London Overground Page 8

  ‘He’d run round and round in circles. He’d run round and round all the time. He’d wreck the grass and he made a terrible mess of himself.’

  Andrew is rag-and-bone shamanic. With the emphasis on manic. A horseless rider of Mudchute steppes. He gallops around a spiral vortex laid out among overgrown bomb craters on the Isle of Dogs. Scorched lines look like a Stone Age premonition of the coming of the railways. ‘He came out of this place where he was. And he wasn’t at another.’

  Jenkinson, tucked away on Kötting’s side of the river, mentoring the spray of umlaut humour, opened doors. As we tramp towards Denmark Hill, Andrew stresses again the debt he owes to the man who knew just what to show him; what he needed to extend his ambitions. David Lynch’s Eraserhead with the monster worm-baby, industrial-apocalyptic sets, the smoke. Frederick Wiseman’s savage 1967 documentary, The Titicut Follies, shot in a Massachusetts hospital for the criminally insane. The inmates put on a talent show. It was hard to watch.

  Kötting talked about these Friday-night screenings as ‘The Strap’. ‘It really felt as if we had been strapped in and weren’t allowed to leave until Philip had shown us just one more film. All my early film noir experiences were there.’

  The Kötting troop would straggle from the council flat in riverside Deptford to elegant Blackheath. Jenkinson was an uphill media figure; he danced in sailor suit on the Morecambe & Wise Christmas Show. He laboured through an interview with the professionally irascible and eye-patched John Ford, who behaved like an admiral pulling rank on a chorus-boy seaman.

  Blackheath is not on the Overground. It doesn’t need it. It’s too long established in its village status, its green spaces saturated with historic traces of Wat Tyler and the rest. Tyler’s betrayal by the young Richard II is a useful demonstration that this meadow is as far as revolting peasants are going to be permitted to march before they’re turned back. Blackheath is part of that whalebacked line of Surrey hills, where white houses perch in safety above flood risks and riverbank piracy and the railway din of immigrants and street markets: Dulwich, Peckham Rye, Denmark Hill, Wimbledon, Richmond. A ridge from which to observe distant plagues and fires.

  The right to trespass, to sprawl on Jenkinson’s sofa with the grinding gears of the 16mm projector, confirmed Kötting on his life’s trajectory: art, struggle, expulsion. Posing now beside a pickup truck – SCRAP CARS & MOT FAILURES WANTED – the sweating, heavy-suited film-maker highlights a path not taken. Or not for long. The Del Boy years of the other Peckham, Fools and Horses. We are reluctant to let go of our own myths. Through misremembered and improved autobiography, Andrew retrieves archival footage of a past capable of validating this long day’s trudge. There are footprints in the ash.

  He made films only to provide backdrops for performance. He called his act Being Kärnal. He supported himself as a market trader. He sold shoes to Derek Jarman. After he had put in a bid for a pitch at Camden Market, he would take himself off to the Scala in King’s Cross for an all-night screening. That was the geography of cross-river London: constant transit, scavenging, cashmoney. Drawings made on flapping canvases with sump oil. ‘This is where it began, all round here. It takes you right back.’

  His destiny begins to make sense. He detects the faintest outline of a coherent narrative. So he leaves for South America with Leila. He is beside himself, he says, he is in love. Leila tells him so. And he knows it is true. They sleep rough and eat nettles in the New Forest. They’re ready. They ship out. They find a ruined mining settlement in the middle of the Atacama Desert. He takes photographs. Then they come home to Deptford, Pepys Estate.

  Denmark Hill reminds us that all the asylums, or factories for processing damaged psyches, are not on the outer fringes of London. They are not all decommissioned and converted into gated enclaves with cod-pastoral names and easy access to the orbital motorway. Will Self brought Friern Barnet, just outside the North Circular, back to life with a jolt in Umbrella, an immersive seance on modernism. One of the features of that grim hospital, recalled and reviled in so many memoirs, a hive of bad dreams and compulsive disorders, is the central corridor: a pedestrian circuit tramped into pilgrim smoothness by generations of white jackets and patient prisoners. A London loop for tranquillized hikers sandwiched between the M25 and the North Circular.

