The boys were taken on excursions to Brighton. They were given the job of lifting and sorting crocuses. They enjoyed themselves, fishing and playing cricket on the lawns. There is a photograph, something like a Latigue, of a card school dressed in Edwardian bathing costumes. One boy, the nearest to the camera, has stuck out his tongue. Another favourite, Fred, did an impression of Gussie with a watering can. He fell into the river. ‘He squelched off to the house,’ Hewitt writes, ‘where Gussie gave him a bath and dry clothes. He reappeared dressed in a pair of Gussie’s flannel trousers, a Norfolk jacket and a trilby with the brim turned down and proceeded to shamble about giving a hilarious imitation of Gussie who joined in the fun.’
Bowles Boys served on the Western Front in the First War. Gussie wrote to them with news of the harvest and the ‘burning hot days in July’, he sent food parcels. Many were wounded, crippled, killed. The honoured dead of the Hertfordshire Yeomanry, the Royal Field Artillery, the Middlesex Regiment and the Royal Fusiliers.
The residue of what Bowles attempted, a life given over to the creation of a garden, remains. It works in a way that Capel Manor, with its strategic planting, its demonstrations, never will. Capel Manor debates a Princess Diana memorial garden, the form it should take: a place of remembrance beside an orbital motorway. Myddleton House has a more direct royal connection. The foreword to Bryan Hewitt’s book is written by the grandson of E.A. Bowles’s brother. ‘I think of my Great Great Uncle Gussie often as I walk around our small Wiltshire garden,’ writes Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles, OBE (horseman, courtier and former husband of the royal mistress, Camilla). ‘If, as I suspect, my uncle is looking back from “across the wide river” he will be amazed to discover that his name is still revered and his works much admired.’
3
Bill Drummond — green weatherproof, thick blue jersey, specs on string, spiky hair — eased himself out of his Aylesbury cab. I was waiting with Marc Atkins beside the (closed) doors of the Church of the Holy Cross and St Lawrence at Waltham Abbey.
Bill has the look of a man interrupted: he’s been thinking about another project, talking/not talking, skidding across a dark landscape, and now he’s expelled. Damp air. Another early start. A walk across Enfield Chase to the National Institute for Medical Research at Mill Hill. Why?
Dumb instinct — on my part. Which is always the best method. It’s a slight detour, in terms of our orbital circuit, but Waltham Abbey to Mill Hill, across the Chase, favours the lie of the land; the way the rivers go, the direction of the footpaths. I reckon we can knock this one off, through parks, woodland, farm roads, and arrive at the hospital in time for the lunchtime lecture. At 1.30 p.m., in the Fletcher Hall, German conceptualist Jochen Gerz (associate of Joseph Beuys and Reiner Ruthenbeck) is going to address the whitecoats on the subject of ‘Works in Public Spaces’.
I don’t like deadlines. They put a damper on the urge to digress. Shouldn’t we expect the unexpected? But the hospital block on the summit of Mill Hill is a real marker, generator of paranoid imaginings. I’m always uneasy when covert research, generously funded, starts to cosy up to subversive art. There’s something awkward about the relationship. To access the art manifestation (conceptual corridor, lunchtime lecture) you have to blag your way into the Pentagon, into Langley. Surveillance swipe, signature in book, electronic barrier, phone call to a higher authority.
I turned up, the first time, to see a show, ‘Cityscapes’, by the photographer Erne Paleologou. 10 February 1998. I love Effie’s work, her nightstalker’s liminal meditations. A young Greek woman, living in East London, she starts at the railway station, moving away, making the familiar unfamiliar, playing with scale and expectation, discovering the City as theatre: curtains, alcoves, trees sculpted with artificial light. Upper-deck revellers in red buses, the revel burnt out of them. Effie looks for risk (surreal anecdotes) but purges it from her prints, which are infinitely calm, balanced, resilient.
Effie’s show was described on the handout from the Medical Research Council (‘research undertaken in diverse fields, including neurophysiology, molecular structure, developmental biology and mycobacteriology’) as ‘the first manifestation’ of a visual arts programme. ‘Large format colour photographs depict nocturnal landscapes in which the ephemeral and fugitive is captured within the stark industrial shapes of the city… Selected photographs provoke a dialogue with the striking architecture of the Institute and play with the notional introduction of the city into the pastoral.’
I walked to Mill Hill from Hackney. A mild day, a pleasant tramp through Golders Green. At 12.50 p.m., I found myself with my nose pressed to the glass of the Villa Dei Fiori (‘Fully Air Conditioned’). One couple in the place. Slatted blinds and white linen (like a Californian hospital, face-lifts, tummy tucks, Mozart). Celebrity photographs with sprawling encomia: Ernie Wise, Christopher Lee.
I bought a chocolate-bar and an apple at the mini-mart. A notice fixed to the top shelf: SORRY NO READING. Hi-gloss, washable magazines. I thought that was the whole point of the transaction. Looking and simulating. Not reading.
Golders Green retains its identity as a civic centre. You can have a pee, buy a rich Viennese pastry, find an urn for your ashes. Near the station, the little barbershop offers showbiz trims. ‘To Tony Thanks For A Perfect Cut’. More celebrity snaps: David Janssen, Johnny Mathis, Kenny Lynch.
The suburbs begin with the Crematorium: ‘50 spaces & about 60 cars’. I search out Sigmund Freud’s plaque. I walk across a buttercup meadow to admire the prospect of this red brick, hill town monastery with its cloisters and towers. I moved on and out, stepping up the pace to navigate what seemed to be an exclusively Japanese enclave; safe streets, silence, JAPAN HOMES announced the estate agent. White houses, red roof tiles, net curtains. Avenues of pollarded trees. No shops, no dogs. Bankrupt, discredited Hackney can’t afford planning officers or planning restrictions; our borough is a building site. Dust is the taste. Noise is the norm: power-drills, chainsaws. Not a leaf can be moved in Kyoto-by-Finchley Road. Not a pebble can be revised. If you talk on the street you face banishment to Hendon or Palmers Green.
The whole, deeply suspect business of hiking through this complex labyrinth of crescents and circuses and dead ends is dreamlike. De Chirico without the squares and fountains. The Crematorium is the liveliest joint in town, folk gathering to chat in the car park, strollers among the colonnades, nicely kept gardens.
Once you cross the North Circular Road you enter a different territory. You’re greeted by an ecstatic sculpture, a strong woman, naked, with an upraised sword. La Déliverance by Emile Guillaume. This is a traffic stopper and even better if you’re on foot. A Health & Efficiency nude, tiptoe, on a stone beach ball, lifting Excalibur instead of a tennis racket.
Passing through Mill Hill viaduct, and starting to climb the hill itself, is dropping into mild-mannered English science fiction; the village that is too much a village, the big house set back from the road. Captured land. Barrack blocks (remember the Mill Hill bomb?). Cult centres. A heavily protected laboratory. WARNING GUARD DOGS ON PATROL. MOD PROPERTY PRIVATE NO PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY. UNAUTHORISED ACCESS FORBIDDEN, KEEP OUT! Chainlink fence. Lights on poles.
Outside Mill Hill East station, I see a man, encountered earlier in the day near the North Circular Road. He was sweating hard, the sweat dried on him, in a suit. Glaswegian. Searching for London. Uncertain as to the direction in which to strike out. Now he was trying to blag his “way on to a train. ‘The staff don’t want to take you. The train will be held. Police have been sent for.’