London Overground Read online

  I’ve not written much about this area of London, because there are no memories to exploit. There are no memories because I haven’t walked these streets enough to initiate a dialogue with the buildings, the spaces between buildings, the stations, platforms, bus stops, cafés and pubs. But now, in a winter twilight of orange lamp-blisters on the yellow wall of Kensington (Olympia), and the candle-flame glow of the interior at West Brompton Station, and the notices ordering customers to TELL US WHAT YOU THINK, and Kötting posing with his lopsided ursine grin beside a poster advising him to SWAP COMFORT FOOD FOR COMFORT FITNESS, and even though it’s inconvenient to stop and fumble with gloved hands for my notebook, I have to record how the neutered husks of Olympia and the barrel-roofed mead halls of Earls Court do provoke memory. They summon disconnected incidents and flash-frames from some sealed archive at the sump of consciousness. Walking does that. Walking inhibits reflex systems of censorship. Andrew talks or clowns or forages for books and bricks to carry home, to confirm memory, to make a record. When he has processed this material in his warm hut, within his chilly sailmaker’s loft studio in Hastings, it will begin to make sense.

  In an odd and rather submerged period of my life, between my last years in school and my temporary migration to Greyhound Lane in Streatham, after leaving Dublin, this was the area of London where I found a bed or couch or portion of floor. As we pound towards Shepherd’s Bush, listening for the sounds of the railway, involuntary memories flood back. A hitchhiker couple I picked up in Glasgow – what was I doing there? – and brought all the way to a basement flat not far from here, to which I had somehow acquired a key. A single narrow bed. And their voices in contrapuntal disagreement, all night, before I turned them out with invented phone numbers.

  Or, again, returning with a London friend, late, unexpectedly, after an abortive trip to Belgium, and falling asleep behind a high sofa while he went out to search for his partner. And being woken by whispers of confession, tears, solicitous words, soothing actions: no no no, yes, no, yes, oh yes, oh oh oh. Brief and vigorous: bed, floor, sofa lovemaking. More tears, more petting. And away. It was my fellow traveller’s girlfriend, the one he had left behind, and another man. The one entrusted with looking after her. Gone, both of them, before the frustrated searcher returned.

  I used to see clusters of agitated young girls hanging around outside the property in Emperor’s Gate, off Cromwell Road, where John Lennon, who was supposed to be a bachelor boy, lived, up six flights of stairs, in a three-bedroom flat, with his new wife, Cynthia. And young baby.

  Earls Court: I was brought to trade shows, Ideal Homes Exhibitions, with my parents. The warm smell of the Underground. The crowds. I remember some Eagle comic space pod for which I had to dress in a silver bin bag for a simulated voyage to the stars. I remember getting a certificate for doing a jump from a parachute tower.

  The emptied vaults of these buildings, visited by so many people, trigger unreliable recollections without structure or chronology. I came to Olympia on the whim of a girl who had been told about a fortune-teller who saw it as it was. The decision to dress up, go out, make this expedition, turned into a performance. There was a subtext that I barely understood: how the relationship she was in was not working: her life, the basement flat, London. She was soliciting permission to behave badly. She’d been brought up as a Catholic, a good system for wiping the slate and carrying on regardless.

  She came out buzzing. The old woman in the tailored charcoal suit – probably twenty years younger than I am now – had no theatrical props, beyond a fistful of rings. She looked as if she might double up with a stall of antique jewellery in Camden Passage. The cubicle, with its creaking plastic chairs and smell of embrocation, might well have been shared with an alternative chiropractor. She sussed me right away and played back all the things my actions and attitude were telling her. (I would never again undergo such a fraudulent experience – until, fifty years later, Alejandro Jodorowsky pulled out his set of well-used Tarot cards.)

  I would fulfil my ambition to write, the fortune-teller confirmed. But I had no such ambition. I wanted to make films. Writing was something like eating and walking and sleeping. And I would come back. She said. That was her throwaway line. I marched out of the booth, telling the girl how good the fortune-teller had been. And how wrong. I was never coming back. Not to her, not to Olympia. Not anywhere west of the park. My future was Ireland, America.

