Downriver (57 page)

Dissenters and criminals (marginal to the needs and legitimate desires of the state) were once spilled into the wilderness of an unmapped world; where they fought for breath with savage aboriginals. The hulks provided a neutral zone, removed from the land's heat. To live here was to lose your memory. You could not vote or speak. But the outbreak of the American War of Independence made it impractical to transport these brutalized slaves. They were held in perpetual transit: a floating Gatwick, without the duty-frees. The only destination was death. Which
was also the only product of their labours. Dame Cholera. Work was the only freedom. ‘
Punished by being kept on Board Ships or Vessels properly accommodated for the Security, Employment, and Health of the Persons to be confined therein, and by being employed in Hard Labour in the raising of Sand, Soil, and Gravel from, and cleansing, the River Thames
…'

Now the hulks were occupied once more, under the co-sponsorship of English Heritage, who had lovingly restored them to the last detail of authenticated squalor. This daringly simple solution had been unveiled by the Widow in her keynote Marshalsea Speech (subsequently recognized by commentators as the moment when the perceived identity of Britain changed from Orwell's colonial airstrip on the fringes of the civilized world to a land which had, successfully, made a reservation of its own history).

‘From this day forward,' the Widow began, with a defiant twist of the head, a lift of the nut-crusher chin, ‘let it be known that We are no longer to be considered the prisoners of history. We have forced open the great iron doors of mystification, self-doubt, self-critical inertia. We have walked, unafraid, into the sunlight. History has been conquered.
Rejoice!
We have summoned up the courage to recognize – after decades of misrule, lip-service to alien gods – that
anything
is possible. If We will it. If it is the mandate of the people. The future is whatever We believe it to be!'

Hysterical (orchestrated) cheering continued until the Widow lifted her hand: to preserve the health of several of her key ministers who were empurpled with enthusiasm, to the point of spontaneous combustion. The fanatical ranks of the faithful (
flog, maim, crush
), gathered for the ceremony of throwing wide the Marshalsea gates (reconstructed for the purpose by Stanley Kubrick's design ace) to welcome the first beneficiaries, fell silent.

‘After We have finished speaking to you today, there will never again in this noble land of ours be such a thing as a prison,'
she continued, unblushing. ‘A prison is a state of mind. And, unlike our opponents – who are fettered in ritual dogmas –
We
sincerely believe that We can
all
be released from outmoded concepts of state care. And, in good faith, We make you
this
offer: let every man become his own warder, protecting the things he loves best: his
family
, his
home
, his
country
. Then, and only then, will We discover what
true
freedom means.'

Sir Alec Guinness shuffled forward, doing some marvellously observed business with a red-spotted handkerchief, touching the side of his nose, dissociating himself from his actions. He smirked, cancelled a cough, and cut the ribbon. The Marshalsea was reopened as a Dossers' Dormitory. Vagrants were driven in (by the container load) from their cardboard camps. They should no longer give the lie to the Widow's rhetoric of achievement. Corporate Japanese in white raincoats (like gulls, they tracked the action) fussed at the lowlife with their cameras, giggling over the quaint ritual of ‘slopping out'. From the viewing gallery above, they composed eloquent longshots as these tattered vacancies perambulated their circuit of the yard, under ferociously pointed walls. The ‘guests' of the hospice paid their way by posing for polaroid versions of Doré's anguished etchings: which, incidentally, were on sale, mounted and framed, at the gatehouse. All credit cards accepted.

The hulks were the flagships of a new social order. The shirts of the prisoners hung over the side, as if in surrender: ‘so black with vermin that the linen positively appeared to have been sprinkled over with pepper'. Benevolent plagues carried off the inadequates. The succubus kiss of Dame Cholera made room among the hammocks for an ever-increasing army of offenders, fit-ups, unbelievers, and political heretics. The parson, a white-livered clown, planted himself on the poop deck of the vessel; claret bottle in one hand, a bible in the other. He was afraid to accompany the corpses, as they were stretchered in their dozens, by mask-wearing trusties, to the burying grounds, away among the marshes. Alone, he read the burial service, at a rattling trot,
dabbing his carbuncular nose with a silk handkerchief soaked in eau-de-cologne. When he arrived at ‘ashes to ashes, and dust to dust', he let the handkerchief drop: a strangled dove, fluttering, stalled, caught in a contagious thermal. And the bodies, at this signal (captured by the sergeant's telescope), were lowered into their lime pit.

