Granta's Blog

Michael Symmons Roberts

Photo by Matthew Wilkinson.

We are in the last days of the city guide. At least in the way we’ve come to know it: landmarks, street names, architecture. Some theologians still talk about the soul, but define it not as entity or essence, rather the sum of all our networks, all our interactions. I see talk of cities going the same way. Future city guides will be as much about virtual maps and apps as iconic buildings.

Manchester has always been a futuristic city. It defined - in its massive mills and opulent office buildings - what an industrial city should look like. In recent years it has blazed a trail in urban regeneration. As Owen Hatherley puts it: Manchester has always been a futuristic city. It defined - in its massive mills and opulent office buildings - what an industrial city should look like. ‘What other cities have dabbled in with piecemeal ineptitude, Manchester has implemented with total efficiency’. In the next decade, I expect this city to show us what a virtual metropolis feels like. Already in Manchester, you can sign up for ‘data walks’ at weekends, attempting to discover (through smartphones and other portable devices) the unseen digital structures and networks between, below, beyond and beside the streets and buildings. But Niklaus Pevsner’s classic approach (county by county, building by building) probably has five years, ten if we’re lucky, and bricks-and-mortar Manchester is well worth a look.

Our tour begins with two planks of wood: elm boards, each three inches thick and too heavy for one man to carry. These planks were discovered last year, propped in the corner of an outbuilding at a retreat centre called Savio House on the edge of the Peak District. Savio House used to be home to a wealthy industrialist’s family - the Gaskells, and the Gaskells had a famous cousin called Elizabeth. The elm boards are likely to have been the two halves of a desktop in the Gaskell mansion. So the man who found the boards wondered if the famous Mrs Gaskell, who spent time at the house with her family, might have rested a manuscript on them as she did a little light redrafting. And was that mouse-shaped burn mark on one side of the boards in fact an ink stain from her leaky pen?

So, the first building on this tour of modern Mancunia is a shed behind a house looking out across peak and plain towards the glittering towers of the great northern city. It is the shed where I write. And I rest my papers on the same elm boards that Mrs Gaskell did when she was writing North and South.

The second building is Elizabeth Gaskell’s house, 84 Plymouth Grove, on the south side of the city. This neoclassical villa sits on a patch of scrub land between large modern estates and the ever advancing university halls. I rest my papers on the same elm boards that Mrs Gaskell did when she was writing North and South. It is the sole relic of its era in this part of town, its incongruity made all the more vivid by the fact that it used to be painted vivid pink. But now it is being renovated and turned into a museum. The pink is an understated grey, and the roof restored in lead. At least it was, until the lead was stolen. Mrs Gaskell and her clergyman husband entertained Charlotte Bronte, Ruskin, Dickens and Harriet Beecher Stowe here. Charlotte liked Plymouth Grove, because it was ‘out of Manchester smoke’. It still is, though she might find it noisy now at closing time.

From Plymouth Grove, head in toward the centre down Oxford Road. Here, just north of the ‘curry mile’ in Rusholme (some of the finest curry houses and sweet shops in Britain) you enter the ‘Learning Corridor’, where the (reputedly) largest student population in Europe wanders between the University of Manchester, the Royal Northern College of Music, and Manchester Metropolitan University, all of which have buildings lining each side of the road. Head on past the fruit stall on the left, which offers five-a-day to the young, pale and hungover. Keep going north until the university buildings peter out, and pause at the beige monstrosity on your right, for this is our third iconic building.

New Broadcasting House was the home of the BBC in Manchester for thirty-five years. This building is the reason I came home from London in the early 1990’s. I had moved south in my early adolescence when my Dad changed jobs, but I was more than ready to come back up north. All institutions go through cycles. Open plan workspaces give way to clusters of individual offices to enhance productivity, then ten years on they burst out into open plan again to generate better team spirit. The BBC is no different. Its recent and controversial relocation of large chunks of programme-making to Salford Quays was prefigured in the early nineties, when the corporation decided to create ‘Centres of Excellence’ in the regions. As a documentary-maker in the Religion and Ethics department, I found myself making the move north. My memory has jump-cut together the London meeting at which my then boss declared we would move north ‘over my dead body’ to the coach trip when the whole department was shown ‘places you might want to live’ within commuting range of New Broadcasting House.

New Broadcasting House itself is unashamedly ugly from the outside, utilitarian, a concrete machine for churning out programmes. But inside, I loved its long windowless This was the centre of so-called ‘Mad-chester’ in the 1980’s, a club and venue set up in a former warehouse by legends like New Order, Factory Records and its boss Tony Wilson. corridors, and its labyrinthine underground car park with every pillar streaked with car-paint. The whole building is wrapped around a vast central studio, big enough to hold the full BBC Philharmonic Orchestra. At night, the glass-fronted reception area still glows, as a security guard sits pressed to his chair by the sheer weight of emptiness above and around him. It seems portentous, grave. There are rumours of buyers, development plans, the possibility that the site will become another part of the Learning Corridor, but I can’t linger here. The people and programmes have moved across the city, but until it is demolished the great beige edifice of New Broadcasting House feels like a memento mori to me, a skull in the corner of the painting, made all the more poignant by the New in its name.

On, then, up Oxford Road, past the Temple of Convenience, that underground bar the size of a men’s public toilet which was once, well, a men’s public toilet. Standing room only on most nights here, now as then. It divides opinion. For some, it still is a toilet, where the rain runs down the steps and the clientele look like they went down for a sad solo pint in 1987 and never came back up. But for others, it’s one of the best bars in the city, with a quirkily brilliant jukebox offering indie classics and a feeling that, for real musos, this is where you go to talk music.

And speaking of music, there’s the Haçienda, just opposite the railway arches in Whitworth Street. Or rather, there it isn’t. Because it was knocked down in 2002 and redeveloped into flats called ‘ The Haçienda Apartments’. This was the centre of so-called ‘Mad-chester’ in the 1980’s, a club and venue set up in a former warehouse by legends like New Order, Factory Records and its boss Tony Wilson. Actually, don’t even bother to look. It’ll make you sad. What happened to the twenty-four hour party people? They became property developers. Or they died. Best not to think about it. 

On over the Rochdale canal, to the former Tootal, Broadhurst and Lee Building. This is where my parents met. As I walk past it now, admiring its majestic proportions, its intricate red brickwork, this former textile company HQ turned office block makes me feel both close and distant. It’s like meeting a long-lost relative and feeling no connection. It’s a beautiful Edwardian baroque building, admired by Pevsner, but what draws me to it is the idea of my parents in the late 1950’s – she the boss’ secretary, he an office clerk - catching each other’s eye in a canteen full of thick-cut double-breasted suits and fashionable bangs, and the smoke of a hundred Park Drives rising to the high stuccoed ceiling. Once these vast mills-cum-offices lose their original purpose, many of them become, like this one, multi-occupancy office spaces, occupied by quangos and fledgling businesses. I think of the Biblical image on the Tate and Lyle syrup tins – ‘out of the strong came forth sweetness’ – as these vast cadavers of our manufacturing past now buzz with the industry of countless small enterprises. Let’s hope some of them come up with the honey.

The ultra-modern five star Lowry, the Hilton with its characteristic glass blade at the top, the Midland with its glorious polished granite and terracotta exterior and its fabulously genteel afternoon tea, haunted by the ghosts of wealthy American cotton traders; Manchester does hotels rather well. But for me, it’s the Palace Hotel at the north end of Oxford Road that takes the (individually wrapped and free with your coffee) biscuit.

Again, this is high, confident Victoriana, rich russet in the morning sun, and dark chocolate in the rain, its brickwork fashioned into barley-twist columns. Like many of Manchester’s great buildings, it comes to life in the rain. But for all its beauty, it’s the scale that gets me. The Palace is in what used to the be the Refuge Assurance Building, and in its late Victorian pomp, the entire ground floor was one colossal open business hall. This was open-plan office space before anyone knew what to call it. And now, despite attempt to screen off different zones into bar, lounge, restaurant, it is still possible to lose yourself in the Palace Hotel. I’ve had all-day meetings there, and you never get questioned or moved on, because the immaculately-uniformed staff only occasionally walks through your neck of the woods. Find a distant sofa or table, and you’re uninterrupted, save the odd hike to the bar to order food and drink. And the exercise will do you good. In these straitened times there could be countless small businesses operating from the lounge here, saving a fortune on office rental.

So, on, past the Bridgewater Hall, beautiful space-age home to the Halle Orchestra, and the first concert hall in the world to sit on giant springs that insulate it from the nearby road and railway. We are heading, out west, Like many of Manchester’s great buildings, it comes to life in the rain. But for all its beauty, it’s the scale that gets me. across the invisible border into Salford, towards Dock House. I must have been about seven, and my grandad recently retired, when he offered to show me round his former workplace. What I remember most was the model container ship they gave me as a souvenir, which sat on my bedroom window ledge for years until I left home. But I do remember other things: the massive waterside cranes like wading birds, the warehouses stacked high with cargo, hearing the word 'molasses' for the first time (although I don’t think I actually saw any), and the small, neat redbrick office where my grandad worked, keeping ledgers of what came in and what went out. And my memory is that his office building was called ‘Dock House’.

Or so I imagine on this rainy afternoon, taking his ghost to visit the new ‘Dock House’. This one is a great glass tower, and the visitors are not lascar seamen, but celebrities and pundits and media hopefuls, signing in to sit and self-publicise on the BBC Breakfast sofa, or to lounge in a breakout space and try to sell a new sitcom to producers who have heard it all before. This is Media City, part of the extraordinary transfiguration of Salford Docks. And those glass-walled breakout spaces gaze out across a radically different landscape, over the Ship Canal towards the iconic Lowry Centre and Imperial War Museum North buildings, towards the most iconic building of all, Old Trafford. But more of that later . . .

Salford Quays is an extraordinary place. Or rather, it will be. Last Autumn I read that Media City was finished, and you could walk through it. We went as a family, persuading my eldest son that his A-Level ‘urban environments’ project could benefit from the visit if he took a camera. He suggested that if he wound the window down and took some pictures from the car, then we need not stop and would be home a lot sooner. But when we got there, he and his younger brothers were entranced by it. We all were. On this rainswept Sunday afternoon, the cluster of new, unoccupied towers looked like a sci-fi set, a post-apocalyptic Gotham, stripped of its inhabitants. Except this was different. It hadn’t met its inhabitants yet. As we strolled past silent restaurants and tram stops where nobody got on or off, I was reminded of Ordos, the empty Chinese city built to serve the Mongolian coal rush, undermined when the Chinese property boom ran out of steam. And here was Media City’s equivalent to Genghis Khan Plaza, an untrodden square with stone benches for tired production staff to soak up the lunchtime sun (ahem . . . ) and a big blank screen designed to carry live feed from the new, dead studios.

But half a year on, all that has changed. The staff from the abandoned Oxford Road studios now come here each day. And departments from London (after completing their ‘living in the north’ courses on how to catch a tram, order mushy peas, breed whippets, etc) have relocated here. The restaurants, at least on weekdays, are full of hopefuls pitching programme ideas, hoping the waitress doesn’t turn up as you reach the killer line, the usp, the game-changer. And though Salford’s Genghis Khan Plaza is now full of sun-seekers on time-out from their offices, there’s still something of Ordos here too. Across the Ship Canal bridge a whole new suburb of Media City is being built, complete with a relocated ‘Coronation Street’ set. As this new metropolis expands, there’s less and less space for the wind to cut through. But still those gales from the Mersey’s mouth can cut and run between buildings and catch a data-walker unawares as he stares down at his smartphone.

