Car Park Life E-Book

Gareth E. Rees

• Herausgeber: Influx Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 260

Beschreibung

Car parks: commonplace urban landscapes, little-explored and rarely featured in art and music, yet they shape the aesthetics of our towns and cities. Hotspots for crime, rage and sexual deviancy; a blind spot in which activities go unnoticed. Skateboarding, car stunts, drug dealing, dogging, murder. Gareth E. Rees believes that the retail car park has as much mystery, magic and terror as any mountain, meadow or wood. He's out to prove it by walking the car parks of Britain, journeying across the country from Plymouth to Edinburgh, much to the horror of his family, friends – and, most of all – himself. He finds Sir Francis Drake outside B&Q, standing stones in a retail park, and a dead body beside Sainsbury's. In this darkly satirical work of non-fiction, Gareth E. Rees presents a troubling vision of Brexit Britain through a common space we know far less about than we think.

Leseprobe

CAR PARK LIFE

Also available from

Gareth E. Rees and Influx Press:

Marshland

The Stone Tide

Published by Influx Press

The Greenhouse

49 Green Lanes, London, N16 9BU

www.influxpress.com / @InfluxPress

All rights reserved.

© Gareth E. Rees, 2019

Copyright of the text rests with the author.

The right of Gareth E. Rees to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Influx Press.

First edition 2019. Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd., St Ives plc.

Paperback ISBN: 978-1-910312-35-3

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-910312-36-0

Editor: Gary Budden

Copyeditor: Momus Editorial

Cover design: Austin Burke

Cover photograph: Jeff Pitcher

Interior design: Vince Haig

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

For Simon, co-pilot during the Makro years.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The book is based on a series of retail car park explorations undertaken between 2015 and 2018. Some of the car parks have since been redeveloped or rebranded, but their essential spirit, or lack of it, lives on. This is by no means a comprehensive collection of British retail car parks, nor is it a complete catalogue of car park experiences. I have only scratched the surface. Everyone has a car park story and I’m sure you have your own. So consider this book a primer. A catalyst. A starting point. Then go out and explore.

Part One

Entry

It is Morrisons in Hastings that lights the fire of my obsession. Not the supermarket itself but the space outside: the car park. The attraction is not instant. We don’t click immediately. At first, I use Morrisons for the weekly shop, making me just like all the others who traipse between the superstore and the car, laden with bags or pushing a trolley, oblivious to the car park’s charms, its mystery, its threat. After a few months, I use Morrisons not only to shop, but also as a shortcut into town. Its car park lies at the other side of an underpass at the end of my road, between a railway embankment and a Victorian street of shops and eateries at the foot of West Hill, a steep elevation behind the Norman castle. I pass through it daily on my way to ostensibly more interesting destinations: the working fishing beach, the pubs, the chippies, the bric-a-brac shops.

One night, I return from the pub and take my usual shortcut through the Morrisons car park. But rather than head directly to my road, I take a look around. I am in no rush and there’s something alluring about the car park tonight, caught in bright moonlight after rain. Hooded lamps, crested with gull-deterring needles, shower light onto the tarmac. The yellow glow of the Morrisons sign, reflected in a puddle, has all the sad beauty of a late-night amusement arcade. I slap my foot in the water and see the stars wobble. ‘Moondance’ by Van Morrison kicks off in my brain. The night’s magic seems to whisper and hush as a herring gull boomerangs over the architraves and the ghost of a cleaner flits through the dimly lit interior. Vehicles are scattered here and there. A superstore car park is rarely empty, and never silent. Water trickles from the guttering. A generator hums. There is a squeak of trolley wheels and the rattle of something moving on metallic rails. A slam and bang. Bakers, perhaps, preparing the morning’s batch. The disembodied voices of the night shift drift across the lots as I wander in transgressive loops, crossing white lines, disabled parking bays and the petrol forecourt, where I send a startled fox crashing into the hedge. This seems a different, wilder car park to the one in the daytime.

