London’s dreaming again. Her fingers claw at the bedposts. She groans and bucks on sweat-drenched sheets as it all comes back to her.
It’s 1940. The black gulls of the Luftwaffe have flocked over the East End. Incendiary bombs light the sky and high explosives obliterate the earth. Fire rains. The air screams. The river turns to smoke.
In the city below, garrulous cockneys stand in their front rooms and shake their fists at the ceiling. “If you take my house, then you can bleedin’ well take me too, Mr Hitler.”
Families huddle around tins of spam and sing Roll Out the Barrel in Anderson shelters. A hand bursts from a mound of rubble and finds the grip of a fire warden. The warden puts a lit cigarette into the hand first, then begins to pull out the man. He recognises the face that emerges. It’s his old school headmaster.
“Old Phippsy. Well I’ll be damned.”
They stagger down the street as bomb shrapnel whizzes over their heads, sharing a hip-flask, laughing. And when the smoke clears the next morning the milkman skips through the rubble, business as usual madam, stepping past boys playing ‘Battle of Britain heroes’ with planes carved from shattered window frames.
This is London’s narcissistic lie-dream.
Tormented by guilt, her psyche re-imagines an inevitable war where acts of violence are purely self-defence in the face of annihilation. She’s exorcised the memories of panic, blind fear and self-interest. Her brain has sealed off many of the neural pathways that carried these messages. They’re like abandoned underground tube stations. Still there, but with no public access. London’s somnolent mind is nourished instead by a flow of legend, truth, popular fiction, film reels and state-generated propaganda.
Despite these psychological defensive mechanisms, it’s still possible to access the dark regions of her mind where long lost truths lie. But to do this you have to come to the edges of the city.
The edgeland of the urban psyche
By their very nature, urban legends require a town or a city in order to survive. The streets, public transport networks, pubs and living rooms of London form a closed circuit system which perpetuates myth with elegant efficiency.
In turn, the city needs urban legends to thrive. Stories are its life-blood. They unify the city. They provide its collective memory. They’re the only connection – albeit fragile and illusory – between the homeless drunk and the pampered Queen, between the Bulgarian immigrant cleaning the toilet and the City millionaire who’s about to shit in it.
But what happens to these stories when they spill over the edges of cities?
Here on the marshes, in that inter-zone between rural and urban the city’s memory begins to break down. Cracks show in the narrative. Weeds break through the concrete of anti-tank bollards hidden in the shrub. Drunks and wanderers, outcasts from mainstream society, can tell you different stories.
The lie-dream has it that Londoners stayed resolute and took their punishment with gusto and good humour. In reality the marshlands were the haunt of those who couldn’t – or refused to – live up to the government sanctioned ideal.
As dusk descended on the city in 1940, figures would emerge from Hackney’s streets and cross the canal pushing their belongings in prams, carts and trolleys. These people were known as trekkers. They didn’t want to stay in their homes, or the shelters, or hide in underground stations. Instead they made nightly journeys to Hackney Marshes and Epping Forest to sit out the bombing raids.
The state may have gone to war. Perhaps there was a good reason for it, too. But they weren’t going to sit there like good citizens and wait to be buried alive. They were frightened and they wanted to run away. And so they did.
Expelled from the Popular Narrative
The government did everything it could to whitewash trekkers from the wartime story. No newsreel mentioned these people. They spoiled the “London Can Take It” narrative which was being carefully constructed for global export. By 1940 the government, in league with the media, had begun stage-managing a mythical London populated by fearless, good humoured sing-along-a-cockney heroes and stiff-upper-lipped toffs, which they could hold up to the Germans as a form of psychological defence.
The idea of terrified Londoners fleeing to the marshlands and woodlands clutching children and their most prized possessions smacked of self-interest and cowardice.
It was an affront to the bulldog spirit.
It simply wasn’t cricket.
In the end, the government didn’t have much to do. It was easy to pretend the trekkers weren’t there. There were no film crews in the Lea Valley. No press. No pubs. No streets. No buses. Outside the infrastructure of the city there were no conduits through which tales of these trekkers could spread and embed themselves in local urban culture.
When these trekkers left the confines of the city, they also exited the narrative. They stepped out of history into the cover of obscurity.
You can empathise with them. Come out to the Lea towpath on a moonless night and stare into the marshes. Now imagine a wall of fire rising from Hackney behind you and think about how alluring that deep blackness must have been at the time.
I know in which direction I’d have walked.
For more on the War and Hackney Marshes, see Blitz Balls, How Hackney Marshes Did and Didn’t Save St Pauls
COMING UP: CONTEMPORARY TREKKERS IN HACKNEY MARSHES – RENEGADES FROM THE CITY’S SURVEILLANCE CULTURE… BUT FOR HOW LONG?