Always a major football city, Manchester has been defined and divided by the question ‘red or blue?’ I was first taken to Old Trafford by my Dad and my uncle (who worked for Boddington’s Brewery, which is as solid a Mancunian job as you can get) at the age of 5, and saw Best, Law, Charlton, Kidd. I’ve always been a red. And for most of my life (with one or two disastrous seasons) that’s been a pretty easy thing to be. At least, it’s been easier than being a blue. And those colours, that particular red and that particular blue carry deep associations from childhood. The rich, tomato red that decorated most of my bedroom – curtains, lampshade, bedspread – and the pale, rinsed-out blue like a milky north-west sky that represented the other side.

But the red-blue balance began to shift when Manchester hosted the Commonwealth Games in 2002. Many locals see this as the turning-point in the city’s recent development, and a Mancunian who had not been home this last decade would step into it now and be astonished. The pace of development The rich, tomato red that decorated most of my bedroom – curtains, lampshade, bedspread – and the pale, rinsed-out blue like a milky north-west sky that represented the other side. (new build and renovation) has been breakneck, and the scale remarkable. Manchester City struck a deal to move out of Maine Road into the Commonwealth Games stadium after the athletes went home, and this has been the making of them. Well, this, plus being bought by (probably) the richest owners in football. And in a city as football obsessed as this, a shift in the balance of red and blue changes everything. Through their wilderness years, City found solace in their local status, claiming that they were the true choice of Mancunians. United fans responded, when the Blues struggled to fill their new stadium, with the chant: ‘The city is yours, the city is yours, / twenty thousand empty seats, are you fucking sure?’ Now, with the stadium filling up fast, on top of the Premiership for the first time in 44 years, blue shirts are on the streets in a way they haven’t been in my lifetime. For lifelong reds like me, there’s the terrible fear that the tide is going out, and it may not be back for a while. We console ourselves with small pleasures, like the fact that the renamed City stadium, the ‘Etihad’, means ‘United’ in Arabic. Except it turns out it doesn’t. Not quite. It means ‘unity’. I can’t avoid naming the ‘unity’ stadium, and the whole planned Eastlands complex of training facilities and academies, as my ninth Manchester landmark.

Which brings me to last on the tour. And here I’m on home turf again. It’s a small redbrick semi, on Eccles Road in Swinton. My mum’s parents moved a couple of miles out of their native Salford to start a family here, when my grandad got his steady job at the docks. Over the decades, the edgelands fields across the road have been developed, and the busy East Lancs road 100 yards away has turned into a multi-lane highway. It’s the story of countless suburban streets in northern cities, an irresistible pull from the centre until what you thought was the urban fringe becomes part of the heart. I remember nights in childhood, lying awake in the box-room at the front of their house, with a magazine-cut picture of the giant Jesus in Rio sellotaped to the wall above the bed to protect me, bathed in the orange streetlight glow, and the constant comforting roar of cars funneling from all points north into the belly of this great city, as they still do.

Imagine that box-room now, picture yourself lying at the edge of sleep with eyes closed, and try to tune in to the multiple networks and messages and lols and encryptions and emails and feeds and streams and songs and voices that surround and pass through you. Your own flesh is shot through with data. You are not in the city. You are the city. ■

You can also see Michael Symmons Roberts at the following event:

How the Light Gets In: Dark Satanic Mills

5 June, 2.30 p.m. How the Light Gets In festival grounds, Globe at Hay, Newport Street, Hay-on-Wye HR3 5BG

From Tintagel and Camelot through to the dystopian 'inner city', has the shifting character of our accounts of the British landscape affected our identity? Are we still the nation of Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Turner and Constable, or is the old country gone forever? In its place should we be creating new landscapes with which to fashion new selves?

Novelists Jim Crace and Mark Haddon and author of Edgelands Michael Symmons Roberts explore visions of Britain's past, present and future with Granta's Ted Hodgkinson.

Ian Teh

‘Woman Walking’ by Ian Teh, as featured in Britain.

Ian Teh is a multi-award-winning photographer whose images of post-industrial landscapes in China, ‘Traces’, appeared in issue 111 of the magazine, Going Back, and who now features in the art showcase of the current issue, Britain, with the ‘Woman Walking’ (above). He spoke to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about how landscape can act as a ‘mirror’, his project to circumnavigate the coast of Britain, encountering racial tensions, embedding yourself in a scene and why he always takes his camera to the pub.

TH: The perspective of your image in Britain seems very mobile, even anonymous, as though the subject doesn’t even see there’s a camera there. You’ve taken a highly methodical approach to perspective in the past – your work in China for example, with the high vintages of Traces and the first-person immersive experience of Dark Clouds. Did you make a resolution to embed yourself almost invisibly in the darker side of British life?

IT: This is actually from an early body of work called East End. At that time I was still very much searching for a way to define my visual expression. I’ve always felt that photography is very precise at describing a moment but it struggles to communicate ideas, its strength lies in its ability to suggest thus delivering an emotion or mood. This in turn encourages the viewer to take a line of thought I lived next to Brick Lane many years back and at that time, around 2000, the area was starting to go through many changes. and travel with it, bringing them outside the boundaries of the frame and the moment it was taken. In this work, it was a portrait of the East End of London. I lived next to Brick Lane many years back and at that time, around 2000, the area was starting to go through many changes. One could see the trajectory the area would take, it was gradually becoming gentrified although it was still rough around the edges. That made the place interesting and because it was one of the poorest boroughs in London that was right next to the City, the richest square mile, it made the subject even more engaging. I approached it as a photo essay trying to show all the different aspects of the neighbourhood, I shot beyond the immediate surroundings to show how neighbourhoods started to change as we travelled further East. Whilst I tried to play with the colours as a way to link my narrative, the approach was a lot looser compared to Traces and Dark Clouds which was conceptually more challenging to produce.

In answer to your question as to whether I embed myself and appear to be invisible – I decided that I prefer to act as a conduit for the audience. As if they are there themselves without the ‘middle-man’. I want them to engage with the subject on a more personal level, gauging their own reactions and not feeling as though I am telling them how to feel.

This photograph captures the current of racism that runs through our society, but also the way that such forces can be strangely faceless, slippery. Do you think we’re a country that finds it hard to grapple with its demons and is this something you want to explore in your work?

Sure, I think so, but I also think that we have come a long way throughout history. Also who are we comparing ourselves to? I think if we compare ourselves to other countries we are not doing too badly but that’s no reason to be complacent. Cases like the Stephen Lawrence enquiry show that the issue of racism is still very present in many segments of society. Situations like this and other forms of racism reveal a deep-rooted fear for those who feel that their lives are adversely affected by people different from themselves, this in turn prevents them from assessing the facts rationally. In this project it was something I wanted to address, but not necessarily an issue I felt driven to explore exclusively. I submitted this image to Granta because I felt this subject is incredibly relevant in our current time of economic hardship. Privation can bring out the best in people but sometimes fear can also bring out the worst. For me, racism will be part of a number of issues I want to address in a project.

It seems you’re interested in tracing political currents through the surfaces and textures of modern life, in this case a graffitied wall. How much are you conscious of politicised symbols like hoodies when working and trying to subvert them?

I would say I am conscious but I don’t necessarily think about subverting wilfully. The process of looking for meaningful images in real life means that I don’t always have complete control, the process is candid. Instead what I look for are opportunities, where interesting juxtapositions can serve to highlight or challenge an issue. But in the end it’s up to the viewer to make his or her mind up about my work. The pictures I take are fly-on-the-wall and open to interpretation.

In your series The Island, you circumnavigate the coast of Britain and captured the life that you witnessed at the edge of country. Would you say that being an island is something that informs our mentality as a people a great deal?

I think so. When I started that project – and it’s still not complete – I was interested in the idea of how Britain although being part of Europe is often seen as somehow slightly separate. The process of looking for meaningful images in real life means that I don’t always have complete control, the process is candid. Even economically Britain shows its separateness by not being part of the Euro. Rightly or wrongly it feels that this individuality is emphasised because geographically it is an island and apart from the continent. We are hardly any distance from France but the cultures couldn’t be more different. This interested me, I wanted to find out if I travelled along its coastline whether I could create a portrait of the country where its character would be revealed. Defining the country by its coastline and missing many major cities will be a challenge, I’m not sure what kind of portrait I’ll get, but that’s what makes it an engaging process.

Does ‘Britain’ to you suggest landscape, as opposed to the people? Have we seen major changes to our landscape recently, do you think?

In a way they are mirrors of each other. The landscape, especially when it has been urbanised or has had man’s presence is a reflection of the prevailing culture, and culture is expressed through the population. I think the biggest change for me is that I feel society is more polarised, I think that the middle classes and the working classes are having a much harder time than ever before and our governments are not able to address these issues convincingly. On my travels in some of the coastal areas of Britain I found there were plenty of £1 shops. The success of this kind of business highlights the difficulties ordinary people are facing but at the same time last year top directors in major corporate firms were awarding themselves an average pay rise of fifty percent. My feeling when I see this is that there is a discord in our society, the tools and institutions we have put in place to protect our communities aren’t working or they are being eroded by short term objectives set out by the state.

Can you tell us some stories about your encounters taking this and other pictures of Britain?

My experience has been varied. I’ve had people come up to me and do outrageous things because they were drunk or in a party mood and at other times it can completely flip into something less genial. On one occasion in Blackpool, I was in a pub with a friend, both of us were collaborating on a project together. We stood in a corner having a drink and surveying the scene in front of us. It was a Saturday night and the atmosphere was festive, many people were just visiting for the weekend, some were on stag or hen nights. Perhaps it was because we were the only two people who had cameras hanging round our necks that two women walked up to us and casually asked us if we had fun film in the camera. The puzzled look on our faces made them rephrase the question, ‘Will you take a picture of us if we pose for you?’ Sensing a photographic opportunity we said yes. They then turned around and with their backs to us they calmly dropped their trousers and waited for us patiently to photograph their bare bottoms. After we took their picture they came over to shake our hands and then they walked back through this crowded bar back to their group of friends as if nothing unusual just happened. One of the chaps standing next to us said to us, ‘Next time I’m going to come into a pub with a camera round my neck.’ ■

You can also see Ian Teh at the following event:

The Hospital Club Granta Salon: This is Britain

7 June, 7 p.m., The Loft Lounge at The Hospital Club, 24 Endell Street, London WC2H 9HQ. Call The Hospital Club for bookings and more information: 020 7170 9100.

Join us for our first arts salon at the Hospital Club. Mischka Henner, Yinka Shonibare and Ian Teh in conversation with Granta artistic director Michael Salu and deputy editor Ellah Allfrey about what British identity means today and how it is expressed in their work in the art showcase in Granta's Britain edition and beyond.

Alan Warner

Photo by Widerbergs.

Wednesday 4 April 1973

Each man’s right hand was stained black with glossy wet muck. Elliot the Englishman had been wiping so hard at his own fingers using a hanky that he almost drew off his signet ring. He put the muddied handkerchief away and then extended his bizarrely large golfing umbrella.

