The church was packed, the ritual unforced, the location powerful and pertinent. In such a place, the vertical view of history holds: the back story is not forgotten. The important dead are given their alcoves. Nothing disappears without trace. No part of this evening’s ceremony shames the past, or forces present quietude into some gaudy exhibition that it will be unable to sustain. ‘Time’ is coded into the celestial zodiac, the syphilitic alabaster of the dignitaries, landowners, floating in their niches. ‘Time and Eternity’ is the tag line for this service. ‘For the Passing of One Age and the Beginning of a New Millennium. Looking Back — Looking Forward.’
Heads down in prayer or private meditation; audible creaks as the congregation struggle to their feet, to let rip with the first hymn. Some of them are in wheelchairs. There is one black family. We have been instructed to assemble cardboard boxes which will contain millennial candles. Not easy with a fistful of palsied thumbs.
Parson: Jesus Christ is the light of the world.
Congregation: A light no darkness can quench.
So out of the church we straggle, smiley-touchy, in it together, candles cupped against the breeze and the damp night, over the meridian flagstone and down towards the car park at the back of the abbey. Singing as we process: ‘Don’t carry a load in your pack/you don’t need two shirts on your back.’ That one wasn’t written by a walker, I thought. The second shirt is to get you into the pub at the end of the day, when the first one is sweat-soaked, streaked with the colour of your cheap rucksack.
Stern, sheepy heads of the elderly; mortality shadows, so many other services to recall. The younger, louder couples, families, are clustering around the beacon, a brazier on a pole, that will be lit at midnight. Essex, England. Munitions factories. Official Secrets Act. Parkland cleaned up by the Lee Valley Authority. Exotic plantings that have survived only because they were on protected government land. The picnic grounds on the west side of Horsemill Stream are, apparently, very popular with Balkan refugees. They gather on Sunday afternoons, balalaikas and barbecued chicken.
The revelry, as we approach midnight, is coming from transistors. Subdued citizens in masks with flashing lights, wobbly antennae, stand around waiting for the heavens to crack open. Small groups have gathered in the drizzle, camp stools and folding tables, crackers, bottle of fizz, to see in the millennium: right on the line, zero longitude, listening to the distant hum of the orbital motorway, tyres on a wet road.
The millennial brazier is actually an elongated Bunsen burner, a cough of gas waiting for a spark. There’s a village feel to the event; a release from corporate sponsorship. Public spectacles that only succeed in messing up the quality of everyday life by imposing road barriers, razorwire, CCTV and ubiquitous gooseberry-fool security jackets (lapel-connected to unseen controllers). The colours of the city at the end of the century: luminous custard with a drape of blue and white plastic ribbons. Smoking holes in which something has happened. Sirens. Cone islands. Chemically upbeat breakfast-time TV presenters announcing another snarl-up on the M25, slowmoving traffic between Junctions 12 and 16, an overturned lorry at Hobbs Cross; Kent disappearing underwater.
Waltham Abbey is the cathedral of the motorway. I feel as if we’ve just listened to Father Mapple’s sermon, from the pulpit with the rope ladder in the whaling port of New Bedford, at the opening of Moby-Dick, before setting out on a hazardous voyage. Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.
Up goes the flame, like an over-oiled chip-pan; fizzing white at the edges against the dull night. Up go the fireworks, splinters of light, coronas and diadems and pink-gold ruffs. Muffled detonations. Public and private displays. City under siege. Blitz memories. A spectacular burst, sequential and increasing in noise and circumference, has some of the old-timers believing that the munitions factory has exploded. But it’s no longer there; like everything with a dark industrial history, the Royal Gunpowder Mills are in the process of being turned into a visitor centre, a heritage attraction.
Christians embrace and link arms to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. On a portable television set, belonging to one of the picnicking families, we see the Thames, the Teflon Toadstool, the crowds; warped and rolling. We can just make out the ironed faces of the national waxworks, dutifully mouthing doggerel of the Scottish borders. What a bizarre spectacle: ‘Piety’ Blair (as Michael Moorcock christened him in his novel King of the City), Edinburgh-educated, grappling with the Germano-Highlander Elizabeth II (inspiration for the Dartford Bridge), in a rictus of homage, pantomimed ecstasy. The certain knowledge that New Labour’s patronage of this awful tent was a disaster. And, worse, they are stuck with it. He can feel the laser glare of all those newspaper editors, fruit-fly celebs, who were kept hanging about on a Jubilee Line platform in the middle of the night. And who now face a nightmare journey home through the disgruntled mob.
*
Heading back down the Lea Valley, I stand on the Seward-stone Bridge over the M25, to watch the lights of the cars: two streams, gold and red. It never stops. Firework displays on the horizon. Flares and flashes reflected in the reservoirs. There was still, at this distance, something epic about the idea of London, the crenellation of bright towers.
Later, I would hear my children’s accounts of their night in the thick of it, down at the river: nothing much to see, a moving stream of fire that didn’t, unremarkable fireworks, trains not running or impossibly crowded. Young girls who fainted or were attacked and couldn’t be got to hospital, or were turned away from police stations. Epic traverses in unsuitable shoes, further and further east, to escape the crush, the craziness. A decent party, all things considered. A subdued rave. Very average. Better next time, next millennium.
I thought of the cheery foursome from the Shuhag. If their night went as expected, the glamour of the big city, Last-Night-of-the-Proms with Catherine wheels, they were prepared, for the first time, to walk home; the full fifteen or twenty miles, they weren’t sure, up the Lea Valley to Waltham Abbey. Madness. A journey no sane Londoner could be accused of attempting.
Soothing the Seething Up the Lea Valley with Bill Drummond (and the Unabomber)
1
27 March 1998. Greenwich peninsula. The Dome. I’ve been here before, many times, in all weathers, picking at the scab. I’ve been here with the photographer Marc Atkins. The river is always a buzz. Atkins was working then in black and white, future memories anticipated, instinctive retrievals; the darkness he tried to draw out, heavy skies reconfigured in an improvised darkroom, secret weathers. The point of the day, the walk, was to lift that grey lid, the miasma of depression that hangs over the city and its inhabitants. To wait for the moment when the sun breaks through, evening beams cartwheeling over an heroic landscape. You have to be out there all day to be sure of getting it. The remission. The pay-off that makes urban life worth enduring.
Atkins, allowed into the tent at an early stage, when there was nothing to be seen except loose cables and optimistic Zone signs, was defeated. The photographers hung back from the print journalists, they tracked each other. If Atkins stood still, the guy from the Mirror and the girl from the Docklands giveaway froze with him. If he scratched, they scratched. He was taller than they were, he had the advantage; he didn’t have to carry an aluminium ladder. But, this time, he couldn’t help. The site had nothing to offer, dead ground; poisoned earth that refused to glow. Bugsby’s Marshes had its own special magic: negativity. Nothingness. Zero with a skin on it. I watched the camera obscura table at the Greenwich Observatory as it scrolled in the local landscape, an invisible meridian line fired across the bows of the Dome.