The Groundwater Diaries: Trials, Tributaries and Tall Stories from Beneath the Streets of London. Tim Bradford
Читать онлайн книгу.
possible and hold it. This is called a smile. Remember this facial expression when you are meeting new people or at a job interview. It tells people ‘I am a positive no-holds-barred-get-up-and-go-live-for-today-smiley-doing sort of person.’ It’s more than a smile – it’s a Power Smile™.
Within minutes of digesting that lot I was feeling like a buff-cheeked gibbon that’s inhaled a year’s supply of laughing gas.
Walthamstow is famous for two things. The jellied eel and William Morris. I’m not always keen on the Great Man theory of history, but in the case of Walthamstow I feel it’s appropriate. I’ve always liked the idea of Morris rather than his art, which seemed to me to be a load of girly Laura-Ashley-style designs copied and repeated on a wall. Morris married Jane Bowden, a local girl with red curly hair who was discovered working in a shop (‘I say, a SHOP don’t you know!’) by his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She eventually become Rossetti’s lover again after Morris became obsessed with discovering the perfect wallpaper glue. In portraits she looks a bit like Nicole Kidman.
And jellied eels taste like slimy, dryish sick. My gran told me the whole point of jellied eels was that you weren’t supposed to taste them, just greedily swallow great gloopy lumps like cheap oysters. Morris was obsessed with these small slippery creatures that lived in a pulsating glob of sticky goo. He felt that they were God’s first creatures, living in the primordial jelly. Many of his most famous designs tried to capture the swirly essence of the jellied eel. People don’t realise that the jelly is natural – it is their house and their food source. It’s as if we all lived in places made out of pasta. Morris knew this. He saw the way jellied eels interacted with their environment and each other and it inspired him to try to create a better, more community-based and creative society. The Walthamstow jellied eel also represents, as Morris well knew, the serpent, life and pagan religion. The Vikings were pagan and their longboats had serpents/dragons/jellied eels carried on the front.
Other artists who loved jellied eels:
Pablo Picasso
James Joyce
Jean-Paul Sartre
Joan Miró
‘It does not make a bad holiday’ to go to Walthamstow, said Morris, evidently not bribed by the Walthamstow Tourist Board. The area was mostly countryside until the end of the nineteenth century. I used to love going running or walking around Walthamstow marshes on summer evenings, then lying down in the grass and watching the clouds scoot by, listening to crickets, cockney geezers with pit bulls threatening each other, car alarms going off and ambulances screaming. It’s an area of interesting wildlife.
History bit – The marshes were first drained for grazing purposes in Alfred the Great’s time as a way of showing off to the Danes. They were so impressed they gave him their jellied eels. What did they get in return? Over 1000 years later the Danes would get punk music. Yet something is not quite right about my punk theory. I’ve been staring at a map of the North Sea/ German Ocean/cold slab of muddy water off Mablethorpe and wondering whether the Bullshit Detector on the makeshift raft really made it to Denmark? How realistic is that? I could be fantasizing. When you look at the facts, it’s much more likely that it ended up in Sweden or Norway.
It was time to walk Stevey P.’s river. First of all I had to get in touch with the spirit of William Morris. I’ve never done channelling before. I remember reading about the great medium Doris Stokes whose ears used to go red when she contacted the dead. My whole face goes red when I drink extra strong lager, so something must be happening. And it was to Tennent’s Super that I turned when looking for a name for Stevey P.’s river. A couple of cans in and I was buzzing. Were those ghosts I could hear or my own voices: happy Tim and Morrissey Tim? I sat back and relaxed, taking deep breaths. And then it came to me. I had an urge to look on the A to Z again and I saw it almost straight away. South of the Lea Bridge Road came my answer. Stevey’s river, the mystery river, was called Dagenham Brook. (Cue Time-Team-style ancient drums and flute music). But why Dagenham? This stream flowed nowhere near Dagenham, which lies 12 miles to the south-east – unless …. Walthamstow used to be near Dagenham and, like the Lost City of Atlantis, was engulfed by the waters of the Lea (but, unlike Atlantis, then deposited 6 miles upriver to a spot east of Tottenham). I could see where Dagenham Brook entered the Lea and its course to there from Stevey’s place. But north of that there was nothing. So I decided to take a different tack and walk towards, rather than away from, the source.
