Dining on Stones
Page 22
Dagenham: birthplace of Sir Alf Ramsey, Terry Venables, and the Dagenham Girl Pipers (Congregationalists, unsullied). See them march (courtesy of Danny’s video grab) through the Becontree Housing Estate (c. 1932), in formation, cold knees lifted in perfect synchronicity on a damp Essex morning. Like a Highland regiment in drag – lipstick, aggressively bobbed and permed, stamping off to repel the invading Fascist hordes.
The parents of Byronic (club-footed) entertainer Dudley Moore were the very first tenants of 14 Monmouth Road, near Parsloes Park. They had been willingly exiled to England’s fastest-growing estate (precursor of Thames Gateway). Diseased slum to production-line Arcadia. Your own garden, broad pavements, easy access to Hainault Forest. Downtown Dagenham: childhood refuge of barefoot chanteuse, Sandie Shaw. There’s always something there to remind me. (Thanks, Danny.)
What is it with Dagenham and feet? Danny’s file carried a report from another Norton (A.M.), no relative, into a previously undocumented episode in the life of David Rodinsky (again again). This hack had got hold of Rodinsky’s London A–Z and walked over the feebly marked path through Dagenham. According to Norton, the town was almost entirely populated by hobblers, persons in invalid carriages (silent, deadly). Maybe that was part of the employment package, smashed feet meant more cars.
Everybody in Dagenham seemed to be on sticks, in electrified carts, padding down broad avenues in carpet slippers. The whole district was a homage to the car. Not as a method of transport, but as museum-quality relics. They parked, like votive shrines, along the pavements. Even mangled wrecks were lovingly preserved.
But this, apparently, was young Rodinsky’s Purgatory, his expulsion from Whitechapel. Sent into care, mother incapable, into old-village/new-estate limbo, he never forgot the childhood episode and traced his autobiographical routes onto a pulp-paper map. He made Dagenham a mystery. And Norton (the other one, the literary vampire) dogged his footsteps. Which led to a museum, Valence House, and a primitive artefact. (Photo enclosed.)
Here I discovered, among the portraits of the Fanshawes and the period rooms, a dark wooden figure, which I elected as my spiritual guide. It had been found in the marshes in 1922 and was known as ‘The Dagenham Idol’. It looked African, armless, with asymmetrical peg legs and a large, paddle-shaped head with deeply indented eye-sockets. It was thought to date from somewhere between 2350 and 2140 BC. The thin, diseased legs, good for hopping or punting on a stout stick, proved the authenticity of this figure: the primal Dagenham limper, the ur-gimp.
The three A13 tower blocks with the pink stripes, previously logged from Beckton Alp, are now seen at speed from the train: across colour-coded warehouses, railway sidings, thorn bushes, yellow hoists. Focus softens. Reflections of Snip, head bowed, mouth agape, on the dirty glass (etched with spirals of obscenity, an aerial view of the Bishopsgate Ice Rink).
DAGENHAM STAMPING OPERATIONS. The visible stink of harsh dyes and chemicals, money in the vat. Dagenham: world capital of asthma. Rhone Poulenc Rorer: identified by a 1999 television report as the principal agent of air pollution in the Estuary. The price of prosperity. TIME ENGINEERS.
Snip snores gently, mutters in his sleep. ‘It’s what Joey wanted.’
Rodinsky’s A–Z expedition circumnavigated the borough, a beating of the bounds. He took in a school, Valence Park, and a march right down the centre of the A13 (Barking By-Pass). He even looped south to pay his respects to the oval of the ‘Greyhound Race Track’ and ‘Fords Motor Works’. The seven wonders. Sights seen and noted in red ink, Rodinsky never again travelled so far east (he didn’t make it to Southend). He returned to Princelet Street and stayed put – until they removed him to the hospital in Epsom.
Snip was a very different case. More like the gangsters and knocker boys of the Sixties, taking advantage of cheap petrol and a developing motorway system, he travelled the country. A widow in Newcastle, a lady from Boots the Chemist in Morecambe. He worked as a stagehand in Liverpool, a tout in Brighton. And he played the horses, dogs, cards.
He deserved a day out. I’d stand him a proper breakfast when we got to Rainham.
The woman’s reassuring voice announces it: next stop. I shake Snip, gently. ‘Right then, son. Lovely.’
