The Groundwater Diaries: Trials, Tributaries and Tall Stories from Beneath the Streets of London

When I told Phil’s boss my upper limit, he did an Elvis-type sneer with a little quiet laugh, then got out an old dusty file called Mugpunter Ramshackle One-Bedroomed Hovels That Haven’t Been Modernised Since The Thirties. There was this little place on Mare Street, Hackney’s central thoroughfare, that I really liked the look of. One bedroom, arched windows. I tried to look at it several times but Phil kept producing blocking manoeuvres. I’d phone up and say ‘Can I speak to Phil?’ and he’d say ‘Phil speaking,’ and I’d go ‘Hi, it’s Mr Bradford. I’d like to view the property in Mare Street,’ and he’d say “‘Ello Chinese laundry no understandee wrong number,’ and put the phone down. Or he’d just play dumb. Eventually I got to see it with a crowd of about six other people. Phil informed me that the price had now gone up by six grand. How is that possible in six weeks, I argued.

‘That’s the market, innit.’

That’s the market, innit. In some way that encapsulated everything I hated about capitalism. Unthinking drones in shiny suits mouthing the ideology of their dad or boss thinking they’re being somehow radical and exciting. This is Hackney, for fuck’s sake. Take it or leave it, Mr Bradford. He then also informed me that I’d have to enter a contract race and I decided, at that moment, to renounce capitalism, forget about buying a flat and becoming a property magnate and concentrate on walking my daughter though the park, racing the old blokes in electric wheelchairs and laughing at it all.

Of course the flat is now worth twice as much. But I never liked the Beatles that much anyway. Shame about the lobsters though.

1 Tallis’s Illustrated Plan of London & its Environs (1851)

2 In The Lost Rivers of London, Nicholas Barton tells us Hackney Brook is now ‘wholly lost’ but at one stage was a large stream which at flood could reach widths of 100 foot.

3 I expect that those lyrics have made their way into the Danish National Anthem by now. King of Denmark: Lave de skylde os en nulevende? Selvfolgelig de lave Selvfølgelig de lave. Lave de skylde os en nulevende? Selvfolgelig de [fucking] lave.

4 When we were kids we had a room that we used to cover in graffiti and drawings then, when the walls were full up, my parents would give us a tin of white paint and tell us to paint over it so we could start again. Like some weird communist job creation scheme.

6 Possibly an obscure relation of top centreforward, Les, who played for Spurs.

7 She walked down from Manor House, one imagines to buy drugs or procure a prostitute.

4. From Eel to Eternity: William Morris and the Saxon – Viking duopoly

• Dagenham Brook – the Lea to somewhere in Walthamstow

Seasonal Affective Disorder – the Danes and Saxons (what they represent), Saxons’ ego, Danes’ id, sensible and crazy – the river near Stevey’s flat – flood plains – oh no, it’s not the Ching – depression vs. positive thinking – William Morris – Dagenham Brook – walk it – go for lunch – look for source of brook – the Beard Brothers – Leyton Orient v. Blackpool – space eels

From the upstairs window looking down over Finsbury Park (the old Hornsey Wood) the sky is a sickly yellow-grey, prickling with TV aerials like broken winter trees. As a kid I used to love winter, the tranquillity and the hard feeling of cold brittle air in my sensitive asthmatic lungs. It gave me energy, as if I was sucking on a can of pure oxygen. Summer seemed frivolous and shallow. Plus it had cricket (sadistic PE teacher whacking a hard ball at you from about 5 yards away) and athletics (running while being shouted at by sadistic PE teacher). Now it’s the other way round. Winter is never-ending, annoying and wet. Maybe we are entering not an ice age but a new crap weather age … (three dots … leave it open … ‘Blimey’, says reader … ‘profound thinker!’ … )

In February, people scowl at each other. It’s bad and it’s called SAD. Sad Arsed Downer. Slobbedout And Drunk. Stoned And Depressed. Shit At Daytodayliving. Seasonal Affective Disorder. Sunlight disappears and people skulk in doorways. Mice shit on kitchen work surfaces when they’re supposed to be in the expensive trap that’s baited with peanut butter – ‘It’s what mice crave,’ said the expert on rodent trapping from the local hardware store. Maybe mice prefer smooth. Pricecutters on Blackstock Road only had crunchy. (Wasn’t the different consistencies of peanut butter the basis of Aesop’s fable about the town mouse and the country mouse?)

