Behind the improved flagship properties, corrugated sheds hide the last traces of a repressed history. A lick of pink paint on wrinkled tin; recreational facilities with barred windows. The yard where farm produce was once sold still exists, you need a map to find it. Sad vegetables on an unmanned table. WARNING. THESE PREMISES ARE PROTECTED BY A 24HR SECURITY AND CLOSED CIRCUIT TELEVISION SYSTEM. PACKS INFOTEL LTD. Withered beans and knobbly tomatoes covered by CCTV cameras.
Previous inmates wander the new roads, questing for something they recognise. Nobody has found them suitable clothing: one, stiff-backed, twisting as he walks, is barechested; another has a tight white, Sunday-best shirt, buttoned to neck and cuff, inherited jeans. They seem to march, eyes down, where Carpenter’s merry men slouch or spring, cameras primed, constantly swivelling.
During what he calls ‘The Lost Years’ — a period Jackson summarises as ‘lager, vodka, unsuitable girlfriends, takeaways, footy, monotony, despair and nights in the Iron Horse’ — Peter Carpenter worked in an Epsom bookshop. On Saturday afternoons, paroled patients visited town. (They’re called clients now: CLIENTS BACK FOR LUNCH. While there is still lunch, there is still hope.) Horton inmates were given sweetie money to spend. Every week the same kleptos would drift into the bookshop, liberate the same books (Asimov, Heinlein, L. Sprague De Camp); take them home. Without fuss, they would be gathered up and returned. (This may go some way towards explaining the popularity of that school of fiction.)
The visiting academic, Dr Wallen, is getting more of his special subject (‘Romanticism’) than any reasonable Oklahoma resident has the right to expect. He’s got strong teeth and a nice hawky profile that could have been chiselled from the totem pole which now stands in the park behind Long Grove Hospital. He’s always grinning: not like Piety Blair (the fear rictus), but like a man who can’t believe his luck. Kevin has him pegged as: ‘bon viveur, weight-lifter, malcontent, dog lover, former owner of cowboy boots’. He’s into Coleridge, Beddoes and Nitrous Oxide: not much use in Stillwater, but useful preparation for a day trip to Epsom.
Wallen’s tense watchfulness and proper rectitude (waiting for the pub) plays nicely against the Jackson/Carpenter double act. Ventriloquist and moosehead dummy. Who keep exchanging roles — so that the story can be told, backwards, in every detail. In stereo. There is much talk of Cambridge, Pembroke College, and of the former Epsom inmate and spurned novelist, William Curtis Hayward. Just as Kevin helped to preserve some record of the achievements of Dr Dylan Francis, so Peter Carpenter has obsessively gathered every scrap of information, every published and unpublished word by William Hayward.
What Carpenter wants now is to lead us to St Ebba’s, the most easterly of the hospitals, on the far side of Hook Road. St Ebba’s is still an active concern. The Italianate tower is in place. (Carpenter tells us that the poet Alan Brownjohn was once, as a child, locked in that tower.) The atmosphere is heavy, time doesn’t flow. The estate is like an English village built by Cold War Russians for war games. Such whimsical notions are contradicted by the villagers: a speedfreak in a baseball cap who mimes the rolling of a monster spliff, a scarecrow who calls to the birds, a man perched on a bench who thinks he is a bird. Several Down’s syndrome adolescents stare at us; they are the only ones to whom we are not invisible.
The point of our (de)tour is to locate a cemetery. Carpenter remembers being here, in a field, with his mother. There were memorials to those who died during the war, when the hospitals were requisitioned; as well as gravestones for the hospital children.
Carpenter was sure this was it, a buttercup field with a view of the Horton tower. We do what we can with potential mounds and bumps, but the cemetery has been swallowed in thorn bushes and sycamore. There is no physical evidence of the memorial. Alongside a bridlepath of loose chippings and small pebbles, Carpenter stands bemused, waving his arms. ‘I’m sure it was here.’ Either he has been betrayed by an unreliable memory, or memory has been violated in some way.
Renchi asks for numbers. How many dead? How many unrecorded? He picks up pebbles, counting them, putting them into his knapsack. Fingers raw, pack sagging: he’s well into the hundreds.
Local papers were incensed by the developer’s sacrilege: WAR HEROES’ GRAVE ANGER. They settled on the number 4,000. ‘War heroes lie in an overgrown cemetery where 4,000 hospital patients are buried in mass graves.’ Owner-developer Michael Heighs refused church groups (backed by Epsom and Ewell Council) permission to erect a memorial cross. The hospitals had housed the shell-shocked casualties of the First War. The developer tried to strike a deaclass="underline" if he allowed the memorial would he be given clearance to build on the land?
The war dead, the mutilated of Flanders, have their champions; hospital patients, wrapped in sacking, went unrecorded into a mass grave. HELM, a charitable group concerned with those who had been ‘returned to the community’, lobbied for some kind of memorial to the forgotten generations. Mr Heighs wouldn’t budge without his development deal. The site, bought ‘for a peppercorn sum from the health authorities’, remains in limbo — in the expectation that Green Belt laws will change. ‘Would you give someone a piece of your garden for nothing?’
Subsequent correspondents, unwilling to accept developer as scapegoat, concentrate on the original contract. It stank. ‘The thing I find most shocking about it all is the fact that the health authorities sold… the land in the first place. Why on earth did they do that? Was it a continuation or reflection of their uncaring and irreverent attitude towards the thousands of harmless people unnecessarily sent to grim psychiatric institutions of the Epsom cluster?’
Keeping up a good pace, flogging around town, our guide was due to check in for a hernia operation. This outing, he assured us, justified his discomfort. By green lanes and half-forgotten paths we navigated the Epsom fringes, from Carpenter’s school (a brazen march through pee-stink corridors) to Nonsuch Palace (stones in the grass). A hubble-bubble of free-associating anecdotes: inspirational English master Kenneth Curtis taught poet Geoffrey Hill (who dedicated King Log to him). Millais used Hogsmill ‘as a backdrop for his Ophelia’. John Procter was a school friend…
Procter? Musician and polemicist (aka ‘I, Ludicrous’). An educated joker who had written and performed an M25 anthem. Spoken voice: ‘The M25, London’s orbital. Take a ride.’ With acoustic interference, throbbing and moaning. More lift-shaft than garage: ‘The M25, the M25.’ Composed at the start, around 1986, Procter’s chant is charmingly antique; sensible and a little crazy. ‘The old farms forgotten, except on out of date maps.’ Procter admits that he won’t be using the road, other than to visit ‘relatives in Somerset’. Or: ‘cricket in Kent.’ For what Kevin Jackson refers to as ‘an inconclusive period’, Peter Carpenter acted as Procter’s manager. ‘Sort of.’
The secret agenda of the day, what we’re edging towards, as we all recognise, is: The Tunnel. The subterranean network that Renchi and I walked past when we climbed Ashley Road towards the Downs. This time we’re going in, Renchi’s cemetery pebbles will be used in a giant M25 sand-painting. He hopes to find a suitable cavern or sanctuary.
As a writer (former market trader, parks gardener, ullage man), I have no status to protect. But I wonder about the professional academic and the English master from a public school, how would they look in the local press — as convicted trespassers? Doc Wallen is grinning (Doc Holliday on ether) as he goes over the fence. KEEP OUT. Renchi manages to drag open the heavy metal door. I find the stub of a nightlight. (Evidence of suburban satanism? Drug orgies?)