London Overground (22 page)

The creatures Clare honoured in his witness. The quick and secret things of copse and cell.

A sequence I like in Freddie's BBC film of Clare has him picking stones from a field in his time as a guest at Matthew Allen's High Beach Asylum in Epping Forest. London visitors, superior journalists, have come to try him. To poke and prod around the fading lustre of celebrity. First, there is place. The gloomy Millet setting, the nondescript corduroy of the field, so unlike the slurp and ordure and knuckle-breaking grind of the mud farm in Kötting's Zola translation,
Filthy Earth.
The mechanical repetition of the actions performed by the labourers,
tamed lunatics watched by their keepers, gives the scene an understated formality. And Freddie as Clare, brought from his fieldwork, his disguise, to take a clay pipe with these alien interrogators, catches the balance perfectly. Muzzling his demons, playing the man cured by fresh air and morally improving exercise, he nods and smiles. With every answer a tease, spiteful with ambiguity. He knows what lies ahead and is helpless to avoid the first fated step on the road. ‘Forget thyself,' Clare would later write, ‘and the world will willingly forget thee till thou are nothing but a living-dead man dwelling among shadows and falsehood.'

The Overground walk had achieved its critical state. Kilburn High Road was a manifest border. Kossoff's painted ghosts, his
Hamlet
play of dead fathers in the booking hall, brushed past us with spidery touch. I thought of Chris Petit's novel
The Hard Shoulder
, in which an Irishman returns from the little death of prison to an old life that is no longer there, among Kilburn rooming houses and Irish Republican pubs. Like so many Petit characters, O'Grady is emotionally atrophied. The book's narrative is a posthumous dream. The released prisoner is one of the revenants on parade, a face frozen in a train window, glimpsed and smeared by Leon Kossoff in rapid sketches undertaken in his Willesden Green garden, where he waits beside the propped-up cherry tree.

‘After West Hampstead,' Petit wrote, ‘the train travelled a ridge. Slate sky bled the colour from the view … O'Grady felt his stomach contract and thought of riding on, but he got out at Kilburn, pausing to watch the train move away down the long, straight track. He couldn't remember if the carriages had always been silver.'

The dead man stands where we are standing now. ‘The Kilburn High Road had been a ditch when he left, and still was
from what he could see.' O'Grady looks for a pub in which to orientate himself while he waits for the sun to go down. ‘Now he had grown invisible, which was how he wanted it.'

Kilburn is fed by the railway. Immigrant workers in boots and dirty trainers step from the station with a thirst.

The days when I could get commissions to make films with Petit were over. In some mysterious way, everybody concerned with the commissioning process seemed to be out of commission themselves: incommunicado with pills and pain, post-operative in Germany, convalescent in Deal, dying in a cottage in mid-Wales. The characters who truly understood film, yellow from cheap cigars and years chasing festivals, and sitting all night at tables where you had to shout in three languages to be misunderstood, were old. Crocked. Crippled with integrity. Some of them were almost as old as I was. And the bright folk who took meetings, the intelligent young women, had to be fastidious about accessibility and outcomes. One of them was kind enough to explain to me that I'd have to find a substitute for a tricky word like ‘digress'. She suggested ‘move'. ‘We can't afford to alienate what's left of the audience,' she said. ‘Keep literature for books.'

And if the thickening night and the fugue-like weariness referenced our swan-pedalo voyage, it also led me to tempt Andrew with tales from the road, the John Clare walk out of Epping Forest on those blistering summer days. It was the notion of becoming a Straw Bear that really sold it. As we inspected the underwater glaze of the patterned wall of green bricks near West Hampstead Thameslink Station, I could see the physical transformation begin: a slump of the shoulders, a lumbering walk, claws sprouting, matted hair spiking into plaits of straw. Andrew was channelling Herzog's
Grizzly Man
, belly growling, and peering suspiciously at the Hampstead horizon as if he were seeing the Alaskan tundra. His actions
cast me in the Timothy Treadwell part; the nutty, bear-watching obsessive who comes to a very sticky end, killed and eaten, off-camera with live sound.

The film of the Clare walk would have to be done, budget or no budget. As we closed in on territory associated with the London exile, and last years of Sigmund Freud, the bear fetish took on flesh, and made itself available for analysis. Anxiety hysteria, in the form of animal possession, sounded very much like a suitable case for treatment.

A few weeks after recovering from our London Overground exertions, we drove to Oxfordshire, to seek out Freddie Jones, the veteran actor who, having played Clare with such bug-eyed conviction, was now the keeper of his spirit. Freddie lived in a converted chapel in a quiet village, not too far from a decommissioned US air base. The abandoned silos and deep bunkers suggested an ideal location in which to record the poems of Clare's madness.

