The brick tunnel drops into darkness. My nightlight gives a feeble glow. Illuminates the veins in my hand. The door, designed to withstand bomb blasts, creaks; threatens to close behind us. The underground complex is rumoured to stretch for miles, with hidden entrances in various parts of town. Fifty or sixty yards in, we hit water. We’re really not equipped for this, we’ll have to come back on another occasion. The tunnel divides, branches off; there are cell-like sidechambers.
By the dying candleflame, Renchi scratches the outline of his M25 drawing on the damp floor. He’ll return, with drummers, sand, chalk – and the pebbles from St Ebba’s cemetery. We’re quite relieved to have an excuse for a retreat to the pub.
A figure in a suit, standing on the embankment, spots us. He makes no challenge, doesn’t move. But when Renchi and his troop pitch up for their shamanic ceremony, the tunnels are definitively sealed. The schematic drawing has to be laid out, over several hours, on the ramp.
The Amato pub, in the early evening, is varnished, brassy; occupied by check-jacket and mustard corduroy equestrians. It’s generous of them to let us in. We don’t talk horseflesh and we’re not cranking up for a serious session. We’ve walked past mansions with complicated ironwork gates, past stables and fields of cattle with designer coats, cleaner, less ostentatious than Hollywood wives.
Drink in hand, day’s ration of Romanticism digested, Doc Wallen recalls his childhood: Carpenter hasn’t got the monopoly poly on Wordsworthian soliloquies. Louisiana. Wallen’s father was a surveyor for an oil company. In a house by the bayou, dim figures moved at night, circling the bed. A Southern Gothic dreamscape. Faulknerian shadows: grandfather, spurned by the detested son to whom he had left the farm, died where he lay. An unremoved corpse, busy with maggots, in a nest of rat-filth.
Such images infect the pub. Peter Carpenter speaks of William Hayward, a troubled life that brought him, inevitably, to Epsom. If the tale is not properly told, the man fades away; the legend is discredited. We allow ourselves to become identified with those we promote, so that the manufacture of another writer’s biography is a gloss on our own. Present neglect supports elective obscurity. The reappraisal of a vanished reputation must initiate a turn in the biographer’s fortune. These exercises move between literary archaeology and psychic vampirism.
I listen to Peter’s fragmentary account. I read pamphlets of Hayward’s poetry and I obtain a copy of the novel, It Never Gets Dark All Night. This was published by Heinemann in 1964. He was in good company; other titles promoted (on the back of the dust-wrapper) include Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun and Patricia Highsmith’s The Two Faces of January.
The cover illustration is a solar disc floating over three very serious bohemians: clean hair and anoraks (male) and trowels of eye-shadow (female). We are revisiting the Lawrentian Spring (CND and rented cottages), before the Summer of Love. Bran Lynch, an uncocky and self-doubting Ginger Man, hanging on to the 1,000-foot contour in the soft limestone country of the Cotswolds, wanders on set ‘wearing the overcoat of a literary critic and a pair of army socks’. Hayward’s comedy is stoic, melancholy; the world squeezes his heart. He has the pulse of the land: ‘Sheepcrunch. The iron blathering of tractors. And the sun aggressing through the cracked window.’
The weekend party sours into its Monday aftermath, spill and chill and mismatched underwear, sticky tea grains in a burnt saucepan. A ‘large, genial negro’ called Shiner makes an uncomfortable entrance (current sensibilities on red alert): Shiner has possession of a black Jaguar car. Has he ‘borrowed’ it? ‘What you mean, boy? I hired it. Been working on the motorway. An’ Roz likes a bit of speed. That so, honey?’
She ‘blushes’. We blush. But, if we’re old enough, we’ve lived through such fictions before, seen the period awkwardness drop away, found surviving strengths. Class shapes the narrative, not race. Hayward doesn’t like cities, or the transport infrastructure. ‘Innumerable family cars were being eased out of congested garages onto congested roads… There would probably only be a few hundred injured in this rush, and those certainly the least deserving.’
The cold cottage, the bothy, the borrowed lodge: somewhere remote, out of it, to contemplate – what? The impossibility of salaried employment, urban life, relationships? Thin sunlight on barren fields, a dreadful silence: ‘It was so quiet she could hear the copulation of flies.’ Hayward’s characters, like the author, are oppressed by their ability to articulate, explain, use language.
