Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire Read online

  ‘I had to get over here, before work, bring my daughter, from Kentish Town, before nursery. It’s a difficult drive.’

  They’re sympathetic, the fit young mechanics, the women in dungarees, but there is nothing they can do. There has to be a system or it would be chaos, punctures leaking, wrecks everywhere like a Shoreditch art installation. Please help yourself to a complimentary plan of Canary Wharf. Unlock the history of London’s river. English Partnerships at Greenwich Peninsula. Investing in the 21st Century.

  ‘If you can’t find the map you want, there’s a website. You can order from there.’

  I’m lucky, my puncture will be treated immediately. I have half an hour to kill in the council zone, the official centre of governance for Hackney. If I can’t walk, I can limp and learn. Street frontage, south of the Town Hall, is non‐commercial, wide‐windowed: walk‐through fast food (access to library), HSBC bank, cycle surgery, and various job‐seeking arcades with machines that print out employment possibilities, on a daily basis. You have to shop for a parking space, purchasing books of tickets like a raffle or a lottery scratchcard. All the paperwork aspires to the condition of an environment‐improving gamble, an investment, blank cheque in the future. Colour‐coded hard plastic chairs. Near‐artworks, digital images, that key up the best of the borough. Calendar illustrations of Hackney Marshes, Springfield Park, London Fields. Urban pastoral. The green lungs that kept the lowlife fit for smoking, their sixty‐a‐day habits. And here too, in case your experience of the real thing is overwhelming, is a large colour print of the Hackney Empire: the sheer cliff of that much loved, much restored old music hall. The rose‐red endstop of the Town Hall precinct. With its vast lettering: HACKNEY EMPIRE. An East German memory‐prompt banished to a sculpture park after the Wall came down: present and loud and stripped of meaning.

  The council are going to splash out – credit rich at last, slush funds kicking in – on new premises in keeping with their burnished status. That’s what regeneration is really about, fancier council offices. But the white block, sharp‐angled 1934 Town Hall, with its balcony and flags, is a civic boast of some substance. You could do a Mussolini, an Oswald Mosley, up there, stiff left arm resting on parapet. Broad steps – seven, then five more – separate the building and its secure entrance from the street. An impression amplified by the formal garden, behind the lively bus stop. The war memorial has been restored. There are palm trees. Sometimes a high police horse tosses its head in front of the south wall of the theatre.

  Active council functionaries come and go, they meet and greet, gabbling into mouthpieces and cellphones. Today they are, for the most part, black. It’s impertinent and probably illegal to remark on the fact. Or to notice, with anything more than vulgar curiosity, a register of social change: that by afternoon all the voices along the Regent’s Canal between Queensbridge Road and Victoria Park are Russian, French, Italian, German. I’ve seen Poles so drunk they are making cocktails from the dregs of bottles left in bins that haven’t been emptied for weeks. You can’t say this. Or even think it, although I do: there is something stirring about a white building under black occupation. Like the presidential palace of an African state that has been destroyed by waves of colonialism; first plunder, then conspicuous charity. But this monoculturalism is an illusion, Hasidic men pass down the marble hall to register births. There are numerous traces, among council clients, of old Jewish Hackney. Of all Hackneys. Including the false memory of a photograph I took, 35mm black and white, of Renchi Bicknell in a pinstripe suit, white socks, bounding across these steps: to be married for the first time. 1969? A ceremony I must have witnessed. I do remember the conclusion of the day, driving to Cambridge, warm afternoon, my cheap fawn suit. Like a terrible anticipatory homage to Ken Livingstone.

  I cycle home across London Fields, sticking to the allocated green track (until it vanishes). I bump into a neighbour who throws me by asking, with some hesitation, if I could supply her with a poem about the future. She is doing the post round. It’s that hour of the day: when householders redistribute wrongly delivered packages. If correspondence arrives in the right street, or within half a mile of it, temporary postmen reckon the job’s done. It seems discourteous to point out minor errors. The situation has improved of late. I haven’t noticed any grey sacks floating in the canal or found bundles of opened envelopes behind our hedge. Some of the posties stick with this miserable round for at least a fortnight.

