Johnny Rebel Meets Progressive Europe
Part III
I had a mostly-bun sandwich for dinner that night; Erin cooked some pasta in her flat. Having just rained, the ground was still wet, which suited my first bona fide tour nicely...
Walking the trail of Jack the Ripper!This can be done officially through arrangements with The Original London Walks for about 5 pounds. Or you can buy a copy of Walking Haunted London, by Richard Jones - a self-guiding primer to dozens of supernatural spun walking tours in London with stories, maps, and tube stop to tube stop street directions.
On our tube ride to Whitechapel Station, I had a hard time keeping to myself the widespread shunning of alcohol codes. People, numerous people, loudly popped cans of beer open without even looking about for bobbies, conductors, or tattle-tale straights. Having just arrived from across an ocean, I tries not to stare, but I couldn't believe it! Everybody - from rock-N-roll tossers to older businessmen in their overcoats & trilbies, loosening their ties - enjoying a 6:30 cold one.
Once we got back outside, I asked Erin if people regularly disregarded drinking laws like that. Smile - she liked this one. "You're allowed to drink in public here." She shared, gesturing with an upturned palm to the world around us. I scanned the block and, sure enough, across the street, a small group was sharing a drink and a laugh... you know... no where in particular... Just in the sidewalk.
London looked a click different now.
"So I could just walk this tour with a drink and I wouldn't get in trouble?"
"No one would really care," she smiled, just soft enough not to ridicule.
Decent.
As I made my way to a the nearest "convenience"-looking shop, the geezer coming out cracked open his beer and took two gulps right in front of me. I took my time browsing all my new options (canned cider, 8.5%, y'all!), eventually grabbing a 16 oz. can of malt liquor (you can take the boy out of Jackson Ward...)
Determined and ready to start, we set off. And walked three blocks without seeing the first turn. Not wanting to waste time, I hurried to make a U-turn (which Mari calls "Pitching a bitch", but doesn't quite gel with Richard Pryor's use of the phrase on my introduction to it on "That Nigger's Crazy" ) and we keep our eyes double-peeled on our way back past the store (I'll publicly gulp to that). No dice three more blocks. I don't remember exactly how many U-turns we made after that, but it didn't take long before we got our act together. I read from the book while we walked, giddily aware I didn't have to look up from the book to scope for the fuzz. I directed us according to the map while setting the scene with the book's introduction - the East End before the Beast of Whitechapel left it forever changed.
The weather itself set the scene brilliantly. The overcast sky blocked any view of the setting son, trapping in grotty moisture left over from this afternoon's rains as it rose back up off the still-hot cobblestone - thick air with no wind to roll it out and on top of all that, the streetlamps hadn't yet come on.
Around the barbed-wire fence of a gradeschool-looking building, my reading led us to a gateway. I looked up at it, then down at the ground, pointing, and read to Erin that right there the body of Mary Ann Nichols was found, her throat cut back to her spine.
Ms. Nichols, a 43-year old prostitute, had been thrown out of her lodging for not meeting rent two hours before her body was found. "I'll soon get my doss money," she spat at her landlord. "See what a jolly bonnet I've got!" When her body was found, lying in a heap, it was so bloody that not until she arrived at the hospital was it discovered she had been emboweled. I pictured her body lying right there and looked around, wondering which direction the Ripper approached from. Which did he leave. On a wall nearby was posted a foreboding warning.
As we approached the location of the next victim, the sky fell dark, street lights switched on, but they only really brought our attention to all the narrow alleys and nonsensical cobblestone turnabouts we wouldn't have otherwise noted. Erin and I made our way down Hanbury Street, now lined with Bangladeshi restaurants. The exotic, barely recognizable scents of their entrees followed us to * Lot 29. At 5:30 a.m., Eight days after the first murder, prostitute Annie Chapman was seen talking to a man wearing a leather apron (that's what the book says) and deerstalker's cap, matching a description of clothes worn by the Nichols killer. At 6:00 a.m., Chapman's body was found in the backyard of 29 - her throat slit, abdomen open and her intestines thrown over her shoulder. I closed the book. We looked up and down the street, listening to the Bangladeshi dinner banter, and thinking about our guts.
