My Time in Space Read Free Page A

all around it. From that (quite properly) modest eminence one sees the Greater London of dingy towerblocks, cardboard-box industrial units and turbid rivers of traffic, with enough aircraft overhead to define aloose skein of flight-paths hanging above and declining into it at various grey points of the compass. Some notes have surfaced, of my first expeditions there:
    19/5/72 I saw across the Kilburn valley (Watling St.) the spire of another church – from there one could look back and see the spire of the Priory Rd. church. Walking along Willesden Lane, ‘I’ll walk as far as the next village and then get the bus back.’ And it is a village. In the dental lab window: ‘Why not get an 18 or 22 carat gold tooth fitted to your dentures?’ Front doors with names and numbers stacked against the wall in the scrap metal yard; mercury 14s. a lb. today. Mr Whisker next to the pet shop. Metropolis, a magnificent green and red perspex service station.
    I asked somebody ‘What’s that big building on the horizon?’ He stared along the sideroad. His first horizon in London? ‘Maybe one of those factories on the North Circular.’ Later I found it is the GPO Research Centre. The parkkeeper in Gladstone Park identified Wembley Stadium for me; ‘Cup Finals, we hear the roar.’
    Beyond that, another valley, then up Dollis Hill. Dodging around to see the Adelaide Rd. towerblocks between the trees of Gladstone Park. Navigating by the sun through slow curves of semi-detached houses towards Willesden Green. A brilliant shortcut along Charlesworth Rd. Places you can see across London: from railway bridges, along the lines.
    6/6/72 Drizzle and semis to Gladstone Park, and a steep hill to the GPO Research Centre, but from there a great vista down and across the Welsh Harp (at last!). From the North Circular Road see church and rounded treetops of a clearly defined village on the other shore beyond the masts of sailing boats. On the south shore, along Blackbird Hill to Neasden . Long detour to get down to the northern shore. Little woods. A squeaking and rustling; waited, saw a little shrew (W.H. Hudson writes about this in A Shepherd’s Life). Further on in the fields watched a pair of kestrels divebombing a crows’ nest. The crows frightened, silent, crouching on the nest. One flew off across the fields and was almost beaten to the ground by the hawk swooping on it. Ambiguous end; did both crows leave the nest? The other kestrel sat in the field for a long time. A robin perched a yard or two from me as I watched all this; thin wistful song, a lonely bird.
    18/6/72 Went back to see if in fact it was the crows which were robbing the kestrels’ nest. Bus to Hendon Broadway; the sight of the lake is nearly as romantic as the inn-sign of it there, ‘The Old Welsh Harp’. Squally day, grey and silver. Coots and ducks on the waves. Watched the nest for a long time, sheltered under an elm from the rain. A hawk came into the tree briefly; the only crows were a little group in the field 200 yards away. So it was the hawks nesting in an old crows’ nest. The kestrels hovering and gliding across to the far side of the lake – and beyond them the regular sloping down of airliners towards Heathrow, quite silent at that distance, two visible at any time. A march-tit by the lake and yellow flags. An hour there, and no-one passed! Past the sailing clubs to Blackbird Hill, walked up it but couldn’t get much sense of the land beyond. Bus back to Willesden Garage, took the wrong turning coming out of a little bookshop and got spectacularly lost. Arrived at the Harrow Road! and walked back to Willesden Lane by endless slow-curved avenues. It was the bus-ride that broke my contact with the land’s directions.
    But in the modern city’s layout ‘the land’s directions’ have been overridden by the impetus of transport; it is perverse to identify oneself with the losing side, the buried past, in this historical agon. My 1960s artistic projects