Downriver

by Iain Sinclair

  Without further debate we plunged recklessly into the streets, the broad channel of Bow Road. ‘I’m getting the twitch,’ screamed Sonny, above the traffic. ‘We’re on to an activated possibility.’

  I agreed: it was my policy at that time to agree with everything, to play Russian roulette with whatever fate threw at me, to break – by paths I could not anticipate – into the madness of the city. I would lead Sonny to the redoubt of Imar O’Hagan, the secret Bracken Bunker. Sonny was beginning to see the shape I had already prepared for him.

  ‘I like it!’ he shouted, as he bounced a pensioner into the path of an oncoming 35cwt van. ‘It’s got realpolitik and balance. This solitary anchorite, O’Hagan, labouring in his cave. Modest, employing horizontal forms, working only with what is available to him – free of sponsorship. A re-enchantment of that which was never previously enchanted. Yes! And we set that against the state art of the Silvertown Memorial, those bragging vertical energies, laying claim to emotions they have not earned. The public river and the unregarded wasteland. God, it’s almost a title! We’ve got it. We’ve got our pitch.’

  Sonny beat his hand against his side (altogether missing the historic tablet that stood with its Noah’s Ark, named Courage, to honour the memory of the match-girls). He was awkwardly squaring his fingers to screentest the statue of Mr Gladstone that rose out of the curve of the Gents on an island in the middle of the road, around which swept an enraged scum of drivers, catapulting from the flyover.

  ‘Who is that? What’s the church? Bow? The bells? You mean, this is it? The epicentre? We’re there, in there, there there, at it – we’ve arrived.’

  He advanced at a run towards Gladstone, emitting idiocies like a froth of ectoplasm. The Grand Old Man’s right hand gestured prophetic scorn back towards the Bow Quarter, in bird-limed resignation.

  ‘Brilliant! This anonymous vision of the great liberal patriarch. It’s biblical. Decency. Authority – by respect. An earned authority. Feel the humanity burning in those eyes. My God, he’s actually supported by a cairn of books. What’s that? Dante? Of course, Juventus Mundi. And a third volume whose title is turned away from the spectator; thus preserving the essential mystery of personality. That’s us. The third force, the mediators between spiritual heaven and material hell. We must shoot our film with the same sense of unegoic communality espoused by the modest craftsman who created this statue. Come on, yes – do you see it? – let’s go.’

  He vaulted the protective fence, to hurl himself among the hog-run of cars. I could not bring myself to point out the sculptor’s name, larger than life, cut into the side of the pedestal: Albert Bruce Joy. Sonny spun past corrugated fences that surrounded soon-to-be-demolished municipal mausoleums: the fences were plastered with fly-pitched posters for rock groups whose names had all been lifted from the canon of modernist literature. A hyperactive collage of quotations; many from William Burroughs, some from Joyce, some even from Jean Rhys. Authors whose works would finally exist only as names on hoardings: memento mori to bands who went out of business before the paste was dry. The hallucinatory wave patterns of the fence metamorphosed a leering Derek Jameson into an avatar of the Elephant Man.

  Devons Road opens to the north from a submerged precinct, half-developed, half-boarded for the bulldozers: nothing happens until you duck under the railway bridge. Sonny was rambling euphorically, pirouetting in tight circles: panoramas of blight – ‘yes, yes’ – grass humps, horizons of aborted social experiments. These were the final killing fields of the welfare state: bleak towers, mud gash, red cliffs of hospital charity. ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ Sonny’s camera/eye swept from the dead nettles of the embankment to the spark-grid of the south-flowing railway cutting, from the marshes to the distant docks. This island earth: a dab of infected lint helplessly staunching a terminal haemorrhage.

  He chanted an ecstatic litany of road signs: Fern Street, Violet Road, Blackthorn Street, Whitethorn Street. ‘I can see for ever,’ he said, ‘an open vein, the lifeblood of London, a trail of light. Devons Road converting to St Paul’s Way, filtering and fading, dying as Ben Jonson Road. Do you realize that Ben Jonson’s first known work, The Isle of Dogs (1597), was suppressed by the Privy Council as “lewd, seditious and slanderous”? It earned him ten weeks in the Marshalsea, where he was plagued by two narks, government agents; one of whom, Robert Poley, was present at the death of Christopher Marlowe in Deptford. Now the play’s lost, only the record of the punishment remains.’

