SILENT KNIGHT
As if he were ice-fishing through iron, Rob crouches on the pavement, paying out two thin cables through keyholes in the manhole cover. At the end of each wire is a binaural microphone, usually worn in the ear. When played back through a good surround-sound system, the sound world they record shapes a space the listener occupies as if standing within the body of the person who made the recording. The effect is both personal and anonymous, a communal listening position tuned and haunted by the attention of a specific sonic curiosity: as if someone had left the door open to their body in the world. I like the effect because there is no I, or eye, just the ear and the acoustic world. But none of this is in play. We’re using them simply because they’re the only microphone’s Rob has with him small enough to post through the keyholes.
Rob’s looking across the road towards the old Bickford’s Factory buildings but not really seeing them. I can tell he’s caught something uncatchable and its running strongly through him. He’s alert and still; entranced; not with the life of the road and the vans pulling up at Warrior Cash & Carry, but as if in some older, timeless, version of the landscape no longer visible to our usual way of passing through it. A woman with a buggy walks past and ignores him, shouting to someone on the other side of the road. I lean on a garden wall, relaxing now Rob’s safely on the pavement; his first listening spot had been at the junction to the carpark by the Methodist Chapel, and suddenly everyone wanted to turn in and park. Me worrying about Rob isn’t new. We often chuckle about him recording a massive thunderstorm echoing off the cliffs at Staithes in North Yorkshire while he was standing out on a vast flat expanse of low-tide stone reef with his boom stuck up in the air like a lightening conductor and me shouting and waving for him to get the fuck out of there. Oh yes, we chuckle about that one. What’s a car beside the random gods of turbulence and electrical charge deciding his fate? I let him get on with listening to what may either be the Red River or a sewer main. To be honest, I’m feeling tired and a little impatient after two days of listening to the river in the cold wind.
© Crown copyright. Historic England Archive
Where the footpath ends just above a row of cottages running up the valley, I can see an Environment Agency sign indicating where the Red River funnels through a storm-drain grill and under the footpath. It’s where the river is being undertaken. Rob beckons me over and hands me the headphones. I’m not expecting much, but as the warm pads settle over my ears a dark space opens an urban pothole in me: water races through the inspection chamber, only now it’s a sound chamber, the resonator of an instrument played by what can only be the river. There’s an illusion of repetition as water hits some hidden barrier over and over, scurrying and dropping through itself like liquid pebbles into a well, but the more I listen the more it becomes an infinite variation on a theme. It sounds like someone filling a deep, stone bath with the first inches of water, swirling their hand in it to mix in some salts: it’s preparing to bathe me and the preparation is the bathing. It makes me think of the words cistern and sarcophagus: I’m being filled and eaten, simultaneously. Behind the treble and alto of the river, there’s a deeper bass sound like a volcano rumbling in the distance; something ominous and all-encompassing; something that sets every cell in my body into resonance with its low continuous explosion. This is not a sound you can hear in the world without a sense of awe. Who’d have thought this nondescript bit of pavement contained such a sublime sound. Is it air being drawn through the culvert by the river? Is it a car? A rumble in the vast black cloud detaches itself into the sound of a car as it accelerates past, engulfing me in an obliterating crescendo. So this is how the underworld hears us.
Wow. I hand the headphones back to Rob to listen to another car coming our way. I look down at the manhole cover. It’s called Silent Knight. There’s something about concentrated listening that makes the visual world seem strange again. Why would someone call a manhole cover Silent Knight? The pun is like a chasm, a baffling cultural non sequitur that seems strangely resonant: I’m crouched on an heroic, quiet protector, who makes no noise as the traffic passes over him, and who also embodies the peacefulness of the Holy Night of the Nativity, as if ‘he’ were the unsung manhole playing his humble part on a busy road by The Stable in Bethlehem. A tender/macho manhole cover: it’s strangely touching. As is the fact someone felt pleased enough with themselves to publish their pun in iron for mass distribution countrywide.
On the threshold between two worlds and two words, I’m not sure where I am. We’re at Tucking Mill, opposite the Hirst House where Bickford, Smith & Co manufactured the first patented safety fuse for explosives. There’s Warrior Cash and Carry, just a little further down the road. I can remember getting lost in there as a child, among the beds, lightbulbs, garden furniture, tools, and shelves of hardware that still obscure the windows of what was the old fuse works. Under the tarmac of the road, the rails of a tramway still exist; I’ve seen a photograph of them being laid, the ghosts of the men who’re working on the job standing either side of them and staring into the lens of the lost moment. There’s a river running under me that’s been cutting its way into the valley for millions of years. Once it was red-ochre coloured and burdened with silt; a filthy, lucrative stream of liquid currency; a deviant stream; a queer stream with its own unique sub-species of trout tucked away in its turbid folds of heavy-metal burdened water: a compellingly hideous thing suitably hidden in places. If, as in Shelley’s exhilaratingly sublime poem ‘Mt Blanc’, the river is rhymed with the mind in a phenomenological flow of energy that speaks us out in wild other voices, what kind of river is the Red River; what kind of voice does it have? While Shelley gazed down into the chasm of the Arve, the Red River was being straightened, modified and set to work: boiled into steam; separated into leats and races; mixed with crushed ore; stilled in settling tanks and generally treated as a beast of burden and sorting machine for in the production of tin. And yet, even towards the end of its red period, it had a strange agency: it articulated not the otherness of the ‘more-than-human’, but the fusion of human with the more-than-human. It carried our stain, the trace of us, and made it visible in the clear waters of St Ives Bay. It was the naked and apparent shadow of all the celebrated rivers of purity. The Red River’s shadowiness is now more subtle. It’s more invisible now its visual appearance has been cleaned up. Sometimes its red water, filling its name with the legacy of mines that cannot stop bleeding their acid mine drainage, but more often it is grey water filled with heavy metals.
We follow the river down towards Tucking Mill, listening through manhole covers and drains as we go, arriving at where it emerges, naked, after its long passage through a pipe. I can feel its disorientation; it’s blankness. At the upper end of the culvert, by the Environment Agency sign, there’s a grill like an egg slicer that catches debris that might cause a blockage, stripping it of signs of where it’s come from. The river emerges into the park depressed, anonymous, mere drainage, but still singing of its loss as it makes its way through the concrete and stone channels that run by the arsenic flues and the tin streaming works that once filled the valley. Briefly its alive and in spate rinsing through the grasses in that lovely flush glistening way of streams, but it’s heading for another great interruption, the big culvert under the A30. It’s as if the river is always beginning again, trying to articulate itself, only to be cut off in mid flow.
We listen as the white noise of water pours around ‘the everlasting universe of things’ trapped against the grill, its wave rolling up and pouring through a gap between shit bags, a plastic clip, a Strongbow can, cup lids, shreds of faded sweet wrappers, in a small oceanic roar as it tumbles down the concrete steps on the other side and into the darkness under the dual carriage, a scouring pulse of traffic overhead.
