‘In this town,’ Peter Carpenter announced, ‘one in ten is mad.’ Our problem, outside Epsom station, was identifying that one. The tour party, assembled on the pavement, you could start there: twitchy, grinning like foxes, clothed from a dressing-up basket. Much too old for this foolishness, a walk around Carpenter’s childhood and adolescence (schools, pubs, asylums). The balding, hook-nosed man in the collarless blue shirt wanted, so badly, to tell his tale: the audience was incidental. Like all poets, and most schoolteachers, he was used to talking to himself; this morning’s drive down the motorway was just enough rehearsal to crank him up to speed. Lay out the past in the right order and it loses its venom.
Wednesday 17 May 2000. Renchi has brought a friend interested in springs and Surrey subterranea, the art of the motorway fringes. Kevin has lined up two of his inner circle: Carpenter (our guide) and Walrus (aka Martin J. Wallen, Associate Professor of English at OSU, Stillwater, Oklahoma). Asked how we’ll recognise Carpenter, if we arrive first at the rendezvous, Kevin says: ‘So high.’ Vague gesture of the arm. ‘Bullish. See him coming through a crowd in London, quite frightening.’
When we steam, mob-handed, down the drive of the old Horton hospital, we are a pack of the dispersed, looking for sanctuary. The townscape, in the months since we paid our last visit, has changed beyond recognition. WELCOME TO HORTON VIEW AND THE PADDOCKS. Fluttering banners: TAYWOOD. A SELECTION OF 2, 3, 4 & 5 BEDROOM HOUSES & APARTMENTS. Three white flag poles mark the border of the captive estate.
The asylum has been replanted, opened to motor vehicles. There is some evidence for the continuing presence of builders, none of civilians, home owners, new suburbanites. The Epsom colonies have been revised into loops and crescents, so that clients can drive effortlessly in and out. Nobody is trapped, coerced, detained. BEAZER HOMES, WAY OUT. THANK YOU FOR OBSERVING SIGNS & DRIVING CAREFULLY.
Behind the improved flagship properties, corrugated sheds hide the last traces of a repressed history. A lick of pink paint on wrinkled tin; recreational facilities with barred windows. The yard where farm produce was once sold still exists, you need a map to find it. Sad vegetables on an unmanned table. WARNING. THESE PREMISES ARE PROTECTED BY A 24HR SECURITY AND CLOSED CIRCUIT TELEVISION SYSTEM. PACKS INFOTEL LTD. Withered beans and knobbly tomatoes covered by CCTV cameras.
Previous inmates wander the new roads, questing for something they recognise. Nobody has found them suitable clothing: one, stiff-backed, twisting as he walks, is barechested; another has a tight white, Sunday-best shirt, buttoned to neck and cuff, inherited jeans. They seem to march, eyes down, where Carpenter’s merry men slouch or spring, cameras primed, constantly swivelling.
During what he calls ‘The Lost Years’ – a period Jackson summarises as ‘lager, vodka, unsuitable girlfriends, takeaways, footy, monotony, despair and nights in the Iron Horse’ – Peter Carpenter worked in an Epsom bookshop. On Saturday afternoons, paroled patients visited town. (They’re called clients now: CLIENTS BACK FOR LUNCH. While there is still lunch, there is still hope.) Horton inmates were given sweetie money to spend. Every week the same kleptos would drift into the bookshop, liberate the same books (Asimov, Heinlein, L. Sprague De Camp); take them home. Without fuss, they would be gathered up and returned. (This may go some way towards explaining the popularity of that school of fiction.)
The visiting academic, Dr Wallen, is getting more of his special subject (‘Romanticism’) than any reasonable Oklahoma resident has the right to expect. He’s got strong teeth and a nice hawky profile that could have been chiselled from the totem pole which now stands in the park behind Long Grove Hospital. He’s always grinning: not like Piety Blair (the fear rictus), but like a man who can’t believe his luck. Kevin has him pegged as: ‘bon viveur, weight-lifter, malcontent, dog lover, former owner of cowboy boots’. He’s into Coleridge, Beddoes and Nitrous Oxide: not much use in Stillwater, but useful preparation for a day trip to Epsom.
