The Groundwater Diaries Page 2
After doing some research (half an hour on the Internet looking for ‘underground rivers’), I discovered that living above an underground river, or groundwater, is bad for your health and should be avoided. This is to do with radiation and ‘bad’ spirits – that’s why feng shui experts, hippies and mad country folk practise water divining. I’m always on the lookout for unified (and easy) theories of everything and it occurred to me that my insomnia, strange dreams and fragmented state of mind could be due to the fact that, since coming to London I had always lived above subterranean streams.
I got a surveyor to come round to investigate a little damp problem we had noticed and, as he was walking around with his damp detector, I tossed a casual question in his general direction:
‘Do you think the … er, damp … could be caused by … er … the lost underground rivers of London like the New River, Fleet, Westbourne, etc., ha ha, as it were?’
‘What a load of bullshit,’ said the surveyor. He moaned that people were always banging on about underground rivers. Were they? I said. I’m the only person I know who does – everyone else seems to be very bored with the whole concept already.
I live on a road with a watery name so thought that should be enough evidence, but decided to check out my theory on various old maps I’d picked up. Two Victorian maps showed the New River, which seemed to run along where our road is now. Then, during a visit to Stoke Newington library, I found an old leaflet about Clissold Park which showed that the raised avenue of trees was where the heavily banked river ran and continued past the brick shed at the park gate (actually an old pump house), then it went under Green Lanes and along our road before heading north. ‘My God,’ I thought to myself, slapping my forehead, ‘so the tai chi people, crap footballers, snoggers and dopeheads are perhaps in exorably drawn to the electro-magnetic currents of the river!’ I was so excited I got goose pimples and had to go for a shit immediately.
At the eastern end of my street, opposite Shampers Unisex Hair Salon (cut £3.50, blow dry £7.00), water is bubbling up through the cracks in the pavement in about six places. This little spring is clear and shiny in the morning sun and I want to reach down and drink from it, only it’s flowing over fag butts, withered banana skins, discarded ice cream wrappers and dog shit. It babbles and swirls for a few moments at the side of the road among a narrow band of cobbles, then pours along the kerb to a shallow trough in the road, where a pool is slowly forming. An empty can of Strongbow is already floating in it. As the water level in the pool increases, a group of middle-aged black people start to arrive at this end of the street. They are all impeccably dressed, the men in dark suits and blazers with ties, the women in dazzling summer dresses and hats. A tall man in specs issues instructions then they fan out, rapping fastidiously on doorsteps in twos, clutching their books and spreading the word.
‘Who is it?’
‘We want to talk to you about Paradise.’
‘Fuck off,’ says a bloke from an upstairs window.
‘The end of the world is coming.’
‘Who gives a fuck?’
It has been raining on and off for forty-eight hours, melancholy vertical summer holiday rain with an afterscent that’s like faint pipe tobacco mixed with petrol and oranges. Plump droplets hang from the trees. A quick sortie around the neighbourhood shows that many of the area’s drains are rebelling. In the network of streets to the north east of the Arsenal Tavern pub small lakes are forming in the roads. It’s as if the tarmac and concrete have been pushed down and the area is reverting to swampland.
By early evening, the pool of water stretches across to the other side of the road. It’s still flowing heavily from the same cracks and along underneath the iron railings. Half an hour later, four men are standing in the pool, one with a clipboard. They’re all looking down at the water.
‘Have you got a burst underground river, then?’ I ask, smiling. The man with the board looks at me nervously and smiles, but doesn’t say anything. As I walk down the road a mechanical drill starts opening up the pavement Er er er er er ererererererererererereerererere. Down below, the New River flows on, biding its time.
* * *
1 (Peter Skellern style number)
Is it me
Is it you
We two
Let’s do
It.
2 Reader: Does Lincolnshire only exist so that you can write a book about it?
2. Special-Brew River Visions (No Boating, No Swimming, No Fishing, No Cycling)
• The New River – Turnpike Lane to Clerkenwell
Invisible rivers – Sex File – magic glasses – more dream analysis – in the library – Turnpike Lane – Clifford Brown – Patrick Swayze in Albanian Ladyboys – Finsbury Park – Woodberry Down – Swedish prisons – Highbury Vale – Clissold Park – Canonbury – Islington – Clerkenwell – Special Brew visions – the floods
Another dream. I’m walking along the bank of the New River in the park with my wife and daughter. The path is very narrow and the water is full of crocodiles. We start to throw golf clubs at them (irons, not woods) to stop them climbing onto the bank. I throw the whole bag in and tell the others to run for it.
London is a city of invisible boundaries. Areas alter in atmosphere or architecture in the space of a few yards, and a reason for this might be that the rivers which once flowed were often the borderlines between ancient parishes and settlements. You might walk down a street now and suddenly notice a change in the air. Chances are you have walked across the course of an underground river. The New River would have been no different. Although a recent addition to the waterways of London (about 400 years old), when it was built it would have run through mostly open countryside and settlements would have grown around it.