Freddie was alone with his posters, the glory days of performing for Fellini in
And the Ship Sails On
, and an elegant coffee tray set out for him by his absent wife. He was a mime of gracious welcome. He waved us towards the tray with all kinds of amusing business, but he didn't have a clue how coffee was actually prepared. Andrew stepped in. He was in high-register mode too, spilling anecdotes, thrusting books at the unprepared actor, swooping and circling – and beyond all else registering his genuine conviction that Freddie was a great figure and the only possible man for the job.

‘Shall we make the coffee a little more interesting?' Freddie said, reaching for the whisky bottle. After two or three cups, the coffee element of the mix was left out.

‘I see passages of quiet contemplation,' Andrew bluffed. ‘The Straw Bear wandering at the end of his tether, across a
busy motorway, in the forecourt of a Happy Eater, stood still in the middle of a ploughed field underneath a wind turbine foregrounded by electricity pylons.'

‘Bear? Be-arrrr? What bear? Oh this is delightful.'

In his snowy-white beard, with wisps of hair above pink cheeks, Freddie was the Lear of
Emmerdale.
He had a driver to take him up to Leeds for his appearances in the popular television soap. ‘Costs me more than my fee,' he muttered. But the addiction was still there, to steal scenes with his electric disability carriage.

When Freddie slurped and sipped, remembering the earlier Clare, but not where he had left his VHS tape of the performance, and anticipating, with some excitement and necessary doubt, his future engagement with a director as mad and visionary as any from the past, the frown and inward gaze of the poet's lost mind was projected across his private face. And he started to recite, with perfect recall, the song of the road, and all its pains. Clare, in the seizure of inspiration, in his forest incarceration, jumped forward to describe what was still to come.

Life to me a dream that never wakes:

Night finds me on this lengthening road alone.

Love is to me a thought that ever aches,

A frost-bound thought that freezes life to stone.

There is a young woman in the front garden, her nakedness enhanced by the coarse covering of an old man's winter coat with a fur collar. She is pleasuring a used cigar. Long hair is caught in the lower branches of Sigmund Freud's favourite almond tree. A witness speaks of snot and smoke. Looking out from the study window, where heavy drapes are always drawn, our suppurating ghost is transformed. Unsupported, he walks through looped films that shimmer with faulty light. A ‘propatetique' striding forward in eternity.

‘Pretend that the others around us are real,' I said, unconvinced by the rasp of my own voice. By Andrew's retreat into his furry carapace. His trundling walk, a bear caught between dances, facing uphill.

Coming now, in the evening of the Overground circuit, to exiled parts of London that are disturbingly familiar, the people on the street begin to look more like themselves. Like characters I think I have known: bookdealers, jobbing translators, migrant Russian women hosting vodka seances to make a scene out of unpromising West Hampstead materials. We are weary enough, after the haul through Brondesbury and Kilburn, to let the fantasies through: self-directed dramas of consolation and reward. In the sodium-gaudy darkness, Andrew's sunglasses have passed beyond eccentricity. Into mimetic blindness. The lecherous grin on the face of his stuffed monkey is justified.

When I snap him against the orange stripe of West Hampstead Station, he holds up a ring of heavy keys. Perhaps he's missing
his motorbike? He has the meat solidity of a Sickert portrait, painted wet on dry: thornproof hiking suit, canvas-strap shoulder bag. He yawns. And scratches a few sparks from his two-day beard.

At Finchley Road & Frognal, where the pulse of north-flowing traffic is felt, the Overground becomes an underground, tunnelling into London clay. This notion engages Kötting. Around this point, so he says, our most recent glacier put on the brakes. And the white tongue of the optimistically named ‘Last' Ice Age ground to a halt. Viennese cafés nudge against the axial moraine, dispensing elaborate pastries and serious coffee. Motorists in their pods are preparing themselves for the bifurcation of M1 and A1. Small enterprises along this nervous stretch are being replaced by the showy windows of brand leaders.

The unsolved glacial question is carried with us, uphill, into what begins to feel like a condition of perpetual night. Is the Pleistocene a temporal division invented by academic professionals to keep the territory in-house? Or does it, as our discussion implies, invoke something
present
but submerged, an older, fiercer, better part of ourselves? And if I see the Hampstead ridge as a coast, a line of difference with which to contest the memories that drag themselves ashore, Andrew is more direct. How long is the tunnel? When was it built? How much did it cost? Can we find a way to trespass and walk through to Hampstead Heath without frying ourselves?

The tunnel, so I read, is 1,166 yards long. I'm not going to measure it. We will head directly up Arkwright Road, paying our respects to the Camden Arts Centre, and over the hump, putting our ears to the ground, from time to time, to be sure that we are still on the right track.

Contemplation of our failure to burrow under this dune of Eocene sand brought back the morning's challenge at Wapping,
when we took the train beneath the Thames, rather than putting in the extra mile that would have allowed us to trudge, choking on fumes, through the Rotherhithe Tunnel.

