The folds of the land are unreadable: to an East Londoner, clogged with blight. No script. No graffiti. No prohibitions. Planes do not circle continuously overhead. The only celestial markers are miles away: sky scratches, contrails, that fix Gatwick Airport.
My sense of unreality is confirmed by coming, out of nowhere, on to a small Grecian temple. Gifted to the hillside in 1909. So that pedestrians from Reigate might offer up a prayer, they are the blessed of the earth. This is a generic temple, circular, colonnaded — without content. No walls, no Vestal virgins. (Hawksmoor’s mausoleum at Castle Howard — without the gravitas, the morbid stone.) The altar, at the centre of this temple, is a device — highly polished — with which travellers can align themselves: distances to notable destinations. The table becomes a pool, reflecting trees and clouds — and Renchi (as he leans in to make his readings). On the ceiling is a golden sun, bright as an egg dropped in a pan.
A uniquely ordinary English evening, warm, calm, finds us on the high ridge, moving east: water tanks, tall masts barnacled with boosters for mobile phones. The route, in its day, was a green road, favouring the lie of the land, hill forts, camps. It’s not much used; the more a path receives official designation, the more it is written up in guidebooks, the more the surrounding country withdraws, protects its ‘territorial security’. As a public park from which the public have been excluded.
By the time we pass through the grounds of the Royal Alexandra and Albert School, long shadows precede us. The emptiness of Deep England seems absolute: if no recreational activity is on offer, no one moves. The school serves various disadvantaged groups. Those with difficulties requiring special care. Large tin sculptures, semi-abstract (from the Kenneth Armitage/Lynn Chadwick period), have been nailed to a high brick wall. Bronze, where it has been used, has weathered to an alien green. The diminishing perspective of the evening avenue becomes a Samuel Palmer watercolour, in which silvery poplars meet in Gothic arches — and the single, symbolic pedestrian, his back to us, lurches through shadow pools. He walks on the twist; one leg, permanently bent, kicking to the east.
Merstham nests among golf courses that have been shaved to a No. 1 fuzz. Yellow balls and red balls meticulously placed on baize. The tired metaphor has been achieved, these greens really are a snooker table. The balls, I’m told, represent positions from which golfers of different abilities, sexes, drive off. Beyond the golf course, the streaming motorway. Then a brown hill, a white scribble of sky writing. Concealed light-boxes allow the golfers to play at night.
Without golf, the M25 would be entirely encircled by smears of oil seed rape, boarding kennels and deconstructed Victorian asylums. Golf stretches the suburban lawn into the motorway landscape; the kiddies’ sandpit, the lake that is not to be fished or swum. The sanctity of the English golf course (Wodehouse and Christie again) has facilitated the latest M25 landfill scam: permission is granted to some cowboy to dig out a brownfield site, convert it to a golf course. In roll the lorries, the JCBs. Huge pits are dug, mega-bunkers. Toxic waste is dumped. After a few months, money made, the ‘developers’ move on. ‘Golf’ has become its anagram: ‘flog’. Flog the soft estates. ‘Golf course landscaping’ is the euphemism for black bag burial. Money in dirt.
Golf draws fringe real estate into the defensive ring. Nicely shaved fields look blameless and they have the advantage of keeping the riffraff out. Golf clubs are all about what journalist Steve Crawshaw calls ‘hermetic exclusivity’. Crawshaw reported on the mysterious events that occurred at a ‘golfers’ Garden of Eden’, near Brands Hatch (just up the Darent Valley from Samuel Palmer’s Shoreham).
The property is known as the London Golf Club — but it’s not in London; it’s an adjunct of the infamous Swanley interchange (scene of the Kenneth Noye road rage killing). The club car park boasts the kind of motors Noye (and deceased prosecution witness Alan Decabral) favoured: alpha-male Alfas, fuck-off Ferraris, premier league Porsches, T-registration Mercs and Beamers. The course was designed by Jack Nicklaus. Members include: Sean Connery, Denis Thatcher, Gianfranco Zola, Kelvin McKenzie. A conspiracy freak’s directory. Kerry Packer paid thousands in membership fees and hasn’t been known to whack a ball in anger (on Kentish soil). Celebs are buying into a hall of mirrors. The famous looking at the famous. Discretion, servility (with a price tag). No guests can be signed in for a day’s play. ‘They can’t,’ as Crawshaw observes, ‘even get through the gates.’
On 7 July 1999, one month before we crossed Merstham golf course, greenkeeper Steve Jones discovered the ruin of Nicklaus’s ‘Heritage’ course: infiltrators (Saddam Hussein-sponsored asylum seekers, anti-global capitalism anarchists) crept out in the night and dug up the fairways. They drew cabbalistic diagrams with weedkiller. The letter D was burnt into the middle of a green. Why D? The general manager of the club is Daniel Loha. The damage was inflicted on the 12th green (the 12th letter of the alphabet is L). The biblical Daniel was a prophet with an apocalyptic book to his name. Daniel, in Hebrew, means: ‘The Lord is my Judge.’
Among early attempts to find scapegoats, someone to pay for this outrage — ‘It’s a war situation’ — travellers were implicated. They used to occupy the fields where the golf course was laid out. Travellers deny all knowledge, the head man says that he is very fond of the occasional round of golf.
Smart money is on an insider. An ex-member, a disgruntled barman or caddy. Detectives need to look at the psychogeography of the setting: Brands Hatch is rage culture. Town/wilderness. Motorway forced through a cutting in the hills. Dangerous roundabouts. Vibes from the other side of the bridge, from Purfleet and West Thurrock. Bandit country. Kenny Noye, the well-known Freemason, was a member. Rogue trader Nick Leeson had his membership suspended after his little difficulty in Singapore. On returning to England, sentence served (book, film and subsidiary exploitation rights flogged), he rejoined. A £10,000 reward is still on offer for evidence leading to the conviction of the Green Destroyers.
I don’t much like the sound of Merstham. I don’t like places I can’t pronounce. Before finding the station (which has some kind of pioneer commuter status), we walk out of town on to the motorway bridge — look east to the flurry of Junctions 7 and 8 (access to M23). Highways Agency horticulturalists have obscured the pitch, trees to the edge of the road. The sun drops behind us, just as my film runs out. The final shot: half a frame of red-gold meltdown, a Fiesta speed-stretched to limo status.
3
12 August 1999. On Merstham station, Renchi looks serious: he’s arranging his blue-shirt bandanna, it’s going to be a long day. We aim to clear the southern stretch of the M25, leaving us free to walk the Darent Valley for our next expedition. Somewhere in the vicinity of Otford ought to do.
There is a threatening, milky haze over the town. The pattern of settlement — single street, mini-cab firms — exists to justify the railway station. Merstham is a fantasy England conjured by a distant viewer, a state-sponsored psychic: train, newspaper shop, white church with steeple. Then he ran out of inspiration, left the rest blank.
St Katharine’s Church is on a slope, hidden among ilex, willow, yew. Trees feed on, and express, the early-morning melancholy of the burial ground. Clipped bushes and globes of yellow privet organise the mound into corridors for private walks. This is a necessary halt for pilgrims.
We’re pleased to find an effigy of Catherine (with broken wheel) set high on the wall. The wheel, standing on its rim, could be taken as the arc of the motorway circuit that we have already covered. The second pan of our story is lost.