Dining on Stones

by Iain Sinclair

  Saw another dead body lying by the path in an attitude of repose … At night when the moon rose heard shouts and drumming in distant villages. Passed a bad night.

  With many more to follow. It’s not the same moon. I don’t care what they say. From my window, writing the Conrad piece (raiding other men’s books), I watched a cigarette-end moon, glowing ash, floating over the wet roofs of the German Hospital: one ward brilliantly lit. No Germans left. No hospital. An improvised film set. A Freudian drama. A naked patient being given the water treatment.

  But that is not why I gave up, why I started walking, making reports from a real landscape. It was the discovery of the arbitrary connection – no accident, no remission – of Joseph Conrad, first officer, and my great-grandfather, Arthur Stanley Norton. (Names that shift, migrate. H.M. Stanley’s painstaking travel journals dressing the piracy of the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo. David Livingstone, febrile and driven: a Xerox of Robert Louis Stevenson. A divided Scotsman looking for the right place in which to die.)

  Arthur Norton’s fatal expedition to Peru resulted from the loss of funds amassed over years of labour in the Ceylon tea plantations. Conrad was also the victim of well-meant but devastating advice (if you have to pay someone to tell you what to do with your money, it’s gone). South African gold mines. Two men, who find themselves, passenger and officer, on a voyage from Amsterdam to Java, The Highland Forest, 1887. Norton, amateur essayist, limping around the deck, talks literature. Conrad talks weather and money. Norton, who has a way of teasing out secrets, encourages the new Englishman, the cultural migrant, to read aloud from his first composition, The Black Mate.

  Conrad talks of South America, ‘the land of the ancient Inca’, which extends ‘along the coast for 3,000 miles, including what is now Colombia, Ecuador, Chili, and Bolivia’.

  My great-grandfather remembered the conversation, made a note of it in his privately published pamphlet, Arthur Norton: The Story of His Life & Times as Told by Himself. He took Conrad for a Frenchman. From the south, Marseilles? The merchant mariner had the disconcerting habit of saying nothing, polishing his monocle, staring at you: butterfly on a pin. Chin up, beard primed, fists thrust deep in the pockets of his nautical jacket. Like Cutcliffe Hyne’s Captain Kettle.

  They conversed in French; Conrad fluently, rapidly, meridional emphasis, a whiff of garlic, Norton with painful slowness and an atrocious accent. My great-grandfather’s shipboard ‘Frog’ is a footnote -1 had to wade through suitcases of untranscribed diaries to fill out the details – in a section entitled ‘Striking Personages and Eccentrics Met On Voyages in the East’. Norton has more to say about his ‘fellow-passengers’: Tindall, Wernham, Jock Hay and the brothers Rossiter. ‘All gone now excepting one of the last-mentioned.’

  Like Conrad, Arthur Norton retired from his first career, at around forty, and took to country living and occasional literary composition. Investments evaporating, he ventured.

  The French-speaking Pole, come ashore at Stanford-le-Hope, wrote, grimly, remorselessly, every word wrenched from him, to keep his family afloat.

  Arthur put the notion of authorship, this whim, aside: he went after gold in Australia, he tried Tasmania (sent for the family). I have a prize-book, Class V, Mathematics, from Hobart, awarded to his youngest son, my grandfather. The Terror of the Indians (or, The Life of David Crockett) by John S.C. Abbott. The frontispiece, a steel-engraving, depicts yet another black river, huts, smoke, coracles.

  Scratching for gold was as foolish as taking shares in South African mines. Norton, so his journals reveal, felt his age – fifty-three – on a circumnavigation of Lake Sinclair. His leg was troubling him, he leant on a heavy stick. But there was one expedition left in the old man, his Nostromo: Peru. He would act on the hint dropped by the first mate of The Highland Forest on the passage out; the madness that did for Walter Raleigh, silver mines, cities of gold covered by jungle.

  And here is the thing that still puts the shiver on me: Arthur Norton’s bias towards the picaresque, the grand project that declines into loose bowels, fevers, hallucinations, might have touched Joseph Conrad – as the Pole’s over-nice attempt to draw financial advice from my bearded ancestor, mistaken for a hardheaded man of business, was fatally misinterpreted. Could it be, I wondered, that Norton had infiltrated Conrad’s fiction? A ghostly cameo, a line or two, offering a sort of immortality? The language of great writers, the order of words, mistakes, inspirations, is outside time. But the order never changes. If Norton was in Conrad, he lived. Lives. Outlasts the rest of us, sons, grandsons, great-grandsons. Hidden away in an Amazonian thicket of sea tales, silver hunts, redemption, loss of nerve – and flashing, dark-eyed women (unreal as miniatures in a locket).

