Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Read online

  The first words of Home’s novel. I should have stopped there.

  One afternoon Stewart shocked me by arriving on my doorstep without his bicycle. He had come to record his memories of crack houses, squats, co‐operatives. He had recently lost an excellent perch on the Golden Lane Estate in the Barbican. Hackney, we agreed, is property. That is all it’s about, mortgages, debt‐ management. The cost of being where you are. Home’s entire catalogue, when you come down to it, dozens of frantic compositions made in the teeth of the storm, concerns eviction. Mess up with current woman, on your bike. A borrowed couch, a floor, whisky talk: new novel (new debts). He circles the sprawling borough, its hot nuclear core. But Hackney is an old suburb, a refuge – which is precisely what Home is fleeing: the idea of suburbia as exile, divorce from the action. A hide of surrogate or actual parents.

  In this new book, new today, 25 April 2007, Home has pasted the property interview he gave me into his published text – before I’ve even had time to transcribe it. He sweeps across the geography of London, on foot, bicycle abandoned as part of the Golden Lane eviction; speeding from publisher to independent film‐maker, patron to website interview, Hoxton to Shoreditch, Brick Lane.

  ‘Mare Street had changed. It had become trendy since I’d first started visiting it regularly as a callow youth of sixteen for various parties against racism,’ he said.

  The Mare Street riff is a standard in Hackney reportage. Dr David Widgery, on the bus, heading south towards his Limehouse practice: mass‐observing, listening, transcribing. ‘Rain pelting down. The road at a standstill through sheer weight of traffic; ill‐tempered cars, double‐banked buses and grinding HGVs. People dart dangerously between vehicles, building workers jack‐in‐a‐box out of Transits, mothers weave buggies between revving Cortinas. The terracotta muse high above the roof of the Hackney Empire waves people to work.’ Social realism works through an accumulation of gritty detail, the drumbeat of fast‐moving lists.

  The forgotten post‐war novelist, Roland Camberton, published Rain on the Pavements – with a high‐angle Mare Street long shot by John Minton on its dustwrapper – in 1951. Before vanishing and never being heard from again. But these were engaged and passionate writers, absorbed in the crowd; Widgery’s jazzy, Beat‐inflected prose, Camberton’s mocking humour. John Minton’s trade unionists march onward with their unreadable banner, protesting against impossibly yellow weather.

  Home has no time for local picaresque, scene setting, he has an appointment to keep at the Homerton Hospital. A man in a coma: Mick Cohen, underground film‐maker. There are a lot of those in Hackney, no shortage of Cohens. The Spitalfields interview was for a film about gentrification. The woman with whom Stewart shares hummus salad in pitta bread has just returned from an arts conference where a lot of people had been talking about how rising property prices were making it impossible for them to pursue their cultural practice in London.

  I have years of interviews with Hackney dwellers, one tape leading to another, story within a story, and they’re all, these talkers, self‐confessed artists. Even the doctors, surgeons, barbers, bus drivers: they have their hobbies, collections of Matchbox Toys from the Lesney Factory on the edge of the marshes, gigs at the Royal College of Art. The would‐be‐writers, future painters, uncommissioned film‐makers are the worst; they want to rehearse their proposals, to record hours of anecdotes from books that will never be completed. Or started. Unless I can be persuaded to promote them, talk them up, send them to eager publishers.

  The archive itself is now a property. Images are property. History isn’t the province of memory‐men, it belongs to speculators, anal retentives smart enough not to throw away their rubbish. Rubbish and property: twinned themes. Eco defaulters, those who refuse to compost, are the latest criminals. If you don’t separate your tea bags from your plastic mineral‐water bottles, you’ll be prosecuted, fined, evicted. Early‐morning streets are dressed with every shade of bucket and bin, stacked with nearly new white goods, vacuum cleaners, CDs in cellophane, computers, lavatory bowls that nobody wants. This is not property, this is the antimatter of a virtual world subject to hourly revision. The flotsam and tidewrack of cyberspace. Scavengers have abandoned the skips of our neat inner‐city villages, the steady gaze of the energy police, for the deregulated wastelands of the emerging Olympic Park. They’re all out there, with bicycles, handcarts, vans, with pliers, bolt‐cutters and knives, asset‐stripping ruins, peeling electricity cables, getting the price of a drink together. So that they can settle on a companionable bench, with a view of water, to smoke and chug in ruminative silence. Absorbed in the landscape they occupy, pilgrims and sadhus of the immediate. The ordinary. The last self‐funding, self‐motivating human machines in the borough. Lost ones on their first days to heaven.