My head back in the book, I read by streetlight while Erin navigated. Leaving the hectic smells and sounds of Southern Asian supper behind us, we found the old site of The International Workingman's Educational Club. Around one in the morning [not to hard to imagine in our newly found quiet] the Club steward was doing his rounds when, from his stagecoach he saw a woman lying behind the front gates. We discerned where those gates must have been and I read on. Assuming the woman to be his drunken wife, the steward turned her over to reveal the slashed throat of "Long Liz" Stride, a local prostitute. Since she had not been mutilated, one can deduce that the sound of the approaching stagecoach scared the attacker off.
"I guess he took the detour," I jest, trying to joke away the undeniable tide of heebie-jeebies we've worked up. The sun is completely gone and the few sounds we can hear are coming from places further away than we can determine. In effort to shake up the mounting spook, I began reading again.
By this point ( September 1888) the law has permitted prostitutes to solicit on the small brick island of the Church of St. Boltoph.
"Cool," digs Erin. "Let's check out the Church of Hassle-Free Hookers."
I begin walking & reading, "On September 29th, at 8:30 p.m., Catherine [oomph]!" I almost fell over waling into the chain hanging the detour sign I just pointed out. Doy. We step over the construction, but the road is so under construction that, even after climbing fences and shimmy-ing across a neglected pick-up truck, we cannot get through. This particular spot is well-lit and I think about how much fun it would be to climb these huge slabs of basked up concrete and mounds of rocks. So we do. A car even passes by.
Once we decide to get back to the Ripper's Path, we make a few U-turns until Erin climbs up on the cement divide and figures out where we should be aiming ourselves. I am confidant of her navigational skill until we enter a narrow passageway with no light at the end of the way, which to me is a sure sign of a dead end. With Erin taking point, I'm bringing up the rear and keep my knuckles touching her back, not unlike basketball defense-style, when Erin stops.
I stop.
"One way?" I ask.
She fishes about her pockets, a noise I find very unwelcoming in these particular quarters, then startles me striking a match. As it flares up, I get a good view of our corridor, a view I definitely don't want since I expect to find a handsome, top-hatted man withdrawing a long knife from his cape. He isn't there, but once Erin's cigarette is lit, she tosses the spent match and we round the corner to a church front. There is a streetlight but, oddly enough, we can't find a name for the church. We call it Boltoph and I continue the saga.
"8:30 p.m., Catherine Eddows is arrested for public drunkenness, detained until sober, and released around 1:00a.m. At 1:35, she is seen chatting with a man, her hand on his chest. At 1:45, her body was found in Metre Square: her throat had been cut, her abdomen ripped open, V-shaped incisions on her cheeks, both eyes stabbed, the tip of her nose sliced off, and her uterus & left kidney were missing.
We found Metre Square and it was just as dark and humid as I hoped it wouldn't be. The Square is maybe 150 feet each side with at least two flights of grey cement bordering each side. There were no streetlamps and none of the surrounding windows glowed with light from the room behind them. All we could here were distant automobiles - no pedestrians. Here, I realize that, being to only people here walking around, it wouldn't be to hard for any of the locals to peg us as tourists in mid-Ripper jaunt. This meant they could easily find a laugh in scaring the poop out of us; thereby exposing me to be the big girl's blouse, which I'm choking (whimpering) back. Now I am searching for the Beast of WhiteChapel, and any number of hooligans.
But Metre Square is something else. Had I never even read the book I would know this is a murder scene. Past, present or future there's no other reason for this place to exist. Erin & I make our way to the northwest corner, where Eddow's body was found and, no shit, there is a shapeless blackened mass there. As we get closer, I see it's too big to be a body [well, one body - perhaps a gory heap?] We get closer, and slower, and closer, and slower* our pupils must be at maximum dilation but we still can't quite make it out. Without warning me Erin lights another match, the scratch & illumination of which send me off the opposite way as if a can of bats flew out.
It was a cellar- with tarped parcels on top.At this point, you can follow the Ripper's actual escape route, determined by a nearby clue found the night of the murder. Erin & I start from the northwest corner, then make our recreated getaway through the paths and gateway to the address the in front of which Police Constable Alfred, at 2:50 a.m. the same morning, found Eddow's smock, still sticky with blood. The exact number of the address is no longer there, but we gathered around our approximation of where the smock was left & found to stare for a few seconds.