  I went everywhere in the canon, odd volumes, sets, battered first editions, before I tried Youth: And Two Other Tales. Heart of Darkness had been milked to death, they’d all been at it, Orson Welles, Nicolas Roeg, W.G. Sebald. It wasn’t Heart of Darkness, although that played best with the situation I found myself in. So many of Conrad’s tales begin at the hinge, the liquid edge of the A13: ‘an enfilading view down the Lower Hope Reach’. The living and their fictional doubles yarning their lives away, ‘not more than thirty miles from London, and less than twenty from that shallow and dangerous puddle to which our coasting men give the groundless name of “German Ocean”’.

  The End of the Tether was a makeweight, thrown in to bulk out a volume, 40,000 words for William Blackwood, ballast for Youth. This was that famously unlucky manuscript, burnt in an oil-lamp explosion, lost, rewritten. Fiddled with by Ford Madox Ford. Critics talk of old age and Lear, ‘assorted fools and grotesques’. The End of the Tether has been eclipsed by Heart of Darkness. But it was here that I found the sepia imprint of Arthur Norton, his limp, the heavy stick that supports him in the Peruvian photographs.

  His age sat lightly enough on him; and of his ruin he was not ashamed. He had not been alone to believe in the stability of the Banking Corporation. Men whose judgment in the matters of finance was as expert as his seamanship had commended the prudence of his investments, and had themselves lost much money in the great failure. The only difference between him and them was that he had lost his all …

  He had to use a thick cudgel-like stick on account of a stiffness in the hip – a slight touch of rheumatism. Otherwise he knew nothing of the ills of the flesh.

  Arthur Norton, dragging around the deck, talking investments, blackguarding his advisers; his dry, Aberdonian humour misunderstood by the supposed Frenchman.

  A burnt manuscript, months of graft, destroyed.

  Norton’s shot at immortality: a dodgy hip, stick, money-talk that sent him back into exile, that pushed Conrad towards the crowning achievement of Nostromo.

  Different Americas, the same Essex. The Lower Hope Reach, in morning light (Conrad favoured dusk, redness over London), never changes. A poultice of yellow mud, a fast-flowing river, an immense and very English sky.

  East Ham

  We’re moving, over ramps, along tolerated pavements – FOOTPATH CLOSED – much faster than the morning traffic, which, in thin blue, first-cigarette tension, is not moving at all. The A13, everybody knows, is the future; the highway on which the sacred cities of Thames Gateway will depend. With the blessing of government and mayor, the one thing on which they agree, brownfield swamps will witness the beginning of a process whereby London is turned inside out. Centre as an inauthentic museum (haunted by authentic beggars, junkies, prostitutes), flexible rim as a living, working, vibrant economy.

  Meanwhile: stasis. Avenues of red-and-white cones. Yellow, giraffe-neck cranes. Heavy-duty machinery exhibited but not used: two Irishmen with one shovel, down a ditch, the only action. Dozens of grey drums, stencilled MILTON: I like those. I photograph them – with a vividly decorated (pink, blue) tower block in the background. Mexican vivacity, Siberian weather fronts.

  We can’t talk. We have to creep, Indian file, backs to the wall. Noise verg
es on blood-from-ear levels. Not from the cars and lorries (thumping engines, exhaust fumes, radios, mobile phones), nor from road crews (drills, banter, radios again), but the sky. Traffic helicopters, weather helicopters, accident helicopters from the roof of the Royal London Hospital: a Murch/Coppola Apocalypse Now, wraparound-Dolby soundscape, without Wagner and the Doors. Sky fouled by contrails, smoke plumes, planes into Stansted, Heathrow, Silvertown. Crossing and circling, holding patterns and bumpy descents. Actual noise and the imagined noise of phonebabble, acoustic fizz, deregulated fibre-optic overload. Outgrowths on church steeples, schools, filling stations: dishes and masts and things that blink from tall poles. Scanners tracking the bands, trying to find a language they recognise.

  When the traffic does stir, it comes straight at us, hating our independence. A blue dumper truck, ISLE OF DOGS, careering across mud, making up for lost time. White vans bombing over the crest of the ramp like breakaway fairground gondolas. We are obliged to press ourselves against scrapwood fences that obscure our view of the Canning Town estates and the Prince of Wales Park Farm.

