City of the Dead

Lost rivers, a bus ride through London and an awkward post-script, from the country.

A window on West Norwood.

In a hotel in central London, I examined my jawline. It has started to collapse backwards into senescence, as if it’s forgotten how to remain straight and firm.

Being back in London makes me feel old. It’s been a long two years since I left. Fashion seems to have regressed to my childhood.

Things I can’t believe are back: those big, plastic, coloured rings. Safety pin jackets. Low rise bootcut. Platform trainers. Y2K, take me home (actually, no, don’t).

And men’s hairstyles, the kind of hairstyles I thought existed purely as a warning to future generations? They’re back. Mullets. Frosted tips. What the actual. Are you shitting me?

I’m heading out to walk the streets, for a glorious lonesome day. Maybe I’ll find an awkward encounter in the city. My son is at a sleepover, Joel is manning the house. I am loose in London. I want to grab the day in my two arms.

London humbles me with its indifference.

In the hallway hotel, even the chambermaid has a grievance. She’s on the phone, barking orders to someone in a Russian accent.

“I told you, he want to be hit.”

Who is this masochistic gentleman and what are they doing for him, I wonder, as I pass.

Can’t believe how exhausting I find London now. Did I really used to negotiate this hellscape day to day? The relentless crush of people, the inconvenience and indifference. It scares me, in a new way. I’m not sure if London was always this scary. It feels more desperate, its people more febrile and edgy.

A friend who lives there tells me I am not imagining it. It’s the cost of living crisis, she says. People are desperate and have no money. They’ll go for your phone, your jewellery. You probably won’t get stabbed though, she offers in an upbeat tone.

I wear no jewellery — that’s not a London thing, I’m just not a bejewelled kind of gal — and my biggest boots. My Christmas boots from Joel. I tell another friend it’s because I imagine they make me quite tall and intimidating. Rape-me-at-your-peril boots, he calls them.

Actually, I’m wearing them because Siri told me it would rain today. Siri knows nothing. It’s sunny and my feet are sweaty in sheepskin-lined boots.

Still, there’s a quiet pleasure riding a bus in London. My favourite is getting the front seat at the top. You can see everything.

So many groceries: halal, Vietnamese, Brazilian meat. Along the cluttered but still interesting Walworth Road, free for now of private equity scat and cookie-cutter shite, everything has its own personality, for better or worse. Pasha Hotel Hotel (so good they named it twice?), with an unsightly jumble of chairs in a glass atrium above the door. Narrow Jecy Jakson’s, where I wonder if they dropped a few letters for lack of space.

Then: “We are Mixed Blessings Bakery”. Find me a better name for a purveyor of baked goods. I’ll wait.

Signs for Nollywood nightclub and a Venezuelan panadería, then we are past Burgess Park and on to Camberwell Green, where the benches are free of users for once. The best Uyghur food in London is close, away down a side road.

Hipsters with small coffees, white socks and billed caps read in the sun, as they always do. The road transitions from Camberwell to Denmark Hill. Up we climb.

Even the graffiti is biting.

“Fake friends erase them.”

“Love who loves you”. Cancel culture panegyrics — and a threat if I ever heard one. Love your stalker?

Up above Ruskin Park, a large red faced guy with a can of Heino sits in the bus stop. With a surreptitious glance at the bus, he leans over onto one cheek to relieve a bubble of trapped wind. From the upper deck, I see all.

It feels a fitting tribute to Ruskin Park — and the man for whom it’s named. I’ve already mentioned what a dirty old misogynist he was, delightful Velvet Crab notwithstanding. I’m glad beer-drinkers fart with abandon by his park these days.

We sweep down to the Half Moon pub, then uphill at Brockwell park, along the crumbling — but beautiful — railway arches at Rosendale.

It’s amazing to me that London works at all.

At one point, we pass a construction site. From my bus-top perch, the bones of the city are exposed.

Those 36-inch water mains pipes hold secret rivers.

When I lived around here, I once spent an afternoon following the watercourse of the buried River Effra. Its valley is still as clear as an upturned bell, even if fully roaded over now.

The second biggest of London’s secret rivers, second only to the Fleet — of drowned dogs, noxious vapours and choleric effluence — the Effra rises off the back of Crystal Palace, courses down under my old home on the edge of West Norwood cemetery and empties, after a detour under Brockwell Park and Brixton, into the Thames at Vauxhall. It joins the Thames under the swish new MI6 offices that feature in one of the latest James Bond movies — remember the bit with the boats? Yeah, me neither but apparently that’s the buried River Effra.

