Instead there was bright sunlight and butterflies clipped the flowering buddleia by the front gate with their bladethin wings. At the end of our block there was a pavement shrine: a score of cellophane-wrapped bouquets leant against the iron railings, the spikes of which were festooned with T-shirts, wristbands and laminated cards covered in rap poetry. Spreading out almost to the kerb were tea lights arranged to form the slogan I LOVE FREDDY. There were two or three brightly coloured plastic water guns propped among the shrivelled floral tributes, and as I passed by one of a pair of youths who were contemplating the shrine bent to touch a play weapon, while remarking to his companion, ‘’E turned ’is back an’ ven vay plunged ’im.’
I had with me a notebook and considered stopping to note this down — but then forgot all about it within yards. In the past, at the start of a journey, its pages would be blankly awaiting the obsessively tight stitching of my handwriting as I tried to sew observation to thought. But now it was already quite full of train times, the places I intended visiting and those where I was booked to stay; a detailed itinerary that was necessary, lest, from one hour to the next, I forgot why it was I had gone to East Yorkshire, where I hailed from — and so was lost entirely.
If I were to be found wandering, mute and disoriented, I wondered what my rescuer might make of those pages where, in anticipation of being unable to recall the right words or phrases, I had pre-emptively set out a multiple-choice list of alternative descriptions, thus:
Flamborough Head is: (a) impressive (b) windy and desolate (c) desolate and oppressive (d) a jolly place, what with the wheeling gulls and the trippers taking tea beneath a candy-striped lighthouse (e) with its humped back and baleen cliffs, suggestive of a beached leviathan.
There were also examples of credible self-knowledge that I could select from upon waking, either from sleep or an amnesiac spell, such as: (a) I dreamt of the lost children again — is there something I am repressing? (b) I have my father’s powerful self-absorption together with my mother’s fearful neurosis. (c) The anger I felt when the woman in the newsagent’s sniggered at me was qualitatively exactly the same as that I experienced aged eleven when teased because of my haircut. (d) Impotence can be a refuge. (e) There is no time left now — yet self-obsession is a dimension of its own.
All I had to do — or so I had convinced myself — was circle the appropriate letter and I would add another niblet of commentary to the great multi-and-no-faith Talmud. Yet, by the time I was sprawled on the chequerboard of sweaty plush, the scheme seemed at best unworkable — at worst futile. As the train pulled away from Victoria a recorded announcement intoned: ‘The next stop is Victoria, change here for District, Circle and Piccadilly lines and mainline rail services.’ At the time I thought it was a mistake.
The east coast line franchise had been won that summer by a company called Grand Central. The ends of the carriages bore blown-up photographs of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean; passengers — had there been any besides me — might have meditated on the desirability of self-murder and good looks, or else played upon the Monopoly and chess boards incorporated into the tables. As I say, the train was nearly empty, yet still it strained to achieve escape velocity, struggling through Camden Town and past Alexandra Palace before leaving the planetoid of London brick behind around Watford.
At Hitchin a Montessori school and a pole-dancing club shared the same single-storey premises. I wondered idly which institution the sign on the flat roof — ‘Wonderland’ — referred to. Ash trees did a dusty hula-hula along the field margins, gloss-black cattle stood in the deep shadow beneath the massy crowns of oaks. I went to the buffet car in my socks. The steward placed a lidded styrofoam cup in a small paper carrier bag, together with a tea bag in a sachet, a tube of UHT milk and another sachet — this one of sugar. I explained to him — as I withdrew the cup, ripped open the sachet and dunked the tea bag — that tea was an infusion, which meant that it was vital for the water to be actually boiling when it came into contact with the leaves. He looked at me furiously — his appeal to health and safety was the hiss of a cornered snake. My probing head felt small, hard, shiny and wedged into the top corner of the carriage like a security camera. I knew — without being able to recall a single instance — that I had behaved like this many times before: taking Canute’s stance in the path of the great surge of ill-brewed tepid tea that was inundating England. The steward’s glare cut me into diamond shapes that sparkled in the sunlight, then condensed into droplets whipped away from the carriage window — a vaporous trail.
I grabbed a complimentary copy of The Times from the counter and beat a retreat to my seat.
The fight went out of the train and it sidled to a halt beside an irrigation system that was jetting liquid assets over a field full of subsidies. I rattled the paper open on this headline: ‘Scepticism Mounts over Installation of Holderness Wind Turbines’. There was an aerial photograph showing the thirty-mile outer curve being described by the giant turbines as they were implanted in the seabed between Flamborough Head and Spurn Head.
How could I have forgotten this? The largest public works project in living memory, one that had been compared in its scale and dynamism to the Tennessee Valley Authority or, more tendentiously, the Mittelbau- Dora labour camps that served the V-2 rocket factories. The government’s commitment to generate 10 per cent of the nation’s electricity using renewable technologies had been the centrepiece of its regeneration programme and seldom out of the news. The long-term unemployed of Tyneside and South Shields had been dragooned back into work, and by some accounts were being treated by the contractors — a German company — with a toughness bordering on brutality. Others said that this was nonsense, that the 30,000-strong workforce was being either newly inducted or retrained in an exemplary fashion and to the highest standards. Once the turbines had been built and installed, these men and women would form the core of a fully revitalized heavy-industry sector in the Northeast: a new generation of welders, fabricators and turners who would rival — then exceed — the output of those who had built the great warships and artillery pieces of the Imperial era.
When they came on-line, each one of the massive, three-bladed turbines would generate five megawatts of clean power — and there were to be a hundred of them strung along the Holderness coast alone. Naturally there was opposition; an uneasy alliance had sprung up between the power station workers — who saw their jobs blowing away in the wind — and the more extreme environmentalists, who, while they may have campaigned aggressively for renewable energy, never envisaged it being generated on quite this scale, nor predicated upon a gargantuan reindustrialization. And then there were the inhabitants — the operators of shrinking caravan parks and the farmers of diminishing acreages, aghast that so much tax payers’ money should be poured into the German Ocean, while their own sea defences — with the exception of those at Hornsea and Withernsea — had been abandoned on the grounds that they weren’t cost-effective. In the pubs and golf club bars from Bridlington to Easington it was reported that dark mutterings could be heard, of sabotage — and worse.