Now I’d ‘done’ two rivers, in the sense that I’d walked them and drawn some pictures of local fat people, but I was already feeling a bit shagged out and worried that hanging around underground streams might be unhealthy. Research has shown that they can cause allergies, disease, poltergeist activity, madness and premature death. Or even spots. The next stream I was due to research was the River Ching in Walthamstow. The thing was, the Ching hadn’t really gone. However, I spent three and a half years living in Walthamstow and I’d never heard of it. And seeing as I never knew it existed, it counted as lost in my book.

For a laugh I take my daughter to a local music workshop, where a large-boned crazily grinning lady sings ‘Kumbayah’ and the ‘Grand Old Duke of York’ while bashing away on an acoustic guitar like she’s trying to smash ice with a chisel, while the kids stare with terrified eyes. ‘Dance!’ she cries, ‘DANCE, YOU LITTLE FUCKERS!!!’ Back in the park we take it in turns to look for amazing things. Cathleen likes nature (‘Leaf!’ ‘Tree!’ ‘Pussycat!’ ‘Baby!’), while I’m into celebrity spotting. So far, we’d only managed to see a woman who looked a bit like Helen Blaxendale the actress, but I couldn’t be sure. Similar nose, but she looked much smaller in real life. Famous people generally tend to hide away from me. In thirteen years of living in London the only other famous person I’d seen was Derek from Coronation Street in a toy shop in Covent Garden. He was buying a cardboard build-it-yourself puppet theatre.

Of course, Cathleen doesn’t recognize as many famous people as me just yet. Except, whenever we pass a construction site she thinks she’s seen Bob the Builder and forces me to sing the programme’s theme tune with her while she jumps up and down in her pram.

Walthamstow is on the north-eastern edge of London. Actually, it’s Essex really, even though it’s got a London postcode. The name suggests that it was a Celtic area – Wal meaning ‘foreigners’ (Wales is the Saxon word for ‘foreigners live here – let’s buy second homes next door to them’). Another, perhaps more likely, interpretation is that it is a derivation of Wilcumstow (Welcomesville). In this area, at the River Lea, lay the boundary between the Danelaw and Saxon Wessex, a psycho-geographic buffer zone with crazy blond blokes in the east with mad expressions and sandy-haired sensible blokes in the west with bored complacent expressions. Positive thinkers in the west, melancholy downbeats to the east. The Saxon ego and the Danish id. Happy sad happy sad happy sad. People still dye their hair to look like Vikings – it’s part of an ancient folk memory which basically says, ‘Don’t kill me! I’ve got relatives in Copenhagen!’

In 894 Alfred the Great successfully fought the Vikings on the River Lea. ‘Alf’ ordered the river to be blocked up and did this – or rather told his men to do it – by cutting many channels in order to reduce water levels so that when the Vikings came back they were surprised that the river had virtually gone and they couldn’t get any further. To celebrate, Alfred burned the cakes. Were they hash cakes? Walthamstow is now an enigmatic dead zone where London ends and Essex begins. It’s cheap housing, big skies, teenagers with expensive clothes hanging around the shopping centre, burglaries, pie and mash shops, video stores, a thirties town hall that looks like a cockney Ceauşescu palace. Walthamstow Market is the longest in Europe, with stalls selling three-year-old fashions, batteries, Irish music tapes, training shoes, football wristbands, pots and pans, kitchen knives, fleeces.

I like it a lot. I lived in the Stow for three and a half years. During that time many amazing things happened.

The Amazing Things That Happened in Walthamstow between 1988 and 1991

1. We had dead pigeons in the water tank.

2. Tiny freshwater prawns once appeared in the cold water.

3. Dukey pinched a glamorous local barmaid from a geezer boyfriend with a fierce dog.

4. I did a Jackson Pollock rip-off painting on an old door in the garden which Dukey then gave away to his glamorous girlfriend while I was away.

5. Ruey blowtorched the grass in the garden.

6. The next-door neighbours shagged really loudly.

7. Our landlord asked how he could meet ‘young ladies’.

8. We got burgled three times.

9. The pubs were full of fat blokes.

They were great days.

