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.

LONDON (NOT REALLY ALL THAT) PECULIAR

Of making many books about London there is apparently no end.  That’s almost a quotation from Ecclesiastes 12:12, which continues “and much study is a weariness of the flesh.”  And to the mind too you might say, though some books are more wearisome than others, obviously.

A few days back I got an email from Jamie Manners, a friend of a friend who’s been commissioned to write a book about, as he puts it, the “interesting/quirky details in London buildings and places.”  And he asked could I think of any “favourite spots, oddities, places with a good story behind them, or notable features in London buildings that might be good for an entry.”.

A direct question like that is pretty much guaranteed to make my mind a complete blank, and as Jamie himself says “of course, when you look through the 'Secret London/Hidden London' stuff you realise this book has already been written 20 times and people recycle the same stuff (Wellington's horseblock outside the Athenaum, etc). They (the publishers) told me to make sure the City/West End are well represented, but I think it'd be nice to give equal weight to the areas where the people of London actually live nowadays.” 

Well, I like to make friends when I can, so I agreed to do my best, which is what I’m doing now.

When I was writing my novel Bleeding London (which is partly about a man who tries to walk down every street in London) I too went walking in London and I started carrying a camera with me, to record any such quirky details I might see; and I’ve pretty much carried a camera with me on all occasions when walking ever since.  Bleeding London was written in pre-digital camera days and I certainly took far fewer picture then that I do now, but so does everybody.  I wish I’d taken more.

There’s always a problem, of course, with “unknown” bits of any city.  The truly unknown bits are likely to remain that way, and then there are “well-known unknown” bits.  I remembering finding, by chance, the statue of Samuel Johnson’s cat Hodge, complete with oysters, and thought it was a wonder.  But now every damn fool knows where it is.

Sir Richard Francis Burton’s tomb in Mortlake is much less visited than the statue of Hodge, largely because it’s in Mortlake, and it’s very odd and wonderful, but there’s nothing unknown about it.

Digging through my old photo files has revealed some very dull pictures indeed, but one or two still seem sort of interesting.  And I’ve only Photoshopped them a little bit in order to retain that “retro” feel.  I can’t swear that all the things shown are still in existence.  (The photos of the noses and the space invaders aren't mine, as may be obvious, nor Hodge, nor the book maze, but otherwise, sure.)

Above for instance is a picture of what I believe is the narrowest building in London (though the internet shows there’s a lot of competition for that title).  The address is 10 Hyde Park Place, and it seems once to have been just an alleyway between two other buildings that got blocked off and became a building in its own right, just 3 feet 6 inches wide.   It’s also, I learn, now part of the Tyburn Convent next door, and I’ve always liked this outdoor pulpit hanging off the side (below).  I’ve always imagined nuns standing out there, delivering fire and brimstone sermons to the corrupt citizens of London, but I never saw one.

But if you want to be reminded of mortality and end times you might do better with the stone skulls in the gateway to St Olave’s churchyard.

As you see, the church is in a street named Seething Lane, which of course reminds me of the stand up comedian/punk poet active at more or less the time I was taking this picture, named Seething Wells.  He died prematurely (I discover) in 2009.

And above is a sign for the “pledge entrance,” above what must once have been the door to some kind of temperance hall.  It was very near to the flat where I lived in Sutherland Avenue, Maida Hill.  At the time I moved out the area was becoming increasingly Islamic, which might lead to a difference kind of temperance, I suppose.  Though not necessarily.

I always loved the Eduardo Paolozzi sculpture at Pimlico tube station, which I believe is actually used to disguise an air vent from the underground.  I used to have a girlfriend whose flat overlooked the station, and I spent a fair bit of time there.  It seemed the vent was very high-maintenance: there were always guys on ladders doing something or other to it.

But here’s where the memory fails, and where the Internet almost saves it. I knew that the above picture was taken somewhere near London Bridge, but I couldn’t have told you exactly where.  Online evidence shows it was there to draw attention to a sort of museum named “Winston Churchill’s Britain at War Experience” though I don’t think Winston Churchill was much involved with the enterprise.  In any case the Internet also suggests it's now closed.  As a long time Pynchonian, I was pretty excited to see what purported to be a V2 rocket up on the wall of any building in London, though I feel reasonably certain that isn’t an actual V2.  Unlike this one, which you can walk around at White Sands in New Mexico:

Incidentally Jamie’s publisher’s want to call his book The Seven Noses Of Soho, a reference far too oblique for me to catch, but according to Jamie “Apparently, in the 90s these bronze and plaster noses appeared all over walls in the West End and urban myths sprang up that anyone who could locate all "seven noses of Soho" would come into great wealth. There was one on Admiralty Arch and people said it was put there to mock Napoleon, & that cavalrymen would tweak it when they passed under. Eventually an artist came out and said he had put them all up as a protest against CCTV.”  Well, London remains a source of wonder and surprise, and curious artistic enterprise.

I was never aware of those but I did like the Space Invader mosaics that appeared around London at about the same time.  The artist also went by the name of Space Invader.  He’s French, apparently.

I gather he came to Los Angeles (they all do in the end it seems) for the MOCA “ Art in the Streets” show in 2011, and was arrested while putting up a mosaic, but released without being charged.  Hey, LA cops aren’t all bad.

The last time I walked around London was May of last year – seems like only yesterday, and I can’t say I found a lot of full-one quirkiness, but I did find a couple of curiosities that I hadn’t seen before, this statue of Bela Bartok near to South Kensington tube, for instance:

This pointy metal thing to tell you that you’re in Shoreditch:

And this splendidly blank and inscrutable door to the London Fruit Exchange (I mean, surely we've all got some fruit we'd like to swap).  I don’t imagine tourists are flocking there, but it quite made my day.