  Hackney, I decided, would be a story of money and cars. Two subjects about which I knew absolutely nothing. A great beginning. I had a title, Black Teeth, and a plan: unity of time and place, one weekend fending off a debt crisis against threats of bailiffs and summary violence. But that was too mundane, too close to fiction.

  ‘Lit‐fic’s a dead duck,’ my editor said. ‘Carry on with the same book but pepper it with real names, actual locations. The London heritage stuff still plays. We’ll squeeze you into the travel sections.’

  So what about Life and Debt on the Eastern Front? Too Russian. The Empire of Hackney: Its Fallen Rise. Too cleverdick. Nobody reads Gibbon. The title will look after itself, concentrate on that first line. First chapter. First section. Like building an upside‐down pyramid, it all starts with a single brick.

  ‘I want to combine popular story telling, poetics and critique. I am Death. I am Undead. I stopped living. Ad nauseam.’

  That’s how Stewart Home finishes.

  Down from Highgate thro’ Hackney

  Stepping out, the spread of the town enhanced by failing vision, the novelty of a remote white‐ribbed King’s Cross development: Highgate. The lengthy down escalator of the hill, its refracted wealth. Walk it and you are part of it: private schools for private money, Whittington’s black cat, Andrew Marvell’s hole in the wall. Anna, in her dreams, would live here. Up above the swamp. On summer heights where our lost Hackney Brook once rose.

  Remember those Saturdays? The period when Anna was pictured in a coffee‐table book, Flea Markets in Europe; long hair pinned back, collar up, blue coat with military epaulettes from a pine‐stripping place on Balls Pond Road? She was presiding over my Camden Passage stall. A flat table of used books. Striking young woman, young mother, catching the photographer’s eye. No easy thing, stolen images in street markets. Sawdust Caesar: a book about Mussolini. A biography of Jan Christiaan Smuts. Remnants of my father’s library? Was he already dead? Or had I bought, for resale, titles I recognized from my childhood? While Anna took her day in the market, I came with the children to Waterlow Park. Squirrels, then a novelty, ran up my legs to perch on my shoulders before leaping away downhill to invade the rest of London. Karl Marx: I marched the children over to see the great hieratic head, the black paperweight holding down so many tracts. A plot in Highgate Cemetery was the only way fortunate Hackney writers, with good connections, were ever going to migrate up here.

  I had located, on Highgate Hill, a furniture shop heaped with German literature; an obviously Jewish collection, pristine in dust‐wrappers. Kafka. Canetti. Hermann Broch. Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. The difficulty being that the shop, by next week, might be gone. Time was pressing, Anna to be collected, car loaded, cherry bakewell treats bought at a corner shop on the way home to Hackney. I scanned the books, fast, leaving four‐year‐old William in the car with his older sister. At least he didn’t drive it away. He set the windscreen‐wipers going, scraping cones of smear, so that they couldn’t be stopped. As our agitated family party juddered back down to Islington. Market traders with a capital fund of about fifty pounds. But without debts or mortgages. In the city, in our own house. Metal steps descendin
g to a cat‐napping, Henri Rousseau garden of vegetables and cannabis plants.

  A slight ache.

  Which was becoming more pronounced with every step closer to Archway. Black suede‐type slipper shoes. A special offer that was not so special. Pain exists to be walked through – but what if you can’t walk? One problem was settled for now: the teeth. Nothing headline generating, by way of cost, light tinkering, a month’s worth of old money. The dentist, tall and Scandinavian, has an interest in art, London’s heritage. It’s up there on the wall, Turner splashes to take your mind off the smoking drill. I find myself thinking of another Highgate exile with a bad mouth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Who was stalked by a man hired to keep him away from the apothecary. Arbitrary jump cuts of consciousness as I sprawl on this plastic‐sheathed airline chair and the oral‐mechanic probes for an icicle nerve. Coleridge and Wordsworth. Family holidays in the west. ‘Quantock ridge in smudge of sun.’

