London Overground

by Iain Sinclair

  Palermo Road, Bathurst Gardens, Clifford Gardens: eastward to Kensal Rise, a series of dormitory dwellings, redbrick with white trim, privet-protected, curving from the north–south stem of College Road like the candelabrum branches of a menorah. The uneasy microclimate of the electrified railway runs me back to 1910, to the kind of house in which I grew up, with late, mass-produced Arts and Crafts elements, colonial porches, diamond details on the pointed gables, half-timber dormers. These are retreats from which we want to retreat, but there is no escape beyond stepping it out, swinging our tired arms. We both grew up in aspirational suburbs, where Arcadian fronts disguised all manner of repression and vernacular weirdness within.

  At every roundabout, at every point where a crossroad bridges the tracks, we detour; peer over the railway wall, cut through tangled foliage, to be sure that the blunt yellow-nosed trains are still in service. Unit prices of desirable properties are surely climbing as we move east, but it’s more Morlockland than Metroland. A certain residual gloom that goes with the safety of being this far out: out from where? Chinese whispers we can’t quite hear rumble through the continuous shrouded terrace, as if the miles of bow-fronted conformity made up a single railway mansion.

  On my reconnaissance visit it was very different. In the nervous optimism of morning – still alive, still fighting for a crust – these narrow corridors become a rat run; school transport stalled and horn-jabbing against delivery vans summoned by absent nuclear families who have no time to shop. Defiant cyclists, mounting kerbs, extending mortality with sweaty gulps of filthy air, the suicide smog leaking from idling exhaust pipes, strike off across town to their open-plan offices. They mourn, every day, the economic realities that banish them to extended village strips between railways and cemeteries.

  This section of London Overground, pioneer metal with a new ginger makeover, has not yet exploded into grass-thatched modernist blocks or factory outlets for Burberry and Aquascutum. The streets are as quiet and regular as the Old Portuguese-Jewish burial ground between Alderney Road and Mile End Road. And the signs are with us, even in the thickening dusk, of a will towards community. LET US RUN OUR LIBRARY! SAVE KENSAL RISE LIBRARY! This is a zone of concerned posters in unpolished windows. Most of them conservationist. One offers: BASEMENT CONVERSIONS. There is no trace as yet of the classic Hackney through-kitchen, the Welsh dressers of Islington, homeworker husbands bent over their light screens.

  That modest neighbourhood hub, the Kensal Rise Library, with its locked door, is the battleground. The dignified redbrick building is fronted by shelves of books enclosed in a see-through plastic tent and announced as: THE KENSAL RISE POP UP LIBRARY. Aggrieved clients of the service have taken direct action. All over London, libraries have been decanting surplus stock, flogging off rarities to dealers, landfilling boxes of local history. Tragic Idea Stores – bad idea – try to blend in among branded corporate high streets by looking as gaudy and dysfunctional as the worst of them. The pitch is to be accessible, to offer broadband connections, DVDs of dead TV, hygiene advice, legal advice, budget t’ai chi classes for senior citizens.

  The problem with this pop-up library is that it has too many books. Well-wishers are so keen to demonstrate their support for the concept of a library, with its deep-England associations, that they are offloading all the charitable donations they can carry. The nocturnal tent, beside the phone kiosk, has a NOT FOR SALE sign, and a greenhouse aspect that implies a familial relationship with that other threatened railway parasite, the allotment.

  The Kensal Rise tent is anti-library: it doesn’t let books out, it gathers them in, until protesting shelves are multi-stacked and groaning. This is a shrine to conspicuous altruism. You could build a section of the Berlin Wall with the mounds of unwanted titles. Daniel Martin by John Fowles. The Ebony Tower. He Who Fears the Wolf by Karin Fossum. Farewell Horizontal by K. W. Jetter. Sad orphans are horizontally stacked in alphabetical order. A handwritten note begs patrons: ‘please keep book donations at home’.

  Advice Andrew Kötting ignores. He digs out the copy of London Falling and asks me to write ‘something peculiar’ on the flyleaf. I can barely see the page, and the presence of all these books in their polytunnel forcing house is no encouragement. I scribble some occulted gibberish that nobody will be able to decipher, then sign and date it as a memorial to our walk. Andrew squeezes yet another unwanted item inside the sweating yurt.

