GRAVITY'S SUBURB

      I’ve been working on, and have very nearly finished, a book about Suburbia.  Before and between lockdowns I made a few expeditions, you might call them field trips, to various suburbs in England.  Most of this material will find its way into the book, but inevitably some of it ended up on the editing room floor.  Not being a man to waste effort or words, I thought I’d use a bit of it here, in much edited form.  

Here’s a description of a visit I made with my occasional drifting pal Jonathan Taylor to Staveley Road, Chiswick, London, W4, 

 

         Now read on:

 

Staveley Road is part of the Chiswick Park Estate, built in the late 1920s and early 1930s.  It’s a prime example of a well-to-do suburban street, as are many of the other streets nearby.  There are small front gardens, some of them surprisingly exuberant, some showing tropical influence, lots of yuccas and palm trees.  

 

And we saw this one neatly decked out with hardboard. I imagine it didn’t stay like that, but I’m not sure what they were up to.

 

         What sets Staveley Road apart is that it’s where the first German V-2 flying bomb, both a rocket, and a ballistic missile, landed and exploded at about a quarter to seven on September 8th 1944.  Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow has the time as 6.43.16 Double British Summer Time, which sounds wonderfully precise, though it may just be the precision of fiction.  We know for certain that three people were killed instantly: Rosemary Clarke, Sapper Bernard Browning, and Ada Harrison, whose husband William survived the immediate blast but subsequently died of his injures.

Other bits of information are harder to come by.   You can find sources that tell you 19 people were injured, others say it was 11 or 22.  Some sources will tell you that 6 houses, or 11 or 18, were completely destroyed and another 6 or 15 or 27 were severely damaged, in some cases so badly that they had to be demolished. The government of the day has at least some responsibility for the lack of clarity, done in the name of keeping up wartime morale. The official story was that a gas main had exploded, though of course the locals knew better.  Churchill didn’t even publically acknowledge the existence of the V-2 until he mentioned it in Parliament, in early November.

The truth is, I knew next to nothing about the V-2 before I read Gravity’s Rainbow, a book that has lived with me for a long time now, and I’ve since seen V-2s close up in a museum at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.  

 

         I knew there was a monument in Staveley Road, marking that first V-2 attack, but I’d been careful not to over-research it. I didn’t want my field trip simply to confirm what I’d already found and seen online.  Given that we were in deepest suburbia, I wasn’t expecting anything very Rococo or avant-garde but I was expecting a little more than I found. The monument looks like this:

 

A modest piece then, made more modest still by its siting on a tiny patch of ground in front of a chainlink fence that an electricity substation, with two mysterious mechanical lumps sitting on it.  The whole thing originally belongs to Scottish and Southern Electricity, and they donated the tiny patch of land where the memorial stands.

 

 It seemed a bit too modest, but what would I have preferred?  A scale model of a V-2?  A full size replica?  No, I can see the locals wouldn’t want anything like that in a suburban street.  But what about something by Tracey Emin?  Or perhaps more likely Jake and Dinos Chapman? They could surely have come up something suitable, or at least something that suited me: again the folks of Staveley Road might have thought otherwise.

 

However, thinking about it later, it occurred to me that perhaps the street itself and its continuing existence is a kind of memorial. Clearly it doesn’t look exactly the same as it did in 1944, much less the way it did in 1931, but it can’t be so verydifferent.  As so often in the suburbs, it was instructive to look at the older houses and observe how no two of them currently look exactly alike.  It’s the usual variations you find in any suburb; new porches, differing paint jobs, the additions of garages, extensions, loft conversions, but here it seems more significant.  You’d have a hard time telling which houses date from the original development, and which ones were built or rebuilt after the war as replacements for those bombed and demolished.  

 

         This living memorial of brick and mortar, wood and tile and glass, reveals an endurance, a consistency and stability, a continuation of daily domestic life that persists however much, and however harshly, it has to confront change, decay and destruction.  Of course if you were building a suburb today it wouldn’t look like this, this street is not timeless, it’s very definitely of its time, but it doesn’t seem particularly old-fashioned or quaint or retro.  Here are elements of suburban life that have in some sense remained constant for the best part of a century.  

