The guy on the door of the Welsh Harp, no bulge-eyed bouncer, let us know that the pub was off-limits, a private party. Through soft rain, we tramped the wet flags of the market square, the spokes of medieval street pattern, pedestrianised (but lacking pedestrians): the usual small-town English mix of charity shops, minicabs (Abbey Cars), insurance, junk food. As the locus for a millennial celebration, Waltham Abbey was looking pretty good. Picture-book pubs closed to strangers. Motorway fringe motels booked solid with revellers. Slithery streets. Church bells. The Lea in spate, and soon to flood the ground-floor rooms of outwardly mobile retirees. Cue: local news interview as the three-piece suite floats out of the window.
There’s always a warm glow in not belonging, in being the only abstainer at a fleadh in Ballycastle, the only non-Iberian bull-runner in Pamplona who hasn’t read Hemingway; it means that you’re not responsible. You don’t have to enjoy yourself. It’s not part of the contract to become one with the spirit of place. You are not obliged to spew, fight, sing, dance, wreck your car or in any other way amuse yourself. And this is very liberating.
I felt so. I’m not sure that Anna agreed. Waltham Abbey wasn’t Hackney. It was, to a significant degree, populated by ex-Hackney escapers who had tunnelled under the wire years ago, at the first sign of the place going to the dogs: when they started selling croissants, jerk chicken and putting up notices advising you that you were walking down a cycle track. Old-timers were nervous of nail extension parlours and hair straightening booths that stayed open all night, doing a steady trade with hooded youths and brothers who’d traded in black, 6-series BMWs for less conspicuous Audis. As the only way to drive through the City of London without being pulled.
Waltham Abbey and the inhabitable pockets of Epping Forest were white Cockney on the drift, the tectonic plate theory. Hackney becomes Chingford. Notting Hill relocates to Hoxton. Rafts of like-minded citizens (holding fast to their prejudices) nudged, ever closer, to the rim of the map. It took the M25 to stop them disappearing into Fenland mists.
Cabbies, always awkward sods, had uprooted years ago: try finding one who didn’t grow up in Bethnal Green and who doesn’t now live in Hertfordshire or Essex. Strange choice. To commute towards the jams, to spend your days snorting diesel, for the privilege of a Saturday shop at an out-of-town mall, nine holes on a Sunday morning. More space — before the latest animal husbandry disaster — to run the dog.
You wouldn’t have known, from the bunting and the flashing lights through the windows of Waltham Abbey pubs, that there was anything special about this night. The driving on the road out, Lea Bridge Road, Hoe Street (Asian mini-marts fully operative), Walthamstow dog track, Chingford Mount, was unexceptional. Bumper car rules: red means go. One headlamp (full-beam) as standard. White vans, windows open, drum ‘n’ bass, take precedence over every other form of transport.
The police were busy elsewhere, organising their lock-ins or earning overtime at Blair’s Riverside Follies. Policing this turf, at the best of times, is retrospective: sirens, three car chases, weaving in and out of sluggish traffic. The state mercenaries were funded, so it seemed, to put up blue and white decorations around murder sites. The ground was guilty, it had to be made an example of, framed off. Landscape art. East London, as I walked it, was becoming a lake of crisp cellophane, fields of wrapped flowers. Concrete bollards that sprouted nosegays. Lipstick-pink peonies, goldenrod and primrose, held in place with brown parcel tape. Commemorative cards: JUSTICE FOR HARRY.
Eventually, a lesser pub, a hangdog funeral parlour, desperate for custom, let us in. The barmaid slipped us a couple of tickets. The atmosphere was like a wake for an elderly bachelor nobody really knew or liked. They were going through the motions. It was the least they could do, but they hadn’t hated him enough to start on the celebratory sweetmeats, the booze. He wasn’t worth a song or a dance. Maybe the wake was for King Harold, the last Saxon king, senior stiff in the burial ground behind the abbey. They had his portrait up on the wall and they’d draped it in coloured streamers. The men hadn’t arrived yet. A suspicion of women, dressed to the nines (and well beyond), perched at the bar. Kids skittered around, seeing how far they could go without getting a slap. We were the relatives who belonged to somebody else, the wrong side of the family. We smiled and nodded, paid for our drinks, slipped away before the fun started.
It isn’t easy to stretch a curry pit-stop over three hours, but the Shuhag was happy to watch us try. Under ordinary circumstances, Anna keeps me out of restaurants that don’t have customers. She wants the reassurance that the experience is survivable, other reckless souls are prepared to give it a bash. Tonight, for this once-in-a-thousand-years moment, rules are relaxed. The only options are going back to the pub for a bag of pork scratchings, or home to bed.
Wine is wasted on mussel beran, chicken tikka, lamb korma, king prawn dansak, and the rest. The usual eccentric mix westerners cobble together when they order by numbers. The equivalent, I guess, of Yorkshire pudding with winkles, gravy, Spanish omelette and boiled sprouts. But, wasted or not, we kept it coming. It was turning into a great night. The waiters were friendly. The ceilings were low. A ‘fully air-conditioned, Balti & Tandoori restaurant’ doesn’t fit easily into one of those step-down-from-the-pavement premises that are usually turned into lace-curtain tea rooms, or tourist brochure and pictorial ashtray information centres. The Shuhag and its chilled Chablis kept us in a state of non-specific wellbeing; dim red light, comfortably upholstered banquettes, unobtrusive service. A table filled with small hot dishes, replenished as soon as they disappeared.
Other diners manifested. A foursome who told us they wanted an early meal, something to line the stomach, before taking the train into town, to catch the excitement. They were astonished to hear that we’d travelled in the opposite direction, by choice. But whichever direction, in or out, we were all on the same beam, the meridian line: Waltham Abbey is one of the few places where they take notice of zero longitude, mark it with decorated pillars and a straight walk. Enough to let you feel that you’re getting somewhere, before it all comes to an abrupt end: perimeter fence, strategic planting and ‘Government Research Establishment’ on the map.
By eleven o’clock we were moving, unsteadily, towards the church. Again, we didn’t really belong, wrong clothes, and again the locals were welcoming. There was a certain powdery greyness about the anoraks and the rigorously disciplined hair, a certain sheen. Steradent and talcum powder. The god-folk were outfitted well short of Songs of Praise; they weren’t expecting cameras. Thin-framed spectacles glinted in candlelight. Footballer-evangelical rather than ritualistic High Church; they weren’t tambourine-bashers but neither did they go in for vestments and Latin and incense.
Superstitiously, I kept to the end of the row — in case I had to make a run for it. But the service, good Essex voices reverberating through that tall building with its twisted Norman columns, contained satisfyingly pagan elements. A ‘Hope Tree’ had been set up, to which we were invited to attach postcards, millennial wishes. We weren’t, by then, in a fit state to write, but I lurched up the aisle and shoved my fractured telegram in among the pine needles.