The rest of the trail was well-lit and followed some main thoroughfares. Although the building is no longer there, we found the proximity where, between 3:30 and 4:00 a.m. on Nov. 9, a woman was heard to cry "MURDER!" That cry was ignored. The next day, a landlord arrived to collect rent and found Mary Kelly's skinned body. The last strike of the Beast of Whitechapel - Jack the Ripper.
There is only one building from that era still intact. It is the Providence Row Night Shelter - a sanctuary where nuns help to ease the suffering of Victorian society's less fortunate. Although well lit on two sides, this building put more of a fright in me than any of the murder sites. Just reading the placard along the length of the archway gave us a sense of eerie deeds and quarrels of dementia just through those doors. Imagine the hundreds of depraved circumstances personified by the women here. And the employee's exasperating onslaught of society's damned night after night. Not that the building, itself, was evil, but the legacy of containing horror after horror would be enough to turn even the cleanest, most sterile quarters into a dungeon.
On the second floor, I spotted a dim light from one of the windows. It was so quiet I wondered of the shelter was even open or [gulp] abandoned. The light that came through was not from the windowed room, but more like a hallway or adjoining room's light which had to pass through an open door before reaching the window. I strained to make out any shapes inside - anything from a lampbase to an insomniac's silhouette. Would they/she even notice I was standing down here, or would we make penetrating eons of eye-contact to the point of hypnosis?
Or is anybody even there? I mean, it's really quiet, I don't hear anything at all from inside. It's nighttime - wouldn't this be peak hour for those seeking shelter?
What if they're all dead? If some trespassing male locked the door and made his way, stabbing, slashing, and tearing from the front desk, to the offices, from room, to room, until he stares out the window and sees me, too. Imagine finally escaping this guy on the streets, you make it here, and finally lay down to safety & calm when he slowly pushes open the door*
I tell Erin about this scenario and she suggests we walk around back. Just walking along the side opens up a whole new bag of ghosts - 19th century unspeakables and wits' ends. There are no more lights on, it's still silent, and we can't get around back. As we make our way to the front again, I keep my eyes glued on that one faint light, hoping for a glimpse of a lumbering male or a nun making her rounds, but no such luck. Shit, for all I know I am being stared at.
Having finished our walk, we make our way to Bishops Gate Road for the Liverpool tube station. The darkness is surely over now as we emerge from our walkway into the direct path of a whole rectangle's worth of megawattage white lights - the kind used in stadiums or MAKING MOVIES! Dude! There are at least seven vans parked along the street, crammed with high tech gear, miles of wires, generators, measuring instruments, and hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of oversized gadgetry I'll never understand. Being a sewer rat at heart, I immediately start sniffing & scanning for the catering truck.
No one seemed to care that we were there, even as we stepped across taped bundles of very thick wires. Although, the lights were keeping the block extremely bright, we still couldn't find anyone receiving any star treatment. But there sure was a shitload of crew - at least 40 people concerning themselves with logistics and timings.
The irony being that all this celluloid attention was being focused, not on humans (or even animals), but the bottom of a marvelous structure. At least 15 flights high, it was illuminated in various violet, yellow, and white lights. The iron supports were all exposed and small lights dotted every conceivable form of stairwell, platform and walkway you can imagine. It looked like Blade Runner or the final ship in Aliens. And here was a time-consuming effort to take pictures at the bottom.
I walked up to the security guard at the bottom of the building and asked if we could climb the stairs. He said "no" which would not have necessarily stopped me except I caught his vast control panel with dozens of security camera screens. I looked up at all the wonderfully lit stairs and thought "yeah, there's probably cameras all over this place. Certainly on all the parts I want to climb.
Erin & I watch the film crew waiting for something to happen, which it doesn't. No one even nicks a sandwich from catering. Took a quick tube home, we parted ways at a fork in the road, no problems with the keycard (cheers), I tip toe into bed, making sure not to wake the three sleeping roomies.
©2001- Chris Hebbe
About the Author: The Author will provide more infomation when he damned well pleases.