Iain Sinclair - Dining on Stones

Now there was heat in our walk. Rainham was classically English: closed for the duration.

A church: THE CHURCH PATH IS NOT A PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY.

A hall: NO WC. CURRENT TENANT HAS DOG.

Shops. COLD BLOODED: SPECIALISTS IN BREEDING REPTILES, AMPHIBIANS & INVERTEBRATES. A pointless franchise. Rainham was over-subscribed in invertebrates, swamp-creeps, folk who delighted in telling you to leave town.

Always optimistic, I tried the library. The hall opens when it wants to, by appointment, for card-carrying members of the National Trust: a leaflet might be found. There is a mulberry tree. A Victorian dog kennel, bigger than a terraced cottage in Bethnal Green, for the Dalmatian pack. An upwardly mobile grifter called John Harle dredged the Ingrebourne, shipped coals from Newcastle, and founded ‘Rayneham Wharfe’. Thereby importing the signature ‘e’ that would prove so useful in heritaging the precinct of future shoppes — and predicting the career curve of chemical entrepreneurs like Mickey O’Discroll and the Sleemans. Harle’s barges were ballasted with marble, iron, clinker, Delft. He married a wealthy Stepney widow.

Nothing else happened, until Harle’s second son was horsewhipped in the back parlour, by his father-in-law, for the crime of associating with ‘newfangled Methodists’. The line, unsurprisingly, died out. Leaving the house as a fretful ghost, occupied by invisibles, unheard melodies.

‘Church?’

An old biddy in a rubber bathing-cap butts in. ‘Once a week — if you’re lucky. They have to lock the door on the cleaners. Kids round here. Give ’em two minutes and they’ll smash the place, altar cloth, Easter display, piss in the font.’

Snip’s belly was grumbling, but he wouldn’t stop until we’d left the village bit, the original settlement, behind. He hammered, at a pace I struggled to match, down Upminster Road. The mounds behind the kiddies’ playpark were neolithic; the ribbon development was more recent, speculative Tudorbethan chalets (Epping Forest pargeting), black horses’ heads on gateposts. This was a notable example of social polyfilling, Essex’s own Bermuda Triangle (Ingrebourne, A13 and M25). More khaki belt than green. Teasing glimpses of marshland in gaps between customised housing units, parks and cemeteries. Fields, if you spot them, are horribly naked, ironically named: THAMES CHASE. Hedgerow Improvement by Tarmac Quarry Products. Dust in the air, your mouth, your clothes.

We need a rinse of tea, something to line the stomach, before we plod on to the enclosure (end of the end), where they stack the banished Jews: the voices of London.

Upminster Road, like The Godfather , comes in two parts: South and North. ( Godfather III , the Vatican opera, Robert Duvall holding out for more money, doesn’t count. It’s the equivalent of Rainham’s Warwick Lane, a pointless third act, a trek through a land without soul or spirit. Mistah Kurtz — he dead . We can’t afford him. When a performer of Brando’s bulk rolls out of a project, you lose a lot of bathwater. Drowned land. Rich black alluvium. Three men dicing for rags: Eliot quoting Conrad, Coppola quoting Eliot and stealing from Conrad. Conrad, at the road’s edge, in Stanford-le-Hope, anticipating both of them. A wall of skulls.)

‘See that. I knew we should wait.’

Irritated by my (silent) cultural ramblings, gurglings of colonialism and prejudice, religion and representation (every high street a thunder of dialectics), Snip spurted. On elfin feet. Pulled ahead, tried to find where he was, who he was, what he was doing: rested, panting. Hand on hip. I loped, slowly, steadily, at a slight tilt (right leg shorter than left), came alongside him, moved ahead. Until he scuttled, crabbed, shot forward like an invalid carriage with automatic gears.

‘ There . Large as life. I’m no mug.’

A dark-blue awning proving the theory that if you persist in your folly you will be rewarded: BAGELS. Fresh filled bagels, sandwiches, rolls. Try our delicious salt beef.

‘We’re on,’ Snip shouted, ‘your treat.’

At the point where Upminster Road gives up its ambition — it knows it’s never going to make it to the end of the underground railway (end of civilisation) — the pale green of the District Line leaks into the landscape. Fields marked out for development. Lighting poles beyond the last hedge.

On the west side of London, film studios occupied the villages, woods; safe and convenient country, just beyond the orbital motorway. Thespians, economic immigrants, exiles from Hitler’s empire: the charcoal-burners of old. Encampments of millionaire gypsies in autumnal Pinewood. Borrowed country houses in which they trained you for the drop into occupied France (codes invented by Leo Marks, writer of Peeping Tom ).

The north: asylums, madhouses, Italianate water towers.

And, to the east, where we find ourselves, a loop from Rainham to Waltham Abbey: cemeteries. Christian (backed by florists and monumental masons, displays of statuary, garden centres). Muslim, under the pylons, screened by the reservoir. Then, alongside the gravel pits, the Jews. Grey, white. Like seagulls on landfill. Memorial stones.

‘He was a character, your David. Good to Joey, fond of the boy. I never come to the funeral.’

SLOW.

Large white letters. Pink tarmac like a welcome mat. The road narrows. A grand arch. A sort of municipal, red-brick Temple Bar. As we walk in, Snip, stumbling, takes my arm.

‘Did him a trim, just the once. Well-set-up man, David. Lovely shoes, handmade. Mouth on him. Soft but sarky. “Snip,” he says, “if you could cut hair as well as you rabbit, I’d let you loose on my poodle.” Schneide bastard, lippy. Like a father to Joey.’

Thousands of white graves in an Essex field. Rules laid out for prayers to be said if you haven’t visited a cemetery in the last thirty days. Hebrew. A chapel with offices. One of the gardeners, local boy in baseball cap, very decent, goes through the ledgers, the deathlists.

‘What year did he pass over?’

Snip can’t remember. Performance was released in 1970, but they had it sitting in the cans, cutting and recutting, for a few years. Litvinoff was still on the scene at that time. He had a biography of Lenny Bruce ‘in development’, commissioned and paid for. Never delivered. Never begun. There are photographs of him, quite dapper, down in the country.

‘Mid Seventies?’

The gardener is willing. The office is too hot: Snip mopping his brow. I’m not sure if I have to keep my cap on at all times. A scorched smell, burnt feathers. The hiss of calor gas.

I think of the posh kid — Harrow? — James Fox, getting his mouth round David Litvinoff’s dialogue. Quite effectively, as it happens. When I tried to transcribe Snip’s rapid-fire utterances, it always came out like Pinter with loose false teeth. Fox and the other toffs, Cammell and Roeg, years later, reminisced about Litvinoff, how he took them deep into the East End, villains’ dens, the Becket in the Old Kent Road. Dives in the Elephant and Castle. Whitechapel, Bermondsey, Deptford, Dartford, Krays, Richardsons, north or south of the river: all one to them. Mouthy Cockneys, hardmen with square-shouldered suits, polished shoes and buckets of respect.

‘How do you spell it again?’

‘L-i-t-v-i-n-o-f-f.’

Nothing.

He tried the late Sixties and the early Eighties, no trace. Loose pages in folders and leather-bound folios. Pen-and-ink ledgers. Name after name. Nothing.

A priest (rabbi, official), a heavy man in a dark suit, is summoned. Hat off, the heat, the gas. Embroidered skullcap. He has a bad cold, allergic to dust; he sniffles, turns away, sneezes. Big handkerchief. Courteous. Won’t give up. It’s oppressive, column after column of names.