I wrote to The Guinness Book of Records explaining my project to travel along London’s streams and rivers and how it would work well on global TV – me racing along with Norris McWhirter by my side being pulled along in a boat on wheels by a car and reciting historical facts about the rivers and their uses. (Cue punk thrash version of the Record Breakers theme tune).

In a bit of a downer mood I went out one night to meet my friend Stevey P. at a North London Short Story Workshop meeting. This group had been going on and off (mostly off) for about six years and now had only two members, me and Stevey. How we lost all the others I can’t quite remember. I think Stevey slept with one of them and the other was his brother. His story was the first chapter in a mad London-based Dickensian sci-fi novel. My stories, on the other hand, were going nowhere. I couldn’t concentrate on finishing any of them. My latest effort, Run, Carla Djarango, Run Like the Wind, consisted of three paragraphs of East Midlands magical realist bollocks. Stevey smiled patiently. He would have put his arm round me if he’d been the tactile sort, but instead he lit up a fag, narrowed his eyes and asked ‘Pint?’

Five minutes later he read my half page short story then said, after taking a sip of his Guinness, ‘Hmmm, it’s got potential.’ We both laughed. I then moaned on about rivers. He told me he had an idea. Great, I thought. What is it? A boat. Why don’t you build a boat? Then dress up in nineteenth-century gear and get pulled around London. What a crazy idea. Thanks for nothing.

Stevey agreed to come out on a river walk in Walthamstow, where he lives. There was a river that runs very close to his house which I presumed must be the Ching.

‘That’s not a river,’ said Stevey, a bit startled.

‘It is.’

‘It can’t be.’

‘What is it if it isn’t a river?’

‘It’s a, a drainage ditch or something. A drain with some water in it.’

‘No, I think it’s a river.’

He started to gabble. ‘No one told me about rivers when I bought my flat. Rivers flood and cause damage. That’s a ditch, not a river. What happens if there’s a really big flood? It’ll ruin my hall.’

To add to his paranoia, soon afterwards Stevey got a leaflet though the door from the Environment Agency informing him he lived in a flood plain and offering some useful survival tactics. This was actually the River Lea flood plain but he seemed convinced that it must be referring to the small river (‘drainage ditch!’) next to his house. He began to fantasize about his street becoming like Venice. Fortunately he lived on the first floor. ‘But what about the post?’

Now here’s a factoid bit for all the research fiends and librarians out there (sounds of skinny blokes with thick specs sitting up suddenly and concentrating). I’d first seen a map containing the Ching in my old second-hand book and, looking at its location in relation to the Hackney Brook, had presumed it was in Walthamstow. But when I looked on my A to Z to check the course of Stevey’s mystery river, I noticed that the Ching actually flowed south-west from Epping Forest and entered the Lea in south Chingford. It didn’t really spend much time in Walthamstow, apart from flowing under the dog track. So Stevey’s river wasn’t the Ching after all.

(Scene: A gang of resentful-looking researchers, looking dead hard, hang around outside a library waiting to beat me up.)

The trouble with SAD is that I get tired of people smiling and being positive at this time of year. Fortunately some new research has recently come to my aid. Apparently you’ve got more chance of being happy if you’re pessimistic. This is because you have lowered expectations, so everything is a bonus. This corresponds with my own world view, what I’d term optimistic pessimism. In this, you go out there with a healthy can-do attitude while accepting that it’ll probably all end in tears.

I also don’t like fun. Or, should I say ‘FUN!’ Fun! is overrated. What I mean is, I don’t like looking for fun! If fun! suddenly appears on my doorstep, that’s great, I’ll invite it in for a cup of tea. If a large candyfloss helterskelter funfair circus run by speedfreak laughing Zippo circus clowns sets up on our street, I’m happy. But the idea of going out and actively searching for fun! leaves me cold. I’d like to say I blame Thatcher – after all, I blame her for most things that are wrong in this country, or with me – but we have got the idea that ‘fun! is our right’ from the Americans. It’s that thing about the ‘pursuit of happiness’ which manifests itself as a need for fun! It’s a waste of time. It’s only in fleeting moments that you’ll ever actually experience happiness. Fun! is happiness with forced laughter, usually while dressed up.

I spent a bit of time in the States a few years ago and I used to feel really tense around happy people. Or at least people who seemed concerned at making the rest of the world think they were happy. Those ‘I’m so pleased to meet you that I’m smiling, look, you make me feel good so you must be a special person’ people. You can always spot them because they pepper their conversation with words they’ve nicked from New Age therapy-style literature. Tim, you look sad, Let Art Heal You. Tim, come into our Love Sanctuary. That kind of thing.