Of course, searching for the source is also in a sense a journey to rediscover one’s own spiritual nature through personal exploration and self-cultivation. At least that’s what Poppy, my ex-dream analyst, used to say before I dumped her for Yorkshire Mike. I kind of miss Poppy now, her madcap Californian optimism. I hoped to unlock the spiritual treasures of the universe and light the way to a life of internal and external harmony and fulfilment. And having already had some experience of Walthamstow, I surmised that this journey would have to take place in a pub full of fat blokes. During my Walthamstow years, our old local boozer was the Lorne Arms in Queens Road and it boasted three of the biggest lads in the whole of north London – the Beard brothers, weighing in at around 60 stone between them. Beard, the eldest, was around 23 stone, his younger brother Little Beard was about 20 stone and the baby of the family, Tiny Beard, was 17 stone. They all had the same beards. I thought they might be the living embodiment of the legendary giants of the City of London, known to most people as Gog and Magog (and Tiny GogMagogGog), who are carried around in the Lord Mayor’s procession. They spend most of the rest of their year propping up the bar of the Lorne. Also there was Val the barmaid. We liked her to leave a decent head on our pints of Guinness rather than knife it off into the tray. ‘You boys like a bit of head,’ that was her catchphrase. ‘I said, you boys like’ … And Landlord Len, denizen of the Grand Order of Water Rats, a sort of Freemasons Lite for cockneys, I suppose.
Walthamstow – the sludgeree years
When we lived in Walthamstow we all fancied ourselves as top chefs. Possibly the cheap local produce available at Walthamstow market inspired us. But it was also a good way to impress any woman who dared to come round. I had four specialities:
1. Marmalade paella – only wheeled out when we were absolutely desperate and about to starve, and which consisted of brown rice and marmalade.
2. Oxo porridge – a highly nutritious oat-based meal in beef, chicken or vegetable flavours. Ingredients: porridge oats, water, Oxo cube.
3. Angel-hair pasta with ketchup – what it says.
4. Sludgeree – buy lots of vegetables. Put in pan with water and leave for several hours and go down the Lorne to lose at pool to Dukey, until ingredients have merged into a thick, industrial sludge.
You’re probably thinking, after seeing those recipes, that I was King of the Cooks, the alpha-male of the oven. But I certainly didn’t have it all my own way. Plendy had this amazing dish called pasta and tomatoes. It consisted of pasta, about a hundredweight of garlic and a tin of tomatoes all mixed up together. If he was feeling really fancy he’d make a salad to accompany it. Dukey had tuna explosion, which involved him hiring a small plane and dropping a couple of tins of tuna fish from several thousand feet. He’d then scoop up the resulting mess and stick it in a pan with – a tin of tomatoes. Ruey had some kind of fishy bits thing. He used to get fishy off cuts from a local fishmonger. Tobe had pineapple curry. All I remember is tins of pineapple and curry sauce. Rich never used to cook, so we’d nick his dope and put it in our own meals, just to take the edge off the anger of those who had to eat it.
And we used to make serious money on these meals. If the food cost, say, £1.50 the chef would invariably ask for 70p each, thus making a handy mark-up. This would go straight into a savings account. Occasionally when a woman came round we’d stick on an album of French accordion music that I’d found at a jumble sale and try and schmooze them with top grub. Strangely, late eighties women just didn’t appreciate fine food.
The house was split down the middle between English and Scottish tenants, but it was more complex than that. The split-personality fault lines of Walthamstow also meant