London Overground (25 page)

Kentish Town West to Camden Road was suspension of disbelief, a necessary sliding away and letting go. There were too many railways. Too many carpet shops. Too many Hackney migrants from the communal era of the 1960s had settled on these welcoming slopes. A beggar started his pitch, looked at
our ruin, and thought better of it. He gestured towards Kötting with a generous can.

Marina Warner, inheritor of Angela Carter's role as fabulist, recaster of fairy stories, wise woman of the west, lives here in a book-filled house threatened by the vibrations of passing trains. Marina investigated the way that local public houses were associated with the myth of old women as witches, predators, baby boilers, cannibals. The loss of the names of hostelries for travellers and traders, Old Mother Red Cap, Jorene Celeste, was felt as much as the loss of the buildings themselves, their inevitable conversion into more commercial enterprises. ‘Does any of this matter?' Warner asked. ‘On the scale of things, with all the other problems near and far, hardly. But there are reasons for minding, apart from the general loss of memories and stories that connect people and places.'

Marina regrets the dissolution of spaces in which unsponsored yarn-spinners, drunks, derelicts, ragged passerines, can tell their tales. Oral histories must have legitimacy beyond the remit of respectful academic recorders. Writers with the peculiar ability to process this free-floating material, hard-working soaks like Julian Maclaren-Ross and Robin Cook, have been unhoused. It was breathtaking to watch how Cook could, over a heavy session, after a reading in Compendium Books, take a story involving characters he'd never met, or even heard of, and make it completely his own. An improvement on the original.

Andrew wasn't buying it. ‘People drift and leave their marks,' he said. ‘Dogs' droppings on the end of the shoe.'

When I recorded him outside the station at Kentish Town West, he gestured derisively towards the Overground map. It was that time of night, the hour of slippage. A young man coming up from the platform had the rat-chewed hair of runaway Rimbaud. He was prematurely grey. Fever-flushed: burned by
booze and pills, not suntanned. He was chewing his nails to the quick. A yawning turnip head secured with the relic of a tartan scarf. Rimbaud was fascinated by the Underground. He wrote about railways emerging on all levels from stations like grand hotels.

The pub we chose was the Abbey Tavern on Kentish Town Road. I don't know what Marina Warner makes of that name, but it worked for me: ecclesiastical pit stop with a dash of W. B. Yeats and Dublin. The foundation stone was set on the 3rd of December 1891 by Mr A. T. T. Cowling. The door instructed patrons to
DRINK EAT GARDEN
.

Refuelling was a requirement, but sitting down would carry the risk of our not being able to rise again. Pints were delivered, swilled back, replenished, before a bowl of steaming fish pie made it from microwave to table. The pub interior was high-ceilinged and roomy, but intimate enough to allow the lurching approach of a person in a black satin bowling jacket who introduced himself as Tony Martin. He looked like trouble in Christmas wrappings. Kötting had taken off his boots and placed the hideous objects on the table, where he could keep an eye on them as he hobbled towards the bar, hoping to secure a stronger fork, and a linen napkin on which to pop his blisters.

He was close to done, but the food and drink, and a couple of hours in the Abbey Tavern, should stiffen his resolve for the final haul. This was not the moment to tell him that we'd be detouring by way of Royal College Street.

‘I don't like the way you keep kicking the kerbstones,' he said, as he set down my pint. ‘You've been struggling, son, since Kensal Rise. That library on the pavement took the wind from your sails.'

Tony Martin, whose hair was black as cuttlefish ink, and
whose remaining teeth were yellow as candlewax, offered to sell Kötting a pair of slip-on dancing pumps. His own. For a tenner in the hand. Or another pint of Bacardi and coke. He'd take the old boots in part exchange, for use in the garden, as plant pots for olive trees. Andrew snatched them back. They slopped with blood and worse.

Our new friend's name rang a carillon of alarm bells. Could this be Tony Martin the Norfolk farmer convicted of blowing away a burglar from the Travelling community with a pump-action shotgun? Unlikely. It was worse than that: an unemployed impersonator of the well-known San Francisco crooner, once married to Cyd Charisse. Tony was about to launch into his interpretation of ‘Lover Come Back to Me'. It was time to make our excuses and get back on the road.

