Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply.
Patti Smith Just Kids
The streets haunt you, just as echoes of you haunt them. You walk past the bell foundry, an insinuation of holy smoke and sonorous alchemy, and into Fieldgate Street. Drunken nights walking home arms around shoulders, your talk bubbling out excitedly with butterfly ideas and suddenly-clear insights, all forgotten by the morning. You tell Sarah about the book on relativity that you just read: words, unmediated and ill-understood tumble from your mouth and vanish like soap bubbles in the night air. She feels sorry for Nixon over yesterday’s resignation, she says, despite everything he’s done. He’s just a flawed human being like the rest of us. You come to the ghost-signed shop fronts at the turning into Settles Street. Store fronts that are never open, whatever time of day you pass, yet often they echo with the sound of voices within. On the next corner a fruit and vegetable distributor, its doors always shut fast, yet still the redolent smell of ripe onions. No longer able to resist, your eyes are drawn to the other side of the road, a monolith of red brick, the fingers of its Gothic corner towers scratching at the sulphurous sky, a low canopy of purple and grey. Rowton House, Jack London’s ‘monster doss house’, stares back at you, daring you to blink. Men queue to be allowed in: a still, silent line, an air of resignation hanging over them like the aroma of an unbidden fart. Meanwhile others, occasional and individual, burst out through the doss house doors, desperate to shake off its fetid air. Here and in the surrounding streets émigré Bolsheviks still debate with Mensheviks and, smiling, secretly plot their moment of vengeance each upon the other. Silent yet wakeful, Joseph Stalin lies in his bunk listening to the snores of Litvinov in the next cubicle. While before you on the street, his head bowed, the boots of a passing dosser beat a loose-soled tattoo against the greasy paving slabs.
This is a short extract from an extended deep memory trip by Bobby Seal with pictures of Whitechapel in the 1970s by David Hoffman. The full piece and photographs can be seen at Unofficial Britian.