Standing beside the Englishman at the far end of the long gravel pathway were the two Ians – big Ian Mhor and Wee Ian – alongside Lawless. Erchie Hannan was there too. All of them watched John Penalty’s slow approach.

‘Penalty’s leg is no looking very good at all.’

‘Eh?’

The noise as the rain hit the wide umbrella and the fine gravel around them made it difficult to hear.

‘He’s saying, John’s leg’s no looking good.’

‘He’ll be next at this rate.’

‘Don’t go saying that.’

‘We’re all thinking it.’ Hannan wore a black mac gone all shiny; his clean hand moved his wet hair up into a conglomeration of spikes and loosed drops dribbled down over his eyebrows. He blinked then held out his other dirty hand into the rain. ‘Saturated but it doesn’t clean this off, does it?’

The Englishman said nothing.

The two Ians wore matching Harris tweed flat caps which seemed to absorb the rain without reaction, though the men’s shoulders hunched as the large spots came down.

Hannan smiled at the Englishman. ‘Now’s the time for you to be thinking about your bloody wet and dry people.’

‘Just so, Mr Hannan. It’s a fact. There are the wet people and dry people in Scotland, and all you west coasters are dry people. It seems to bounce off you.’

Lawless didn’t look at him. ‘I’ve never telt you, Elliot. But here’s the secret to keeping dry. I walk up to the engine inside the fucking carriages when it’s raining. Ya don’t need to be a genius, ya Sassenach diddy.’

‘Oh.’

The other men all laughed.

‘But you arrive on the engine dry even on the midnight freight, when we’re way out in that yard.’

‘He crawls underneath the wagons. Blind drunk out of a lock-in at the County.’

‘We’ve heard your theory, Elliot. It goes well with our theory. That all Englishmen are daft. Mind him, boys, Percy Thrower here, stopping the midnight mail yon night in the cutting up the Tulloch Bank just so’s he’d could lean out with his bloody secateurs and snip off yon bramble branch that was bothering him so much. A train driver coming to his shift with a pair o bloody secateurs.’

‘English secateurs in Scotland’s green garden. You’ll be kept busy, man.’

The others all chuckled.

‘Can you no tell yet us west coasters get born with a wee layer of wax on us – like a duck?’

‘That’s just all your Brylcreem, Lawless.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘The Jerry Lee Lewis look.’

‘The wife likes it.’

‘The wife gives you shampoo for Christmas but you keep fucking drinking it, ya cunt.’

‘Despite your waterproofing, are you sure you don’t want to share this? One of you?’

‘That’s the kind of brolly they issue at Toton Depot, is it?’ Hannan licked his tongue around his wet lips.

Big Ian smiled. ‘Red Hannan thinks the umbrella is a sort of bourgeois conspiracy.’

There was laughter.

Lawless nodded. And out came the hip flask. With the top still screwed tight, he mimed tipping a little bit onto his balding scalp and using the other hand to massage it in.

‘That explains why he’s baaldy,’ said Wee Ian.

Hannan said, ‘Explains why he’s still got some fucking hair.’

John Penalty was still slowly coming up that pathway towards them – alone – The two Ians wore matching Harris tweed flat caps which seemed to absorb the rain without reaction, though the men’s shoulders hunched as the large spots came down. cigarette in the corner of his mouth despite the rain, and true enough, the gammy hip was making him fairly roll to the left that morning. Penalty’s right hand was also black with muck which they could tell he had not tried to wipe away in his distress; lumps still clung between his short fingers. They’d all witnessed how long Penalty had taken, stooping to the earth and getting himself back up again to drop the handful of wet muck – with a slap – down on his co-driver’s coffin.

Lawless offered the flask across to the Englishman, who frowned.

‘We’re backshift.’

‘Aye. Too right we’re backshift. And it’s eleven on a pishing-down morn.’

Hannan announced, ‘By now, Legless Lawless is banging the door of the County desperate for opening time.’

‘It’s been known for fucking closing time when the train’s late in on a backshift.’ Lawless quickly screwed off the top and offered the flask.

Hannan took the flask and spun round to take a swig, facing away from the congregated crowd up by the graveside.

‘Watch yourself. Lincoln’s just over there.’ The Englishman nodded towards the Area Manager, then he stepped forward and up the path towards old John Penalty where he turned, sheltering Penalty under the big umbrella without a word – the brolly at arm’s length so he himself was left mostly exposed to the rain. Penalty just nodded to the Englishman as they moved together, back towards the other drivers. Penalty wore full uniform: official issue suit, waistcoat and the hat with the zigzagging British Rail insignia in gold and purple backing – showing his length of service.

‘Got the full uniform on the day, John?’ Wee Ian often stated the obvious.

Penalty called back from underneath the held brolly, ‘Old Peter might be down there but he wouldn’t have recognised me out of it.’

‘What about your famous doms nights?’

Hannan interrupted, ‘Is the goods shunted?’

Lawless shook his head. ‘Naw-is-it-fuck. The Tory was up here like a shot. They said the coal yard is greeting already. They just put it all in the fence road. The tanks too. They’ll be shunting it in the fucking dark at this rate.’

John Penalty reached them at last and he looked directly at Hannan. ‘Aye aye. Another vote gone at our branch meetings.’ Penalty was upset but they all had to smile at the tough quip. Penalty patted at his big stomach in the black waistcoat and looked at Wee Ian. ‘Ian, we wore our uniforms to our doms nights as well.’

They all laughed.

‘Some turnout.’

‘Aye. From down the whole road. Even signalmen.’

‘It’s a nice gesture.’

Ian Mhor laughed. ‘They must have left the wives in charge of the signal boxes.’

‘The railway’ll run like fucking clockwork now, boys.’

‘The windows’ll be washed on every box.’

‘They’ll have ironed curtains hung on them by now,’ Wee Ian said.

As well as the rain hitting the earth, now came the sound of the large funeral party crunching its hesitating way back up the gravel pathways as everyone retreated from the graveside.

The entire railway had split into its groups: the six guards in theirs and the signalmen from town and all down the line were clustered in consultations. The clerks from the station and all the conciliation grades had formed gangs too. The many spare shifts had all donned uniforms in their guilty leisure.

Umbrellas were popping up which had been ignored by the graveside. They had all taken the next pathway up, through the chequerboard of graves, walking stooped in the rain. There were staff from the Back Settlement, one man each from Nine Mile House and the Fort Junction. Even the family from Ardencaple passing loop had sent an ambassador from the box. Then civilian figures from the town itself – who almost outnumbered the fifty or so railway persons – even Donaldson the butcher, who one of the drivers moonlighted for. Then there were dead Peter’s two sons and a good show of other aged, retired railway.

‘Some turnout right enough,’ Lawless said.

Five more drivers approached: Jonty with his driver, Shoutin’ Darroch followed by Coll, Hannan’s own driver. Toshack was coming and Duncan ‘The Tory’ was a bit behind. They had all taken the next pathway up, through the chequerboard of graves, walking stooped in the rain.

‘Aye. Sad, John, eh?’ called Jonty.

‘Aye.’

As usual, Shoutin’ Darroch said absolutely nothing. It was known Jonty got a lot of reading done on the engines – even if it was mainly nudie mags.

‘Come along. Let’s get in the cars and down that house.’

‘Aye but, boys, boys.’ John Penalty held up his muddied hand, still sheltered by the Englishman’s brolly. ‘Get our hands washed off of this shite so Bunty and the wee grandkids arnie seeing it.’

‘Toshack has all oily rags and stuff in his car.’

There was no talking.

‘Fucking sad,’ said Toshack.

‘It is. Aye, Tosh.’

‘That’s the end of an era that,’ Lawless announced.

‘Nineteen fucking twenty-two Peter joined the railway. Cleaning out boilers and fireboxes.’

Among the men, nobody said a thing.

‘Nineteen twenty-two,’ Penalty repeated.

‘Some retirement.’

‘Aye, the same story. Four month to go. Didn’t taste a pint of his retirement money.’

Every man nodded without hesitation.

The others were thinking it, but Penalty alone had the authority to state, ‘He did taste plenty of the wage though.’

The others chuckled softly.

‘Want a nip yourself, John?’ Lawless tipped his head back questioningly.

‘I’ve gone and took all ma fucking wee coloured Smarties, haven’t ah? Ach, on you go then.’

Lawless side-palmed the flask and Penalty took it up in his muddied hand. They watched him swallow two full gulps and then pass the flask back with a sour noise. ‘That’s powerful stuff.’

The Tory walked along the path towards them, his brogues crushing the gravel. He gave a look at the flask.

‘Aye.’

‘Aye.’

The Tory stood beside Toshack. He took his glasses off and tried to wipe the rain from the lenses with his clean fingertips. ‘If it weren’t for the circumstances, this would be like a good Hogmanay, boys. It’s no often the lot of us are all thegether at one time.’

Hannan announced, ‘We’re just no seeing enough of each other, eh, boys? Unless it was a strike call, Duncan? Eh?’ he taunted. ‘It’s going to come soon enough. For the ASLEF at least.’

There was no response until the Tory replied, ‘We’d better get down the house. Lincoln was saying we should go with you in his car and that’ll give you a bit more room, John?’

‘Are yous coming to the house? I thought you’d that goods to shunt?’ Hannan asked.

‘Oh aye.’ The Tory looked at his watch. ‘Oh aye. Popping in to pay our respects.’

‘That fucking ferry’ll be late in anyway. Day like this. Could be you’ll find yourselves twenty minutes down leaving.’

The Tory shrugged and looked up into the sky. ‘It’s more rain than wind. We should have started that twelve twenty-five engine up before we left. The coaches will be cold.’

‘Aye but ya cannie risk leaving the heating on. What is it?’

‘Eh?’

‘What machine is yon?’

‘Sixty-two. Is it, Tosh?’ The Tory looked at Toshack. ‘What machine’s yon we’ve got?’

‘Aye, sixty-two. That one’s all right. Fucking boiler in fifty-seven is no fit to be unattended. The Vital bloody Spark that one is. Even down the bothy for twenty minutes and I’m on tenterhooks. The fucking coil pressure is blowing off every minute. Put it in the book twice but Glasgow done fuck all.’

‘Can you no fix it yourself ?’

‘Naw. Needing dismantled.’

Big Ian said, ‘Look at the railway bodies here. That station must be fucking empty.’

‘Did the last cunt out switch the lights off ?’

‘Folk’ll be thinking that’s the railway closed down, at long fucking last. An end to its agonies and put out its misery.’

‘Aye. They’ll be stealing the fittings.’

‘They’ve closed the ticket office right enough.’

‘Never?’

‘Oh aye.’

‘Another crash in profits. There must be at least six people and a donkey wanting out the villages on a day like this.’

‘Isobel the Ticket just closed the window.’

‘Here’s President Lincoln.’

Lincoln and McGarry the station master came up, grinning grimly against the rain. They both had blackened right hands but they didn’t want to put them into the pockets of their good-quality overcoats. Lincoln’s spectacles were steamed up too.

Nobody said a thing and John Penalty went, ‘Isobel closed the ticket office, eh, James?’

Lincoln shrugged. ‘Quite right too. It’s only for half an hour.’

With his clean hand he awkwardly removed and squinted at his railway pocket watch on its chain.

They all began to walk towards the main gates.

The six guards had come up behind the drivers, each with blackened hand. Hannan pointed. ‘Young Colin, that can’t be you, can it, caught doing the shunting without your gloves on?’

