Nobody, other than Kevin Jackson, could have written about ‘the incalculable part his [Cowley’s] ghost played at various parts of our ramble, from the Payroll Boys’ incomprehensible gibberish about the “Abraham Cowley Ward” of some local hospital to the Cowley Roads we encountered’. Kevin’s blisters, apparently, were deflating, leaving flaps in the skin of his feet. He squeaked slightly as he hotfooted over Cambridge pavements. He was undergoing a strict physical regime (reading the training manuals, High Sierra psycho-yomping guides), in expectation of joining us on future walks.
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In the evening light, long shadows on a dull road, we marched on Weybridge. DRIVE SLOWLY ANIMALS. I applaud a red brick semi that has taken the trouble to convert a strip of communal lawn into a paved terrace, topped with decorative balcony (so tight to the house that nobody could stand behind it). Scores of young children in yellow waistcoats (crash-helmets) push their bikes along the pavement.
The sky over Woburn Park sagged with Zeppelin cloud-socks. An hour when bad photographs work best, smearing essence: egg and ketchup colours. Well-licked breakfast plate under a glaze of washing-up liquid.
Dragonflies twitching on nettles. A blue too slight to capture. The diluted English surrealism of a twilight park: a water chute with empty plastic logs, a misplaced Epstein woman drumming robotically (visible wires trailing from her back). A Toshiba showroom designed to look like a roadside temple.
Crossing the River Wey is a big moment for Renchi. A quick turn around a Chinese church (eccentric anti-vernacular, Gothic turrets, Greek Orthodox dome) and we head for the station. Weybridge is a good place to leave for another day; suspended visions of St George’s Hill, phantom Diggers camped among immaculate golf course mansions.
4
16 June 1999. Renchi talked so much about Sara H that she became a real presence in my own imaginings; I saw her work as feeding on (and ameliorating) the momentum of the M25’s perpetual (stop/start) motion. Sara lived outside the orbit. In a comfortable house in a village on Salisbury Plain. A mill stream, coming off the River Avon, ran through the garden.
Sara was the one who guided Renchi (and others) around the heat-contours, the dispensations of Stonehenge. She was a painter. Her regular shows — still life, animal — sold out. The work was meticulous, unsentimental, based on close observation. Pet portraiture, had she continued with it, would have provided a decent living. The singularity of the beasts, the glint, was assiduously recorded; hyperreality as a branch of Surrealism. There was nothing soft or splashy about this work. Fruit displaced its own weight, cut a shape in the consciousness: Zurbarán, not Renoir. A memory world captured in a convex mirror.
And then, abruptly, the career was aborted. Sara, under the control of a spirit guide, struck out on an epic undertaking. She was instructed to abandon the garden produce, moggies and curs, and move into abstraction. Abstraction in which every line had a moral integrity, every curve mapped a dream motif. The manageable format of the earlier oils replaced by vast canvases — which had to be painted, fast, in a narrow, off-kitchen extension. Stacks of canvases, calling for expensive paints and brushes, were produced to order.
What were they like? Renchi struggled to describe them. He spoke of the magnitude of the task, of quantity. Technique. The Wiltshire house with its inherited furniture, lived-in rooms, creaking stairs, tight corridors, was bursting with the product of this merciless grind. Each canvas had a narrative, an interpretation that only Sara (handmaiden to her unappeased instructor) could deliver. The meaning of the series would not be revealed until all the paintings — three, four, five hundred — were exhibited in one place.
Coming off our walk to Weybridge, we felt that it was the right moment to break away, a trip to Salisbury Plain. By leaving the road, witnessing Sara’s dream maps (a project as mad as our own), we might achieve an overview. Whatever compelled me to spend two years expiating the shame of the Millennium Dome was as fierce and inexplicable as Sara’s daily ritual in her studio.
Anna was up for the outing, by train to Alton, where Renchi would meet us and drive us to Sara’s house. The first breath of morning air, on the kitchen doorstep, was hot. London was sticky with pollen, obscure allergies were activated. Pass a particular building, pause at a road crossing, and the sneezing would start. The fits were not related to trees or bushes, they were triggered by memory, previous attacks, forgotten journeys.
The Nigerian mini-cab was late. It had gone to the wrong Albion. We were forced to dodge, double back; foot-down detours to avoid the sombre (Farringdon Street) march of the ‘Carnival against Capitalism’. We jumped on the train as it was moving out.
Settled in an almost deserted carriage, we met a young sculptor, friend of Renchi’s stepdaughter, who was also interested in witnessing Sara’s work.
I’ve always enjoyed — pre-privatisation, pre-Hatfield and Clapham and Paddington — riding on trains. Real time cinema, floating landscapes. And now there is the bonus of linking up, seeing from a different perspective, areas we have walked through. It was important, Renchi and I agreed, to get the first circuit done: start each walk, fresh, from the point we stopped on the previous outing. Which meant that quite significant locations — such as Royal Holloway College, Holloway Sanatorium — demanded a supplementary visit.
A walled estate, effectively restored and policed, the Holloway Sanatorium in Virginia Water was the ultimate heritage-asylum conversion. Discreetly positioned, within a few miles of Windsor Castle, Eton College and the liberties of Runnymede, the sanatorium catered to the carriage trade. Socially awkward relatives of the well connected were boarded out: inconvenient pregnancies, mild eccentricities, boozers, society dope fiends. No headbangers, no drooling imbeciles, no lowlife. Marienbad on the Bourne.
Mervyn Peake was treated with ECT in Virginia Water: the Holloway Sanatorium as an electro-convulsive manifestation of Gormenghast. In more recent times, the poet John Welch, undergoing remedial therapy, was given the task of burning medical files.
Thomas Holloway, the philanthropist responsible for college and asylum, spent £40.000 on the Belgian Gothic building. He consulted E.W. Pugin, launched an architectural competition, and named Crossland, Salomans and Jones as the winning firm. It wasn’t charity, wealthy relatives would pay a premium to lodge patients in a set every bit as extravagant as St Pancras station hotel.
How many lunatics was Holloway expecting? The restored sanatorium buildings, rebranded as ‘Virginia Park’, seen through ironwork gates, are grouped like an Ivy League campus (imposing, pastiched). Big Ben tower, numerous chimneys, turrets, archways, cloisters: Holloway Sanatorium was a magnum opus. The architect William Crossland, pupil of George Gilbert Scott, made a huge emotional investment in this paradise of the slightly disturbed. Everything about his pitch was wonky.
Examine the Victorian portraits in their silver-framed ovals. Crossland, bald and bearded, is a serious man with an expanding forehead. Holloway, on the other hand, is quiffed and teased; commas of luxuriant growth decorating his cheekbones. Crossland, the artist in stone, presents himself as a solid citizen. Holloway, peddling his patent remedies, ointments possessed of a ‘healing genius’, photographs like a male lead out of Dickens: Pip or the youthful David Copperfield. The magic medicine, when analysed, was found to consist of yellow beeswax, lanolin and olive oil. It made Holloway’s fortune, sponsored his civic benevolence: two colonies, red brick monsters, college and sanatorium. A theme park madhouse carved out of beeswax.