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May 10, 2004
signpost to suburbia
A day pounding the lesser-trod paths of Truro city (no sight of the town-crier this time though). I should preface this with a 'biting luka-style' admission in blissblog fashion. It's only the dialogue-recall of the heronbone's MO I've decided to try out. And right enough, somehow things start to exert an uncanny fascination just by recording them (just like photography). Do you use a notebook though, luke, or do you have a phonographic memory?
Tired by the routine of town, we go over the railway bridge and descend into a valley lined by an accreted patchwork of housing estates and suburban culs-de-sac, clusters of houses in a hundred shades of inoffensive pastel and concrete grey. Reginald Perrin country. Tranquil, hidden, wanting nothing more than to be forgotten and left alone, it's a type of paradise, some sort of solution to the insanity of life. Proof that there is still a mass of people for whom vibrant aspirational chic futurism is a dream safe in its utter remoteness: while their serene hearts rest encased in breeze-block and double-glazing.
Drifting on the breeze, faint murmurs of teatime crockery. Proprietorial cats, each maintaining their territorial solitude : guardian spirits, sleeping sentinels on doorsteps and tarmac roofs; One ginger cat with red sleep in its eye and no tail.
Like secret warp tunnels in platform games, tree-arched passageways bordered by back gardens shuttle you between apparently discrete arrays of terraces and semis. Child-warrens, part of the secret cartography which binds young populations together, making well-planned housing estates rich, dark labyrinths traversed by shouts and sticks, bikes and carts, tribes, adventurers, and lone wolves; a vivacious refutation of the small-minded temptation to dismiss the scene with an all-too-adult eye as dispiriting and grey.
Forgotten places behind everything, where garbage collects, where tendrils of shrubbery entangle broken fences in an embrace that renders the smog-tarnished leaves and lichen-encrusted wood interchangeable. Damp, scrubby holes in reality with nothing to recommend them; this is the accidentally-deterritorialized residuum where children can fashion portals into other worlds:
'The finding is chance. Wasteland and boundaries: places that are neither one thing nor the other, neither here nor there - these are the gates of Elidor'
Children are drawn to these places by a ineluctable magnetism - they have eyes for the potential vectors before they exist, and only after they have worn through the paths, slashed the nettles, punctured the hedges, do adults recognise their utility, and absorb them into the official map.
Two boys come into view, one carrying a rusted bedspring like something from a mediaeval armoury.
Descending further into suburbia proper, houses become named rather than numbered. Tranquilla; O So Cosie; Fairhaven - Each one is a twee dream of heaven, and they are arranged in rank order of seclusion (or rather, a mutually-assured delusion of seclusion). Everyone wants to get to reach the end of the road, the bottom of the bag, to leave work one day and never be found again.
'This is a Neighborhood watch area';'Please shut the gate'
Via another warp-tunnel, we officially exit the territory, crossing to a pub on the inner rim of the ring road. No concessions to any known trend. A few proper Cornish locals at the bar:
- I didn't get out the gunsmith's til three. Shootin saturday morning if you care to join us.
- Ee's manic down'ere innee?
- I can't multitask, me
Snooker, Darts. '2 X Rump Steak Meals for £9.95'.
Half-led from behind by a proud mother, a toddler staggers like a drunken giant across the ramified field-system of a vast mock-persian carpet. The staff busy themselves with sundry tasks while it's quiet. A young barmaid tiptoes across the room and through the mysterious staff-only door carrying a bushel of striplight bulbs, and returns with peanuts.
A child bursts in, the orange globe of a basketball clutched to his chest like a precious gourd.
- Go play with Uncle Chris, he'll give you a game of pool.
2 x plaice goujons and chips later, following the flank of the railway viaduct leads us to a cemetery where 18th and 19th century headstones are stacked up straight against the containing walls, shoved inward by the encroaching boundaries of new-build. Beautifully-carved slate slabs piled up anyhow, cracked and smashed, underneath trees; sepulchres with tipped lids.
A derelict church with boarded doors, breeze-blocked windows; 'No ball games' the somewhat hopeful prohibition on the wall. In one corner a screwed-up mass of sodden carpet is presided over by a squat parodic headstone; a decapitated garden gnome with its paint flaked away.