There are others here. By the wall, two boys with skateboards smoke joints beneath a NO SKATEBOARDING sign as a huddle of girls pass around a can of Monster energy drink. A dented sports car rumbles down the access road, driver in a baseball cap, eyes lit up like a cat’s in the lamp glare before he veers off into the shadowy perimeter for a reason I cannot fathom, nor dare to discover. Three lanky Polish lads by the entrance talk in low voices and shoot me a dirty look as I veer towards the recycling bins at the perimeter, where a bed frame lies in the shrubs. I pass a Mercedes with a crumpled bonnet and, disconcertingly, a licence plate that includes the number 1066. As I turn back to the supermarket I approach a car with a solitary woman inside. She fumbles with her keys in panic. I pretend to look at my phone so that she knows I have no interest in what she’s up to. When I take a glance back she is twisted around in her seat, staring at me, wide-eyed. We remain connected for a torturous moment before she fires up the engine and pulls away. I get a strange sense that I have stumbled onto a drama that connects the woman in the car, the lingering Polish men, the stoned skateboarders and the crashed Mercedes; secret lives that hide in plain sight.

At the rear hedgerow of the car park I notice a sign, which reads:

THIS DEVELOPMENT IS NOT DEDICATED AS APUBLIC RIGHT OF WAYENTRY IS ONLY PERMITTED TO SHOPPERSAND THOSE WITH THE WRITTEN PERMISSIONOF Wm MORRISON SUPERMARKETS PLCPROCEEDINGS WILL BE TAKEN AGAINSTTHOSE ENTERING ONTO THIS DEVELOPMENTFOR ANY OTHER PURPOSE

It strikes me that I have entered the car park without any intention to shop, an illegal act in the eyes of the supermarket. The public are not permitted to walk or linger or play here. Proceedings might be taken against them. It feels like a challenge. Car parks are not only places for cars but also thoroughfares for pedestrians. Hangouts for teenagers. They’re places to rendezvous. Bump into neighbours. Exchange goods. Get some cash out. Have an argument with your partner. Make an awkward phone call. Eat a quiet lunch away from your colleagues. Secretly munch into a diet-busting burger from that chain you tell everyone you hate. Car parks are an intrinsic part of the landscape, like them or not, and if they are going to encroach on the space where our common grounds, marketplaces, municipal buildings, factories and marshlands once were, then we have a right to interrogate the space, find a way to embrace it, even learn from it. What do we even know about these places? Are they simply slabs of tarmac or are they something more? Do they have the potential to contribute something of worth to society? Or are they pernicious entities, Trojan horses of neo-liberalism, ruining us from the inside? Sites of psychosis, decay and disaster? Someone needs to find out, and this kind of landscape is right up my street. In the same way that a rambler who walks the same route regularly through private land can convert it to a public right of way, given enough time, perhaps I can do this with retail chain store car parks, and help reclaim the space for the good of all.

This is the moment when the car park nonsense, as friends and family describe it, takes over my life. I don’t know yet how many hours I will lose to car parks, how many cheeky car park diversions I’ll take on the way to someplace else. I don’t know yet that talking incessantly about car parks and arranging a week-long holiday around a series of car park visits between Hastings and the Scottish Highlands will contribute to the end of my marriage, but I cannot change that future. When the iceberg broke away and the Titanic set sail, the two had already converged. In this Morrisons at night, time and space conjoin, and the car-park-me is born. As I savour the thrill of a landscape mutating in significance before my eyes, I realise that a car park can have as much mystery and magic as a mountain, meadow or lakeside. When we hurry through them with groceries on our mind they may look indistinguishable, but like a second-hand book where the previous owner has scrawled notes in the margins, they are full of intriguing human detail. Examine them closely and they come to life. This challenges an assumed truth, that car parks are non-places without geography, nature, social history or cultural nuance. Here, beneath the Norman castle, circled by gulls, with the 1066 Mercedes and the bored teenagers, I feel that I couldn’t be anywhere else, and that here is not only a Morrisons, but a multiplicity of places reaching back through time.