  West Brompton to Willesden Junction

  The next passage, as afternoon thickened around us, was our Sargasso Sea. The Overground was still present, but its vigour, its tendency to promote a strip of satellite development alongside the track, was countered by older, more established patterns of exploitation. The action was underground, in the shuffle and skitter of torpedo containers worrying through hot clay wrappings: the shuddering oven of transit by through-travellers, backpack antipodeans, casual bar staff, and legions of babbling, map-devouring tourists. To keep the district in balance, all this subterranean action was flipped by the somnolence of the streets between Earls Court and Shepherd’s Bush. Warwick Road and Holland Road were boulevards down which nobody strolled.

  Respecting public avenues, feeders for the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, while staying on the west side of the railway, we found ourselves in Sinclair Road, running into Sinclair Gardens. A nameplate Andrew took as permission to shake up, unscrew, and glug down, Adam’s apple bobbing like a cork, the vial of purple caffeine-sugars he’d found in Earls Court among disapproving redbrick mansion blocks from the 1880s. This enamel-rotting stuff, sold as a budget sex aid under the rubric of something like HOT ROD, SUPER STUD, BIG UP, coursed visibly through his veins like a barium meal. A liquefied spinach substitute fizzing and spitting and causing tired muscles to cramp and swell to shirt-splitting proportions like a Popeye cartoon. Pinhole pupils behind dark glasses glowed vampire-red in steroidal bliss-orgy: eyeball Viagra. He was himself again. Bruise-blue Maori ankle tattoos, phantom socks made from ink, rippled like electronic signage.

  ‘We’re a long way from Deptford,’ Andrew said. ‘And my last remembered rapture. Oh yes! If I tell myself the Pyrenees are just around the corner, nothing will stop me.’

  Hammersmith air is bottled air, drained of all virtue; snowploughed by stalled traffic, and coughed into a choking fug by the exhaust pipes of anxious vehicles held at the lights for sadistically calculated intervals.

  Walkers are spies for truth. Drawing imaginary lines from Deptford, and our starting point in Hackney, to this railside halt, we are at the sharp point of an isosceles triangle. And, therefore, in some mystical-mathematical way, at the limit of one chapter of our journey. We are equidistant from our respective bases. Go any further and we’ll enter the unknown, trusting ourselves to orbital tracks, symbol of the diurnal cycle, darkness into light.

  Thomas Taylor, the Platonist and inspiration for William Blake, considering the Eleusinian and Bacchic mysteries in 1816, wrote of the soul coming under the influence of Saturn like a ‘river voluminous, sluggish, and cold’, merging herself in fluctuating matter, before becoming one with the sea, that emblem of purity.

  Quitting the protection of the now-achieved triangle, Andrew’s stories and mine arrow back to source: we are shipwrecked. Peckish as crows. Taylor speaks of intellectual nature, without bearings in sublunary darkness, navigating by match flares, ‘and continuing the pursuit into the depths of Hades herself’.

  Within the scheme of our day’s walk, Shepherd’s Bush as railway hub, road hub, severed village green, mother of malls, was our nominated Hades. Or plastic paradise. Take your choice. I had spent time visiting Westfield, the huge retail hangar waved through by Mayor Ken Livingstone, when it was newly opened. And I’d written about the experience in a book called Ghost Milk. Andrew, having sampled the few paragraphs in which he appeared, avoided the rest: so he came to this bright island in a spirit of optimism. Food. Drink. Micturation in a pristine trough.

  ‘You’re such a grouse,’ he said
. ‘Muttering and moaning and chuntering words of Brandoesque nonsense like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. With your polished skull and your T. S. Eliot and overlandunderground rumbles. And what’s wrong with people enjoying themselves at the Olympics? I’m proud to be a British German, a roastbeef Englishman with an umlaut.’

  Kötting was confusing the feudal field system of the western Westfield, where the 1908 and 1948 Olympics were staged, with the new eastern park, which will eventually be opened to the public, after being landscaped as a backdrop to the shining memory of the 2012 Olympic city of Stratford. A forgivable mistake. When parking space is at a premium, build slots for cars and the public will come: you might as well stack shops and coffee halts up above.

