6.15 a.m. The figure at the upstairs window is Kevin Jackson. Dressed and ready. He’s been waiting there all night. Tall, quite sturdy, with a full head of hair. Bounding downstairs and out of the door, he employs a manly handshake. I’m not convinced that Wardrobe have come up with the optimum outfit for a hike through the Surrey countryside on a warm day. If you spotted Kevin, hanging about the bus stop near TV Centre, you might guess: alpha male from Blake’s Seven — a British lead with Californian aspirations. Wardrobe has gone with Sam Shepherd leather (improperly distressed). Combat veteran. This can perform, coupled with circular (Dr Strange-love) spectacles, quite effectively on a filigree-featured miniature like Tom Cruise. Kevin is no miniature; he’s the proper size for an English gentleman, head and shoulders above the mob.
This overload of culture references, film titles, anecdotes, fits the man. He’s lived in America, labouring on (unmade) scripts with Paul Schrader. He’s worked with an Oscar-winning documentary director. He’s edited and written episodes of The Archers. He’s visited Ballard in Shepperton (New Worlds fan from the age of eleven). He’s just back from Scotland. On his way to…
Kevin is the freelance’s freelance. Whatever hours you burn — essays in New York, reviews in London, radio, TV, presentation, production, small press squib, large press remainder — you sink a little deeper each year. It never comes in as fast as it goes out. Success kills you. Copy is edited on the phone as you wait for the next appointment. You review your own reviews. A day on the hoof is just what Kevin needs — but he’s lumbered himself with having to write as he walks. He’s doing a photography course and a Latin course and he’s dropping out of social anthropology. By the time we reach the M4, he’ll have compiled (by alphabet) a list of British road movies, a dictionary of motorway fiction, a critique (illustrated) of Manser Associates Hilton Hotel at Heathrow (glass-fronted fridge for body parts).
Some monkey-drumming battery, or Puritan residue, keeps Kevin on the move, an exuberant neurosis of achievement. Been everywhere, read everything, but he hasn’t come up with the right kit for Staines. The leather rucksack hangs too low on his back, it’ll bruise the spine. He’s midway through the photography course; studied the masters, penned the thesis, bought the camera. One small detail overlooked: no film stock. The gleaming jacket, authentically frontier (envelope-pushing, ass-kicking), is too heavy. It will cook him if he wears it; cripple him if he carries it. The greying hair is probably long enough to keep the sun off his scalp, but he’s not hefting any water, or packing plasters. Yellow trailbreaker boots may look great at the timber line (tested in Notting Hill), they’re an overreaction to the Thames path, the lazy villages of Surrey. The preppie striped shirt with button-down collar and pen in pocket is fine, if a little tight fitting for a day of swinging arms and excited conversational semaphore.
Renchi is waiting at Staines station: blue shirt tied into piratical bandanna, loose sweater, rucksack packed with maps, water, spare T-shirts. I pose the two men under the hoarding: the Silk Cut scarecrow has been replaced by a fake US Marine, a black and white BT ad. The affronted sergeant (old-timer with moustache) and jug-eared recruit, muddy from route march. The freshness and bright expectancy of our two strollers play ominously against their oversize counterparts.
From the window of the station café, I see the Marine sergeant, mouth wide in a silent scream. He is both promoting Cellnet and demonstrating how you can live without it: Just Shout. The sky, bad news for Kevin’s body-armour, is an unbroken blue; of a purity that cohabits with the glassy surface of the Formica rectangles on which our plates of poached eggs and thick buttery toast rest, waiting for a break in the chat.
The café, convenient for station, town and river, is so true to itself that we award it the immortality of the unnoticed. The building is twinned with the Slough Electrical repair shop, outside which is parked a Vespa motor scooter. Bodged Bauhaus. Flat roof (with shipboard rails), metal-trim windows, narrow doorways; white paint showing signs of weathering. Light pours in, casting precise shadows across wood-panel walls. Tables are small and set close together to encourage intimacy with other all-day breakfasters. If you want democracy, the free debate of the Levellers and Ranters, this is where you’ll find it. Elbow to elbow with layabouts, semi-urban casuals. Readers of yesterday’s newspapers.
Kevin Jackson’s account of the day’s walk, published in the Independent (as ‘Putting London in Its Place’), is very good on our induction into Staines café society. We noticed the other dilettantes, the early loungers (two skiving, one in permanent residence), but that didn’t stop us pulling out the maps and associated literature. Kevin, I realise, is taking everything down in a neat notebook. Like a proper journalist. Or TV policeman. (I’m with the old-time coppers who always wrote up their notes after the event. Selective memories.)
We might have got away with it — if Renchi had held back on Mary Caine’s The Kingston Zodiac, which he’d picked up on one of his visits to Glastonbury. Advancing from Waltham Abbey to Shenley, by way of Temple Bar, we were in my liminal territory, we ran with my myths: star ceilings, Rodinsky, John Clare in Epping Forest, Hawksmoor’s grave. Now that we were about to cross the river into Surrey, I was adrift. Renchi would act as our guide.
Mary Caine, inspired by Mrs Katharine Maltwood’s A Guide to Glastonbury’s Temple of the Stars, had marked up the country around her base in Kingston in accordance with the configurations of a spiritual zodiac. The blue and gold ceiling of Waltham Abbey church would be reasserted as a metaphor — by a walk that carried us, initially, down the back of the Dog. ‘Huge hounds guard these circles,’ warned Mary Caine.
Glastonbury, mound rising out of the Somerset levels, is easy to map (and read) in terms of gigantic ‘effigies’. Motorways, warehousing, ribbon development and private estates do not complicate the picture. The outlines of ancient field systems are still visible from the air. Mrs Maltwood’s Dog is Gwyn Ab Nudd, ‘the British Pluto’. His pedigree is Celtic and he inhabits The High History of the Holy Graal. The Hound is formed ‘by conducting channels of water between immense artificial earthworks, and by the ancient “path” bounding Aller Wall’. Maltwood quotes a section from The High History. It refers to a river as ‘water royal’.
With ‘bounding’ moors and ‘water royal’ (the Thames running through Windsor, where pedestrians are turned away from the riverbank), it would be easy to suppose that we were working from Maltwood’s text. Such speculations are energising devices; they help us to respect a landscape. The local is taken into the archetypaclass="underline" contours and canals construct patterns around churches, monastic ruins, ‘historic’ houses.
‘It might be supposed,’ Mrs Maltwood writes, ‘that one could see such creatures on any map! but it would be impossible to find a circular traditional design of Zodiacal and other constellation figures, arranged in their proper order, and corresponding with their respective stars, unless they had been laid out in sequence, according to plan.’