The train’s gone. The cold grabs us. A landscape to die for: haze lifting to a high clear morning, pylons, distant road, an escarpment of multicoloured containers, a magical blend of nature and artifice, greed and altruism. Bugger Conrad, Rainham is one of the bright places of the earth. Comfortable beside the Thames, between river and forest. And soon to disappear for ever down the black hole of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. Struck from the map.
Rainham
Provoking Snip’s visible irritation – ‘brass bleedin’ monkeys’ – I climb the railway bridge: marshland divided by the new A13 relief road (old road banished to Purfleet, oil tanks, travellers and their horses). Away to the south, winter sunlight bounces from a swift river. To the north, the remnant of a lost Essex village: Norman church, regularly proportioned Georgian hall, several pubs, Thames tributary (the downgraded Ingrebourne). Quite enough to get us moving.
Snip is already moving, leg to leg.
‘I’m busting for a jimmy, son. Any facilities on this poxy platform?’
Enough, I’d say, to launch a raft of essays about … borders, the middle ground. I’m revived, revitalised. That’s all it takes, a new spread. Virgin turf. The A13 book will write itself; start snapping, Norton, get your camera out. And don’t forget the car park: no cars (no commuters), rattle of trains, heavy plant, quarrying, yarns about villains.
Rainham Station car park is much more threatening (less obvious), as a site for mayhem, drug deals, porn shoots, than the urban multistorey. (Acceptable in Get Carter, done to death by TV cop shows. By the time the multistorey reaches the Mitchell brothers and EastEnders, sack the location scouts.) There is an implied risk in wide skies, undefined criminous business occurring at the horizon, the flick of constant traffic: no vertical humans, no voices. It’s like that moment in film noir when German Expressionist interiors, tilted sets, give way to apparently innocent Californian landscapes: Out of the Past. The filling station and the breakfast bar come into their own. If nothing else is happening, a man will drive slowly into town and hit you with a back story: fate. Malefic as the kiss of syphilis at a high-school hop.
Talk about location scouts. Danny’s file has a beauty, a photograph of a resting motorist: Captain Amies, land agent. Rainham, back then (early Twenties), was like the Wild West, frontier country; unexploited, inhabited by inbreeds whose ambition, after uncounted millennia, had allowed them to bellycrawl twenty yards out of the river mud. Amies, who must have served in the First War and lived to bring his traumas home, had the perfect job: scouting the middle ground, the gap between what was known (London, dirt, people-stink) and hazy distance (Turner’s atmospherics, his showy skies). The London County Council commissioned the captain to cruise the lanes and farm tracks and river roads of the back country: genial fellow, military title, in search of, so it appeared, the perfect pub.
I don’t know anything about cars, but this one looks very much like a Model T Ford; spare tyre (necessary) clipped to driver’s door, canvas roof, detachable headlamps and a very impressive horn (scare the cows).
Prairie, cropped grass, a fence. And, almost lost in the distance, the silhouette of – what? The Belvedere Generating Station across the river on Erith Marshes? The captain is placed. He has been given a specific brief: find the right location for the Becontree Housing Estate.
This gentlemanly occupation, from those post-war years, has now devolved to artists like Jimmy Seed. Get out there. Take your snaps and bring them back to town. Jimmy reworks, recreates (cleans up) Dagenham, West Thurrock, the QEII Bridge, hypermarkets, fast-food joints, cinemas. He puts down a marker. When they exist, to his satisfaction, in the studio, they’re done with: sell the painting (to America, to be stored in a barn in the Midwest), knock down the redundant actuality.
At the end of the platform was a long mirror, like Dr Jekyll’s cheval glass. Disturbing: twin panels. Mirror offering the view back down the platform (no Snip, he doesn’t register) and the diminishing perspective of the long straight railtracks. Backwards and forwards, past and future. Seamlessly joined in my snapshot (I hoped the flash wouldn’t blow the effect).
Snip was no vampire. The reason he didn’t show up on the screen soon became evident: he’d ducked into the Gents. A long-term victim of the eroded social amenities of London, I’d forgotten such things existed. I had to experience this, the cold-weather micturation, when you fear for that merciless final spurt, after the shaking, and the folding back, the fiddling with buttons.
‘Will you fuck me in front of Her?’