  I am looking forward to the walk home. A free afternoon. No meetings, no students, nothing overdue: apart from the Hackney book. Which is more of a way of life than a serious project. My children have left home. I can enjoy the liberty of the city: accidental encounters, fresh discoveries. No cash in my pocket, nothing to tempt me into junkshops or cafés. There is a cheque to pay in, an insignificant amount but useful. A small credit to reverse the flow of standing orders, surcharges, council threats. I’ve carried the cheque around for a week, on random London diagonals, without coming across an operative HSBC bank.

  When you notice the fact that one step is made after another, you’re in trouble. Zephyrs of diesel grit. Drifting bands of batter‐waft: frying onions, burgers. But no filling stations, those green‐shaded pagodas have gone, not economic. More use as development sites. No HSBC banks either. Is the cheque still there? At the last count thirteen payments were outstanding; the chaff of journalism, talks delivered months ago to colleges where the mass of required forms far outweighs the script for the lecture. It takes an afternoon to prepare your material and a week to figure out the online invoice requirements. Calling yourself ‘freelance’ is a confession of penury. The new universities take the ‘free’ part too literally. Writers without tenure are public beggars.

  Plenty of money‐transfer activity on Holloway Road. They’ll take your cash and send it on holiday, anywhere in the globe. Hole‐in‐the‐wall fiscal launderettes. Sirens and shakedowns. Collisions. Power walkers sweep past as I make the error of looking at things, recalling previous incidents, journeys.

  By Highbury Corner, the pain has progressed from ankle to calf. Air thickens and early pollen makes my eyes water. Tomorrow will clear or confirm this condition: as a problem. Mouth fixed, leg shot. Walter Sickert ran a painting school on Highbury Place. Write that down, it might be useful. Blue plaques are the Islington equivalent of Hackney’s Sky satellite dishes.

  With my leg gone, I had no choice but to excavate my bicycle. When I worked as a labourer, packing cigars in Clerkenwell, I cycled. The bike cost £6 in Kingsland Waste Market. I wobbled around the notorious Old Street roundabout without damage. I cycled down Homerton High Street, past the Lesney Matchbox Toys Factory, on to the Marshes, when I had the task of painting white lines for the football pitches. At an era when the canal path was overgrown and forbidden, I peddled to Limehouse, through Victoria Park, down Grove Road and Burdett Road, to work as a gardener. The sharp‐saddled bicycle was a collaborator in any reading of the city. Territory crossed and crisscrossed: burial grounds and back rivers explored.

  It was too late in life to mount up again; a terrible reversion, the penultimate stage before the electrified buggy, the golf cart of the incapacitated, waiting for a ramp to descend from the special‐needs bus. Both tyres were flat, the gears didn’t work: the yellow wreck supported me like a Limerick drunk as I hobbled towards Mare Street, London Fields Cycles. In the old days, the never‐were days, you could take in a bike smarting from its latest catastrophe: no problem, small cash transaction, straight back on the road. Now it’s like seeing an overworked oncologist, you make an appointment. This is a borough where cycling is close to compulsory; yellow‐tabard squads set up checkpoints on London Fields or by the canal gate at Cat and Mutton Bridge. To harass and advise. To offer nutty cakes and green apples. To share your sorrow at the absence of a working bell.

  Ting ting.

  Best practice. Fit for purpose. Take home a leaflet.

  Cyclists should slow down, ring with Two Tings and let other users through the bridge before continuing. Never pass a pedestrian or another cyclist underneath a bridge. The waterways and towpaths have many historic structures and important wildlife habitats. The Regent’s Canal has been designated a Site of Metropolitan Importance.

  There is a three‐month waiting list before you can book your bike in for a check‐up. The cycle health service is in crisis. And don’t imagine you can breeze into the surgery one afternoon with anything as trivial as a buckled wheel. They have a rigid system: the first five patients, chosen from an orderly queue, out on the street, will be admitted at 8 a.m. To receive a ticket and to wait while basic treatment is given. No point in hanging about checking the alternatives, new bikes kick in at around £250 for a basic model. They have cycling maps, but not of this area. They have an array of gaudy‐tough helmets like laminated skulls. They have everything in fluorescent yellows and greens, psychotropic decay, vampire mouth scarlet, fairground gothic.