  ‘There’s something unlucky about the mere mention of the place,’I replied. ‘It probably vanished with Jonson. There’s no other reason to go there; you can leave the known world behind. Let it be struck from the maps.’

  ‘Poets knew how to live in those days,’ Sonny accused. ‘Jonson was branded, rope-scorched; an angry, sweating, pock-marked, ungodly man. He killed the actor Gabriel Spenser on Hoxton Fields with a sword. This empty arena lets all those things flood back. Do you feel it? It’s a flattened book, ready to snap shut, and kill us like flies. We’re there, and here. On it, in it. Found. A slice through the wedding cake of culture, a geological section: a self-preserved dereliction.’

  It was true. We had stumbled into the Borderland, the space between the fortress developments of New Money to the north and the De Stijl colour-charts and pineapple-dressings of the riverside oases to the south: between the poisoned swamp of the Lea and the Limehouse Cut was one last slab of unclaimed territory.

  Beneath the railway embankment was a wide allotment band, neatly tended, five-year-planned, baled with straw; a medieval strip system, generously sooted by the constant fret of passing trains. Commuters could glimpse this rustic scene and imagine a greening of the inner cities. The hospital barracks conveniently blocked out the uncontained acres of industrial graveyards. It was marvellous: we were floating between Empson Street and Purdy Street – the austerities of the Cambridge School and the fine baroque flourishes of homophile decadence.

  Kids used the mud slopes to road-test their liberated BMX bikes, while barefoot freaks spun and stabbed in exotic Tai Chi ballets, like white-faced’ Nam vets exorcizing their trauma in some crummy Hollywood guilt trip: Nick Nolte, or the cheapest available beefcake. One solitary end-of-terrace pub, the Old Duke of Cambridge, stood in the middle of the wasteland. It was somewhere for the demolition men to drink, while waiting for the loot to come through, so that they could step back on to the street as fully-fledged brickies for yet another motte and bailey canalside folly.

  A pirate cable had been run over the wall from the Docklands railway to a fugitive scrapyard, where blue flashes from welding guns lit the gloom with nerve-destroying bursts, as they cosmetically sculpted new wrecks from a mound of old ones: spare-parts surgery.

  Sonny did not know how to handle this. He kept twisting, grandmother’s footsteps, muttering: an aide-mémoire for his ‘Last Show’ synopsis. ‘Gladstone… City of Towers… the sump… anarchist aubergines… Colin Ward.’ He did not recognize what stood directly before him, what I myself had only vaguely sensed, until Imar O’Hagan, the anchorite, the snail painter, had pointed it out to me. This dim field had been, very slowly, and very precisely, rendered as a scale model, smoothed and graded, of the Silbury Hill-Avebury-Windmill Hill complex. Imar, alone, had worked for years, digging and measuring, planting out. So that now Sonny stood, arms raised, on the East London Silbury, the burial place of kings: he trumpeted aloud his brazen affirmations of everything that was not here.

  IV

  Bracken House was the kind of set you encounter only in radical documentaries about ‘Chasing the Dragon’, or in reruns of ‘The Sweeney’. These places had no official existence; they had been wiped from the books, transferred from the housing list to some directory of naff locations. Unpeopled balconies, madly angled, relished their independence – beyond the reach of stairs that went nowhere, connecting only with other stair systems. Numerology had run riot: doors and walls were defaced with columns of figures (like equations that would never com
e out, predicting a sun-swallowing black hole). Every dustbin was numbered, many of them several times over. After slashing your way through a yard of booby-trapped motors you can enter the labyrinth, and never be seen again. Your finger bones discovered in the foil of a Chinese takeaway. Rabid infants snapped the wipers from the vans of social prowlers, or set fire to the rags that fluttered on the wire washing lines, from which some trainee psycho suspended the occasional cat.

  Imar O’Hagan had converted his flat into a stunning workshop/cave, a vibrant green cell, the walls electric with a Baconian brew of fish oil and reconstituted snot. It was heaped with piers of axed firewood, gathered from the wilderness of Tower Hamlets Cemetery. An abandoned mangle had been transformed into an etching press. One glimpse of Imar’s wild-eyed charms and Sonny was filling in the application for his Equity card.

  Trays of lascivious snails betrayed one of Imar’s current obsessions. A visit to the fridge revealed the other: blocks of frozen vampire bats, shipped in from the German labs (like an airline breakfast of compressed leather gloves), fought for space among the melting sparrow hawks and other assorted dead things that friends charity-faxed from the Dorset backwoods.

