Walking to Hollywood

by Will Self

  The very evenness of even disgusted me; a spondee, its syllables equally stressed, I found it doubly stressful. It also reminded me of my father, of whom it was often remarked that he had ‘a remarkably even temper’. Even to think of his phlegm was enough to rouse my choler. In the years since his death I had resolved my issues with him, operating like a family therapist who views dysfunction comfortably from behind the mirrored glass of mortality, yet I knew that he’d think the books I was writing exhibited both a profound negativity as well as a satirical miniaturism that he was fairly (fairly!) critical of when alive. True, his mildness meant he was ill cast as a punitive superego, and when I compared his gentle critiques with the execrations that issued forth from the death masks of friends’ parents, it occurred to me that, although I was losing my memory and my sight, I remained preternaturally sensitive.

  So, there were these: the amnesia and agnosia, the myopia and logophobia. I was as disengaged from the zeitgeist as my father – who had been a conscientious objector during the Second War – for, while much of the commonality were passionately engaged with their support for – or alienation from – campaigns against nouns (the ‘War on Drugs’ and that on ‘Terror’ being the most salient), I was trying to defeat an adverb. In sum: it was all these yappy feelings that herded sheepy me towards another walking tour, whilst the very erosion of my memory drew me, seemingly ineluctably, towards the Holderness coast of East Yorkshire, the 35-mile stretch of crumbling glacial till between the chalk cliffs of Flamborough Head and the shingle spit of Spurn Head.

  Carried along in the mudslide of my amnesia were pathetic fragments of childhood recall. One was of Michael Barratt, the presenter of the long-lived BBCI current affairs programme Nationwide, interviewing a man in a house that was tumbling down a clayey cliff. The homeowner was saying, in broad Yorkshire accents, as he stood in one half of a conservatory – the other half was nowt but a jumble of broken spars and cracked panes – ‘I can’t oonderstand it, I only poot those UPVC windows in two year ago – and now loook at the place!’

  Even at the time – and I cannot have been more than eleven or twelve – I remember thinking that this fellow must have been formidably stupid to have invested in a property on the brink of a sea cliff; for had Barratt not just told the viewers that this was the fastest-eroding coast in Europe? That its biscuity loess was being dunked, then chomped, by the North Sea at the prodigious rate of two whole yards every year, as fast, in geological terms, as a speeding bullet?

  Then again, I may be giving too much credence to a capacity for retention that I’ve already conceded is ruptured, because, now I come to think of it, Barratt seldom ventured beyond the Lime Grove studios from where Nationwide was put out live. These local interviews were conducted by regional reporters and screened via a feed. Barratt, with his distinctively 1970s hairdo – a splodge of ice cream rippling over his forehead – was a rock of a presenter, who, even when the mass medium was only twenty-odd years old, still managed to fuse dash and paternalism in a uniquely televisual way.

  A snappy clarion of horns, a rappel of strings: ‘Dadadaaa! Dada-daaa!’ ‘The Good Word’ by Johnny Scott leapt down the scale accompanying the beguiling title sequence. Archetypes of modern Britain appeared in quick succession: a car accelerating up on to the Severn Bridge; a man with a child in his arms; the Tyne at Newcastle; a man speaking on a car phone the size of a small car; electricity pylons stalking across countryside; the ectomorphic cooling towers of a power station with sheep grazing in the foreground; a train disgorging commuters.

  These vignettes took up alternate spaces with the Nationwide logo in a 3 X 3 grid, the logo being simply the letters ‘NW’, with the arm of the W and the leg of N curled so as to cuddle the couple. In retrospect this logo was strongly evocative of the Nazi swastika, while the sequence evoked our own naive faith in technological advance. The very rapidity of these images of motion, then the way the ‘NW’ logo multiplied, streaming in threads across the screen to form four revolving cogs, while ‘The Good Word’ went on ‘Dada-daaa! Dada-daaa!’ing – all this I am able to summon up despite Nationwide being closer to the Normandy landings than I am now to it. I wonder, has each generation’s perception of time – its decadences, its stratigraphy – always been like this? Or is our current sense of time piling up into a necessarily terminal moraine of events simply a function of the digitization of knowledge, which makes it inevitable that the entire networked society will end up, like poor Funes in Borges’s tale ‘Funes the Memorious’, unable to delete a single paltry occurrence or cultural factoid?

