Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

The Cowley Lock and the Cowley Peachey Junction have a particular interest for me. As far as the Grand Union Canal is concerned, Cowley marks the end of a twenty-seven-mile ‘pound’ and the start of the ascent to the Colne Valley and the Chiltern Hills. In more leisurely times, the Paddington Packet used to ply the fifteen-mile, lock-free stretch between Cowley and Paddington, pulled by four horses.

The anarchist and libertarian graffiti of the Colne Valley shares the concrete with dopers and slackers and sticky adolescents.

I was ere smokin weed

I was ere but now

I’m not round the corner

Smoking pot I’m writing this

To prove a point but uter shit

Without a joint

In another hand, the critical riposte: YOU SUCK COCK. Princess Di is memorialised by twin hearts and a question mark. A great red cock, Basquiat-hot, spurts blood. A fleshy lighthouse tower floating on a savage sea. WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME…

Low clouds part, rain in the air. Sunbeams scintillate on ruffled water. The smooth curve of a brick bridge, the Cowley moorings. There is none of the jaunty Notting Hill communalism here, decanted Sixties street warrens. The agenda is quieter, more serious. Boat people keep their heads down, mind their own business — which is often survival (the new subversion). One of the true British poets of the last half-century lived in Cowley, tactfully removed from the scene, carrying out his researches, a rate of production (a bibliography of ‘about four hundred’ items) that would shame any of our logophile novelists. Booklets flow from the grizzled (and exiled) Bill Griffiths with the regularity of newsprint. He avoids publication dates on many of his self-produced chapbooks. There’d be no point. He revises, reissues, amends, sticks on a new cover. Bill’s poems require time codes like video tape. He brings out more editions, so it seems, than the Evening Standard .

I wrote to Bill, when he was staying in London, cataloguing the Eric Mottram archive (a monster task), and asked about his time in Cowley.

Now, as to the Grand Union, he replied , I can tell you much or little. It was one of the last canals to be built, unifying the country’s canal system into an Orion-like configuration (now the Kennet Avon is reopened, it literally spans from Thames to Severn Estuary as well as north to south). North of Uxbridge I am not too sure about; the settlement tends to get thicker around Uxbridge itself, and I was based at Cowley, about 2–3 miles south of Uxbridge, where there is a lock, a couple of bridges and a few coveted residential moorings. Near there too is the ‘Slough Arm’, an extra limb of water, which I used in ‘Rabbit Hunt’ and which is notable for the banks of refuse from Central London deposited there in the early C20th.

This ‘Rabbit Hunt’ was a good place to start thinking about Bill. Rabbits and boats again. Griffiths’s work atomises, splits off into discrete files or songs; his poems are many-voiced, resolutely non-hierarchic. You learn to navigate the tributaries, while waiting to be carried back to the main stream. He’s a musician who deploys subtle and shocking rhythms.

The critic Kevin Jackson, visiting Griffiths at Seaham on the Durham coast, locates the poet as existing in ‘about the most cheerless Spartan dwelling I’ve seen since I stopped hanging around with graduate students’. In other words, a beached narrow boat. A terraced cabin in a sea-coal settlement, a few miles south of Sunderland. The only incongruous item in this brick coaster was a grand piano. Griffiths, Jackson reveals, is a virtuoso. ‘He tells me he’s been playing since the age of three and, just before I left to catch my train, underwrites the claim by running effortlessly through a complex little piece by Bartok, LOVE and HATE rippling along the keyboard so swiftly that they begin to blur.’

Fading Hell’s Angel tattoos on the cuticle-chomped digits of a softly spoken man: LOVE/HATE. Bill wheezes, enjoys a roll-up. Beneath all that scholarship — stately build disguised under lumberjack shirt and baseball cap — is a man of the river. Dr Griffiths fits very comfortably into the ruled margins of the Cowley moorings. A boat dweller who hunts rabbits.

‘The Rabbit Hunt’ comes from The Book of the Boat , which, in standard Griffiths fashion, appears in various undated editions. The original would seem to be the Writers Forum version in blue covers, with repro-holograph text, line drawings, stapled sheets. An attractive variant was issued from Seaham by the poet’s own Amra Press: spiral bound with hand-coloured drawings. The Book of the Boat celebrates an odyssey, a serpentine voyage from Cowley through London’s canal system to the Thames at Bow Creek, and around the Essex coast to Brightlingsea.

As someone who has survived a number of rackety voyages in that direction, with percussionist and sound-pirate Paul Burwell, and other less competent skippers, I can vouch for the accuracy — and wit — of Bill’s base account. Place gets at poet. The structure has to encompass sea shanty, camp-fire yarn, hero tale; the hiss and spit of masterless men, rogue spirits who passed through Cowley. In the upheaval of the English Civil War, discharged soldiers, freelance prophets, took to the roads. There were meetings, debates; chapbooks and pamphlets were produced and distributed. Dissent worked its way around the western fringes of the capital; Enfield, Iver, Kingston, Weybridge, Cobham. Griffiths’s associates, his tribal connections (from Hell’s Angels to the narrow boat survivalists), are aligned with traditions of independence, the freedom to roam and rant. In the shadow of grandiose civil engineering projects, scavengers camp out like seventeenth-century Diggers. In his letter, Bill spoke of ‘a family with houseboat and own view onto waste land near Heathrow’.

Mythologically astute, Griffiths begins The Book of the Boat with a passage through the Blisworth Tunnel (or birth canal); a ‘ballad’ he calls it. Once boats had to be ‘legged’ through the second longest tunnel open to navigation (3,057 yards beneath Blisworth Hill). Now travestied water folk queue up to chug down the dark bore. Griffiths has fun with those who sentimentalise history, closet antiquarians who think a voyage into the past is a matter of wearing the right hat.

All folk-fakery is a bare-arsed bane, and lace & bonnets &

[waistcoats are a

shame, awful to tell as th’opening time came near, they most

[dressed up in quaint

Victorian gear .

To match these ghouls was not an easy task, we settled for

[lots of balloons &

pirate masks, soon the boat was trimmed with bobbing skulls .

Disposing of this tame carnival, the narrator goes off on a ‘Rabbit Hunt’. Stuart has the gun and is ‘speechlessly quiet: & mute of eye’. Barry is ‘a guy who knows about holes & rabbits’. What a revelation the hunt is: ‘snow set in the sky’, ‘a good deal of slow introduction’. It is late afternoon before this half-wild bunch move off into the real and actual landscape. Don’t they know about the superstitions, rabbits and boats? The hare-fields of the heart hospital? The necessary appeasement of lunar gods? Ancient gravity that will put lead in their boots?

They drink: ‘like unpacked astronauts’. It’s ‘beer, beer, beer, lovely luring beer’ as they stand in ‘a magic circle’, hallucinating rabbits who will never hop into their pot.

I stare. & I crunch, but and I weave, all around the waste-way .

after him. (I like to keep the gun in front). I’m no nearer a catch .

than is Alf: Why not the geese? (I ask) .