‘More like he’s been busy wiping his arse while a train he’s on is due to leave.’

They all laughed.

‘I hear you havnie shunted the goods yet? There’s a surprise.’

Young Colin just smiled.

Penalty shouted behind, to the guards, ‘Boys, mind. Clean your hands before goan up this house. There’s wee grandkids there as well as Bunty. No fucking queuing up to wash your mitts in their scullery sink, for fuck’s sake.’

Allan Kinloch the guard said, ‘I telt yous we’s should of all brought our coupling gloves to do the ashes-to-ashes with in this weather. Peter would’ve understood. A real railway send-off.’ Hannan shouted, ‘No way young Colin’ll have his gloves with him. He keeps them under his pillow at night so he dreams of the railway and he’s went and forgot them.’

Men chuckled.

Penalty claimed, ‘Nah. With gloves on, we’d have upset poor Peter, looking down on us; he’d be supposin we were keen to get back to our work, and we all ken that’s no the case.’

They all laughed. Even Lincoln.

‘John?’ Lincoln stepped up behind Penalty. ‘Want to go down with us? It’s just, it’s a bigger car.’

The Tory, McGarry and Lincoln were all looking at Penalty.

‘Nah, you’re all right there, James. Thanks all the same; I’ll go back with these bloody monkeys.’

Lincoln nodded and stepped away.

The Englishman took the brolly from covering Penalty and walked to another car. The others all moved to the same cars they’d taken up from the town. Hannan, Coll and Penalty crossed the car park with Toshack to his old Ford Cortina.

As they opened the unlocked doors, the others stood and briefly surveyed across the road – mainly to give Penalty time to painfully lower himself in. The pedestrians continued to come out of the cemetery, the family and railwaymen were distinguished from the townsfolk by each having the black hand of peat muck from the graveside – with that hint of whisky contained deep within the earth’s scent. ■

This is an extract from The Deadman’s Pedal by Alan Warner, which is published by Jonathan Cape on 31 May.

Ilija Troyanow

Today Granta Bulgaria launches with issue one: The Future. To celebrate granta.com publishes the translated introduction here, in which the editor, Ilija Troyanow, writes about how he first encountered Granta.

My first Granta was a gift of circumstance. I was changing flights somewhere on my way to visiting my parents in Kenya, stuck in the corridor waiting for a small overweight man to come to terms with his innumerable pieces of hand luggage (these were the old days of lenience), when my attention was caught by a book sticking out of the back compartment of a seat. Always eager to rescue abandoned books I swiftly picked it up. Several ‘thank you for flying . . . ’ announcements later, held up at the ugliest space on the planet, the luggage delivery hall, I took a closer look at my find. The cover showed two men with hugely extended lips, probably Indians, and the title proclaimed ‘In Trouble Again’, followed by ‘A Special Issue of Travel Writing’. So Granta must be a magazine, I reasoned astutely, and then I checked the contents. Amazonas, Nanjing, Cuba, Bradford, Chichicastenango, Angola, Afghanistan – what an array of destinations you want someone else to travel to. There were no signs of the luggage arriving, so I started reading.

The first piece was by a man named Redmond O’Hanlon, who turned out to be the John Cleese of travel writing. Going to the rain forest as a modern urban white man is the most hilarious exercise imaginable. I was standing under a gloomy artificial Several ‘thank you for flying . . . ’ announcements later, held up at the ugliest space on the planet, the luggage delivery hall, I took a closer look at my find. light following Redmond and his croupier friend Simon down the Rio Pasimani, chuckling from time to time and once bursting out in laughter, thus frightening two identically dressed girls passing by. O’Hanlon, I later found out, is always riotously funny, whether he happens to be in Borneo, Amazonas or Congo. Still no luggage in sight, so I read the story of a Polish journalist in Luanda in the turbulent days of change, the Portuguese having left in a destructive hurry, the different independence factions still fighting it out and as a witness a perceptive man who evidently preferred the cataclysms of Africa to his Communist home. This is how I discovered Ryszard Kapuscinksi, an author whose works I was decades later to edit in German. His Angola memoir Another Day of Life is to me still his most endearing book. Time and again I have wondered how Granta has managed to discover or rediscover authors that would establish themselves as important contemporary voices (my first issue also included texts by Rushdie, Qureshi and Ghosh!). Leafing through old issues is like marvelling at the showroom of a renowned jeweller.

It was only then, wondering whether to move on to Martha Gellhorn’s Cuba or Norman Lewis’ Guatemala, that I realized that I was waiting the wrong wait, my luggage was of course checked through to the final destination, I was a transit passenger. I had four hours to kill and a Granta in my hands; all I needed was a seat and a glass of water. I moved on.

In the many years that have since gone by, I have been at times a subscriber, at times I have lost sight of ‘The magazine of new writing’, then again I have bought issues on topics that fascinated me – I prepared for my first journey to India with the seminal anniversary issue of Granta that introduced me to so many of the Indian authors that would accompany me in the years to come. The last eight copies were – once again a gift of circumstance, having met the current editor John Freeman in Sozopol – sent to me in a huge package that I had to pick up at my next-door kiosk. ‘Granta’, the gruff Viennese lady running the store muttered, ‘what is that? Could be the name of a cigarette brand, no? A good name it would be.’ ‘Yes’, I answered, grabbing my precious package, ‘who wouldn’t want to smoke a Granta!’ ■

Today Granta Bulgaria launches with issue one: The Future. You can visit their site, here.

Simon Armitage

An unpublished Ted Hughes letter, introduced by Simon Armitage.

Image courtesy of the Estate of Fay Godwin and the British Library.

Ted Hughes was a prolific letter writer, perhaps from the last age of letter writing. A selection of his output, edited by Christopher Reid in 2007, runs to over six hundred pages, and my guess is that there is at least as much again which remains unpublished. Amongst other exchanges, I’m told there is an extensive and extraordinary correspondence with Seamus Heaney tucked away in the archives of Emory University, Georgia, which will hopefully see the light of day at some stage. I have about four or five letters from Ted plus a handful of cards and notes, and it’s always a thrill to see the quick and enigmatic pen strokes again, and to remember the excitement of finding an envelope on the doormat with a Devon postmark and the tell-tale handwriting.

This two-page, four-sided, undated letter beginning ‘Dear Peter’ (Peter Keen, the photographer Hughes would later collaborate with in the book River) is unremarkable on the face of it, with no revelatory personal utterances, no far-reaching literary insights and no traces of the heightened poetic language which is a feature of so many of his letters. But look beyond the surface and it tells us a great deal about Hughes the poet and Hughes the man. The first issue is to do with clarity. Right from the outset Hughes hopes the accompanying map is ‘clear enough’, and just in case it isn’t provides an extended commentary and further detailed instructions. In fact there are three maps within the letter, one highlighting a section of the River Taw and two showing stretches of the Torridge (Map A for the Torridge in spate and Map B for when the river is ‘wadeable’). We learn from these that Hughes owned or shared fishing rights along both these rivers, and in Hughes’s absence Peter is being invited and initiated, as well as being told where to park, which residents to approach and who might be best avoided (‘a fussy lady makes problems between X and Y. In fact if the word ‘fish’ in this letter is substituted for the word ‘poem’, we have a rather interesting extended metaphor on the nature of poetic composition. I never fish it – it’s not very good anyway’). In my experience, it’s indicative of Hughes’s personality that he should go to such lengths to pass on the benefit of his experience and to try and ensure any recipient gets the greatest possible pleasure from it. Hughes’s philosophical concerns were complex and tangled, but he avoided the tiresome obscurity which afflicted many other poets of his generation, and the hallmark of his best poems is a purposeful clarity, brought about through pinpoint verbal accuracy and precisely observed detail. It’s the reason why the poems were admired by both critics and general readers, and why many of his adult poems made such a lasting impact when used in schools. We also get a glimpse here of Hughes the teacher. The tone of the letter reminds me a lot of his handbook Poetry in the Making, assembled from radio broadcasts aimed at young writers but in my view required reading for aspiring and accomplished poets of any age and experience. At one point in the book, he suggests that without the right techniques for accessing ideas the imagination will languish like a fish in the pond of someone who doesn’t know how to fish. In fact if the word ‘fish’ in this letter is substituted for the word ‘poem’, we have a rather interesting extended metaphor on the nature of poetic composition. Given the number of poems Hughes wrote in his life and the number of days he evidently spent fishing, there must presumably be some correlation between the two, and a picture emerges of Hughes reeling in as many poems from those Devon rivers as he did salmon or trout.

The other point which this letter illustrates is Hughes’s depth of local knowledge, though it doesn’t surprise me. During his upbringing in the Calder Valley in West Yorkshire Hughes became intimately familiar with the surrounding landscape of moors and cloughs, and the same thing appears to have happened with the fields, copses and watercourses of north Devon where he eventually made his home. For all his desire for privacy Hughes was never going to be confined within the walls of his house or the borders of his garden, though in this letter there’s an element of stealth – an awareness not just of roads and villages but of byways, backwaters, farm-tracks and paths, a means of getting out and about under the radar. A more arcane form of knowledge comes in his description of the river itself, an understanding of its rhythms and moods and the movements and behaviour of the fish populations within it. This extends as far as actually referring to one particular fish, a ‘big trout – 1½ lb’ and where to find it (over a fifteen foot wall, by Farmer Stokes’s place), as if that trout were someone he knew personally, if not by name then at least by habit.

I’m embarrassingly ignorant on the subject of fishing, so I don’t know what he means by ‘nymphs’ and ‘a bit of real mayfly’. Embarrassed because my wife’s grandfather was a well known fly-fisherman in the Tregaron area of Wales, and her father’s ashes are scattered along the banks of the River Barle near Simonsbath on Exmoor, where he spent hundreds of hours doing . . . whatever fishermen do. Embarrassed also because once, on a visit to his house, Ted took me on a short evening walk along the side of a river – possibly along one of the stretches mentioned in these letters – and talked about fishing, and I kept quiet, not knowing one end of a rod from the other, but happy just to be in his company and to listen to his voice. We stopped for a while near some sort of marker stone or commemorative plaque on the bank, then after a few quite moments he said, ‘But it’s dead now.’ He was talking about the river itself, and the devastating effects of pollution on the fish stocks. I hadn’t realized at the time how concerned Ted was with the environment, and how involved he was with campaigning across the county, writing to the government about what he saw as an impending natural disaster and even giving evidence at a hearing about a proposed water treatment plant in Bideford. This letter, with its tone of optimism and boyish enthusiasm, would have pre-dated my visit to his deceased river by perhaps twenty years, and more than anything it makes me realize how much it must have pained Hughes to witness that demise.

On a more upbeat note, it’s reassuring to see a spelling mistake (‘style’ for stile) and I love the maps. As a geography graduate, I once dreamed of joining the Ordnance Survey, but A picture emerges of Hughes reeling in as many poems from those Devon rivers as he did salmon or trout. became disillusioned once I realized that it was essentially a maths-based activity involving compass bearings, theodolites and advanced trigonometry. Hughes’s maps are old-school, the kind we find in the front of ancient books, drawn with a free hand and free mind. I like the kinks in the road, the candy-floss trees, the curve of the walls across the fields, the toy building blocks of Bondleigh Church, and of course the thick red lines along the banks of the river, where the fishing will be best if the fish ‘feel like it’, like a thermal image revealing a layer of information not available to the naked eye. It speaks of someone not just in touch with the landscape around him but in tune with it, feeling it deeply, and always trying to put that physical response into words.