Wallen’s tense watchfulness and proper rectitude (waiting for the pub) plays nicely against the Jackson/Carpenter double act. Ventriloquist and moosehead dummy. Who keep exchanging roles – so that the story can be told, backwards, in every detail. In stereo. There is much talk of Cambridge, Pembroke College, and of the former Epsom inmate and spurned novelist, William Curtis Hayward. Just as Kevin helped to preserve some record of the achievements of Dr Dylan Francis, so Peter Carpenter has obsessively gathered every scrap of information, every published and unpublished word by William Hayward.
What Carpenter wants now is to lead us to St Ebba’s, the most easterly of the hospitals, on the far side of Hook Road. St Ebba’s is still an active concern. The Italianate tower is in place. (Carpenter tells us that the poet Alan Brownjohn was once, as a child, locked in that tower.) The atmosphere is heavy, time doesn’t flow. The estate is like an English village built by Cold War Russians for war games. Such whimsical notions are contradicted by the villagers: a speedfreak in a baseball cap who mimes the rolling of a monster spliff, a scarecrow who calls to the birds, a man perched on a bench who thinks he is a bird. Several Down’s syndrome adolescents stare at us; they are the only ones to whom we are not invisible.
The point of our (de)tour is to locate a cemetery. Carpenter remembers being here, in a field, with his mother. There were memorials to those who died during the war, when the hospitals were requisitioned; as well as gravestones for the hospital children.
Carpenter was sure this was it, a buttercup field with a view of the Horton tower. We do what we can with potential mounds and bumps, but the cemetery has been swallowed in thorn bushes and sycamore. There is no physical evidence of the memorial. Alongside a bridlepath of loose chippings and small pebbles, Carpenter stands bemused, waving his arms. ‘I’m sure it was here.’ Either he has been betrayed by an unreliable memory, or memory has been violated in some way.
Renchi asks for numbers. How many dead? How many unrecorded? He picks up pebbles, counting them, putting them into his knapsack. Fingers raw, pack sagging: he’s well into the hundreds.
Local papers were incensed by the developer’s sacrilege: WAR HEROES’ GRAVE ANGER. They settled on the number 4,000. ‘War heroes lie in an overgrown cemetery where 4,000 hospital patients are buried in mass graves.’ Owner-developer Michael Heighs refused church groups (backed by Epsom and Ewell Council) permission to erect a memorial cross. The hospitals had housed the shell-shocked casualties of the First War. The developer tried to strike a deal: if he allowed the memorial would he be given clearance to build on the land?
The war dead, the mutilated of Flanders, have their champions; hospital patients, wrapped in sacking, went unrecorded into a mass grave. HELM, a charitable group concerned with those who had been ‘returned to the community’, lobbied for some kind of memorial to the forgotten generations. Mr Heighs wouldn’t budge without his development deal. The site, bought ‘for a peppercorn sum from the health authorities’, remains in limbo – in the expectation that Green Belt laws will change. ‘Would you give someone a piece of your garden for nothing?’
Subsequent correspondents, unwilling to accept developer as scapegoat, concentrate on the original contract. It stank. ‘The thing I find most shocking about it all is the fact that the health authorities sold… the land in the first place. Why on earth did they do that? Was it a continuation or reflection of their uncaring and irreverent attitude towards the thousands of harmless people unnecessarily sent to grim psychiatric institutions of the Epsom cluster?’
Keeping up a good pace, flogging around town, our guide was due to check in for a hernia operation. This outing, he assured us, justified his discomfort. By green lanes and half-forgotten paths we navigated the Epsom fringes, from Carpenter’s school (a brazen march through pee-stink corridors) to Nonsuch Palace (stones in the grass). A hubble-bubble of free-associating anecdotes: inspirational English master Kenneth Curtis taught poet Geoffrey Hill (who dedicated King Log to him). Millais used Hogsmill ‘as a backdrop for his Ophelia’. John Procter was a school friend…
Procter? Musician and polemicist (aka ‘I, Ludicrous’). An educated joker who had written and performed an M25 anthem. Spoken voice: ‘The M25, London’s orbital. Take a ride.’ With acoustic interference, throbbing and moaning. More lift-shaft than garage: ‘The M25, the M25.’ Composed at the start, around 1986, Procter’s chant is charmingly antique; sensible and a little crazy. ‘The old farms forgotten, except on out of date maps.’ Procter admits that he won’t be using the road, other than to visit ‘relatives in Somerset’. Or: ‘cricket in Kent.’ For what Kevin Jackson refers to as ‘an inconclusive period’, Peter Carpenter acted as Procter’s manager. ‘Sort of.’
