Night 1
Night 1: Friday 18th November. Hilary and Dan.
The crowdfunder goes live. We scrabble around to make sure rewards are set up. We sort out a good tea and I warn Dan he’s perhaps drinking too much wine for rooftop sleeping. G goes to cubs. We get a key cut so we can lock the door from inside and out. We climb the ladders in trepidation and settle in. After leaving all the bedding under the plastic sheeting with pools of water above and having to have the heating on to dry everything we’re learning a system. The plastic cover in the mattress is taped on and the only thing left up in the daytime is a sheet on the bed with the clear plastic tarpaulin tied securely over it and weights placed on it. The lights are covered in plastic bags and the desk is exposed to the elements and still needs its drawers in.
I ‘m writing this in the morning of Saturday 19th November totally wiped out. The alarm went in my pocket when I was deeply asleep to get up and make sure E got to football – down the ladder, bringing up a cup of tea and making a packed lunch, walking the dogs around the corner to drop her off at her friends to go down south London for a match. G keeps opening the loft windows asking where his special t shirt is and I have no idea. The inside of the house is a total tip and today should be for tidying so that at least when we go inside there is some semblance of calm and order. It’s actually calmer up here. Peaceful.
As soon as we said we were doing this people started mentioning John and Yoko. I didn’t understand why and hadn’t heard of their ‘bed ins’. Researching it I can see why – a kind of conflation of the couple in bed making a point/protest and the Beatles rooftop recording sessions. But that’s about it. They were in luxury hotels. We’re on a roof and critically we can’t and don’t want to be the kind of (David Blaine in a box) hero’s story. We have to include the stories not told – of maintenance and care and routine – dog walking, cooking, cleaning, keeping both family life running, applications going in, practical issue sorting, the campaign building and neither of us are willing to leave all that to the other whilst we undertake some kind of personal quest.
So this is something else – a patched together occupation of the rooftop – the rule being we sleep up here every night but we are allowed up and down to see to the everyday. As Friday’s daylight faded, we took photos and filmed with Leonie and the theatre of it all is apparent- we’re on a kind of rooftop stage. I have to keep my glasses on a string around my neck at all times even when sleeping as when people talk to us I have no idea who they are. I hear clapping and laughing from a nearby loft window and its Joanne opposite. People wave and shout up to us. Kristin’s children look up from the bike locker below and want to join.
There is something children’s literature about it – from rooftoppers, to Lyra in Pullman’s Oxford to Aristocats, Esmé says it reminds her of the cardboard models she used to make positioning Sylvanian family furniture of rooftops. And as I write this on my laptop on the roof with the trains rolling by nearly as high on the embankment at the end of the garden as I am I do feel like this is some kind of residency. A time and space out of the normal routine.
Having said that I was called down to find a script and ended up doing an hours cleaning and putting the washing on.
Sleep last night was fitful. I couldn’t wait to give in to it. To snuggle down under the covers and sleep. But I was freezing. I ventured back inside to add another layer of joggers and cardigan and found some amazingly warm socks that are probably stretching my nice but rapidly declining boots over the limit. That’s more like it.
Dan brings up his technical mountain gear he’s got for the occasion and I am realising that it might be a good idea. I wanted the bed to look properly domestic with quilt and coloured blankets but the damp pervades. We pull over the plastic sheet and are glad to – it keeps a bit of the wind out and the drizzle that comes sporadically.
Weather forecast says 5% rain. Better than the 90% of the last few days. As dusk falls we wave at the trains passing by. Most people are looking down at their phones so I wonder if anyone would even notice this strange spectacle. Someone messages via Instagram to say they’ve spotted us and it would make a great photo. We’ll organise a filming/photography trip on the train one stop and back to capture it.
