At Packet Boat Lane, we came away from the tow path, twitchy to make contact with a road that went over the motorway, where a (disused) branch of the Grand Union Canal passed under it. The tarmac had broken up into sticky black granules, like a porridge made from coal. Tough spikes of grass pushed through the mantle. I lay, curved to the camber, to take a photograph; and would, if I could, have swum away to the west. The sounds of the road, as the M25 approached the tangled interchange with the M4, were compulsive; as complex and as many-voiced as a Bill Griffiths poem. A sound that was its own score.
4
We lost the Colne at Cowley and now, at West Drayton, we bid farewell to the eastward swerving Grand Union Canal. Off-highway territory is cake-sliced into discrete bands; the natural flow, of water and footpath, is to the south, the Thames, but the Money requires a series of difficult-to-negotiate horizontal barriers. Railway (out of Paddington). M4. A4 (Bath Road). The inscrutable geometry of Heathrow’s terminals, runways, hangars and car parks. How are we going to walk through that lot?
Our first step must be to the west, in the direction of the vertical blue band of the M25 (colour co-ordinated on my Nicholson with its mate the Colne). River and road define the westerly limits of London Airport’s piracy. The land-grab that will never be satisfied. Terminals 5, 6, 7: it’s not enough. Flight-zone must be bigger than the city it serves. In five years, so the planners tell us, there will be four-hour intervals (on good days) between leaving the centre of London and being called for your flight. (Such optimistic forecasts were soon overtaken by events: four hours might get you down the Euston Road, invalid carriages sailing past the window of your cab, limping backpackers leaving you in their wake. Heathrow was the holiday. You’d be lucky to get out of there in a week, patted down by security, papers checked, sleep on a bench. The full asylum-seeker experience for the price of a bucket-shop ticket.) Check-in queues will stretch back to that model Concorde on its traffic island, to the M4. Severed communities, such as Harmondsworth, are under threat; in time, West Drayton itself will be swallowed.
A theatre of catastrophe in which all the global disasters play: heightened security, longer waits. More time for comfort-blanket shopping malls, bad coffee. Flight after flight of Third World drug mules, snacked to the eyeballs on coke-flavoured condoms. More desert parking lots for unwanted aircraft. Why not use the M25, stack ‘em nose-to-tail, Colnbrook to Leather-head?
‘Who needs West Drayton?’ you say. But you’re wrong. West Drayton is the gateway to the Green Path, a site of some significance for psychogeographers, dowsers, Zodiac conceptualists (of the K.E. Maltwood tendency).
None of these great themes was immediately obvious, as we picked our way through the urban sprawl. You could, if you pushed it, remark the Railway Arms, with its balconies and verandah; a colonial outpost fallen into disuse when travellers became commuters. The rest was a standard extrusion of hairdressers, charity caves, fast food. The difference is — thinking back to the sleepwalking hamlets of the Colne Valley — a slipstream energy derived from railway/motorway/canal systems. West Drayton is the frontier, the first whiff of the (wild) West. Bicycle shops are a nostalgic recollection of the days when H.G. Wells’s clerks took to the country roads. Tidy suburbs, brave in their pretensions, bleed into raw-elbowed commerce.
For a pound I snaffle a copy of Simon Winchester’s The Surgeon of Crowthorne (on the strength of its puff as ‘A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Love of Words’). The cover illustration (Broadmoor Special Hospital) showcases, under an operatic sky, the most extreme version of the asylums we’ve been tracking around the M25. A prison for no-hopers with no date for release. Winchester runs with the ambivalence of that term: asylum. He quotes Johnson’s Dictionary: ‘A place out of which he that has fled to it, may not be taken.’ Sanctuary, refuge; trap.
An ordinary house, in an ordinary village, in a prettily rural royal county just beyond the boundaries of London.
We have to orientate ourselves for the push south, over the M4. I like the look of a church set at the head of something called The Avenue. The church tower, if we blag our way inside, will offer a view across lagoons and gravel pits to the Tower Arms Hotel on the far side of the M25.
Lurking-with-intent, in the vicinity of a fifteenth-century church, parts of which have a thirteenth-century pedigree, when coated in the dust and dirt of a seven-mile yomp down the canal, tends to arouse a degree of suspicion in proper citizens. The solitary communicant (female) is not so bad; the parents dropping off their kids (from gleaming metro-country motors) are less happy. To the point of making the phone call. Hitting the emergency button. We have cameras and rucksacks. We’re indigents or asylum seekers, possibly paedophiles. John Piper-tendency terrorists. The ‘church as sanctuary’ deal has been discontinued, charity begins in Station Road, West Drayton, with the musty books and racks of dead clothes. Charity is a corporate enterprise, cold calls, junk mail, celebrity auctions. It’s where skimmers like Lord Archer get their start.
We persevere, follow the communicant, gain access. St Martin’s is the parish church of West Drayton. A square-towered building lodged in a small, well-kept burial ground, alongside a turreted sixteenth-century gatehouse. A good day on the hoof should include: (1) a section of river or canal, (2) a Formica-table breakfast, (3) a motorway bridge, (4) a discontinued madhouse, (5) a pub, (6) a mound, (7) a wrap of London weather (monochrome to sunburst), (8) one major surprise. So far, so good.
Being inside a church, after the locked doors of the northern quadrant, is a minor shock: the 800-year franchise works its spatial and temporal magic, the narrow building detaches itself from its surroundings, the bluster of West Drayton.
Hats off, from custom or superstition, we creep and whisper. Cruise the usual circuit, interrogating the fabric: in expectation of some clue or sign. Or confirmation. Thicker air. Stone-dust and candle grease. Stained light. Windows designed by Burne-Jones, to the memory of the Mercers. The monumental brass of Dr James Good, the Elizabethan physician. Alabaster memorials to the De Burghs — an echo from Jane Austen (Lady Catherine de Bourgh); Fysch and his wife Easter. A ‘ship’ memorial to Captain Rupert Billingsley. The suspended teardrop of the pyx — in which the sacrament is reserved. This is lowered on a cord from the opening above the tower arch. A medieval survivor? A swinging lodestone from which to navigate the next stage of our journey? Not this time. The pyx is a crafted fake, based on the canopy at Dennington, Suffolk, and created by underemployed technicians at Pinewood Studios.
The item of church furniture that pricks Renchi’s interest is the font. He chews his fingers, studies the leaflet, in which Theo Samuel sounds a cautionary note: ‘We are aware, at St Martin’s, that the beauty of the architecture and surroundings of the ancient church can contribute on the one hand to a sense of calm trust in God, but on the other to an overdependence on the achievements of the past.’ The Revd Samuel wants to shake the faithful from their torpor. They must confront ‘the everyday realities of life’, especially the needs of’ ‘the poor’. He invokes the tradition of St Martin of Tours.
Martin sounds like a useful guide: he was both bishop and hermit, missionary and wonderworker. According to my Dictionary of Saints, ‘he penetrated into the remotest part of his diocese and beyond its borders, on foot, on donkey-back, or by water’.