Graffito. The final pronoun capitalised as in the Francophile novel by San Francisco poet and publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. This tease was not a literary hommage, inscribed by some ageing downriver beatnik. It was a direct question, a philosophical challenge.
The conjured scenario pricked me: which her? Until, ticket barriers navigated, down the steps, stride for stride with Snip, the gender of the actors in this erotic dramaticule became clear. Penned in the Gents, the artist was advocating male-on-male action: as a provocation, a way of neutralising female potency. Enforced voyeurism was not the game: trashing mum. I would ring Hannah, or stop off at the Travelodge on my way back, talk it out. The statement. And my reaction to it. Her reaction to both the tale and my telling of it.
Now there was heat in our walk. Rainham was classically English: closed for the duration.
A church: THE CHURCH PATH IS NOT A PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY.
A hall: NO WC. CURRENT TENANT HAS DOG.
Shops. COLD BLOODED: SPECIALISTS IN BREEDING REPTILES, AMPHIBIANS & INVERTEBRATES. A pointless franchise. Rainham was over-subscribed in invertebrates, swamp-creeps, folk who delighted in telling you to leave town.
Always optimistic, I tried the library. The hall opens when it wants to, by appointment, for card-carrying members of the National Trust: a leaflet might be found. There is a mulberry tree. A Victorian dog kennel, bigger than a terraced cottage in Bethnal Green, for the Dalmatian pack. An upwardly mobile grifter called John Harle dredged the Ingrebourne, shipped coals from Newcastle, and founded ‘Rayneham Wharfe’. Thereby importing the signature ‘e’ that would prove so useful in heritaging the precinct of future shoppes – and predicting the career curve of chemical entrepreneurs like Mickey O’Discroll and the Sleemans. Harle’s barges were ballasted with marble, iron, clinker, Delft. He married a wealthy Stepney widow.
Nothing else happened, until Harle’s second son was horsewhipped in the back parlour, by his father-in-law, for the crime of associating with ‘newfangled Methodists’. The line, unsurprisingly, died out. Leaving the house as a fretful ghost, occupied by invisibles, unheard melodies.
‘Church?’
An old biddy in a rubber bathing-cap butts in. ‘Once a week – if you’re lucky. They have to lock the door on the cleaners. Kids round here. Give ’em two minutes and they’ll smash the place, altar cloth, Easter display, piss in the font.’
Snip’s belly was grumbling, but he wouldn’t stop until we’d left the village bit, the original settlement, behind. He hammered, at a pace I struggled to match, down Upminster Road. The mounds behind the kiddies’ playpark were neolithic; the ribbon development was more recent, speculative Tudorbethan chalets (Epping Forest pargeting), black horses’ heads on gateposts. This was a notable example of social polyfilling, Essex’s own Bermuda Triangle (Ingrebourne, A13 and M25). More khaki belt than green. Teasing glimpses of marshland in gaps between customised housing units, parks and cemeteries. Fields, if you spot them, are horribly naked, ironically named: THAMES CHASE. Hedgerow Improvement by Tarmac Quarry Products. Dust in the air, your mouth, your clothes.
We need a rinse of tea, something to line the stomach, before we plod on to the enclosure (end of the end), where they stack the banished Jews: the voices of London.
Upminster Road, like The Godfather, comes in two parts: South and North. (Godfather III, the Vatican opera, Robert Duvall holding out for more money, doesn’t count. It’s the equivalent of Rainham’s Warwick Lane, a pointless third act, a trek through a land without soul or spirit. Mistah Kurtz – he dead. We can’t afford him. When a performer of Brando’s bulk rolls out of a project, you lose a lot of bathwater. Drowned land. Rich black alluvium. Three men dicing for rags: Eliot quoting Conrad, Coppola quoting Eliot and stealing from Conrad. Conrad, at the road’s edge, in Stanford-le-Hope, anticipating both of them. A wall of skulls.)
‘See that. I knew we should wait.’
Irritated by my (silent) cultural ramblings, gurglings of colonialism and prejudice, religion and representation (every high street a thunder of dialectics), Snip spurted. On elfin feet. Pulled ahead, tried to find where he was, who he was, what he was doing: rested, panting. Hand on hip. I loped, slowly, steadily, at a slight tilt (right leg shorter than left), came alongside him, moved ahead. Until he scuttled, crabbed, shot forward like an invalid carriage with automatic gears.