  When in doubt, quote Ballard: The continued breakdown of the European road-systems would soon rule out any future journeys’.

  Track was unimpressed.

  ‘You don’t attempt future journeys. Every walk you lead disappears, very rapidly, into the past.’

  She kept her eyes open, this girl. Crunched by wheels (taller than she was) of an articulated lorry, she swooped on something black and shiny. An old record, a seven-incher with rat bites taken out of it. ‘My Oh My’ by Slade. Log it, the absurdity. (For the grid, the only future that counts: the sketchbook.)

  Log official posters: FREE COMPUTER COURSES. LONDON SCHOOL OF PROFESSIONAL STUDIES. FIRST RIGHT. Log fly-pitched posters in lurid red on yellow: PYJAMA CLAD PSYCHOPATHS. HARD KNOCKS ON YOUR XBOX! SEXY NINJA VIXEN. LYCRA CLAD WEBSLINGER.

  Wing mirrors brushed our sleeves. We were the only pedestrians in a panning shot that took in discriminations of improbable and impossible human habitation, imposed-from-above housing schemes, cottages, demi-villas, low-level estates (neo-suburban or punishment colony), solitary tower blocks like periscopes surfacing to challenge the ruin.

  There were Pupil Referment Units like battery farms with paranoid security. Galvanising outfits. Rusting gas holders. Stinking creeks. A yellow-blue Mercedes lorry, canvas-backed, stalled at the next section of roadworks, asked us for directions. The canvas billows suspiciously at the sound of English voices. The driver, heavy beard, dark glasses, is browner than anything achieveable on a Loughton sunbed.

  We can’t, by my calculation, be more than two and a half miles from Beckton Alp. In a straightish line. But there is no sign of it. Nothing untoward breaks the horizon: pedestrian bridges, cranes, estate agents’ boards, communities severed by the great arterial road (five lanes ambitious for expansion). Little gardens with rudimentary planting (grass, privet) are used as parking lots (second, third car, another on the pavement).

  A hundred-yard section, between aborted or incomplete engineering projects, threw us from our road-edge walk and into a brief transit along the boundary wall, red brick, of a Canning Town estate. The wall acted as a noticeboard for this abandoned settlement: trysts, declarations of love (or the mechanisms of love), threats, political and occult symbols.

  ROBERT KEYS YOUR NEXT … FUCKEN TRAITOR. HAPPY XMAS LONDON. LOVE + BEST WISHES. SINN FEIN AND THE IRA.

  Such niceties are soon behind us. We’re back in the virtual tunnel, of noise, remorseless traffic flow, cancelled pathways, detours, sand, yellow jackets and hardhats. It’s cold and we feel the first flakes of snow burning against our faces, melting and dripping from upturned collars.

  The alp, when it appears, is as unimpressive as the Millennium Dome, which, under a powdering of fresh snow, it resembles. As we advance, the mound becomes more dramatic, conical not humpbacked. Beckton Alp is a considerable event that nobody notices. They, motorists, are preoccupied with traffic lights that seem to change on a weekly basis, holding reluctant tourists under a flyover, alongside a series of piers and supports (supporting nothing but foul air). Precast concrete columns and elegant structural solutions – for which, as yet, no questions have been found.

  The approach to the alp is by way of a parodic suburb, a single line of misplaced Hendon semis, grafted together to form a mile-long terrace, with bow windows, porches, stained-glass sunrises, bushes and cropped evergreens at regular intervals. As if this vulgarity, the A13, wasn’t happening, wasn’t hurtling past the garden gate. (If those gates had not been removed to convert garden into garage.).

  I’m struck by a pair of white horses’ heads (manes, veins, bulging eyes) that stand, like chess knights, on gateposts. The missing ears are encouraging. It means that somebody, at some time, must have walked this route.

  CLUTCH CARE CENTRE. NEW & USED OFFICE FURNITURE. DIVERSION.

  We take it, willingly. Coffee would be welcome. East Ham must have a café. The transient amnesia of the road, keep moving, see nothing, builds up a powerful undertow of disenfranchised weirdness: it puddles and spills from ancient villages, pilgrim route stopovers. Anything human and messy that has to happen, happens here.

  S. KOREA/BEAT & EAT/DOGS.

  White transit van with red script: ISRAELITE CHURCH OF CHRIST.

  A team of Kosovans working the lights.

