Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (25 page)

Ackroyd sees a walk towards the source of the Thames as a journey made backwards, away from human history. But that is the direction I decided to take; the legends of the Isle of Grain, from William Hogarth’s drunken boat party, through Robert Hamer’s film
The Long Memory
(1953), to climate camp protests at Kingsnorth, were history enough for me. Ackroyd provided my starting point: London Stone. This beacon, on the east bank of the Yantlet Creek, is said to mark the point at which the Thames merges with the North Sea. ‘The song of the Thames has ended,’ he wrote.

Walking west, I reached Ballard’s Shepperton after days of misadventures and forced diversions: before niggling doubts sent me back, yet again, to my starting point near the village of Grain. The true pilgrimage, in the Ackroydian spirit, could only begin after touching the London Stone. I had stepped off from the wrong side of the creek, a spit from the symbolic beacon, but it wouldn’t do. The Crow Stone on the Essex shore and the London Stone in Kent: an imaginary line, spanning the Thames, joins them. This is all the information Ackroyd has to offer. How he reached the London Stone on his own expedition, and how he felt after so many hard miles, is not revealed. The author, as embodiment of London, dissolves into the cold water of the North Sea.

Studying the Ordnance Survey map for the Thames Estuary, I saw no good reason why I couldn’t walk along the shore from Grain, by way of Cockleshell Beach, to the London Stone. Or, failing that, down a track past Rose Court Farm to Grain Marsh. But maps are deceptive, they entice you with pure white space, little blue rivulets, a church with a tower, the promise of a shell-hunting foreshore: and then they hit you with tank traps, warning notices.

MILITARY FIRING RANGE KEEP OUT
.

Rusting metal poles looped with barbed wire. A pebble shore protected by sharp-angled Vorticist obstructions, concrete blocks crusted with orange lichen. Wrecked cars turned on their backs and absorbed into nature. Footpaths doubling into aggregate dunes, dark-shadowed lakes. Refuse dumps dressed in meadow vetchling and rosebay willowherb. Cattle, on strips of land between creeks, might be part of a real farm or target practice. Across the marshes, in the soft haze, smokestacks of constantly belching power stations.

When the coastal path failed, I tried a quiet back road: running, very soon, up against ponds reserved for the angling club of Marconi Electronic Systems and the elite fishermen of BAE Systems. A huddle of police cottages monitored access to North Level Marsh and the London Stone.

PRIVATE M.O.D. ROAD. RESIDENTS AND VISITORS TO POLICE COTTAGES ONLY
.

I backtracked, walked for hours – and eventually found myself on the wrong side of the Yantlet, near the colony of huts and holiday homes where any upstream Thames pilgrimage should start. The only standing stones were a blunt obelisk commemorating the ‘completion of the Raising of the Thames Flood Defences between 1975–1985’ and a compacted cairn, like the remains of a fireplace after a bomb blast, from which the plaque had been removed.

The tactic of culling inconvenient elements from a map went back, as did so many other aspects of the GP era, to Dr Goebbels. Baedeker guides, as Vitali Vitaliev points out in
Life as a Literary Device
(2009), were subjected to censorship, for the first time, in Hitler’s Germany. ‘Strategic areas, such as railways and bridges, were removed from the 1936 edition of
Baedeker’s Berlin and Potsdam
, published for the Berlin Olympic Games.’

On the edge of the frame, whatever your direction of travel through the Isle of Grain, the belching stacks and trumpet-mouths of power stations remind you that this is a working landscape. Its seductive emptiness is a consequence of an invisibly enforced, but always felt, exclusion policy. Without an invitation, a hard hat and protective vest, you trespass on these salt marshes at your own risk.

Children of the middle classes were getting their first taste of counterterrorism, increased levels of state paranoia. Well-meaning, university-educated, self-elected friends of the planet were experiencing dawn raids: the trashed flat, seizure of books, papers, laptops. They were being arrested, processed, released, or brought to trial: before the contemplated action happened. They were pressured into becoming informers. They time-travelled to a 1967 mindset of tapped phones, spooks with cameras in a van across the road, infiltrators in every group, agents provocateurs heating up demonstrations.

The fiercest reaction was reserved for opponents of the energy industry. This was where the crunch would surely come and politicians were taking no chances. If your face appeared in the movie of the Kingsnorth Climate Camp, among the loose confederation of tribes opposing E.ON’s coal-fired power station, you could expect a wake-up call at your home address. The Kent police who held individual protestors arriving at the camp, often for more than an hour, while they were searched and photographed, defended their actions. ‘National security. War footing. Afghanistan. The 2012 Olympics.’

