Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

The war dead, the mutilated of Flanders, have their champions; hospital patients, wrapped in sacking, went unrecorded into a mass grave. HELM, a charitable group concerned with those who had been ‘returned to the community’, lobbied for some kind of memorial to the forgotten generations. Mr Heighs wouldn’t budge without his development deal. The site, bought ‘for a peppercorn sum from the health authorities’, remains in limbo — in the expectation that Green Belt laws will change. ‘Would you give someone a piece of your garden for nothing?’

Subsequent correspondents, unwilling to accept developer as scapegoat, concentrate on the original contract. It stank. ‘The thing I find most shocking about it all is the fact that the health authorities sold… the land in the first place. Why on earth did they do that? Was it a continuation or reflection of their uncaring and irreverent attitude towards the thousands of harmless people unnecessarily sent to grim psychiatric institutions of the Epsom cluster?’

Keeping up a good pace, flogging around town, our guide was due to check in for a hernia operation. This outing, he assured us, justified his discomfort. By green lanes and half-forgotten paths we navigated the Epsom fringes, from Carpenter’s school (a brazen march through pee-stink corridors) to Nonsuch Palace (stones in the grass). A hubble-bubble of free-associating anecdotes: inspirational English master Kenneth Curtis taught poet Geoffrey Hill (who dedicated King Log to him). Millais used Hogsmill ‘as a backdrop for his Ophelia’. John Procter was a school friend…

Procter? Musician and polemicist (aka ‘I, Ludicrous’). An educated joker who had written and performed an M25 anthem. Spoken voice: ‘The M25, London’s orbital. Take a ride.’ With acoustic interference, throbbing and moaning. More lift-shaft than garage: ‘The M25, the M25.’ Composed at the start, around 1986, Procter’s chant is charmingly antique; sensible and a little crazy. ‘The old farms forgotten, except on out of date maps.’ Procter admits that he won’t be using the road, other than to visit ‘relatives in Somerset’. Or: ‘cricket in Kent.’ For what Kevin Jackson refers to as ‘an inconclusive period’, Peter Carpenter acted as Procter’s manager. ‘Sort of.’

The secret agenda of the day, what we’re edging towards, as we all recognise, is: The Tunnel. The subterranean network that Renchi and I walked past when we climbed Ashley Road towards the Downs. This time we’re going in, Renchi’s cemetery pebbles will be used in a giant M25 sand-painting. He hopes to find a suitable cavern or sanctuary.

As a writer (former market trader, parks gardener, ullage man), I have no status to protect. But I wonder about the professional academic and the English master from a public school, how would they look in the local press — as convicted trespassers? Doc Wallen is grinning (Doc Holliday on ether) as he goes over the fence. KEEP OUT. Renchi manages to drag open the heavy metal door. I find the stub of a nightlight. (Evidence of suburban satanism? Drug orgies?)

The brick tunnel drops into darkness. My nightlight gives a feeble glow. Illuminates the veins in my hand. The door, designed to withstand bomb blasts, creaks; threatens to close behind us. The underground complex is rumoured to stretch for miles, with hidden entrances in various parts of town. Fifty or sixty yards in, we hit water. We’re really not equipped for this, we’ll have to come back on another occasion. The tunnel divides, branches off; there are cell-like sidechambers.

By the dying candleflame, Renchi scratches the outline of his M25 drawing on the damp floor. He’ll return, with drummers, sand, chalk — and the pebbles from St Ebba’s cemetery. We’re quite relieved to have an excuse for a retreat to the pub.

A figure in a suit, standing on the embankment, spots us. He makes no challenge, doesn’t move. But when Renchi and his troop pitch up for their shamanic ceremony, the tunnels are definitively sealed. The schematic drawing has to be laid out, over several hours, on the ramp.

The Amato pub, in the early evening, is varnished, brassy; occupied by check-jacket and mustard corduroy equestrians. It’s generous of them to let us in. We don’t talk horseflesh and we’re not cranking up for a serious session. We’ve walked past mansions with complicated ironwork gates, past stables and fields of cattle with designer coats, cleaner, less ostentatious than Hollywood wives.

Drink in hand, day’s ration of Romanticism digested, Doc Wallen recalls his childhood: Carpenter hasn’t got the monopoly poly on Wordsworthian soliloquies. Louisiana. Wallen’s father was a surveyor for an oil company. In a house by the bayou, dim figures moved at night, circling the bed. A Southern Gothic dreamscape. Faulknerian shadows: grandfather, spurned by the detested son to whom he had left the farm, died where he lay. An unremoved corpse, busy with maggots, in a nest of rat-filth.

Such images infect the pub. Peter Carpenter speaks of William Hayward, a troubled life that brought him, inevitably, to Epsom. If the tale is not properly told, the man fades away; the legend is discredited. We allow ourselves to become identified with those we promote, so that the manufacture of another writer’s biography is a gloss on our own. Present neglect supports elective obscurity. The reappraisal of a vanished reputation must initiate a turn in the biographer’s fortune. These exercises move between literary archaeology and psychic vampirism.

I listen to Peter’s fragmentary account. I read pamphlets of Hayward’s poetry and I obtain a copy of the novel, It Never Gets Dark All Night. This was published by Heinemann in 1964. He was in good company; other titles promoted (on the back of the dust-wrapper) include Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun and Patricia Highsmith’s The Two Faces of January.

The cover illustration is a solar disc floating over three very serious bohemians: clean hair and anoraks (male) and trowels of eye-shadow (female). We are revisiting the Lawrentian Spring (CND and rented cottages), before the Summer of Love. Bran Lynch, an uncocky and self-doubting Ginger Man, hanging on to the 1,000-foot contour in the soft limestone country of the Cotswolds, wanders on set ‘wearing the overcoat of a literary critic and a pair of army socks’. Hayward’s comedy is stoic, melancholy; the world squeezes his heart. He has the pulse of the land: ‘Sheepcrunch. The iron blathering of tractors. And the sun aggressing through the cracked window.’

The weekend party sours into its Monday aftermath, spill and chill and mismatched underwear, sticky tea grains in a burnt saucepan. A ‘large, genial negro’ called Shiner makes an uncomfortable entrance (current sensibilities on red alert): Shiner has possession of a black Jaguar car. Has he ‘borrowed’ it? ‘What you mean, boy? I hired it. Been working on the motorway. An’ Roz likes a bit of speed. That so, honey?’

She ‘blushes’. We blush. But, if we’re old enough, we’ve lived through such fictions before, seen the period awkwardness drop away, found surviving strengths. Class shapes the narrative, not race. Hayward doesn’t like cities, or the transport infrastructure. ‘Innumerable family cars were being eased out of congested garages onto congested roads… There would probably only be a few hundred injured in this rush, and those certainly the least deserving.’

The cold cottage, the bothy, the borrowed lodge: somewhere remote, out of it, to contemplate — what? The impossibility of salaried employment, urban life, relationships? Thin sunlight on barren fields, a dreadful silence: ‘It was so quiet she could hear the copulation of flies.’ Hayward’s characters, like the author, are oppressed by their ability to articulate, explain, use language.