  And so, there will be Holocaust Remembrance Day, and Holocaust Remembrance Day Remembrance Day, and Holocaust Remembrance Day Remembrance Day Remembrance Day, and Holocaust Remembrance Day Remembrance Day Remembrance Day Remembrance Day – until the significance of the Holocaust itself – which no one any longer living has had direct experience of – is quite forgotten.

  I repeat, a culture that is afflicted with such a hyperthymestic syndrome will never recoup itself, never experience the necessary downtime for renaissance to occur. ‘It was very difficult for him to sleep. To sleep is to be abstracted from the world; Funes, on his back in his cot, in the shadows, imagined every crevice and every moulding of the various houses which surrounded him. (I repeat, the least important of his recollections was more minutely precise and more lively than our perception of a physical pleasure or a physical torment.)’

  There was a raw constructivism to the Nationwide title sequence – and a peculiar masculinity also. There were no women nationwide – at least, not in this erect procession of images, whose subtext was a series of phallicisms: Progress, the well-lubricated interpenetration of Town and Country, Benign Paternalism. I loved Nationwide; my brother and I would watch it whenever we could – which wasn’t often, because our insufferably bien-pensant parents had, in their infinite snobbery, got rid of our television. Usually, the current affairs the show reported were emphatically soft and mushy: items about skateboarding ducks, or a monastic order that manufactured toothbrushes; hard news resounded elsewhere. It was presumably in this spirit of quirky human interest that the man at Skipsea Sands on the Holderness coast had been interviewed.

  Middle age – the fulcrum around which the mind-world turns. In youth the future is murky, while the past has a seeming clarity – but now it’s the future that becomes crystal clear: blackberries shining in a hawthorn hedge after sudden autumnal rain. Decline – then death. Meanwhile the past recedes, lapping back from a muddied shore across which it’s unsafe to wade – who knows what might have happened there?

  At New Year there had been a photograph in the newspaper headed ‘Hazardous New Year’ and captioned ‘Houses close to a cliff in Skipsea, Yorkshire, have been gradually falling over the edge and it is thought unlikely that they will survive the year.’ They? Survive? Echoes surely of the personification of property that had dominated Britain in the early years of the century, but, setting this to one side, there remained the uncanny feeling that while the householders had been watching for years as the void encroached on their loved ones – undercutting the gardens, munching on the rockeries, crunching up the cucumber frames, then picking its teeth with raspberry canes – I had been watching them watch.

  I conceived of taking a walk from Flamborough Head, north of Bridlington, where the chalk synclines of the Yorkshire Wolds are sheered off by the brown sea, to Spurn Head, that peculiar three-mile shingle bracket that hooks round into the wide mouth of the River Humber. It occurred to me that were I to keep for the entire distance within six feet of either cliff edge or shoreline, I would, very likely, have completed a journey it would be impossible for anyone to ever make again. By the time another year had passed the solid ground that had risen up to meet my feet would have disappeared forever.

  This would be a unique walk of erasure – a forty-mile extended metaphor for my own embattled persona, as its foundations were washed away by what I suspected was earlyonset Alzheimer’s. Perh
aps it was also sympathetic magic: the walk devised as a ritualized erection of groynes, which might impede the longshore drift of my psyche.

  To counter this – frankly morbid – self-absorption, I scanned the data on long-, short- and medium-term cliff erosion rates. I checked out coastal evolution and beach plan shape modelling. I examined the evidence of site inspections, and the various proposals – including the Mappleton coastal defences – that had been advanced against the ceding of solid to liquid. I read the reports of expert witnesses, and looked at the aerial photographs they had posted on the web, marked up so as to make explicit the underlying dynamics.

  The names of the towns and villages that had been inundated since the medieval era were legion: Wilsthorpe, Hartburn, Hyde, Withow and Cleton; Hornsea Burton, Hornsea Beck and Southorpe; Great Golden, Golden Parva and Old Aldborough – and so on; like mortality itself, the sea had ground into utter oblivion, these, the habitations of already faceless villeins. Near to Spurn Head itself had stood the substantial town of Ravenser, a sturdy plantation of spires and spars where Henry Bolingbroke landed in 1399, and which, until the rise of Hull, was the principal port of Yorkshire. Since the Roman occupation more than fifty square miles of land had gone from Holderness, and still it disintegrated, clods and stones plash-plopping into the shallow sea.