  Sonny timidly refused the offer of a carton of blue-green yogurt, uncapped among this ice-furred carnage. We voted instead to broach an interesting bottle that contained either Monte Alban worm-water, or turpentine.

  A postcard self-portrait of Chaim Soutïne honoured Imar’s master. The Bracken hermit had successfully brought Minsk to Bow. Notebook flashing, Sonny gazed longingly at the dark curls, the high cheekbones, the profile chiselled and chipped by adversity. Fired by our interest, Imar’s predatory smile broadened: he shone in an aureole of red-gold light, as he piloted us through his portfolio of deformity: the darkly etched abortions, the pathology crayons, the quattrocento dementia of snails and hands.

  Finger-drumming, Sonny stared – with a costive pout – into the courtyard. He had almost completed the draft treatment he would offer, as soon as he could reach a telephone, to the top corridor of teenage producers. ‘The FRIDGE as Storehouse of Magical Possibilities (cf. Joseph CORNELL). Any chance of working in Eli LOTAR’s slaughterhouse photos for Bataille’s Abattoirs? (Check with Sofya.) Outsider Art. MUD location (Voice over: Eliot reading from Wasteland). Studio; Talking Heads – Januszczak? Ignatieff? Some woman??’

  (The prime advantage of these jokers with the outlandish monikers is that your godfearing Englishman will only accept that something is ‘cultural’ if it comes with a music-hall accent. Foreigners may be an inferior product, lacking true spunk, but they do know about art and cooking.)

  Sonny would not sit: a mistake. He refused the luxury of another era, a row of salvaged tip-up cinema seats. He could not let the moment breathe; he was impatient to drive on, impale all the facts, achieve some grand conclusion. He began to read aloud from his preparatory notes. ‘The bunker?’ he blurted. ‘I thought there was a bunker. I need a definite bunker for our title: “The Bunker and the Monument”. That essential contrast of vertical and horizontal energies, the secret and the showy: the glitz of Silvertown and the modesty of Bow. All those nightland images. I want some of the great Henry Moore drawings on our rostrum. Tilbury Shelter Scene! The sleepers and the dead. What a metaphor for the condition of English kultur. Epstein’s pietaà attached to the Headquarters of the London Underground. Thick-lipped mothers of gloom!’

  ‘It’s bad karma to watch people sleeping,’ Imar frowned. ‘Better to put your eye to the keyhole and watch them fuck. It’s especially bad to watch a pregnant woman sleep. That’s taboo. The whole quality of the experience is so intense.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Sonny yelped, ‘I want the heroic side. People taking action for themselves, capturing their own space; taking their destiny, forcibly, into their own hands. That blitzed community of sleepers, dreaming their archetypal dreams, recapturing previously excommunicated territory – railway tunnels, sewers, bridges. Photographs by Bill Brandt evoking communal memories: lovers nestling against each other… the face of an old hag in the crypt of Christ Church, Spitalfields… timeless!… she could have known the Ripper. Or those orthodox Jewish fathers in the Brick Lane shelter. The dignity! Undisturbed, carrying on their work, Books of the Law. What Brandt does… here, look.’

  He shoved a photograph towards Imar.

  ‘What? A shed of gassed chickens?’ I mar responded. ‘Mouths agape, toothless, arms flung out – they are nothing but victims.’

  ‘I see the shelters,’ Sonny persisted, ‘as a “concrete armada”. This is one of the highs of our history, a time for the people, and we’ve got to link it with what you’re doing now – not with the madness of Crosby’s Tower of Babel.’

  If the Silbury Mound field was a strong, though imperceptible, public statement, then the Bracken House bunker was one of the most notable single-handed achievements I have ever encountered. Imar, in the guise of a remedial gardener, had been granted access to a stark exercise yard, imprisoned on three sides by tall blocks of windows. Every move he made was viewed by the other tenants; and yet his master plan went unremarked, if not exactly a state secret.

  Beneath the grass-flecked clay of this sombre garden was the formal geometry of a wartime bunker, harmoniously divided into four self-contained chambers. Platonic truths had been reasserted in these gnomon-activating depths: invisible passages between the world of elements and the race of life. Imar had excavated the entrances, one by one; had listened carefully to the oracle of falling water. He waited for clusters of eolithic light to break from the tainted darkness.

