Those boards outside newsagents’ shops, with their broken haikus, fascinate me. DIANA’S RESTING PLACE CHANGED. ROYALS URGED TO SELL BRITAIN. SPICE GIRLS ‘SPLIT’ FEAR. FOOT AND MOUTH ARMY MOVE IN. Anonymous poetry, urgent and anxious. Banishment of definite and indefinite articles. Present tense. Absence of lower-case lettering. It was a style to which I aspired. The city composing its own disposable legend. Royalty, crime, transport, weather. On a daily basis. Unselfconscious surrealism. Even the one-eyed got the message. Burdening yourself with a newspaper was a waste of time. Terse black-on-white newscasts told you everything you needed to know. More effective than contradictory traffic updates and fog warnings flashed from gantries above motorways.
On the final afternoon of the old millennium, the boards predicted DOME FIASCO, hours before it happened; hours before the salaried opinion-makers and big cheeses were abandoned on a cold station platform in Stratford East. Up to that point, they’d bought the New Labour spin, the shameless bullshit. The Dome, an obscene fungus on Bugsby’s Marshes, empty of content, serviced by a flamboyant Underground link, had received a good or neutral press. The Jubilee Line had been shoved through (magnificent stations, no customers) while Hackney was kept in purdah, outside the system. Just because the brand name of this expensive interloper sounded regal and upbeat.
East London stayed indoors. The Acorn pub on Queens-bridge Road promised: CONTINUOUS SKY. Motor traffic was forbidden to pull over, take a look at the river or the preparations for the big night. MILLENNIUM CLEARWAY. SPECIAL. CONTROLS APPLY. NO STOPPING.
Helicopters droned overhead like a gangland funeral. Some of the Wapping riverside balconies made a halfhearted attempt at getting into the spirit of things by hanging year 2000 banners and a few coloured balloons. A melancholy airship drifted over the News International fortress. Knots of well-wrapped folk gathered in front of the Tower Hotel, gazing hopefully upstream at the gothic spires of H. Jones’s nineteenth-century bridge. Whose party was it? Had they been invited? Where was the action?
I wanted to stay with the story – Dome, Millennium, meridian line – but I couldn’t face the orchestrated riverside jollity. The Thames resisted such vulgar and ill-considered nonsense, an evening of stage-managed spontaneity: ‘rivers of fire’, red, green and gold starbursts, the spinning of the new Ferris wheel, the London Eye. The Eye wasn’t working, it had failed its safety check. The heavens were shrouded, rain beads hung in the heavy air.
My first notion was to try the Beckton Alp. Far enough out, down the A13, to avoid the crush; high enough to see the fire-stream as it raced, barge to barge, along the river. This manmade conical wonder, a ski slope overlooking the City Airport at Silvertown (retail park, golf driving range, Northern Sewage Outfall, arterial roads), seemed to be the ideal platform. It had everything I looked for, a privileged overview as grand as anything produced by the early London mapmakers, Anthony van den Wyngaerde or Wenceslaus Hollar. The Alp had been perfect for the solar eclipse, attracting locals and periscope-wielding enthusiasts, but it might prove bleak and damp, and difficult to reach, on the last night of the millennium.
The other obvious choice, honouring the Greenwich meridian, was Waltham Abbey. My circumnavigation of the M25 had begun and ended there; I would align myself with the fuss at the Dome, but drift to the perimeter, staying alert for distant noises, flares in the sky. I booked a table at the Shuhag Balti house (WE ONLY SERVE CHICKEN BREAST); I’d noticed the Millennium Special menu as I’d plodded through town on the last leg of my walk.
Anna, by now, was used to my unorthodox notions of a good night out. Waltham Abbey had the edge on Beckton Alp. In light rain, we ambled out of a deserted car park.
Early evening, around seven o’clock, it didn’t seem as if much was happening. We tried to get into the Welsh Harp, a quiet enough pub at the end of a day’s tramp. It’s a special feeling to pull off that double, abbey and pub. The great church doors of Holy Cross and St Lawrence were always locked when we made our starts, just after first light. And locked again when we returned in the dark. The presence of this sealed building, its surrounding orchards and fishponds, travelled with us. The astrological ceiling, with its zodiac symbols, deep blues, golds and whites, was a conceptual umbrella carried into the Essex countryside. The ceiling had been designed by the eccentric William Burges and put in place in the 1860s. Its theme, according to the brochures, was Time.
