"I know contemplation as a living, active union of myself and the world."
Nikolai Bakhtin (1894-1950)
One day after his first heart attack Francesca Wilson came from London and read Aftermath to Nicholas Bachtin. It was to be her first Penguin paperback, and he was so proud of her. So capable, so accomplished. He lay there muttering criticism through the fug of atrophy. A more constructive response would have been easier before his relentless energy vanished, instead he cursed himself for being a burden, for having needed to be rescued in the first place. When, or if the energy returned, would he be any less of a burden? With his outbursts and tirades, his wild gesticulations and exclamations of outrage, he had already sapped the strength of his wife, Constance. Now look at them, reduced to a pair of cripples. Francesca would return to London, leave them here in this provincial desert where she had brought him all those years ago. He may have been starving in Paris, but it was Paris, the capital of the Russian emigration. He thought of his friends Kobeko and Guerchenkron, Adamovitch and Cantor, the days of Zveno, and he even managed a small chuckle as he remembered the preposterous Green Lamp salon and being feted by Merzhkovsky and Hippius. The Parisian days of promise, destitution and promise. Finally, and almost too late, Birmingham had given him a School of Linguistics, and his work on Plato’s Cratylus was coming along… well, it was coming along. Bachtin would not curtail his ambitions of prophesy while he drew breath. Now they had all stopped killing each other, the students would return, and if they did not, he planned to lecture to anyone in the Birmingham streets who would listen.
Bachtin had the appetite of a gourmand for language. Having searched on shelves once heaving with abundance, he now stretched to the back of the cupboard, tapping at the top shelf for the correct English words which stubbornly shifted out of reach when required. The doctor insisted on rest and a controlled diet. Of course she did, Dr Barrow was Constance’s friend from the Communist Party, with her colourless grey suits and severe haircut, like one of those bohemian poets from the Stray Dog, who were all either dead now or banged up in some horrendous gulag. Mollie Barrow had been firm with him, he expected nothing less, warning him off his many indulgences. As his whole philosophy rested on the simple assertion, I thirst therefore I act, he instinctively recoiled from the thought of perpetual abstinence, then immediately recalled the presence of one of those dinky little packets of coffee that Wittgenstein had brought him, still sitting on the top shelf of the pantry. He smiled at the thought, at the memory of the aroma. Francesca smiled back, touching his hand.
And yet again I walked the Bachtin streams through Edgbaston. This time descending down to the Lee Bank extension, over the Middleway, into the new B5 Central area, towards the Rea. I took the steps down into Barrow Walk and a path along St Luke’s Road to where the Children’s Emigration Home once stood, just as the road begins to curve towards the Middleway. That particular edifice of bad memory had been unsentimentally demolished, its shadow too dark, and it had opened up a new vista of the deeper Highgate area whose dilapidation was a stark warning to the sparkling new Barrett homes behind me. In the middle of the road, under a manhole, Bell Barn Brook was babbling away to itself. The summer had been one long heatwave. The grass yellowed, and the air of this landlocked city was dry and dusty, but here was the sound of water flowing, an underground river heading for its confluence with the Rea.
Turning back to look at the series of cul-de-sacs and cut-throughs of Barrow Walk, the mossy garage doors and mouldy brickwork were signalling the temporal defiance of the damp meadowland beside the Rea. Beginning in the 1820s around Five Ways, on the dry ridge above the river, the eastern fringe of Edgbaston began to be developed. After a faltering start, building was in full swing from the 1840s to make it Birmingham’s most fashionable suburb. The tenant farmers were moved west allowing the damper south-eastern corner of the Calthorpe estate to be developed later in the century, and as that land overlapped with Balsall Heath and Highgate, the new houses were built for the lower middle-class and the ‘labour aristocracy’. One hundred years later, Varna Road which ran from Speedwell Road all the way to St Luke’s Road, became the focus of media attention which had dubbed it ‘The Wickedest Road in Britain’ for its poverty and vice. At the end of the 1960s, the whole area was razed to the ground and new but poor-quality homes were built. The name Varna Road disappeared, never to return, and in its place, north of the Middleway, Barrow Walk emerged. It was named after Mollie Barrow, the very same doctor who had signed Nicholas Bachtin’s death certificate.
Between Belgrave Middleway and Gooch Street there is a shambolic alleyway squeezed between the Rea and the back of houses on St Luke’s Road. It is usually strewn with rubbish and has a slightly menacing vibe, but I had used this shortcut for 30 years and never had trouble. The Rea has been entirely captured by human design at this point in its course. The riverbed and banks are brickworked, the local run-off entering through pipes at neatly calculated intervals. After stepping around fridges and ducking under masses of buddlea, I noticed an entrance to the river, shaped like some utilitarian fireplace with water flowing in from the west, the rivulet emerging from darkness, sparkling briefly as it falls onto the slimy bricks of the canalized Rea. This, I surmised, was the mysterious Bell Barn Brook. I was eager to believe it was and claim a longstanding problem solved, but had little in the way of proof. Was this really the confluence of Birmingham’s philosophical waters, and the Rea?
