong teeth and a nice hawky profile that could have been chiselled from the totem pole which now stands in the park behind Long Grove Hospital. He’s always grinning: not like Piety Blair (the fear rictus), but like a man who can’t believe his luck. Kevin has him pegged as: ‘bon viveur, weight-lifter, malcontent, dog lover, former owner of cowboy boots’. He’s into Coleridge, Beddoes and Nitrous Oxide: not much use in Stillwater, but useful preparation for a day trip to Epsom.
Wallen’s tense watchfulness and proper rectitude (waiting for the pub) plays nicely against the Jackson/Carpenter double act. Ventriloquist and moosehead dummy. Who keep exchanging roles – so that the story can be told, backwards, in every detail. In stereo. There is much talk of Cambridge, Pembroke College, and of the former Epsom inmate and spurned novelist, William Curtis Hayward. Just as Kevin helped to preserve some record of the achievements of Dr Dylan Francis, so Peter Carpenter has obsessively gathered every scrap of information, every published and unpublished word by William Hayward.
What Carpenter wants now is to lead us to St Ebba’s, the most easterly of the hospitals, on the far side of Hook Road. St Ebba’s is still an active concern. The Italianate tower is in place. (Carpenter tells us that the poet Alan Brownjohn was once, as a child, locked in that tower.) The atmosphere is heavy, time doesn’t flow. The estate is like an English village built by Cold War Russians for war games. Such whimsical notions are contradicted by the villagers: a speedfreak in a baseball cap who mimes the rolling of a monster spliff, a scarecrow who calls to the birds, a man perched on a bench who thinks he is a bird. Several Down’s syndrome adolescents stare at us; they are the only ones to whom we are not invisible.
The point of our (de)tour is to locate a cemetery. Carpenter remembers being here, in a field, with his mother. There were memorials to those who died during the war, when the hospitals were requisitioned; as well as gravestones for the hospital children.
Carpenter was sure this was it, a buttercup field with a view of the Horton tower. We do what we can with potential mounds and bumps, but the cemetery has been swallowed in thorn bushes and sycamore. There is no physical evidence of the memorial. Alongside a bridlepath of loose chippings and small pebbles, Carpenter stands bemused, waving his arms. ‘I’m sure it was here.’ Either he has been betrayed by an unreliable memory, or memory has been violated in some way.
Renchi asks for numbers. How many dead? How many unrecorded? He picks up pebbles, counting them, putting them into his knapsack. Fingers raw, pack sagging: he’s well into the hundreds.
Local papers were incensed by the developer’s sacrilege: WAR HEROES’ GRAVE ANGER. They settled on the number 4,000. ‘War heroes lie in an overgrown cemetery where 4,000 hospital patients are buried in mass graves.’ Owner-developer Michael Heighs refused church groups (backed by Epsom and Ewell Council) permission to erect a memorial cross. The hospitals had housed the shell-shocked casualties of the First War. The developer tried to strike a deal: if he allowed the memorial would he be given clearance to build on the land?
The war dead, the mutilated of Flanders, have their champions; hospital patients, wrapped in sacking, went unrecorded into a mass grave. HELM, a charitable group concerned with those who had been ‘returned to the community’, lobbied for some kind of memorial to the forgotten generations. Mr Heighs wouldn’t budge without his development deal. The site, bought ‘for a peppercorn sum from the health authorities’, remains in limbo – in the expectation that Green Belt laws will change. ‘Would you give someone a piece of your garden for nothing?’
Subsequent correspondents, unwilling to accept developer as scapegoat, concentrate on the original contract. It stank. ‘The thing I find most shocking about it all is the fact that the health authorities sold… the land in the first place. Why on earth did they do that? Was it a continuation or reflection of their uncaring and irreverent attitude towards the thousands of harmless people unnecessarily sent to grim psychiatric institutions of the Epsom cluster?’
Keeping up a good pace, flogging around town, our guide was due to check in for a hernia operation. This outing, he assured us, justified his discomfort. By green lanes and half-forgotten paths we navigated the Epsom fringes, from Carpenter’s school (a brazen march through pee-stink corridors) to Nonsuch Palace (stones in the grass). A hubble-bubble of free-assoc
iating anecdotes: inspirational English master Kenneth Curtis taught poet Geoffrey Hill (who dedicated King Log to him). Millais used Hogsmill ‘as a backdrop for his Ophelia’. John Procter was a school friend…
Procter? Musician and polemicist (aka ‘I, Ludicrous’). An educated joker who had written and performed an M25 anthem. Spoken voice: ‘The M25, London’s orbital. Take a ride.’ With acoustic interference, throbbing and moaning. More lift-shaft than garage: ‘The M25, the M25.’ Composed at the start, around 1986, Procter’s chant is charmingly antique; sensible and a little crazy. ‘The old farms forgotten, except on out of date maps.’ Procter admits that he won’t be using the road, other than to visit ‘relatives in Somerset’. Or: ‘cricket in Kent.’ For what Kevin Jackson refers to as ‘an inconclusive period’, Peter Carpenter acted as Procter’s manager. ‘Sort of.’
The secret agenda of the day, what we’re edging towards, as we all recognise, is: The Tunnel. The subterranean network that Renchi and I walked past when we climbed Ashley Road towards the Downs. This time we’re going in, Renchi’s cemetery pebbles will be used in a giant M25 sand-painting. He hopes to find a suitable cavern or sanctuary.
As a writer (former market trader, parks gardener, ullage man), I have no status to protect. But I wonder about the professional academic and the English master from a public school, how would they look in the local press – as convicted trespassers? Doc Wallen is grinning (Doc Holliday on ether) as he goes over the fence. KEEP OUT. Renchi manages to drag open the heavy metal door. I find the stub of a nightlight. (Evidence of suburban satanism? Drug orgies?)
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