The small wasteland also has its microclimate: hail. Rattling off the road, my unprotected head. This abandoned spot, hidden at the back of the estate, was once the hospital’s burial ground. It’s on the old maps — ‘Joyce Green Cemetery’ — but will soon be deleted; the designation would be meaningless. Burne slashes at brambles with his stick, looking for a single gravestone.
He came down here, so he told us, from Staffordshire. He remembered picnics, early in his marriage, on Cannock Chase. He was appointed Consultant Pathologist in 1955. His wife’s family were Welsh. Two sons dead. One from diphtheria and the other from being sent ‘as a precaution’ to the diphtheria hospital.
‘It’s the ultimate stupidity,’ he said. ‘What they’re proposing for Joyce Green and West Hill. The loss will be incalculable. The work done in the elimination of smallpox was one of the most important medical achievements of the century.’
We were drenched. He didn’t want to leave that place. It might be his final visit.
‘Do you know that smallpox cultures have been stored in Russia and America? Total insanity. If you don’t kill them, they’ll kill you. One day they’ll get out. Sold off to any fanatic with spare change.’ When the paradise gardens of Harry Hopkins have returned to marshland, the Joyce Green viruses will be immortal.
With images of bio-terrorism as a parting gift, we thank Dr Burne and walk over Temple Hill to Dartford. The hail stops as soon as we quit the burial ground. There are notices plastered all over town about the Mick Jagger Performing Arts Centre. Jagger has done an Alleyn. Like the Elizabethan actor and theatre promoter, Edward Alleyn, Jagger has manoeuvred himself from lowlife mountebank to man of property and status. Alleyn founded Dulwich College, Jagger got his name on a Millennium project school-hall.
We stopped for lunch in the Wat Tyler, as a way of reading the mood of the Dartforders. WAT BURGER, CHIPS & SALAD.£3.30. ‘And a pint of Peasants.’
A chainsmoking woman sat by the door, her nose in a Wilbur Smith. A pensioned skinhead, grey as anthracite, vast belly sagging out of T-shirt, stared at the floor; two inches of warm beer untouched. A Hamlet cigar salesman was practising a stand-up routine at the bar. Two lads, competitively slaughtered, asked if there were any new vodkas that week. On the wall, above our table, was an advert: a man wheeling a manacled mermaid in a lobster trap.
11
Coming off the bridge, in light rain, we’re carved up by a biker. He’s in a hurry. The message on his vest says: BLOOD. He’s probably lost the Darent Valley Hospital, somewhere among the chalk quarries. He’s detouring towards Bluewater. One of Dracula’s outriders, I reckon. Emergency supplies for retail vampires.
We can’t cross back into Essex without making the Blue-water pilgrimage, setting foot in the Wellsian pit. The Martians used laser technology, carpet-bombs, eco-terrorism. Their successors, the planners and promoters of the Bluewater space station (‘a non-smoking environment’), are more subtle. Blueness is the right subliminal message: heavenly ceiling, sparkling sea. Bluewater is aspirational. Profoundly conservative. Blue-water is the measure that separates those who belong, who know the rules and the language, from the sweaty, unshaven mob who rush the Channel Tunnel. Bluewater is the perfect name for ‘the most innovative and exciting shopping and leisure destination in Europe today’. Bluewater is where the Martians of the New Millennium have landed (the Dome business on Bugsby’s Marshes was just a rehearsal). They have learnt their lesson: they don’t move out from the crater to threaten London, they let London invade them. Excursionists arriving at the chalk quarry, to the east of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge, find themselves in a sort of processing plant, or customs post for asylum seekers. A channel port (on go-slow). Bluewater skulks in the desert like the set for a Star Wars sequel. Humans, having negotiated the precipitous descent, are reluctant to get out of their vehicles.
Pausing, on the lip of the pit, I saw the weird beauty of this excavation. Virtual water, glass fountains and imported sand have replaced the tired Kentish shore as the favoured day trip for Cockneys. Bluewater is the new Margate. The sickly London child Samuel Palmer was sent to the Isle of Thanet to convalesce; sea bathing and sermons. T.S. Eliot nursed his soul-sickness at the Albermarle Hotel in Cliftonville. Such indulgences have been suspended: now perfectly healthy urbanites, primed by subtly placed road signs, descend on Junction 2 of the M25. BLUEWATER. No need for further explanation, the name is enough. Retail paradise. No visas required. City of glass in a kaolin bowl. But the effect of this Martian pod cluster, this ecumenical Disneyland of tinsel-Gaudí, is enervating. Arrive in rude health, buzzing with energy, and a few minutes trawling the overheated malls, losing all sense of direction, overwhelmed by excess of consumer opportunity (choice/no choice), will bring you to your knees. Or to one of the many off-mall pit stops. The headache kicks in: which coffee from a list of thirty? (They all taste the same.)
Bluewater is the contrary of the sanatorium in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Instead of a high place in which interestingly tubercular eccentrics rehash the great European themes, here is a hole in the ground in which ordinary, unsuspecting citizens crack up, develop the downmarket equivalent of yuppie flu. They wander the levels, under the soft cosh of muzak, feeling the lifeforce drain. These are the Retail Undead. De-blooded victims of the Purfleet kiss. Travellers in limbo. Suspended between life and death (an extension of the Queen Elizabeth II Bridge).
Chris Petit, a longtime stockpiler of business park and off-highway imagery, is persuaded from his bunker by the promise of a run to Bluewater. (He will then accompany Renchi and I on our pedestrian journey to the north bank of the Thames — however that is to be managed.) We get a ride down my favourite road, the A13, a spin over the bridge in the Merc with blue-tinted windows. The world looks better that way, clouds acquire definition. Supporting cables, mad eyelashes, blink against the climbing sun.
Bluewater has parking space for 13,000 cars. Coming into London on a weekend afternoon, between Junctions 4 and 2 of the M25, you know that this isn’t enough. The motorway is clogged, costive. Bluewater has no public parking space. Spend or move on. Pedestrians will never make the descent. They are treated like Morlocks. Any unwelcome incursion will show up on a state-of-the-art security system that cost £1.6 million. There are 35 °CCTV cameras watching you wherever you go. Silent, deadly, they drain your essence. Miles of fibre-optic cable. Walls of 28” and 38” monitors. Follow the winding road down into the quarry and you’re in the movie. The release print is CinemaScope, but that’s an illusion, a drive-in fantasy; the true spectacle is the rolling wall of monitor screens, drugged shoppers leaving ectoplasmic contrails. The Bluewater complex is linked to the Dartford Interchange, the bridge, the tunnel; 200 cameras pour images on to digital tape that allows thirty-one days of continuous recording. Lift an Olympus Superzoom 120, a Sony DV, and the uniforms will pounce. No souvenirs from this car park. The movie belongs to Bluewater™. Leisure-terror, that’s what frightens them. You might walk away with a Polaroid shot of the fountain, a revolving door, the markings in the car park. (Empty bay reserved for sponsors, politicians, quango vermin.)