I had moved apart from the others. There was a hatch in the cabin roof through which I squeezed my head and shoulders. I could not move my arms, but I could see everything ahead of us. Kay fired the engine. And we roared back out on to the river. The noise dispersed the ghosts. I could hear nothing my companions said. I was driven over the marbled waters like a wooden figurehead; mute, powerless – but inconveniently sensitized to every whim of the light, every
memento mori
in the running tide. The river outpaced my fear of it: a tightening roll of mad calligraphy, scribbled wavelets, erasures, periods of gold. I was buffeted through a book that had turned to water.

We left Woolwich behind us; its barracks, Arsenal, Museum of Artillery: we dodged the trundling ferry, and scorned the gaunt mushroom field of Telecom discs on the north shore. We relished the clear water of Gallions Reach. There were no other craft. A torn-paper outline of advancing headland. A carpet of clouds.

It could not last. Even Jerome, safely upstream, had his unexpected encounters: he found ‘something black floating on the water'. A suicided woman, around whom he spun a sentimental fable. But I was staring into the dark spaces between the wave crests, letting the ink run,
willing
some apparition to justify our voyage, as we retraced the fatal track of the
Bywell Castle
, midstream, closing on the beacon at Tripcock Ness. Navigation lights. The
Princess Alice
, visible over the murky ground – a land vessel caught among the dead branches, the hooks of thorn! Her red light and her masthead light. ‘
Stop the engine! Reverse full speed!
' The thing was inevitable. We passed through the wings of tragedy. I could not turn away. It was too easy to enter the
consciousness of Captain Harrison, who also travelled here from the domestic safety of his Hackney villa. I was repeating his account of the journey. And I was aware of it.

Harrison of the
Bywell
, I learnt, resided in Cawley Road, Victoria Park. One of those strong, ugly, family houses taken on in later years by exiled Poles. The hobbled green of Well Street Common lay to stern; the ocean of the Park broke, tamely, over the bows. The house, a brick-built collier, rode at anchor, between voyages. But it could catch the tide at an hour's notice from the owners.

Cawley Road survived into the 50p edition of the
London A–Z
, but it has subsequently been purged – leaving Henry Milditch, the thespian bookdealer, who lived directly behind Harrison, and who stalked his destiny like a herring gull, with an unimpeded view of the Park.

Milditch, red-bearded (as of this
A.M
.) – worried, wrinkled like a preserved fruit – stared over Captain Harrison's shoulder at the familiar prairie. He was sunk into the immortal melancholy (stateless, land-locked) of a man who knows that, however well his affairs prosper, it is only a matter of time before the Cossack hordes thunder out from the Lido. Grass liquefied before his tired eyes. The Burdett-Coutts Folly was an island – on which the child, Jerome K. Jerome, claimed to have met and held a prophetic conversation with Charles Dickens. Authors of Destiny!

Milditch saw none of this. In his hand was a telephone. He smiled as he lied. In an empty room he made appointments. He withdrew books he had already sold. He smoked a cheap cigar. Captain Harrison, the dead man, was cleared to sail to his fate.

The sense of wellbeing, the anticipated pleasure of a short voyage, was such that Harrison carried his wife with him in a growler to Millwall on the Isle of Dogs. An unlucky thing, a taboo broken: a woman brought on board. A rival to the jealous spirit of the river. (As they clipped through the south side of the Park, the Captain noticed a gang of workmen repointing the stone alcoves, the London Bridge trophies.)

The Captain asked Christopher Dix, a pilot of thirty-four years' experience, to scour the riverside drinking dens for ‘runners': family men, far gone in drink, who would sail to Newcastle, but no further. Purcell, the stoker, was – even by the long standards of his craft – outrageously drunk. Skewed, damaged, blotto. He stank of doom. Wharf rats backed away from his reeling shadow. He rambled incontinently. Two strong-stomached runners supported him up the plank to the
Bywell Castle
. (Do or Die?
Pass the bottle
.)

