The view from this point, high upon the area’s eastern slopes, has stayed essentially unchanged for all that time, if by ‘essentially’ you mean that the fleeced sky is in the same place and the angle of the sweeping incline remains constant. Nearly every other feature of the landscape has been altered or removed. The recently refurbished NEWLIFE buildings dominate the stepped-on vista, the surrounding circuit board of flats and maisonettes, communal cubes that have replaced the terraces of individual homes. Though greatly simplified, the neighbourhood’s original main thoroughfares are visible in their archaic tangle, Bath Street, Scarletwell, Spring Lane. Some patches of the panorama are dispirited and overcast while others briefly glory in their sudden spotlight as the afternoon sun pours down through a threadbare sheet of cloud. The graduations of the distance appear much the same as ever, or at least they do to Alma’s blurring eyesight. She sees bands of brick or concrete housing giving way to stripes of railway track with overhead wires, and then finally resolving to the grey-green smoulder of Victoria Park in the far west. Despite the shabby overlay of the last half-a-century, she knows the golden template of the district is still there somewhere. The buried heart still beats under the rubble. Forking off from Silver Street into the incline of an underpass below the roaring Mayorhold, Alma draws in a deep breath and ducks her head beneath the mottled surface of the present.
She emerges from the tunnel’s orange murk onto a sunken walkway lined with thirty-year-old tiling that suggests to Alma a bulimic Mondrian after a Spanish omelette. Turning left she climbs the ramp towards Horsemarket (West) and makes her way down into the bollard-occluded mouth of Bath Street, past the Kingdom Life building that was erected as a Boy’s Brigade Hall in the 60s. Alma’s brother had belonged to that peculiar Baptist paramilitary, the Baden-Powell Youth. He had marched with them and their cacophonous percussion-heavy band on Sunday mornings, an eleven-year-old with a brass badge and a lanyard, with a jaunty cadet cap atop his girly golden curls, a happiness and innocence in his blue eyes that Alma thought looked borderline subnormal. He’d have made a perfect paediatric Nazi if he could have carried off a decent goose-step without skipping like a cartoon milkmaid. Alma’s fairly certain he attended the odd torchlight rally at the pebble-dashed pavilion across the way, him and his mates all chanting “Arbeit Macht Frei” or “Be Prepared” or whatever their motto was.
She idly wonders if the former Boy’s Brigade Headquarters is located near where Moseley’s Blackshirts had their offices back in the ‘30s. This provokes a trailing strand of thought relating to an article by Roman Thompson, which the grizzled lefty veteran had photocopied for her, all about the B.U.F.’s activities around the Mayorhold. There’d been grainy reproductions from newspaper photographs of leading local fascists posing with Sir Oswald while he toured the provinces, with one name in the captions underneath the pictures whited out, presumably by somebody in the archive department. Roman hadn’t noticed the deletion and had no clue as to what the missing name might be, though Alma had heard unsubstantiated rumours about Mr. Bassett-Lowkes, the erstwhile local footwear manufacturer and former owner of a house in Derngate with interiors by Rennie Mackintosh. Who knows? If World War Two had gone a different way he might have launched a line of sporty jack-brogues to commemorate the Führer’s victory.
Alma carries on down Bath Street with the corned beef-coloured Moseley-vintage flat-blocks on her left, the NEWLIFE towers and their attendant modern terraced houses coming up on Alma’s right. Her inner musings still have a large National Socialist component, very like the winter scheduling on Channel Five. She’s heard, relatively recently, that Hitler’s planned invasion of the British Isles had ended with the capture of Northampton, as if once the centre of the country had been taken then the rest was a foregone conclusion. Alma giggles to herself. Say what you like about the Third Reich, at least they recognised places of historical strategic import when they saw them. And the area has ended up with all the brutal and intimidating Nazi architecture anyway. Albert Speer might have stuck eagles and swastikas up on the tower-blocks, but would that necessarily have made the locals feel more subjugated and discouraged than the cheesy sideways silver lettering that’s up there currently? Quite frankly, either way the message would be much the same: tomorrow, most assuredly, does not belong to you.
