The Groundwater Diaries: Trials, Tributaries and Tall Stories from Beneath the Streets of London. Tim Bradford
Читать онлайн книгу.
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 stone-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,