London Overground (14 page)

St Mary's
at Battersea, a white church dwarfed by cliffs of river-facing flats, is a site of abiding significance. This is where William Blake married Catherine Boucher, daughter of market gardeners. Blake moved to the neighbourhood in July 1782 to stay with relatives and establish residence before the marriage ceremony. Catherine, who marked the formal certificate with an ‘X', accompanied Blake through all his shifts, helping with the colouring of his proofs, cooking, keeping house, singing – and, like Leila (Kötting) McMillan, making her husband's clothes.

I have been inside this church and appreciated the bounce of light from the river, the way it polishes the soft leather seat of the old chair associated with Turner – and the claim that he kept it here, dragging it outside to paint when sunset visions, upstream, took his fancy. I don't think it matters so much what these London luminaries actually did or did not do; the tables, beds and addresses supposedly sanctified by their presence. There are so many ghosts present in these quiet buildings; unregistered, obliterated from gravestones. We dowse for traces, for special sites to confirm the mystery and magic of the city. Ruin becomes rune. Eloquent absences sustaining our faith in the continuity of stubborn visionary experience. Against everything that is permitted or accountable. The belief in progress. Investing in the future. Serving the community.

St Mary's invokes the spirit of Catherine more than that of William. He came to her. He responded to the empathy she demonstrated over the way he had been spurned by an earlier love. She may or may not, at that time, have been literate. She was parted from Blake for only a few days in the forty-five years they were together. He never had reason to write to her. His letters were matters of business, solicited commissions, sleights by patrons. ‘To the Eyes of a Miser a Guinea is more beautiful than the Sun, & a bag worn with the use of Money has more beautiful proportions than a Vine filled with Grapes.'

SPIRITUALLY SEARCHING SINCE
693
AD
.
OPEN CHURCH OPEN HEART
. New apartment blocks, new Battersea: locked church door. Even when the interior is off-limits, the memory of it remains potent. The temenos, the scoop of ground, retains its quality as a riverside retreat, a mooring with an exposed beach of silt, clay, broken bricks, returned plastic. A sanctuary set against the non-denominational pyramid-tower of Chelsea Harbour on the north shore.

The temenos for Carl Jung had aspects of the peyote shamanism promoted by Carlos Castaneda in his books about the Yaqui
brujo
, Don Juan: a secured area of ground in which it is ‘safe' to attempt feats of meditation or magical workings for the renewal of self. ‘I was the noisiest walker,' Castaneda wrote, when he resumed his apprenticeship after a break of four years, ‘and that made me into an unwilling clown.' Jung's temenos was the squared circle, the mandala garden with a fountain at the centre. A site in which to confront one's shadow. In a degraded form, this was the ambition behind our orbital tramp. To be attentive to the voices; to walk beside our shadow selves. To reverse the polarity of incomprehensible public schemes, the secret motors of capital defended and promoted by professionally mendacious politicians capable of justifying anything.

We walked down to the foreshore, which was granular, rough under our tread, like a beach made from cracked nutshells swept from a parrot's cage. Hanging from the grey-blue wall, at the slipway leading to the river, was a votive display of single shoes, drowned trainers, slime-encrusted boxing boots and scarlet football slippers. They rocked against the rising tide on leather straps and coloured strings. They reminded me of Maltese churches decorated with crutches and callipers, offered as evidence of miraculous cures. This Battersea installation invoked a troop of one-legged marathon runners swallowed
by the Thames. Kötting, who had more experience of provincial art galleries, half-cooked conceptualism, put it down to sex, gay trysting. ‘They're all at it down here. Six-foot hulks with five-o'clock shadow looking for Cinderella's glass slipper under the railway arches.'