Some portions of the New River are visible to the naked eye. Yet these sections (for instance, Turnpike Lane to Finsbury Park), which flow silently behind housing estates and terraced streets, seem somehow not as alive as those which have disappeared. It’s the ghost parts of the river, now covered by houses, gardens, shops, parks and roads, that get me going more than the algae scum1 cuts I can see filled with bikes, shopping trolleys and empty plastic Coke bottles.
Searching for lost rivers is, in a way, a spiritual journey, searching for things that I once valued but have lost, like my Yofi acoustic guitar, God, my grandfather’s retirement watch, a sense of childlike wonder at the universe, old girlfriends’ phone numbers, a large cardboard box containing copies of the New Musical Express 1979–82, and my Sex File. Actually, my Sex File, one of the Really Big Things in my life that was truly lost (or, rather, forgotten about – it’s often the same thing) – a pink four-sided A4 folder plastered with pictures of models from a stolen late-seventies edition of Playboy, with notes and drawings (and even coloured in areas) by me – was recently rediscovered by my father. He found it folded up in an old cobwebby red-brick chicken shed in the field behind the family house, where it had lain untouched (except by spiders) for over twenty years. The Sex File was a snapshot of my early teenage desires and fears, in many ways a mystical (almost religious) document – sort of like an East Midlands Dead Sea Scrolls but with leggy blondes, huge breasts, erect nipples and adverts for penis enlargers.
Before I could track the exact course of the New River I needed to do some research at my local library. However, I was immediately faced with a problem. I wouldn’t be able to take any books out because I was currently a library Non-Person as I had a couple of books that were seven months overdue. One was an earnest tome about water spirits (the author had apparently lived with the spirits for several months and had been accepted as one of them), the other a teach-yourself aikido manual written in the fifties.
Aikido is a jolly nice way to get fit and beat up chaps who are giving you a hard time or staring at your wife. Rather than going into the ring with them you simply give them a couple of hefty aikido chops and, hey presto, their nose cartilage has been pushed up into their brain and they’re s
tone-cold dead! Crikey! You’ll be the talk of the Lounge Bar. I say, old chap, here come the rozzers. Remember, this is the fifties. The forces of Law and Order don’t take kindly to fellows who are dressed up as Chinamen. You’d better leg it, old man. Aiiee banzaaai!
The Gentleman’s Guide to Aikido
To go with my new habitat I also had a new look, a pair of mid-seventies National Health glasses. I’d originally got them when I was thirteen but never used them, having been anxious in my early teenage years to appear both tough (to stave off the hard cases who roamed the playground like carnivorous dinosaurs with feather cuts) and cool (to try and impress just one of the many girls I fell hopelessly in love with every week). Janus-like, I looked in two directions, at the birds and the bullies. Pity they weren’t in focus. Like the Sex File, the glasses had been forgotten about for a couple of decades until I recently found them at the back of a drawer in my parents’ house and brought them back to London. Now I wanted to reclaim my swottishness. If I hadn’t been so hung up on not being beaten up and getting a snog I would probably have been a pupil who enjoyed learning (‘Ha ha, not really, Togger. Only joshin’, mate!’) Now I was going to recreate the Anal Years and spend weeks in libraries. The National Health specs would give me the vision of an inquisitive and swotty thirteen year old. Without the spots, the Thin Lizzy albums and the contraband porn mags.
Leaves were already blowing across Clissold Park. The skies were now grey and heavy. Then, just as an autumn melancholy was descending over north London, summer started up again, with muggy days and tropical drizzle and dragonflies dancing around the park. Then came a full-blown three-day heat wave while all over the country irate lorry divers were picketing garages due to a petrol shortage. A sense of unreality was in the air, culminating in England winning a cricket series against the West Indies. Then the rains came again.
An email arrived from Keith the online dream analyst:
Water in dreams is a consistent symbol for emotions. (Some people speculate that our first emotional memories are created when we’re still floating in our mother’s wombs. This may explain the correlation between water and emotions.) Accordingly, floods and tidal waves and other dream visions of rising water usually are associated with periods of ‘heightened’ emotion in our lives.
Keith
This was getting annoying. Keith the online dream analyst hadn’t analysed my dream – he’d completely ignored the stuff about crocodiles and golf clubs. This highlighted a major problem with the online world. Things don’t get done properly and you, the consumer, have no come-back because even the biggest corporations are actually run from some student bedroom in the LA suburbs. With razor-sharp clarity I realized there was only one way to sort this out – go to a better and more expensive online dream analyst.
More rain. The old tree-covered New River embankment in the park was dotted with pools of murky water. Beneath some of the trees were clusters of magic mushrooms. A few years ago I would have been tempted to pick them to find out what strange dreams the river might offer me. Now, my drug of choice was a strong cup of tea. Maybe with a biscuit. While splodging around at the edge of the park I noticed that the gate to the little Victorian pump house was open and I just had to peek inside. Expecting to find lost and magical artefacts relating to the New River’s past, I found only empty cans of strong lager and cigarette packets. I stood in the building trying to imagine what it would have been like 150 years ago, but all I could picture was a couple of blokes in tatty leather jackets with beetroot faces swearing at each other. I then walked to Stoke Newington Library and sat there surrounded by books on London, place names, rivers, architecture. For the first hour I flicked through free leaflets on yoga and local arts courses, then read the papers. The other people, mostly old or worn-out looking folk and the odd goateed library employee, seemed to be there because they didn’t have anything else to do. But not me. No, ha ha, not me.