Dear Peter,

I hope this map is clear enough.

Leave North Tawton square on the BONDLEIGH ROAD. The first T junction is at Bondleigh Bridge. By then you are on my map. Turn right, (without crossing the river) + go up the hill 40 yards, take the first on the left, to CLAPPERDOWN FARM. 50 yards along that lane, the river comes beside the road, and right there, under the road, is the pool I’ve marked, in red, above the top limit of my fishing. But I always fish it. Farmer Stokes is a nice chap. He owns that pool and about 1½ miles above it. So if you want to fish on up through the bridge, go and see him. (I’ve marked his farm.) (I’ve also marked a red dot just below his farm house. There’s a high wall there, you look over and 15 feet down to the river. Right under the wall there’s usually a big trout – 1½ lb.

I’ve marked the pools + fishable runs in [red]. I’ve marked the fishing side – the wading etc side – in [blue]. It’s best to go below the bottom of the fishing, and get across before you start – otherwise it’s difficult to approach that very good bottom long run stealthily enough. Yesterday there was a tremendously heavy rise going on, to nymphs, between 12 and 4:30. I lost a 1 ½ lb-er in that pool above the top [end of page] limit. There was a bit of real mayfly – unusual. Technically, my bank is the right (looking downstream), but cross over wherever you need. The water covered by the 2 copses enclosed in [red circle], is not ours, and a fussy lady makes problems between X and Y. I never fish it – it’s not very good anyway.

Map.

It’s tricky fishing, a lot of it pretty bushy, but if you’ve small rods and are used to it, it is good when the fish feel like it – can be really good this year. I’ve put a lot back, in only 3 visits.

If the water on the Torridge is up, as it just might be if the rain keeps on, then maybe you’d like to go there. I’m seeing the owner tomorrow, and I’ll fix it. For that, you need to know whether the river is wadeable. If it is, you go to IDDISLEIGH + ask for Nethercott House. Go down past the house, about a mile, or less, till you see a sign NETHERCOTT FISHING PARKING. It’s a little inlet where you park. Then you go up the lane beside the parking, through a gate, over the hill top, and see the river below you. Follow the lane down to a gate, go through that + down the field to a style over the hedge between you + the river, and straight on to a fishing hut. The ford across is the pool tail thirty yards below the hut. All that field – which contains the hut – is our fishing, on that bank. Across the river, the fishing goes upstream about a ½ mile (limit marked) and down about 2/3 mile (limit marked). (On left bank looking downstream).

If the river is up, as it is at its best, you go to the Meeth, on the Hatherleigh – Torrington road. Opposite the pub, a lane goes down past a bus depot and leads [end of page] to a farm - about 200 yards. Park at the farm. Go through the farmyard, and on down over the fields as you like. If you follow the lane + continue on in that line, on up over the hill beyond the lane end (follow the lane where it becomes a track up a fieldside) you come to the bottom of the fishing – stump pool, below a bit of a weir, 20 foot deep + the best pool for several miles either way, I’m told.

Map. ■

Tash Aw

Photo by The Wandering Angel.

In 1981, not long after I turned ten, Malaysia implemented its infamous ‘Buy British Last’ campaign that was to carry on for a full two years; the following year, a complementary policy was introduced – the ‘Look East’ policy that strove to learn from the emerging economic powerhouses of East Asia. Mahathir Muhammad, then in his early days as Prime Minister, was already establishing what was to become his unique brand of leadership – brash, insolent, provocative, sometimes mischievous, occasionally inflammatory, and on more than one occasion, downright illogical. In many ways, his no-holds-barred style of government reflected the manner of Malaysia’s rapid economic rise in the years that followed. It was as if he was consciously trying to fashion an image for what he wanted the country to be: ultra-confident and unapologetic, not just severing all links with our colonial past but sticking a bold middle finger up to it while we strode chest-out into the future.

For my family, like most ordinary Malaysians, the ‘Buy British Last’ policy had little impact. The lack of availability of British-made products – shortbread biscuits, fine blended teas – had no bearing on our everyday lives. There were a few people for whom the sudden shift in trading relationships triggered a deep nostalgia for golden syrup and Horlicks, which had to be purchased on the sly through friends and relatives who had connections at the NAAFI, but for the vast majority of Malaysians, The lack of availability of British-made products – shortbread biscuits, fine blended teas – had no bearing on our everyday lives. the idea of British-made goods held little appeal. Over-priced and obscure, things like Scottish jumpers (for those rich enough to travel to colder climes) and Marks & Spencer biscuits were beyond the imagination and price range for most ordinary people, and for those who were aware of them, the recherché quality of these goods lay in a sort of dowdy reliability which seemed increasingly irrelevant in the ever-growing presence of Japanese goods, shiny and practical and glorious in their modernity. Why bother getting an expensive, unreliable Rover when you could buy a sleek new Nissan at half the price and twice the efficiency? I remember a period when rubbish bins outside the houses of the middle-class suburb where I went to school seemed to overflow with old turntables and radios (wireless sets – even the name sounded ridiculously old-fashioned), thrown out in favour of crystal-clear Yamaha and Sony stereo systems. If ever there was a conflict between Old Order and New Order, this was it – the beginning of the end of the ancien regime, played out with such startling certitude that it seemed almost comical in retrospect.

And yet the blithe throwing out of the old masked a more complex reaction to the new. While the history books might record the high-level meetings between trade delegations in London and Kuala Lumpur, and the unthinking vigour with which the entire country jettisoned their last remnants of colonial sentimentalism, they might not necessarily articulate the unease with which a substantial proportion of the population regarded this new policy of Looking East, for the East meant, for all intents and purposes, Japan, which had invaded Malaysia a mere forty years previously. For the ethnic Chinese population of Malaysia, this new policy represented a serious test of their much-famed sense of practicality, their ability to look forward and forget the past. Then making up 35 per cent of the population of the country, Chinese-Malaysians still felt the raw emotional wounds of war, when they had been targeted by the Japanese army for particularly brutal treatment, a legacy of China’s ancient enmity with Japan. Most Chinese-Malaysians capable of making an informed choice in such matters (such as my parents and those of their generation) had been born during the war, or just after it, and it is safe to say that all of them had firm opinions on Japan. For them, the idea of buying from the enemy was abhorrent; and to complicate the issue further, there was the ever-thorny issue of racial politics which, inherited from the British colonial government and steadily exacerbated by post-Independent government, assigned differing social and economic benefits to the various ethnic groups in the country. The long and short of it is that many Chinese-Malaysians, already angered by discriminatory politics, felt the governmental decree to buy Japanese goods as a slap in the face. In the predominantly ethnic Chinese neighbourhoods where I grew up, it was not uncommon to hear people swearing over long-dead mothers’ graves that they would never, ever buy anything Japanese . . .

I used to listen to these tirades while counting the increasing number of Japanese-made goods in the house: the Hitachi rice cooker, lurking in the corner of the kitchen; the Casio alarm clock; the neat, solid plastic food storage boxes in the fridge – all this without even mentioning the objects of our childhood desire, which ranged from cute little Nintendo games to the ultimate of teenage glamour, the Sony Walkman.

For us, one generation further removed from the War, the injustices of the past blurred hazily into the distance, replaced by things we could use, objects we could covet. We were growing up, becoming aware of the allure of material objects, and it was impossible to resist Japan. Even in the most hard-line households, with the battered old Austin squeezed into the small open-walled garage, this renewed anti-Japan rhetoric felt less an attack against the old enemy itself but a protest against the government, the cry of an aggrieved people. No one had any real attachment to Britain, but the determination to get their hands on British products seemed a convenient way of expressing their dissatisfaction with their lot. I think it was in this way that we ended up buying a Ford Cortina (cream body, black plastic fixed roof), which we drove for over fifteen years. Towards the end of its life it broke down repeatedly in ever more embarrassing and inconvenient circumstances, until one day we left it with a scrap merchant who gave us twenty bucks for it.

The Buy British Last policy produced only one real, lasting source of anxiety for us as a family, as it did for most of the people I knew – a key issue in the dispute that caused the policy in the first place. Although there had been fairly serious skirmishes along purely commercial lines – such as the London Stock Exchange’s implementing of rules preventing stealth takeovers (a reaction to the Malaysian government’s seizing of control of The long and short of it is that many Chinese-Malaysians, already angered by discriminatory politics, felt the governmental decree to buy Japanese goods as a slap in the face. Guthrie, one of the flagship plantation holdings during colonial rule), the incident that really provoked Prime Minister Mahathir’s already brimming sense of injustice was the British government’s decision to introduce exorbitantly high tuition fees for foreign students at British universities. In the late seventies and early eighties, Malaysian students represented the largest single body of overseas students in Britain, reflecting the long-established cultural ties between the two countries. Our entire school system was modelled along British lines, we studied in Malay and English and for bright students, Britain was the default option for tertiary education; America was then just a distant, nascent Plan B. The National University of Singapore was acceptable, as were the then unknown Australian universities; Britain was still where people wanted to study. Suddenly, however, that entire possibility was evaporating before our very eyes – the ambitions of an entire burgeoning bourgeoisie dashed. Figures were bandied about –three, four, five thousand pounds – easily twice the annual salary of a middle-ranking manager or lawyer.

I was only ten, but already aware of the importance of such matters; my sister was getting ready to sit for her O-levels, and in the true aspiring fashion of the new Asian middle class, our entire existence was subtly geared towards performance in public exams, with the ultimate goal being access to an old British university. What happened thereafter was a void – nothing seemed to matter after university; everything was presumed glorious. Getting in was all that mattered – your passport to a brilliant life. As I once heard a family friend say, ‘Once you’re at Cambridge, no one fails.’ (This is not true, obviously.) It was, and still is, entirely the done thing to speak openly about exams and university admissions in front of a ten-year-old, and assume total comprehension on his part. But although I understood the gravity of the situation, I never quite got what had to be done, unlike my peers, who seemed instinctively to grasp the importance of the task at hand. The only way for the non-rich to attend university in Britain now was to gain one of the few scholarships available to the ethnic Chinese population, mostly – and ironically – awarded by the British government or else by charitable foundations. Thus began an unseemly, often vicious scrap for these bursaries, an all-consuming competition from which I disqualified myself by being utterly hopeless at Maths, the essential element of Southeast Asian public exams, particularly for boys (I wasn’t great at the Sciences, either). Only those who have grown up in an Asian environment can know the constant pressure and low-level paranoia that many school-going children experience – a mentality that our Singaporean cousins call kiasu: the fear of losing, even though it isn’t clear what, or to whom, they are losing. In the dizzy haze of childhood anxiety, it was impossible to appreciate the delicious irony of this desperation to study in Britain, even as our entire country was celebrating its new, confident self – celebrating a renaissance that had no further need for Britain, that would only look into the future.

