Iain Sinclair - Downriver

Now the hulks were occupied once more, under the co-sponsorship of English Heritage, who had lovingly restored them to the last detail of authenticated squalor. This daringly simple solution had been unveiled by the Widow in her keynote Marshalsea Speech (subsequently recognized by commentators as the moment when the perceived identity of Britain changed from Orwell’s colonial airstrip on the fringes of the civilized world to a land which had, successfully, made a reservation of its own history).

‘From this day forward,’ the Widow began, with a defiant twist of the head, a lift of the nut-crusher chin, ‘let it be known that We are no longer to be considered the prisoners of history. We have forced open the great iron doors of mystification, self-doubt, self-critical inertia. We have walked, unafraid, into the sunlight. History has been conquered. Rejoice! We have summoned up the courage to recognize — after decades of misrule, lip-service to alien gods — that anything is possible. If We will it. If it is the mandate of the people. The future is whatever We believe it to be!’

Hysterical (orchestrated) cheering continued until the Widow lifted her hand: to preserve the health of several of her key ministers who were empurpled with enthusiasm, to the point of spontaneous combustion. The fanatical ranks of the faithful ( flog, maim, crush ), gathered for the ceremony of throwing wide the Marshalsea gates (reconstructed for the purpose by Stanley Kubrick’s design ace) to welcome the first beneficiaries, fell silent.

‘After We have finished speaking to you today, there will never again in this noble land of ours be such a thing as a prison,’ she continued, unblushing. ‘A prison is a state of mind. And, unlike our opponents — who are fettered in ritual dogmas — We sincerely believe that We can all be released from outmoded concepts of state care. And, in good faith, We make you this offer: let every man become his own warder, protecting the things he loves best: his family , his home , his country . Then, and only then, will We discover what true freedom means.’

Sir Alec Guinness shuffled forward, doing some marvellously observed business with a red-spotted handkerchief, touching the side of his nose, dissociating himself from his actions. He smirked, cancelled a cough, and cut the ribbon. The Marshalsea was reopened as a Dossers’ Dormitory. Vagrants were driven in (by the container load) from their cardboard camps. They should no longer give the lie to the Widow’s rhetoric of achievement. Corporate Japanese in white raincoats (like gulls, they tracked the action) fussed at the lowlife with their cameras, giggling over the quaint ritual of ‘slopping out’. From the viewing gallery above, they composed eloquent longshots as these tattered vacancies perambulated their circuit of the yard, under ferociously pointed walls. The ‘guests’ of the hospice paid their way by posing for polaroid versions of Doré’s anguished etchings: which, incidentally, were on sale, mounted and framed, at the gatehouse. All credit cards accepted.

The hulks were the flagships of a new social order. The shirts of the prisoners hung over the side, as if in surrender: ‘so black with vermin that the linen positively appeared to have been sprinkled over with pepper’. Benevolent plagues carried off the inadequates. The succubus kiss of Dame Cholera made room among the hammocks for an ever-increasing army of offenders, fit-ups, unbelievers, and political heretics. The parson, a white-livered clown, planted himself on the poop deck of the vessel; claret bottle in one hand, a bible in the other. He was afraid to accompany the corpses, as they were stretchered in their dozens, by mask-wearing trusties, to the burying grounds, away among the marshes. Alone, he read the burial service, at a rattling trot, dabbing his carbuncular nose with a silk handkerchief soaked in eau-de-cologne. When he arrived at ‘ashes to ashes, and dust to dust’, he let the handkerchief drop: a strangled dove, fluttering, stalled, caught in a contagious thermal. And the bodies, at this signal (captured by the sergeant’s telescope), were lowered into their lime pit.

I had moved apart from the others. There was a hatch in the cabin roof through which I squeezed my head and shoulders. I could not move my arms, but I could see everything ahead of us. Kay fired the engine. And we roared back out on to the river. The noise dispersed the ghosts. I could hear nothing my companions said. I was driven over the marbled waters like a wooden figurehead; mute, powerless — but inconveniently sensitized to every whim of the light, every memento mori in the running tide. The river outpaced my fear of it: a tightening roll of mad calligraphy, scribbled wavelets, erasures, periods of gold. I was buffeted through a book that had turned to water.

We left Woolwich behind us; its barracks, Arsenal, Museum of Artillery: we dodged the trundling ferry, and scorned the gaunt mushroom field of Telecom discs on the north shore. We relished the clear water of Gallions Reach. There were no other craft. A torn-paper outline of advancing headland. A carpet of clouds.

It could not last. Even Jerome, safely upstream, had his unexpected encounters: he found ‘something black floating on the water’. A suicided woman, around whom he spun a sentimental fable. But I was staring into the dark spaces between the wave crests, letting the ink run, willing some apparition to justify our voyage, as we retraced the fatal track of the Bywell Castle , midstream, closing on the beacon at Tripcock Ness. Navigation lights. The Princess Alice , visible over the murky ground — a land vessel caught among the dead branches, the hooks of thorn! Her red light and her masthead light. ‘ Stop the engine! Reverse full speed! ’ The thing was inevitable. We passed through the wings of tragedy. I could not turn away. It was too easy to enter the consciousness of Captain Harrison, who also travelled here from the domestic safety of his Hackney villa. I was repeating his account of the journey. And I was aware of it.

Harrison of the Bywell , I learnt, resided in Cawley Road, Victoria Park. One of those strong, ugly, family houses taken on in later years by exiled Poles. The hobbled green of Well Street Common lay to stern; the ocean of the Park broke, tamely, over the bows. The house, a brick-built collier, rode at anchor, between voyages. But it could catch the tide at an hour’s notice from the owners.

Cawley Road survived into the 50p edition of the London A — Z , but it has subsequently been purged — leaving Henry Milditch, the thespian bookdealer, who lived directly behind Harrison, and who stalked his destiny like a herring gull, with an unimpeded view of the Park.

Milditch, red-bearded (as of this A.M.) — worried, wrinkled like a preserved fruit — stared over Captain Harrison’s shoulder at the familiar prairie. He was sunk into the immortal melancholy (stateless, land-locked) of a man who knows that, however well his affairs prosper, it is only a matter of time before the Cossack hordes thunder out from the Lido. Grass liquefied before his tired eyes. The Burdett-Coutts Folly was an island — on which the child, Jerome K. Jerome, claimed to have met and held a prophetic conversation with Charles Dickens. Authors of Destiny!

Milditch saw none of this. In his hand was a telephone. He smiled as he lied. In an empty room he made appointments. He withdrew books he had already sold. He smoked a cheap cigar. Captain Harrison, the dead man, was cleared to sail to his fate.

The sense of wellbeing, the anticipated pleasure of a short voyage, was such that Harrison carried his wife with him in a growler to Millwall on the Isle of Dogs. An unlucky thing, a taboo broken: a woman brought on board. A rival to the jealous spirit of the river. (As they clipped through the south side of the Park, the Captain noticed a gang of workmen repointing the stone alcoves, the London Bridge trophies.)