The secret agenda of the day, what we’re edging towards, as we all recognise, is: The Tunnel. The subterranean network that Renchi and I walked past when we climbed Ashley Road towards the Downs. This time we’re going in, Renchi’s cemetery pebbles will be used in a giant M25 sand-painting. He hopes to find a suitable cavern or sanctuary.
As a writer (former market trader, parks gardener, ullage man), I have no status to protect. But I wonder about the professional academic and the English master from a public school, how would they look in the local press – as convicted trespassers? Doc Wallen is grinning (Doc Holliday on ether) as he goes over the fence. KEEP OUT. Renchi manages to drag open the heavy metal door. I find the stub of a nightlight. (Evidence of suburban satanism? Drug orgies?)
The brick tunnel drops into darkness. My nightlight gives a feeble glow. Illuminates the veins in my hand. The door, designed to withstand bomb blasts, creaks; threatens to close behind us. The underground complex is rumoured to stretch for miles, with hidden entrances in various parts of town. Fifty or sixty yards in, we hit water. We’re really not equipped for this, we’ll have to come back on another occasion. The tunnel divides, branches off; there are cell-like sidechambers.
By the dying candleflame, Renchi scratches the outline of his M25 drawing on the damp floor. He’ll return, with drummers, sand, chalk – and the pebbles from St Ebba’s cemetery. We’re quite relieved to have an excuse for a retreat to the pub.
A figure in a suit, standing on the embankment, spots us. He makes no challenge, doesn’t move. But when Renchi and his troop pitch up for their shamanic ceremony, the tunnels are definitively sealed. The schematic drawing has to be laid out, over several hours, on the ramp.
The Amato pub, in the early evening, is varnished, brassy; occupied by check-jacket and mustard corduroy equestrians. It’s generous of them to let us in. We don’t talk horseflesh and we’re not cranking up for a serious session. We’ve walked past mansions with complicated ironwork gates, past stables and fields of cattle with designer coats, cleaner, less ostentatious than Hollywood wives.
Drink in hand, day’s ration of Romanticism digested, Doc Wallen recalls his childhood: Carpenter hasn’t got the monopoly poly on Wordsworthian soliloquies. Louisiana. Wallen’s father was a surveyor for an oil company. In a house by the bayou, dim figures moved at night, circling the bed. A Southern Gothic dreamscape. Faulknerian shadows: grandfather, spurned by the detested son to whom he had left the farm, died where he lay. An unremoved corpse, busy with maggots, in a nest of rat-filth.
Such images infect the pub. Peter Carpenter speaks of William Hayward, a troubled life that brought him, inevitably, to Epsom. If the tale is not properly told, the man fades away; the legend is discredited. We allow ourselves to become identified with those we promote, so that the manufacture of another writer’s biography is a gloss on our own. Present neglect supports elective obscurity. The reappraisal of a vanished reputation must initiate a turn in the biographer’s fortune. These exercises move between literary archaeology and psychic vampirism.
I listen to Peter’s fragmentary account. I read pamphlets of Hayward’s poetry and I obtain a copy of the novel, It Never Gets Dark All Night. This was published by Heinemann in 1964. He was in good company; other titles promoted (on the back of the dust-wrapper) include Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun and Patricia Highsmith’s The Two Faces of January.
The cover illustration is a solar disc floating over three very serious bohemians: clean hair and anoraks (male) and trowels of eye-shadow (female). We are revisiting the Lawrentian Spring (CND and rented cottages), before the Summer of Love. Bran Lynch, an uncocky and self-doubting Ginger Man, hanging on to the 1,000-foot contour in the soft limestone country of the Cotswolds, wanders on set ‘wearing the overcoat of a literary critic and a pair of army socks’. Hayward’s comedy is stoic, melancholy; the world squeezes his heart. He has the pulse of the land: ‘Sheepcrunch. The iron blathering of tractors. And the sun aggressing through the cracked window.’
The weekend party sours into its Monday aftermath, spill and chill and mismatched underwear, sticky tea grains in a burnt saucepan. A ‘large, genial negro’ called Shiner makes an uncomfortable entrance (current sensibilities on red alert): Shiner has possession of a black Jaguar car. Has he ‘borrowed’ it? ‘What you mean, boy? I hired it. Been working on the motorway. An’ Roz likes a bit of speed. That so, honey?’