  We sat on a log at the bunker’s edge and let the night swallow us: solitary windows flared, glimpses of movement, opera snatches muffled in rapidly drawn curtains. This welfare rookery had fallen into the hands of the only people prepared to relish a Soviet-style glamour: students, archivists, state-sponsored artists. A gibbous moon slid from its cloud cover, offering – in the unwalled southern sector – a carnival vision of the most outflung of the Docklands studio-bivouacs; a pointless flurry of trapped waves, portholes and marine quotations. A pleasure boat grounded one nautical mile from the river.

  It was time to go under. We slid our spades beneath the squares of turf that Imar designated, and dug – until we heard the clink of metal upon metal. A trapdoor was located, prised open, lifted. We lowered ourselves, feet scrambling for the rungs of a ladder, into the clammy darkness. We advanced, hesitantly, inch by inch, through unconvinced puddles of light afforded by my pocket torch. We found ourselves, at last, inspecting an icehouse, in which time itself had been chilled, slowed, handicapped. Even in the breath of our heightened expectations, the bunker remained obstinately less than it was.

  The antechamber was steepled so high with industrial fallout that the only entry to the inner sanctum (the heart shrine) was by way of an obstacle course, perilous enough to deter any respectably mercenary tomb robbers. ‘I let an old rag and bone man stash his stuff,’ said Imar. ‘He asked if he could leave a couple of things here – just for a few days: then came back with a pantechnicon.’ What was on offer? Washing machines so ancient they must have been pedal-driven; useless slices of bicycle; sodden briquettes of paperbacks, congealed into twelve-deckers; enough folding chairs to sit out a square dance; Marcos-rivalling collections of single shoes; artificial limbs for dogs; gas stoves; lavatory bowls; columns of rusting paint tins: a fully-stocked museum of folk memories. We picked our way, admiringly, among the exhibits. And, as we stumbled blindly forward, we snapped off the spears of occasional stalactites; limey droplets plicked irregularly on to the flooded tile floor. In the torchlight the low ceiling shone like a dome of radium-licking insects (about to become stars). An eidetic cinema.

  The secret inner chamber had been successfully dammed, mopped, dried, polished. The walls had been scoured of bureaucratic symbols and the blood oaths of cadet gangsters. The chimney pipe had been cleared of dirt, dead birds, rags: it was possible, once more, to light a fire. ‘You should see them hea
ve shut their curtains, when they see smoke rising, without apparent cause, from the old grass hump,’ said Imar. ‘Legends are spreading. Civilians keep well clear. They think some berserker mob are incinerating inconvenient human evidence.’

  Oozing goodwill, and cackling with pleasure at his own strategies. Imar was no ‘divine light’ zombie: his vision could have been realized only through an immensely powerful self-belief (and many man-hours of vein-popping muscular effort).

  ‘I determined, when I first heard rumours of this heretical Silvertown monument,’ he announced, ‘to counter it with one of my own. To work faster than they could work. To start digging while they were still farting around with brochures and flogging the circuit of merchant banks. Look at the blasphemy of it.’ He jabbed fiercely against a projection of Crosby’s river, pinning it to the wall; then swept an avenger’s hand over this plucky attempt to align such reservoirs of the eternal spirit as the Museum of Design, Tower Bridge, and HMS Belfast.

  ‘Can you believe it?’ he stormed on. ‘These people want to erect their obscene stack, a heap of inert and spiteful weaponry, upon the most potent site on the aetheric highway between Greenwich Hospital and St Paul’s Cathedral. They actually intend to deflect the path of light, opened and acknowledged by Nicholas Hawksmoor; the ley that runs down from Blackheath – without drama or fuss – exactly through the gap between the twin domes, across the river, over the malign Isle of Dogs, to circle and recharge at the Tower of St Anne, Limehouse. As the light travels, it fades from our sight, but its influence does not pale: the Jews’ Burial ground, Whitechapel… King Cole’s eucalyptus, the caterpillar dreaming tree, Meath Gardens… Victoria Park fountain… Well Street. It blesses and touches all those unacknowledged and marvel-provoking enclosures; a spine of hope. How dare Crosby misread Turner’s “View of St Paul’s from Greenwich” (the Maze Hill eidolon)? Turner is careful to place an antlered deer in the foreground, and also a buck – so insubstantial that you can see the canvas beneath. These are the animal familiars, the spirit guides. Turner must never be dragooned into the enemy’s camp.’