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.

 

BALTIC-RELATED FUN

 

When I lived in California, as I did until comparatively recently, people often said to 

me, ‘Oh but you’re English, don’t you miss the seasons?’

And I always said, ‘No I bloody don’t.’

 

I was born and brought up in Sheffield, which is built on seven hills.  The school I went to was two bus rides away from where I lived. The first bus took me down from the heights of Longley, then Gleadless when we moved, into the centre of town where I took another bus up a different, less steep, hill to school.  

 

However bad the snow was, I could usually get to school: it was getting home that was the problem.  After school, the bus came down the shortish hill into the centre of town but then I had to get up the other, much steeper hill to get home.  Because of ice, snow, bad road conditions, and perhaps the occasional disgruntled driver, buses were delayed or canceled and sometimes I had to walk – yes WALK - all the way home.  Up hill in the snow and ice.  Arguably it turned me into a flaneur but at the time I could have done without it.  

 

By the time I went to university in the softer, warmer south I was more than happy to leave all the snow and all the hassle behind.

 

And now, after more than a decade and a half in LA, I find myself living in Essex, hardly the frozen wastes, but we are currently experiencing Storm Darcy – the Bitch from the Baltic - and yes we have snow.  This does not fill me with joy.

 

Still, the ground here is fairly level and I don’t have to rely on buses so of course on a snowy Sunday a man, or a woman, has to go out walking.  It was OK, really, honestly, not bitterly cold and the snow was still soft and not frozen into ice slicks. I didn’t fall down even once.

 

There was a walk to be had, there were pictures to be taken, there was something to write about.  This makes many things tolerable.  I did what I could. 

 

Do you want to see a picture of me in the snow in California?  Of course you do.  The photo below was taken in Death Valley, one January.  I am on high ground and not overdressed, the sun is shining, and just a short drive down the hill there is warmth, dunes, and a not terrible motel.

 

How very different from the home life of our own dear Sheffielders.

 

 

SOME NEW OLD OBELISKS

If you happen to be visiting a patient in the Cirencester Community Hospital in Gloucestershire, you might well feel like having a walk after the visit.  If you go one way, the easier route, you’ll pass through the staff car park and see this sign:

Did you know the NHS was in the business of creating forests and orchards?  I didn’t, and I don’t think many others do either, but if you follow the signs you’ll find yourself in a gloriously ramshackle bit of land, with apple trees and pear trees, with a few benches to sit on, though nettles tend to be growing up through many of them, so you’ll probably keep on walking, and chances are you won’t see another soul.  It would be nice to think that patients from the hospital wander here as part of their recovery but I saw no actual evidence of this.

If you walk the other way from the hospital, you go through Querns Wood, where you might see evidence of guitar hero worship among the tree cutters:

And before long you’ll arrive at the Circencester Amphitheatre, a Roman creation, now reduced to a circle of hills forming a grassy bowl.  Once it held about 8000 people, now it’s a place where kids run up and down exhausting themselves while parents watch.

However if you walk around the side of the amphitheatre you can find yourself at the Circencester Obelisk, which is a very big, very impressive and slightly mysterious construction.

The sources say it’s ‘probably’ 18^thcentury, and probably erected for Earl Bathurst in what was, at the time, the grounds of Cirencester Park Mansion. Alexander Pope may have had some input.  Bathurst wrote to Pope in 1736, ‘I have also begun to level the hill before the house, and an obelisk shall terminate the view’.  Pope didn’t think an obelisk was quite the right thing for that spot, though signficantly, or not, Pope did erect an obelisk as a memorial to his mother.

My trip to Gloucestershire wasn’t a walking expedition but, thanks to my plucky chaffeuse I was able to walk (after a car ride) in the graveyard of the church of St James’s, Sevenhampton (which is actually in Wiltshire), famous chiefly as the place where Ian Fleming, his wife Anne and their son Caspar are buried.  

The Flemings bought Sevenhampton Place in 1959 and spent four years having it restored and remodeled. It had forty bedrooms, a billiard room and a ballroom. Does anybody in the world have 39 friends they’d want to have stay with them? Anne love the place, Fleming not so much.  Maybe after spending so much time in Goldeneye, in Jamaica, an English country house didn’t seem so appealing.

The Fleming grave is in a beautiful spot, overlooked by a field of cows and marked by (you probably guessed, if you didn’t know already) an obelisk, which is very elegant and surprisingly modest: traits that we only partly associate with Ian Fleming.

OH WELL, OH MY

Peter Green died recently. The Green Manalishi (with the Two-Prong Crown) was my favorite song of his.  And I also liked Oh Well because of the lines

I can't help about the shape I’m in

I can’t sing, I ain’t pretty and my legs are thin

Did Peter Green have thin legs? Well thin-ish, I think, but not amazingly so.  It’s hard to get a really good look.  

He sometimes kept them very well covered:

Was he much of a walker?  I’m not sure.  He did have a song titled Walkin’ the Road, but then every blues player has a song about walking

And then in the Times t’other week there was a profile of Rishi Sunak the current English Chancellor of the Exchequer and by some accounts our Prime Minister in waiting.

Is Rishi Sunak a walker?  Well apparently so. One paragraph in the Times read, ‘Another (student friend) remembers bumping into him on a Saturday at the sort of time most students were sleeping off hangovers.  He was walking around with a notepad. ‘I asked him what he was doing and he said, ‘My parents are coming tomorrow so I am devising a walk of interesting landmarks in the city.’'

A lad who prepares a walking tour for the aged parents is OK by me. 

Does Rishi Sunak have thin legs? If the photo below is anything to go by then yes, yes he does.  

GET CARTER

I’ve been looking at photographs of Howard Carter walking in the desert.  Carter was the discoverer (or I suppose rediscoverer), in 1922, of the tomb of Tutenkhamun.

I notice Carter’s walking stick in all the photographs, which might suggest he wasn’t a great walker, I don’t think it was just a style thing.  But chiefly I noticed that he seems wildly overdressed for doing anything in the desert - the three piece suit – definitely herringbone, possibly tweed and of course the high collar and the bow tie, and sometimes the handkerchief in the breast pocket.  

But maybe he only dressed up like this for a photo-op; these photographs look decidedly set up, and some of the other people in the photographs look overdressed too, especially the soldiers and the guy on the far right in the picture below who seems to be wearing jodhpurs.  The guys who are doing the heavy lifting inevitably look more appropriately dressed for the occasion.

Then I started thinking about the few pictures that have been taken of me walking, and sometimes posing, in the desert.  I look overdressed too.  The one below was taken somewhere near Death Valley (I think) and I honestly don’t remember what the temperature was like, but evidently not exactly blazing.

Geoff Nicholson

And this one was taken in the East Mojave desert in winter when I know it was absolutely freezing:

I can’t say I’ve ever tried to look very stylish or dressed up while walking in the desert, but then I’m no Howard Carter.