She ‘blushes’. We blush. But, if we’re old enough, we’ve lived through such fictions before, seen the period awkwardness drop away, found surviving strengths. Class shapes the narrative, not race. Hayward doesn’t like cities, or the transport infrastructure. ‘Innumerable family cars were being eased out of congested garages onto congested roads… There would probably only be a few hundred injured in this rush, and those certainly the least deserving.’
The cold cottage, the bothy, the borrowed lodge: somewhere remote, out of it, to contemplate – what? The impossibility of salaried employment, urban life, relationships? Thin sunlight on barren fields, a dreadful silence: ‘It was so quiet she could hear the copulation of flies.’ Hayward’s characters, like the author, are oppressed by their ability to articulate, explain, use language.
Lynch cracks and is removed to a fictional version of the Epsom hospital in which Hayward himself had once been incarcerated. The hospital has its snobberies, hierarchies of incompetence. Robotic table-tennis and ECT are compulsory. ‘Everything was quiet, sunny, calm, but below these obvious suggestions of the air a hint of indescribable horror and violence.’
Within parkland, behind high walls, in an environment policed by burly men in white coats (NCOs left over from recent wars), Lynch encounters ‘the burning’. ‘With clinical assistance he cut his way back into sanity, but the shadow of the greater reality was never far from his mind.’
The asylum as rite of passage – through brain-shock, redirected lightning – goes back to Mary Shelley. And to Hayward’s contemporaries, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. To Ken Kesey. To Carl Solomon (dedicatee of Howl), to Allen Ginsberg’s ‘starry dynamo’. And Harold Pinter’s Aston (in The Caretaker): ‘Then one day they took me to a hospital, right outside London… They used to come round with these… Idon’t know what they were… they looked like big pincers, with wires on, the wires were attached to a little machine.’ Hayward, shocked in every way, every sense, is closer to the Gloucestershire poet/composer Ivor Gurney (and David Jones) than to the excited Laingian rhetoric of the Sixties. He associates himself with the landscape in which he lives, with forms of traditional knowledge. He fears: love and its loss.
His angst feeds in that dark ditch of the English imagination, the First War: in missing it. The guilt. Edward Thames spending a final, shivering winter in an Epping Forest cottage. Hayward’s bland Cotswold escarpment lacks shellholes, blackened tree stumps, bones poking from mud. Hayward faces: ‘The dilemma of those who are chosen to speak, but dare not. The trivial escape via sheer sensation, or the terrified plunge into the narrowing corridor of psychosis. With the increasing urgency of the voices on one side, it is scarcely possible not to crack.’
Hayward’s sense of place is respectful. Districts are recalled by a few precisely observed details. Epsom is vividly present in the walk that only a patient or hospital visitor would recognise, our green way between gulag and station. Locals, so Peter Carpenter informed us, know these byways as ‘The Slips’.
Released from confinement, Bran Lynch ‘took a narrow footpath that ran behind the backs of absurd villas towards the centre of town’. His delusions couldn’t be contained in a complacent Surrey town. ‘His particular kind of illness was a bit much for provincials to cope with. Even his insanity, it appeared, was metropolitan.’ City: madness, voices. Country: incubation or denial of visionary experience, silence.
Lynch, the dreamed double, walks Hayward’s walk: as we walked it, the same geography.
Tarry pavement soft after much sun. Rigidly fenced little back gardens, nakedly exposed from the sly angle of this path. Like a succession of intricately decorated privies, each revealing the particular crapulous mode of the indwelling imagination. Some with gnomes, goldfish. Some with pampas grass. Some with prize dahlias. One tusked and hummocked with coarse grass and weeds, among which lay jagged tins of Kit-e-Kat. At the end of this one a lithe sumac, already beginning to turn.
The aristocratic countryman’s eye falls on the follies and pretensions of suburbia, and exposes its own shame; an awkward passage through a mundane world. The banality of Epsom is eternal: Lynch enters the same cheap clothing store we visited. He buys ‘tapered K.D. trousers’, and gives his flannels to a charity shop. He takes a train for London.
The nakedness of the relationship between author and avatar possessed Peter Carpenter. Carpenter saw Hayward/Lynch as a significant Epsom figure, a man purged and refined by the hurt he had suffered. He sent me a ‘draft biographical outline’. Research materials for a potential ‘life’; a story that would, in all probability, never be written.