Years ago, I stood on Vauxhall Bridge with a friend and squinted between the bars of a locked gate. My friend shouted hellooooo into the abyss in an attempt to be amusing — and a knock from the bowels of the bridge rattled back.

The haunted River Effra.

Anyway, apart from the shape of the valley, there are two other markers that help a water walker chart the lost river under the pavement.

One is the famous Victorian stink pipes. Yes, that’s what they’re actually called and that is what they actually are: tall, thin chimney pipes that rise forty feet above the street, like lamp-posts — but instead of lighting the way, they dispense sewage fumes, high above the noses of pedestrians. If not for the stink pipes, the pavement would swell, crack and bulge with the welter of trapped swamp gas beneath. Thanks to the stink pipes, the Effra is released and no street-level nose is the wiser.

This is a stink pipe near my old house:

The second types of markers are even harder to spot — and, for that reason, more pleasing. They are the whorled bronze plaques, placed at intervals along the pavement above the lost watercourse. Easy to miss because they look just like the access points to sewage, gas, electricity and all the other ticking organs of London, the plaques go mostly ignored — but occasionally remind the observant walker that the hidden River Effra is beneath her feet.

These days, instead of a waterway you couldn’t wade across, it’s a sewage pipe you don’t even notice.

That’s the Effra right there, in one of those colossal water mains under Tulse Hill station, tamed and trapped in a yellow, plastic tube.

And there’s the Queen of the South pub. That means we are almost there.

I alight outside the Tesco on Robson Road, grab a bean enchilada from Blackbird Bakery (a treat, how I’ve missed these) and wander through the cemetery gates.

West Norwood cemetery looks a mess these days, building works everywhere with National Lottery funding for new entrances and walkways and who knows what else. These information boards have been up for years and nothing seems to have changed, apart from the scaffolding and the construction trailers and the dust.

West Norwood cemetery is a special place, if you don’t know (and why would you, it’s pretty niche and remote in far-flung London’s Zone 3.)

Back when the sprawl of London wasn’t quite keeping pace with its production of dead bodies, the Victorians built enormous cemeteries in then-peripheral spots: Highgate, Nunhead, Abney — and West Norwood.

One of these “Magnificent Seven” — not superheroes but superb cemeteries — West Norwood cemetery is a moody Gothic contrivance straight out of Edward Gorey’s The Dwindling Party. There are tombs and chapels and raised vaults and sunken stairs to hidden crypts and everything mouldering into weeds, twisted about with decades of root growth.

I say decades. I mean centuries. These are the ancient woodlands of the Great North Woods that once covered London away to the South Downs. There are oaks in West Norwood cemetery that predate the enclosures, saplings when Henry VIII was on the throne. You think I’m exaggerating but I’m not. This place is something to see.

Anyway, I have a soft spot for this cemetery because the garden of my old house backed onto its very walls. You could grow anything in that garden, I swear, the worms were seven feet long. The cemetery walls are imposing edifices, of London yellow stock brick, fourteen feet high. They were built high to keep out the Victorian body-snatchers, determined to dig newly-turned earth for the price — equal to a couple months’ wages — they’d catch from surgeons for a fresh body.

Joel and I used to climb the ash tree in my garden to sit on top of the wall at dusk and drink a bottle of wine above the empty cemetery. When the gates were locked, the foxes owned that cemetery. We watched four fox kits once, at dusk, gambol and snap at each other in their grave-filled fiefdom in the middle of London. For a dare, Joel jumped down into the cemetery — and invented several new ways to climb back out (this was in the days when he still used to show off for me).

During the pandemic, the cemetery was closed to walkers. The crematorium chimney, dispensing smoke high up on the hill, was in constant use. Each day, someone pinned a new schedule — a list of names — to the gate. It was strange to sit in my old bedroom, in the stillness of those days, staring out across the busy, working industry of death. If it has made me a little strange stranger post-pandemic, well, who isn’t.

I take the longest route around the cemetery, meandering down side paths, through undergrowth. There is a Greek necropolis — “city for the dead” — at the back. Built 150 years ago by a devastated Greek family for their 16 year old son, carried off by a fever while studying at Eton, public access is by appointment only now. In my day you could wander into the dead city at will, fall into holes between the cracked terraces. I’m sure most people would say it’s better now you can’t.

Because it’s spring, there are primulas everywhere. Rarer, cyclamen and scotch heather dot some graves.

A bench on the quietest loop is dedicated to the memory of one Stephen Fourran. He died in 1992, aged 55. I honour him for being the kind of person who might have appreciated a well-placed bench. Here you can look east, not a mile away, to the dense rise of Dulwich Woods.

