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

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.

You’re probably thinking, after seeing those recipes, that I was King of the Cooks, the alpha-male of the oven. But I certainly didn’t have it all my own way. Plendy had this amazing dish called pasta and tomatoes. It consisted of pasta, about a hundredweight of garlic and a tin of tomatoes all mixed up together. If he was feeling really fancy he’d make a salad to accompany it. Dukey had tuna explosion, which involved him hiring a small plane and dropping a couple of tins of tuna fish from several thousand feet. He’d then scoop up the resulting mess and stick it in a pan with – a tin of tomatoes. Ruey had some kind of fishy bits thing. He used to get fishy off cuts from a local fishmonger. Tobe had pineapple curry. All I remember is tins of pineapple and curry sauce. Rich never used to cook, so we’d nick his dope and put it in our own meals, just to take the edge off the anger of those who had to eat it.

And we used to make serious money on these meals. If the food cost, say, £1.50 the chef would invariably ask for 70p each, thus making a handy mark-up. This would go straight into a savings account. Occasionally when a woman came round we’d stick on an album of French accordion music that I’d found at a jumble sale and try and schmooze them with top grub. Strangely, late eighties women just didn’t appreciate fine food.

The house was split down the middle between English and Scottish tenants, but it was more complex than that. The split-personality fault lines of Walthamstow also meant that we were divided along organised (Saxon) and chaotic (Viking) lines.

I go round to Stevey’s flat to collect him for our walk of his river. He is still flapping a bit. He’s cleared out his valuable seventies football card collection, in case the place gets flooded, and gives it to me in a Tesco bag, asking that I donate it to the artefacts library of my erstwhile employers When Saturday Comes (independent football magazine). It is a bit of a John Paul Getty III gesture.

We walk up to the end of Blyth Road to Bridge Road and look at Stevey’s river, sorry, the Dagenham Brook, as it slowly snakes its way behind the little terraced houses. There are a few bits and bobs in the water – cans, bottles, old bikes. Soon, we turn into the Leyton relief road, which hasn’t yet opened because they haven’t finished building it. Concrete bollards bar access. A sign says that it’s due to open in Spring 2002. A Somalian guy is in the little Portakabin office, all fenced off. We tell him we are on a research project, hunting for the Dagenham Brook. Right, OK. He seems a bit too laidback and cool for a security guard.

‘Look,’ says Stevey, ‘Bywater on the skips. Are you noticing all these signs?’ Stevey is a bloody teacher knowall. In a minute he’s going to suggest we split up into smaller groups. We find the end of the river before it goes under the new Leyton relief road and under a light industrial estate to the River Lea. As we clamber into the undergrowth we suddenly come upon a group of very smiley people all pushing wheelbarrows. We’ve stumbled across some sort of gardening sect activity, which is alarming. I picture us being kidnapped and in a couple of days we’ll be pushing wheelbarrows too. What are they carrying in their wheelbarrows? We have no option but to press on. But the barrow people are following us.

I confront one of the leaders, who explains to me that he’s from the Environment Agency and these are volunteers helping to clear the lower reaches of the brook. He said they were planting stuff in and around the river, encouraging wildlife back. Kingfishers and that. I ask him about the route of the river. He says it disappears pretty soon after it crosses Lea Bridge Road. Stevey is jumpy, but manages not to ask about emergency flood procedures. As Stevey and I saunter past with our serious explorers’ expressions, the not-barrow-people-but-voluntary-workers who are sweating hard obviously guess that we are pros or environmental activists and start to say hello. The brook then disappears under Leyton Wingate football club. There is a game on, but it’s three quid to get in and we’re not that desperate to find the stream. And that’s the last we see of it, until it sluggishly flows behind houses then disappears somewhere to the north in the vicinity of Markhouse Road. We celebrate our victory by repairing to the Hare and Hounds where we have some god awful half-frozen-food and thin Guinness, surrounded by fat blokes.

In John Rocque’s 1746 map of Walthamstow there are several country houses with ornamental gardens and ponds. Dagenham Brook is called the Mill River and appears to be an artificial ditch, as Stevey had hoped. I’II go round to tell Stevey but I don’t think he wants to talk about it. He’s recently given me some more old bubblegum cards, this time of my beloved Leeds United, believing he can buy me off so I won’t keep going on about rivers and we can get back to How It Was Before – stories, politics, women and football. He’s underestimated me, because … bloody hell, between 1970 and 1974 Eddie Gray only played sixty games for Leeds. I think he might have been injured. I rub the back with a coin. Magic! A picture appears. Then it disappears again! Ooooh.

It’s now late March. I walk from my house to Brisbane Road stadium, which lies about 100 yards to the east of the Dagenham Brook’s southern section, to watch Leyton Orient play Blackpool in a Third Division game. On the way I get caught up in a torchlit procession by hundreds of Kurdish demonstrators, some playing medieval-sounding pipes, some banging drums. The rest are singing a Kurdish version of ‘All We Are Saying Is Give Peace A Chance’. At least that’s what it sounds like. A quarter of a mile further on someone lies dying at the side of the road, surrounded by a crowd of people, a victim of a hit-and-run driver. Blackpool win 2–1.

A few days later the USA pulls out of the Kyoto Protocol for climate control. Then Stevey P. phones me to say he is very worried about the river again. His bit is filled up with rubbish – old bikes, oil cans, car seats. Barely half a mile away, the Environment Agency are planting rare flowers and kissing kingfisher eggs. This is, he points out, the London of extremes. Dagenham Brook, once a river of mystery, is now one of contrasts – heaven and hell, London and Essex, Saxon and Viking, good and evil, kingfishers and used bicycles, something nice and jellied eels.

I needed sleep. I padded through to my study to get my well-thumbed copy of Albert Camus’s The Rebel. I’d been reading it for about five years. (My other insomnia beater is The Scarlet and the Black.) In seconds I was drifting off.

I went back to Walthamstow, bought some jellied eels and took then up to the William Morris Gallery. Didn’t feel anything. I then went back to the Lorne after eating the jellied eels to show some William Morris prints to the Beards and Len the Landlord, plus my eel illustration. It was closed up. Then I walked back up Lea Bridge Road towards the roundabout at Clapton and decided to find out if there really was a psychic border at the River Lea. At the pub there I ran from one end of the bridge to the other to see how I felt. Saxon or Viking? Saxon … run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run … Viking … run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run … Saxon … run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run … Viking … run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run run … stop … gulp for air … dirty fumes … have coughing fit …

There was a rumour doing the rounds a while back that a bear had gone missing from a travelling circus in East London (maybe Zippo, maybe not). Eventually the authorities dragged the Lea in Hackney Marshes just south of here, near the Walthamstow pitch-and-putt course, and found the bodies of three bears, skinned. But not the one they were looking for, which turned up somewhere else.

To: The William Morris Society

Hi there

I’m researching a book about underground rivers and William Morris crops up a couple of times. I was wondering if you had any information on whether rivers influenced Morris’s work. I’m also interested in his time at Walthamstow – I’ve heard a story that he loved jellied eels! Have you ever heard this?

Hope you can help.