  As I undertook these researches the conviction grew in me that far from the erosion of two yards of land every year being a tragedy, it should be regarded as uplifting – for here was a landscape that was more transient than an individual human. The bungalows would be rebuilt inland, the UPVC windows reinstalled, the caravans would head north to Filey – only the earth was drowning.

  I had never visited the Holderness coast, although, on a couple of occasions, I’d gone up to Hull to do book readings. The first time I went the crowd at the bar where I read seemed convivial, and afterwards I fell into conversation with a local man, talk that – I now realize – had itself been rendered parenthetical by the great bracketing of nearby Spurn Head. (He was a tall British-Asian with angular, faceted looks that mirrored my own – including the sunken cheeks, pockmarked with old acne scars.)

  The man explained how he and his son liked to drive out on a Sunday, through the lush reclaimed lowland of Sunk Island to the peninsula, and how the sense of abandonment and loss they both felt – the family was broken, they were deracinated – was almost pleasurably compounded by Spurn Head itself, where on the eastern flank of the peninsula a Victorian lighthouse stood, surrounded at high tide by the waters of the estuary, for the shingle and sand spit where it had once rested had wavered away to the west.

  On their walks along the beaches, the man and his son happened upon slimed reefs of discarded chattels – fridges, televisions, washing machines, the dinosaur bones of antediluvian agricultural equipment – all of it caught in serried piles, which in previous centuries had been driven into this skittish land in a forlorn attempt to pin it down. And as I listened to the man talk – he was not articulate, but expressive, what with his shrugs and hand-chops and hesitations – I was thrust back to the Paragon Station at which I had arrived a couple of hours previously.

  It was a proper terminus – emphatically at the end of the line. As I had lurched stiffly from the train, I was struck by how lofty the vaulted roof seemed; tiny humans beetled along the grey platforms beside the worms’ casts of the rolling stock, while from up on high cold loads of light were let down through translucent perspex. By the time I had reached the booking hall the fugue had intensified: the old oaken island of a branch of W. H. Smith’s and the blind arches along the walls faced with caramel-brown tiling shored up the mounting sensation that I had arrived too late; that this was the voided – although not yet decaying – outpost of an empire that, rather than being overthrown, had been undermined by creeping indifference.

  That was the first visit. The second time I went to Hull I was early for my event and so walked through the shopping zone to visit the museum down by the old dock area, passing a pub that advertised Lindisfarne Fruit Wines and mixed drinks with names such as ‘Dr Pepper’s Depth Charge’ and ‘Shit-on-the-Grass’. In the cobbled streets of the eighteenth-century town the silence was louder than bombs.

  It was a quiet weekday afternoon in summer, and almost museum closing time. Once I’d passed the somnolent staff in the shop full of moulded plastic and printed cotton, I found myself alone in a series of comfortingly predictable spaces. Polystyrene rocks housed dioramas of the Holderness coast of 120,000 years previously, when elephants wandered the jungly cliff that ran miles to the west of the present-day coastline. Then came a dummy of a Holocene mammoth, standing foursquare on the linoleum tiles; then there were Neolithic artefacts and a life-sized, mop-topped human dummy that had been buried in a fibreglass sarcophagus.

  Passing between the glass cases full of earthenware and bronze anklets, I became aware of an eerie hissing sound and a woman muttering in a half-foreign tongue. Exactly at the moment I realized this must be a recording, I saw the lit-up glass case containing the late Bronze Age wooden figurines known – after the Holderness drainage ditch where they were discovered in 1836 – as the Roos Carr Figures.

  As I read the information cards, and stared at the curious spindly men, carved from pine over 2,000 years previously, I found that my mind was racing – forward in time, back in time, circling my own lifetime, then plotting its curve on to the widening gyre of history itself – while my body was paralysed, drenched in sweat.