Birmingham’s founding river flows from the watershed of the Clent Hills, south-east of the city, to its own confluence with the Tame near Spaghetti Junction. The Tame rises from springs across the Black Country, and takes the waters of the Rea with it to Alrewas where it submits to the Trent, then the Humber, and finally the North Sea. In Highgate the Rea begins to shy away from onlookers. Firstly, by making itself look unloved then disappearing around a bend between Charles Henry Street and Bissell Street towards its crossing of significance under Digbeth High Street. Once upon a time this was a more complicated affair when it was joined by a stream from the manor’s moat and circled around a small causeway between Deritend and Digbeth. But now at the place where Birmingham began to grow, the Rea is at its most hidden, as if the city is ashamed of its roots. Of course, this was really because of the stench and disease which emanated from it. The toxicity of industrial progress and the tragedy it bequeathed to the landscape went hand-in-hand with the rapid expansion of the town in the 19th Century, leading directly to regular flooding of the Rea through factory floors. The floodplains had quickly been made impermeable without foresight of its consequences. Although the Rea was canalized by the end of the century, in the 1920s the situation was still so bad that a huge sum was spent to lower the riverbed and raise bridges along its course through Digbeth. The conquering of this small river by fording, followed by the exploitation of its limited motive force, was all that was needed to seed Birmingham, and the purposeful destruction of its natural landscape became synonymous with the city’s name.
The natural drainage system of Birmingham and the Black Country is the Tame of which the Rea is a tributary, and tributaries have tributaries have tributaries down to the slightest trickle, which will find its way downhill until it meets likeminded molecules. One of the Rea’s feeder rivulets caught my attention and became an object of obsession over the three years following my father’s death, and in particular its subsidiary streams which met the Bell Barn Brook near to the last home of Nicholas Bachtin. The Rea is named for what it does, an Old English term meaning ‘to flow’. Ironic then if you catch a glimpse as it passes through Highgate and Digbeth, it has been so canalized and lowered that it hardly seems to be flowing at all, but a glimpse of the Rea is more than you are likely to find of Bell Barn Brook which disappeared from view during the Chamberlain years of Civic Gospel. As mayor of Birmingham the mighty Joseph of Effluvium instigated the development of gas and water infrastructure to modernise the city.
I was the creator of this precept; that I must follow the invisible rivulet. This was my own path, to follow by compulsion, to trace its existence by speculative meandering. To follow one step with another, because what else is to be done? The momentum makes it so. A river does not stop to think, to worship Reason. Its purpose would evaporate. It is what flows, not in discrete steps, but continuously; the motive power of its function is the impulse of its necessity.
A grainy, uncredited photograph from the archives of the Library of Birmingham, looks uphill from the valley floor of Wheeley’s Road towards the lodging house where Nicholas Bachtin lived. He returned to Birmingham ten years after his rescue from Paris by Francesca Wilson and Serge Konovalov, to take up the post of assistant lecturer in Classics. The job which Louis MacNeice had vacated two years previously. It is a strain to see any detail in the murky print-out of the photograph taken over a century before. 27 Wheeley’s Road seems just as allusive as it is today. It was demolished around fifty years ago, leaving the remains of two gateposts cemented into the boundary wall of a private cul-de-sac. One fact is clear though – visiting Bachtin in October 1938, Wittgenstein stepped through those gateposts during his own return to the city after 25 years.
My thoroughly unscientific speculations led me to believe that there were two arms of the philosophical streams which fed Bell Barn Brook. One rising in the valley of Wheeley's Road, just left of where the photograph was taken, and the other rose uphill and to the right a little, in the vicinity of West House school. Using today’s names of locations, these two arms met at Templefield Square, flowing eastwards across Pakenham Road towards Charlotte Road at its lowest point and then met Bell Barn Brook somewhere around Summer Road. The brook then headed north-east, crossing Bristol Road (formerly the Bromsgrove turnpike) at Stone Road as we know there was a bridge beside the milestone. It then turned north over Belgrave Middleway, then north-east again following the line of Stratford House Road and St Luke’s Road towards the Rea at what was once Vaughton’s Hole, a former claypit repurposed as a flood defence and popular bathing spot.
I had been staring through a magnifying glass at a historical Cassini map of Birmingham and its environs when I noticed the tiny marks of the streams in the valley of Wheeley's Road. It is hard to articulate why they stimulated my interest so much. Finding them present in the abstract landscape of the map and out of sight in today’s reality, made me want to explore them further, to unfold the document, move within it and trace the invisible.
The river and its tributaries form a hierarchy of names reaching into obscurity. The streams I was investigating remained hidden from view and posed a difficulty in discussion by not being named beyond tributaries of Bell Barn Brook. For my own sake I thought of these as the philosophical streams or the Bachtin streams, but, as I came to realise, Bachtin was not the only philosopher who lived along their course. Halfway down the hill of Charlotte Road is Pakenham House, still looking very grand after all these years. When Constance Naden was barely a week old her mother slipped from this world, and the infant was placed in the care of her maternal grandparents. Pakenham House became her home for almost all of her own short life.