In the eleventh century, when Hastings was a Cinque port, this spot would have been at the marshy edge of a bay that give shelter to ships. After cataclysmic storms in the thirteenth century, half the castle collapsed into the bay and caused it to silt up, ending Hastings’ role as a locus of sea power. Things took a turn during the late eighteenth-century bathing craze when it became a hotspot for rich folk seeking recuperative waters and salty air. The location of this Morrisons car park became the site of a waterworks and the Hastings & St Leonard’s Gas Company. The buildings that fronted Queens Road were known locally as ‘the Gas Showrooms’ and included an arched entrance into the works, inscribed with the words: Our Motto is Service. As the population grew and gas consumption soared, the site became too small. When the council demanded a £4,000 coal levy, the company’s shareholders voted to move the works to Bexhill. Only the Gas Showrooms remained, a series of red-brick buildings with a tower that jostled for supremacy with the neo-Gothic steeple of St Andrew’s Church next door, the interior of which was decorated by local tradesman Robert Tressell, who would write The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, a novel about the plight of working-class people in a fictional version of Hastings. His book describes the shady dealings of the gas company owners who moved the works to line their own pockets, which gives this car park location a cameo role in the town’s radical history.

When the gasometers and tower were levelled in the 1970s, a supermarket was established. On the site of the Victorian church, they built a petrol station in the service of our oil gods. The location of the arched entrance to the Gas Showrooms became the access road to the superstore. On occasions when I walk the dog up West Hill and look down at Morrisons, nestled in the valley by the railway line, I see the ghostly outline of its past: the roofs of amassed vehicles glistening like water in the former marshland; the clock tower on the superstore roof counting the hours until home time for the gas workers; shoppers solemnly filing into the entrance by the petrol station like Victorian worshippers on a Sunday; cars trailing down Waterworks Road ready to stock up for the week; the corporation still trying to impress upon the locals its benevolent intentions. Our Motto is Service… Morrisons Makes It. This Morrisons has retained its genius loci as a place of energy, power and influence. It feeds the town with nourishment and fuel; it brings people together. Along the front of the store, benches are placed next to ashtray bins, rows of smokers gazing at car park life going by. There is the sound of chatter. Teenagers laughing. Parents telling their kids off. A sulking dog, tethered to the wall. An elderly couple eating Scotch eggs while waiting for their taxi. The trolley collector clattering past with his precarious train of steel. There are maps of Hastings, Bexhill and Battle on the wall. Taxi numbers and ads for local businesses. You don’t get as much sense of community in the car park of a Lidl or an Aldi. The new wave of budget car parks doesn’t encourage dwelling. There’s nowhere to sit. No advertising. No bins for cigarette ash. No car park attendants. These newcomers dispense of such wasteful fripperies. It makes me sad. Perhaps one day I will look back on my life and remember the car parks of Morrisons with a strange, sentimental yearning.

Morrisons was not my first car park. It was the catalyst for an explosion, the combustible components of which were forged in my formative years. I believe we all have a childhood retail car park buried deep in our psyche. If we think back to the times we went shopping with parents, took shortcuts through town or sought out territories for illicit teenage activities, most of us could dig up a story that tells us something about the adults we became. Everyone I speak to has a car park of note. It is not always uppermost in their minds, of course. Sometimes it takes cajoling on my part, or a few alcoholic drinks, for the story to come out like a burp, surprising and ugly, yet oddly familiar, a sulphurous whiff of the deep past.

My significant first was the Makro car park in Manchester. My family lived in Glossop, a market town in the Peak District, a mile and a half away from where The League of Gentlemen was filmed. On Saturday mornings, my brother and I were ushered into the Mazda, clutching Star Wars figures, books or furry puppets, then off we’d go. I’d stare out of the car window at the topography roll by in a blur, the mills of Hadfield, the Victorian bridges of Dinting Vale, and majestic pylons ranged along the busy carriageways, while Dave Lee Travis played the hits of the year: ‘Karma Chameleon’, ‘Billie Jean’, ‘Club Tropicana’, ‘Uptown Girl’. Mostly, we would go to the Arndale Centre in the city, but sometimes Mum and Dad craved bulk-buy wholesale bargains, which meant a trip to the Dutch trade ‘cash-n-carry’ chain store Makro, the Manchester branch of which was on a ring road in the Eccles area. Its interior was forbidden to children under twelve, so my parents would leave me and my brother in the car and vanish through the sliding doors. What was inside that place? I envisioned towers of boxes, men in brown coats with clipboards and forklift trucks moving at speed with heavy stacks. A place where no child could survive more than five minutes without being crushed to death, which is why we were banished to the car park.

