The ghost of Conrad’s Cadillac
By: Rosanna Vitiello
Tags: Placemaking, Storytelling, London, Travel Writing, Short Story

The ghost of Conrad’s Cadillac

A Hackney local legend

“Parked at the back of the German Hospital, as an oblique tribute to Joseph Conrad, was a distressed, fashion-accessory Cadillac. In layers of sedimentary brown: red mud with traces of iron: Brougham D’Elegance it said on the hood.” Iain Sinclair: Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire

Back in the day I lived in Brooklyn. Problem was, my head was mainly in Hackney. I would gaze across my desk at New York’s East River, comforted by industrial ship traffic busying up and down. But all the while I day-dreamed across the pond, to a city I’d once despised and now couldn’t rid my mind of. A place that in my head was slowly pulling me back.

At the time, I was working on a project to capture the story of London’s Olympic Park. The atmosphere brewing before the Games was shot with anticipation, but soured by heavy doses of British cynicism. The Park was a big deal and a big battle for East London: 30 years of development fast-tracked into 5; Many miles of hoardings that felt like banging your head against a blue wall. Stationed in New York, I felt the need to walk those streets and be among the building tension to tell the story. So I moved my mind to London.

Iain Sinclair was firmly in the cynics camp. Just before the Games, the itinerant writer published Hackney That Rose Red Empire a book that mused as it wandered his home host borough. Written in response to the ‘greatest show on earth’ set to erupt that July, Sinclair became the most vocal critic of the Park. He countered the approaching avalanche of development with a deeper read of Hackney past and present. Stop-start glimpses caught while walking, a blur of strange truths, fiction and nostalgia. ‘Unreadable,’ said some, but perfect for stranded New Yorkers. It became my A-Z of atmosphere as my head paced the East.

It was the cadillac that first caught my minds-eye. Turning into the chapter on The German Hospital, Sinclair described the rusting relic dumped outside the old building. Maybe it was the American connection that stuck with me, or the rarity of this type of car in London? Regardless, the hulk was an anomaly in this part of town. How did it get here? Outside a hospital built for London’s German population in 1846, where Joseph Conrad and Florence Nightingale were patient and practitioner. Conrad after years as a merchant seaman, ventured to the Congo where he fell ill, then onto London via Belgium to convalesce. His great friend George Fountaine Hope recalled ‘When he arrived, he looked half dead with fever. So Krieger, who knew the doctor at the German Hospital got him in there.’ Years later, as fortune picked up, Conrad bought his first car: a second-hand Cadillac, affectionally known as ‘the puffer’ by his family, and roared around the lanes of rural Kent. But while this car was rusting, it was certainly not Conrad’s.

The car threw up so many questions, and intrigue and ambiguity drew me in. The situation couldn’t be have been further from the Park, where — to make peace with surrounding communities and make transparent public monies — any queries had to be answered fresh, bright and clear. No stone unturned, no questions asked.

My mind continued to wander until it emigrated back to London, this time with body and family in tow. Firmly back, the city for once felt positive, perked up for gamestime in jazzy pinks and purples. I began to feel at home in Hackney, piecing together excerpts of the book to match reality, like meeting the relatives you’ve only ever seen in family albums. Before long we moved as if by magic into said German Hospital —now converted to apartments— to find the real live cadillac flunked outside: owner long gone.

Cabbies would sometimes drop us off and crack a nostalgic smile as they turned the corner. ‘Haven’t been here since 1988. Was still an hospital then.’

But when I quizzed them no-one knew the origins of the car. So there it remained sedate, surrounded by a haze of speculation and stories. I admit, I was proud to live with this rock’n’roll landmark outside, even if it had the air of a hungover guest who’d come to the party and never left.

Someone thought it was time to clean up. One neighbour couldn’t see the charm in flat-tyre Americana and reported the car as fly-tipped. The night before it was set to be towed, dusk fell blue and the Cadillac glowed bronze under lamplights. I peered out the window to see two men emerge tinkering, as if pulling for scrap. Keying with the locks, they tried to jump start it up, but to no avail. Unceremoniously the next day, the Cadillac left the building.

Days later I came across the same two outside: an elderly African gentleman, frail, small and leaning on a stick for support. Part of the neighbour’s complaint was that this vast cadillac had taken up the disabled spot, but clearly this guy needed it. His grown-up son, looking strong and sharply well-dressed, supported his father’s arm as they walked.

‘Was that your car they towed?’ I said, ‘I loved that Cadillac.’

‘It was my father’s,’ said the son, eyes hanging.

‘They should never have taken it’ he lamented, and with a flicker of furious pride, ‘It was a local legend. A landmark.’

‘Where did you get it?’ I turned to the older man and asked.

He looked up, and in a French-tinged African accent, he responded proud:

‘I bought it from an American General in Belgium.

And I drove it. All-the-way-back-to-Hackney.’

—