The sudden absence of notable features, the quietness of the lake, is very appealing. People take up fishing as an excuse for standing all day in just such a place, doing nothing. Our modest view disguises an important conflux of energies: the M25 beginning to pull to the east, St Ann’s Hill (with ruined chapel), Great Foster’s Hotel (talked up by Mary Caine) — and, on the horizon, another red tower, the Holloway Sanatorium.
The weight of possibility, unsecured narrative taking off in every direction, hits Kevin. He makes no complaint, but he is starting to limp. That jacket drags like a lead poncho designed by Anselm Kiefer. He knows: it’s untellable. Memory is a lace doily, more hole than substance. The nature of any walk is perpetual revision, voice over voice. Get it done, certainly, then go home and read the published authorities; come back later to find whatever has vanished, whatever is in remission, whatever has erupted. Kevin has sunk into the trance state all hikers know: the initial excitement, the yarn-spinning of the Staines station cafe, is over. Books in the rucksack are dead weight, ballast he’d be happy to dump. The theoretical is overwhelmed by the actual. He knows what lies behind him — home, car, breakfast — but he has no idea what lies ahead. How am I going to get out of this?
Movie references help. Conveyor belts of gravel crunch and moan. We speak of the end of Touch of Evil; a bloated Orson Welles stumbling among derricks and nodding donkeys, bridges and gantries of an oil field. Black water, floating rubbish. Get Carter. That’s closer to home. A rig for sea coal. Rattling stones on a belt. An extraction system that plays into the aerial rides and thrills of Thorpe Park.
Walking beside the perimeter fence, we smell wild animals in their enclosures. They’re too bored and depressed to roar. Water sloshes against glass. Empty carriages trundle around their rickety circuit; a slow ascent, then the plunge through the water chute. Suspended excitement. A sorry piece of engineering that can only be brought to life by the screams of deliriously anxious punters.
A bridge over the M3, looking back to the junction with the M25: Renchi is busy with his camera, but Kevin has moved beyond transcription. Why would he want to prolong, to memorialise this agony? The leather jacket is hooked over a rigidly horizontal left arm, a struck flag. A trophy smuggled out of Saigon. Kevin poses dutifully; a light slick of sweat, smile contracted into a wince of discomfort, eyes on the ground. If he lifted them, he’d see where we are going, the short sharp hill — which, if he knows anything about it, will involve detours, diversions and a horrible, spine-twisting, corkscrew ascent.
‘We walk and walk and walk,’ Kevin wrote in his article for the Independent. ‘By this time almost five hours have passed, and the metaphorical tenderfoot is also a literal tenderfoot. I’ve chosen the wrong kind of boots, the wrong kind of socks; the soles of my feet are blazing, and by the evening will erupt into a gratifyingly spectacular crop of blisters.’
Hoping to postpone the assault on the conical hill, Kevin initiates a discussion of private estates; the sort that flourish unseen among these wooded slopes. We won’t go as far as to align ourselves with Charles Manson’s dune buggy berserkers, but five hours on the hoof has given a certain edge to our argument. The alienation that Ballard, safely bunkered in Shepperton, recommended as a device for firing the imagination, flourishes in territory trapped between motorways (M4, M25, M3).
Look west from St Ann’s Hill, beyond the restless levels of Junction 12 (of the M25), beyond Virginia Water, and you have Wentworth; land drops sharply away, property values climb into the stratosphere. CCTV estates concealed by managed stretches of ancient woodland. Nicholson’s map has nothing to say: white on white, private roads in an ex-directory reservation. A golf course the size of Rutland. Wentworth is a sand trap with satellite housing, Jimmy Tarbuck and Bruce Forsyth. Razor-smooth greens walked by men whose shoes are as bright as their sweaters, men in hair-hats. More rough on their heads than down the edge of the fairway. Superglued Shredded Wheat. White teeth in collapsed mouths. Crinkly tap dancers, rheumy with showbiz nostalgia: Windmill and Winter Gardens. December-tan comics who hack out their rounds, rehearse their schtick, mourning the defeat of Margaret Thatcher. They promise to quit Britain if another Labour government is voted in. And they honour that promise. Went-worth is another country. With its own golfing prince, Andrew. Its Dallas ranches. Winking security. The Wentworth zodiac, should Mary Caine find the time to compute it, is made from lizards, serpents, hammerhead sharks. The divisions of the woodland are militaristic, imperiaclass="underline" General’s Copse, Duke’s Copse, King’s Copse, Wellington Bridge, King George’s Field. And, in any case, Lew Grade’s veterans console themselves, the Conservatives might have been wiped out in successive elections, but the Thatcherite lineage is secure with Tony Blair. All that has happened is some discreet rebranding, less confrontation, better suits. Sex scandals lose their zest. Denials are issued with straighter faces.
One of New Labour’s most unyielding red-tie commissars is the former student leftist Jack Straw. It was Straw who was landed with the hassle of ‘The Dictator on the Golf Course’: the million-pound safe house on the safest estate in the safest county in England. General Augusto Pinochet, butcher of Santiago (funded by the CIA, armed by Margaret Thatcher), liked to do his Christmas shopping in London. He would receive Lady Thatcher and other old cronies, cruise the Knightsbridge bazaars, check into a clinic for a 10,000-mile service. Chauf-feured from hotel suite to Harrods, winter traffic at its busiest, the General was well placed to offer an opinion on the level of courtesy available on English roads. Ian Parker, in ‘Traffic’ (an essay published in Granta), notes that Pinochet ‘praised Britain for its impeccable driving habits’. The verdict of a man who is always driven. The streets Pinochet glimpsed through a tinted window were swept of rubbish. The populace dressed well and didn’t sing or shout or form ugly mobs brandishing photographs of the disappeared. It was Pinochet, after all, who instructed Thatcher in the advantages of a deregulated bus service. ‘Check out downtown Santiago,’ he said. ‘Any time you’re passing.’
It was a terrible shock to be arrested, threatened with extradition, a ‘human rights’ trial in Spain. Old chums, Falklands War colleagues, were outraged. Lord Lamont: ‘Disgraceful!’ Lady Thatcher: ‘His health has been broken, the reputation of our own courts has been tarnished and vast sums of public money have been squandered on a political vendetta — so friends of Britain be warned, the same thing can happen to you.’
But the health of elderly gentlemen in good standing with the establishment is not like the health of ordinary mortals: when they are faced with public examination, it declines rapidly and demonstrates the most alarming symptoms — premature senility, dodgy ticker, the shakes. No memory and a drooling, but brave smile. Partial blindness. Sight like a one-eyed football manager: ‘Sorry, missed that one. I was unwrapping a fresh stick of gum.’ Released into the bosom of the family, on compassionate grounds, they stage a remarkable recovery. Alzheimer’s disease can be shaken off like the common cold. Malfunctioning hearts regenerate; the miraculously restored patient, cured by love and tender care, is back on the fairway. The boardroom.
Pinochet benefited from the hospital service that is still out there in the north-west quadrant of the M25 — for those who really need it.