My brother Simon was eight and I was ten, but we moonlighted as pilots of the Mazda interstellar spaceship – me the captain and Simon a highly expendable crew member. As soon as our parents were out of sight, it was time for action. We leapt into the front seats and buckled up, for belt buckles were a novelty item and there was a thrill to putting them on. In the early eighties, safety was for adults in the front seats. Kids rattled in the back without restraint and smashed like eggs in the event of a crash. It never did me any harm. We never crashed and, if we had, I’d be dead and someone else – or perhaps nobody at all – would be writing a book about car parks. Back then, people didn’t know enough about the many ways to die to care about seat belts, or leaving their kids unsupervised, or shutting them in the car while they shopped for low-fat yogurt, light bulbs and muesli at wholesale stores. Simon and I were blissfully ignorant of phantom rapists in the car park who wanted to snatch us for their torture basements. We were concerned only about being at the controls of an intergalactic Mazda with tractor beams and asteroid fields to deal with. I gripped the steering wheel and punched buttons on the cassette player as Simon checked to see if Mum had left anything edible in the glove compartment. The game continued until we grew bored and took things up a notch. I realised that if I opened the door and stood on the passenger seat with my head over the roof, I could view the car park, a galaxy of colourful metallic stars glistering as far as the eye could see. It was time to leave the confines of the spaceship. I jumped onto the tarmac and sneaked around the back of the car, poking my head up at the windows to startle Simon. But he was one step ahead, pulling the passenger door shut and pushing down the locks. Now I was trapped outside.

‘Open it!’ I tugged at the door.

He laughed, but eventually let me in. That adventure was the beginning of a series of spacewalks. My brother and I took it in turns to exit, circle and re-enter the Mazda, messing with the locks, opening and closing the doors, trapping each other out, until we were both outside the ship with all the locks down and – suddenly – we were locked out of the car. Lost in space. Or not lost, but disconnected, severed from the mother ship, exposed to the elements, two fleshy humanoids in a landscape of tarmac and metal. There was no obvious path, no trees, no signs, no escape but through a vale of cars between us and Makro, a menacing grey building in which we were not welcome.

Above us, encroaching cloud blocked out the sun. The air carried voices. The steps of adults approached. Keys rattled. An ignition system shuddered. The whine of a reversing vehicle made us jump. We were too short to see what was going on beyond the few cars around us. The car park had become a hostile world of strangers in unpredictable machines and, worse, Dad was going to be really cross when he came back. It was hopeless. For a while we stood with our palms pressed against the glass, looking in at our Star Wars figures. Then we made two plans. One was that we remained here until Mum and Dad returned, which could be hours, days even, perhaps never, leaving us to eke out an existence among the killing machines, drinking rainwater from puddles. The other was that we made our way through the alien car-scape and asked a member of staff to call our parents on one of those tannoy machines. Public humiliation for both them and us. Neither plan was attractive. We tossed the options back and forth until we heard more footsteps, the clank and thunk of a trolley, and there were Mum and Dad, gods from the heavens come to rescue us.

The gods were angry but merciful, because one of the windows was rolled down enough to get a coat hanger inside and flip the lock, a coat hanger which the child-sceptic overlords of Makro were happy to provide for free.

______________________

I stand in the same car park over thirty years later. My imagination might have filled in a few blanks in the story, but then again, the Makro car park of 1983 was always a half-imagined place. I was a ten-year-old boy exploring outer space with his sibling, only to find a strange tarmac world that human adults had created solely for bulk-buy shopping beside monolithic tower blocks and busy carriageways.

There are many landscapes I remember from my youth – playing fields, reservoirs and cobbled market towns; Derbyshire fells, Kentish cliffs and Spanish beaches – but this car park is as important as any of those places. If anything, it is more influential on the way I see the world. The territories that excite me are the overlooked, mundane places in which I find myself far more often than bucolic idylls. Scrapyards, alleyways, canals, railway sidings, service stations and shopping centres fuel my imagination.