Lynch cracks and is removed to a fictional version of the Epsom hospital in which Hayward himself had once been incarcerated. The hospital has its snobberies, hierarchies of incompetence. Robotic table-tennis and ECT are compulsory. ‘Everything was quiet, sunny, calm, but below these obvious suggestions of the air a hint of indescribable horror and violence.’
Within parkland, behind high walls, in an environment policed by burly men in white coats (NCOs left over from recent wars), Lynch encounters ‘the burning’. ‘With clinical assistance he cut his way back into sanity, but the shadow of the greater reality was never far from his mind.’
The asylum as rite of passage – through brain-shock, redirected lightning – goes back to Mary Shelley. And to Hayward’s contemporaries, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. To Ken Kesey. To Carl Solomon (dedicatee of Howl), to Allen Ginsberg’s ‘starry dynamo’. And Harold Pinter’s Aston (in The Caretaker): ‘Then one day they took me to a hospital, right outside London… They used to come round with these… Idon’t know what they were… they looked like big pincers, with wires on, the wires were attached to a little machine.’ Hayward, shocked in every way, every sense, is closer to the Gloucestershire poet/composer Ivor Gurney (and David Jones) than to the excited Laingian rhetoric of the Sixties. He associates himself with the landscape in which he lives, with forms of traditional knowledge. He fears: love and its loss.
His angst feeds in that dark ditch of the English imagination, the First War: in missing it. The guilt. Edward Thames spending a final, shivering winter in an Epping Forest cottage. Hayward’s bland Cotswold escarpment lacks shellholes, blackened tree stumps, bones poking from mud. Hayward faces: ‘The dilemma of those who are chosen to speak, but dare not. The trivial escape via sheer sensation, or the terrified plunge into the narrowing corridor of psychosis. With the increasing urgency of the voices on one side, it is scarcely possible not to crack.’
Hayward’s sense of place is respectful. Districts are recalled by a few precisely observed details. Epsom is vividly present in the walk that only a patient or hospital visitor would recognise, our green way between gulag and station. Locals, so Peter Carpenter informed us, know these byways as ‘The Slips’.
Released from confinement, Bran Lynch ‘took a narrow footpath that ran behind the backs of absurd villas towards the centre of town’. His delusions couldn’t be contained in a complacent Surrey town. ‘His particular kind of illness was a bit much for provincials to cope with. Even his insanity, it appeared, was metropolitan.’ City: madness, voices. Country: incubation or denial of visionary experience, silence.
Lynch, the dreamed double, walks Hayward’s walk: as we walked it, the same geography.
Tarry pavement soft after much sun. Rigidly fenced little back gardens, nakedly exposed from the sly angle of this path. Like a succession of intricately decorated privies, each revealing the particular crapulous mode of the indwelling imagination. Some with gnomes, goldfish. Some with pampas grass. Some with prize dahlias. One tusked and hummocked with coarse grass and weeds, among which lay jagged tins of Kit-e-Kat. At the end of this one a lithe sumac, already beginning to turn.
The aristocratic countryman’s eye falls on the follies and pretensions of suburbia, and exposes its own shame; an awkward passage through a mundane world. The banality of Epsom is eternal: Lynch enters the same cheap clothing store we visited. He buys ‘tapered K.D. trousers’, and gives his flannels to a charity shop. He takes a train for London.
The nakedness of the relationship between autho
r and avatar possessed Peter Carpenter. Carpenter saw Hayward/Lynch as a significant Epsom figure, a man purged and refined by the hurt he had suffered. He sent me a ‘draft biographical outline’. Research materials for a potential ‘life’; a story that would, in all probability, never be written.
Born (1931) to an established, landowning Gloucestershire family. Parents separate. A ‘peripatetic existence’, with his mother, ‘moving between various hotels in the South of England and relations in the Isle of Man’. The estate is sold. They retreat to Galloway.
Dartmouth Royal Naval College. Hayward is allowed to leave the Navy to try for Oxford. Labourer on an organic farm. National Service. Merton College, Oxford. Fruit picking, libretto for opera. Oxford literary friendships include: Edward Lucie-Smith, Elizabeth Jennings, Adrian Mitchell. Receives instruction with a view to converting to Roman Catholicism. ‘Viva’d for a First but awarded a Second.’ Decides against becoming a Catholic, meets David Jones. They correspond.