A few days later I took the Overground to Camden Town. I wanted to check out the Oxfam bookshop a few yards up the road from the Abbey Tavern. It had been shut when we limped past, but I had an instinct that something in there was waiting for me. Sure enough, after a thorough scan of the usual necrophile stock and overpriced nonentities in the locked glass case, I excavated a copy of Knut Hamsun's
Chapter the Last
in a nice 1929 blue-cloth US edition. I parted with £4.99. ‘Truly we are vagabonds in the earth,' it began. ‘We wander by roads and trackless wastes, at times we crawl, at times we walk upright and trample one another down.'

It was that point, around the mid-watch of the night, when walking becomes dreaming. Legs could not remember a time when they weren't keeping my weight off the pavements. Those grey Camden flagstones were another sky. Tarmac was treacle. My soft cartilage was so worn down that I could hear the grinding of bone on bone. I was a xylophone of improperly attached skeletal parts. Kötting was thick meat, sploshing and squelching, as blister-pods popped and burst in an obscene harvest.

‘On islands,' he said. ‘On small islands, elephants get smaller. And rats get bigger. Until they meet, somewhere in the middle. Imagine a rat the size of a baby elephant.'

He was losing it fast. A late Overground train, windows illuminated by an uncanny storm-light glow, ferried a party of circling warlocks across the Camden Road bridge: a Jules Verne submarine out of its element.

The house to which I'd brought Andrew, while letting him believe we were on the most direct route for Hackney, was set with a plain tablet, very much like a gravestone: as if a double coffin had been slid straight into the white wall.
THE FRENCH POETS
/
PAUL VERLAINE
/
AND
/
ARTHUR RIMBAUD
/
LIVED HERE
/
MAY–JULY
1873.

It was enough for now to have it confirmed, that this was indeed the location from which the poets, with their few words of English, set out in combative and temporary alliance on long walks across the city that symbolized the
moderne.
From this window –
which window?
– Rimbaud registered the secular
cathedrals of the stations, King's Cross and St Pancras. ‘Je vois des spectres nouveaux roulant à travers l'épaisse et éternelle fumée de charbon.'

Odd couples. Coal smoke. Intertwined smoke serpents from the engravings Gustave Doré made to illustrate Blanchard Jerrold's
London: A Pilgrimage.
The two men, the English journalist and the French artist, were yet another pair of questing urban wanderers, tramping in the footsteps of Dickens and Henry Mayhew, in the expectation of forcing the uncatalogued sprawl to give up its secrets.

London: A Pilgrimage
was published in 1872, when Rimbaud and Verlaine visited London for the first time, taking lodgings at 34–5 Howland Street, off Tottenham Court Road. Overground railways and cavernous arches were part of the nightmare dreamscape of the modern city, the new Babylon. Rimbaud, in the period of his runaway vagabondage in Paris, slept under the arches. Edith Sitwell tells us that the hands of the young poet ‘were covered with chilblains, no matter what the weather was like, since they never recovered from the icy nights he spent huddled under the railway arches of Paris'. Doré's final engraving for Jerrold's attempt at a microcosm of London is called
Under the Arches
. It depicts rough sleepers huddled under a bridge alongside a
bateau ivre
, a drunken boat freighted with the dead. Smoke-shrouded trains, wherever they are found, crawling on ladders above the dark chasms of the imperial city, are ferrying the damned across the Styx.

Ludgate Hill – A Block in the Street
is the best known of Doré's railway visions: a steam locomotive, frozen mid-bridge, as we look towards the melon dome of St Paul's, down the stalled highway of Fleet Street, with its omnibuses, carts, hearses, hawkers, idlers and workers in their multitudes. With obelisks, spires, chimneys, trade signs.

Jerrold the nightwalker records the first stirrings of outlying
districts: ‘The sometime silent City is filling at a prodigious rate. The trim omnibuses from Clapham and Fulham, from Hackney and Hampstead, make a valiant opposition to the suburban lines of railway. The bridges are choked with vehicles.'

Doré depicts
The Workmen's Train
as an arched subterranean vault illuminated by hanging globes, while the first glimmers of daylight are projected through a line of apertures. Labourers with their bundles crowd into third-class trucks. From the start, railways asserted hierarchy, each in his place. The slave classes setting out before dawn. Clerks next, breakfasted in Hackney and Holloway. And then, first class, the merchants and bankers, in time to make a show before taking a leisurely luncheon at the club. Rimbaud called the regiments of London's poor ‘poverty's cattle'.