And yet, I realized that I was only going to be able to continue this rivers project if I got myself into a more positive state of mind. So I jotted down a few ideas to get me started.

The Groundwater Diaries self-help guide

This short course aims to turn you from a normal person (possibly even a well-adjusted one, but who cares about that?) into someone who is an incredibly annoying positive person who never gets down about anything. People will run from you in the street when they see you.

For example, being positive isn’t just about thinking, ‘Yeah I can do that. I reckon,’ it’s also about showing the world who’s boss, that you can do anything and that you’ve also got a very loud voice (possibly with a sort of American accent creeping in at the edges). Most self-help books work on the inner person (god how pathetic is that!?), putting over the idea that positive vibes will spill out from you into your universe in a kind of George Harrison sitar big beard huggy sort of way.

The techniques and exercises outlined here work in an opposite direction, making you look absurdly positive on the outside until finally, when you’re head of IBM or you’ve won the Eurovision song contest three years in a row, you start to believe it yourself.

But as most psychology experts will tell you, ‘We take Access or Visa.’ OK, that’s the first thing they tell you. The second thing is that everything is bullshit and pretending. People like to be fooled by others who seem more assured than they are.

Positive Exercises

Get yourself a new name

Ditch your old name that your parents gave you and grab a bright shiny positive new one. Here’s some examples: Dong Powerlamp, Jemma Zii, Zak Backkaboo, Pandora Lightshower, Dalrymp Supercharger. These are positive and say something about you. If you don’t want to go the whole way, why not get into the craze of Power Initials. John Smith becomes John Z. Smith, Ethel Jones become S. Ethel M. Jones. See? Hmm.

Affirmative thumbs

Put your arms straight out in front of you and stick your thumbs up. Hold this position for thirty minutes while holding you mouth in a large wide grin. You can use Affirmative Thumbs™ at work if you are getting hassle from your boss. Half an hour of Affirmative Thumbs™ and he’ll be happy to give you a pay rise. Possibly.

Power Smile

Sit with your arms by your sides. Take a deep breath. Now pull your arms up and insert your index fingers into the corners of your mouth. Pull your mouth as wide apart as possible and hold it. This is called a smile. Remember this facial expression when you are meeting new people or at a job interview. It tells people ‘I am a positive no-holds-barred-get-up-and-go-live-for-today-smiley-doing sort of person.’ It’s more than a smile – it’s a Power Smile™.

Within minutes of digesting that lot I was feeling like a buff-cheeked gibbon that’s inhaled a year’s supply of laughing gas.

Walthamstow is famous for two things. The jellied eel and William Morris. I’m not always keen on the Great Man theory of history, but in the case of Walthamstow I feel it’s appropriate. I’ve always liked the idea of Morris rather than his art, which seemed to me to be a load of girly Laura-Ashley-style designs copied and repeated on a wall. Morris married Jane Bowden, a local girl with red curly hair who was discovered working in a shop (‘I say, a SHOP don’t you know!’) by his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She eventually become Rossetti’s lover again after Morris became obsessed with discovering the perfect wallpaper glue. In portraits she looks a bit like Nicole Kidman.

And jellied eels taste like slimy, dryish sick. My gran told me the whole point of jellied eels was that you weren’t supposed to taste them, just greedily swallow great gloopy lumps like cheap oysters. Morris was obsessed with these small slippery creatures that lived in a pulsating glob of sticky goo. He felt that they were God’s first creatures, living in the primordial jelly. Many of his most famous designs tried to capture the swirly essence of the jellied eel. People don’t realise that the jelly is natural – it is their house and their food source. It’s as if we all lived in places made out of pasta. Morris knew this. He saw the way jellied eels interacted with their environment and each other and it inspired him to try to create a better, more community-based and creative society. The Walthamstow jellied eel also represents, as Morris well knew, the serpent, life and pagan religion. The Vikings were pagan and their longboats had serpents/dragons/jellied eels carried on the front.

