Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

The female bodybuilders, the Magic Circle conjurors, the once-celebrated poets whose works are no longer a part of a shrinking literary consciousness, summoned another Epsom name. Kevin told us about William Hayward, poet, author of a single published novel, It Never Gets Dark All Night . Hayward had been a correspondent of David Jones. He had, at some point, been taken into the Epsom gulag. The novel dealt with the experience.

‘Should we contact him?’ I asked.

‘Dead. I think, suicide. Peter Carpenter has the whole story.’

So it was arranged, that when the motorway circuit was completed, Kevin would fix another day in Epsom. His friend Peter Carpenter, poet and publisher, could guide us around town and tell us about William Hayward.

‘In this town,’ Peter Carpenter announced, ‘one in ten is mad.’ Our problem, outside Epsom station, was identifying that one . The tour party, assembled on the pavement, you could start there: twitchy, grinning like foxes, clothed from a dressing-up basket. Much too old for this foolishness, a walk around Carpenter’s childhood and adolescence (schools, pubs, asylums). The balding, hook-nosed man in the collarless blue shirt wanted, so badly, to tell his tale: the audience was incidental. Like all poets, and most schoolteachers, he was used to talking to himself; this morning’s drive down the motorway was just enough rehearsal to crank him up to speed. Lay out the past in the right order and it loses its venom.

Wednesday 17 May 2000. Renchi has brought a friend interested in springs and Surrey subterranea, the art of the motorway fringes. Kevin has lined up two of his inner circle: Carpenter (our guide) and Walrus (aka Martin J. Wallen, Associate Professor of English at OSU, Stillwater, Oklahoma). Asked how we’ll recognise Carpenter, if we arrive first at the rendezvous, Kevin says: ‘So high.’ Vague gesture of the arm. ‘Bullish. See him coming through a crowd in London, quite frightening.’

When we steam, mob-handed, down the drive of the old Horton hospital, we are a pack of the dispersed, looking for sanctuary. The townscape, in the months since we paid our last visit, has changed beyond recognition. WELCOME TO HORTON VIEW AND THE PADDOCKS. Fluttering banners: TAYWOOD. A SELECTION OF 2, 3, 4 & 5 BEDROOM HOUSES & APARTMENTS. Three white flag poles mark the border of the captive estate.

The asylum has been replanted, opened to motor vehicles. There is some evidence for the continuing presence of builders, none of civilians, home owners, new suburbanites. The Epsom colonies have been revised into loops and crescents, so that clients can drive effortlessly in and out. Nobody is trapped, coerced, detained . BEAZER HOMES, WAY OUT. THANK YOU FOR OBSERVING SIGNS & DRIVING CAREFULLY.

Behind the improved flagship properties, corrugated sheds hide the last traces of a repressed history. A lick of pink paint on wrinkled tin; recreational facilities with barred windows. The yard where farm produce was once sold still exists, you need a map to find it. Sad vegetables on an unmanned table. WARNING. THESE PREMISES ARE PROTECTED BY A 24HR SECURITY AND CLOSED CIRCUIT TELEVISION SYSTEM. PACKS INFOTEL LTD. Withered beans and knobbly tomatoes covered by CCTV cameras.

Previous inmates wander the new roads, questing for something they recognise. Nobody has found them suitable clothing: one, stiff-backed, twisting as he walks, is barechested; another has a tight white, Sunday-best shirt, buttoned to neck and cuff, inherited jeans. They seem to march, eyes down, where Carpenter’s merry men slouch or spring, cameras primed, constantly swivelling.

During what he calls ‘The Lost Years’ — a period Jackson summarises as ‘lager, vodka, unsuitable girlfriends, takeaways, footy, monotony, despair and nights in the Iron Horse’ — Peter Carpenter worked in an Epsom bookshop. On Saturday afternoons, paroled patients visited town. (They’re called clients now: CLIENTS BACK FOR LUNCH. While there is still lunch, there is still hope.) Horton inmates were given sweetie money to spend. Every week the same kleptos would drift into the bookshop, liberate the same books (Asimov, Heinlein, L. Sprague De Camp); take them home. Without fuss, they would be gathered up and returned. (This may go some way towards explaining the popularity of that school of fiction.)

The visiting academic, Dr Wallen, is getting more of his special subject (‘Romanticism’) than any reasonable Oklahoma resident has the right to expect. He’s got strong teeth and a nice hawky profile that could have been chiselled from the totem pole which now stands in the park behind Long Grove Hospital. He’s always grinning: not like Piety Blair (the fear rictus), but like a man who can’t believe his luck. Kevin has him pegged as: ‘bon viveur, weight-lifter, malcontent, dog lover, former owner of cowboy boots’. He’s into Coleridge, Beddoes and Nitrous Oxide: not much use in Stillwater, but useful preparation for a day trip to Epsom.

Wallen’s tense watchfulness and proper rectitude (waiting for the pub) plays nicely against the Jackson/Carpenter double act. Ventriloquist and moosehead dummy. Who keep exchanging roles — so that the story can be told, backwards, in every detail. In stereo. There is much talk of Cambridge, Pembroke College, and of the former Epsom inmate and spurned novelist, William Curtis Hayward. Just as Kevin helped to preserve some record of the achievements of Dr Dylan Francis, so Peter Carpenter has obsessively gathered every scrap of information, every published and unpublished word by William Hayward.

What Carpenter wants now is to lead us to St Ebba’s, the most easterly of the hospitals, on the far side of Hook Road. St Ebba’s is still an active concern. The Italianate tower is in place. (Carpenter tells us that the poet Alan Brownjohn was once, as a child, locked in that tower.) The atmosphere is heavy, time doesn’t flow. The estate is like an English village built by Cold War Russians for war games. Such whimsical notions are contradicted by the villagers: a speedfreak in a baseball cap who mimes the rolling of a monster spliff, a scarecrow who calls to the birds, a man perched on a bench who thinks he is a bird. Several Down’s syndrome adolescents stare at us; they are the only ones to whom we are not invisible.

The point of our (de)tour is to locate a cemetery. Carpenter remembers being here, in a field, with his mother. There were memorials to those who died during the war, when the hospitals were requisitioned; as well as gravestones for the hospital children.

Carpenter was sure this was it, a buttercup field with a view of the Horton tower. We do what we can with potential mounds and bumps, but the cemetery has been swallowed in thorn bushes and sycamore. There is no physical evidence of the memorial. Alongside a bridlepath of loose chippings and small pebbles, Carpenter stands bemused, waving his arms. ‘I’m sure it was here.’ Either he has been betrayed by an unreliable memory, or memory has been violated in some way.

Renchi asks for numbers. How many dead? How many unrecorded? He picks up pebbles, counting them, putting them into his knapsack. Fingers raw, pack sagging: he’s well into the hundreds.

Local papers were incensed by the developer’s sacrilege: WAR HEROES’ GRAVE ANGER. They settled on the number 4,000. ‘War heroes lie in an overgrown cemetery where 4,000 hospital patients are buried in mass graves.’ Owner-developer Michael Heighs refused church groups (backed by Epsom and Ewell Council) permission to erect a memorial cross. The hospitals had housed the shell-shocked casualties of the First War. The developer tried to strike a deal: if he allowed the memorial would he be given clearance to build on the land?