Publishers’ rep for Elek Books, marriage. Honeymoon in Tenby and West Wales. Drives long distances, ‘often sleeping in the back of the van’. Sets up his own press. Moves from cottage to cottage. Children. Flat in Cheltenham: ‘acquainted with various poets, artists and bohemians, including Lyn Chad-wick and W.S. Graham’. Absorbed in a textual commentary on David Jones’s The Anathemata.
More poetry, more cottages: no electricity. ‘A petrol pump brings water from a well.’ Takes up woodcarving. Visits Harrow and discusses his commentary with David Jones.
‘Meetings with Gerald Yorke in Forthampton, interest in Aleister Crowley and magical rituals.’ Attempts novel. A number of extra-marital relationships: ‘drinking heavily and feeling trapped in London’. Quits Arrow Books. ‘Investigates possible life as a crofter.’ Calls on David Jones ‘in a distracted state’. Arrested for assault on police officer: ‘remanded in custody and subsequently admitted to Horton Hospital in Epsom.’ ECT. Released, after six weeks, into wife’s care. Teaches Cheltenham Technical College. Depression. Stays at Tibetan Centre. And at the Cistercian Monastery on Caldey Island (as David Jones had done).
It Never Gets Dark All Night accepted by Heinemann. Research into private papers of Ivor Gurney. Affairs on Ibiza: ‘manic episodes and feelings of alienation… increasingly reliant upon alcohol, tranquillisers and sleeping pills’. Novel published to generally favourable reviews.
Travels through France, Spain, Morocco, Ibiza: ‘hearing voices’. Starts work on novel ‘dramatizing a conflict between white magicians in Gloucestershire and black magicians in Ibiza’. Plans to set up bookshop in Exeter. Takes overdose, recovers in hospital. Invests in stock market. Travels relentlessly. Visits England, returns to Ibiza. ‘On 9th December 1968, he dies at Can Marias, probably by his own hand. Body flown back to England and buried at Quedgeley in Gloucestershire in an unmarked grave.’
I open Hayward’s novel at random: ‘An excess of transparency, described by the experts as a “nervous breakdown”, had brought him into direct contact with this world. Yet there were no devils.’
The chain of authorship, of promptings, coincidences, is laid bare. In a way that could only be broached in an Epsom pub, after a day touring lost hospitals and sealed tunnels. Carpenter chases Hayward, who chases David Jones, who is a pivotal figure in my own Welsh mythos. Jones is fractured by war, spiritual crisis, the impossibility of knitting together strands, whispers of Celtic, Roman and contemporary history: broken inscriptions, nervous palimpsests of sign and symbol. He convalesced, through long years, in his Harrow cave, his trench; submerged in boarding houses until he passed into the hands of the nuns. Harrow Hill looks west to the motorway. Hayward, like so many other casualties of London, is shipped out to Epsom.
A table of misaligned Ancients, retro-Romantics, in a racing pub, conduct a seance on nominated predecessors; hoping, like the other madmen of the town, to find clues in printed texts. Kevin Jackson takes the prize by dipping into Jones’s The Anathemata and fixing on ‘a weird premonition of your Epsom encounter with my pal Martin Wallen’.
‘The Lady of the Pool’ (p. 130):
brighted up old imaged Lud, as some tell is ’balmed ’Wallon,
high-horsed above Martin miles, what the drovers pray to
We stroll back to the station. Cars, tucked away in the Sainsbury’s park (which closes at seven p.m.), now face a £25 pound ‘release’ fee. We turn out our pockets, scrape it together. And then the lucky ones get themselves on a train for London.
9
Between South Darenth and Junction 2 of the M25, we walk through an area of ponds, small lakes, deer parks, estates associated with St John of Jerusalem: captured Templar lands, as Renchi would have it. The Net keeps him informed about such things. Chat rooms crammed with speculation about the Sinclairs, Rosslyn Chapel, Danbury Hill in Essex. ‘It was the St Cleres who dedicated the church to St John, a connection has been made between other parishes held by the family and hilltop sun-worshipping sites. Their name is said to mean “holy light” and they may have been active in the mysterious cult of “The Priory of Zion”.’ Etc. Etc.
Such housing as there is has made its treaty with Dartford, pebbledash (under a pink wash) decorated with drooping lines of coloured bulbs, carriage lamps. The effect might have been achieved by wet paint, a mound of gravel and a wind-machine. Cars parked, off-highway, on concrete lawns, are for sale. And, if there’s room, green tables offer windfall, the bounty of pillaged orchards. Newsagents are plastered with special offers for excursions to the Millennium Dome.