  Mark Twain opened Kensal Rise Library in 1900. He felt the same compulsion as current community bibliophiles: he donated five of his own titles and an inscribed photograph. I wonder what became of those? The site was gifted to the railway suburb by All Souls College, Oxford.

  Shortly after our visit, the pop-up library with its gazebo was dismantled by agents acting under orders from All Souls (where Salman Rushdie was granted sanctuary in his hour of need, after a fatwa had been issued threatening his life, following the publication of The Satanic Verses). The books were left on the pavement in what was described as ‘an act of cultural vandalism’. All Souls, it is understood, has a financial endowment of £256 million.

  The affair came to the attention of a number of concerned petition signers; some, like Zadie Smith, had direct local connections. Many of the emails supporting the plans to turn the library into private flats were proved to be fraudulent, coming from false addresses. The police, pleading lack of resources, declined to investigate. Under considerable public pressure, the developer, Andrew Gillick of Kensal Properties, after consultation with advisers from All Souls, agreed that space would be allocated for a small community library staffed by unpaid volunteers.

  Kensal Rise houses got bigger, they stood a little more aloof from their neighbours. The leading on the windows was more pronounced, net curtains protected interiors with real books and flowers and baby grand pianos, weighed down by ranks of coloured family photographs in silver frames. Gables were sharper. Ironwork balconies imitated vines. There were inset panels with wreaths and conches in white relief. The houses were set further back from the pavement.

  Kötting’s meaty yawns threatened lockjaw. His shoulders slumped. Hunger, I feared, would soon have him rummaging through well-stocked bins. Or kipping down among the laurels. It was the hour of fugue for both of us. The walk became all walks, our own and those whose recorded adventures had inspired us: Werner Herzog making his ice pilgrimage, much improved in the telling, from Munich to Paris. Albert Speer, shaping an epic travel journal/novel from circuits of the prison yard at Spandau, a Berlin suburb. John Ledyard tramping across Russia, heading for the Bering Straits, before being turned back in 1788. Cabeza de Vaca, naked, deranged, roaming the American Southwest, Florida to Mexico, sometimes a slave, sometimes a miracle worker raising the dead. And John Clare. Always John Clare. Labourer, poet, madman.

  Clare, on his ‘Journey out of Essex’, the walk from Epping Forest up the Great North Road to Peterborough and Werrington, describes a period towards the end of the third day when he has been chewing tobacco to stave off hunger. ‘Going a length of the road afterwards’, shreds of tobacco stuck between his teeth, he remembers nothing; no place names, no details. It’s all gone. When he comes to relive it, to write it, to go back into the sensations of the walk, there is a great hole. Pain returns him to himself in Stilton: ‘completely foot foundered and broken down’. Ready to drop to the gravel, broken, sleeping where he falls. He hears the voices of two women. The old one thinks he shams. The young one sees that he is done. The collapse is absolute.

  We are not there yet. We are moving steadily towards Kilburn High Road and the station Kossoff populated with ghosts. I suggest a break at Ciao-Ciao, a friendly restaurant where I stopped for coffee on a previous circuit, but Andrew is set on identifying the right pub. We talk about reprising the Clare walk, but that is not hard enough for the film-maker. He decides that he must dress as a Straw Bear. Leila McMillan will weave a costume, stitch him into a suit of reeds, and leave him to provide his own mud, internal and external. He’ll lurch
and prance through the forest, accompanying the troubled poet, who will be played by the actor Toby Jones. Toby, who has done Truman Capote and Alfred Hitchcock, would manage the silence of Clare very well, Andrew reckoned. The pride, confusion, scorn that always burned and argued beneath the placid surface. Andrew would supply momentum, physical comedy. I wasn’t sure how much comedy there was in this episode, but I recognized that we were approaching that state of something close to intoxication, when tiredness is no longer tiredness and roads merge and names are not worth recording or remembering. Even our own.

  Kossoff carried his sketching board to the vestibule of Kilburn Underground many times, in a trance of recognition: newspaper kiosk, stairs, ticket machines, checkered floor. Now, when we stop to photograph the revised station, painted ghosts return. Through Kossoff’s prescient engagement, they are fixed, even when the building that contains them is altered or abolished. Charcoal preparatory drawings, made on the street outside the station, are unpeopled: railway bridge, lines of force, racing clouds. Kilburn High Road runs north like a funnel of Darwinian psychopathology, energies in crisis.

