Shamed that our lives lack such commercial acumen, the spirit of self-help promoted by Lord Tebbit, we sidle off to the pub beneath the viaduct. Which turns out to be what passes on this turf for a sophisticated establishment — run by a female bodybuilder and her white T-shirt, gold bracelet, geezer-in-residence. Showbiz and steroids. Good-hearted folk, affable to damp strangers, happy to do a pie and pint. The pub has a gallery of erased celebrities around the walls: character actors who left EastEnders, only to discover that being called a ‘character’ was a euphemism for unemployed. After the motorway blowjobs and the destroyed septa, the tabloid frenzy, you were condemned to the northern clubs, Raquels in Basildon, sing-alongs under the viaduct. The remembered names, for those who watch daytime TV and do the quizzes, were: Gareth Hunt, Tessa Sanderson and magician Fay Presto.
Seated among this exhibition of the reforgotten, Kevin comes into his own; he’s a compulsive list-maker, a print and radio journalist, contriver of profiles, puffer of lost lives. Names, dates, stories. I don’t mean that being on the road, in movement, hobbles his style, or caps the outpouring of anecdote; but, necessarily, his audience is limited. To whoever is alongside him in boggy field-margin, splashing through fords, quizzing gravestones. The pub is a better forum. The small round table. And, beneath this railway viaduct in South Darenth, at the outer limits of Dartford, he has struck lucky: a fabulous display of the unrecognisable, reverse celebrities, unvarying variety acts, body-sculptors, freaks of withdrawn fame.
I love the innocence of these flock-wallpaper albums as much as he does. By such devices, monochrome gods and goddesses (dressed like bouncers), we can recover memory; who we were when the glamorous ghosts first appeared on the (bought-for-the-coronation) TV goldfish bowls of our childhood. Thorn EMI multiples of John Dee’s crystal. The rogues’ gallery in the viaduct pub is a challenge: remember the name and you’ll remember some part of yourself you’d rather let go.
Kevin talks of Epsom. The literary references have been stacking up: William Blake, David Gascoyne. Kevin reminds me that Tommy Butts, son of Blake’s patron Thomas, mentions in his diary (14 August 1809) that ‘Mr. and Mrs. Blake are very well… they intend shortly to pay the promised visit at Epsom.’
Gascoyne, in a memoir called ‘Oahspe’, unravels an episode that seems in a few pages to contain all the elements that distinguish his work: magic, derangement, a sleepwalker’s courage. An Edgar Allan Poe tale comfortably relocated to the English Thirties; polite, grey-brown, lethal. From a dusty shelf in Watkins Occult Bookshop, Cecil Court, Gascoyne acquires OAHSPE: A New Bible — glossed as ‘the most astonishing book in the English language’. It will, so he hopes, lead him to information about a cult called Kosmon.
‘For some years I continued to speculate intermittently about the possible existence of an underground organization concerned with an aberrant fake book of revelations purporting to expound the secrets of the visible universes and their cosmogonies. A time came when my mental state began to deteriorate to such an extent that eventually I underwent a series of nervous breakdowns.’
He notices: spectral messengers on underground platforms, their cheeks daubed by ‘sticks of anthracite’. Conspiracy theories and ‘parousial notions’ interbreed; the cults of Kosmon and Scientology are linked in Gascoyne’s mind. Drawing him towards Surrey, the foothills. As William Burroughs, chasing his own demons, checked into the L. Ron Hubbard franchise at East Grinstead (in the mid-Sixties), so Gascoyne found himself trapped in Epsom.
‘The disorder I was suffering from when admitted to a psychiatric establishment near Epsom was accompanied by a number of vehement convictions. I believed myself to be a vessel containing momentous insights that it was my boundless duty to impart… I believed intensely that there was a worldwide conspiracy going on, the intent of which was to rob us of our minds and souls. Scientology was allied with the adepts of Kosmon at the heart of the conspiracy.’
The conspiracy was rooted in the London suburbs, in parkland, in the Epsom colony. Madness and vision cooked and simmered. (The madness began with that argument between insight and duty. With being a poet. A condition for which there is no known cure.) Gascoyne was convinced that his fellow inmates would be susceptible to his message. Imagine then his horror when he discovered that the old man in the next bed, a silent, sunken ruin, ‘was actually a longstanding Kosmon initiate and official, and even had a copy of OAHSPE in a tin box under his bed’. Gascoyne willed himself to stay awake, to wait until his neighbour was snoring — so that he could liberate this dangerous text. He was, of course, caught in the act and forcibly sedated.
The female bodybuilders, the Magic Circle conjurors, the once-celebrated poets whose works are no longer a part of a shrinking literary consciousness, summoned another Epsom name. Kevin told us about William Hayward, poet, author of a single published novel, It Never Gets Dark All Night. Hayward had been a correspondent of David Jones. He had, at some point, been taken into the Epsom gulag. The novel dealt with the experience.
‘Should we contact him?’ I asked.
‘Dead. I think, suicide. Peter Carpenter has the whole story.’
So it was arranged, that when the motorway circuit was completed, Kevin would fix another day in Epsom. His friend Peter Carpenter, poet and publisher, could guide us around town and tell us about William Hayward.
8
‘In this town,’ Peter Carpenter announced, ‘one in ten is mad.’ Our problem, outside Epsom station, was identifying that one. The tour party, assembled on the pavement, you could start there: twitchy, grinning like foxes, clothed from a dressing-up basket. Much too old for this foolishness, a walk around Carpenter’s childhood and adolescence (schools, pubs, asylums). The balding, hook-nosed man in the collarless blue shirt wanted, so badly, to tell his tale: the audience was incidental. Like all poets, and most schoolteachers, he was used to talking to himself; this morning’s drive down the motorway was just enough rehearsal to crank him up to speed. Lay out the past in the right order and it loses its venom.
Wednesday 17 May 2000. Renchi has brought a friend interested in springs and Surrey subterranea, the art of the motorway fringes. Kevin has lined up two of his inner circle: Carpenter (our guide) and Walrus (aka Martin J. Wallen, Associate Professor of English at OSU, Stillwater, Oklahoma). Asked how we’ll recognise Carpenter, if we arrive first at the rendezvous, Kevin says: ‘So high.’ Vague gesture of the arm. ‘Bullish. See him coming through a crowd in London, quite frightening.’
When we steam, mob-handed, down the drive of the old Horton hospital, we are a pack of the dispersed, looking for sanctuary. The townscape, in the months since we paid our last visit, has changed beyond recognition. WELCOME TO HORTON VIEW AND THE PADDOCKS. Fluttering banners: TAYWOOD. A SELECTION OF 2, 3, 4 & 5 BEDROOM HOUSES & APARTMENTS. Three white flag poles mark the border of the captive estate.
The asylum has been replanted, opened to motor vehicles. There is some evidence for the continuing presence of builders, none of civilians, home owners, new suburbanites. The Epsom colonies have been revised into loops and crescents, so that clients can drive effortlessly in and out. Nobody is trapped, coerced, detained. BEAZER HOMES, WAY OUT. THANK YOU FOR OBSERVING SIGNS & DRIVING CAREFULLY.