I'm not convinced. I saw trees on mountain passes in California thick with a harvest of unmatched trainers; much cleaner, it's true, than this shoreline crop. Crossing Hungerford Bridge, one time, making a considerable detour with the intention of connecting with the District Line at Embankment, to ride east to Whitechapel, for the sole purpose of coming home on the Overground, I looked down, as jumpers do, and noticed a great spread of shoes dropped on one of the piers supporting the bridge. There must be hundreds of barefoot pilgrims out there, following the river, and paying their dues before
crossing to the other side. That made more sense: the slipway in Battersea and Hungerford Bridge were points of transition. Give the ferryman his due. Take off
one
shoe before you enter the next chamber of the city. Limp on, urban sadhu: one foot, encased, touching the ground, and one foot, bare, cleansed in the river. Every step a penance, every step a memento mori.

Battersea Bridge confirms the distance now separating us from the Overground circuit. Shallow arches, alternately black and white, harpoon directly into the alien aggregation of the Chelsea Harbour development. Our footfall bridge is a Turkish fantasy, nicely managed, playing games with scale, under thunderous skies already stained with sunset. We are conscious that the five-span bridge with its seductive cast-iron detailing, its rose-pattern screens throwing shadows on the path, is a relative newcomer, a Joseph Bazalgette replacement of 1885, taking trade from the original ferry. Coming over by boat allowed time for adjustment. There are claims that this was the point of the Thames, then sluggish and fordable, where Julius Caesar made his crossing in 54
BC
.

Alongside the statue of Whistler, in a little riverside alcove, is a bench of respite, where pilgrims can follow the exiled artist's unblinking stare back across the Thames to St Mary's in Battersea. A gaunt figure, in a greasy trilby, was slumped, panting, recovering, legs gone. I noticed that he was wearing a shroud-like garment, a hospital gown or unlaced straightjacket, under his long brown coat. Andrew was too tired to bother with memorials. The American impressionist, master of tone, moonlight on river, silver on luminous black, left him cold. He was flinching from the sudden wealth of Cheyne Walk, the compulsory blue and brown heritage plaques like posh people's satellite dishes. He spoke of cycling down here, not really knowing where he was, and making deliveries to
pioneer production companies. He didn't have the puff, at that moment, for his usual interrogation.

‘Four miles to Mortlake,' said the man on the bench. ‘Must be at least that, wouldn't you say?'

He spoke as if he knew me. The trick is never to stop moving. Just smile and nod. I nodded.

‘You could get the Overground from Imperial Wharf to Clapham Junction, then the train,' I said.

‘I don't employ buses. Or trains,' he replied. ‘One never knows who one is going to have to sit beside.' He gave Kötting a meaningful glare.

The distressed walker reminded me of a character out of Sebald, a revenant squeezed from the sepia juices of old photo albums, incubated out of friable press cuttings, translated and mistranslated into the contemporary world. He called up the Sebald laboratory assistant in Manchester, the one who absorbed so much silver that he became a ‘kind of photographic plate'. Face and hands, exposed to bright light, turned blue. Then other selves, earlier portraits, came up through his skin: a carousel of death masks.

Sebald, I was reminded when I came to check that reference in
The Emigrants
, also had something to say about the dangers of a morbid obsession with train systems. Which sometimes led in his manipulated histories to acts of ritualized suicide, head on tracks, spectacles laid aside, shadowy form approaching as a terrible sound: mortality. ‘Railways had always meant a great deal to him,' Sebald wrote, ‘perhaps he felt they were headed for death.'

Our man hunched forward. If he moved, the pain would be unbearable. His brown brogues were unlaced; in fact, they had no laces.

‘It hurts too much to bend down.'

He
had no socks and his ankles were like wrists, all knob and hairless bone.

‘How far have you come?'

‘Brompton.'

Long walks, at certain points, throw up messengers from parallel worlds. You see them when you need them. Perhaps, in some strange way, they need us too: confirming absence, confirming the validity of a confession that has to be made, over and again. I've come across old women supposedly picking up litter in Kentish woods who saved me miles by putting me back on the right path. Wise men waiting in birdwatchers' hides near Whitstable. Snake-tattooed stoners on narrowboats with keys to forbidden locks.