  A number of locations from the necklace of this Overground walk are beginning to fuse: Denmark Hill merges with Hampstead, the Maudsley Hospital with the Royal Free. Now that the BBC had pulled out of White City, as a tactic for exorcizing back channels to Jimmy Savile, in just the way they wiped his gurning obviousness from repeats of Top of the Pops, sequences shot within the demolished buildings float back to the surface. When London Overground vanishes underground, to tunnel through the glacial debris, between Finchley Road and Hampstead Heath, memory and topography slip out of synch. We don’t have the strength to talk. We free-associate soundbites.

  ‘Wood Lane?’

  ‘Pinter.’

  ‘Accident.’

  There’s a bit in Joseph Losey’s 1967 film where the tightly furled Oxford academic impersonated by Dirk Bogarde, wrestling with briefcase and umbrella, arrives at Television Centre for a conversation about a possible role in a talk show. His contact is not there, he’s in hospital. The manically brisk, spectacle-adjusting substitute is Harold Pinter, rattling through his own dialogue. Another BBC arts man, in country suit and squashy hat, perches on the desk to talk straight through Bogarde. This turn is performed by Freddie Jones, Toby’s father. Freddie, in his pomp, did John Clare for the serious BBC. It came to us, somewhere between Kilburn High Road and West End Lane, that we should invite Freddie to return to that role; the extinguished poet questioning his identity in the long exile of St Andrew’s Hospital in Northampton. While an earlier, brighter self, played by Toby, trudges the road, teased and provoked by hallucinatory glimpses of Andrew Kötting’s shambling and shamanic Straw Bear.

  As we came under the railway and into Iverson Road, I noticed a black wool glove lying on the pavement. The glove was painted with a set of white finger bones. As if an X-ray had been too forceful and left a permanent print. A polished black car was parked beside the lost glove: CENTRAL PEST CONTROL. MICE – RATS – BEDBUGS & OTHER INSECT PESTS

  The creatures Clare honoured in his witness. The quick and secret things of copse and cell.

  A sequence I like in Freddie’s BBC film of Clare has him picking stones from a field in his time as a guest at Matthew Allen’s High Beach Asylum in Epping Forest. London visitors, superior journalists, have come to try him. To poke and prod around the fading lustre of celebrity. First, there is place. The gloomy Millet setting, the nondescript corduroy of the field, so unlike the slurp and ordure and knuckle-breaking grind of the mud farm in Kötting’s Zola translation, Filthy Earth. The mechanical repetition of the actions performed by the labourers, tamed lunatics watched by their keepers, gives the scene an understated formality. And Freddie as Clare, brought from his fieldwork, his disguise, to take a clay pipe with these alien interrogators, catches the balance perfectly. Muzzling his demons, playing the man cured by fresh air and morally improving exercise, he nods and smiles. With every answer a tease, spiteful with ambiguity. He knows what lies ahead and is helpless to avoid the first fated step on the road. ‘Forget thyself,’ Clare would later write, ‘and the world will willingly forget thee till thou are nothing but a living-dead man dwelling among shadows and falsehood.’

  The Overground walk had achieved its critical state. Kilburn High Road was a manifest border. Kossoff’s painted ghosts, his Hamlet play of dead fathers in the booking hall, brushed past us with spidery touch. I thought of Chris Petit’s novel The Hard Shoulder, in which an Irishman returns from the little death of prison to an old life that is no longer there, among Kilburn rooming houses and Irish Republican pubs. Like so many Petit characters, O’Grady is emotionally atrophied. The book’s narrative is a posthumous dream. The released prisoner is one of the revenants on parade, a face frozen in a train window, glimpsed and smeared by Leon Kossoff in rapid sketches undertaken in his Willesden Green garden, where he waits beside the propped-up cherry tree.

  ‘After West Hampstead,’ Petit wrote, ‘the train travelled a ridge. Slate sky bled the colour from the view … O’Grady felt his stomach contract and thought of riding on, but he got out at Kilburn, pausing to watch the train move away down the long, straight track. He couldn’t remember if the carriages had always been silver.’