‘My first ride on the Tube,' Andrew said, ‘was to Stamford Bridge. Chelsea/West Ham. I was seven. I supported the Hammers because of the World Cup. Peters, Geoff Hurst, Bobby Moore. And the away kit on my Subbuteo team. I had a thing for hoops. Any team with hoops.'

The psychoanalytical bias towards lying on a couch, with some bearded confessor, chin on fist, his chair behind your head, straining to interpret, to catch the halting phrases as they stutter and gush, might be a mistake. Walking releases the lock gates of memory with greater effect. And the process is not so costive, smoke-stained, airless. Walking therapy, side by side, turn and turn about, counters inhibition. Roles are exchanged like hats. No hierarchy. No punishing fee. No guilt. Narratives bleed into the map.

Kötting spoke of his excitement and fear. He was then a wide-eyed innocent going with the bovver boys in their Doc Marten boots, by rattling Underground train, into deepest enemy territory. He polished the symbols as he laid them out. How certain youths handled the black knobs of the cosh-like devices that hung down to steady standing passengers in the swaying viral torpedo. And how the speed-charged lads used the rubbery supports to kick out the window glass, roaring and jeering. Testosterone reek was heady. And carried with the warring tribe deep inside the bowels of the ground.

Andrew Kötting – Straw Bear, biker – fashions his panting-uphill anecdote to integrate material gathered from our walk. ‘They came over the wall from Brompton Cemetery.' He made it sound like a Stanley Spencer resurrection. Football-hooligan invaders swinging into the stadium to attack the notorious Shed. While Kötting, the rememberer, being an unimplicated
child, is absolved of the violence, the tribalism that has so much appeal.

Of late, he confesses, he has lost that punch. The desire to ram through impossible projects, bounce bureaucracy, is beginning to fade. His frontal lobes have taken one hit too many. He's on his feet, moving as well as ever, but he doesn't always know where he is. Or what he is doing. Pain is constant. His left hand fumbles with necessary straps. ‘Stamp on it,' he said, ‘and I won't feel a thing.'

We were too late for the Camden Arts Centre, but the venue held memories for both of us. Andrew had exhibited, participated, and checked out shows. I took a refreshment break when I made my preliminary reconnaissance of the Overground route, before I inflicted it on Kötting. Energized now by a sense of familiarity, I dragged my subdued and strategically dumb companion on a minor detour to a major resource, downhill and then up again, to a well-kept house. Although it existed, and glowed a fiery red in our evening reverie, this blue-plaque address – 20 Maresfield Gardens – was as mythical in the psychogeography of London as the rooms associated with Sherlock Holmes at 22b Baker Street. And with my search for Holmesian traces when I should have been in the library of the Courtauld Institute of Art in Portman Square, trying to get my hands on that single copy of some French thesis booked out for weeks ahead.

Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes shared many characteristics. But Andrew was not for halting, and the Freud Museum, the house where the celebrated analyst spent the last years of his life, had closed its doors to paying customers hours before. I kept my dissertation to myself, as we navigated a walled byway known as Shepherd's Path, and on over the crest of the hill. There seemed to be a valid connection between Freud's
excavations of the unconscious, impacted layers of repression and fantasy, and the physical tunnelling into the lobes of London, the glacial moraine. The railway interventions in the clay mantle were extreme, a forced lobotomy for Finchley & Frognal.

The Hampstead Junction Railway (later the Broad Street Line, later the North London Line, later London Overground) was an associate of the LNWR. It came into being to link Camden Town (and the NLR) with Willesden (and the NSWJR). An alphabet soup of railway companies and their parasitical developments carving up territory in the teeth of geography; subverting patterns of flow, springs and streams percolating through silt and sand. Hampstead the spa, the retreat, grew up around restorative waters. Quacks in gaudy waistcoats, bottling the chalybeate springs for sale at threepence a flask, declared that Hampstead waters were ‘a stimulant diuretic, very beneficial in chronic diseases arising from languor of the circulation, general debility of the system, or laxity of the solids'.

Underground water collected in basins of clay flooded the tunnels. The invaders burrowed, shaping ledges for men and machinery. They burrowed again. Streets were lost, dwellings demolished: much of the present surface, as we pass among neat villas and regimented gardens, is dirt from railway excavations, gaping tunnels covered over with replenished and compacted soil. The metaphors are clumsy, but they won't go away.

Freud, nursing his cancerous jaw, and keeping off flies drawn to the ripe stench of bone rot with acrid cigar smoke, listens to the stories, playing and replaying significant details, teasing out explanations that read like crafted fictions. Like detective stories in yellowback shilling shockers: the Wolf Man, the lurid confessions of Anna O.
Studies in Hysteria
.
A Study in Scarlet
.

