We live inside our discomfort. In Dartford, poring over the fiction of the map, we were impressed by the scale and structure of a hospital (the Joyce Green) that should be out there, acting as a marker. A double V pivoting on the inevitable water tower: isolation wards for the worst contagions of the East End. A secure colony-estate with a rail link to the Thames, its own jetty.
Renchi and Marc are hooded, rain cuts through the layers. I’ve picked up a small black umbrella that somebody has chucked out. No sooner opened than stripped to the prongs. We can’t see where we’re going. We try to follow the eccentricities of the Darent path — from a high bank, somewhere above the river.
The memory of our walk from Shoreham is wiped by weather, the desolation of the salt marshes. From the embankment, we can make out shapeless dunes, mud, the refuse of London, the indestructibles. For the first time (since Runny-mede Bridge), our journey has a proper conclusion: the broad Thames. Minor digressions are swept aside. We stand at the river’s edge, the point where the Darent is absorbed. Or what we take to be the edge: pipings of redshank, a slurping earth-soup. We don’t move. It’s uncomfortable, wet, cold; magnificent. The nonsense of journal-keeping and photography is exposed as sheer folly. This is almost as good as being on the river in a small boat, drifting out to sea. It’s that kind of abdication of responsibility.
Heading east, along the Thames path, the Dartford Bridge (with its necklace of slow-moving traffic) is our horizon. Smeared headlights spit their short beams into the wet night. The bridge spells civilisation. And spells it loud: FUCK OFF. Liminal graffiti. A mess of letters sprayed on grey stone windbreaks. FUCK OFF.
Soft detonations overhead: bombbombbomb. Of never-ending lorries, containers, monster rigs. The motorway streaks the land with sick light. For half a mile, in every direction, there is hard evidence: burnt-out wrecks, torched and rusting husks, solitary tyres. The trash of transit.
The sewage plant hums and seethes. National Power cooks water, fences off territory. A great chimney stack. A perimeter fence. Block buildings that shudder and hiss. Strategies of the margin (the orbital road) that we have come to know and love. In this wilderness, in our sodden wretchedness, a rush of sentiment. We are homesick for London.
If Kevin had stayed with us, we’d be discussing Eddie Constantine in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville. The Paris peripheral loop as the access ramp to an intergalactic highway. That’s what the M25 needs as an interpreter: a sandpaper-skinned American playing a hardboiled detective (faked by an English author) in a French film with a Swiss director.
Exterior. Night. The suburbs of Alphaville, the Capital City of a distant Galaxy. A lone car is being driven along one of the boulevards, ablaze with flashing lights, neon signs…
Lemray (off): It was 24 hours 17 minutes Oceanic Time when I arrived at the suburbs of Alphaville.
Wormholes in the fabric of time. Mythic projections invade an unoptioned landscape, the gloom over Gravesend. The bridge is more metaphor than reality, lorries disappear into the clouds. Marc gets into character. He loops his favourite literary quotation: ‘The horror! The horror!’
And he’s right. The dominating voice on this reach of the river belongs to Joseph Conrad, out there on the other shore in his house at Stanford le Hope. (‘A whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind.’) Conrad, monocle to eye, beard elevated, stared across at us — and saw a cruising yawl, the Nellie, waiting on the tide. He fed us the line they all quote: ‘And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ He’s a master of shifts and swerves, scrupulously weighted paragraphs that allow one river to fade into another. Lost lives are re-narrated, coastal places lose definition. ‘Men and sea interpenetrate.’
On this wild night, out on the Dartford Marshes, I was ready to jump ship, go native. The motorway circuit was beyond resolution. The M25 was lost. There was no access to the bridge. We stumbled through ditches, climbed slippery banks, found a road. Off-highway, in the shadow of the bridge, geometry is unbalanced: more concept than actuality. Eddie Constantine’s boulevards as dead ends. Warehouses, roundabouts, fountains. Roads peter out into swamp: Clipper Boulevard, Crossways Boulevard, Anchor Boulevard. Headlights sweep the dark. No shops, no pubs, no humans. To advance on the railway line and the Stone Crossing station, we have to navigate a series of crescents that have been designed with the sole aim of frustrating pedestrians. Momentum is directed towards the Bluewater retail quarry, the Radiant City.
Nervous motorists (a woman and her daughters) waved down, put us on track; an old green path to the station. We’re told that it’s impossible to walk across the Dartford Bridge. Absolutely forbidden. Turn up with a bicycle and they’ll transport you in a truck. Otherwise: forget it. Surveillance levels are high. Police cars are on permanent patrol. We’ve walked 270 degrees of our circuit and now it’s over, we’re trapped on the wrong shore. We discuss kitting ourselves out in hard hats and overalls, but that’s just bravado. The tour, within the acoustic footprints of the M25, is finished.
The Stone Crossing station is deserted: no ticket office, broken machines. Marc, having sat on a bench, isn’t sure that he’ll be able to stand up — even if a train does arrive, which seems unlikely. The railway is an icy ladder disappearing into the all-enveloping night.
10
Renchi, back in his Hampshire cottage, cruising websites, re-interrogating ground we had already covered, made contact with Dr J.C. Burne. Burne was the honorary archivist of Joyce Green Hospital, the memory man of the Dartford Marshes. His hospital was doomed; it was about to be rationalised (put to the bulldozer), asset-stripped, reconfigured. The usual land-management scam, in which silence (ignorance) assumes consensus. Local rumour favoured another M25 satellite estate, convenient for Dartford Tunnel and Bluewater. Better-informed whispers revised the plan: a refuge (holding pen) for asylum seekers. Bus ’em in, bang ’em up. The prison hulks, romanced by Charles Dickens in Great Expectations, were moored here; beyond the knowledge of the metropolis, a landscape fit for Gothic projection. Casualties of war had always been held on the marshes, wounded Germans, displaced Poles; their names and dates cut into the red brick of the hospital walls. The French, too, from the Second War: PAILLARD, YVES, 1940. OLIVIER, EMILE. 5.6.1940, FRANCE. DEP. 6.1O.1940. The scratch of a bent nail recording a memory-prompt lost to everyone except Dr Burne. And soon to be lost entirely.
Burne will give us the tour (27 March 2000). We must sneak through the gates just ahead of the wrecking crew; ahead of Burne’s retirement. The hospital library is due to close, the archive will disappear into other archives — except for files which have been destroyed (contagious, pox carrying).
West Hill Hospital closed in 1997. The Accident and Emergency Department transferred to Joyce Green. Many of the West Hill beds had already been removed to Gravesend; and so, as a pamphlet put out by the library points out, ‘for the first time since 1840 when the Workhouse authorities built the hospital the site was devoid of all hospital beds’. Now Joyce Green, just short of its centenary, will vanish and a new hospital, ‘built under the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) scheme’, will be magicked from the grounds of the former Darenth Asylum.
The ‘flagship’ Darent Valley Hospital won’t be in the Darent Valley and it won’t be much of a hospital. It’s taken a hundred years to shift from prison hulk to plague ship (for smallpox victims) to New Labour ark. But, from its launch, the Darent Valley Hospital generated reams of publicity, all of it bad.