(Adjusts National Health glasses) When James VI of Scotland arrived in London in the hot summer of 1603 to be crowned King of England, he soon discovered to his horror that his new capital had a foul and unhealthy water supply. Most of the city’s medieval wells and streams had been used up and the water in the larger rivers was undrinkable. The largest of the tributaries, the Fleet, was little more than an open sewer, while the Thames was also, literally, full of shit. Small-scale conduits were piped in from outlying villages such as Paddington, but these had little impact on the now rapidly rising population. James knew that something had to be done quickly because he was thirsty.
After my first book Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive? was published in the spring of 2000 I began to consider the idea of myself as Travel Writer. Travelling, jotting things down on the back of beer mats and being paid for it seemed too good to be true. Emboldened, I decided to embark on my second book. One idea was provisionally titled Heartbreak On The Horizon, a sort-of-travel-book about (me) trying to make it as a country music songwriter, incorporating my experiences in a group which once nearly supported Eric Random and the Bedlamites at Nottingham Ad Lib Club.
However, I’d also been plugging away on a book about my experiences of London. It had developed from a novel I’d written in 1988 about tai chi film-buff bikers, set in and around a squat in Leytonstone (with free jazz, Leeds United and the history of the pullover thrown in) and had entered in the P. G. Wodehouse Comic Novel competition. After getting the rejection slip back I buried it in a field somewhere – I still get backache just thinking about it. Now I dusted down the idea. Travelling in London seemed more intriguing than roaming the planet in search of the exotic. The stuff happening at the end of any street in London is far more interesting than, say, the antics of someone stuck on a didgeridoo farm for a year. The idea of finding mystery and adventure on the other side of the world has been hijacked by the tourist industry and TV travel shows. There’s nothing new to find out there so people are turning in on themselves and looking for enchantment closer to home, looking at the things they’d forgotten about or possibly never even looked at. Like the Hare Krishna food delivery van parked across the road, the bloke at the end of the street who shouts ‘Grandad Grandad’ at the top of his voice every evening, the 125-year-old Greek woman who sits at the top of her front steps and waves to passers by. It was now obvious to me that my only course of action was to attempt a book about real life, a diary about my various journeys along the courses of the underground rivers of London.
Maybe I could do the rivers book and incorporate the country music stuff – get C&W stars to don wetsuits and swim in some of the subterranean water courses. For charity. Then record a concept album about the whole experience.
Using the old maps, I traced the course of the New River – as close as I could get – onto my A to Z. I had decided to start the walk just up the road in Hornsey, near Turnpike Lane tube, where the river reappeared after an underground stretch. There are also various sections further north – an original loop, an ornamental waterway, now flows around Enfield Town (it was replaced by a straight section of underground pipes in the thirties) and there’s also a section to the north of Wood Green. I took the Piccadilly line to Turnpike Lane, then ambled east along Turnpike Lane with its flaking Edwardian buildings, mostly small red-brick shops with awnings, selling fruit and vegetables, kebabs, the odd estate agent. It’s a tight squeeze. You almost have to move sideways to get past the people staring at the traffic, at each other, at that nowhere-in-particular place in the middle distance that many bored people look at. There also seemed to be some kind of work-for-all scheme going on – it took five people to transport a crate of satsumas or packet of toilet paper from van to shop and the pavement was full of blokes nattering to each other about the news of the day (‘Oi, Memhet, the bloke next door has got seven blokes outside his shop and there’s only six of us. We need another bloke – can we hire someone?’)
What is a turnpike? The name derives simply from a ‘lane beside a toll barrier’. Many of the major thoroughfares
into London had these barriers, presumably to pay for the upkeep of the roads. However, whenever I hear the word turnpike I think of Clifford Brown, the jazz trumpeter who died driving off the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It sounds so much more glamorous than, say, smacking into the back of a bus near Turnpike Lane tube (it’d be the 341 or 141). That’s American roads for you. If there was a road in the US called the North Circular it would seem romantic and mysterious. We’ve all been brainwashed, somehow. Maybe through hamburgers or subliminal messages in rock ’n’ roll records and Hollywood films. They’re much better at that sort of thing than us Brits. Our idea of subliminal messaging is backtaping on LPs so when spotty fourteen-year-old introverts at boarding schools in the seventies played their Led Zeppelin records backwards they would hear stuff like ‘You must worship the deviiiiiiiiiilllll. If you are a girl you want to shag Jimmy Paaaaaaaage.’
I scrutinized the squiggly blue biro line I’d drawn in my A to Z. The section of the New River I was looking for was at the junction of Turnpike Lane and Wightman Road. The New River appeared not very majestically behind a high, half-rotten wooden fence crusted with barbed wire. It snaked from around a small housing estate into a bit of a straight.