PLEASE PUT ALL LETTERS FOR ST. JOHN’S JERUSALEM IN THE BLACK POSTBOX TO THE RIGHT OF THE 5 BARRED GATE.
Marc Atkins takes a call on his mobile; his connections sense that he’s on his way back to town. Kevin looks mildly shocked. Electronic interconnectedness doesn’t fit with his preconceptions (shaping nicely as a future essay): skinhead camera-artist as linear successor to Julia Margaret Cameron, Alvin Langdon Coburn. Kevin’s footwear is beginning to pinch. The liberties of Shoreham and the Valley of Vision, vineyards and villas, have given way to suburban drudgery, hedge tunnels of the kind we have previously encountered in West Drayton and Enfield Chase.
As Kevin suffers, Marc revives. He’s a poet of margins, bad skies. Fast-moving weather systems suit him: glints in mud puddles, darkness at noon, early-evening alchemy. He likes identifying fault lines, indeterminate zones where towns loosen their grip: unfinished roads, abandoned civil engineering projects, pylons. He avoids humans – who tend to give the game away, fix the scene in a particular time scale. Marc’s work is theatrical, future archaeology is what he’s after; hints of a capacity to hang around beyond the point of no return. There is something sinister in the way he swoops on any railway that we have to cross; he’s busking for disaster, willing catastrophe. He empties the set, so that the furies can advance without interference.
When he makes portraits, he’s dowsing for a late bloom, evidence of a well-spent (or misspent) life. It’s not that he’s an ambulance chaser, but he appreciates experience as a cosmetic of revelation. He talks to his victims, draws them out. With that unnerving height (shaved skull, dark glasses), the request for a photographic session is not always welcome. It’s like collaborating with an obituarist. He might tell you more than you want to know.
Industrial units replace farms. FRUIT DISTRIBUTION CENTRE: a white flag pole garlanded with barbed wire. A faded Union Jack. We’re closing on territory where Englishness is a threat, faces painted with red crosses. The Darent is nudged aside by the thrust of the M25 – as it races towards the Thames. Wat Tyler, famously revolting peasant and local hero, lends his name to profoundly conservative pubs. Top man: the most popular Dartford heritage token. Before the advent of Mick Jagger.
Flooded gravel pits, desultory fishermen, fade into empty meadows. The scabby planting of the M25 embankment. On the hard shoulder, we stop to repair Kevin’s feet. A true English gentleman, of the Captain Oates type, Moose has made no complaint. A steady stream of self-mock
ery yields to clammy browed (but unadmitted) desperation: will this day ever end? When he bares the ruined feet, we blanch. ‘Last time,’ he announces, with a slightly hollow laugh, ‘the nails went black and fell off. I squelched when I walked.’
It was fortunate that Renchi (who stayed overnight in Hackney) had helped himself to the various antiquated packages of plaster from our medicine cabinet: waterproof, quilted, smooth and smelling of matron’s room. The Quaker carer gets to work. He binds the abused flippers like Christo wrapping the Reichstag. Each foot has twenty short muscles primed to flex, extend, abduct and adduct the spindly toes: all shot, screaming. The horn of the nail is black (the burnt crisps you find at the bottom of the bag). Epithelial tissue oozes pink, no longer capable of securing nail to toe. It’s probably time for Kevin to step outside, into the fast lane. Do the decent thing.
Marc’s camera hovers, an inch above the insulted flesh. When he’s satisfied that he’s got the shot, Renchi supplies fresh socks. The rest of us are bearing up quite well; we can live with Kevin’s pain. Somebody on these occasions has to take the bolt, pay the ferryman’s fee. It’s noble of Kevin to volunteer.
But it’s not just Moose Jackson who is on his way out, the M25 abdicates at Junction 2; its title is not returned until it manages to cross the Thames. Panic strikes. Roads spin off in every direction. Powder mills, pumping stations, flooded sports fields will have to be negotiated before we reach town. The Darent is no longer a Kentish stream, it’s a canal, a dirty ditch between rat-grey banks. A drudge. The force of the river labours to drive cog wheels and grindstones. Dartford is the property of Glaxo-Wellcome, global pharmacists: insulin for diabetes, digoxin. A strong dose of reality to counter pastoral sugar, the saccharine of Samuel Palmer. Speed to whip the heart’s tired muscle.
London Orbital Page 44