It’s 10.55am on Saturday 19 November and the sun is warming my face. 2 doors down are having massive works down with scaffolding reaching into the sky and chimneys in ghostly silhouette through misty plastic. It is so quiet and yet so full of specific sounds – of work ladders being unfolded, car doors closing, bike lockers opening, children crying, nearby football field shouts, the crisp shuffling of the plastic wrapping the lamp shades that I should just take off for better visual effect but am lazy and happy here wrapped in my blanket.
It's tempting to check how we’re doing now we’ve first shared the campaign. One blooper is that we shared the wrong link in the recent mailout but Dan’s correcting it now.
Unbelievably I ‘m now hot, basking in the winter sun and actually thinking I should wear sunscreen. People say we’ve chosen the wrong time of year to do this, and they might be/are definitely right but if I imagine doing this in the recent 40 degree heatwave I think there would be a very real danger of severe heatstroke with no shade or shelter. I watch people walk by on the pavements below. Only the children seem to have noticed me and look up in surprise… and maybe a bit of wonder. And that’s what I want to hold onto and share – amid all the gloom - to keep a sense of wonder in this world. To see the extraordinary in the everyday. My hopes for being up here with a ‘roof under our heads’ as we’re now calling this, is that I can also see my habitat anew – a place we share with many living things. A magpie chatters, an unidentified small missile of a bird skims past my head, foxes walk the rail tracks and seagulls ride the thermals above.
My colleague Jenny says ‘you’re building a nest.’ I ‘ve read more up here in one night than I have for a while, hands poking out of covers to turn the pages of ‘H is for Hawk’ from this rooftop eyrie – a story of grief and of the tame and wild.
It is clear from this position that the wild city is around us and the spaces we build ourselves, the homes we shelter in and take flight from. I think of the Yeats poem ‘The Second Coming’ – “Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer, the centre cannot hold, things fall apart…‘
And if I have slight vertigo up here – the tingle in the feet that only happens when a child is here with me, the inbuilt instincts that make me more careful than I’d like to be or am on my own – then maybe it’s part of a bigger sense of vertigo – a consciousness of the precipitous history we balance on top of. Dan always seems to see permanence – he trusts in the stone he stands on, the chimney pots he climbs as solid, material fact. I see their imminent demise or collapse. It’s a kind of x ray vision that could be super power or kryptonite.
These houses were built by people, most likely men, labouring in the late 1800s, building wooden scaffold, mixing lime mortar, lugging bricks which in turn were made by hand in local brick fields. I ‘m obsessed with these bricks. So much so I took one to a recent ice breaking via object session as part of the GLA ‘civic futures’ fellowship I ‘m part of. Attempting to take it into the glass walled offices of City Hall in Canning Town I was stopped in the airport like security. They ask me to identify the solid block showing up in the bag scanner imagery. After internal discussion I’m allowed in - the responsibility for me not using it as a weapon lying with the fellowship organisers.
Smashing windows aside, I talk about the shape shifting nature of this brick, the origins of the London clay it is made of - formed in the sub-tropical swamps of prehistoric times. You can match the map of London’s future flooding to this watery past and this porous, liquid history surfaces increasingly regularly in these streets of Walthamstow, built on the floodplains of the River Lea – reclaimed and managed land of rising damp and sea levels.
Sometimes it does seem pointless. Too little. However much we work to reduce our carbon emissions in this small corner of the world it isn’t enough. But if the alternative is to do nothing then I ‘d rather this.
We do not act in isolation. Action can be contagious and stories and images can shift both perception and reality. Maybe it’s the fact my hands on the keyboard are starting to seize up with cold that the mood is darkening with the skies. Dan would say this scudding, volatile weather suits or reflects me. It is amazing how quickly it changes. It induces a kind of seasickness and requires the same kind of organisation as the camping or sailing I stay away from to avoid sodden blankets and electrical faults. Dan shouts he’s off to pick up G, a squirrel pops its head over the edge of the rooftop and I wonder how long it will take before they get too friendly. The half eaten bar of dairy milk must be tempting them. It’s tempting me.
