Lakeside is not for walkers. We don’t hang around. It’s exhausting, having your ghost-soul stolen by CCTV cameras, stolen and stored, time-coded: to keep you where you are. ‘Once you’ve been to Lakeside, you’ll return again and again!’ That’s the vampire promise. ‘Something for all tastes and ages.’ Something for 800-year-old, plasma-gorging Transylvanian aristocrats. ‘Lakeside at night… it’s magical!’
*
It was a relief to get back inside the M25, to the lost village of Aveley, the Mardyke Way and the Mardyke Valley. Ground so proud of its obscurity that some comedian felt obliged to erect a noticeboard, pin a map (gouged by Stanley knives), set an agenda. The sodden Mardyke Way was unwritten, forlorn. Eco-bureaucrats smeared it with their feelgood fictions: ‘A secret landscape of classically flat flood plains bounded by ancient woodland on all sides.’
Which interprets as: pylons, irrigation ditches, scrub, damp cattle. Bounded by the ‘ancient’ Purfleet Arterial Road and the ‘classically flat’ M25, this country was so sad that nobody had the heart to exploit it.
Burnt-out cars form a causeway across the swamp. A man in a yellow jacket is filling in forms. An old bath, with salvageable taps intact, provides a trough for imaginary horses. This is one of those days when the rain comes down steadily and softly, so that you can’t quite be bothered to dig your coat out of the rucksack. Then it pours. You stop. And just as you wriggle into the coat (or, in Renchi’s case, the waterproof trousers), the sun breaks through. A pale rainbow over drowned Essex. Teasing us, leading us on.
Lakes, dog walks, public golf courses. In theory, on paper, this is a recreational zone: Thames Chase, a ‘Community Forest’. Today, the community can’t be arsed. Wood gatherers and charcoal burners stay at home with their feet up. A very wet beast, a hairy greyhound thing, a near-lurcher, plunges into one of the lakes and then shakes himself over us. The owner isn’t sure where the path goes, nobody has put that question before. Ever.
The next storm blows my umbrella inside-out, rips off the multicoloured canvas. I bury the naked staff in a hedge. I like the idea of golf umbrellas, abandoned around the road, beginning to flower. Like the Glastonbury thorn.
Public golfers, as we have come to expect, are friendly. After they’ve spent an hour or two hacking lumps out of the Thames Chase, watching balls fly backwards in a hurricane, they’re ready to chat. They dress down, these old boys: as for a DIY session in a garden shed (baggy cardigan, flannels, comfortable shoes). They point out a hut where anyone with loose change can buy coffee and a bun. If we keep going, heads down, in a northerly direction, we’ll find a Green Way.
The brochure confirms the tale: ‘Greenways link the towns to the forest. Some of them will be parks that you can walk and relax in; others will simply be car parks.’ That’s the problem, differentiating. ‘Arts and crafts, planting trees and hedges, are just some of the things we want to see more of.’
Green Lane, when we achieve it, is a ‘Private Road’. An unsanctioned car park for bombed vehicles. A pastoral Beirut. COUNCIL IS AWARE. A yellow notice taped to the wing of a torched Dagenham multiple. Highway carrion have removed the wheels, windows, numberplates and door handles. Welcome to the Empty Quarter of Nicholson’s Greater London Street Atlas.
At Corbets Tey, we admire the pargeting and think of Marc Atkins. It might be a moulded shield or an entire wall. The iconography of Essex pargeting is a topic we’re too wet to debate. Oak trees, stags, horsemen: the confederacy of the forest. Wet plaster ornamentation that proves we’re on the right track. The pull now is towards Epping Forest; the motorway, even when it’s in full view, is redundant. Thames Chase publicists are frantic to keep you occupied. Birdwatching, orienteering, trim trails, kite flying, crazy golf, windsurfing, jet skiing, karting, sauna-soaking: they’ve got them all. These activities may be invisible to the untrained eye, but the drowned fields of the Mardyke Valley are the English Yosemite National Park. A forest of conceptual trees that must, one day, carry Epping to Purfleet. Hence the stucco panels, the impressed trefoils and stars. A coded trail for wood fetishists.
The immediate question is: will they let us into the pub? We’re not wet; we’re soused, deluged, bedraggled. Colour has run. We’re blue. We look like something rescued from the North Sea and left floundering on the deck.