Helicopters hovered throughout the night. The agreed route of the protest march was altered without explanation. Ministers, responding to media criticism, made much of the seventy officers who suffered injury during the battle of Grain. When the relevant documents were acquired under the Freedom of Information Act, it was revealed that only twelve of the injuries had any direct connection with the demonstration. Other war wounds included: being ‘stung on the finger by a wasp’, succumbing to heatstroke, lower-back pain from sitting too long in a car, nasty headaches, loose bowels.

I continued to push west, towards Oxford, but any hope of narrative continuity was undone by involuntary flashbacks and surreal forward visions, like a character getting on a plane in a paranoid American TV fantasy. When you travel beside water, time is plural, personality dissolves. We are in the story, but we are not the story. Place dictates its own terms and conditions.

I was trudging into Reading on my reverse Ackroyd walk, when I realized that I would have to return to the Yantlet Creek. The sight of the London Stone across the narrow rivulet was an inadequate response, my walk through the salt marshes counted for nothing: hands-on touch was required. The unviolated obelisk, 54 kilometres from London Bridge, marks the downstream limit of the authority of the City of London Corporation. The fact that it lodged on forbidden ground made it more appealing; if I failed in this quest, my expedition was without substance. True to Ackroydian dogma, I pitched it pretty high: the stone had become the symbol of liberty. To reach it was to release the riverside reaches from a cloud of unknowing. The madness of Thames Gateway colonization. Military zones struck from the map. Rebranded domes. Swine flu. Floating airports. Press packs and laptop presentations.

Before parking in the village of Grain, near the unwelcoming pub named after Hogarth’s rollicking peregrination of 1732, I drove to Kingsnorth through a
Red Desert
aftertaste of roads too well made to be comfortable. Private railways screened by poplars. Chimneys like disconnected prosthetics. Silos (as sinister as the word). Lagoons that looked like oil slicks. Corrugated fields where silver lakes were exposed as sheets of crop-forcing plastic. When I left the car outside a yellow-signed café in a reservation of rubber-shredding sheds, the early-morning lanes and grazing marshes were somehow bereft. E.ON UK are demonstrating all the standard strategies of exclusion: cameras, warnings, a scrambled-egg security gang manning checkpoints, high fences around a nature reserve. The energy brokers patronize wild birds, passerines, nesting avocets and rarely seen bobtailed godwits. If a bucolic cyclist weaves down this country lane, he will be wearing a large identity tag on a string around his neck. (Jimmy Savile fixed it.)

Bill Oddie turned out, in 1989, to open the purpose-built freshwater pools of the Kingsnorth Nature Centre, which is closed and shuttered today, fence draped with prohibitions.

NO PERSON SHALL DIG, TRAWL, DREDGE OR SEARCH. ENTRY TO THIS AREA IS A BREACH OF SECURITY AND WILL RENDER YOULIABLE TO PROSECUTION UNDER THE SHIP AND PORT FACILITY (SECURITY) REGULATIONS
.

Agribiz fields, shielded from the Medway by an embankment, are edged with sunken tractor tyres, making shrines of the connection points to an hydraulic irrigation system. Wind sings in pylon cradles. The power station hums. Rabbits break cover. Skylarks tread air. Two tiny creatures I later identify as yellow wagtails bounce from the path.

The death of J. G. Ballard was not unexpected, but it is still shocking, and now a quality is missing from this place, and from the microclimate of London. Acknowledging that a writer, whose work we have come to rely on, is out there, alive and active, sustains us. The non-specific headache, the dry throat, they are not caused by the sickly electromagnetic field, white dust on the road. There is a persistent black hole in the landscape, a broken connection between optic nerve and retina, a measure of loss.

Making another attempt at the track across Grain, I pass unmolested until I reach the row of police cottages. A large lady, interrupted in her domestic duties, accompanied by a scrawny youth in a vest, stands her ground. ‘Excuse
me
.’ I do. It’s not her fault. She is a manifestation of everything laid down between Yantlet and Medway. And I’m carrying a large rucksack and have a shirt wrapped around my head to keep off the sun. Pale Taliban. ‘You can’t come down here. Notices.’

I notice the spike of what I assume is the London Stone, frustratingly close, but I’m not permitted to pass. This woman knows nothing of the stone. ‘Go back the way you came.’ It’s an enviable morning. After I detour around the cottages, to sit watching swans on a back channel, I am ready to abandon the mission. Ackroyd reckons this landscape has not changed in 2,000 years. He speaks of it as an escape from the world.

