The Hope Inn, oxymoronic, is nicely situated on the moor’s edge; a friendly, but essentially hopeless enterprise. Asserting its humanity in a place that has no use for it. Remove the Hope Inn to somewhere between Winchelsea and Dymchurch, give it a pedigree as a haunt of smugglers, and it might work. Ploughing through a ploughman’s mighty roll, washed down with cider, I understand why the Industrial Revolution succeeded: ploughmen were doubled over with stomach cramps, mouths gummy and snag-toothed. The quantity of this lunch-time treat is overgenerous, a brick of orange cheese, a tub of onions and pickles on a bed of lettuce (the size of rhubarb leaves).
Rain is jabbing at the moor. It’s comfortable in here; genial folk hitch themselves on to stools, nobody bothers much about two gently steaming walkers with massive packs. I stretch the break with a dried-out cigar, take it with me when we move on, down the Bonehead Ditch. Along the embankment of the King George VI Reservoir.
We agree: this is the most inspiring section we have so far encountered on our M25 orbit. The road keeps its distance. We can hear it, but we’re closer to the spirit of the Colne as it wriggles across Stanwellmoor.
How could you get a car on to this path? Reservoir on one side, Bonehead Ditch on the other. And here is a burnt-out shell, on its back, scaly with rust; the kind of trophy joyriders leave in Epping Forest. With a POLICE AWARE notice.
Renchi decides to go through the fence, to climb the slope to the reservoir. Burdened with broken statuary, Nicholson’s map, spare sweater and water bottle, I don’t follow him. I photograph his progress — as he turns into a chalk figure, cousin to the Long Man of Wilmington. Red scarf tossed by the wind, pitched against clouds, he looks heroic. What he sees, the mystery of dark water, is not revealed — until I come back, in the summer, to do some filming. Even in my snapshots, you find something that announces: Big Subject. Thunder skies pressing on an inland sea (a Soviet-style secret); concrete fence posts dividing the unwalked reservoir fringe from the lush yellow slopes of the embankment. It’s like working your way around a Dorset earthwork — and still being in sight of Heathrow. Thomas Hardy or John Cowper Powys cohabiting with J.G. Ballard and Thomas Pynchon. Land, where it is forbidden, is also preserved: the reservation reserves time, that which is unviewed becomes the ultimate view. The recognition of a dream place.
After the taboo-defying vision, the Green Way ties all the loose ends together: Colne, pylons, Staines Bypass. On the rough wall of the dual-carriageway underpass is an arrow and a strange graffito: INIT ILAND. Cockney paraphrase of Inuit? Green weed in swift-flowing water. Our track winds its way through the dormitory estates of Staines. We’ve made it, the town, the railway station. The car.
Ad Pontes, the Romans called it: a place of bridges, over the two rivers, Thames and Colne. There was once a stone, in a meadow beside the bridge, known as the London Stone, said to mark the western limit of the jurisdiction of the City of London over the Thames. The back story has been quietly buried, tidied away into a museum around the side of the (discontinued) town hall. A few main street pubs peddle their pedigree. Staines is best known these days as the fictional base for the comedic celebrity, Ali G. A branded look: dark aviator glasses, sock-hat, male jewellery, white as black. A voice, innit?
The market element of the Roman town is still present in a scatter of sweet stalls and a lorry dispensing fruit and veg. The museum boasts of Staines as the world capital for the manufacture of linoleum. That’s about it.
A statue of Queen Victoria, a war memorial angel that everyone (including me) photographs, access to the Thames path. For the first time, since we lost sight of the Millennium Dome, we’re back with the river: in all its sovereign dignity. The sun is going down behind the bridge, the familiar sludge-coloured waters, running smooth and swift, are fired. Like a petrol spill. We stand at the point where the weary Colne rushes under a footbridge and into the main stream, the Thames.
On another day, we might have plunged into the water. The Swan Hotel, with its sloping lawns, looks inviting. Reality inhibits instinct: we trudge, through evening traffic, back to the station.
The shamanic archer has vanished. In the course of our day’s walk, the Silk Cut poster has been papered over. Scarecrow, smoke warning, fields: deleted.
Diggers & Despots Cutting the Corner, Staines to Epsom
1
Picking my way early through Shepherd’s Bush: 26 May 1999. Associated as it is with stop/start journeys out of town — the grot-shock of the Green — this is not an area with which I’m comfortable. I’ve never walked it, other than rapid hikes through Popular Book Centres on my way down to the original Any Amount of Books in Hammersmith. I came here recently to interview J.G. Ballard for a book I was doing on Cronenberg’s film of Crash. Ballard weekends in the borough. It’s as close as he wants to come to London.
I took the wrong road, involved myself in an unnecessary detour, a swing past Fortress BBC in White City. I was looking for a side street, a right-hander off Wood Lane. The conjunction of Wormwood Scrubs Prison, Westway and the White City estates struck me as a convenient accident of civic planning. Empty-headed fools, heading for the TV studios, drive through here with their windows down, flashing conspicuous expenditure in the form of a Rolex. Masochists blabber on cell-phones. East Acton to White City (desolate rat runs between Westway and the Uxbridge Road) is bandit country. I was fortunate, it was first light. The bandits were sleeping it off. And, in any case, as was obvious to the most shortsighted teenage toller: I was unreconstructed Swatch Man in a twelve-year-old motor. An ex-drug dealer BMW with one active headlamp and moss emphasising the rectangle of the sunroof.
Now that our orbital walk had crossed the river and — if you included the Lea Valley opener — reached its halfway point, I made the mistake of talking about it. A journalist (autodidact, radio producer, scriptwriter, assembler of micro-books that come in alphabetically arranged units) thought he might be able to punt a piece, written while accompanying us on the next leg of the journey. Kevin Jackson, in his day, had wallpapered most of the broadsheets: Blake, Ruskin, Humphrey Jennings, Anthony Burgess, Surrealism. You hum it, he’ll play it: Alan Moore, Bill Griffiths, a photographer called Richard Heeps who chased the Greenwich Meridian Line across Cambridge-shire. Jackson tags Heeps as working ‘the old Modernist Project of Making It Strange’. If there is anything stranger than camping (without coercion) in the triangulation between the West-way, Scrubs Lane and Harrow Road, I don’t want to know about it.
Kevin uses his West London property as a bibliophile’s crash-pad. He lives elsewhere. With his interests, the need to hit libraries on a daily basis, do jokes in Greek and Latin, eat competitive dinners, it was inevitable that he’d return to Cambridge. He acts as generous patron to the sort of troop Sandy Macken-drick assembled for The Ladykillers. Undiscovered geniuses of the city, free (for a time) to pursue arcane researches or compose intricately layered epics set in suburban hinterlands. The bathroom was an unrequired extra. The fridge contained a pot or two of outdated yogurt.
The bell doesn’t ring. Kevin’s house is posthumous, dead in the definitive way East Acton houses die: theoretical tenants come and go, you never see them. The front door is a coffin lid. This byway is a Prozac dormitory, a self-referential nexus feeding on a busy through-road. In East London it would be squatted. And the hallway decorated with hanging bicycle parts. Alongside Wood Lane you have invisible Crusoes, let go by Radio 3; decent souls enduring an exile at the limits of the possible (where the Central Line loses contact with the centre).