  Our own marathon trudge around London Overground was no more eccentric or arbitrary than the route of the 1908 run to White City Stadium. The old distance of twenty-five miles was extended by a mile, so that the race could begin at Windsor Castle, and it was tweaked again to have the athletes line up under the window of Princess May. British officials made a final adjustment by moving the finish line to a position immediately beneath the Royal Box. Thereby setting the now-established distance of twenty-six miles, 385 yards. Andrew, in his pomp, lacking credentials, inserted himself into the London Marathon and ran the whole gasping route as a self-sponsored free-floater. His training runs out of Deptford took him through the fume-tube of the Rotherhithe Tunnel, shoulder to shoulder with white vans. Which explains a lot.

  Veteran brownfield acres left over from the Franco-British Exhibition of 1908, and the Olympic summer when the original White City was known as the Great Stadium, gave way to usage as a railway depot. Railways, like wildlife on the central reservations of motorways, flourish in places where the curious can’t get at them. No vistas are more appealing, and less available, than the tumble of dereliction, shed cults, covert industries, squatted warehouses, spray-painted walls, train-seeded knotweeds and glimpsed canals of railway-terminal approaches. Or those unexplained halts when the carriage trembles and passengers yawn and inspect their watches, before gazing without recognition at some wilderness snaking between busy carriageways and motorway spurs. Which is why the Defoe entrapment of Ballard’s Concrete Island, a car spinning off a Westway interchange and hurling an architect, Robert Maitland, into a no-man’s-land pit, was a necessary stage between White City’s railway stagnation and the rebirth of Shepherd’s Bush as the prime port of entry for the Westfield supermall. The Piraeus to the Athens of the Overground.

  ‘The apex of the island pointed towards the west and the declining sun, whose warm light lay over the distant television studios at White City,’ Ballard wrote. Now those studios were as doomed and ghost-freighted as the acoustic echoes of the 60,000 spectators at the 1908 Olympics, and the characters of the dog-track era that followed. The wide boys who don’t work out of lost novels by Robert Westerby.

  One fine summer afternoon, coming away from a meeting in Bayswater, I drifted west through streets and crescents in which I find it easy to get lost. I’ve never quite worked out how those Westbournes and Ladbrokes and Landsdownes and Elgins contrive their mazy circles, complicated by private gardens, around a theoretical centre, which may or may not be of psychogeographic significance. Choices of artisan bread and fine-ground coffee, both of which I needed to carry home, were overwhelming. The villas of Holland Park invoked so many generations of literary figures – Ford Madox Ford and Violet Hunt, Wyndham Lewis, Hackney’s upgraded Harold Pinter, J. G. Ballard ducking into the Hilton for a Chinese meal – that I was confirmed in my tourist status. I kept my head down, hugged my grainy loaf, and stepped it out until I was safely positioned on the Ginger Line platform at Shepherd’s Bush; waiting nervously for a connection to the railway loop that would carry me back to Highbury & Islington. Then Haggerston. The known world.

  Safely back among my books, I dug out a copy of South Lodge by Douglas Goldring, his account of Ford and the English Review circle, published in the year of my birth, 1943. I was surprised to find the story opening with a letter from Goldring to Tommy Earp, in which he hesitates ‘to try to estimate the number of miles of Dockland pavements we have tramped together in the course of our riparian wanderings; the number of noisy East-End pubs in which we have exchanged ideas’. So the compulsion must always be there: to go out of your knowledge, cross the river, scrape off a little of yourself in areas so obscure that every encounter becomes a potential fiction.

  I was sharing the platform with faces I knew and didn’t know, half-familiar characters waiting to be assigned roles I had failed to invent for them in abandoned novels. They were like cousins or uncles seen once at a family funeral in a suburb of Peterborough, a cold wedding in a flapping Dorset tent. Something had gone wrong in the intervening years. Wrong with me, my eyes. My index system. These men were the mirror of my own decline. Even the physical size wasn’t right; they had shrunk somehow. The flesh tones were too high. Hair was thin and overbarbered. Actors of note, evidently. TV drama recidivists. Staff officers of White City. You’ve shared your sofa with this trio as paranormal investigators, forensic scientists, colonial administrators, East End godfathers, hitmen waiting in a basement for a word from Harold Pinter. I wasn’t a casting director, but the names would surely come.

