Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

In a clearing, we met two builders in baseball caps. They said they were working on a round white house, a distant relative of Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion. Someone, inspired by Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff, had created a late Modernist barrel: DNA staircases, screen walls and a panorama of Surrey pastoral. The house was hidden, as in a fairy story, and yet its flamboyantly minimalist design shouted: ‘Notice me, write me up.’

Renchi and Kevin were still talking architecture when, on the road to Chertsey, we found a pub (the Golden Grove) where we could settle ourselves in the garden, without making a public spectacle of Kevin’s feet and the rituals that would be needed to keep him mobile. Pints secured (lemonade and orange juice in Renchi’s case), the Golden Grove became the golden bowl. Kevin eases off his boots, abandons the formerly white socks, and stares at forensic evidence of his overambitious hike. I photograph the damage, while Renchi begs a brown plastic tub and does the Jesus thing with Kevin’s wrecked phalanges and metatarsals. Tendons have contracted, skin is raw or puffed into mushroom cushions. The twenty-six bones, a hundred-plus ligaments and thirty-three muscles are outraged by mistreatment. They’ve carried the journalist around town, into the belly of the BBC, on and off trains, why this impetuous vagrancy? My photographs of feet in bowl are like those water-colours in Tate Britain of the deformities of war, insulted flesh stitched together, torn mouths, missing appendages. Kevin’s ankles have their own imprinted tartan, ghost socks. The originals, a pulp of sweat and blood, would fit over a baby’s head. Renchi, prepared for all eventualities, kits Kevin out in spares, hairy red numbers (to hide the leakage of bodily fluids).

Restored, Kevin decides to curtail the excursion and take a train from Chertsey. This is close enough to the Thames to give his day on the road a certain symmetry, river to river. Decision taken, spirits lift. Renchi consults Mary Caine. Chertsey, it seems, is under the titular protection of Sirius. ‘Chertsey, anciently spelt Cerotes, Sirotes, Certesey, recalls both Ceres and Cerberus.’

I recall the white house on St Ann’s Hill — which brings the other two back to their architectural jag. They have a common interest in a much-discussed private residence in Cambridge. To Kevin this house, thanks to its occupation by Mansfield Forbes (who taught English to Humphrey Jennings, the subject of one of the half-dozen books Kevin was currently working on), was a significant footnote. To Renchi, it was home.

‘Finella’, in the Backs, on Queens Road, was owned by Gonville and Caius College, and leased to Mansfield Forbes in 1927. Forbes, by repute a charismatic and eccentric teacher, didn’t pursue publication. Outside Cambridge, the archivists of the English Faculty, purveyors of gossip, he is unknown. With a little more effort, a frolic with Wittgenstein, a decisive encounter with Leavis, he might have made a teleplay by Alan Bennett. His achievements in friendship are rehearsed in a biography by Hugh Carey for the Cambridge University Press. (Kevin duly picked up a discounted copy for £ 3.)

Specs held together with sticking plaster, lectures begun in carpet slippers, a fondness for nephews, nervous breakdown: Forbes played from an orthodox script. The healing part of his story consisted of a love for the Scottish wilderness and a series of epic walks. He painted and composed occasional poems. Most of his life consisted of shrugging off the effects of a dismal adolescence (in the same West Country public school where Patrick White and Lindsay Anderson did time).

Hugh Carey salvages the comic turns expected of a Cambridge man, sympathetic to Modernism. When a friend was done for cottaging, Forbes became convinced that the vice squad were about to raid ‘Finella’. He bundled up the Paris editions of Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover in an old waterproof and chucked them into the Cam. Panic over, he stood on Clare bridge and supervised, with a pocket torch, while a young research student dived in the murk (without success).

The madeover house in Queens Road is generally acknowledged as Forbes’s greatest achievement. I imagined that, in the casual fashion of the time, ‘Manny’ (as he was known) had built the place from scratch; a gentleman amateur like Christopher Wren. I soon discovered that ‘Finella’ began life in the more prosaic disguise of ‘The Yews’: ‘a Victorian villa some eighty years old of the Bayswater period, of sooty ash-grey brick, with a sloping lawn, overhung with yew trees’. Manny confronted ‘sombre dullness’ with the vigour of a TV virtuoso, a hit squad of carpenters and fabric teasers. He made it new. And cod-Mediterranean: yews chopped, grey brick washed with rose-pink, woodwork and frieze in lemon-yellow.

The story came to me in teasing fragments. At the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill, I bought a book on Serge Chermayeff, a self-taught architect (dancer, painter, teacher). Skimming it, I came across a reference to ‘Finella’. I knew ‘Finella’ as the house in which Renchi had grown up. He often talked about it. Finella was supposed to be a Scottish goddess of glass; the Cambridge house traced her legend through mirrors and doors, a ‘waterfall’ encased in the wall of the dining room. The narrative of Renchi’s childhood is interwoven with the geography of’Finella’ and its grounds. In 1973 he published a chapbook, Relations , in which drawings, family snapshots, were overwritten with holograph text to contrive a slender Jungian album of place, dream, antecedents. A cedar tree like an unfleshed spine. An aerial view of the roof: ‘home as centre’. A child in bed. A shared bath (mother). Sisters and father playing a game on the drawing room floor.

I visited ‘Finella’ once, the reception after Renchi’s wedding, figures spilling out of the house, across slanting lawns. Grey photographs of a white afternoon.

The Chermayeff book placed ‘Finella’ in context:

If there was a modernist ‘establishment’ in England at the end of the 1920s, it was centred on the house ‘Finella’ at Cambridge, the home of Mansfield Forbes (1889–1936), a fellow of Clare College, who commissioned a young and unknown Australian architect, Raymond McGrath (1903–76), visiting England on a scholarship, to transform the interiors using a great deal of glass and other modern materials such as copper-faced plywood, ‘Plymax’. The effect was novel and theatrical.

The house was widely reviewed and lavishly praised in the architectural press. Modernism — in terms of a look or a style — was promoted here, in a series of parties, gatherings, debates. Forbes and Chermayeff were much influenced by Eric Gill. Cambridge contacts got Gill the Broadcasting House commission in Portland Place. Gill was the link to the pre-1914 artistic avant-garde in London; an inheritor of Arts and Crafts theories, proselytised in the language of St Thomas Aquinas.

Chermayeff, who frequently quoted Wyndham Lewis’s The Caliph’s Design (1919), might well have challenged the other members of the ‘Finella’ group (Frederick Etchells, Joseph Emberton, Howard Robertson, Maxwell Fry): ‘Architects, where is your vortex?’

‘On Queens Road, Cambridge,’ would come the reply. ‘Finella’ is where the new ideas cooked: Plymax, glass, pink paint. Mansfield Forbes opened his house for the exhibition of Jacob Epstein’s scandalous figure, the squat (child-carrying) figure of Genesis . Punters rushed the lawns, clutching their shillings. For the duration of this event, Forbes slept on a rubber mat at the foot of the primitive stone-carving.

I photocopied an anecdote from the Chermayeff book: ‘Barbara Chermayeff remembered “Manny” performing a fake black mass in the mirrored hall, turning off all the lights and making it up as he went along.’