The canal is an interloper in what was once a landscape of private parks, perched on a synclinal basin of chalk strata. The evidence of country mansions, captured and downgraded, is visible on all sides. Pheasant woods and copses with their well-tended roads, their gates and surveillance systems. The Grand Union Canal was a Faustian contract, which allowed ruffians into the garden. Locks for road tolls, riverside pubs for service stations. Industrial cargoes on the move, without much noise, without devastating fossil fuel reserves. Between the Midlands and London. Cassiobury Park on the outskirts of Watford, with its golf course, bowling green, paddling pool and watercress beds, was once part of the Earl of Essex’s estate.
The Navigation was a conduit for runaways, disappearances, the adoption of new identities. Alongside one of the bridges, a notice in a plastic envelope has been pinned to the walclass="underline" MISSING. We’re used to pet solicitation, pen portraits of dogs and cats. Snapshots taped to trees in parks and suburbs. Rewards offered. This is different. ‘Man aged 57, silver-grey short wavy hair, slightly built 5ft 5in tall, last seen in Gadebridge (Hemel Hempstead) 9:30 am Tues 26th January 1999.’
The head of the man, smiling, has been cut from another photograph and enlarged. White, open-neck shirt. A segment of striped sofa, a wallpaper border of roses. The smile is hesitant. What’s the occasion? Who took the photograph? Who kept it? Is this a working man or a member of the middle classes relaxing at the weekend? He’s clean-shaven. The hair is short, carelessly chopped. The visible right ear is a flesh oyster, a boxer’s ear. The jaw’s firm, there are no teeth on show. The nose might once have been broken. But somebody is still looking for this unnamed man who was last seen in Gadebridge.
Canals, creeping out of town by the dimmest and dirtiest ways, brought harm into the countryside. Canals were places of suicide. They were convenient for the disposal of bodies. The literary trajectory runs from Dickens to Alex Trocchi and the Northern working-class novelists of the Sixties — who favoured the urban Gothic of dying industries and wild nature, abandoned paths and gloomy basins. In Our Mutual Friend Dickens uses the canal system as a clogged drain, silted with recrimination, self-lacerating guilt and fantasies of revenge. Walkers hustle beside dark water, pursued by ghosts and whispering demons.
Bradley walked out of the Lock-house. Catching up from the table a piece of bread, and taking his Bargeman’s bundle under his arm, Riderhood immediately followed him. Bradley turned towards London. Riderhood caught him up, and walked at his side. The two men trudged on, side by side, in silence, full three miles. Suddenly, Bradley turned to retrace his course. Instantly Riderhood turned likewise, and they went back side by side.
And so on.
After an hour or more, Bradley abruptly got up again, and again went out, but this time turned the other way. Riderhood was close after him, caught him up in a few paces, and walked at his side.
The bitter schoolteacher, Bradley Headstone, and the bounty-hunting riverman, the fisher of bodies, who doubles as a Lock-keeper. They walk their fugues: stop, turn, retreat, begin again. Until they plunge together into the weir, Riderhood gripped by Headstone: ‘girdled still with Bradley’s iron ring, and the rivets of the iron ring held tight’.
Watford, though I’ve never thought of it that way, is a place of water, the River Colne closing on the Gade, the sweep of the Grand Union Canal; there are basins and barges and docks that facilitate waterborne traffic. Road signs direct us towards the promise of a necklace of ‘Springs’. Watford is Hertfordshire’s biggest town, a hilltop settlement known for its breweries and printing works. Or that’s what the brochure would have you believe. Our impressions, coming in on foot, are less focused.
There are no shops, no cafés. A Tesco megastore dominates the canal, exploiting water as a picturesque backdrop, rather than a way of transporting potential customers. A spray-bandit has revised the British Waterways sign that forbids swimming (‘danger of contracting waterborne disease’): ANGER for DANGER. A Nottingham narrow boat offering TAROT readings is moored alongside the railway bridge.
We decide that it is time to come away from the canal, to head into Watford in search of breakfast. We tramp, obediently, towards the ‘centre’ of a town that has no centre, just a collision of random bits and pieces representing different eras, abandoned speculations. Renchi returned a few weeks later to a house in a quiet Watford street. He attended a Hindu fire-ceremony. Fire and water. Music. Candles and food. A welcome for this stranger.
When it seems as if the road we are walking will never be anything but a featureless stretch of low-energy commerce, linked by roundabouts, we spot a Grimms’ Fairy Tale cottage, a misplaced quotation. The frontage is an exercise in marquetry that has got seriously out of hand: rectangular panels assembled from sawn logs. A sharp gable. Leaded windows, red tiles, Jacobean chimneys and cluster of TV aerials. There’s no explanation for this oddity, a forester’s retreat (from the time of the Earl of Essex).
Our situation improves, a side street (burst rubbish bags, threadless tyres, prams, shoes, mattresses) skews towards a container park: a zone of hauliers, mud, spare parts and rogue apostrophes. Good to see the Christian name of Dickens’s drowned schoolteacher: BRADLEY. SKIP HIRE, WASTE DISPOSAL.
Find a razorwire fence, gold-on-red signs, contradictory arrows, outdated phone numbers, and you’ll find a proper breakfast. MUNCHIES CAFE (steaming cup logo), OPEN 7AM–4AM.
Some of the best British conspiracies were hatched here, in greasy caffs; men with coloured cellphones, anorak over pinstripe, elbows on red Formica. Andrew Morton’s ghosted biography of Diana, republican propaganda, was chopped and stirred and cooked from tape-recordings made with Diana’s deepthroat go-between in a workmen’s cafe in Ruislip (convenient for the M40, Junction 16 of the M25, and our car park at Denham).
You don’t have to be an Aboriginal to track MUNCHIES by its teasing, wafting bacon trail. Deep-fried pig overrules diesel and rubber, chemical spills. The gated Portakabin fortress is a place where you pay cash money to get rid of things. Cities need covert dumps where ex-motors are cannibalised, chained dogs hurl themselves against chainlink fences. Watford, protected by its towers of parked cars (the M25’s equivalent of those sea forts at the mouth of the Thames Estuary), took care of a measure of London’s off-highway business; it acted as a buffer between the capital and rude territories to the north. All-Day Breakfast shacks on dirt paddocks where unwanted and unsightly rubbish can be disposed of, crushed, buried.
R.J. & H. HAULAGE LTD., SPECIALISTS IN SKIP HIRE AND ALL TYPES OF WASTE DISPOSAL will facilitate any little difficulties in the general area of removal, disappearance, eradication of material that has served its time. Obsolete consumer durables are not really so durable after all. R.J. & H. HAULAGE can see you right for ‘soft and sharp sand, ballast, peashingle, hardcore, crazy paving, crushed concrete’. They are happy to engage in post-industrial collaging: they smash, trample, pile-drive, squeeze, stretch, tear, hack, chop and jack-hammer anything you want to bung in a skip. They’re inventive. Alchemists of the scrap yard. Shape-shifters. Streets fold into their bright yellow receptacles to re-emerge as jigsawed garden walkways, toxic rubble on which you can lay mile after mile of tarmac.