Kuala Lumpur, where I grew up, is a curious city. Established in the latter half of the nineteenth century on the site of vast tin mines, it lacks the heritage of the old Straits settlements of Penang or Malacca, with their layers of history and old-world charm. As a capital city, it is unassuming and relatively ordered, unlike the frenetic urban sprawls of Bangkok or Jakarta or Manila; and of course it lacks the cosmopolitan pizzazz of Singapore. The absence of any pronounced character had always made KL (as everyone calls it) an easy place to live – a small big city, its streets are cleanish, its suburbs neatly laid out in grids of numbered streets; food is plentiful and readily available, day or night; and the traffic, though bad and worsening, is still nowhere near the semi-permanent gridlock of Jakarta or Bangkok. Sometimes, driving around the city on my way home after dinner, I am struck by its small-town ambiance – the inherent slowness of life, the dedication to a certain way of life that revolves around languid, simple meals with friends, often in modest, open-air eating places, or going from one mamak stall to another, nowadays perhaps interspersed with a drink in a fancy bar somewhere in central KL. We call this kind of social interaction to lepak, even when we are speaking English.

‘What do you want to do tomorrow?’

‘I don’t know, maybe just lepak’.

It can be most closely translated as hanging out, or relaxing, or kicking about, but it is more than that – it involves a greater sense of intimacy, an acute appreciation of the absence of responsibility, a feeling that there is, in fact, nothing more to do in life than to lepak – as if to lepak is inevitable. To understand the Malaysian’s commitment to the art of lepak (or lepak-ing; the verb can be used with great freedom) is to understand why KL is a strange place – a capital city with the soul of a village, a metropolis that doesn’t quite know how to be a metropolis.

During my childhood, KL often felt like an overgrown village, or at least a series of interconnected villages separated by large stretches of fairly thick jungle, through which narrow, unlit roads would snake, giving the impression of travelling deep in the countryside, even if that journey only lasted five or ten minutes. During my childhood, KL often felt like an overgrown village, or at least a series of interconnected villages separated by large stretches of fairly thick jungle Even in the centre of town, around the expensive hotels such as the Hilton and the Equatorial, the cityscape was distinctly low-rise, verdant and slow-paced, dominated by the racecourse (horses, not Formula 1, just to be clear) fringed by huge old angsana and rain trees, under which there was a permanent presence of food stalls and their clients, lepak-ing even on weekdays when the races weren’t on. Founded under the patronage of Sir William Maxwell, the Turf Club’s provenance made it a prime target for redevelopment as we moved into the 1980s (a quick scan of the surnames associated with the Club’s early days gives an idea of its origins: ‘Messrs Aylesbury, Tate, McD Mitchell, F Douglas Osborne, Dr Travers . . . et al’); the sharper the acceleration of nationalism and modernism (always a dangerous combination), the more it seemed likely that the racecourse’s days were numbered. Today, predictably, its former site is occupied by the Petronas Twin Towers, for six heady years the tallest building in the world, and still the proudest emblem of Malaysia’s gleaming modernity.

Although it would take a further decade or two for the redevelopment drive in central KL fully to hit its stride, the signs were clear to see in the early 1980s – quite literally, as it turned out. The renaming of roads in KL had begun in the decade following Independence back in 1957 – a gentle, gradual translation of English words into Malay – ‘road’, ‘lane’, ‘market’, etc. But suddenly, in 1981, the year of the Buy British Last campaign, the proper nouns of scores of major roads in the city centre were changed, so that by the time I was old enough to navigate my way around the city as a teenager, I had no idea where Birch Road, Treacher Road, Cecil Street or Foch Avenue were. In the map of my memory I have only ever know Jalan Maharajalela, Jalan Sultan Ismail, Jalan Hang Lekir and Jalan Cheng Lock.

And where words go, actions soon follow – the beautiful stuccoed mansions built either by the British colonial administration or wealthy Chinese families at the turn of the century began to disappear, the land on which they sat considered too valuable not to be used for a shopping mall or a high-rise, high-tech office block or a five-star hotel. The Cheong mansion opposite Pudu jail survived until the late 1990s, when it was replaced by the giant Berjaya Times Square shopping mall that already feels tiny and shabby compared to the newer malls in the area; and the last great privately owned mansion, Bok House, home to the legendarily bad-yet-wonderful Le Coq d’Or restaurant for over fifty years, was torn down just over five years ago.

There is, I admit, a slight nostalgia in my descriptions of the KL of my childhood, exacerbated by the fact that I live half of the year in London; distance always sharpens the sense of loss. But I am not a sentimental person, nor am I particularly nostalgic: I like change, and it is entirely understandable that a country like Malaysia should build an image of itself by reacting to what it had been before. My problem is not so much with how we destroy the past, but with what we build in its place. Looking at any of the big shopping malls – the Suria KLCC at the foot of the Petronas Twin Towers, for example, though the same could apply to any of them – you will notice that the ground and first floors are lined with glamorous shops. Vuitton, Cartier, Prada, Burberry – they are all there, and all empty, save for a few tourists from Saudi or the Gulf States; the concourses are wide, cool and empty. Go a few floors up, however, and the cheap and cheerful food courts are overflowing with people eating all day and night, just as they would at the streets stalls which these air-conditioned food courts imitate. Build a gleaming new luxury mall and Malaysians will still turn it into a place of simple pleasures where they gather to eat, laugh and while away the time.

This is why KL often feels hard to pin down – a comfortingly sleepy village clad in First World glitter. This is also why we look across with such envy at our neighbours in Singapore. Build a gleaming new luxury mall and Malaysians will still turn it into a place of simple pleasures where they gather to eat, laugh and while away the time. They have the chutzpah to carry out what Mahathir would like us to have done, to force our way noisily and unashamedly into a new world order where fusty old countries like Britain no longer matter. Across the causeway, Singaporeans make money and achieve blingy modernity as naturally as breathing; their thoughts seem unanchored in the past, washed through with a kind of collective amnesia that we secretly covet. (On more than one occasion, I have heard it said at book readings in Singapore that while Malaysian novelists of my generation are still preoccupied with ‘stories about the past,’ like World War II or anything pre-Independence, our Singaporean counterparts write stories ‘relevant to contemporary life.’) But the average Malaysian is, let’s face it, easy-going and reticent, fundamentally unsuited to a life of glamour - so while other countries hustle their way into the future, we seem to spend all our time at street stalls and food courts, as we have always done, perfecting the art of lepak. ■

The Commonwealth Short Story Prize has announced the five regional winners from Africa, Asia, Canada & Europe, Caribbean, and the Pacific regions. In partnership with Commonwealth Writers, Granta will publish each of the winning stories online during the week of 4 June. This selection introduces some of the most exciting emerging talents in the world, writers who bring a thrilling and essential glimpse of the world and the worlds that are within Britain. The stories will be published in order of their region, from east to west.

4 June: Regional Winner, Pacific

Emma Martin, New Zealand, Two Girls in a Boat

5 June: Regional Winner, Asia

Anushka Jasraj, India, Radio Story

6 June: Regional Winner, Africa

Jekwu Anyaegbuna, Nigeria, Morrison Okoli (1955-2010)

7 June: Regional Winner, Canada and Europe

Andrea Mullaney, UK, The Ghost Marriage

8 June: Regional Winner, Caribbean

Diana McCaulay, Jamaica, The Dolphin Catcher

The overall winner will be announced on 8 June at Hay Festival.

You can also visit Commonwealth Writers, here.

Nadifa Mohamed

photo by Henry Lawford.

I set foot on British soil, or tarmac to be precise, on a frozen February day in 1986. Perched atop my sister’s hip at the top of the steps leading down from the Aeroflot plane, I took one sharp breath before a missed step left us both tumbling down to the icy surface. Bruised and offended I decided that this wasn’t the place for me. Months later, ensconced in a Victorian terrace in Tooting, my mind still perceived threats everywhere: in the creepy power lines that criss-crossed the street, in the curious gas-smell that emanated from the cold walls, but most of all in the cat that watched us interminably from the windowsill of the flat across the street.

It was a source of anxiety not just to me but to my nine year-old sister and fourteen year-old brother. We formed an investigative panel and decided that the cat was no humble feline but a spy, just like the secret policemen in Somalia, but spoke English and reported our daily activities back to its owner. I became English by osmosis; a new sense of humour, altered manners, an alternative history filtering through my old skin. The memories of booted men stomping into our bungalow at night and looking for our eldest brother had left us suspicious and untrusting, but England and the house on that street coupled with that cat exacerbated our paranoia. With a three-inch afro and sweatpants under my school skirt to keep out the chill, I marched to the prison-like schoolhouse every morning as sullenly as a convict joining a chain gang. On the green mat at Mrs Moore’s feet I responded to laughter from bullies with a stern look and a finger drawn menacingly across my throat like a blade, a move copied from the Indian films I had enjoyed in Somalia. All I needed were a pair of aviator sunglasses and a gold medallion and I could have been filmstar Amitabh Bachchan. Slowly, slowly I learned to speak and read English, the script falling into place from Sunday mornings spent piecing together subtitles on the televised drama ‘Mahabharata’. It was full of moustachioed Indian rajas on horseback and simpering ranis in distress; a story two thousand years old but familiar and nostalgic to me.

Soon the ‘Mahabharata’ was ousted from my heart by Home and Away, Roald Dahl, Benny Hill, Top of the Pops. I became English by osmosis; a new sense of humour, altered manners, an alternative history filtering through my old skin. Eventually that skin came to appear a cocoon, tight and paper-thin, the passage of time affecting small change after change until I appeared another person altogether; long-legged, bleary-eyed and confused. Do butterflies and moths suffer this perplexity? This ‘how did I get here?’ and ‘who am I?’ crisis? They seem to just beat their wings twice and then take to the air. I felt weighed down, burdened, not so much by what I did have but what I didn’t, a dearth that I couldn’t describe. I sought shelter under my father’s shadow, a former sailor who believes himself a citizen of the world and thinks the term ‘global warming’ is an internationalist greeting. He has visited more than a hundred countries and has an amalgam of accents to show for it. If anyone knew what it meant to belong everywhere and nowhere it was him. He described arriving in 1947, sailing into Port Talbot, Wales on a prison ship that had just delivered Jewish refugees caught trying to enter Palestine illegally to detention centres in Germany, and being inducted into a peripatetic world of sailors, boarding houses, casual acquaintances and long waits at Naval offices for the next ship to come in.

Somalis had started arriving in England in the mid-nineteenth century, most employed as stokers on steamships but others stowing away inside cargo ships. These pioneers had established communities in Hull, Cardiff, South Shields, Liverpool and London’s East End. It was in Hull that my father met Mahmoud Mattan, another northern Somali eking out a living in the flattened post-war economy. Mahmoud had married a Welsh girl and had three sons, putting down roots unlike the other Somalis who intended to return home with suitcases full of cash. The soil was hard though, hostile and acidic, and instead of finding opportunity, Mahmoud was forced to live apart from his family and eventually accused of the murder of a jeweller. He was executed in Cardiff in 1952. It took his widow, Laura, another fifty years to prove his innocence and have his remains removed from the prison cemetery. This story of love and hate got under my skin and I pursued it in libraries, in museums in Cardiff, in day centres for old sailors in Butetown where men who had once drifted from one corner of the world to another seemed welded into plastic armchairs, their legs either wasted or tight and swollen with fluid, their eyes leaky and rimmed with sea-blue rings. Mahmoud’s story was a mere footnote in their long, adventurous lives; his distinguishing features, manners, idiosyncrasies scrubbed from their memories. ‘What is there to say?’ my father exclaimed. ‘He wore a trilby hat and moustache, worked for a time in a slate foundry, enjoyed a flutter on the horses. He was an ordinary man.’ An ordinary man with an extraordinary fate.