  The dead man stands where we are standing now. ‘The Kilburn High Road had been a ditch when he left, and still was from what he could see.’ O’Grady looks for a pub in which to orientate himself while he waits for the sun to go down. ‘Now he had grown invisible, which was how he wanted it.’

  Kilburn is fed by the railway. Immigrant workers in boots and dirty trainers step from the station with a thirst.

  The days when I could get commissions to make films with Petit were over. In some mysterious way, everybody concerned with the commissioning process seemed to be out of commission themselves: incommunicado with pills and pain, post-operative in Germany, convalescent in Deal, dying in a cottage in mid-Wales. The characters who truly understood film, yellow from cheap cigars and years chasing festivals, and sitting all night at tables where you had to shout in three languages to be misunderstood, were old. Crocked. Crippled with integrity. Some of them were almost as old as I was. And the bright folk who took meetings, the intelligent young women, had to be fastidious about accessibility and outcomes. One of them was kind enough to explain to me that I’d have to find a substitute for a tricky word like ‘digress’. She suggested ‘move’. ‘We can’t afford to alienate what’s left of the audience,’ she said. ‘Keep literature for books.’

  And if the thickening night and the fugue-like weariness referenced our swan-pedalo voyage, it also led me to tempt Andrew with tales from the road, the John Clare walk out of Epping Forest on those blistering summer days. It was the notion of becoming a Straw Bear that really sold it. As we inspected the underwater glaze of the patterned wall of green bricks near West Hampstead Thameslink Station, I could see the physical transformation begin: a slump of the shoulders, a lumbering walk, claws sprouting, matted hair spiking into plaits of straw. Andrew was channelling Herzog’s Grizzly Man, belly growling, and peering suspiciously at the Hampstead horizon as if he were seeing the Alaskan tundra. His actions cast me in the Timothy Treadwell part; the nutty, bear-watching obsessive who comes to a very sticky end, killed and eaten, off-camera with live sound.

  The film of the Clare walk would have to be done, budget or no budget. As we closed in on territory associated with the London exile, and last years of Sigmund Freud, the bear fetish took on flesh, and made itself available for analysis. Anxiety hysteria, in the form of animal possession, sounded very much like a suitable case for treatment.

  A few weeks after recovering from our London Overground exertions, we drove to Oxfordshire, to seek out Freddie Jones, the veteran actor who, having played Clare with such bug-eyed conviction, was now the keeper of his spirit. Freddie lived in a converted chapel in a quiet village, not too far from a decommissioned US air base. The abandoned silos and deep
bunkers suggested an ideal location in which to record the poems of Clare’s madness.

  Freddie was alone with his posters, the glory days of performing for Fellini in And the Ship Sails On, and an elegant coffee tray set out for him by his absent wife. He was a mime of gracious welcome. He waved us towards the tray with all kinds of amusing business, but he didn’t have a clue how coffee was actually prepared. Andrew stepped in. He was in high-register mode too, spilling anecdotes, thrusting books at the unprepared actor, swooping and circling – and beyond all else registering his genuine conviction that Freddie was a great figure and the only possible man for the job.

  ‘Shall we make the coffee a little more interesting?’ Freddie said, reaching for the whisky bottle. After two or three cups, the coffee element of the mix was left out.

  ‘I see passages of quiet contemplation,’ Andrew bluffed. ‘The Straw Bear wandering at the end of his tether, across a busy motorway, in the forecourt of a Happy Eater, stood still in the middle of a ploughed field underneath a wind turbine foregrounded by electricity pylons.’

  ‘Bear? Be-arrrr? What bear? Oh this is delightful.’

  In his snowy-white beard, with wisps of hair above pink cheeks, Freddie was the Lear of Emmerdale. He had a driver to take him up to Leeds for his appearances in the popular television soap. ‘Costs me more than my fee,’ he muttered. But the addiction was still there, to steal scenes with his electric disability carriage.

  When Freddie slurped and sipped, remembering the earlier Clare, but not where he had left his VHS tape of the performance, and anticipating, with some excitement and necessary doubt, his future engagement with a director as mad and visionary as any from the past, the frown and inward gaze of the poet’s lost mind was projected across his private face. And he started to recite, with perfect recall, the song of the road, and all its pains. Clare, in the seizure of inspiration, in his forest incarceration, jumped forward to describe what was still to come.