The guy on the door of the Welsh Harp, no bulge-eyed bouncer, let us know that the pub was off-limits, a private party. Through soft rain, we tramped the wet flags of the market square, the spokes of medieval street pattern, pedestrianised (but lacking pedestrians): the usual small-town English mix of charity shops, minicabs (Abbey Cars), insurance, junk food. As the locus for a millennial celebration, Waltham Abbey was looking pretty good. Picture-book pubs closed to strangers. Motorway fringe motels booked solid with revellers. Slithery streets. Church bells. The Lea in spate, and soon to flood the ground-floor rooms of outwardly mobile retirees. Cue: local news interview as the three-piece suite floats out of the window.
There’s always a warm glow in not belonging, in being the only abstainer at a fleadh in Ballycastle, the only non-Iberian bull-runner in Pamplona who hasn’t read Hemingway; it means that you’re not responsible. You don’t have to enjoy yourself. It’s not part of the contract to become one with the spirit of place. You are not obliged to spew, fight, sing, dance, wreck your car or in any other way amuse yourself. And this is very liberating.
I felt so. I’m not sure that Anna agreed. Waltham Abbey wasn’t Hackney. It was, to a significant degree, populated by ex-Hackney escapers who had tunnelled under the wire years ago, at the first sign of the place going to the dogs: when they started selling croissants, jerk chicken and putting up notices advising you that you were walking down a cycle track. Old-timers were nervous of nail extension parlours and hair straightening booths that stayed open all night, doing a steady trade with hooded youths and brothers who’d traded in black, 6-series BMWs for less conspicuous Audis. As the only way to drive through the City of London without being pulled.
Waltham Abbey and the inhabitable pockets of Epping Forest were white Cockney on the drift, the tectonic plate theory. Hackney becomes Chingford. Notting Hill relocates to Hoxton. Rafts of like-minded citizens (holding fast to their prejudices) nudged, ever closer, to the rim of the map. It took the M25 to stop them disappearing into Fenland mists.
Cabbies, always awkward sods, had uprooted years ago: try finding one who didn’t grow up in Bethnal Green and who doesn’t now live in Hertfordshire or Essex. Strange choice. To commute towards the jams, to spend your days snorting diesel, for the privilege of a Saturday shop at an out-of-town mall, nine holes on a Sunday morning. More space – before the latest animal husbandry disaster – to run the dog.
You wouldn’t have known, from the bunting and the flashing lights through the windows of Waltham Abbey pubs, that there was anything special about this night. The driving on the road out, Lea Bridge Road, Hoe Street (Asian mini-marts fully operative), Walthamstow dog track, Chingford Mount, was unexceptional. Bumper car rules: red means go. One headlamp (full-beam) as standard. White vans, windows open, drum ‘n’ bass, take precedence over every other form of transport.
The police were busy elsewhere, organising their lock-ins or earning overtime at Blair’s Riverside Follies. Policing this turf, at the best of times, is retrospective: sirens, three car chases, weaving in and out of sluggish traffic. The state mercenaries were funded, so it seemed, to put up blue and white decorations around murder sites. The ground was guilty, it had to be made an example of, framed off. Landscape art. East London, as I walked it, was becoming a lake of crisp cellophane, fields of wrapped flowers. Concrete bollards that sprouted nosegays. Lipstick-pink peonies, goldenrod and primrose, held in place with brown parcel tape. Commemorative cards: JUSTICE FOR HARRY.
Eventually, a lesser pub, a hangdog funeral parlour, desperate for custom, let us in. The barmaid slipped us a couple of tickets. The atmosphere was like a wake for an elderly bachelor nobody really knew or liked. They were going through the motions. It was the least they could do, but they hadn’t hated him enough to start on the celebratory sweetmeats, the booze. He wasn’t worth a song or a dance. Maybe the wake was for King Harold, the last Saxon king, senior stiff in the burial ground behind the abbey. They had his portrait up on the wall and they’d draped it in coloured streamers. The men hadn’t arrived yet. A suspicion of women, dressed to the nines (and well beyond), perched at the bar. Kids skittered around, seeing how far they could go without getting a slap. We were the relatives who belonged to somebody else, the wrong side of the family. We smiled and nodded, paid for our drinks, slipped away before the fun started.