No problem. Corbets Tey is twinned with H.P. Lovecraft’s Innsmouth (‘blasphemous fish-frogs of the nameless design’). Locals with phosphorescent complexions, neck-breathers, welcomed us: as warm-blooded novelties. Give them credit, they didn’t flinch when Renchi stripped off his outer layers and wrung out his thick red socks.
We gnaw at very dead plaice and convulsed scampi. Blind-tested, all the varieties of fishmeat on offer would be uniformly flavourless. A grit of breadcrumbs dressing partially de-iced sog. Sachets of salad cream and tomato ketchup add zest to lumpen wedges of saturated potato. The wedges have a metallic aftertaste. Like something you’d spit out in a dentist’s surgery.
While Renchi’s kit steams on the old-fashioned radiator, we settle on Upminster as our destination. The end of the District Line. And therefore a part, however remote, of London. Termini are mysterious places. You want to see where the rails die. It’s like reaching the ultimate fold in the map, the final footprint of the known world.
Renchi, so he says, is reading Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space. This is a coincidence of sorts, because I’m not reading The Poetics of Reverie (by the same author); even though I have a copy by my bed. The title was appealing. But the print was too tight. I couldn’t get past the thicket of green ink annotations left by a previous owner. ‘The night has no future.’ It’s like having a smart aleck digging you in the ribs. ‘Reverie is a manifest psychic activity. It contributes documentation on differences in the tonality of being.’
Reverie is the best response to Empty Quarter Essex, something less than trance. Landscape floats. It is there to be seen from passing cars, not to be experienced at first hand. Essex is better remembered than known. The book I’m really reading is Roger Deakin’s Waterlog (A Swimmer’s Journey through Britain). Deakin left out Mar Dyke and the River Ingrebourne. Lido and lock, his own moat, channel and quarry, he dipped and plunged and thrashed. He lay on his back and drifted. But no London circumnavigation (Lea, Colne, Darent, Wey) was attempted. London’s watery dreaming is untapped. Nothing ventured at the hinge of town and country. He does enjoy a circuit of pools within the city and the suburbs, but that’s not the same.
Bundles of papers, saved from the damp in plastic folders, are produced by Renchi. Who has been tracking the ground we are covering on the Net. He has accessed: ‘An Essex Mystery’. Peter Fox of Witham, an enthusiast for ‘the truly excellent ales brewed by Mr Ridley’, has located three Essex pubs, all called ‘The Compasses’, in a dead-straight line. ‘The 4th pub called The Compasses creates a circle and points to an ancient centre of Templar activity. Other strange coincidences. Geomancy, Masons, Templars and the Peasants Revolt (1381) could all be linked.’ And linked, inevitably, to Danbury Hill (‘considered as the highest eminence in Essex’). Danbury Church is dedicated to St John the Baptist, ‘patron saint of the Templars.’ Fox notes, as do all the Net dowsers, that ‘there are Saint-Clere (Sinclair) knights buried in the church’.
Renchi has further evidence, photocopies from topographical guides in his father’s library. While he digs them out, I run my own alignment triple: Danbury, the Kelvedon Hatch nuclear bunker (captured farmhouse), Tottenham Hotspur FC’s football ground at White Hart Lane. That’s the real Essex: Templar/Secret State/footy.
The grey sheets – which spookily show Renchi’s hand holding the book open – trace the story of the De Sancto Claro family to Danbury, to the opening of a ‘leaden coffin’ thought to contain ‘the body of the Knight templar represented by the effigy’.
On raising the lead coffin, there was discovered an elm coffin in-closed, about one-fourth of an inch thick, very firm and entire. On removing the lid of this coffin, it was fou
nd to enclose a shell about three quarters of an inch thick, which was covered with a thick cement, of a dark olive colour, and of a resinous nature. The lid of this shell being carefully taken off, we were presented with a view of the body, lying in a liquor, or pickle, somewhat resembling mush-room catchup, but paler, and of a thicker consistence. The taste was aromatic, though not very pungent, partaking of the flavour of catchup, and of the pickle of Spanish olives. The body was tolerably perfect, no part appearing decayed, but the throat, and part of one arm: the flesh every where, except on the face and throat, appeared exceedingly white and firm. The face and throat were of a dark colour, approaching to black: the throat was much lacerated…
The coffin not being half full of the pickle, the face, breast, and belly, were of course not covered with it. The inside of the body seemed to be filled with some substance, which rendered it very hard. There was no hair on the head; nor do I remember any in the liquor; though feathers, flowers, and herbs, in abundance, were floating; the leaves and stalks of which appeared quite perfect, but totally discolored.