On our first date I took Joel for a walk in those woods, from my house in West Norwood to Peckham, along the uninterrupted ridge line from Crystal Palace out Sydenham Hill to Nunhead and down to Peckham Rye. It is an old route. A pub in Bermondsey — The Ancient Foresters — tells why.

This is still an area of woodland, even in the midst of London’s sprawl. On that first date walk, we found a rope swing in the woods under Honor Oak Park, the original One Tree Hill where Elizabeth I rode to picnic and dance around a maypole. I watched Joel swing on that rope and then climb the tree in which it hung and thought to myself: there’s my country boy.

A crow in a tree above my bench rattles like one of the blind zombies in The Last of Us. From the top of the hill, I can see the station — and my old house. A wheel of pigeons fling round it, perhaps scattered by the local peregrine. She nests at the top of the church. I remember taking my son to school, that first morning when we saw her cut a loop to the steeple. That church commands quite a view, over the lost valley of the Effra to Dulwich Woods. Great spot for a nest. I could see why she liked it. I liked it.

Every morning after that, we looked for her. Sometimes she was there, perching and watchful; mostly, not.

I told a neighbour once, about the peregrine. Didn’t he know? That church was just at the top of our street. He laughed.

“Man, that’s just perfect for West Norwood. Everywhere else gets pigeons. We got ourselves a bird of prey.”

Ivylyn, Brucesella, Esmine.¹ The dead are everywhere in London. The air is thick with them. I look at people on buses and want to pinch them, get in their face, check they’re real.

These are ancient woodlands. Even if I don’t ever want to be put down in the ground, I can see the appeal of resting here forever.

Peregrine nest.

Outside the cemetery, back in London, I ordered a filter coffee.

“We don’t have filter coffee, we have hot brew.”

“Hot.. brew?”

“Yeah. Like a cold brew, but hot.”

“So… coffee?”

“Yeah, it’s basically the same thing.”

“Ok, what’s the difference?”

“No difference, it’s made the same way.”

“It’s just a different name?”

She allowed this was so.

“Ok then, I’ll have one of those.”

I’m getting older. I have no idea what a fucking hot brew is or why anyone would want to wear a mullet. But I have lots to say about the places I’ve been and the places I go. That’s the mixed blessing.

Town, country. I take what I can find, wherever I look.

Call it whatever you want, it’s the same.

—

An awkward post-script, from the country:

A few days later, in the gym, from a less exalted perch on the loo, I was messaging thoughts in that aimless way you can only do with someone you know really, really well.

Today it was about how miserable the wife of a particular Irish actor looked when she kissed him congratulations at the Oscars.²

I finished my business in the loo stall and realised there was no toilet paper. None, not a whisper. Not even the cardboard inside of one (which, you know, sometimes needs must).

My compatriot vanished from the chat leaving me more alone than ever.

No choice, I resorted to calling out.

“Hello? Is there anyone in here?”

Silence.

Fuck. I felt inside the loo roll holder again and checked behind me. Nope, definitely nothing.

“Hello? Anybody there?”

“Oh sorry, I thought that was someone outside.” It’s a person! “Are you ok?”

“Yes, I’m so sorry.” Christ, I’m so British. “Please would you mind passing me a bit of toilet paper? There’s none in here.”

“Oh, how annoying.” She’s being kind and sympathetic, not suggesting I was annoying her.

She crouched down to pass me a wedge of toilet paper under the door and then, because I didn’t want her to think I need paper because I’ve just had a massive shit, I forced a chortle.

“Seriously! Bad time of the month to have no toilet paper.”

My phone was in my hand, unattended, as I reached down to grab the proffered paper.

Siri heard “seriously”, thought she’d been summoned and seized the opportunity to send an inscrutable text message to a mum friend in London I hadn’t seen in two years.

“Time of the month to have no toilet paper,” Siri squawked. Sent to Arthur’s Mum, today at 12:44pm.

That’ll confuse her. I thought.

See? Even after a contemplative week, the awkward encounters, they find me — anywhere.

Actual photo of me, after the text.

1. Names on gravestones I passed in West Norwood cemetery. I’m not sure why but names on gravestones always seem so improbable to me, so not like the names of the living. I wonder what transformation occurs to make them so suddenly and recognisably the names of the dead.

2. “She looked very sad to me for some reason.”

“It’s the tight, Irish nut face. Steinbeck’s description of Liza Hamilton in East of Eden. Suspicious of fun.”

“OMG, yes. 🎯”

“When really it’s because Sally Rooney wrote a whole novel about having an imaginary affair with him that launched her career.”

Read Conversations with Friends — great read — and tell me it’s not a flight of fancy about Cillian Murphy, I dare you. Am I the only one that sees it? I will die on this hill.