The floating things looked human but on the wrong scale, evolutionary accidents. Grey-pink. Flesh like a body condom. The paws had been lopped off, leaving the sorry creatures without proper means of identification. Interspecies monsters. The heads were never recovered. They vanished into London’s cabinet of curiosities, along with the skulls of Emanuel Swedenborg and John Williams (the suicided suspect in the Ratcliffe Highway Murders), the phantom hat of gangland victim Jack McVitie.
Heads as trophies. The bears were redundant once the heads had been hacked off. Were they decorating some Leaside pub? Or were they nailed to the wall of a neo-baronial ranch in Chigwell? Did they fulfil some shamanistic requirement, bear spirits raised as guides? Heads had long been used, in London’s underworld, as occult sources of power, botched voodoo displays. Instead of Dahomean carpets of skulls around the throne of a high king, the boiled poll of a smalltime informer, a rival.
East London’s waterway system, dank canals, had canteens of blood-rusty cutlery in them, weapons that continued to sing about forgotten crimes. Knives that begged to confess, plea-bargain. Customised shotguns. Arsenals of suspect weaponry. The police diving team was an everyday sight on the Hackney Cut and the Lee Navigation; wet suits, air bubbles, ropes. Dark fishing after the latest bin bag floater had been hauled ashore. I’ve watched them, with thermoses of coffee, thick sandwiches, cranking a car from the river. Not like Taggart. No hardbitten dialogue, no cynical pathologist dragged from a Burns night dinner. A small team taking a blow in the sunshine.
It’s more disturbing when heads start reappearing. I’m never happy with empty alcoves on English baroque monuments. It’s too easy to picture the Jacobite heads on Temple Bar. The spikes on London Bridge. Nobody liked it when Billy Moseley’s head turned up in a bundle of newspapers, in a Gents’ lavatory in Islington, up on the ridge overlooking the valley of the Fleet. It was clear, from the frosted flesh, that Billy had spent time in a deepfreeze. Less clear as to why he aborted his ill-advised cryogenic experiment.
It wasn’t just rubble under the marshes. There were legions of the unregistered dead. Children, animals. Foetuses. All, as I pictured it, headless. As a qualification. To preserve anonymity. Meat without eyes. Without souls.
*
I’ve been promising Bill and Marc a notable breakfast in the café by Springfield Park and I’m praying that it will be open. Bill, a connoisseur of cafés, knows the place. It’s where he meets his early mentor, the actor (director, philosopher, madman) Ken Campbell. A Liverpool connection. Campbell lives near the park. I’ve passed the house, without realising that it was his, noticed the tribal masks and fetish figures in the window. Hackney Marshes is a good backdrop for this latterday pataphysician with his alarming caterpillar eyebrows. Sit down with Campbell at an outside table and you are in company with a Ben Jonson clown, a whirlwind of cataclysmic energy; you realise, caught by that stare, those white, bottletop eyes, that the man is stonecold sane. He talks tickertape but his argument is rehearsed and organised; years of improvised performances, multilayered monologues, have honed his pitch. Fast as morse — but intelligible if you give yourself up to him. He puffs a small cigar. Sucks noisily at his mug of tea. He takes his role as spirit of place very seriously.
The river, as it flows beneath the gentle rise of Springfield Park, that Middle European reservation where orthodox Jews yatter on benches, reminds Campbell of a trip he made by coracle to the source of the Lea. The river slows consciousness. I could never survive in Ken Campbell’s retreat. I wouldn’t write a word. I’d spend my mornings at a table in the café, skying, watching patterns of flow, oil spill psychedelia. But Campbell’s a native, you feel the realpolitik of Leytonstone in everything he says.
He put on a durational, science fiction epic at Three Mills. And now he’s up for a ‘pidgin’ Macbeth at the Middlesex Filter Beds. He’s right. There’s a sense of theatre about these abandoned industrial spaces; trenches, dark water, tumbled concrete menhirs. The experience of going up west for an overpriced musical, a rejigged Priestley, is hell. Move the National Theatre to Walthamstow Marshes.
From his days as a pop-eyed stooge for Warren Mitchell, a bent lawyer for G.F. Newman, or anything that called for extreme physicality, Campbell graduated into a professional explainer (nutty experiments, Citroën ads). Whatever it takes to fund his own brand of spectacle and monologue, Campbell’s up for it. He’s not shy of self-promotion. Pidgin as a world-language is his current obsession.
With his soft black hat and his small cigars, he’s a piratical, actor/manager figure. The bushy eyebrows have, unilaterally, declared their independence. He has to cope with a tangle of dogs and leads, stagy business that involves feeding them a constant stream of broken biscuits. His teeth are magnificently shipwrecked, the colour of ancient dominoes. He’s performed as a duck in Alice in Wonderland, with Ken Dodd as a rat; he’s given underwater concerts with Heathcote Williams. He wears a Dreamcatcher T-shirt. He raps through the ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow’ speech in pidgin to the amazement of the riverside loungers.
The café serves filter coffee and has calamari on the breakfast menu. We settle in, calling for additional rounds of tea and toast. Drummond is scribbling in his notebook. He tells us about The Unabomber Manifesto. ‘Today,’ he would write, in his account of the walk, ‘I’m a born-again would-be terrorist.’ From that landmine laugh, you might believe it. The look is right: sensible, corduroy, with pale-rimmed specs. What’s in that rucksack? (He carries it looped over one shoulder, so that it doesn’t actually qualify as a twitcher’s pouch.) Bona fide terrorists are lab technicians, junior lecturers, schoolteachers with a grievance. Bill has some of that, but he’s too tall, too much of a walker. He knows his wildlife. As we strolled alongside the Marshes, the reservoir embankments, he pointed out grey wagtail, dunnock. We aren’t going to challenge him. Atkins knows two kinds of birds: seagulls and the ones that aren’t seagulls. He’s telling Drummond about his time as a Heavy Metal roadie.
*
Gradually, landscape induces confidences. The cycle gates become less of an irritation. Road bridges energise us, traffic noise plays against pastoral tedium. Ferry Hale Road, Forest Road. On my first walks up the Lea, I used to think that an old fisherman’s pub, here on the fringe of Walthamstow, was truly rustic. Izaak Walton in the back bar stuffing a pike. There must have been a ferry somewhere near this clapboard ghost. A haunt of narrowboat skippers and their dogs.
The site is now distinguished by a frivolous display of marine architecture. It thinks it’s on the Algarve: balconies, furled parasols, greenery dripping from window ledges, blue glass. The Heron Hospitality Centre. Even the herons are embarrassed by it, they spindle away to Tottenham Marsh. Perch, in solitude, on convenient branches, trying to pretend — which is impossible given their size, the design faults — that they’re not really there. Neo-Romantic doodles, scissor-beaks and Anglepoise knees.
Drummond is gobsmacked. Hand on hip, he tries to make sense of this latte-coloured folly. Why would anyone position a glass and plaster box alongside a scummy lock on the high road to Walthamstow and Epping Forest? Blatant white space-ism: architects ignore the implications of where their buildings will be sited. Nothing exists beyond the frame of an idealised sketch. Invertebrate people with identikit faces lounging on an imaginary deck. There’s no road, no marsh, no industry.