It isn’t easy to stretch a curry pit-stop over three hours, but the Shuhag was happy to watch us try. Under ordinary circumstances, Anna keeps me out of restaurants that don’t have customers. She wants the reassurance that the experience is survivable, other reckless souls are prepared to give it a bash. Tonight, for this once-in-a-thousand-years moment, rules are relaxed. The only options are going back to the pub for a bag of pork scratchings, or home to bed.
Wine is wasted on mussel beran, chicken tikka, lamb korma, king prawn dansak, and the rest. The usual eccentric mix westerners cobble together when they order by numbers. The equivalent, I guess, of Yorkshire pudding with winkles, gravy, Spanish omelette and boiled sprouts. But, wasted or not, we kept it coming. It was turning into a great night. The waiters were friendly. The ceilings were low. A ‘fully air-conditioned, Balti & Tandoori restaurant’ doesn’t fit easily into one of those step-down-from-the-pavement premises that are usually turned into lace-curtain tea rooms, or tourist brochure and pictorial ashtray information centres. The Shuhag and its chilled Chablis kept us in a state of non-specific wellbeing; dim red light, comfortably upholstered banquettes, unobtrusive service. A table filled with small hot dishes, replenished as soon as they disappeared.
Other diners manifested. A foursome who told us they wanted an early meal, something to line the stomach, before taking the train into town, to catch the excitement. They were astonished to hear that we’d travelled in the opposite direction, by choice. But whichever direction, in or out, we were all on the same beam, the meridian line: Waltham Abbey is one of the few places where they take notice of zero longitude, mark it with decorated pillars and a straight walk. Enough to let you feel that you’re getting somewhere, before it all comes to an abrupt end: perimeter fence, strategic planting and ‘Government Research Establishment’ on the map.
By eleven o’clock we were moving, unsteadily, towards the church. Again, we didn’t really belong, wrong clothes, and again the locals were welcoming. There was a certain powdery greyness about the anoraks and the rigorously disciplined hair, a certain sheen. Steradent and talcum powder. The god-folk were outfitted well short of Songs of Praise; they weren’t expecting cameras. Thin-framed spectacles glinted in candlelight. Footballer-evangelical rather than ritualistic High Church; they weren’t tambourine-bashers but neither did they go in for vestments and Latin and incense.
Superstitiously, I kept to the end of the row – in case I had to make a run for it. But the service, good Essex voices reverberating through that tall building with its twisted Norman columns, contained satisfyingly pagan elements. A ‘Hope Tree’ had been set up, to which we were invited to attach postcards, millennial wishes. We weren’t, by then, in a fit state to write, but I lurched up the aisle and shoved my fractured telegram in among the pine needles.
The church was packed, the ritual unforced, the location powerful and pertinent. In such a place, the vertical view of history holds: the back story is not forgotten. The important dead are given their alcoves. Nothing disappears without trace. No part of this evening’s ceremony shames the past, or forces present quietude into some gaudy exhibition that it will be unable to sustain. ‘Time’ is coded into the celestial zodiac, the syphilitic alabaster of the dignitaries, landowners, floating in their niches. ‘Time and Eternity’ is the tag line for this service. ‘For the Passing of One Age and the Beginning of a New Millennium. Looking Back – Looking Forward.’
Heads down in prayer or private meditation; audible creaks as the congregation struggle to their feet, to let rip with the first hymn. Some of them are in wheelchairs. There is one black family. We have been instructed to assemble cardboard boxes which will contain millennial candles. Not easy with a fistful of palsied thumbs.
Parson: Jesus Christ is the light of the world.
Congregation: A light no darkness can quench.
So out of the church we straggle, smiley-touchy, in it together, candles cupped against the breeze and the damp night, over the meridian flagstone and down towards the car park at the back of the abbey. Singing as we process: ‘Don’t carry a load in your pack/you don’t need two shirts on your back.’ That one wasn’t written by a walker, I thought. The second shirt is to get you into the pub at the end of the day, when the first one is sweat-soaked, streaked with the colour of your cheap rucksack.