Kötting took the chance to massage his own ankles, but he wouldn't risk removing boots that were beginning to slurp with burst blisters and the cheesy secretions of feet that had never quite recovered from the rats and mud of his swan voyage up the Medway.

The vagrant's story emerged in fits and starts. The Mortlake room, in a house overlooking the graveyard where Sir Richard Burton, the saturnine adventurer and eroticist, pitched his stone tent sepulchre, was the motivation for this desperate hike. The man without socks lived between river and railway. The light of one. The sound of the other. He wasn't well, but who is? Blinding headaches, white light. Pressure on the basal ganglia. Eventual collapse. Local quack. Ambulance with siren screaming. Hospital on the wrong side. Brain tumour. Power drill splits the scalp.

‘They always say “size of a grapefruit”. More like a moderate-sized lemon. And good riddance.'

He discharged himself in two days, against advice. And is now walking back to his Mortlake room, his papers.

I
told him about a person who sent me a bag of notes, diagrams, X-rays. He superimposed the outline of his tumour, the size of a Christmas pudding, on Clerkenwell. The notion being to walk the shape as a healing pilgrimage. He dedicated the exercise to Rahere, the monk who founded the hospital of St Bartholomew in Smithfield. He died within a month of the attempt. I left out that part of it. And we took our leave, wishing the outpatient well.

It's unfeeling and predatory to dwell on such incidents, but the encounter with the man on the bench gave our steps a certain lift, as we discussed and debated the veracity of his account. The wounded walker didn't remove his trilby when we raised our hands in a farewell salute, but I saw no evidence of hair beneath.

Heritaged artists of former times, now approved as enhancers of real estate, dominated this stretch of the river. Along with parking space for superior houseboats under threat of eviction, to make room for the yachts of oligarchs. Here were moorings where bohemians hung out in swinging London films of the 1960s. John Osborne, at the time of his triumph with
Look Back in Anger
, was tied up at Chiswick. In more recent times, Damien Hirst customized one of these floating islands to the highest specifications. He was part of a co-operative of barge owners trying to buy the Chelsea Reach moorings, before the owners could sell the land for £4.75 million. The Cheyne Walk spectres of Sir Thomas More and Sir Michael Jagger nudged us towards the Overground. We would all live on the river if we could, waiting for the rains of
Schadenfreude
to wash us away. Climate is another word for conscience.

Turner, Whistler, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, George Eliot, Mrs Gaskell, Hilaire Belloc, Philip Wilson Steer, Sylvia Pankhurst,
Ian Fleming: quite a party. What a roost of entitled egos blue-badging enviable properties.

Lots Road, losing the impact of the Thames behind the domineering bulk of the former power station, is a useful demonstration of how London can switch gears in a blink.
Don't look back.
Lot, the Old Testament fugitive from Sodom, his wife recently converted to a pillar of salt (valuable commodity), was condemned to wander in desert places. The name ‘Lots Road' reverberates; tight terraces, now brightly painted, sound like
Lost Road.
Like Los, Blake's ‘Prophet of Eternity', manifestation of the spirit of poetry.

Andrew does look back to days editing early films in production houses that advertise the transition from dirty (and useful) industry to artisanal latte, retrospective orthopaedic chairs, and property sharks wanting to price anachronistic residents out of the market.

And I look back too. We are salty enough already, sweat dripping down our collars. The power station was still in play, 1964, and I was home from France, roofless, in company with Ivan Pawle, later to achieve cult status with the psychedelic folk group known as Dr Strangely Strange. The usual West London floors, around Cromwell Road and Notting Hill, were not available. A riverside drift brought us to a boarding house in Lots Road, hot bunks for shift workers at the coal (and later oil-fired) power plant. This brief Orwellian moment made me aware of what the city offered if you were without employment or money in your pocket. A view of smoking chimney stacks and a penitential wall.