  ‘That it’s movement that’s essential for the formation of memories,’ Self writes. ‘That memory is a somatic phenomenon, and so if a mind can no longer manipulate its body in space, it loses the capacity to orientation within time …’ And he goes on: ‘The ward is hot, the angled casements seem not to vent the sodium hypochlorite vapours and ruinous eddies, but only draw in the far-off shushing of traffic on the North Circular.’

  The corridors ran for a mile around the intestines of the hospital. Agitated skeletons progressed, sleepwalked, snow-walked, crawled, crept, jerked, wall-touched, step-counted – like those outside, but without mobile phones – until their shot nerves demanded medication or the penance of reheated institutional food.

  Self identifies the problem we face, as we collect graffiti, photographs of spray-can murals, fragments of torn advertisements. The catalogue of visual trophies, laid out, becomes the chart of a particular day, a journey. To stitch it together requires concentration. But the map can never be more than the map of a further map. Tighter and tighter, maps within maps, until our skulls split and we come to a dead halt in the middle of an attempted portrait of Kötting beside the sign for Denmark Hill Station in its Overground guise. The orange strip is the colour of the regular methadone prescription picked up by William Burroughs in Kansas City: medication for commuters. You can get away.

  The rail halt, with its Xanax’d café, feels like a service hatch for the Maudsley Hospital. Paul Merton, a comedian who took his name from the district of London in which he grew up, checked in for a six-week stay, suffering from the side effects of Lariam, a drug taken in tablet form for the prevention and treatment of malaria. The active ingredient is mefloquine hydrochloride. Merton said that he was ‘hallucinating conversations with friends’. Which was, despite the pain and loss of control, not a bad preparation for Have I Got News for You, where he became a regular panellist shortly after his release.

  He no longer believed that he was a target for Freemasons. But he stayed in the cross hairs of Will Self, a luminary of the show, who told the Mirror that it was time for Merton and Ian Hislop to quit. ‘All due respect … they’re multimillionaires, plump middle-aged men sitting behind a desk making cracks about Clive Anderson’s hairstyle.’ The last time the TV show was any good, Self reckoned, was when he guested and ‘ripped the tits’ off Neil Kinnock.

  The acknowledged side effects of mefloquine, leaking into the Denmark Hill landscape, and away down the Overground circuit, are anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, feelings of persecution, unmotivated weeping, aggression, forgetfulness, agitation, restlessness, confusion, nightmares, hallucinations. Apart from that: fine. The shakes are just swamp fevers, Deptford tremors, property envy.

  Kötting’s fingers were twitching so much he began to text, spattering predictive runes in the hope that some domestic crisis back in St Leonards would give him the excuse to pull out of the rest of the walk without losing face. He started rambling about the quality of blowjobs he had received in his alpha-male days as a Being Kärnal headbanger, supporting the Weather Girls at the Fridge in Brixton. Like having the marrow of your spine siphoned, he said, through a glass straw. He thought this had something to do with altitude: high-ceilinged rooms with big windows at the top of the hill, the upper reaches of Camberwell Grove.

  The best advice, the Maudsley quacks reckoned, was: avoid being bitten. And sleep under mosquito nets. Kötting, I’m sure, had a set in his miracle pouch, along with energy bars, shards of rosy, sea-smoothed brick, crow feathers, comedy spectacles, a coverless copy of Beckett’s Happy Days, and a slab of Kendal Mint Cake.

  Mosquito madness was contagious. In January 1942 Heinrich Himmler gave the
order for the creation of the Dachau Entomological Institute, with the covert intention of using mosquitoes as biological weapons. The protocols of the institute, ostensibly set up to find remedies against diseases transmitted by lice and other insects, allows no other conclusion. The master plan, never carried out, was to release malaria-infected insects into enemy territories.

  Ruskin Park, with its wooded slopes, tennis courts, its outline like a dog’s head (Disney’s Goofy without the ears), belongs in a chain of soulful South London spaces, the captured gardens of grand houses offering relief from the endless grid of residential streets. In my first, confused days at film school in Brixton, I came on these green reservations with contained excitement: Brockwell Park, Tooting Bec Common, Streatham Common, Norwood Grove Recreation Ground. My attitude was provincial, a dawning recognition of the mysteries of gravel overlaying London clay. Maryon Park, downriver in Charlton, identified and exploited by Antonioni in Blow-Up, was the prime example of just such a site: a natural amphitheatre soliciting mime and ritual.

