Our breakfast, in the Mad Max kingdom of these war lords of waste, is a treat. A caravan, an awning, white plastic tables. Strip-lighting on the strobe. A large lady with big gold rings in her ears. And a face as featureless as a satellite dish. Eggs in their dozens, ready to break into the pan. Pink and yellow notices with handwritten specialities of the house: TOASTED SANDWICH VARIOUS FILLING FROM £1.50. In France this vehicle would have appeared in half a dozen movies. In California it would (as a replica) have its own gag-a-minute TV series.
We swill our mugs of near-coffee, lick our plates and congratulate ourselves on being somewhere we’ll never find again; a morning epiphany among stacked containers, long sheds. The best of England: close to a canal path, close to allotments, close to a football stadium, faces deep into a (£2.50) ‘big breakfast’ in a culture that only does breakfasts. On a circuit where, all too often, microwave pubs won’t serve you after 2 p.m. and can’t offer anything more appetising than saltlick potato shavings dipped in mouth-numbing additives.
Soft rain patters on the plastic awning. We’re inside and outside at the same time. In town and hidden away. Tinned tomatoes bloody Renchi’s mouth as he articulates the anxiety we share: we’re pulling too far from the motorway. Like the Colne, we need to move west.
After Batchworth, the Colne stays outside the Grand Union Canal, wandering south through industrial estates and sewage farms towards a scatter of small lakes. Using the Colne, we re-establish contact with the road. But nothing is happening up there, a sluggish section where traffic snarls towards the mess that lies ahead, the M40, the M4 and Heathrow. Solitary drivers are hunched into themselves, coming down from the buzz. Tapping like speed-freaks. Waiting for the horror.
The Munchies caravan sets us up for the next section of the canal. A yellow morning, quite cold. Evergreens and alders reflected on the canal’s glassy surface. Narrow boats are moored, nose-to-tail, streetwise, downwardly immobile. They’re moving at about the same speed as the lines of cars on the motorway — which is to say, they move as the earth moves. They are where they are and they know where they are. They stick and they drift. This is the last vestige of the old hippie dream: self-sufficiency (of a sort), a stove, a bicycle, dope. Living on water, you connect with water. And water things. Dreams. Clouds above and below. The long thin boats are like beds with lids. Removed from their original, cargo-shifting purpose, aligned on a north/south axis, they are freed from orbital madness, the clusters and roundabouts of fear and confusion that make up the scattered outstations of London.
On the M25, fixed in their lanes, trying to make sense of flashing overhead signs and warnings, smoking, finger-drumming, jumping radio bands, jabbering into cellphones, the motorists are out of time, out of place. Between Junctions 16 and 17, there is nothing on the map, nothing on the ground. A frosted whiteness. Refuse tips, gravel pits — if you want them. If you know they’re here. The orbital motorway, on its western flank, in the long morning rush hour, is where claustrophobia and agoraphobia are indistinguishable. Tensed travellers, sweating in their metal pods, discover the inside of the outside. Nerves are stretched. Memories of the miles they’ve driven, to arrive at this compulsory stasis, melt into exhaust fumes.
Renchi and I return to our discussion of the figures who took up residence just beyond the circuit of the motorway: culture heroes pinned to the wall by centrifugal forces. It happened before the M25 was imagined, let alone constructed. Blind John Milton in Chalfont St Giles, escaping the plague, composing Paradise Lost. Bill Drummond, near Aylesbury, forever brooding on a move to the city, shuttling between writerly retreat and urban conspiracies; looking for an excuse to get out on the road for another conceptual/missionary journey. Roald Dahl in his garden shed at Great Missenden, board across knees, fan-heater going full tilt, as he cranks out another juvenile revenge saga. Russian roulette fantasies from Graham Greene, the headmaster’s son in Berkhamsted.
I proposed Arthur Machen, the ultimate city wanderer and fabulist, who retired to the contented obscurity of Amersham.
‘Machen, as an artist, had many deficiencies,’ wrote Wesley D. Sweetser, ‘not least of which was his psychological obsession to write on every possible occasion.’ That, unfortunately, is the nature of the contract. Amersham is as good a place as any other (as good as Lawrence, Kansas) to try to forget the signature in blood. The long wait for that knock on the door. The smiling stranger in black.
Judging by the names of the narrow boats, I’m sure we could have tapped at portholes and come up with a suitcase of Machen paperbacks, ARCTURUS. SORCERESS, VISCOUNT SASCHA, INTERNATIONAL PHYSIOTHERAPIST (BY SPECIAL APPOINTMENT TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE USA). Really? Which one? Kennedy’s spine? Nixon’s retracted turtleneck and hunched shoulders? Clinton’s cigar? Sascha’s barge is five or six miles from Heathrow, and next to nothing from Northolt, the military aerodrome where royals and celebs fly in. I’ll buy it: the vision of Slick Willie rocking the boat, while the Viscount dances along his backbone.
As we leave Watford, communes of narrow boats give way to solitary pirate craft, hulks. The sort of cheerful but slightly squalid domesticity that Machen cultivated in Amersham. Nautical rubbish, sheets of polythene, black bags spread on the bank. Use one of the tyres hung around the gunnel as potential life-preservers and you’ll sink like a stone. This isn’t a boat, it’s a kennel nailed to a dismasted fishing smack: all deficiencies covered with green tarpaulin. There’s a second, peeling Dunkirk veteran with odd-sized windows, which looks as if it’s held together with gaffa tape and unfounded optimism. Somebody started to daub the wheelhouse with a can or two of knocked-off battleship-grey. Inspiration ran out with the paint. Which has started to devour the wood. The vessel is low in the water, but still afloat. As a precaution, the skipper has shifted his household goods on to the towpath: a red, simulated-leather armchair, a duvet, overcoats and pyjamas, a disconnected deepfreeze unit filled with melting TV dinners, roadkill and industrial-strength lager.
The Colne has been our companion over a good stretch of country. We’ve followed it south from its adolescence among the hospital colonies. The river’s name connects with the harshest of asylums, Colney Hatch. Nut hatch. Booby hatch. Freak farm.
Too much towpath walking was depressing us, we decided to leave the Grand Union and to climb the slope to Harefield. After our tour of the Crest Homes, we were ready for a hospital that was still operative. A hacksaw and catgut operation. The perfect place for a change of heart. We fancied paying our respects to Magdi Yacoub and the Eric Morecambe Department of Cardiology. The metaphor was right: we panted uphill, thirsting for transfusions of the imagination. A fresh start.
2
The ascent of Mountain Pleasant: neat, detached houses, humped road unspooling like a roll of grey felt. Nobody. Nothing. Not a car. Renchi slumps on a bench in Harefield village to attend to his feet. A sharp-sided obelisk alongside a duck pond, a memory needle. The date ‘1914’, the faded names. This is a village that is still a village. Formula patented in popular fiction: Enid Blyton, Richmal Crompton, P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie. The exportable paradigm of a fantasy England (copyright acquired by offshore asset strippers). A strategic site above a river valley; crossroads, chapel, choice of pubs for different political or religious factions. A green, a pond. The big house that became Harefield Hospital.