In later childhood Naden would walk uphill to the school of the highly-cultured Martin sisters on Frederick Road while entertaining other girls of the neighbourhood with imaginative and fantastic stories. She drew upon the information gleamed from her talks with trees, birds and butterflies, and convinced her young audience of impossibilities both delightful and grotesque. When her schooling ended, she spent her time in seclusion; learning languages and composing the poems included in Songs and Sonnets of Springtime. Then she enrolled at Mason College, the forerunner of the University of Birmingham, where she threw herself into the sciences, notably studying geology under Charles Lapworth. The mysticism which had informed her poetry came to be joined by her enthusiasm for the Synthetic Philosophy of Herbert Spencer. In 1883 the Birmingham Natural History and Microscopical Society established a Sociological Section for closer examination and propagation of Spencer’s ideas. Over the next few years, Naden delivered talks to its members and contributed many papers to the scientific journals of the day.
The truth came to her as a revelation – rocks are liquid too, to be is to flow. Steadying herself from a sudden dizziness, she held on to a kind word from her mother, but that was impossible of course. She lay deep in the keuper marl of Key Hill. A fleeting consciousness, then an eternal repayment to the earth. It is but cannot be, no! She asked the birds and she asked the trees how it was and why not some other way as the ground shifted beneath her, the whole hillside sliding downwards until the plaint of the streams could be heard. As a six-year-old Naden had wandered to the edge of the pastures, to the rivulet, and saw the sunset burning through the smoke which rose beyond the ploughed fields. Then as a young woman the sun was dimmer, the smoke thicker. On her Thursday evening walks to the Home for Friendless Girls where she taught the three Rs, more of Colborne Fields disappeared every week until even Bell Barn Brook vanished.
The bucolic landscape had shrunk to the tips of her toes. The human organism was spreading, and through industry and its multitudinous new skills, it was evolving. It seemed as if all men were occupied with a great endeavour, or someone was wholly occupied on their behalf and was very keen to involve them in the construction of one all-encompassing and never-ending laboratory. Clouds of the most bewildering gases spewed out from the town, the result of beguiling alchemical processes, but thankfully the prevailing winds prevented them from permeating the lofty Edgbaston air.
The observers gazed upon the static image, their eyes sweeping the picture into life. Britannia victorious, frozen in time and draped on the circular wall. At the corner of Bennetts Hill and New Street stood the circular panorama where visitors paid money to stand on a central platform and transport themselves into the heat of battle. The weapons drawn against Napolean’s army were no doubt made in Birmingham. The glorious scene was inescapable, a titillation suggesting the heroic ecstasy of near-fatal injury. Wars were won and alliances changed. When Bachtin was shot through the lung while serving in Morocco with the French Foreign Legion, he shouted, “Vive La France!” before collapsing into unconsciousness. They gave him a medal to aid his recovery. And it was not the first time he had cheated death. Under the fever of typhus, he had clung desperately to a corpse in a frozen goods wagon as the White Army retreated south through Russia. He reached out to the dead for comfort and warmth. In 1930, he received a pension from the French military for his wounds. It wasn’t much but it was enough to buy a small boat which he then proceeded to row from Paris to the Mediterranean. He had regained enough strength for an adventure through France along its rivers and canals. First, he was joined by his future wife, Constance Pantling and her sister. Then at Macon they were replaced by Francesca Wilson and the adventure continued, until the shipwreck.
One day a photograph of Cambridge Crescent appeared on Facebook from the Memories of Birmingham group. It prompted me to return once again to the street which had been the last home of Bachtin. Nothing remains now of how it looked in 1950. In fact, one half has entirely disappeared and the other was unglamorously redeveloped into a little cul-de-sac sometime in the post-war decades. So I was deeply intrigued by my first insight into how the street would have looked at the time of Bachtin’s death.
Only one house is visible in the photograph, sitting on the bend in the road and on a slight incline. It is a large Victorian terrace house with a central entrance and rooms on either side. An attic window is visible on the gable end. There are a few similar houses still surviving in the wider area, but not on this road, half of which no longer exists. There are no cars to narrow down the age of the photograph, but judging from its quality it is more likely to be mid-twentieth century than earlier. This is definitely not a Victorian photograph and it could very well have been taken by a Birmingham City Council surveyor prior to redevelopment. The Crescent is decades past its prime. One section of the garden wall has started to lean into the road, the lamppost is heading the other way, kerbstones are unaligned, bricks missing and a tree has become overgrown, obstructing the view of the house opposite. The photograph is most likely of number one Cambridge Crescent but there is no reason to think that Nicholas and Constance’s house differed greatly. The lack of people and cars on the street gives it an extra stillness and silence. It could almost have been taken at the moment of his death, or as a memento mori in the interminable mournful hush. For a while I was wandering about inside this photograph, exploring the moment at the end of the story, overwhelmed by the silence. Too late to be a witness, too late to help. And then time stopped.