  Even today, tramping with Kötting, we experience that sense of otherness, the way these parks invoke exiled French Impressionists in Norwood or Émile Zola wandering around Crystal Place with a camera. The Overground tracks run between the northern border of the park and King’s College Hospital. Paths and close-shaven slopes that seem deserted and outside time, on closer inspection are occupied by catatonic recreationalists on hard benches, and passerines on urgent diagonals, giving off powerful chemical signals: they are no danger. They are not sex-cruising, lurking, or itching to flash. They are going to work. Or railway station. Or hospital appointment. They are adequately medicated.

  ‘All these big buildings,’ Andrew says. ‘It’s an obligation to keep them supplied. Do your bit for the NHS Foundation Trust, fall out of a tree.’

  John Ruskin, who lent his name to the park, lived on Denmark Hill. His parents, moving from Herne Hill, and holding firmly to the high ground, took the lease on a large, detached, ivy-smothered house in 1842. They were enthusiastic advocates of pre-railway suburbia. Ruskin promoted the new property as exemplifying ‘dignity’; death’s waiting room, a vantage point from which the old couple could stare with rheumy eyes out of their western windows into the captured darkness of the noble cedar tree on the front lawn. John, commandeering the centre of the house for bedroom and study, woke each morning to inspect the latest formations of clouds, mingled with the democratic smoke of industry, over Deptford and Rotherhithe. A discipline he found ‘inestimable for its aid in all healthy thought’. He draped his walls with a flush of Turners, including Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying – Typhoon Coming On. Lake District watercolours and refined topographical sketches imported a certain vision of England (depopulated, high-toned) indoors, elevating Ruskin’s spirits and allowing the Oxford aesthete to congratulate himself on how swiftly an omnibus could carry him, by way of Vauxhall Road, from his Denmark Hill retreat to St James’s Street and Cavendish Square.

  We plunged, we dropped. The Overground got away from us. It was a long haul to Clapham High Street. Picking up the airs and graces of superior suburbia, high-ground halts like the hill stations of the British Raj around Simla, the railway declined to take on custom in low-caste Brixton. The whole diaspora of Brixton was station. The place was like a seething platform of hucksters, fast-food peddlers, jerk-chicken joints under bridges and pillars with sparking electrified cables.

  Still under the influence of Ruskin, we failed to follow the railway string; we lost the Overground and blundered into Herne Hill, with its myths of stag-antlered forest gods. Herne the Hunter. Along the way, I noted Wellfit Street and a cash business soliciting copper, lead, brass, aluminium, electrical cable. White vans belonging to tribes we took for nocturnal railway strippers waited their turn to make a drop. No journey is worth undertaking, I told Kötting, without at least one fruitful detour. What is another three miles when set against unlooked-for discoveries?

  Picking up our feet now in anticipation of a late lunch, we arrived in Electric Avenue, Brixton. My original London. It wasn’t quite a Proustian seizure. I should have been stepping down from the train, not dragging it behind me like an anchor tangled in gravestones. I remember, back in 1962, how the act of arriving here in wide-eyed innocence carried the imprint of a platform as exotic to me as New York City’s Third Avenue El. You were, suddenly, without warning, above a street market, with its active press and squeeze and smell. But you were inoculated with resistant visions of Thames, council flats, green plots: the memory-film of the run out of Victoria Station.

  I’m still reading Patrick Keiller’s The View from the Train. Cinema for Keiller begins with the spectacle registered by a fixed camera on the Liverpool Overhead Railway, the first elevated electric railway in the world. There is no cutting away, it’s a ride. A journey that runs for as long as the reel of film lasts; a ride that allows the sedentary traveller to experience shifting perspectives, numerous jolts and jumps of attention, incidents, revised alignments. A totality that Keiller associates with James Joyce’s enraptured account of the city of Dublin in Ulysses, from sweep of bay at Kingstown, to bars, brothels and birthing places at the centre; to fat-frying basements, private schools, Martello towers, and cemeteries of the suburbs.