Other artists who loved jellied eels:

Pablo Picasso

James Joyce

Jean-Paul Sartre

Joan Miró

‘It does not make a bad holiday’ to go to Walthamstow, said Morris, evidently not bribed by the Walthamstow Tourist Board. The area was mostly countryside until the end of the nineteenth century. I used to love going running or walking around Walthamstow marshes on summer evenings, then lying down in the grass and watching the clouds scoot by, listening to crickets, cockney geezers with pit bulls threatening each other, car alarms going off and ambulances screaming. It’s an area of interesting wildlife.

History bit – The marshes were first drained for grazing purposes in Alfred the Great’s time as a way of showing off to the Danes. They were so impressed they gave him their jellied eels. What did they get in return? Over 1000 years later the Danes would get punk music. Yet something is not quite right about my punk theory. I’ve been staring at a map of the North Sea/ German Ocean/cold slab of muddy water off Mablethorpe and wondering whether the Bullshit Detector on the makeshift raft really made it to Denmark? How realistic is that? I could be fantasizing. When you look at the facts, it’s much more likely that it ended up in Sweden or Norway.

It was time to walk Stevey P.’s river. First of all I had to get in touch with the spirit of William Morris. I’ve never done channelling before. I remember reading about the great medium Doris Stokes whose ears used to go red when she contacted the dead. My whole face goes red when I drink extra strong lager, so something must be happening. And it was to Tennent’s Super that I turned when looking for a name for Stevey P.’s river. A couple of cans in and I was buzzing. Were those ghosts I could hear or my own voices: happy Tim and Morrissey Tim? I sat back and relaxed, taking deep breaths. And then it came to me. I had an urge to look on the A to Z again and I saw it almost straight away. South of the Lea Bridge Road came my answer. Stevey’s river, the mystery river, was called Dagenham Brook. (Cue Time-Team-style ancient drums and flute music). But why Dagenham? This stream flowed nowhere near Dagenham, which lies 12 miles to the south-east – unless …. Walthamstow used to be near Dagenham and, like the Lost City of Atlantis, was engulfed by the waters of the Lea (but, unlike Atlantis, then deposited 6 miles upriver to a spot east of Tottenham). I could see where Dagenham Brook entered the Lea and its course to there from Stevey’s place. But north of that there was nothing. So I decided to take a different tack and walk towards, rather than away from, the source.

Of course, searching for the source is also in a sense a journey to rediscover one’s own spiritual nature through personal exploration and self-cultivation. At least that’s what Poppy, my ex-dream analyst, used to say before I dumped her for Yorkshire Mike. I kind of miss Poppy now, her madcap Californian optimism. I hoped to unlock the spiritual treasures of the universe and light the way to a life of internal and external harmony and fulfilment. And having already had some experience of Walthamstow, I surmised that this journey would have to take place in a pub full of fat blokes. During my Walthamstow years, our old local boozer was the Lorne Arms in Queens Road and it boasted three of the biggest lads in the whole of north London – the Beard brothers, weighing in at around 60 stone between them. Beard, the eldest, was around 23 stone, his younger brother Little Beard was about 20 stone and the baby of the family, Tiny Beard, was 17 stone. They all had the same beards. I thought they might be the living embodiment of the legendary giants of the City of London, known to most people as Gog and Magog (and Tiny GogMagogGog), who are carried around in the Lord Mayor’s procession. They spend most of the rest of their year propping up the bar of the Lorne. Also there was Val the barmaid. We liked her to leave a decent head on our pints of Guinness rather than knife it off into the tray. ‘You boys like a bit of head,’ that was her catchphrase. ‘I said, you boys like’ … And Landlord Len, denizen of the Grand Order of Water Rats, a sort of Freemasons Lite for cockneys, I suppose.

Walthamstow – the sludgeree years

When we lived in Walthamstow we all fancied ourselves as top chefs. Possibly the cheap local produce available at Walthamstow market inspired us. But it was also a good way to impress any woman who dared to come round. I had four specialities:

1. Marmalade paella – only wheeled out when we were absolutely desperate and about to starve, and which consisted of brown rice and marmalade.

2. Oxo porridge – a highly nutritious oat-based meal in beef, chicken or vegetable flavours. Ingredients: porridge oats, water, Oxo cube.

3. Angel-hair pasta with ketchup – what it says.

4. Sludgeree – buy lots of vegetables. Put in pan with water and leave for several hours and go down the Lorne to lose at pool to Dukey, until ingredients have merged into a thick, industrial sludge.