When I slunk back, defeated, to the village of Grain with its single shop and pub forbidden to wearers of muddy boots, I noticed a powerful woman in a bright blue singlet, hoop earrings, cigarette in mouth, swishing a Flymo one-handed around the ornaments in her front garden. She didn’t have gnomes. There were two shrunken policemen book-ending her front door: a helmeted constable with upraised truncheon and a sadistically bland commander in peaked cap, hands clasped behind his back.

But it wasn’t quite over. At an art event in a squatted charity mission in Hackney Wick, I bumped into the photographer Stephen Gill. I wondered if Stephen was up for a kayak voyage across the Yantlet. A week later, at 6.30 a.m., we dragged the inflatable, paddles, life jackets, camera bags, down the track from Allhallows. The mouth of the Thames Estuary was choppy, white crests and a gusting east wind. The tide was out. Stephen noticed how the big ships, in an orderly queue, were riding at anchor in the deep channel, off Southend. The Yantlet Creek was a fast-flowing trickle, banked with mud. ‘Let’s go for it,’ I said. We dumped our kit and waded out, jumping from insecure foothold to foothold, to arrive on a sandy beach of Crusoe novelty. Not a footprint. Strings of seaweed, shell, plastic tidewrack. A wild-flower fringe smelling like a herbivore’s tangy breakfast.

The London Stone on its slippery islet is a fossil-embossed obelisk perched on a plinth, which has been constructed from sodden masonry and calcified wood. This weathered tooth is like a monument to a drowned city. There is a memorial aspect, but nobody can remember who or what is being celebrated. The higher your name on the obelisk, the more it is obliterated. It’s almost as if the sailors on a sinking raft had carved their titles on the mast. Captain William Ian Pigott. Captain B. J. Sullivan. Rear-Admiral Horatio Thomas Austin. Blind witnesses to a walk that I could now resume in good heart. Picking up a smoothed triangle of London brick, roseate, and good to hold, I had my fetish to carry along the river path to a distant Cotswold field, the source.

I treated Gill to a major fry-up at the Kingsnorth café. The rubber-stripping operation had a yellow truck parked at the gate:
HOGARTH TYRE SHREDDERS
. An Ackroydian coincidence? The owner admitted that the painter was his inspiration, the way he nailed the follies and foibles of a corrupt society. This man commuted to Grain, daily, from a home near the Chiswick Roundabout. It was Hogarth’s Chiswick aspect that he was commemorating. The Grain part of the story had passed him by. ‘You learn something every day.’ The big tyres cost £1,000 each. Minor flaws are easily smoothed over and the reconditioned jobs can be knocked out at £300 a pop.

After a farewell stroll on Grain, introducing Gill to an endlessly fascinating terrain, we would return to London. Coming through the zone of dunes and solitary trees poking out of rubble islands, we paused at the perimeter fence of the military firing range. If these tidal marshes are so dangerous, why are cattle allowed to roam? Why do horses stick their inquisitive noses over gates that mark the ‘demolition boundary’? A kiosk, its window-flap rattling in the wind, has been perched on stilts. An unmanned forward-observation post like a portable toilet for the rock festival that would never come. A name was stamped, grey on grey, above the steel-shuttered window:
OLYMPIC
.

Anna came with me. Rucksacked and booted, sandwiches prepared, it felt as if we had finally made the break. We could follow the Thames to Oxford and beyond, why not? When light lifts over the rim of the marshes, there is a challenging sharpness in the air. The place is undisturbed, almost as I remember it, carrying on its furtive transactions, requiring neither acknowledgement nor attention. Allhallows-on-Sea: a landscape imagined by a blind man.

Crossing a causeway, past the pub and the hut colony, decisions have to be made, paths divide. The direct rush at the river never works: trenches, rivulets hidden in reeds. The big sky is clear, for the first time in weeks, no rain, a pinkish emphasis over Southend. Behind us, a ring of interconnected power stations leaks vertical columns of white smoke into the still air. This is one of the special places, nudging the open sea, giving access to the Medway; half-exposed with flat fields of cattle and horses, barbed-wire fences, broken sheds. Salt marshes against a beach of detritus left by surging tides. Hoo is occupied by people and buildings that have chosen to drop from sight. Those who know it only from helicopter swoops, downloads of unreliable maps, are excited by grand schemes for runways, wind farms, settlements assembled overnight from kit.