  Where the eastern rim of the Overground, Haggerston to Shoreditch, was infested with image cannibals, photographers taking photographs of photographers taking photographs, the western corridor, Brompton to Willesden Junction, was populated by actors in civvies. They were everywhere, tour guides without a script. In my part of town, on any morning circuit of Victoria Park and Regent’s Canal, you might witness actors being actors, doing their job: alfresco breakfasting, resting in caravans. The east is London’s local-colour location; the west is where the performers live (the ones of a certain age and status).

  By the time we were settled in our Overground carriage, the rolling credits came to me. The subdued performers were returning home after a hard day under the lights in the BBC studios: Tim Piggott-Smith, Bill Paterson, Kenneth Cranham. No courtesy cars. The enforced democracy of the Ginger Line. In spite of a nicely underplayed nonchalance about the prospect of being recognized – or, worse, of not being recognized; or, worse again, of one of the others being recognized first – nobody did. Fellow commuters were slumped behind free papers, finger-jiggling screens, earplugged to playlists. And if travellers did acknowledge faces that belonged on something grander than a CCTV surveillance monitor, they were too polite to make anything of it. Respectable actors should be quarantined within the magic rectangle, not expelled to the 3.39 p.m. shuttle on the Overground.

  They were around my age, these men, even a few years younger; or, in Cranham’s case, a year older. After a punishingly early start and a day shoehorned into costume, they were dressed down in casual jeans and jackets, but with visibly good wristwatches. They exchanged inconsequential remarks, giving the impression of having been thrown together for a particular job without being close friends or neighbours.

  ‘I was travelling up to Leeds,’ Piggott-Smith said, ‘and they booked me second class! I upgraded to first. Even with my Senior Railcard, it cost forty pounds.’

  Cranham, flushed, stroking a grey beard, gasps. He breathes hard, hanging on to the ginger pole as the train lurches. Piggott-Smith and Patterson managed seats. ‘We can catch up, Tim,’ Cranham says. ‘We can catch up at Willesden Junction.’

  Willesden Junction is where they exit. Willesden Junction, and the rail-serviced diaspora of Kensal Green, Kensal Rise, Willesden Green, is a reservation for actors and film-makers. Substantial villas, screened by leylandii hedges, gardens generous enough to contain cricket nets, were once available at competitive prices. Drifting out from Hampstead and Notting Hill, upgrading from Acton and Kilburn, actors with families, second families, dependants, followed Peter O’Toole, a pioneer Willesden Green migrant.

  If we decided, at some future date, to make a mad Kötting film about the orbital walk, would we se
cure sufficient budget for the three Shepherd’s Bush actors to play themselves? Andrew, in full flow, could be persuasive. He got Dudley Sutton, in smart tweed three-piece, out on the plastic swan. He made Sean Lock swim the English Channel. He hypnotized Freddie Jones, the King Lear of Emmerdale, into chugging enough ‘interesting’ coffee to rip through a heart-rending recital of poems by John Clare.

  Within the year, it was revealed that the Willesden Junction actors were responsible for starting the First World War. If the war ended with the Armistice of Compiègne, signed in Marshal Foch’s railway carriage parked in a forest siding, after the German delegation had been brought, by private train, to this secret destination, it launched in Shepherd’s Bush.

  Tim Piggott-Smith played Asquith, the prime minister. No wonder, staying in character, he felt entitled to a first-class ticket. Kenneth Cranham was John Burns, trade unionist and radical. In life, Burns came around our tramped London circuit: born in Vauxhall, schooled in Battersea, arrested after a demonstration on Clapham Common. In retirement, he developed an obsession with the matter of London. He is credited with first voicing the future TV cliché: ‘The Thames is liquid history.’ The diminutive Patterson, all Scottish frown and calibrated intensity, played Lord Morley, the Liberal and anti-imperialist. Morley and Burns were the two cabinet ministers who opposed war and who resigned when it was declared. The programme was called 37 Days. It felt longer.