The tunnel between Hampstead Heath and Finchley Road
was constructed in 1859, three years after the birth of Sigismund Schlomo Freud in Mähren, Moravia. Financial considerations meant that the bore of this gaping hole, crossing Finchley Road, trepanning Arkwright Road, was narrow. Soil was slippery, unreliable. Records, giving a contemporary account of why this tunnel had to be tighter than others, were not kept. Sealed carriages slid through the dark. Passengers were tense, folded back into themselves, impatient for the return of daylight.

Kötting was unimpressed by my Freudian improvisations, he wanted Gradgrind facts: references, page numbers, dates, measurements. The pedagogic German aspect of the man was becoming clearer as his physical outline vanished in the Hampstead night between puddles of electrified twilight. ‘It's all about archive,' he said. ‘Archive never fails. An antidote to preciousness. Pure evidence. Live footage from the past rescues me from future depression. Show me any image and I'll subvert it.'

Freud and railways: escape. He travels from Vienna to Paris, a deal brokered with the Nazis after shaming exactions, documents signed, fraudulent claims settled, so that the collection of books and antiquities can be shipped out of Austria to Maresfield Gardens.

June 1938. One of those cinema escapes: last train, misty windows, closed frontiers. France. Sisters left behind. The dog, Lün, a chow, is brought out to perform, after quarantine, in home movies on the Hampstead lawn: the final birthday.

A passenger train transports Freud into London: Victoria Station. Newsreel cameras. Magnesium flares flashing like the assassination in Hitchcock's
Foreign Correspondent.
London welcomed the facsimile of the man, this cultural trophy, like a hieratic Egyptian figurine to be stored in the British Museum. Broadsheets congratulated themselves on their advocacy of
the psychoanalytic fad; their liberality in letting such a distinguished alien step ashore, seeing him settled in a suitable quarter of the town. The obvious fragility, the fact that Freud was so close to death, added poignancy to the scene. The swagger of the earlier portraits – watchchain, gambler's drooping bow tie, black cigar – were as much Doc Holliday as Viennese medical man. The repeated and barbaric acts of surgery conducted on Freud's jaw, the cancerous lumps hacked out, the crudely inserted prosthetics, belonged with the kind of dentistry that Holliday might have practised. Freud dosed himself with a couple of aspirins and a fat cigar, and carried on.

‘Ne moriare mori,' he said. ‘To prevent death by dying.'

Another train. To Manchester. To visit his half-brother Emanuel in 1875. And his sister Rosa in 1884–5. This film of railway England, fields and factories, as witnessed through the smoke, made a deep and lasting impression. Emanuel died on 17 October 1914, after falling out of a train travelling between Manchester and Stockport.

A later Manchester migrant, arriving as a Lektor in the German department of the university, and conscious of the implications of following in the tracks of the philosopher Wittgenstein, was W. G. Sebald. The bricks of Sebald's retreat in Kingston Road, Didsbury, were not as red as Maresfield Gardens: part of a tactful development, not a custom-built Hampstead mansion, with eight bedrooms, three bathrooms, designed in 1920 by Albert Hastilow in the revivalist style, and improved by Freud's architect son, Ernst, who installed a lift to transport the ailing analyst from one floor to the next.

Trains were the weave of Sebald's prose. How many cavernous stations with abandoned waiting rooms? How many station hotels with slits looking out on brick walls and strands of ominous wire? How potent the urge, at the end of all that restless journeying, to lie down on the tracks?

In
Ghost Hunter
, a CBC Radio interview with Eleanor Wachel, Sebald reminds us that there are ‘trains all the time' as punctuation between the episodes of Claude Lanzmann's
Shoah
documentary. ‘The whole logistics of deportation was based on the logistics of the railway system.' That visibility is so obvious that it doesn't register as a symbol. Holocaust echoes are seeded throughout Sebald's texts: ‘the track, certainly, the smoke, and certainly the dust'.

Ghost hunter or ghost detective, Freud appears in London, on the cusp of the Second World War, as a living phantom derived from the speculative fiction of that table-tapper Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes couldn't operate without his
Bradshaw's Railway Guide
. He ventured in the historic period between hansom cabs and primitive aeroplanes, with trains as his favoured theatre. Trains meant timetables, meant the end of clocks set to the whims of local stations: standardization.

Holmes precedes Freud:
A Study in Scarlet
, with the first appearance of the consulting detective, was published in 1887. Freud's
Studies in Hysteria
came into print in 1895.
The Hound of the Baskervilles
stalked the moors and crags in the
Strand Magazine
between August 1901 and April 1902, while Freud's ‘Wolf Man', the stern-bowelled Russian aristocrat Sergei Pankejeff, didn't make his way to the Viennese couch until 1910. But the two projections, Holmes and Freud, written into existence, animated by fanatical cultists, had much in common.