  I arrive, second in line, at half‐seven. I have to get away sharpish, Renchi is dropping in at Albion Drive for a cup of fruit tea. Renchi Bicknell of Glastonbury, with Vanessa, his wife and partner in a B&B operation. There is a significance about the times when Renchi manifests in the city. We walked the acoustic footprints of the M25; he, coming from outside the motorway, to meet me, pushing out from the centre. Whatever emerged from those excursions was a proof of difference, a sympathetic dialogue between separated worlds. It was Renchi who brought me here in the first place: 1968. A communal house in De Beauvoir Road. His sisters had already staked out parts of Islington and this raid, across Southgate Road, a boundary, was a demonstration of the way inherited capital flows east. Six of us in an area that was unknown, coming together after Dublin, from West and North London. I was the only one who had lived, twice, south of the river. Now here was Renchi, returned, prompting me to get this bicycle surgery done as quickly as possible.

  Southgate Road: 1907. The year of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Special Branch liaising with the Tsar’s secret police. Watchmen at Liverpool Street Station waiting for the Harwich train. The Georgian bandit, Soso Djugashvili, also known as Joseph Stalin, was expected for the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social‐Democratic Workers Party. To be held at the Revd Swann’s Brotherhood Church, Southgate Road. Lenin. Trotsky.

  Stalin and Maksim Litvinov kipped in Fieldgate Street, Whitechapel, in Jack London’s ‘Monster Doss House’. The twin towers of Tower House. Eileen, in the pub next door (once a synagogue, now an upmarket curry franchise), opened a biscuit tin and showed me the nicotine‐yellow, friable cuttings. Subversives. Agitators. Political exiles. They slip across the border. Then as now.

  2007: public conveniences, generously provided in the civic confidence of the imperialist era, are being restored. Ting ting. The Gents in Stamford Hill, so locals report, is occupied, nightly, by Polish builders.

  RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONISTS AFRAID OF THE CAMERA.

  Block headline. Daily Mirror, 1907. Southgate Road. Procession of men in bourgeois‐workers’ funeral outfits, umbrellas, removed bowlers disguising beards. Iron railings. Lumpy ecclesiastical bricks. Churches like prisons. Journalists are spooks, double agents, narks. Pigment is metaphor: blood red. Not til the red fog rises. Afraid of the camera’s cyclopean eye, as they walk heads bowed towards it. Fifth Congress. Third World. The Sign of Four.

  Astrid Proll, driver for the Red Army Faction, that counter‐cultural eruption of the late 1960s, on the run, escaping from the suicide fate of her colleagues in Sta
mmheim’s futurist prison, was somewhere in London. Half‐forgotten: not by the watchers, the bill posters, the graffiti polemicists.

  FREE ASTRID PROLL. Underneath the Westway. Noticed by a German cameraman, Martin Schäfer, Wim Wenders associate, working on Chris Petit’s English road film, Radio On. Proll is a presence, an absence around which a number of contradictory myths accumulate. She was arrested, while training young black offenders as motor mechanics, in a West Hampstead garage. She had marched into the local cop shop to register a protest on behalf of one of her charges. Celebrity mug shot. Lightbulb of recognition. After Paddington Green, then HMP Brixton, a return to Germany. On her release, Proll trained in film, Hamburg. She published her Paris snapshots, Baader‐Meinhof on holiday. Cafés, mirrors. Ricard ashtrays. She edited a scrapbook of archival friezes, late history. And introduced it as: ‘pictures of dead people’. The key sentence jumps out: We were afraid of photographs.

  Hackney is this: cameras and bicycles. On thin balconies of recent flats. Chained to fences. In the windows of council front‐operations, TfL promotions. Sponsorship of bicycles and cameras. The folded maps in the London Fields cycle shop, highlighting cycle paths, are free: propaganda. They demonstrate how territory can be invaded by any determined special‐interest group and how all maps are political, they are about not telling. Giving users just enough rope to hang themselves. Ting ting.

  There’s a man, number eight in the queue, with a young child, a girl, in his arms – and they’re telling him he’ll have to go away, try again tomorrow. Which he simply cannot understand. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘well well, but . . . can I leave the machine?’

  ‘Sorry. First five, every morning, that’s it.’

  There is a notice in the window: ‘Eight O Clock Drop. We will only do punctures, cables and brake blocks. One item per customer. We will be operating a “no leave” policy.’ Ting.