This is why I have come to this car park, a place I haven’t visited since my family moved away from Glossop in 1989. I’ve not thought much about Makro until my interest in car parks began, a fascination that is not shared by my wife and kids who stare at me bleakly from our Peugeot as I prowl with my camera, sniffing the air for a memory. For me, this is an important piece of my history – the origin car park – but I am convinced I’ve come to the wrong place. This can’t be the Makro from my childhood. I found the location on Google Maps and it seems right, geographically, but this car park is smaller than I remember, a puny square of white lines. It’s almost empty, although I realise that this is a Tuesday afternoon and as kids we’d have come here on a Saturday. Still, this isn’t it. Outside the perimeter there are fields and a scrubland piled with mounds of earth, with diggers rumbling over them. It’s as if this Makro is the first in a series of encroachments onto farmland at the edge of the city. I cannot recall the car park backing onto a wilderness. Nevertheless, we are here now and the girls need a wee, so we shamble to the entrance where I’m asked for my membership card. I don’t have one. Yet again, I am forbidden to enter Makro. I explain to the woman at the desk – name tag: Maria – that my daughters are desperate for the toilet and she directs them through a nearby door. While I wait, I ask her where the original Makro was located, the one from the 1980s.

‘This is the same old Makro,’ Maria says, laughing. ‘I should know because I’ve worked here since 1979.’

I am overjoyed. While Simon and I were on our car park space adventure, Maria had been right here, inside the building. I feel like hugging her. When Emily and the kids emerge from the toilet I tell them that this is it – the same Makro that their dad came to when he was their age. They show absolutely no interest. I explain to Maria why I have come to Makro, not to see the store, only the car park. She shows no interest either, only a flicker of pity.

‘I’m thirsty,’ says my eldest. Maria kindly offers them some hot chocolate and, despite our lack of Makro cards, leads us towards a cafe. This sparks another mental disruption because I remember being allowed into the cafe at the age of twelve, but it was upstairs, with windows that looked onto the warehouse so you could watch the forklifts.

‘There’s no public cafe now’, explains Maria, ‘this is just the staff canteen.’

We pour hot chocolate into plastic cups from the dispensing machine and, thanking Maria, leave as quickly as possible. The girls return to the car with their drinks while I explore. The one aspect of Makro’s car park that matches my childhood recollection is the lack of foliage. No islands with trees or shrubby dividers. No pedestrian paths. No child-and-parent parking. The tarmac is marked with plain white lines for cars, yellow bays for the trolleys and gullies for water run-off. Minimalism is key. This place is about trade. Business-to-business. No fripperies. Get in, get out.

Things become more interesting when I walk down the side of the building into a garden with picnic benches and ornaments. This is a surprise. The nether regions of a car park are usually scruffier zones, out of sight and out of mind. I assume it’s an alluring front for the Makro garden section. A path leads into another car park at the rear, marked ‘store technician parking’. These are the places you don’t imagine exist behind the stores. And why should you? What kind of mind imagines store technician parking?

I return to the main car park via a grassy verge lined with plastic hatches, entrances to subterranean recycling containers, perhaps, or the burial chambers of deceased Makro managers. I hear bird trills as the hedge falls away to reveal a field where a man sits in a tractor, engine turned off, crows circling. The car park is separated from it by a wire fence under attack, its buckled concrete posts consumed by nettles, briars and buddleia, a vision which would have unsettled me as a nine-year-old, the marauding plant from The Day of the Triffids being my second most feared monster after the shark from Jaws. But I never came to this perimeter. I never knew it was here.

At the far corner I can see the freshly churned land where diggers growl among red pile drivers and men in hard hats yell across flooded pits, beckoning trucks to come tip their stones. What are they building out there? I turn to see my kids staring as I photograph the decayed yellow paint of the decommissioned assembly point sign, aware of myself suddenly, and how ridiculous I am. I remember me and Simon in our Mazda spaceship as Mum and Dad moseyed around Makro, hunting for cheap toilet roll. Now my girls watch me explore paint markings outside the store. Is what I am doing any better? Any worse? Any different? I feel a cycle turn. Two eras overlaid. Time dissolving. I marvel at how this place could be so different to how I remember it, and yet be virtually unchanged since I was last here. I get an unsettling feeling that this car park and its environs are nothing more than a chronologically retarded synaptic memory circuit in my brain, and that when I drive away in five minutes’ time, everything will stop again until I next return.