The first collision came when the
Bywell Castle
's propeller inflicted a cut on the port chine of a barge that drifted across her path as she ran on the ebb tide from the outer Millwall Dock. This was a sober rehearsal. Grander sacrifices were required. The collier dutifully aligned herself with the High Victorian demand for drama (and with our desire to write about it). Panther-feasting poetasters, trained for years on stock drownings and suicide sonnets, let rip in a flood of privately printed chapbooks. The gross weight of public sympathy was forcing the boats together (like the mating of pandas) before they so much as let their hawsers drop on the quayside. All that good will could not go unrewarded: 640 deaths was the most reliable estimate. Rescue services can justify themselves only among the dying. The health and security of any society is measured in regular cathartic doses of mayhem. The
Alice
was split and its human cargo spilled into the water.

The account of what happened after the sinking belongs to Purcell. The strange incident in the cutter. Purcell and Mullins (a Somerset runner) pulled downstream for Erith. They trawled for corpses – finding four, including a young woman, ‘
warm and supple as though she was still alive
'. They were in awe of a tall stranger, handsome, flame-bearded, who sat with them, though they did not know him, nor where he came from. The men spoke later of his enveloping ‘boat cloak' and the stovepipe hat that he clutched to his head. His hair was unusually long. Certainly, his manner was that of‘a gentleman'. He spoke only once
– sharply – in warning to Purcell: ‘Hold your row.' The keel scraped on the slipway. The boatswain crossed himself. Moonlight. Two gas lamps illuminated the landing place. The stranger had vanished. And was never seen again. Neither among the crowd giving statements, nor in the Yacht Tavern, nor even at the Inquest.

Purcell. The bodies taken from the cutter and placed in a handcart. A constable painstakingly entering the particulars into his notebook. Age, height, weight, clothing. Mullins carried an old man, more dead than alive, on his back to the tavern. ‘Better to have let him ride in the cart,' said Purcell. ‘They'll measure his length before the night's out.' They took brandy and later beer. Purcell seemed strangely elated. Said he had spilled some silver in the bottom of the cutter. Returned to the river; alternately lifting a pint pot and a lantern. He found a halfpenny down among the scuppers. Was visibly shaken. His dampened moleskin trousers bulging comically over his engorged member.

Before dawn he had accused the Captain and the pilot of being drunk. These were serious charges. ‘Take care what you say, man.' ‘Boozed, sir? Every blood bung. Soaked – all of us.' Purcell: shivering in shirt, moleskins, calico cap. Borrowed a jacket off Harris the confectioner, got some warmth from the fishtail burners: ‘a pleasant yeasty smell'. Accepted cake and ginger beer. Returned. This time he was not followed. The body of the young woman on the landing stage, under a policeman's cape. Her feet and her ankles uncovered. ‘Warm and supple.' Hot brandy to her lips. ‘Boozing all the afternoon long, guv' nor. As I'd report before my Maker.' He had the skirts up, bruised her white thighs with his thumbs. Sniffing at her – a dog – for warmth, for the smell of life. He would not look in her face. Rolled her. They thought he was after jewellery, hidden coins. It was worse. Or: it was the only human reaction. He let down his trousers. ‘A call of nature,' he claimed. To piss back into the river. Turn spirit to water. He climbed on her. Mounted. Entered. Spent. They drew a bucket to pitch over him. Mullins
put a fist in his mouth. The cur! He spat blood. Tobacco juice. Called out, justified.
Daughter!
He believed there was life in her still.

Harrison recalled the navigation lights crossing over the headland. ‘Like lamps on a hansom.' Margaret, or Tripcock Ness. ‘There was singing from a multitude of voices.' The ship's orchestra. The dancers inherit the party. A bass viol floated away on the tide: an inflatable curate. A varnished torso. The bow fetched up in Gravesend. Bodies drifted ashore between Frog Island and Greenhithe. The victims chose an unlucky hour to enter the water. They were discharging the sewage from both the north and the south banks into Barking Creek. Outflow. Mouths open, screaming. Locked in a rictus. Rage of the reading classes. Public demand for the immediate provision of swimming pools for the worthy poor. Let them learn breast-stroke. Letters to
The Times
. Eels suture the ragged wounds. Good, traditional fare, served in public houses: The Angel, the Mayflower, Town of Ramsgate, White Swan, Blacksmith's Arms. Begetting potency. Lead in the pencil. Oil on troubled water. Tanned, condom-skinned sliders. Toyed with (forked aside) by fastidious matrons. Ripe green: catarrh. ‘Two continuous columns of decomposed fermenting sewage, hissing like soda water with baneful gasses, so black that the water is stained for miles and discharging a corrupt charnel-house odour.'