  I comb through notebooks, things published and unpublished, but I can’t find a single poem that touches on the future. Everything is resolutely nudged by the now, under the drag of an invented past. I’m sorry, Harriet, I have no idea what the future holds. Or what it is. The architect Erich Mendelsohn, who was responsible for the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill‐on‐Sea, said: ‘Only he who cannot forget has no free mind.’ In Berlin they labour to exorcize the past. In Hackney we must train ourselves to exorcize the future.

  PARK BARBERS

  Memory is built to last.

  – J. H. Prynne

  Gore Road

  It’s not just the red cranes looming over the towpath, or the acknowledgement that feeling good, walking again, events must very soon take a turn for the worse. Shadows have shadows. Static water is opaque and unreadable. Seeing what’s wrong is not much of a stimulus to start work. I want some inkling of the virtues of this place and of our lives in it. I want what I don’t know: the names of animals, trees, plants, stones. A method for disappearing, absolutely, into the tapestry.

  Forty years and I have learnt nothing, nothing useful, about the people, factories, politics and personalities of Hackney. The name has declined to a brand identity. A chart‐topper: worst services, best crime, dump of dumps. A map that is a boast on a public signboard, a borough outline like a parody of England. My ignorance of the area in which I have made my life, watched my children grow up, is shameful. I’ve walked over much of it, on a daily basis, taken thousands of photographs, kept an 8mm film diary for seven years: what does it amount to? Strategies for avoiding engagement, elective amnesia, dream‐paths that keep me submerged in the dream.

  I’m at the age when the friends who came here with me, in the 1960s, have gone, moved out. The provinces or the cemetery. And the next wave after them: schools, children, the pressure of the streets. Writers who can no longer afford to write, not here. And the ones who took their real‐estate profits and slid sideways into Islington or Clerkenwell. Human contact with fellow spirits becomes a matter of telephone conversations. Rachel Lichtenstein, with whom I collaborated on a book about David Rodinsky, the Princelet Street hermit, had relocated to Leigh‐on‐Sea: down the line from Fenchurch Street, back to her childhood territory in Southend. She was assembling an oral history of Brick Lane. I admired her tenacity, the sympathy she brought to the interviews she conducted, her talent as a curator of memory‐spaces and people prepared to talk about them. There would be technical difficulties, for sure, fights over intellectual property, confessees who reneged on their confessions, but Rachel always managed to present her subjects in the best possible light. I couldn’t go that far. I was too fond of flaws, eccentricity. Characters who subverted any role assigned to them. Fictional projections who grew real flesh.

  ‘You should start your Hackney book with Uncle Sid,’ Rachel told me. ‘Before it’s too late.’ A cousin of her father, Sidney Kirsh lived in Gore Road, Victoria Park. Hackney, strapped for cash, had handed over the park, in its entirety, to Tower Hamlets. In years past, the days of Sid’s pomp, there was an imaginary border running through the grass. You could find marker stones if you looked for them. Sid’s Victoria Park was a staging post on the northwest passage out of the Whitechapel ghetto. ‘He’s a storyteller,’ Rachel said. ‘He’s eighty‐seven now, but he remembers everything.’

  For me, this was a detective story. I knew where the body of our poor borough was lying and who had killed it, but I didn’t know why. The previous history of the corpse was a blank. Conflicting ve
rsions of the same episodes would have to be investigated. I thought of an Orson Welles film I’d seen, years ago: Mr Arkadin (aka Confidential Report). A ludicrously bearded and putty‐nosed tycoon hires a burnt‐out hack to investigate his past. Witnesses, having related their part of the story, are bumped off. My interviews, however tactfully pitched, were still interrogations: to discover the rules of engagement. You start with lies, evasions, and you uncover a shape. For months, taking on anything and everything to fund my research, I gathered Hackney books, chased references, collected news cuttings, ran old films, hounded suspects. Like Arkadin I wanted to know who I was and where I had been hiding. And then what? Confidential Report opens with an empty plane approaching Madrid.