The Doré illustration that returns me to our walk is titled
Over London by Rail
. The arch of a bridge becomes the frame of the engraving; the tight terrace curves away to the next bridge, on which, inevitably, a train is making its black-smoke transit. We are invited to stare down into a nest of backyards, laid out like pens, making this segment of London into a factory or factory farm.

One of the few English words Rimbaud brought with him to London in September 1872 was ‘railway'. V. P. Underwood in an essay dealing with ‘English influences in Rimbaud's work', published by
Adam International Review
in 1954, describes a period when Rimbaud stayed with his mother and sister at 12 Argyle Square, near King's Cross. ‘Crowded trains hurry in all directions, and they stop to watch the new Metropolitan line, partly underground, its trains dashing in and out of tunnels. Is it not this that makes Rimbaud imagine, long before Fritz Lang, his vast Palais-Promontoire which
leurs railways flanquent, creusent, surplombent
? Most of his visionary
Villes
of modernity or futurity seem to have
points de départ
in London landscapes.'

That
early refuge at 34–5 Howland Street was once commemorated by a plaque for Verlaine, with no mention of his youthful partner in crime. Underwood, in a footnote to his essay, tells us that he was walking down Howland Street ‘on the precise day in 1938 when the house was being demolished to make way for a telephone exchange'. He rescued the Verlaine plaque that had been unveiled in 1922 by Paul Valéry. At the time of writing, he still had it.

It's a nice notion, as Patrick Keiller points out in his film
London
, that the lover-poets are now honoured, not by a modest plaque, but by the priapic absurdity of the Post Office Tower. A sculpture of unsatisfied male desire. ‘L'acropole officielle outre les conceptions de la barbarie moderne les plus colossales,' Rimbaud wrote in ‘Villes', one of his
Illuminations.

Allen Ginsberg would have been excited by the connection. When I interviewed him on Primrose Hill in 1967, he made constant reference to the ‘thorn tower' and its magnificent thrust, bristling with paranoid listening devices. For the Beat poet, this was the ultimate symbol of the City. When a young boy, dodging school, sat on the grass for a smoke, Ginsberg interrogated him.

‘Hey, you know that big tower up there, what is it?'

‘It's the GPO Tower.'

‘No. The tower tower tower tower. The round thorn tower. Is that a hotel?'

‘General Post Office Tower. They send all the television relays out.'

‘They got radar on the top. In case a war starts.'

We come through a tight passageway, one of those urban secrets allowed to survive between eras: a crack, a cranny, old bricks brushing our shoulders. It's an effort of will to reconnect with the Overground and not to drift on to St Pancras Old
Church, the railway terminals, redeveloped warehouses, Euro shopping zones, canal veins ghosting towards the Islington tunnel. The whole area is up for grabs.

We plodded back to the point where the railway crosses Camden Road. I remembered a Day of the Dead window I wanted to photograph: flowered skulls and tombstone teeth rioting in psychedelic frenzy. In our present condition, a little woozy, a lot weary, those brilliant, sharp-edged skulls were enamel badges to be pinned straight to our white eyeballs. We were well prepared for our future engagement with John Clare and his ‘paraphrenic delusions', as Geoffrey Grigson called them. Clare as a night-wanderer in London was supersensitive to emanations associated with the cracks and fissures between buildings, the slippage between centuries: ‘Thin, death-like shadows and goblins with saucer eyes were continually shaping on the darkness from my haunted imagination.'

I was sympathetic to the description of his condition on the form filled out for his induction into Northampton General Asylum. A mental collapse brought on ‘after years addicted to Poetical prosing'. Soon Clare would believe that his eyes had no pupils. Soon we would believe that the end was in sight and a second circuit was not required.

Andrew was cowled in silence. We were on parallel tramlines, locked into our separate derangements. Whenever he came up alongside me, he seemed to be muttering the same phrases on a loop, as a form of neurotic penance or bizarre humour.

‘Almost mathematical,' he whispered. ‘Make up your own rules. Own rules, own rules. Make it up. Flesh radios. Start at the end. Reverse engineer meaning.'

Sanity was preserved by the bones of the railway, dragging us towards Caledonian Road & Barnsbury, the residential squares and visible aspirations of Islington. The sort of territory from
which the Blairs could move on to oligarchic wealth and global infamy.