Stern, sheepy heads of the elderly; mortality shadows, so many other services to recall. The younger, louder couples, families, are clustering around the beacon, a brazier on a pole, that will be lit at midnight. Essex, England. Munitions factories. Official Secrets Act. Parkland cleaned up by the Lee Valley Authority. Exotic plantings that have survived only because they were on protected government land. The picnic grounds on the west side of Horsemill Stream are, apparently, very popular with Balkan refugees. They gather on Sunday afternoons, balalaikas and barbecued chicken.
The revelry, as we approach midnight, is coming from transistors. Subdued citizens in masks with flashing lights, wobbly antennae, stand around waiting for the heavens to crack open. Small groups have gathered in the drizzle, camp stools and folding tables, crackers, bottle of fizz, to see in the millennium: right on the line, zero longitude, listening to the distant hum of the orbital motorway, tyres on a wet road.
The millennial brazier is actually an elongated Bunsen burner, a cough of gas waiting for a spark. There’s a village feel to the event; a release from corporate sponsorship. Public spectacles that only succeed in messing up the quality of everyday life by imposing road barriers, razorwire, CCTV and ubiquitous gooseberry-fool security jackets (lapel-connected to unseen controllers). The colours of the city at the end of the century: luminous custard with a drape of blue and white plastic ribbons. Smoking holes in which something has happened. Sirens. Cone islands. Chemically upbeat breakfast-time TV presenters announcing another snarl-up on the M25, slowmoving traffic between Junctions 12 and 16, an overturned lorry at Hobbs Cross; Kent disappearing underwater.
Waltham Abbey is the cathedral of the motorway. I feel as if we’ve just listened to Father Mapple’s sermon, from the pulpit with the rope ladder in the whaling port of New Bedford, at the opening of Moby-Dick, before setting out on a hazardous voyage. Yes, the world’s a ship on its passage out, and not a voyage complete; and the pulpit is its prow.
Up goes the flame, like an over-oiled chip-pan; fizzing white at the edges against the dull night. Up go the fireworks, splinters of light, coronas and diadems and pink-gold ruffs. Muffled detonations. Public and private displays. City under siege. Blitz memories. A spectacular burst, sequential and increasing in noise and circumference, has some of the old-timers believing that the munitions factory has exploded. But it’s no longer there; like everything with a dark industrial history, the Royal Gunpowder Mills are in the process of being turned into a visitor centre, a heritage attraction.
Christians embrace and link arms to sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. On a portable television set, belonging to one of the picnicking families, we see the Thames, the Teflon Toadstool, the crowds; warped and rolling. We can just make out the ironed faces of the national waxworks, dutifully mouthing doggerel of the Scottish borders. What a bizarre spectacle: ‘Piety’ Blair (as Michael Moorcock christened him in his novel King of the City), Edinburgh-educated, grappling with the Germano-Highlander Elizabeth II (inspiration for the Dartford Bridge), in a rictus of homage, pantomimed ecstasy. The certain knowledge that New Labour’s patronage of this awful tent was a disaster. And, worse, they are stuck with it. He can feel the laser glare of all those newspaper editors, fruit-fly celebs, who were kept hanging about on a Jubilee Line platform in the middle of the night. And who now face a nightmare journey home through the disgruntled mob.
*
Heading back down the Lea Valley, I stand on the Seward-stone Bridge over the M25, to watch the lights of the cars: two streams, gold and red. It never stops. Firework displays on the horizon. Flares and flashes reflected in the reservoirs. There was still, at this distance, something epic about the idea of London, the crenellation of bright towers.
Later, I would hear my children’s accounts of their night in the thick of it, down at the river: nothing much to see, a moving stream of fire that didn’t, unremarkable fireworks, trains not running or impossibly crowded. Young girls who fainted or were attacked and couldn’t be got to hospital, or were turned away from police stations. Epic traverses in unsuitable shoes, further and further east, to escape the crush, the craziness. A decent party, all things considered. A subdued rave. Very average. Better next time, next millennium.
I thought of the cheery foursome from the Shuhag. If their night went as expected, the glamour of the big city, Last-Night-of-the-Proms with Catherine wheels, they were prepared, for the first time, to walk home; the full fifteen or twenty miles, they weren’t sure, up the Lea Valley to Waltham Abbey. Madness. A journey no sane Londoner could be accused of attempting.