 

         Jonathan was the ideal companion for this walk because he used to live in the neighbourhood.  He was able to direct us to this fabulous ice house in Grove Park, originally on the land belonging to Sutton Court Manor:

 

And afterwards we walked on to Chiswick Park and Gardens.  If you want obelisks, and we did, then this isn’t a bad place to look.  There’s this one:

 

and this one

 

         And as we wandered away from the scene of our drift we came to a quite amazing garden, complete with obelisk.  It is not exactly what the ancient Egyptians would have recognized as an obelisk, but as a piece of garden decoration it was outstanding.

 

WALKING WITH ROCKETS

“As you walk deeper, you retrace the Rocket's becoming: superchargers, center sections, nose assemblies, power units, controls, tail sections . . .”

       The above quotation (you guessed?) is from Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Tyrone Slothrop is walking through the factory where they made V2 rockets, the Vergeltungswaffe 2, Nazi Germany’s super sonic “revenge weapon,” subsequently seized by the Russians and Americans.

I was a little surprised, as I was walking down Tooley Street, in London earlier this year to find that this thing was still in place on the wall above what used to be, and perhaps still is (though their website seems to be in hibernation) a museum called Britain at War.

That rocket (let’s call it that) has been in place for 20 odd years, but I really don’t know what it is.  It’s obviously not a “real” V2.

         There are quite a few of the real things around, though they tend to be in serious aeronautical museums rather than on the wall of tourist attractions.  The nearest I’ve been to one was at the White Sands Missile Range, outside of Alamogordo in New Mexico.  I walked around it, stood beside it, and could probably have reached out and touched it, but since but I was standing on the property of the American military industrial complex I decided against that.

There’s a kind of “rocket garden” at the White Sands Missile Range where you can walk around and look at scary hardware.  Most of the stuff is out in the open air, but the V2 is in a solid substantial building, because it needs protection and preservation.

Not many miles down the road from the missile range is the entirely separate White Sands National Monument, a fabulous, two hundred plus square miles of white desert that are a wonder even to a skeptical old desert rat like me.

White Sands has been on mind lately since I was looking for something else in the Nicholsonian archive and found this photograph taken of me – oh good god – probably 25 years ago.

The thing I’m holding that looks like a bit like a clipboard is in fact some kind of rocket debris that must have found its way into the dunes from the missile range next door, after some kind of explosion or jettisoning operating.

It’s one of the smaller regrets of my life that I didn’t stick this piece of detritus in my hand luggage and take it home, though conceivably it was drenched in rocket fuel and evil chemicals and would have done awful things to me.  And maybe I wouldn’t have got it through airport security – though this was obviously well before 9/11.

I know I’ve bleated on elsewhere about gardens of subversion, places that are less than Edenic, and possibly all the better for that.  And without having more than the average interest in rocketry or space or ballistics I seem to have walked among quite a few flying objects, some identified, some not.  This one in Essex for instance:

The most recent one I went to was in Utah, actually called the Thiokol Rocket Garden, belonging to ATK Thiokol, “Supplier of aerospace and defense products. Munitions, smart weapons, propulsion and composite structures.”  It’s a place designed so that you can walk and sit and have a snack – all of which I did.

Depending on your finer feelings you can regard this place as a garden of death, or a tribute to man’s greatest achievement, or a piece of accidental “land art.”   But my favorite thing about it was this:

Sure, a standard rocket is good enough for me – who needs anything too fancy?

And finally a last word from one of White Sands’ most famous inhabitants, begetter of the V2, and therefore of much else besides, Herr Wernher von Braun, words that form the epigraph to the first section of Gravity’s Rainbow, from an article he wrote titled “Why I Believe in Immortality.”

“Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. Everything science has taught me, and continues to teach me, strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death.” 

         This is him in later life, with a very nice display of model rockets behind him:

And this is him earlier, working on his Dr. Strangelove impersonation.