  The pebble eyes inserted in the pinheads of the four figures that had been placed upright in the carved boat held me captive for long minutes, then released me to stagger into the mockup of an Iron Age village. The muttering was, as I suspected, a curator’s notion of proto-English, placed in the mouth of a manikin at a treadle. I stood gathering my wits for a while, under the cutaway thatch of a newly ancient hovel, until the staff member assigned to check the galleries were empty came past me. ‘Oh! You frightened me,’ she said, and then: ‘I suppose I should be used to it by now.’ It being, I supposed, the presence of live humans in among the instructional dummies.

  Later on, I was approached after the reading by a man who told me that his wife had very much wanted to attend but was unable to do so because she was trapped in their house by a swarm of bees. It was a warm evening and it took us about ten minutes to walk there. The bees were densely clustered on the front door of the two-up, two-down, their translucent wings, gingery bodies and black extremities conveying an impression that this living micro-mosaic was but a detail of a far larger picture.

  We went round to the back door and found his wife drinking gin with a friend in the kitchen, while clearly relishing her predicament. ‘I called the police hours ago,’ she said. ‘But they’ve not sent anyone yet.

  I pictured the beekeepers who must be on stand-by during the swarming season; half dreading, half hoping that they would be called upon to go and twirl the living candyloss on to a stick, put it in a box, put the box in the back of a small van. The bespoke suit of tiny bodies agitating your skin ... the galvanic stress of knowing they are about to poison you from every angle.

  That night I ate in an empty Bengali restaurant. There were overhead strip-lights, and neon tubes rimmed the plate-glass windows. The tablecloth fluoresced beneath my sad hands as I ate far more chana masala than I’d intended. Later, my belly slopped in my dinkily awful room at the Royal, which was one of those hotels built into the wall of a station like the Grosvenor at London’s Victoria Station, or the Great Eastern at Liverpool Street. As a child the Grosvenor had entranced me; its fusty reception rooms and wide staircases seemed doubly interior – rooms inside a big building that was itself inside a bigger building. Yet Victoria, like the Paragon Station in Hull, was open to the elements, swirling with soot and pigeons, and so the hotels were perhaps only gatehouses between one world and the next.

  In the predawn I awoke to crouch grimly for a rope-burn of an evacuation, then slept again, uneasily, and dreamt I
was standing in the booking hall of the station, staring up through the oculus. I was aware of the tremendous emptiness of sky over sea, and, on stepping out through the main doors, I discovered not the expected thuggery of the shopping centre opposite, but the peninsula of Spurn Head tapering into the distance, its shingle, furze and sand a collage that had no relief or hue but lay Rat on the still Ratter sea. Just visible, at the very end of the spit, was a vapour trail such as you sometimes see streaming from the tip of an aircraft wing, or a Himalayan peak.

  2

  Static Homes

  I left home at 7.00 a.m. on the Thursday, 24 July 2008. It had been a damp summer and, perversely, I was hoping for poor weather – a Hollywood rain of milky droplets to veil my departure, through which I could scuttle along shining pavements before burrowing into the tube. Down there, in the hypocaust of the city, warmed by the commuters’ foodybreath – well, it would be like relapsing into sleep once more; then, I’d reawaken to the sooty chill of King’s Cross, a space that no amount of renovation could ever rejuvenate.

  Instead there was bright sunlight and butterflies clipped the flowering buddleia by the front gate with their bladethin wings. At the end of our block there was a pavement shrine: a score of cellophane-wrapped bouquets leant against the iron railings, the spikes of which were festooned with T-shirts, wristbands and laminated cards covered in rap poetry. Spreading out almost to the kerb were tea lights arranged to form the slogan I LOVE FREDDY. There were two or three brightly coloured plastic water guns propped among the shrivelled floral tributes, and as I passed by one of a pair of youths who were contemplating the shrine bent to touch a play weapon, while remarking to his companion, ‘’E turned ’is back an’ ven vay plunged ’im.’

  I had with me a notebook and considered stopping to note this down – but then forgot all about it within yards. In the past, at the start of a journey, its pages would be blankly awaiting the obsessively tight stitching of my handwriting as I tried to sew observation to thought. But now it was already quite full of train times, the places I intended visiting and those where I was booked to stay; a detailed itinerary that was necessary, lest, from one hour to the next, I forgot why it was I had gone to East Yorkshire, where I hailed from – and so was lost entirely.