The further down the hill she goes the more subdued and shadowy her mood becomes, as though Bath Street were an emotional gradient. She’s thinking about history’s celebrated victims, thinking of the holocaust, the blight of slavery, female suppression and the persecution of sexual minorities. She can recall her own Spare Rib days in the 1970s and how she’d briefly entertained the idea that a woman leader might make all the difference. This had obviously been back in the early seventies. Her point is that despite the very real continuing abuses born of anti-Semitism, born of racism and sexism and homophobia, there are MPs and leaders who are female, Jewish, black or gay. There are none who are poor. There never have been, and there never will be. Every decade since society’s inception has been witness to a holocaust of paupers, so enormous and perpetual that it has become wallpaper, unnoticed, unreported. The mass graves at Dachau and at Auschwitz are, rightly, remembered and repeatedly deplored, but what about the one in Bunhill Fields that William Blake and his beloved Catherine were shovelled into? What about the one under the car park in Chalk Lane, across the road from Doddridge Church? What of the countless generations that have lived poor and have in one way or other died of that condition, uncommemorated and anonymous? Where are their fucking monuments and special ringed dates on the calendar? Where are their Spielberg films? Part of the problem is, no doubt, that poverty lacks a dramatic arc. From rags to rags to rags to rags to dust has never been an Oscar-winning formula.
Across the street a door opens in Simons Walk, one of the modern terraces that crouch beneath the high-rise buildings, and a fat bloke with a shaven head and internet-porn eyes emerges. He looks flatly and dismissively at Alma and quite blatantly hits the ‘Delete’ key on his Wank Bank before lumbering off along the walkway, probably towards the chip shop in St. Andrew’s Street. Alma lets her attention linger for a moment on the tree-walled ‘pocket park’ that’s just over the road, one of the only genuinely nice additions to the neighbourhood. She’s got an artist friend called Claire who lives down here in Bath Street flats and makes a point of keeping the small green enclosure litter-free and weeded. Claire had painted an intensely-felt cartoon depiction of her threatened acre with carnivorous tower blocks encroaching on it from all sides which she’d insisted upon giving Alma after Alma fell in love with it, refusing any money and deeply embarrassing the nouveau-riche celebrity, who is forever in her fellow artist’s debt. Claire’s brave and lovely and a bit bipolar. She makes Alma smile just thinking of her, with a psilocybin mushroom and the legend ‘MAGIC’ tattooed on one forearm; ‘FUCK OFF’ on the other. Both of these, to Alma’s mind, are worthy creeds to live by.
She considers the made-over bulks of Claremont Court and Beaumont Court, the NEWLIFE towers engaging in their double penetration of the sky. About ten days ago, knowing the renovations for the publicly-loathed swindle that they really were, the council had attempted a stealth opening event. Ruth Kelly’s deputy as Minister for Housing, Yvette Cooper, had been ferried in to cut the ribbon early on a Wednesday morning with no prior announcements made, in order to avoid alerting organised protesters. Roman Thompson, obviously, heard all about the covert visit on the night before it happened. Requisitioning a megaphone from local union premises, Roman had turned up bright and early with a hastily convened posse of local anarchists and activists, bringing the sleepy tenants of the maisonettes on Crispin Street out to their balconies by bellowing “GOOD MOOOOOOOORNING, SPRING BOROUGHS” through his borrowed loudhailer. When the pencil-necked Deputy Minister and partner of Brown-aide Ed Balls arrived with the attendant local dignitaries, Roman’s vastly-amplified Old Man of the Sea voice had gleefully regaled them with their recent improprieties.
He’d sympathetically asked Labour MP Sally Keeble how well she was sleeping these days, after voting for the Iraq War. He’d loudly paid another councillor a compliment upon how smart he looked and speculated that this might be due to all the backhanders he’d recently received. At this point a policeman had rushed up to Roman and informed him that he couldn’t say that, to which Roman had replied by pointing out, with logic that was unassailable, that he already had. Alma is grinning. It had been an entertaining morning in the Boroughs, from the sound of it.
Reluctantly she turns her gaze back to the side of Bath Street that she’s walking down, the 1930s flat-blocks with the entrance to their central walkway on her left and just ahead. Alma stares at the spot where she is fairly certain that the hulking chimneystack of the Destructor had once stood and instantly her cheerful mental image of Claire’s painting shatters into shellac flakes of green and yellow. These immediately scatter on the wind to be replaced by Alma’s previous notion of the Boroughs and the other districts like it everywhere across the world as concentration neighbourhoods: zones where the population could be readily identified by prison uniforms of apron or shiny demob suit if they strayed beyond the boundaries, zones where the inmates could be safely worked, starved or simply depressed to death with no fear of a public outcry. Here in Bath Street they’d even provided the continually smoking tower of an incinerator chimney to enhance the death-camp ambience.
