Harrison recalled the navigation lights crossing over the headland. ‘Like lamps on a hansom.’ Margaret, or Tripcock Ness. ‘There was singing from a multitude of voices.’ The ship’s orchestra. The dancers inherit the party. A bass viol floated away on the tide: an inflatable curate. A varnished torso. The bow fetched up in Gravesend. Bodies drifted ashore between Frog Island and Greenhithe. The victims chose an unlucky hour to enter the water. They were discharging the sewage from both the north and the south banks into Barking Creek. Outflow. Mouths open, screaming. Locked in a rictus. Rage of the reading classes. Public demand for the immediate provision of swimming pools for the worthy poor. Let them learn breast-stroke. Letters to The Times. Eels suture the ragged wounds. Good, traditional fare, served in public houses: The Angel, the Mayflower, Town of Ramsgate, White Swan, Blacksmith’s Arms. Begetting potency. Lead in the pencil. Oil on troubled water. Tanned, condom-skinned sliders. Toyed with (forked aside) by fastidious matrons. Ripe green: catarrh. ‘Two continuous columns of decomposed fermenting sewage, hissing like soda water with baneful gasses, so black that the water is stained for miles and discharging a corrupt charnel-house odour.’
Later. The city vermin, pouring out of excursion trains (‘Derby Day’, hampers, buttonholes), tramped the marshes, grinding down the tussocks. Pickpockets, inebriates, ladies’ men, gay girls. Sensation seekers rowing in pleasure boats to the beached wreck, the afterpart of the Alice; breaking off pieces of wood, relics to carry home. Watermen fought each other with oars and boat hooks: five shillings for each body recovered. Eyes lost. Traumatic injuries. Ruffians, far gone in drink, drew their shivs on the constable guarding the site; swore to slit any bluebottle who got in their way.
Lines of sleepers. False claimants (legions of Tichbornes) searched the corpses in the dockyard. Crocodile tears, intimacies. They felt for earrings. They assessed the silk of undergarments. They moved among the dead, weeping and stuffing their carpetbags. By night, inconvenient stiffs from other locations were added to the platform of the unburied. Numbers rose, confusing the statisticians. Foul murders were ‘inspired’ by this golden opportunity. It was as if the graves opened in sympathy. The dead multiplied as they lay in state. They coupled in fertile embraces.
Madness on madness. Dig them under. Hide them. War rockets fired over Plumstead Marshes: the feeble and transient shock of magnesium flares. Spirit photographs. The darkness floods back, covering the ground in decent obscurity. Afterimages. The sad legend: little pale-blue flowers with purple leaves, Rubrum lamium, grew only over the graves of criminals. Tender, unobtrusive. A starry carpet, visible (there) for a single instant of trust.
Wilder and wilder stratagems. The idea of the cannons. The heavy artillery of the river defences put, at last, to use: sixty-eight-pounders with a range of 3,000 yards; muzzle-loaders, firing 250-lb shot, to rock the casemates. It had been suggested by W. Aldridge (plumber, house decorator, wholesale oilman) that gunfire would bring some of the bodies swimming to the surface. ‘I have seen it tried and have seen a body rise almost perpendicular. The cannon are there as the internal part decomposes gas is formed which renders the body lighter and then the concussion makes it rise all my household with my self, have wept over this sad affair.’
An irregular bombardment shook the skin of the river, pitching the Reunion like a runaway rocking horse: lifting crows from their cover. But none of the anchored dead march of their own volition on to the beaches. We are the only craft to suffer this repeated concussion.
Something happens with the draw of time. With names. The Alice. Fleeing from the extreme interest of Lewis Carroll (weaving a labyrinth of mirrors for his English nymphet) into the tideflow of Thames. ‘Can you row?’ the sheep asked, handing her a pair of knitting needles. Dodgson. Dodge-Son. Out on the river with another man’s daughters: Lorina, Alice, Edith. ‘Edith’ rediscovered as the Tilbury — Gravesend ferryboat. Edith Cadiz.
I was returning from the Children’s Hospital in Hackney Road, looking at the waxy yellow (Wasp Factory) light of the windows reflected in a newly dug ditch of water (a future wild-life habitat). I was brooding on the character of a fictional nurse: caring, competent, driven by her obsessions. Another (dream) life as a Whitechapel prostitute. Neither role cancelling the other. And, as I ran home along the southern boundary of old Haggerston Park, I noticed the name plaque of a street that no longer existed, weathered to the high brick wall. Edith Street, E2. Only the names survive; riding the tide of history like indestructible plastic. Without meaning or memory. Alice, Edith: the unplaced daughters.
If you need to understand nineteenth-century Southwark, you must float downstream to Deptford. The old qualities migrate, drift like continental plates, move out from the centre: rings on a pond. The faces Dickens saw in Clerkenwell are lurking in Tilbury junkshops. De Quincey’s Greek Street chemist is a Travel Agent in Petts Wood. Everything escapes from its original heat. That is why, in error, I located the fatal encounter of the Princess Alice and the Bywell Castle, midstream, off Gravesend; which was, by historical record, merely the point of embarkation. Rosherville Gardens. No trace remains. The passengers, waiting to go aboard, were already dead. A few songs, a fine sunset. It was over. But nothing is lost for ever. It slips further out, abdicates the strident exhibitionism of the present tense: lurks like a stray dog, somewhere beyond the circle of firelight.
Subdued, the Reunion came into Erith Reach, like Purcell’s cutter: heavy with corpses. I relieved Joblard at the wheel. The sky was a darker ocean, livid with portents. Our faces were stinging and raw. Red-cheeked as schoolboys. As brides on the staircase. There was an immediate surge of bliss. A connection with other voyages. Our small craft bucked over gentle waves, a sheep in open pasture: we had escaped. We had left behind the dense pull of the city, the bad will (hating, fearing) of a huddled and grasping populace. Channels of beaded sunlight opened their doors to us. We had only to follow.
Erith Rands. To starboard: the cluster of an old sea town, its slipways, gardens, taverns. A municipal facelift that had fallen behind on its payments. Then marshlands, horses; the revolving radar beacon at the mouth of the Cray. Crossing my own path. An unlucky thing? An accident? I saw myself plodding along, buoyant, grim-faced, quest-hungry — carrier bag in hand, map and camera. ‘It’s too late,’ I wanted to shout. ‘That story never worked out.’
I saw the hieratic river gate, like the entrance to a flooded temple. The local storm gods crowded above, perched like calligraphic crows. They assaulted the entablature, but were unable (as yet) to break through. The framed window of light shone with columns of grey and silver. It wouldn’t last. It was a flaw, a fault, a forbidden glimpse. This presentation of emptiness was the (lost) third section of Nicholas Moore’s ‘Last Poem’. Words. They were not his words, but they came into my mouth. Uninvited. I spoke them aloud, startling Jon Kay, who tongued his spliff, swallowing the hot worm of ash in a small crisis of heartfelt loss. ‘Remember me.’ Remember me. The only goal worth striving for, William Burroughs has always stated, is immortality. Remember. The museum of memory. No more than that. Gardens of river wheat. Feathers of golden truth. Another path opening; a meandering tributary to the ocean of the world’s business. A possibility. I remember. Charles Stuart, on the scaffold — to Bishop Juxon. ‘Remember.’