Upminster is London-aspirant, but it is also submerged Essex. The Underground finishes, the railway runs east to Basildon and Southend. Suburbia revealed. Those sponsors of community art, Barratt, have been busy with their ‘computer generated’ Impressionism. Mega-hoardings: 100 PC HOME EXCHANGE AVAILABLE. Pavements white as tropical beaches. Strollers in unseasonal leisurewear.
The reality check is a grey filter, a winter sun dissolving at the road’s edge. Landscape dipping towards the distant motorway. A green and white sign: C. LONDON/ROMFORD/AI27. Tears in the eyes.
The evening fields dim, there’s a luminescence in the sky. Upminster is far enough from Lakeside to retain some retail heft; fewer charity shops than Dartford, more newsagents and dry cleaners. Eventually, tourists will arrive to photograph the station. It’s architecturally undistinguished, but definitive: The End of the Line. The town, old as it once was, is now an after-thought. You can smell the beginnings of north-east London; bigger houses, better examples of pargeting (oak trees and herons).
We decide to go with the flow of commuter traffic, to stick with the road. Empty heads and tired feet. Upminster to Harold Wood. We’re walking a metalled ridge, hedges and villages, golf courses, empty fields. The dawn sky, witnessed over the Thames at Grays, is matched by dusk at Harold Wood. An effect worthy of Luke Howard or John Constable: underlit cloud-bands above black ground, an horizon of jagged roofs.
A final photograph to celebrate Harold Wood, suburb of suburbs. A composition in three bands. (1) Pargeted oak panel. (2) Picture window, with stained-glass roses; in which walkers, road and evening sky are reflected. (3) Twin hebe bushes (bought at one of the Enfield Chase garden centres).
Now that there are destination signs for Epping Forest and the M25, we can look for the railway station. The next walk, with luck, will return us to Waltham Abbey, and close the circuit.
4
7 December 1999. Liverpool Street station: seven a.m. The idea is to muster the full troop for the return to Waltham Abbey. Kevin Jackson is game, the first arrival. He’s so frightened of being late, I have to check the back of his flying jacket for benchmarks. Has he slept here? Pale, pouchy, collar up: the holy drinker shakes recognisable by railway postmen. When I worked in Liverpool Street on the night shift, I learnt to spot non-travelling travellers, TV actors in camelhair coats resting their heads on smart leather luggage. The second-time divorced, newly dropped from a series and come, by habit, to witness the departure of the last train for Colchester. Dossing down, moving off early for a shave in the Gents. A black coffee. A call to the agent’s answerphone.
Kevin is mustard keen and alarmingly over-bagged. Families have emigrated with less. Moose is burdened by a rucksack and an air-miles shoulder satchel. He’s going on somewhere, coming back from something: he never spends two nights under the same roof. It’s the Cambridge temperament, restlessness, guilt. The unfinished essay. The abandoned thesis. The masterwork that dies in the drawer. Now that Marxism is as respectable as marquetry (and about as relevant), the Cambridge Apostles have been forced to invent a new brand of subversion. A confederacy of reforgotten texts and landscapes. The loop from Harold Wood to Epping Forest should do the trick. Noak Hill, Watton’s Green, Passingford Bridge: even people who live there have never heard of them.
Marc Atkins doesn’t show. He wanted to. He was definitely up for it. He was going to bring his partner. But then he had to cancel at the last moment, he’d been offered an exhibition at the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill. He had to take the meeting.
Renchi, panting, arrives just in time for the 7.20. He’s been on late shift. And battling through commuters, down the Drain, Waterloo to Bank. He grabbed a taxi, then decided it was quicker to run.
There are no cafés in Harold Wood. What would be the point? Everybody is moving in the other direction. By now, Renchi is operating with the most subtle of maps, discriminations of pink and scarlet, bruise-blue to sky-blue: a geological survey. As a work of art, great. Useless for locating sausage rolls. By my reckoning, there’ll be nothing but winter cabbage and raw turnips this side of Theydon Bois. We settle for a bacon roll from a baker’s shop.