Alma, who makes little distinction between internal and external reality, doesn’t much care if the Destructor in her brother’s vision is the awful supernatural force that he described it as, or if it’s some hallucinatory and visionary metaphor. As Alma sees things, it’s the metaphors that do all the most serious damage: Jews as rats, or car-thieves as hyenas. Asian countries as a line of dominoes that communist ideas could topple. Workers thinking of themselves as cogs in a machine, creationists imagining existence as a Swiss watch mechanism and then presupposing a white-haired and twinkle-eyed old clockmaker behind it all. Alma believes that the Destructor, even as a metaphor, especially as a metaphor, could easily cremate a neighbourhood, a class, a district of the human heart. By the same token then, she must believe that art, her art, anyone’s art, is capable of finally demolishing the mind-set and ideas that the Destructor represents if expressed with sufficient force and savagery; sufficient brutal beauty. Alma has no other choice than to believe this. It’s what keeps her going. Hardening her eyes to the eroded Bauhaus balconies and arches, bricks the colour of dried blood, she turns left and begins to head up the long path that separates the two halves of the flats, towards the walled ramp that leads into Castle Street.
The sun absconds behind a cloud and the green lawns turn grey. The ornamental stepped edge of the brickwork, grass-cracked and distressed, takes on a different character. The architecture, neat and modern and efficient in its time, now looks its age, a pre-war civil servant who’d once had a promising career ahead of him but now is in his eighties, haunted and incontinent, incapable of recognising his surroundings. Past the flats’ drawn curtains are the chambers of a crumbling mind through which the tenants shamble like unfathomable dreams. Outpatients, rock-heads, migrant workers, prostitutes and refugees and transposed flowers like Claire somehow still painting pictures in amidst it all, the way that Richard Dadd had laboured on his tiny fairy visions in the screaming, defecating hells of Bedlam and of Broadmoor.
Alma realises that the place is like a grindstone on which reason, sense of self, and sanity are milled to an undifferentiated flour of madness. Mental illness and depression have been stirred into the mortar of these buildings, or have seeped into the plaster as a type of melancholic damp. Attempting to sustain even the ordinary notion of a purpose to existence in this bleak environment would slowly drive you round the bend, would send you cornery. She realises, wading through the thick air of the central walkway, that insanity occurs most often where a human vision meets the social brickwork. She remembers Pastor Newton’s old hymn-writing colleague, madhouse veteran William Cowper, in 1819, addressing William Blake: “You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all – over us all – mad as a refuge from the unbelief of Bacon, Newton and Locke.”
This was a different Newton that the fragile poet was condemning, obviously, not hymn-composing and slave-trading John but Isaac, architect of a material scientific certainty that would supplant the levelling moral apocalypse of his contemporary John Bunyan. Isaac Newton, founding member of the Royal Society and of Freemasonry’s Grand Lodge, brutal commander of the Mint and therefore engineer to a financial system rife with Darien Disasters, South Sea Bubbles, Wall Street Crashes and Black Wednesdays. Instigator of the gold standard and thus of Britain’s gold reserves, which Blair’s chancellor Gordon Brown has quietly sold off just this last year. Sir Isaac, the inventor of an utterly imaginary colour, indigo, and the creator of the modern world’s materialistic rat-trap on so many different levels. The great tranquilliser of the spirit, the inducer of what Blake called, accurately, “Newton’s Sleep”. In Bath Street flats, amongst the destitute and desperate and depressed, she can see all the dreams with which that sleep is troubled.
She breaks from her train of thought to skirt around a recent-looking dog-evacuation that is in her path, a turreted turd-castle that’s as yet unbreached by toddler’s shoe or teenage trainer, perfect end-product of the material world and also its inevitable monument. It gives at least a semi-solid form to the most frequent word, most frequent thought upon the local modern mind, reiterates the creed of the Destructor: “This is where we send our shit, the things that we no longer have a use for. This means you.”