  The women, long skirts, headscarfs, smear windscreens with dirty water, scrape and scratch with harsh sponges and squeegees. The cold, the ice: it doesn’t help. A young lad with a mobile phone keeps watch. I can’t lift my camera without being spotted, abused. The men, minders, smoke in a flash American car, discreetly parked in Roman Road.

  This is a major crossing point for the energies of London. Danny is excited. He takes out a black box that reads the health of the landscape, electrical pulses, numbered keys. I don’t need the box to reach a verdict: sick, possibly terminal. Purple and black. Ameliorated by snowfall.

  Tides of sewage rush under the road, down the Northern Outflow, to Beckton Creek. Traffic grinds on an east-west axis. Travellers heading for the retail parks, City Airport, Silvertown, Woolwich Ferry, wait for a break in the flow. The Kosovans have the whole thing covered. Head for the M25, Lakeside, QEII Bridge, Southend – or back towards the City – and you’ll be hit by windscreen polluters.

  Head for the Thames, on the A117, the old north-south road, and a troop of war zone performance artists will attack you. Like a George Grosz tribute band. Strong meat, this. Men, on a bitter morning (bitter themselves), rapping on car roofs, shouting, gesticulating, butting at windows, holding out their hands. No attempt to charm or to go for pathos. Trouser leg rolled up to reveal a livid stump, a limb the size of a knotted rope’s end. Landmine deformities and mutilations pressed against the screens of Dagenham multiples, Mondeos, Capris, Escorts. Angry, handsome men with pieces missing. They move among the stalled cars like relic peddlers on the Mexican border. In T-shirts, they weave through lanes of captive motors, raging, pinched and shivering in the sudden arctic snow shower.

  ‘You know,’ Track said to me, across the Formica table in the neat East Ham café, ‘you chew like an old man. At the front of your mouth, slowly. Like your teeth might fall out at any moment.’

  ‘I am an old man,’ I shot back. With feeling. This place, with its wall mirrors, was a shrine to memento mori. ‘I’ll eat any way I want.’

  Danny didn’t do food. He took his tea, sweet, by the pint. He sucked, wiped his beard, without comment from Track. Who was amused by my peevishness, my vestigial vanity. She hadn’t meant her comment that way, it was a technical observation. She liked to know precisely how things worked.

  ‘Do you live around here?’ I asked Danny – who seemed very much at home, getting tannin refills on a wink at the hostess (ink hair, full slap), spreading his books and charts across neighbouring tables with no challenge from the authorities.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  I don’t know why I imagined that
Danny lived anywhere. He was the sort of man you meet on the road, lose on the road, find again: in field or ditch or stone circle. Or church. We’d walked past a good one, St Mary Magdalene. It was closed. And Danny, his bag and his reputation to consider, wouldn’t go over the wall. Track had no such scruple. She reported that the church was built around 1130, Kentish rag, flints and chalk from Purley, Caen stone from Normandy, pudding-stone from local quarries. A Roman cemetery was close by: hence, Roman Road. A doctored wilderness, enlivened with overgrown memorials, ran down to the A13. At nine and a half acres this was, so the notice claimed, ‘the largest churchyard in England’.

  ‘I’ve got a place,’ Danny admitted, when the subject had been abandoned, ‘near Basildon. You’ve heard of the Plotlands?’

  We hadn’t. So he produced the book: Basildon Plotlands (The Londoners’ Rural Retreat) by Deanna Walker. What a story. It brought tears to the eyes, the liberties that had been lost. Anarchist (Guild Socialist/Naturist/Up Yours, Squire) Essex men and women allowed to erect whatever form of shelter they chose, chalets and shacks, on land nobody could find another way to exploit (not then, late nineteenth century to utilitarian Fifties). A frontier cabin on the Langland Hills (they made the Beckton Alp look like the Matterhorn). Danny was the last open-range squatter. The rest had been swallowed in planning restrictions and the thrusting New Town – where so many pill-peddling gangsters and A13 pirates thrived.

  I listened to his tale, gumming my bean-and-sausage mush. Another coffee. The ascent of the alp, in this weather, could be indefinitely postponed. Behind us, at the table next to the door, sat three all-day-breakfasters as unlikely as ourselves. A woman who used words like ‘altruism’ and ‘atrophy’. A sallow dude who spoke of weekends in Milan and Venice. An older woman who knew how to cook. English was their common language, but not their native tongue, they used it to greater effect than anyone else in the caff. They treated the experience of English eggs and bacon ironically.