Always in the distance, the cathedral, afternoon sun turning its spires golden. And cutting across the scene, the railway viaduct, proud survivor of the GWR.
Off to Tescos to develop the film...waiting in the only open cafe, part of the millenium-funded, always empty 'showpiece' concert hall, which nevertheless provides a welcome low-key setting where you can sit around for an hour without arousing suspicion.
A teenaged girl makes a token effort to clean the glass front of the counter, firstly dropping the cloth and sprayer, then smearing foam stuff all over the place, and looking round hopefully for her boss :
- (plaintively) It's made it worse.
- You need to get a paper towel or something and wipe it off
Responding to her opening gambit, he gets up and comes over to show her, exulting in his fatherly, managerial air, and ends up doing it himself. They both get what they want.
- Look at that. Gleaming, gleaming!
The only-half-ironic pride fails to impress his young protege. Realising how much knowledge he has to impart, he warms to the task:
- Anything now is on the inside.
- Yeah.
As soon as he leaves the scene she gives the glass a perfunctory rub and steps out the door with her mobile.
- Awright ... Are you pissed? ... Oh, right ...
Posted by robin at May 10, 2004 12:07 AM
Comments
child-warrens is a good phrase, i liked the bit about child warrens a lot. i like the photos too. i sometimes think itd be nice to have accompanying photos too.
i have both notebook and photographic memory!
well, not quite photograpic, its more like a sketch than a photo, i don't actualy repeat conversation verbatim like nero wolfes faithful assistant archie, though he is my inspiration.
anyway, some more stuff in that vein would go down a treat young man
Posted by: luke at May 12, 2004 12:32 PM
there are many different ways of thinking about photographs, but no doubt the unit of a photograph and a bit of writing linked together is something uniquely satisfying. Anyway, I thought from your writing that you did take photos - do you just not allow yourself to put them on the blog?
'Child-warrens' came from an attempt to convey childhood memories (that walking through this place brought back) so I'm glad other people get it. The only writer I ever felt captured this feature of being a child is Proust - the way he evokes these abstract shifting maps of a child's imaginary territory, which have nothing to do with strictly geographical maps, and more to do with the emotional investment of certain places. Which I suppose is what psychogeography is all about.
- Who's nero wolfe?
- And I'm not that young you know, young man !
There will be more, it's just whenever I happen to go somewhere populated (there's not much where I live except stones, cows and gorse bushes)
Posted by: undercurrent at May 12, 2004 01:12 PM
Actually, another writer who does this child warren thing very well is Stephen King; the best aspects of It capture this sense of an urban space as seen from a child's POV. (King tries the same thing for old people in Insomnia).
Posted by: mark k-p at May 12, 2004 08:51 PM
Fabulous post btw Robin....
Posted by: mark k-p at May 12, 2004 08:51 PM
I think you're right about 'It' - it's years since I read it, but I remember enjoying it, and I remember the sense of derelict locations very well. On this point, if no other, Marcel Proust and Stephen King are as one ;)
Posted by: undercurrent at May 13, 2004 10:20 AM
i got kazillions of photos. of everything i've talked about almost. i toy with the idea of buying a scanner but i usually think, nah, some people are brilliant at taking photos, they got a really good eye, like you and electronik and my mate paul i linked to the other day and i think it would be liberties if i stuck mine up like they were something special.
nero wolfe is a detective who never leaves the house, he just sits at home and thinks. he has an assistant called archie with a photographic memory and an eye for the ladies who gos out for him. they're but rex stout. he started writing them in the thirties i think and went on till, i dunno, sixties maybe. they're good. read one.
Posted by: luke at May 13, 2004 10:34 AM
nero wolfe is also almost a ton in weigh, has his own chef and an orchid house with his own gardner.
he lives in new york.
Posted by: luke at May 13, 2004 10:36 AM
I'll look out for them...
I think you should add some photos - in this context I don't think they have to be 'good' in some arty sense to be good and add a lot to the text (in fact the opposite is true) - ie look at Derelict London. Personally I'm not sure there's such a thing as a 'good' eye, it's more a case of whether you work at finding out what works for you and refining it over a period of time.
Posted by: undercurrent at May 13, 2004 11:35 AM