  The poet Apollinaire, when he was still Wilhelm Kostrowicki, or Wilhelm de Kostrowitzky, visited Landor Road in Stockwell, a spit from the railway, in quest of a young woman called Annie Playden. ‘The crowd moved about in all directions,’ he wrote in ‘L’Émigrant de Landor Road’. Kostro, as Annie called him, had proposed, when she was a governess in Germany, but she turned him down.

  In May 1904, he caught the boat train from Paris Saint-Lazare to London Victoria. And on, it must be supposed, across the Thames. Annie was a big girl of firm opinions. An Apollinaire scholar tracked her down, in 1951, in the United States. So it was Annie who turned out to be the emigrant, not the poseur of the poem. ‘Tomorrow my ship sails for America.’ Apollinaire, wounded in the First War, died in 1918, on the day the Armistice was announced.

  The writer James Campbell, like Keiller a committed retriever of the French in London, describes, in ‘To London, for love’, how he tracked down the addresses associated with Apollinaire, an Overground circuit of his own: from Oakley Crescent, off the City Road, to Chingford.

  Campbell located an Apollinaire notebook that ‘seemed to flash a momentary light on the cubist poet in Islington’.

  retour á Angel

  Tube en face poste

  Demander Clapham Road

  4d

  Clapham Road Station is now Clapham North, right alongside the Overground. But not a stop. Train rides, with their voyeuristic glimpses, their enforced leisure, are a laboratory for the making of poems. Watch out for those notebooks, those iPads, those scribblers.

  ‘And I shall never come back,’ Apollinaire said. If you can take the word of a poet. I weakened. I relented. I did come back to the high, redbrick enigma of Electric Avenue. The curving, roofless arcade of foods and fancies between Brixton Road, the market and the station. A consciously modern street launched at the time of Jack the Ripper. Tall, narrow windows, two floors of them, reflect their twins on the far side, to recessive infinity. The butcher’s shop, whose fatty reek saturated the linoleum stairs to the film school, was under new management: ZANA, QUALITY HALAL MEAT & FISH.

  For me, Electric Avenue was the ideal starting point for half a century of London venturing. Cinema was doomed but not yet posthumous. Sublimated in train rides. Markets. Spicy lunches. Thump of sound: years before Eddy Grant’s 1982 single carried the street’s name right up the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Atlantic Ocean, not Atlantic Road – which spilled into the notorious Railton Road; a battleground from the 1981 Brixton Riots, when more than 200 youths engaged with helmeted police foot patrols. A minicab was stopped and searched. Shops were mobbed and looted. A police van was set on fire. A street-specific local event, heated by festering resentment and m
utual misunderstanding, escalated into guerrilla warfare, confirmed and exacerbated by newsreel crews looking for the image: urban apocalypse.

  Atlantic Road is a conceit worthy of Apollinaire. A stone beach beside a thread of urban ocean. That’s how it felt when I walked up the stairs of the film school. I arrived in the twilight of the first street market to be lit by electricity. There were canopies shading the shops. A walk to the door beside the butcher’s slab was a daily experience of dropping into an invocation of Paris, the confidence to dress this arcade with manufactured light. Patrick Keiller places Electric Avenue on the route of one of his fictive pilgrimages in London, his documentary tribute to his years as a South London lodger.

  Esther Leslie, in her 2013 book, Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage, has a photograph of Passage Choiseul in Paris from 1908 (twenty years after the construction of Electric Avenue). The passage is glassed over, but the commercial impulse is the same; a single spoke of a mercantile hub built for strolling. An anticipation of the much grosser Westfield supermall in Stratford. Which would be a fortress of commerce set against the city, rather than a seductive passageway through it. Leslie solicits Walter Benjamin. ‘Benjamin writes of the arcades of Paris, as if he were writing of the labyrinth of the self, criss-crossed by paths made through encounters with others … The arcades are the stuff of recent history, but they have come to be experienced as ancient, once they – and the lives and relations they incubated – begin to pass into memory.’

  The early promotional postcards of Electric Avenue have bulbs in trees, bedazzled windows, lights strung like stars from the canopies, but no pedestrians. Passage Choiseul, in 1908, is frozen: straw boaters of the men, a stopped regiment diminishing into the far distance, all facing inwards, their backs to the windows.