  Rachel circled Jewish Whitechapel, soliciting resolution – and finding it. Once I walked through that first door, I was lost. The process could go on for ever. Hackney had no beginning, no end, its boundaries were strategic; they expanded or contracted in accordance with the political whims of the moment. But there was something, a trace element, that was specific: a word, a broken sentence, an unnoticed detail in a dull painting hanging in an unvisited municipal gallery. And Sidney Kirsh, my hunch told me, owned a part of it. Alive in Victoria Park, in all worlds, at this time. Our time, today: 12 January 2006.

  I’ve been here before, these close rooms, in other parts of London. In Golders Green, Fortune Green, Hampstead Garden Suburb: when I worked as a gardener, grass‐cutter, ripper out of weeds (and shrubs), for a pound an hour, once a week. I’d been in North London, servicing the narrow strips on either side of a concrete path, for a man who said he wrote historical novels, under a selection of aliases, uncommissioned radio scripts. Breath ripe with afternoon sherry. He tried to make up a pound from milk coppers and woolly sixpences, the lint of deep‐pocket cardigans. Objects had accumulated over the years of neglect and solitude. He snorted the plastic seats of indented chairs for testosterone contrails of the young actors, hopeful of preferment, who no longer called. Windows wouldn’t open and sweat‐bandage curtains moved with his rasped breathing like an anticipation of the future oxygen tent. Even the books this man showed me, he may indeed have written them, had laminated skins stuck to the dustwrappers. They looked as if they had been gathered up from the closing sale in a public library. I had to stand there, paw out, listening to these legends of the city, before he would release the hot trickle of coins. The cliffhanger autobiography, what happened with Maclaren‐Ross that night in the Turkish baths at Russell Square, would keep until next time, next year. No point in my returning in the winter. Nothing grew.

  When I got home, exhausted, Anna had to admit that the contractions were coming quite strongly, she’d gone into labour. A busy night ahead, midwife rushing to the wrong Albion, Albion Road in Stoke Newington. The ambulance that should have taken us to Bart’s arrived in time to ask if the crew, since they didn’t have anything better to do, could witness the birth. ‘Fuck off,’ Anna screamed. ‘Now!’ The disappointed youth backing away from the door, upstairs to our small kitchen, to join the others. Boil water. Now I understood what that meant in the old Westerns. Endless cups of tea. William was delivered at home, on film, in the early hours. A great thing, a gift. And a further initiation into the mysteries of place. The uncollected afterbirth was buried in the garden.

  Sidney Kirsh is a pre‐war London size, his head reaching somewhere about the middle of my chest. He’s bright‐eyed, alert. He answers the door in trailing tartan dressing‐gown and slippers. The ground‐floor flat, operated by Crown Properties, has a gauzy, cataract view of a triangle of garden. Beyond that, on the street, the borough architects have come up with a pedestrian obstacle, a burial mound with a sloping lid of sea pebbles. In summer, white roses break through the leaves of a solitary ash tree. Mr Kirsh’s vestigial lawn is a quilt of undisturbed leaves. Getting my measure, on the instant, he asks if I’d like to take on some basic remedial work out there: raking, scything, sweeping. He had a boy, once, but he proved unreliable. Then a friend, a young man from the Philippines, gave it a shot. ‘I had to watch him all the time,’ Sid said. ‘I could give you a list as long as your arm of the things that disappeared out of that garden.’

  I have never fancied gardening in Hackney, not since my vegetable patch was invaded by squirrels and foxes. Renchi Bicknell, who worked in Victoria Park when I was in Limehouse, did private contracts in this locality. He put an advert in the Hackney Gazette. All the takers lived in Sharon Gardens, a transported fragment of Golders Green; a self‐declared suburb, one street. Villas. Semis. Bowed fronts, leaded windows. Portholes with stained glass. Garden patches to be kept as neat as front rooms, lounges. Renchi didn’t take to it, the fuss. Manoeuvring an electric mower, in a tangle of cable, around Sunday‐smart motor vehicles.

  The furniture in Sidney’s warm cabin is substantial, every armchair a presence as solid as Gladstone. The walls are dressed with family photographs and paintings. The paintings are stories. I’m waiting for Mr Kirsh to wiggle his ears. Rachel says that when she lived around the corner, her two boys were mesmerized as Sid performed his party trick.

  I’ve never had much use for pocket‐recorders. They don’t work, for me or on me. And if I glance away from Sid’s face, those burning eyes, even for a moment, he stops talking. ‘I’ve gone on too long. You’ve got things to do. You’re a busy man.’

