Hopkins carried through the arboretum conceived by the Medical Superintendent Dr A.F. Cameron. Between 1919 and 1935, he transformed rough, windswept grounds into ‘a little paradise’; the subject of a glowing testimony by Arthur Hellyer, one-time patient and gardening correspondent of the Financial Times. ‘A garden filled with as fine a collection of exotic trees and shrubs as you would be likely to find anywhere near London, except in the most renowned places or at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew.’ A grove of eight Koelreuteria panicu lata. Sprays of small yellow flowers and the ‘curious bladder-like fruit’ that follow them. A young paulowinia. Magnolias by the score. A thicket of yuccas.
The three of us sit on Hopkins’s bench, a curve of wooden slats, sheltering in a V of weathered bricks. Someone has left wildflowers in a bottle. Beneath the bench, in heavy clusters, are cigarette stubs. It’s obvious, standing back, that Harry Hopkins’s memorial duplicates the winged design of the hospital. A cabbalistic conceit: outside as inside, a system of magical equivalents. Within this grove, the spirit of the old gardener (picture him in First War uniform, cap and moustache) is present: curated by Doc Burne who never goes anywhere without a pruning knife. If any part of this secret garden is to survive, it will be down to Burne, and whatever he can replant or graft in his own soil.
Time is not on his side. Burne’s expedition has to be conducted at a clip; out of the hospital grounds and down, by overgrown tramlines, to the vanished Long Reach Smallpox Hospital. The river-road where plague ships anchored.
A long green lane, straggly hedges; incongruous tarmac. The black skin is worn away, revealing the underlying pattern of bricks. We step over the first chalked graffito: BNP. Horses stick their heads through gaps in the hedge. ‘If they’ve got a blanket,’ Burne says, ‘riding school. If not, gypsy.’
Chalk signatures, territorial assertions, come at regular intervals. We are walking down what was once a private railway, linking the isolation units with Joyce Green. Long Reach had its own jetty, demolished in the Seventies. Smallpox ships, paddle-steamers such as the Atlas, would make regular voyages from Rotherhithe; there were beds for up to 250 patients. Scrubbed deck planks, a hiss of gas, the stink of sulphur. Whole streets, infected warrens and rookeries, could be evacuated. At first guilty housing was sealed like a ghetto, hung with plague flags. And then, with some degree of secrecy, the sick were shipped out.
‘She was a short fat town girl,’ Burne chuckled. ‘Panorama sent her down. Heels and all.’ We were scrambling over rubble mounds, hacking through a thorn wood. ‘It was twilight by the time she got here. A terrible scream, an owl. I asked if she’d like to see the Long Reach mortuary cesspit. She ran. When the programme went out, they used one sentence.’
Bushes heavy with white blossom. We find the cesspit, now hidden, lost in the brambles like a holy well. Dr Burne, forging ahead, can only be distinguished from Renchi by the walking stick and the bright yellow gloves.
Bikers love riverside earthworks, the high banks that keep the Thames out. Burne doesn’t disapprove. A burnt-out car is a rusted antiquity, older than the stories the doctor tells. Older than the plague ghosts.
We stand at the river’s edge, taking in the whole broad sweep, Queen Elizabeth II Bridge to the oil storage tanks at Purfleet. Myths grew up around the Atlas, when she used to anchor off Greenhithe. Children of the time, now elderly patients in the hospital, were interviewed by Dr Burne. They remembered coffin ships which they confused with the Dickensian prison hulks.
In 1980 a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl wrote an essay based on stories told by her grandmother, Clara Couchman. ‘All Gran remembered was being carried at the dead of night in a red blanket by her parents through Greenhithe down to the water front. Then she was taken by rowing boat out to a big boat moored off Greenhithe Reach… It was dark and filthy. There were rats on board which you could hear scampering about in the night. It smelt of sulphur candles… People stayed on that ship for three weeks and if you were still alive a rowing boat was sent by relations out to the hulk. This ferryman was paid, and had to be paid well. He would call out your name for you.’
Nobody could visit Long Reach without passing through a regime of disinfection, carbolic baths. The system fell down, as always, on English notions of caste. Surgeons and doctors strolled around the checkpoints, unhindered. A gate-keeper who waved through Reuben Message, a Dartford meat vendor, lost his job. The delivery man developed smallpox.
Dr Burne fitted his narrative to the landscape we had struggled through in the dark and the rain. He led us around the hospital estate and out on to the marshes, showing how apparently random piles of stones, holes in the ground, bits of rail, broken gates, belonged to a living history.
The drench from the sewage farm came in columns. You didn’t smell it, you wore it. It invaded your clothing. Marsh Lane, so Burne told us, derived its name from Marsh Gas Lane. Huge gulls feasted on the sewage outflow, rode the tide, pecking at submerged delicacies. ‘Do you know how old I am?’ Burne challenged. ‘Eighty.’ He chuckled.
How had we missed it? From the chalk mound of Beacon Hill, a stone cairn on the embankment, the old straight track arrowed into the water tower of Joyce Green Hospital. A thin grey line between hefty, untrimmed hedges. What felt, on the night of the storm, like a march through a completely unstructured landscape now made sense. The view arranged itself into discrete elements. Remove the hospital, garden and tower, and balance is lost; orchards grow wild, there is no estate to give focus and meaning to an exploited wilderness.
Entry to Joyce Green, coming from Long Reach and the isolation wards, was by way of a wicket gate; a fever bell had to be rung. The bell was preserved, as Dr Burne would show us, in the hospital library: polished, with the crest of St George. ‘You realise,’ he said, understanding our reluctance to leave the riverside, ‘that the estate — gardens, woods, farm, hospital — has its own microclimate.’
It was true: the rain, soft and steady, had stopped. The suspension bridge hung over the Thames like a solid rainbow. ‘Look: Spanish oak, laurel, white daffodils. Bees and butterflies you won’t find anywhere else on the marshes. This place is the uniquest of the unique.’ He jabbed with his stick at a fallen tree, brought down across our path. ‘That proves it. Ivy kills.’
For Burne, ‘filthy plumes of smoke’ was an endearment. The power station had as much right to its position on the river as the sewage farm and the hospital — even though pollution bleached the leaves. Fuel had been stockpiled here in advance of the miners’ strike: Burne saw Thatcher’s strategy before it came into play. Know your own small patch and the rest of the world becomes readable.
*
The tour was over and we were about to head back into Dartford, but Dr Burne was reluctant to let us go. He wanted us to see everything. A humped bridge was the only way of crossing the busy bypass. ‘Tricky for cripples in wheelchairs,’ he said. The man who was too old for euphemisms.
He led us — the rain was back — into a new estate that had swallowed up the superintendent’s villa. Bland units. Statistics to satisfy government white papers. Quota-fillers stacked on the road’s edge. Visitors to Joyce Green can no longer walk out of town and ambulances are as rare as albatrosses; what we see from the bridge are the gleaming buses. They appear, so Burne tells us, every ten minutes or so. The destination windows spell out the story: HOSPITAL — DARTFORD — BLUEWATER.