Leaving the station, to cross the A12 and climb towards Dagnam Park, we have to cope with a stream of Harold Wooders rushing downhill, screeching into their cellphones. They are pale, soapy, razor-raw. Underdressed. The rest of the day will be spent in overheated offices, so this brief exposure to the weather has to be tolerated. Heels and halloween slap. The office, in fact, zooms out to meet them. Opening a telecommunications link, they are there before they arrive. Unpaid overtime eats into a period which should be spent in reverie. Jabber jabber jabber. The whole mob look like revenants, let out of the graveyard, being talked through unknown territory by a distant controller. Between bed and train, nothing. A dull blank. A set of Tipp-Ex’d snapshots.
The Saxon King pub, with its signboard portrait of King Harold (crown, sceptre, rock-dinosaur moustache), proves that we are on track for Waltham Abbey, the grave. Name five famous Saxon kings. Kevin Jackson probably could (in alphabetical order), but those bags are beginning to make themselves felt. If he has to go to ground, like cop-killer Harry Roberts in Epping Forest, he’s equipped for it: toothbrush, clean shirt, a yard of books.
Harold Wood, Harold Hill, the Saxon King. A stucco forest of ancient trees leading to the Royal Oak pub. The houses on Harold Hill have been laid out in crescents and circuses that look from the air like helmets and shields. This, according to Pevsner, was ‘one of the largest L.C.C. housing enterprises after the Second World War’. Seven thousand three hundred and eighty units for 20,000 metropolitan emigrants. ‘Architecturally not much of special interest can be discovered.’ How much time, I wonder, did Pevsner spend here? His wife at the wheel. Was there anything to get him out of the car?
Broad streets. Privet hedges. Hillside adapted into village green. A school with a view. An ambulance, lights winking, is parked at the end of a terrace. One bright window in a lifeless street.
We amble over uncombed heathland. We’re close to the M25 at the point where it starts to pull to the east. The road yields to the gravity of Waltham Abbey.
I’ve remembered my binoculars. With foreshortening, the stalled motorway dazzles. A plantation of dead trees (‘The Osiers’, it says on the map). Black willows. Low hills. Six lines of stationary traffic: SAFEWAYS, EDDIE STOBART.
Long shadows chase us. The morning path is quilted in brown leaves. We’re back with the boarding kennels and catteries. People do things with horses. If they restore a barn or piggery, they’re sure to call it: THE FORGE. And to hang a white horse sign from a chain. Real pigs are not much in evidence. They’ve gone out of fashion, since the Seventies, when the Hosein brothers, Arthur and Nizamodeen, fed their kidnap victim, Mrs Muriel McKay, to the porkers at Rooks Farm in Stocking Pelham. (In an act of Seventies revivalism, Thomas Harris reran the plot device for his
novel Hannibal, but nobody noticed.)
Rooks Farm was around the corner in Hertfordshire, but these discreet properties, hidden down farm tracks, have the authentic feel of bandit country. Convenient for the East End, Essex or Suffolk coast. They are so visible (from the M25) that nobody sees them. Gravel pits, plantations, private airfields. Barns, ponds, tin sheds. The mingled scents of heavy-duty slurry and diesel.
This walk is a nightmare for my Nicholson, every mile is a new map; we’re cutting across the squares, chasing the broad blue band of the M25. After Noak Hill, we find ourselves, unexpectedly, in Havering-atte-Bower (which behaves like a footnote from Chaucer). The path carries us through a mud yard of caged greyhounds. Who shiver, sniff and piss until the concrete steams. Chained guard dogs snarl.
The churches are all closed. St John the Evangelist at Havering-atte-Bower, with its twelfth-century font, is not interested. We have to make do with a rare example of Essex stocks on the village green. A woman puts us right for Hobbs Cross: ‘It’s a very long way.’ Not to be walked. ‘At least seven or eight miles.’ She restrains her air-boxing dogs, astonished that we intend to carry on.
Hob (or Hop) is Old Norse for ‘shelter’. Readers of Alan Moore will be aware of a darker etymology. Pigs again: ‘big pigs, and long, with one on other’s back’. Pigs and pig gods. The first voice summoned by Moore in his linked sequence of Northampton tales, Voice of the Fire, is that of’Hob’s Hog’.
The stink of piggeries, pig squit, recycled offal, rendered bone, stays with us – though no pigs, or other animals, are to be seen. If they’re here, they lead lives as resolutely ‘interior’ as the last years of Marcel Proust. Beasts bent to our convenience. Pre-processed food waiting for the short ride down the M25 to Great Warley. And the gun.
London Orbital Page 51