‘There. Large as life. I’m no mug.’
A dark-blue awning proving the theory that if you persist in your folly you will be rewarded: BAGELS. Fresh filled bagels, sandwiches, rolls. Try our delicious salt beef.
‘We’re on,’ Snip shouted, ‘your treat.’
At the point where Upminster Road gives up its ambition – it knows it’s never going to make it to the end of the underground railway (end of civilisation) – the pale green of the District Line leaks into the landscape. Fields marked out for development. Lighting poles beyond the last hedge.
On the west side of London, film studios occupied the villages, woods; safe and convenient country, just beyond the orbital motorway. Thespians, economic immigrants, exiles from Hitler’s empire: the charcoal-burners of old. Encampments of millionaire gypsies in autumnal Pinewood. Borrowed country houses in which they trained you for the drop into occupied France (codes invented by Leo Marks, writer of Peeping Tom).
The north: asylums, madhouses, Italianate water towers.
And, to the east, where we find ourselves, a loop from Rainham to Waltham Abbey: cemeteries. Christian (backed by florists and monumental masons, displays of statuary, garden centres). Muslim, under the pylons, screened by the reservoir. Then, alongside the gravel pits, the Jews. Grey, white. Like seagulls on landfill. Memorial stones.
‘He was a character, your David. Good to Joey, fond of the boy. I never come to the funeral.’
SLOW.
Large white letters. Pink tarmac like a welcome mat. The road narrows. A grand arch. A sort of municipal, red-brick Temple Bar. As we walk in, Snip, stumbling, takes my arm.
‘Did him a trim, just the once. Well-set-up man, David. Lovely shoes, handmade. Mouth on him. Soft but sarky. “Snip,” he says, “if you could cut hair as well as you rabbit, I’d let you loose on my poodle.” Schneide bastard, lippy. Like a father to Joey.’
Thousands of white graves in an Essex field. Rules laid out for prayers to be said if you haven’t visited a cemetery in the last thirty days. Hebrew. A chapel with offices. One of the gardeners, local boy in baseball cap, very decent, goes through the ledgers, the deathlists.
‘What year did he pass over?’
Snip can’t remember. Performance was released in 1970, but they had it sitting in the cans, cutting and recutting, for a few years. Litvino
ff was still on the scene at that time. He had a biography of Lenny Bruce ‘in development’, commissioned and paid for. Never delivered. Never begun. There are photographs of him, quite dapper, down in the country.
‘Mid Seventies?’
The gardener is willing. The office is too hot: Snip mopping his brow. I’m not sure if I have to keep my cap on at all times. A scorched smell, burnt feathers. The hiss of calor gas.
I think of the posh kid – Harrow? – James Fox, getting his mouth round David Litvinoff’s dialogue. Quite effectively, as it happens. When I tried to transcribe Snip’s rapid-fire utterances, it always came out like Pinter with loose false teeth. Fox and the other toffs, Cammell and Roeg, years later, reminisced about Litvinoff, how he took them deep into the East End, villains’ dens, the Becket in the Old Kent Road. Dives in the Elephant and Castle. Whitechapel, Bermondsey, Deptford, Dartford, Krays, Richardsons, north or south of the river: all one to them. Mouthy Cockneys, hardmen with square-shouldered suits, polished shoes and buckets of respect.
‘How do you spell it again?’
‘L-i-t-v-i-n-o-f-f.’
Nothing.
He tried the late Sixties and the early Eighties, no trace. Loose pages in folders and leather-bound folios. Pen-and-ink ledgers. Name after name. Nothing.
A priest (rabbi, official), a heavy man in a dark suit, is summoned. Hat off, the heat, the gas. Embroidered skullcap. He has a bad cold, allergic to dust; he sniffles, turns away, sneezes. Big handkerchief. Courteous. Won’t give up. It’s oppressive, column after column of names.
‘Give Joey a bell,’ Snip said. ‘He was there, the service. Me, I can’t stand phones.’
I’m waved towards a Battle of Britain instrument. The kind you have to crank. Joey knows. Voice weak, distant. He has the letter and the number, off by heart. I have to get out of that office. The year of death – 1975 – is missing from the file. The binding is loose, a few pages have vanished. The official is perplexed. I don’t need directions. I know exactly where the grave will be. I’ve dreamt it, time and again. Joey standing beside me, smoking a cigarette.