Agar Grove shadowed the Overground with not much between road and railway. In 1966 Leon Kossoff, coming west down the old line from his perch on Dalston Lane to the builder's shed at Willesden Junction, paused on York Way. There is a promising railway bridge that it would be churlish to resist. Cross-town workaday traffic is a modest intrusion on the landscape, while economically significant intercity services gush out of King's Cross. Here you will find the random accumulations, fragments of wall and shed, that passengers, settling back, if they have managed to secure a seat, register as symbolizing the essence of the city they have paid so much to leave behind.

Kossoff sketched York Way Railway Bridge, and from those sketches made a number of large drawings, charcoal and pastel on paper. Again he seems to be registering, in landscape format, the seminar of floating huts, shredded sky, stumps of towers along the curve of the horizon. All this energized space is seen in bright, sunless illumination, like the afterflash of an explosion at night. The method of choosing a number of privileged viewpoints, and returning to them, time after time, had its advantages over the steady plod around the entire circuit; a technique fated to decline into more poetical prosings. A queasy flicker-show of snapshots and echoes. Misremembered dialogue and overloaded prose. Painters have the purity of gesture: thought as act as meaning.

Impossible to tramp down Brewery Road without recalling Beckett's
Murphy.
I knew and honoured the hawk-faced Dubliner as a great and perhaps undervalued London walker: there was much ground to be covered between the early decades in Foxrock and Paris. Biographers call these ‘The Bad Years'.
London was mental anguish, frustration, psychotherapy; visits as a close observer to the Bethlem Royal Hospital in Bromley; the suburban version of the original Bedlam. The hospital was useful research for the novel that became
Murphy.
Beckett, in his disaffection with work, place, life, stamped many miles across the metropolitan area. He has spoken about how, on one occasion, out of nowhere, he found that he had stopped moving. There was no valid reason to take another step. He sought help from psychoanalysis, in the person of W. R. Bion. Psychoanalysis was not available in Dublin, though the town was well supplied with madhouses.

Like his leading character, Beckett lived in World's End, West Brompton, while he wrestled with the novel. Presumably he was attracted by that name: World's End. I was fascinated by the way the geography of
Murphy
predicated our Overground circuit: from dealings with Lots Road, Cremorne Road and Stadium Street, ‘the smell of the reach', the proximity of the burial ground with its specialized cruisers, to our present map reference on the approach to the old Caledonian Cattle Market.

Murphy relocates to a room in Brewery Road: ‘between Pentonville Prison and the Metropolitan Cattle Market'. He likes to take the sun on a bench where he can enjoy the perfume of ‘disinfectants from Milton House immediately to the south and the stench of stalled cattle from the corral immediately to the west'.

I mention these things to Kötting, whose feet are now advancing in a mechanical Cartesian fashion, very true to the spirit of Beckett. Push out. Test the surface, as if the toes were fingers. If the pain is acceptable, draw the leg back and repeat the prescription. As a proselytizer for Sam, Andrew looked more to the plays than the novels.

‘The unfathomability,' he said. ‘The placelessness that is
his
writing.'

I
found nothing but place, place transformed. Andrew is more the poet. He talks of ‘contemplation as a means of navigation'. I'm a clay-footed literalist. I saw in the deserted street Murphy's long climb home. ‘And while Brewery Road was by no means a Boulevard de Clichy nor even des Batignolles, still it was better at the end of the hill than either of them, as asylum (after a point) is better than exile.'

Putting on time, the element that is never truly put on, Murphy makes repeated pedestrian circuits around Pentonville Prison – where so many, including numbers of his countrymen, met their ends. Sir Roger Casement, the Irish republican and author of the notorious
Black Diaries
, was hanged within these walls. Oscar Wilde, whose sad wraith, in transit between Wandsworth and Reading, we encountered on the platform at Clapham Common, was lodged here. Murphy walked as Beckett had walked in other cities around silent cathedrals after they had sold their last tickets for the day.

There is a circulation, of prisoners in privatized vans, cattled between the holding pens of remand and facilities adequately furnished as places of execution. A circulation of footballers, rising and falling, injured and ageing, between railway-accessed stadia. A circulation of poets and political exiles moving between rooming houses. A circulation of figures trapped in the limbo of novels specific to certain districts of London. A circulation of images of circulation: the terrible clockwise procession of silent men in Doré's engraving
Newgate – Exercise Yard
. They shuffle under brick walls that cancel any prospect of the sky. The motif is reprised by another London visitor, Vincent Van Gogh, in
Prisoners Exercising (After Doré)
, which he completed in the asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in February 1890. The painful circularity of asylums and motorways and railways for commuters.