Joblard pierced another can; and shut his eyes, wedging the glossy green-and-red spout between nose and lower lip — while he glugged in naked satisfaction. We relaxed and enjoyed the morning. It had been, so far, one of the best. Suspended time. The hours on the river are never held against you. We drifted back and forth, cradled between memory and forgetfulness. Superb clouds, menacing and charged with iron, squadroned in from the sea: continents of cloud, shaping and parting, overlaying the last brave peepholes of blue. The scene was pure narrative, a conversation piece: horizon to horizon, unchecked, a revelation of ‘England’s End’.
We had not yet escaped Woolwich Reach. We pitched and bumped against the Powder Magazine which might, for all we knew, be still active. Nobody had anything to say. We were submerged in the sounds of the tide rushing past our captive craft, and the steady trickle of beer, flushed in choking gulps, down Joblard’s capacious throat. But it was coming back on me. After-images of unredeemed pain. The fixed present was slipping, getting away: under siege from the combined forces of the poisoned light, the solidity of the water, and the low-lying, feverish marshground. We were ephemeral to the singular quality of this scene.
I saw a tier of chained hulks, as they had once been — or perhaps as they were about to become. I saw them as prisons. (‘What’s Hulks?’ said I. ‘Answer him one question, and he’ll ask you a dozen directly. Hulks are prison-ships, right cross th’meshes.’). The prison service was collapsing, overwhelmed with technical offenders, swollen with the evicted mad, the helpless, the demented. Market forces suggested privatization on the American model. But we had our own well-tried methods. We had thousands of years of dark history to draw on. The hulks had been pressed back into service. I could not believe what I told myself I was seeing.
Men-of-war, old Indiamen, burnt-out relics of the Falklands campaign were chained together, another Thames barrier, a malign thunderhead. We lay among them. They were low in the water, patched with canvas, rotten, decayed. The pollution of the river met all the diseases of timber in an illicit and riotous embrace. No name but ‘hulks’ would satisfy this graveyard fleet. The deck planks were cemented by grey-green mosses: spores migrated on to the raw skins of the sleeping bilboe-shod convicts. They scratched, they tore at themselves — sunk too deep in exhaustion to wake for such minor annoyances. Blackened fingernails opened wounds in which bred a pomp of maggots. Woolwich was swiftly returning to its former glory. (A red-white-and-blue illustration on the lid of a matchbox.)
Dissenters and criminals (marginal to the needs and legitimate desires of the state) were once spilled into the wilderness of an unmapped world; where they fought for breath with savage aboriginals. The hulks provided a neutral zone, removed from the land’s heat. To live here was to lose your memory. You could not vote or speak. But the outbreak of the American War of Independence made it impractical to transport these brutalized slaves. They were held in perpetual transit: a floating Gatwick, without the duty-frees. The only destination was death. Which was also the only product of their labours. Dame Cholera. Work was the only freedom. ‘Punished by being kept on Board Ships or Vessels properly accommodated for the Security, Employment, and Health of the Persons to be confined therein, and by being employed in Hard Labour in the raising of Sand, Soil, and Gravel from, and cleansing, the River Thames…’
Now the hulks were occupied once more, under the co-sponsorship of English Heritage, who had lovingly restored them to the last detail of authenticated squalor. This daringly simple solution had been unveiled by the Widow in her keynote Marshalsea Speech (subsequently recognized by commentators as the moment when the perceived identity of Britain changed from Orwell’s colonial airstrip on the fringes of the civilized world to a land which had, successfully, made a reservation of its own history).
‘From this day forward,’ the Widow began, with a defiant twist of the head, a lift of the nut-crusher chin, ‘let it be known that We are no longer to be considered the prisoners of history. We have forced open the great iron doors of mystification, self-doubt, self-critical inertia. We have walked, unafraid, into the sunlight. History has been conquered. Rejoice! We have summoned up the courage to recognize — after decades of misrule, lip-service to alien gods — that anything is possible. If We will it. If it is the mandate of the people. The future is whatever We believe it to be!’
Hysterical (orchestrated) cheering continued until the Widow lifted her hand: to preserve the health of several of her key ministers who were empurpled with enthusiasm, to the point of spontaneous combustion. The fanatical ranks of the faithful (flog, maim, crush), gathered for the ceremony of throwing wide the Marshalsea gates (reconstructed for the purpose by Stanley Kubrick’s design ace) to welcome the first beneficiaries, fell silent.
‘After We have finished speaking to you today, there will never again in this noble land of ours be such a thing as a prison,’ she continued, unblushing. ‘A prison is a state of mind. And, unlike our opponents — who are fettered in ritual dogmas — We sincerely believe that We can all be released from outmoded concepts of state care. And, in good faith, We make you this offer: let every man become his own warder, protecting the things he loves best: his family, his home, his country. Then, and only then, will We discover what true freedom means.’
Sir Alec Guinness shuffled forward, doing some marvellously observed business with a red-spotted handkerchief, touching the side of his nose, dissociating himself from his actions. He smirked, cancelled a cough, and cut the ribbon. The Marshalsea was reopened as a Dossers’ Dormitory. Vagrants were driven in (by the container load) from their cardboard camps. They should no longer give the lie to the Widow’s rhetoric of achievement. Corporate Japanese in white raincoats (like gulls, they tracked the action) fussed at the lowlife with their cameras, giggling over the quaint ritual of ‘slopping out’. From the viewing gallery above, they composed eloquent longshots as these tattered vacancies perambulated their circuit of the yard, under ferociously pointed walls. The ‘guests’ of the hospice paid their way by posing for polaroid versions of Doré’s anguished etchings: which, incidentally, were on sale, mounted and framed, at the gatehouse. All credit cards accepted.
The hulks were the flagships of a new social order. The shirts of the prisoners hung over the side, as if in surrender: ‘so black with vermin that the linen positively appeared to have been sprinkled over with pepper’. Benevolent plagues carried off the inadequates. The succubus kiss of Dame Cholera made room among the hammocks for an ever-increasing army of offenders, fit-ups, unbelievers, and political heretics. The parson, a white-livered clown, planted himself on the poop deck of the vessel; claret bottle in one hand, a bible in the other. He was afraid to accompany the corpses, as they were stretchered in their dozens, by mask-wearing trusties, to the burying grounds, away among the marshes. Alone, he read the burial service, at a rattling trot, dabbing his carbuncular nose with a silk handkerchief soaked in eau-de-cologne. When he arrived at ‘ashes to ashes, and dust to dust’, he let the handkerchief drop: a strangled dove, fluttering, stalled, caught in a contagious thermal. And the bodies, at this signal (captured by the sergeant’s telescope), were lowered into their lime pit.
I had moved apart from the others. There was a hatch in the cabin roof through which I squeezed my head and shoulders. I could not move my arms, but I could see everything ahead of us. Kay fired the engine. And we roared back out on to the river. The noise dispersed the ghosts. I could hear nothing my companions said. I was driven over the marbled waters like a wooden figurehead; mute, powerless — but inconveniently sensitized to every whim of the light, every memento mori in the running tide. The river outpaced my fear of it: a tightening roll of mad calligraphy, scribbled wavelets, erasures, periods of gold. I was buffeted through a book that had turned to water.