A few weeks after my inaugural walk around Morrisons I test my proposition on another local superstore car park. I want to check that it wasn’t a fluke, a peculiar confluence of events or a fleeting insight that will never recur. I am prone to flights of fancy. Seized momentarily by fantastical visions. An epilepsy of the imagination. It comes and goes, with supreme highs and crashing lows. What seems beautiful in the throes of passion can become ugly the morning after.

We had a wild night togetherbeneath the moon, my dear Morrisonsbut now I wake up with a pounding headand a dreadful sense of regretbefore I turn my headto see what you really look like.

In the sober light of day, outside another supermarket, I might realise that car parks are just car parks – flat, identikit, devoid of idiosyncrasies – and that there’s desperation in my desire to find meaning in them. Perhaps I am yearning for something to convince me that when Britain becomes a flyblown Poundland, its public institutions sold off, its green spaces polluted, its wildlife decimated, there will be moments of magic in what remains of the landscape, some consolation for what we have lost.

It is with immense trepidation, then, that I take the twisting road from my house to Silverhill, a former hilltop farm that became a Victorian turnpike. It remains a busy crossroads between the A21 and Battle Road as they meet on the descent to St Leonards-on-Sea. Queues of cars and buses rumble past a florist, cafe, fried chicken takeaway and post office. Silverhill was the site of the Marshall-Tufflex plastics factory until Asda bought the land in 2007 and built a store on it. ‘Mixed regeneration’, they called it, promising additional retail units, pedestrian links and a car park in a place notoriously bad for off-road parking. I’ve been here a few times to shop but paid little attention. I try to picture what I remember from my previous shopping trips. All I see is an amalgam of the other Asdas in my life. Green signs, white markings, trolley bays, cars and zebra crossings. I try to think what else there could be. What if there is nothing else, and I don’t find anything of note? Then again, what defines something of note? Surely a thing which is noted is of note by the very act of it being noted. I note therefore it is. If all else fails, I can will significance into being. Animate that life which lies dormant in the tarmac.

Burdened with these worries, I cross at the lights onto the concourse of Asda, a wide sweep of tessellated paving slabs beneath the steel-and-glass frontage of the superstore. Immediately, I’m surprised. Some of the slabs are marked by dinosaur footprints. A woman in a blue tracksuit, riding a matching blue mobility scooter, rumbles over the prints, unperturbed. The concourse is separated from the pavement by crude blocks of sandstone to create a prehistoric effect. A raised verge, bordered with similarly misshapen hunks of stone, bristles with a verdant jungle of ferns, fronds waggling in the breeze. Behind is a mosaic frieze depicting colourful dinosaurs, designed by children for a ‘Community Inclusion Project’. The dinosaur footprints lead me past the cafe to the main doors, then up to the trolley stacks, where the prints have been painted official Asda green. A sign in a faux-antiquated font says Welcome to Silverhill Village, with an array of cartoon dinosaurs above an illustrated map of its roads, with a list of local amenities. There’s a green Asda insignia at the bottom. This is history in association with Asda, appropriating the palaeontological legacy of the area.

St Leonards was built by the Victorians as a health resort next to Hastings, which was considered too dirty and disreputable for the upper classes. During construction, extensive quarrying yielded many fossils. Local guidebook writer William Diplock wrote in 18641: ‘Remains of Saurians have been found in the neighbourhood of Hastings. The skeleton of a gigantic Iguanodon was discovered in digging the foundation for the new house at Tivoli, called Silverlands.’ The Iguanodon was a herbivore which, in my childhood dinosaur books, was usually getting savaged by an Allosaurus, so I was never a fan, but you get the dinosaurs you deserve and the Iguanodon is a very British beast: a duck-faced victim with a herd mentality and spiky thumbs aloft, like Paul McCartney’s, to give the illusion that everything is fine.

In 1891, an almost complete Iguanodon was excavated on Silverlands Road, then another on Bohemia Road. Incidentally, specimens from three Iguanodon species were discovered by local amateur palaeontologist, Charles Dawson. They were the few genuine finds in a career which became notorious for his archaeological hoaxes, culminating in the discovery of Piltdown Man. For thirty years, these skull fragments were considered ‘the missing link’, until scientists proved the fragments were aged artificially and placed in ancient alluvial deposits along with manipulated orangutan jaw fragments. After I discover this piece of history, Charles Dawson becomes a character in my autobiographical novel The Stone Tide