  I grew up in the East End, I didn’t grow up in Hackney. I came to this area at fourteen, fifteen. If you walk down Gore Road to the Crown Office and look back to the corner, that’s where I lived. The main road, Victoria Park Road. Twelve rooms. I finished up living in them all on my own. The rest of the family? Some died, some married.

  I’ve stayed in Hackney all my life, except during the war. I was six and a half years away in the army. They started bombing here and my parents moved to Hinckley in Leicestershire. We took over an estate. When the war was virtually over, I told my father I was coming back to London. He said, ‘Son, if you go, don’t get the old house, get the one next door. It has got an additional building on the side, we’ll have more room.’

  I went to the agent. He said, ‘With pleasure, Mr Kirsh.’ We moved next door. My father had the first floor with kitchen. My brother had the second floor with his wife. I had the top floor with my wife. And down in the basement, we eventually got my grandmother and grandfather. After a few years my brother moved away.

  What happened is that I was working with a friend of mine, I’d known him for many years, and he said, ‘Come and help us at weekends.’ I said, ‘Right.’ It suited me. I was playing table tennis most of the time. See them, over there, the cups? See how many I’ve won? I got paid a couple of times. I had a proposition to play for a firm of furriers, they were determined to win the league.

  This feller I was working with, he says, ‘I’ve been offered a shop. I don’t fancy it down there, too Irish.’ I said, ‘All right, I’ll go down and have a look.’ And my goodness, at lunchtime, they were queuing up at the door. I thought, this is good enough for me. I spoke to the young chap. I said, ‘Who’s the boss here?’ He said, ‘He’s outside feeding the rabbits.’ George was his name. He said, ‘What you want?’ I said, ‘I’ve heard this shop is for sale, what d’you reckon?’ He said, ‘Are you a communist?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ He said, ‘You can have it.’ ‘What about a lease?’ He said, ‘Write up a lease and I’ll sign it.’ Which I did. I had three, four men working all the time.

  Poplar was wonderful. I learnt to paint there – as you can see on the walls. But I had to think about taking on the business, I can tell you. When I went down there, they said, ‘They don’t like Jews here.’ Rubbish! They were an educated bunch, the dockers. I did a painting. The feller in the barber’s chair says, ‘I paint.’ I got into trouble fixing my background. This bloke told me what to do. In three months the shop looked like an art gallery. They were all bringing paintings in. I’ve got some of them here. The dockers were a great bunch. And the men from the factories, Tate & Lyle.

>   Before I got into that business, barbering, I was in plastics. I wasn’t really a communist. In the East End we voted in a communist member of parliament. I lost my faith in communism during the war. One minute they were saying, ‘Don’t fight a capitalist war, stop fighting against Hitler.’ And then, as soon as Russia comes in, they say, ‘Why haven’t you opened up a second front?’

  One afternoon a chap, a tubby chap, came into my shop. He said, ‘I understand you deal in purses?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘I’ve got a sample here if you want some.’ I took him out the back and showed him that I was the one who made them. I made the purses he was trying to flog. He said, ‘You’ve got a barber shop here, I’m a barber.’ I said, ‘Do you want a job?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ I took him on. He was a bit of a gambler, we finished up opening one of the first betting shops in Poplar.

  Poplar was different, you understand? My barber shop, anything could happen. The Canadian seamen pulled a strike on their ship in the docks, the Beaverbrook. They couldn’t strike in their own country, because they’d send the thugs in to beat them up, and then blacklegs would do the work. The headquarters of the strike was the barber shop. They were good customers.

  The habit with the dockers was to come in the morning and be appointed to a ship. The manager would say, ‘The Beaverbrook.’ ‘Can’t. It’s blacked.’ Eventually the whole docks were on strike, they wouldn’t work that ship. The strike lasted six weeks. London was virtually on its knees.

  This would have been about ’48, ’49. The Daily Mirror had a headline: STRIKE ORGANIZED FROM BARBER SHOP. The seamen weren’t communists, they really had a grievance. I had a telephone bill a mile high. I was in that barber shop until ’66, ’67.