Investigating Mahmoud’s life sparked something in me, a sense that my story was just a page within an old epic. Here – a sepia photograph from 1904 of Somalis in white robes living in a ersatz traditional village in a park in Bradford in one of the travelling ‘human zoos’ popular a hundred years ago, These ghostly, restless men left traces so slight that every generation that followed them felt as if they were the first. the same individuals appear in a newspaper article a while later, having thrown off their robes and taken their employers to court for breach of contract. There – Somali Dockers fighting alongside Irish, Jewish and British anti-fascists in the Battle of Cable Street against Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, one Somali boy exultantly telling journalists after the scuffle, ‘we got them good, didn’t we?’ The strangest document I found was the autobiography of a sailor, Ibrahim Isma’il, written in 1928, he dictated his story to his Belgian host in an anarchist’s commune in the Cotswolds and vividly describes the 1919 ‘race riots’ in Cardiff that left most of his countrymen in prison or on remand. He also discusses less dramatic events such as the winter’s night when the sky was as ‘black as ink’ and ‘a cold wind was raging’ when he missed the bus from Stroud and was forced to trudge many miles home in the rain meditating on his state as ‘an outcast, an African . . . who could not ask for shelter.’ Shortly after the autobiography was written Isma’il left Britain and disappeared, never to be heard from again by his anarchist friends. These ghostly, restless men left traces so slight that every generation that followed them felt as if they were the first.

In the Sixties, students and civil servants from the newly created Republic of Somalia joined the sailors, their paths rarely crossing apart from at the Somali embassy in London’s Portland Square, where after renouncing his British citizenship my father collected his new passport and planned a permanent return to his birthplace. New arrivals such as my maternal uncles, educated men who lived affluent lives back home, enjoyed much better conditions than their predecessors, renting flats in West London and working comfortable office jobs. They wore a uniform of sharp suits and thick-rimmed glasses, and met with other African intellectuals in cafes to argue over how the post-colonial world could be remade for the better. My own time in England linked those earlier migrations to the exodus that followed the disintegration of the Somali state. My father retired from the merchant navy and set up a support group for the refugees pouring first into London and then Leicester, Birmingham and Sheffield. The numbers arriving became so great that Somalis stopped hurriedly exchanging details whenever their paths crossed – we had once befriended a Somali Olympic athlete after my father spotted his typically Somali face in a crowded, central London street- and the once inclusive community fragmented into clan divisions. Neither the past, the present or the future seemed easy to talk about, it was at this moment when it became apparent that there would be no return to our former home – that I must have become unmoored, drifting spiritually from one place to another and then back again.

The quiet men who arrived on our doorstep with nothing more than a plastic bag of possessions ate insatiably and slept for days but said nothing about what they had seen. Brutal news broadcasts filled in the blanks: crying infants with crepe-like skin, overflowing feeding centres, General Aideed in a Panama hat and sunglasses, American marines in wetsuits storming Jezira beach. My own time in England linked those earlier migrations to the exodus that followed the disintegration of the Somali state. Trudging to the phone box, I would stand beside my mother as she pummelled one pound coins into the slot and waited to be connected to her mother in an Ethiopian refugee camp, it was loyalty to my grandmother and all the others we had left behind that stopped me feeling truly British. Despite having just fragments of memories of my old life in Somalia and my mother tongue literally being a language I only used with my mother I stubbornly refused to think of myself as anything but a Somali living in Britain. This was and is a common feeling within the diaspora; we have one foot in Somalia and one foot in the country we are living, but while I was forced to navigate through a new culture, Somali children brought up now in places such as Bethnal Green, Shepherd’s Bush and Wembley might only study and socialise with other Somalis and Muslims. The desire that Somali sailors had to discover the world has been replaced by a fearful, insular attitude and a demand for conformity within the community. As Somalia has fragmented and reached an uneasy peace my need to claim solidarity with it has decreased, visits to my hometown of Hargeisa always highlight my foreignness; I cannot bear camel’s milk, I leave gatherings to read a book, I play punk music loudly and don’t know what to do when a Sultan pays a visit but my life in England is not something I will apologise for.

But similarly my roots in Somalia are not something I can forgot.

Twenty-six years after arriving here and I am as close as I will ever be to being British, three generations of my family have lived here and if my life ever plays before my eyes it will be squirrels in parks, grimy underground carriages, brooding bus drivers, iron-gated schools, rotund lollipop ladies and men in tight t-shirts with a pint of beer in their hands that I will see. ■

Nick Papadimitriou

Nick Papadimitriou is a writer and ‘deep topographer’ of London’s fringes, suburbs and hidden massif. Selected as a New Voice by Granta, he was also introduced by walking companion Will Self who describes Papadimitriou’s work Scarp, extracted here, as a ‘treasure trove of information and insight’. Here Papadimitriou talks to online editor Ted Hodgkinson about the telling changes he has witnessed to London’s edgelands over the last thirty years, the writing on landscape that inspires him most, the mysteries of the suburbs and a close encounter with a large hornet.

 

 TH: This is your first book but it has had a long gestation period, both in terms of the writing time and the vast amount of walking you’ve done along this unusual and captivating landmass. To what extent do you find the two activities, of composing sentences and putting one foot in front of the other, are linked for you?

 

When I first began walking consciously back in the late 1980s, I found that the torrent of inner voices I habitually heard began to organise itself in relation to the landscapes I passed through, the things I saw, the sensory experience of weather and light that buffeted me and the responses triggered by these. It was as if the land was trying to transmit a message through me, or as if I wanted to communicate to some as yet undiscovered loved one what it was I saw. This statement may seem to be unduly poetic or high-flown but it is the need to convey magnitude that concerns me here. It was inevitable that some sort of art would rise out of the encounter and Scarp is my first, faltering communiqué. However, this is only part of the story. Frequently I refuse to keep notes or other records of walks undertaken and as a result the memories of these fade and ultimately pass down into the land, and are forgotten. At some level I think this is as it should be.

There is deep tradition of writing about landscape in Britain , from the Lake Poets to the psycho-geographers of more recent times. To what extent are you conscious of literary tradition when working and do you think there is something particular to Britain – perhaps our class-bound society – that leads us to re-imagine our surroundings?

Class is the great quicksand at the heart of English thought and culture. To simply ignore class seems to me to be to act with wilful ignorance. Unfortunately, when I go the other way and engage with class I all-too-easily find myself becoming more deeply entrenched in my relative position in the social hierarchy. I don’t know why class is such a strong presence in our collective It was as if the land was trying to transmit a message through me, or as if I wanted to communicate to some as yet undiscovered loved one what it was I saw. thought but one thing that can be said in its favour is that it provides a starting block from which particularly intense narratives can kick off and surge forward as much as become a sticking point. My favourite landscape writer is W.H. Auden. Human activity and the consequences of anthropocentrist power brokering are never far from the surface in his invocations of the land. Other ‘literary’ writers on landscape such as Iain Sinclair or Peter Ackroyd I tend to avoid as their perceptions interfere too readily with my own responses and my need to find space for the voices to surface. I prefer to read either scientific ecology papers dating from the 1920s – fine-detailed witness statements regarding what once was – or popular topographers such as the brothers Maxwell. The books these two intrepid writers produced between the wars such as The Fringe of London and A Detective in Surrey are near-holy books for me.

In Scarp, you reveal how overlooked, neglected or liminal spaces can be arenas rife with signs of the shifting psychological make up of society. Over the course of your lifetime what are the most salient changes you’ve seen occur?

 

In the twenty-five years I have been walking the brown field sites scattered around London have gradually disappeared as a result of the pressure for new housing. It’s heartbreaking really. A lesser evil is the conversion of wasteland to official ecology and conservation sites complete with We live in a great era of retrieved ‘forgotten’ histories but it is the recording eye of absolute fact that intrigues me the most hogging paths, picnic tables and information boards. The snob in me is appalled at the prospect of sharing what once seemed my own personal domain with the general punter, but I have to admit that if it preserves space for wildlife it is a good thing. Another change in the landscape is the systematic eradication of rusted hastate fencing and cross-hatched wire supported on pre-moulded lintels such as you used to see around rail-yards, schools and council depots. The rust-proof trident palings that have usurped them are potentially deadly and speak clearly of changes in the national psyche, the emergence of intolerance and fear, the growth of the impulse towards control.

Is getting lost an important starting point for your work or do you always know where you’re going when you set out on a walk?

 

I have no great theory or methodology regarding the relative benefits of finding my way around or not. There are obviously occasions when accurate map-reading is desirable, say on open moor land in the winter. On the other hand, wilfully abandoning a planned route in order to explore through getting lost can be rewarding but these options are worn lightly and don’t figure for me at a theoretical level

In the New Voices extract you describe a cluster of violent road accidents on ‘Suicide Corner’. As a nation do you think we’re adept at blotting out these kinds stories from the fringes of society from our history?

 

As a nation and as individuals we do this all the time. Often it is out of necessity – we would simply go insane if we didn’t. On other occasions there is a wilfulness that points to more sinister motives. We live in a great era of retrieved ‘forgotten’ histories but it is the recording eye of absolute fact that intrigues me the most: that a spider drowned in a water butt just outside Watford in June 1967; that a drunken businessman ran over a woodpigeon on Clack Lane, West Ruislip in 1999, laughed about it and never told anyone. These I imagine. These I see.

You have a great affinity with the natural world, from the mating cycles of urban foxes to the ‘lunch meat’ of adders. Have you found yourself in any tight spots when encountering the wildlife around London ?

 

I once put on my shirt after sunbathing in the old rail yards at Feltham and then, acting on instinct, quickly took it off again. Inspection revealed a huge continental hornet pulsing just inside the collar. I saw it as a signal – I was not in control.

There is a terrible fire at your home in the suburbs which informs a great deal of the course of Scarp and indeed, of your life it seems. Are those suburbs a site of renewal for you, or is it a memory that spurred on a wider exploration of the region?

The suburbs – and the further out of London I travel the stronger the sense of this grows – are the site of my most fevered imaginings and yearnings. Inspection revealed a huge continental hornet pulsing just inside the collar. I saw it as a signal – I was not in control. The interpenetration of pocket-woodland, fields and hedgerows with houses dating from the 1910s, 20s and 30s, as found out beyond Zone 5, is the complex dance of relative duration with equally relative temporality. The mock-Tudor displacers of old farmland are now threatened in turn as houses are torn down and once well-kept gardens now deserted by death in which families passed generations are levelled to be replaced by care homes and multiple luxury flats complete with parking spaces. Stasis, flux: both exist in stark form in the stockbroker-belt. The emotional confusion at the heart of my response provides the frictional heat necessary for creative writing. ■

You can read an extract from Scarp by Nick Papadimitriou, introduced by Will Self, here.

Scarp will be published in July by Sceptre.

Nick Papadimitriou

New Voices highlights six emerging talents each year on granta.com. The latest in series is Nick Papadimitriou, who is introduced here by Will Self.

