Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

One of New Labour’s most unyielding red-tie commissars is the former student leftist Jack Straw. It was Straw who was landed with the hassle of ‘The Dictator on the Golf Course’: the million-pound safe house on the safest estate in the safest county in England. General Augusto Pinochet, butcher of Santiago (funded by the CIA, armed by Margaret Thatcher), liked to do his Christmas shopping in London. He would receive Lady Thatcher and other old cronies, cruise the Knightsbridge bazaars, check into a clinic for a 10,000-mile service. Chauf-feured from hotel suite to Harrods, winter traffic at its busiest, the General was well placed to offer an opinion on the level of courtesy available on English roads. Ian Parker, in ‘Traffic’ (an essay published in Granta ), notes that Pinochet ‘praised Britain for its impeccable driving habits’. The verdict of a man who is always driven. The streets Pinochet glimpsed through a tinted window were swept of rubbish. The populace dressed well and didn’t sing or shout or form ugly mobs brandishing photographs of the disappeared. It was Pinochet, after all, who instructed Thatcher in the advantages of a deregulated bus service. ‘Check out downtown Santiago,’ he said. ‘Any time you’re passing.’

It was a terrible shock to be arrested, threatened with extradition, a ‘human rights’ trial in Spain. Old chums, Falklands War colleagues, were outraged. Lord Lamont: ‘Disgraceful!’ Lady Thatcher: ‘His health has been broken, the reputation of our own courts has been tarnished and vast sums of public money have been squandered on a political vendetta — so friends of Britain be warned, the same thing can happen to you.’

But the health of elderly gentlemen in good standing with the establishment is not like the health of ordinary mortals: when they are faced with public examination, it declines rapidly and demonstrates the most alarming symptoms — premature senility, dodgy ticker, the shakes. No memory and a drooling, but brave smile. Partial blindness. Sight like a one-eyed football manager: ‘Sorry, missed that one. I was unwrapping a fresh stick of gum.’ Released into the bosom of the family, on compassionate grounds, they stage a remarkable recovery. Alzheimer’s disease can be shaken off like the common cold. Malfunctioning hearts regenerate; the miraculously restored patient, cured by love and tender care, is back on the fairway. The boardroom.

Pinochet benefited from the hospital service that is still out there in the north-west quadrant of the M25 — for those who really need it.

A medical report was issued — and leaked. Lamont fumed. The motorcade rolled to Wentworth. The dictator was boarded out in an up-market Barratt home. Newsreel crews were on hand to capture the phone call, expressing support, from Margaret Thatcher. From this point on, footage is real estate promo: wheelchair access to garden, picture windows, double-glazing to neutralise the racket from drummers beating out their protest at the limits of the security cordon.

Wentworth swallows celebrity. And takes its sheen into the immaculate grass, the dazzling windows.

The story retreats into a blizzard of newsreel clips. Police car with flashing sign: KEEP OUT. Pinochet photo-op with Baroness Thatcher.

Thatcher: ‘Senator Pinochet was a staunch friend of Britain throughout the Falklands War. His reward from this government was to be held prisoner for sixteen months.’

Aerial view : convoy of cars taking Pinochet to military airbase in Lincolnshire for flight home to Chile.

Peter Schaard (friend of Pinochet): ‘I have seen a deterioration in his health — more than anything else his mental health. He said that when he was back in Chile he would like to learn to read again.’

Aerial view : RAF Waddington, Lincolnshire. Barbed wire. Plane taxiing on runway. Plane taking off. Protesters drumming, Wentworth. Held back by police.

Voice-over : ‘The former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, has won his fight to go home. He is on his way back to Chile this lunchtime, after attempts to have him extradited finally failed. The Home Secretary, Jack Straw, ruled this morning that he wouldn’t send him to Spain to face trial. The operation to move the General out of the country this morning was quite a cloak and dagger affair. He was finally smuggled out of the Wentworth estate where he’s been staying, in a police convoy, shortly after ten o’clock.’

Cloak and dagger is something we do better than most. If America wants you in the dock, as a redundant Serb, the wrong kind of Afghan, you go down. If you’ve got previous as a top customer for military hardware, you walk. That seems to be the rule. Noted political thinker Lord Lamont mused: ‘I don’t see how the world can conduct business between states if heads of government do not have immunity from prosecution. Many democratic politicians, who may find themselves held accountable — perhaps Lady Thatcher — for things that happened in their name, will be very uneasy about this.’

Neil Belton, in The Good Listener (his life of Helen Bamber), pointed out that as soon as the Conservatives were elected in 1979, horse-trading between the two heads of state, Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet, began in earnest. Diplomatic ties, damaged under old Labour, were restored in October 1980. ‘Nicholas Ridley at the Foreign Office made no secret of his wish also to resume arms sales,’ Belton wrote. The release of a report on the torture of a young British student, Claire Francis Wilson, was deliberately delayed, ‘in order not to interfere with his [Ridley’s] announcement… ending the ban on arms sales’.

Prince Andrew, the royal most closely associated with golf (and the Sunningdale/Wentworth/Windsor triangulation), would do the state some service, flying helicopters during the Falklands conflict. But the chummy relationship between Britain and Chile would be damaged by Pinochet’s sleepover in Wentworth. What had once been considered, socially, a plumb posting — military attaché (arms rep) at the British Embassy in Santiago — was now a disaster. Retired submarine commanders, instead of being welcomed, fêted, wined and dined, found themselves in purdah at the ragged end of the world.

Winding up St Ann’s Hill, by a spiral path, it became obvious that Kevin was in some discomfort. His blisters had blisters. His eyes were itching. And the leather straps of his rucksack (book bag) were cutting into his armpits. Renchi, who had moved ahead, searching out the chapel (remains of), paused at a gap in the tree line: a beacon had been established, a potential fire-basket to celebrate coronations, Armadas, millennia. Summit linked with summit across England, coast to downland, hill fort to coast. News of invasion would be relayed to the relevant forester.

We are fleas in the fur of Mary Caine’s Dog. The beast is barking at Wentworth. ‘A British camp defends the circle on the dog’s contoured shoulder at St Anne’s Hill, Chertsey,’ she writes. ‘Its steep terraces and woodland walks haunted by a ghostly nun executed for trysting here with her lover… Here the Otherworld begins — the Mysteries of Ceres, Ceredwen, Black Annis.’

Contemplating such possibilities, Renchi stretches out, full-length, on a low wall: he dreams England. Eyes shut, hands resting on belly, feeling the passage of breath, he lets the orbital miles flow into the green world, the distant lakes. It is important to halt at the right place, switch off, put the system into suspension. Spying, cataloguing, recording give way to leisurely meditation. Kevin likes the sound of that. I warn him not to take his boots off, not yet; he must wait for the pub, a couple of stiff drinks. The socks will have to be cut away with a knife.

The woods are filled with wonders. Abandoned cars are part of the ecosystem. Once you get them off the road, on to Rainham Marshes, the Green Way to Staines, the River Lea, they achieve a posthumous status as sculptural objects. Nature loves alien curves and textures. Bugs root into soft padding. Birds nest. Paint, whatever its original colour, shades towards river-bottom green. Rust predicts autumn. We stopped to admire a Wolseley whose headlamps were owl-eyes and whose side-mirrors had twisted to catch glints in the high canopy. Spiders’ webs glazed missing windscreens with tough lace. A mulch of leafmould, like shredded tobacco, cushioned (insect-arm) wipers.