Iain Sinclair - London Orbital

This provoked Renchi, in his turn, to dredge up a memory of his mother. She was a connection of Mansfield Forbes. She spoke about Manny’s prophetic dream of flight: how he saw himself floating over Finella’s shallow roof. Next day came the news of his death.

Hugh Carey mentions the incident in his Forbes biography:

Manny seems to have had a natural affinity with the uncanny; friends often described him as ‘fey’ without the usual implication that he was also ineffective. On the night of his death a Scottish cousin, anxious about him, dreamed that he was teaching her to levitate, then himself flew out of the window at ‘Finella’ over the big cedar tree in the garden and out of sight.

Invented and misremembered rituals gave ‘Finella’ its ability to provoke dreams, communications, dialogues with the dead. It would take an M.R. James — across the Cam in King’s — to do them justice.

You can define the towns of Little England by their ability to deliver 35mm black and white film. Kevin was struggling. He’d used up his single reel on roads, bridges, ruins. And forgotten that he was supposed to procure an author portrait to go with his article. We combed Chertsey and finally came up with the goods in a shopping development that was more car park than mall. Posed among wire trolleys, I squinted at the camera. Then Kevin was on the train and out of it.

The walk had to be commemorated with a book. Naturally. Out of the Jiffy bag, with Kevin’s covering letter (and Latin inscription), fell a copy of Abraham Cowley: Selected Poems . Cowley, a Royalist at the time of the English Civil War, an accused spy, opted for the classic upriver (Ballard) exile: in Chertsey. His bibliography included, along with a political epic ( The Civil War ), a 1643 satire called The Puritan and the Papist .

Chertsey wasn’t fussed about literary associations. The heritage committee couldn’t summon the energy to run with Cowley (wig and gigolo moustache). He escaped local interment (and possible pilgrimage status) by being buried in Westminster Abbey. In his riverine retirement, Cowley delivered The Visions and Prophecies Concerning England .

Nobody, other than Kevin Jackson, could have written about ‘the incalculable part his [Cowley’s] ghost played at various parts of our ramble, from the Payroll Boys’ incomprehensible gibberish about the “Abraham Cowley Ward” of some local hospital to the Cowley Roads we encountered’. Kevin’s blisters, apparently, were deflating, leaving flaps in the skin of his feet. He squeaked slightly as he hotfooted over Cambridge pavements. He was undergoing a strict physical regime (reading the training manuals, High Sierra psycho-yomping guides), in expectation of joining us on future walks.

*

In the evening light, long shadows on a dull road, we marched on Weybridge. DRIVE SLOWLY ANIMALS. I applaud a red brick semi that has taken the trouble to convert a strip of communal lawn into a paved terrace, topped with decorative balcony (so tight to the house that nobody could stand behind it). Scores of young children in yellow waistcoats (crash-helmets) push their bikes along the pavement.

The sky over Woburn Park sagged with Zeppelin cloud-socks. An hour when bad photographs work best, smearing essence: egg and ketchup colours. Well-licked breakfast plate under a glaze of washing-up liquid.

Dragonflies twitching on nettles. A blue too slight to capture. The diluted English surrealism of a twilight park: a water chute with empty plastic logs, a misplaced Epstein woman drumming robotically (visible wires trailing from her back). A Toshiba showroom designed to look like a roadside temple.

Crossing the River Wey is a big moment for Renchi. A quick turn around a Chinese church (eccentric anti-vernacular, Gothic turrets, Greek Orthodox dome) and we head for the station. Weybridge is a good place to leave for another day; suspended visions of St George’s Hill, phantom Diggers camped among immaculate golf course mansions.

16 June 1999. Renchi talked so much about Sara H that she became a real presence in my own imaginings; I saw her work as feeding on (and ameliorating) the momentum of the M25’s perpetual (stop/start) motion. Sara lived outside the orbit. In a comfortable house in a village on Salisbury Plain. A mill stream, coming off the River Avon, ran through the garden.

Sara was the one who guided Renchi (and others) around the heat-contours, the dispensations of Stonehenge. She was a painter. Her regular shows — still life, animal — sold out. The work was meticulous, unsentimental, based on close observation. Pet portraiture, had she continued with it, would have provided a decent living. The singularity of the beasts, the glint, was assiduously recorded; hyperreality as a branch of Surrealism. There was nothing soft or splashy about this work. Fruit displaced its own weight, cut a shape in the consciousness: Zurbarán, not Renoir. A memory world captured in a convex mirror.

And then, abruptly, the career was aborted. Sara, under the control of a spirit guide, struck out on an epic undertaking. She was instructed to abandon the garden produce, moggies and curs, and move into abstraction. Abstraction in which every line had a moral integrity, every curve mapped a dream motif. The manageable format of the earlier oils replaced by vast canvases — which had to be painted, fast, in a narrow, off-kitchen extension. Stacks of canvases, calling for expensive paints and brushes, were produced to order.

What were they like? Renchi struggled to describe them. He spoke of the magnitude of the task, of quantity. Technique. The Wiltshire house with its inherited furniture, lived-in rooms, creaking stairs, tight corridors, was bursting with the product of this merciless grind. Each canvas had a narrative, an interpretation that only Sara (handmaiden to her unappeased instructor) could deliver. The meaning of the series would not be revealed until all the paintings — three, four, five hundred — were exhibited in one place.

Coming off our walk to Weybridge, we felt that it was the right moment to break away, a trip to Salisbury Plain. By leaving the road, witnessing Sara’s dream maps (a project as mad as our own), we might achieve an overview. Whatever compelled me to spend two years expiating the shame of the Millennium Dome was as fierce and inexplicable as Sara’s daily ritual in her studio.

Anna was up for the outing, by train to Alton, where Renchi would meet us and drive us to Sara’s house. The first breath of morning air, on the kitchen doorstep, was hot. London was sticky with pollen, obscure allergies were activated. Pass a particular building, pause at a road crossing, and the sneezing would start. The fits were not related to trees or bushes, they were triggered by memory, previous attacks, forgotten journeys.

The Nigerian mini-cab was late. It had gone to the wrong Albion. We were forced to dodge, double back; foot-down detours to avoid the sombre (Farringdon Street) march of the ‘Carnival against Capitalism’. We jumped on the train as it was moving out.

Settled in an almost deserted carriage, we met a young sculptor, friend of Renchi’s stepdaughter, who was also interested in witnessing Sara’s work.

I’ve always enjoyed — pre-privatisation, pre-Hatfield and Clapham and Paddington — riding on trains. Real time cinema, floating landscapes. And now there is the bonus of linking up, seeing from a different perspective, areas we have walked through. It was important, Renchi and I agreed, to get the first circuit done: start each walk, fresh, from the point we stopped on the previous outing. Which meant that quite significant locations — such as Royal Holloway College, Holloway Sanatorium — demanded a supplementary visit.