I first met Nicholas Papadimitriou in the mid-1980s. We were both lost young men at that time - now we’re lost middle aged men. Nick lived in Child's Hill, North London, where he still does to this day - I was based in Barnsbury, near Islington, and latterly Shepherd’s Bush. We crossed and recrossed London frequently on purposeless walks that we would’ve called derives in the manner of the French Situationists - if we’d ever heard of such things. I also had a Hillman Hunter car, complete with veneered dashboard, and in this we drove to the city’s outer limits - we were both obsessed by these liminal zones, where the city declined into a series of disjointed entrepots of urbanity. We dubbed them ‘interzones’ after the William Burroughs fiction of the same name. I remember visits to the marshes where Belmarsh Prison now lowers, to Thamesmead and to the Ultima Thule of the Isle of Grain – the haunt of Magwitch and Marlow’s shades, of Dickens and Conrad, those great proto-psychogeographers. Nick was a man of passions, of poetry and of certainties: the ground beneath his feet. Already he disdained the Moloch of the man-machine matrix and went his own way, weaving along, a figure emerging from the interwar period, clothed in Symbolist verse, wreathed in tobacco smoke.

We lost touch some time in the early 1990s, and then in around 2005 I ran into him again, walking along the Charing Cross Road. This was only as it should have been. In the meanwhile much had happened to us both – some good, a lot bad. Nick was still living Child’s Hill, in the same flat. He had spent time teaching Polish naval officer English in Gdansk and acquired a working knowledge of the language – but apart from this Nick was a man of passions, of poetry and of certainties: the ground beneath his feet. Modernist high-tension cable lashing the Thames Estuary to the Baltic, a zipwire that the poetic Papadimitriou span along, he had remained mostly in the purlieu of his territory, and there his practise had refined itself into the most intense relationship between man and massif that it's ever been my privilege to witness: looking out in from the windows of his flat on the second floor of Harpenmead Point, Nick had descried the outline of what geologists term the ‘London tertiary massif’, a ridge of high land stretching across the northern reaches of the city. Nick had set himself the task of exhaustively mapping this landmass, or divining its complex web of ecological, historical and psychic networks. The result was a treasure trove of information and insight, and an astonishing archive of material. In the past three years Nick has completed the astonishing feat of condensing this ‘deep topography’ (his own term for his practise, now adopted by the luminary of these practises Iain Sinclair) into a single volume, ‘Scarp’, which I believe represents some of the best writing on the relationship between psyche and place that I’ve ever read.

It’s been my great joy over decades now to have walked and talked and journeyed with the remarkable Nick Papadimitriou – now it’s your opportunity to travel with him across the page.

Will Self

photo by MaxWilliamson.

Auburn-haired, freckled and elfin-faced Miss Borehamwood 1954 was picked up at eight o’clock at her house in Elstree by her fiancé William McGrath. After a quick spin in McGrath’s white MG Midget to St Albans where they had dinner, the couple set off south, car-roof down on the hot June evening, heading for Edgware and the cinema. As they passed over Elstree Hill, Sheila Margaret Lomath and William McGrath discussed plans for their approaching wedding day. Everything was arranged, the service at St Nicholas’ church, Elstree, to be followed by a reception at the Orchard Restaurant in Mill Hill. The honeymoon would be spent touring France, the new Mr and Mrs McGrath (plus MG Midget) taking the Silver City cross-channel air ferry from Lydd in Kent to Dunkirk. As they shouted to one another over the engine noise, the evening air hitting their faces, they crossed Brockley Hill, swung onto the sleek and modern A41(T) Edgware Way and plummeted down off the ridge at 70 mph. Sheila smiled as she gazed at the curve of streetlamps marking the course of the arterial road up ahead; in her beautiful mind the chain of orange globes became a necklace bearing the years-to-come, each jewel-like soda-light a rich season, distinct yet integral to the shaping pattern of her life. William merely pondered his luck; to wed an ex-beauty queen – who’d have thought it? It was good to be alive in 1958.

Forty-five minutes later Miss Borehamwood 1954 is no more. While the firemen cut her decapitated body free from the smoking wreckage down by the roundabout at Newlands Corner, the traffic backs up on the two-lane bypass all Overhead, on a pre-moulded concrete streetlamp, a crow perches and mocks the event taking place below. the way to Five Ways Corner in Hendon, all the way to The Spider’s Web Motel near Watford. Faces stare from the windows of the new tower blocks in the Spur Road estate as an ambulance speeds off, carrying a critically injured McGrath to Edgware General Hospital. A Hendon Times reporter licks his pencil before asking a copper for inside information while Public Carriage officers from Scotland Yard standing in their mackintoshes by the other vehicle involved in the crash – a six-ton British Road Services truck carrying fruit down from Leyland in Lancashire – photograph the silvery skid-marks of the MG Midget’s final moment. The reporter shakes his head woefully: this is just the latest fatality in a year that has seen Edgware’s so-called ‘mile of death’ truly earning its title.

1958 opened with a bang on January 6th when a car driven by Mr Sidney Thomas Davies, sixty-nine, collided with a bus at the junction of the A41(T) and Station Road, Hendon. Mr Davies was thrown through the car windscreen and suffered fatal injuries including multiple fractures to his skull. He had been driving his family back to their home in Watford from a day out in London’s West End when the accident occurred. His son, recording engineer Peter Thomas Davies, later described the sound of the impact as ‘the loudest noise I ever heard.’ A fatality left unrecorded at the subsequent coroner’s inquiry was Mrs Davies’ poodle, Bon-Bon, which was left to lie bleeding to death in the glass-strewn gutter outside the local branch of the National Provincial Bank.

In May three passengers alighting from a 113 bus – Mark Cohen, fifty-six; Mrs Dorothy Fawcett, sixty-seven; and her daughter, Yvonne Williams, forty – were killed after an estate car ploughed into them at the bus-stop by the junction of the A41(T) and Tithe Walk, Mill Hill. The driver – a twenty-one-year-old man from Elstree – lost control of his vehicle as the result of a sudden puncture caused by a one-and-a-half inch woodscrew later found embedded in the car’s rear off-side tyre.

As Sheila Lomath’s body is wheeled towards a waiting ambulance, a brown rat emerges from the roadside herbage and rummages in some shopping bags dumped by a chipped concrete bollard before dragging a greyed sliver of ox-tail impregnated with used tea-leaves onto the York-stone paving. Unperturbed by the arc lamps and the purring fire engines, it hunches over The same breeze from the Chilterns which shook the wild flowers further down the hill ruffles the grass at the civil engineer’s feet . . . its find. Overhead, on a pre-moulded concrete streetlamp, a crow perches and mocks the event taking place below. After the rat has disappeared into the nettles the bird drops heavily and takes his turn. Pulling cold spaghetti from one of the bags, he grips the slimy stringy stuff with his right claw, pinning it to the paving as he leans forward and down to take his fill. Further along the pavement dusty mauve mallows lie flaccid, strewn across the hot granite of the road’s edge. Nearby, behind a mound of gravel topped by scentless mayweed and white horseradish flowers, pretty yellow Johnny go-to-bed-at-noon stands wrapped in his green gown, well and truly asleep. As a crane flips the burnt-out MG Midget the right way up, the flowers are swayed by a stirring of cool air permeated with the scent of hay, fresh-blown over Scarp from the distant Chiltern Hills. The world has not ended with the tragedy at Newlands Corner.

Meanwhile, a mile uphill, at Brockley Grange Farm, where the A41(T) straddles Scarp and crosses the A5 Roman Road at Suicide Corner before descending into Hertfordshire, a dream of motorways takes shape in the mind of a civil engineer working for the transport ministry who, though eyeing the scraggy wood just to the north of the farmhouse, sees only camber, curve and how best to extend the planned M1 extension over this high ground from its present terminus near Radlett. Momentarily distracted from his plans by the chirring of some unnameable night bird, he looks eastwards across the brightly lit Edgware Way, towards the high ground at Edgwarebury. Perhaps moved by some spontaneous memory of childhood holidays spent in the New Forest, his imagination lingers in the woods and fields like a slowly drifting plant community and then dissolves into ditches lined with black waterlogged leaves – a residue of previous summers – and the ghosts of dead insects. The same breeze from the Chilterns which shook the wild flowers further down the hill ruffles the grass at the civil engineer’s feet and, feeling suddenly cold, he decides to leave. Turning, he mounts his motor scooter and heads off home for creamed tomato soup and beans on toast. As his scooter’s rear light merges into the molten red stream marking the northbound evening traffic – now eased with Sheila Lomath’s removal – Scarp broods and waits.

*

As I climb Scarp’s southern face, passing a snagged tree and near-bald pastures scattered with purple and green docks, the hills at Harrow and Perivale come into view. The blue gasometer at Southall Junction; the green slopes of Sunnyhill Park in Hendon; the red-roofed dome of Wakeman’s Hill, Kingsbury: these are the cardinal points. And packed between these and Scarp are the human multitudes, their dynastic interweavings too complex to map. Our privileged modernity is as nothing in the face of the onslaught of clouds and air, the globules of sunlight sliding across the land’s surface and eating whole postcodes at will. Time moils and folds in on itself under this dancing light. The car, bought, lovingly polished and rocked by sex in a Brent Cross car park 1987 is now scrap, the engine stuffed with grasses, a home for field mice. Your lips, the smell of your hair, the earring you left in my bedroom by accident, which I hung on the tube frame of my 1960s shelf unit as a trophy: they surface to my memory like bones rising in a field.

Streams and ditches run through pipes beneath the chipped and cracked concrete track. These conflux to form the Edgwarebury Brook, which joins the Dean’s Brook (a tributary of the river Brent) at Brookside Avenue in Edgware, Our privileged modernity is as nothing in the face of the onslaught of clouds and air, the globules of sunlight sliding across the land’s surface and eating whole postcodes at will. after crossing below the Watford by-pass. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of these watercourses to fox, insect or bird in the parched summer. Once, just up by Bury Farm, I found the shrunken dried-out husk of a fox wedged high in a hedge of blackthorn. One of its hind legs had become trapped in a crux of blackthorn and the animal had died there. The fox’s skin was a parchment wrapped loosely about a bleached bundle of bones on which was inscribed a life’s journey from heathery spring through dry-ditch summer to hen-house autumn and motorway winter. I looked closely at its teeth, pointed and yellow beneath the curled-over upper lip, and imagined its slow agony under the sun. Just yards away a narrow ditch carried an inch or so of water. I was reminded of another dead fox seen in a disused factory near Trumpers Way in Ealing a couple of years earlier. There was the same snarling challenge to my skin-wrapped reality bubble. The dead fox lifted me out of the sunlit day and the concerns of the human world into an open field of possibilities.

Edgwarebury Farm, demolished in 1965, stood a hundred yards or so from the M1 motorway. The farmhouse was replaced by a curious Swiss chalet-like building. Close by are small cottage-type dwellings and a derelict Portakabin. I escaped from rain once by entering the cabin through a hole knocked into the plywood door. The place had that damp burnted smell often found in deserted dwellings. A rancid mattress surrounded by cider bottles and fag packets told of its unofficial use by other wanderers. The kitchen was a mess of splintered chipboard in the middle of which lay an overturned sink. I stood in the kitchen doorway and smoked while the rain rattled against the roof. The sound of water dripping to the linoleum floor intensified the cosiness I felt. Finally the rain stopped and a burst of sunlight diffused through the scratch marks on the Perspex windowpanes. I decided I’d had enough and left. Outside, a woman wearing a headscarf led a coated horse towards the farmyard. We averted our eyes from one another as we passed. The scoured ditches gurgled and my breath – still laced with nicotine – misted my glasses. The February landscape was hissing with damp and I thought of the curled foxes, warm in their hidey-holes somewhere deep in the angled land. ■

Scarp will be published in July by Sceptre.