Heading towards the ramp that has replaced the steps that she remembers from her childhood Alma wonders, with a lurch, how many individuals have died down here, how many last breaths have fogged mirrors in unsatisfactory bathrooms or escaped into cramped kitchenettes. It must be hundreds since the flats were put up in the 1930s; all those disappointed souls, their stories worked into the grain of the veneer, encoded in the bar-stripes of the ugly wallpaper. She feels as though she’s walking on the bottom of a sea of ghosts, through suffocating fathoms of unruly ectoplasm reaching far above her. Bed-sand memories and voices rise in clouds of silt at every footstep. Poltergeist shells, astral rubbish, rusted ghoul-cans tumbling through the murk of her periphery. Grey ladies drifting on the sluggish phantom current like a strain of supernatural waterweed. An algae of dead monks. She wades with astronaut deliberation up the ramp, a channel-walker slogging up an underwater rise that might with any luck turn into Dover Beach, uncertain how much longer she can hold her breath beneath this sea of misery, this betiding woe.
Under the concrete of the ramp, the steps she sat on as a child must still be there. She can remember walking home once with her mum and little brother, cutting through from Castle Street to Bath Street. Alma would have been, what, nine or ten? She’d bought a comic from Sid’s bookstall on the market and had run ahead of Doreen so that she could sit here on the steps and read it for a moment while she waited for her mother to catch up. The comic, unsurprisingly, had been Forbidden Worlds. She can’t remember if there’d been a Herbie story in that issue, but it would have certainly contained the work of Ogden Whitney in one form or other. While she’d sat here on her chilly granite perch and marvelled, Whitney would have been already more than halfway down the boozy path that led to the asylum and the grave. She has a chilly premonition that somewhere in the year 2050 there is someone having much the same thoughts about her, as if Alma and Ogden are already both together in a pallid green Unknown with all the wolf-men and the Frankensteins; as if the whole world and its future were already posthumous and she was looking down on all this loveless folly from a point outside and over time, from the forbidden world. Everything’s dead already. Everyone is gone.
She steps out onto Castle Street and pauses, noticing the almost instantaneous shift in mood and light. Well, that was interesting. She turns to gaze back down the ramp, along the central path
to Bath Street with the NEWLIFE tombstones rising up beyond, and smiles. Fear of decay and death, she thinks. Fear of depreciation, destitution and decline. Is that the best you’ve got?
With a refreshing dodgem whiff of new resolve flaring her nostrils, Alma heads down Castle Street towards the point where Bristol Street bleeds into Chalk Lane. Crossing over the deserted road towards its south side, Alma eyes up the dilapidated Golden Lion, the establishment where Warry had poured out his wild phantasmagoria to her only a year ago. A year. She can’t remember anything about it except painting, drawing, chewing Rizla papers up and spitting them into a bowl, the shifts of season only noticeable in the change of imagery upon her drawing board or easel, a whole summer spent delineating snotty-nosed dead children in soft pencil. And now here she is.
The junction she’s approaching used to have a sweetshop owned by someone that she and the other children knew as ‘Pop’, a white-haired portly chap with glasses who sold homemade penny ice lollies and penny drinks. The latter had been half-pint milk bottles filled up with tap water and homeopathic doses of fruit cordial, a water-memory of having once been shown a molecule of rosehip syrup. Still, on thirsty afternoons, even the immaterial concept of a tasty beverage had been enough. They’d paid their pennies and had gratefully gulped down a fluid that looked pinkish if you happened to be drinking it at sunset. Looking back, she realises that she should have automatically mistrusted anybody who called themselves Pop. Ah, well. You live and learn.
Down at the bottom end of Castle Street, she passes on her left the little patch of grass, still seemingly unoccupied, where she had almost been abducted as a child. It’s one of the few childhood memories that she still can’t properly resolve, where she’s still not sure what was really going on. Her and some other eight-year-olds had found the rusted shell of an abandoned Morris Minor on the grass and, in an area that offered little in the way of free activities and entertainments, they had treated it as if it were a theme park or at least a proto-bouncy castle. They’d climbed on its bonnet and had sat inside behind its steering wheel. Alma had been on top of the wrecked vehicle, manically jumping up and down on its corroded roof, using it as a heavy metal trampoline, when a black car had glided out of Chalk Lane into Bristol Street to pull up suddenly beside the stretch of turf where they were playing.