As for the ecosystem, developer and hospital planner have much in common. Crest’s ‘masterplan’ is to create ‘a total living environment’. An independent community with chapel, recreation hall, gymnasium, swimming pool, park — alongside ‘the original Victorian water tower and cricket pitch’. The only difference is the quality of the silence: by day, the Crest Homes estate is deserted (no sign of children); you feel the eyes tracking you, the soft hum of surveillance cameras. The silence of the asylum was the silence of repression. Language interdicted. To speak was to confess.
Evening in Harperbury is a sombre business. The status of the hospital is unresolved. It feels very much as if those who have been released from their confinement are about to make a down-payment on a more sophisticated version of the very thing from which they have taken hundreds of years to escape. Now there will be a public/private partnership: they must pay for their own prison. The only healing passage is the motorway fugue, the journey between this nowhere and the place of business. The road is the relieving dream.
Walking under the M1 and on to Chequers Lane carried us east towards Abbots Langley. And Renchi’s car. Somehow, even though it looked simple when scrutinising the map under a light-pole, we became disorientated. The virus was getting to us; worse than the ulcers and terminal sniffles of foot-and-mouth, the memory haemorrhages of the Shenley Ridge hospital trail. We avoided footpaths and stuck to the road, dazzled by headlights.
We were spinning, blindfolded, around a Foucault wasteland, a bell jar of ill-defined territory caught between the north/south pull of the M1 and the curve of the M25, as it turned towards Heathrow and the Thames. We felt the presence of water, the River Gade and the Grand Union Canal (ahead of us), and the Colne (which we had left behind). We were entering the gravitation field of Watford. That might have been the source of our directional difficulties: I couldn’t convince myself that Watford belonged inside the M25. It was too exotic for that: the family-friendly football club with the Italian millionaire manager, the multimillionaire figurehead, sparkly pub pianist Elton John (the former Reg Dwight). Watford was the testing ground for the multi-storey car park. In fact, Watford was to car parks what Chartres was to cathedrals. Watford’s automobile stacking experiments had an advocate as obsessed with their strange beauty as Monet had been with the light-filled windows of the great French cathedral.
J.G. Ballard came to Watford to make a television documentary called Crash! which preceded his notorious auto(mobile)-erotic novel by two years. ‘There are an enormous number of multi-storey car parks in Watford,’ he told me when I interviewed him for a book on the Cronenberg film of his 1973 novel. ‘It’s the Mecca of the multi-storey car park. And they’re quite ornate, some of them. They played a special role in The Atrocity Exhibition. They were iconic structures. I was interested in the gauge of the psychoarchitectonics. The multi-storey car park and its canted floors, as a depository for cars, seemed to let one into a new dimension. They obviously decided to beautify these structures. They covered them in strange trellises. It was a bizarre time.’
Picturing Ballard’s haunted concrete temples, I brooded on why they made me uncomfortable. It doesn’t matter how high you climb, how many tight bends you sweat around, how narrowly you avoid leaving paintwork on a pillar, the trip to the top deck of a multi-storey car park is a voyage underground. Space-time is reversed. There’s no sound like the trapped screech of anxiously cornering tyres. They reverberate even when there is no vehicle on the ramp. The secret interiors of these post-human fortresses solicit conspiracy, acts of sexual transgression. Illicit exchanges between dealers. Movement fuzzes on the monitor, drivers swim from their vehicles.
I used to meet a publishers’ rep in a car park in Watford, when he wanted to sell proof copies and other promotional gimmicks that would never reach the bookshops. Watford was the perfect location; obscure but not quite inconvenient for London or the garden city satellites. I drove there often, with-out really knowing where it was. The route wasn’t worth committing to memory. Ballard, describing a multi-storey car park in The Atrocity Exhibition, enthused over ‘inclined floors… forever meeting the events of time and space at an invisible angle’.
That’s what was throwing us, we weren’t in a car. Watford only made sense if you drove. The rest of the ground, captured in a bell jar, was being squeezed of air. We couldn’t take decisions, so our best option was to walk faster. In the twilight, by full-beam headlights, you couldn’t tell a Theological College from a Rehabilitation Centre. From a terminated asylum.
The novelists of the early Sixties got it right with their titles. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, published in 1963, activates a metaphor that describes not only the airlessness of the ‘queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs’, but also the landscape in which an asylum should be located.
‘The air of the bell jar wadded around me and I couldn’t stir.’ Wadded is spot-on for the top left corner of the M25 circuit; punchdrunk, throat choked with feathers. The neurosis is in the weather, alternately speedy and sluggish microclimates. Fast roads, slow rivers; traffic grudging to a halt. Fingers drumming on wheels. Harassed women who light up the first cigarette of the day, before checking their lipstick. The comfort-dummy of the cellphone.
Plath’s novel, originally published under the pseudonym ‘Victoria Lucas’, was reissued by Faber in 1966, with a spiral cover illustration that looked as if it had been lifted by Bridget Riley from the credits of Hitchcock’s Spellbound. The intended effect, I presume, was to gaze into or out of (according to temperament) a bell jar. Concentric black lines refocusing, forming hallucinatory Maltese cross patterns, left the viewer nauseous and shaky.
A fiction that in many ways anticipated The Bell Jar — sensitive, high-achieving young woman cracking up, retreating to an institution that is of course more eccentric, more difficult than the outside — world — appeared in 1961. And again the title could be interpreted as referring to territory on the fold of the map: Jennifer Dawson’s The Ha-Ha. Dawson’s metaphor of the moat or ditch (to keep out animals or imprison inmates) was expressed in heritaged, country house language. Archaic (if charming) terminology for the corner into which we were digging ourselves.
A turn in the road, a gateway, a set of buildings, an arrangement of trees that seemed almost familiar: morning impressions compared with the evening return. The discovery of an arranged meeting place, early in the day, coming in from the motorway, is a very different thing to our arrival after a day’s walk. In walking, Potters Bar connects with Abbots Langley (lost apostrophes, both); we have followed a preordained narrative and not skipped from first sentence to conclusion.
Without Renchi’s white car (I only do cars by their colour), I wouldn’t have known that this was the hospital where we had parked. The buildings have an uncomfortable Victorian look — grass you can’t walk, regimented flower beds, gymnasium that doubles as chapeclass="underline" uniform design for hospital, barracks, Borstal, public school.
At Leavesden Hospital, unauthored depression vectors the clammy ground. Abbots Langley (bestowed by Edward the Confessor upon the abbot of St Albans) was always sequestered territory: the pastoral care of the church devolving to apparently enlightened provisions of the state. By removing incapacitated and antisocial elements from the city and exposing them (in ‘airing courts’) to country breezes, it was fondly supposed that troubled memories would fade, useful skills could be acquired.