Born (1931) to an established, landowning Gloucestershire family. Parents separate. A ‘peripatetic existence’, with his mother, ‘moving between various hotels in the South of England and relations in the Isle of Man’. The estate is sold. They retreat to Galloway.
Dartmouth Royal Naval College. Hayward is allowed to leave the Navy to try for Oxford. Labourer on an organic farm. National Service. Merton College, Oxford. Fruit picking, libretto for opera. Oxford literary friendships include: Edward Lucie-Smith, Elizabeth Jennings, Adrian Mitchell. Receives instruction with a view to converting to Roman Catholicism. ‘Viva’d for a First but awarded a Second.’ Decides against becoming a Catholic, meets David Jones. They correspond.
Publishers’ rep for Elek Books, marriage. Honeymoon in Tenby and West Wales. Drives long distances, ‘often sleeping in the back of the van’. Sets up his own press. Moves from cottage to cottage. Children. Flat in Cheltenham: ‘acquainted with various poets, artists and bohemians, including Lyn Chad-wick and W.S. Graham’. Absorbed in a textual commentary on David Jones’s The Anathemata.
More poetry, more cottages: no electricity. ‘A petrol pump brings water from a well.’ Takes up woodcarving. Visits Harrow and discusses his commentary with David Jones.
‘Meetings with Gerald Yorke in Forthampton, interest in Aleister Crowley and magical rituals.’ Attempts novel. A number of extra-marital relationships: ‘drinking heavily and feeling trapped in London’. Quits Arrow Books. ‘Investigates possible life as a crofter.’ Calls on David Jones ‘in a distracted state’. Arrested for assault on police officer: ‘remanded in custody and subsequently admitted to Horton Hospital in Epsom.’ ECT. Released, after six weeks, into wife’s care. Teaches Cheltenham Technical College. Depression. Stays at Tibetan Centre. And at the Cistercian Monastery on Caldey Island (as David Jones had done).
It Never Gets Dark All Night accepted by Heinemann. Research into private papers of Ivor Gurney. Affairs on Ibiza: ‘manic episodes and feelings of alienation… increasingly reliant upon alcohol, tranquillisers and sleeping pills’. Novel published to generally favourable reviews.
Travels through France, Spain, Morocco, Ibiza: ‘hearing voices’. Starts work on novel ‘dramatizing a conflict between white magicians in Gloucestershire and black magicians in Ibiza’. Plans to set up bookshop in Exeter. Takes overdose, recovers in hospital. Invests in stock market. Travels relentlessly. Visits England, returns to Ibiza. ‘On 9th December 1968, he dies at Can Marias, probably by his own hand. Body flown back to England and buried at Quedgeley in Gloucestershire in an unmarked grave.’
I open Hayward’s novel at random: ‘An excess of transparency, described by the experts as a “nervous breakdown”, had brought him into direct contact with this world. Yet there were no devils.’
The chain of authorship, of promptings, coincidences, is laid bare. In a way that could only be broached in an Epsom pub, after a day touring lost hospitals and sealed tunnels. Carpenter chases Hayward, who chases David Jones, who is a pivotal figure in my own Welsh mythos. Jones is fractured by war, spiritual crisis, the impossibility of knitting together strands, whispers of Celtic, Roman and contemporary history: broken inscriptions, nervous palimpsests of sign and symbol. He convalesced, through long years, in his Harrow cave, his trench; submerged in boarding houses until he passed into the hands of the nuns. Harrow Hill looks west to the motorway. Hayward, like so many other casualties of London, is shipped out to Epsom.
A table of misaligned Ancients, retro-Romantics, in a racing pub, conduct a seance on nominated predecessors; hoping, like the other madmen of the town, to find clues in printed texts. Kevin Jackson takes the prize by dipping into Jones’s The Anathemata and fixing on ‘a weird premonition of your Epsom encounter with my pal Martin Wallen’.
‘The Lady of the Pool’ (p. 130):
brighted up old imaged Lud, as some tell is ’balmed ’Wallon,
high-horsed above Martin miles, what the drovers pray to
We stroll back to the station. Cars, tucked away in the Sainsbury’s park (which closes at seven p.m.), now face a £25 pound ‘release’ fee. We turn out our pockets, scrape it together. And then the lucky ones get themselves on a train for London.