SASHA TUCKER — Study: The Mole Man

In 2012, artist Tisch Vernon-Jones bought 121 Mortimer Street. It was tense at auction, but she prevailed: her thin-lipped, bald dealer, a certain Mr. Boyce, put in the winning bid. “He knows how to spend that kind of money,” Vernon-Jones told Vogue, smiling. “He buys Warhols!” By the time she took possession of the house, the council had filled in most of the tunnel system. It took her 300 days, at a rate of one skip-load a day, to remove the massive amount of rubble and trash in and under the house. Three cars and a boat emerged, Vogue reported. Vogue also included, as a subheading before the byline, that when Vernon-Jones took on the Mole Man House of Hackney, she didn’t predict the ensuing excavation of her personal life. Vernon-Jones is divorced now. Although she’s kept the Jones accoutrement. And 121 Mortimer Street is her home and studio. She’s replaced all of the windows with mirror vinyl, so she can see out without anyone seeing in. It’s beautiful, Vogue reports, what she’s done with the house, and in particular her commitment to maintaining the house’s yellow Victorian façade. She told a young Financial Times reporter that she didn’t buy the building to make a Mole Man museum. “It’s a functional property for me to live in, but of course I was attracted to the story!” When William Dinty died of natural causes in 2010, the council was left with many holes. “From documents and bank statements I’ve seen, let’s just say his finances were a lot better than most people’s,” a bemused financial investigator told the press. Dinty was survived by one daughter. The Metropolitan Police could not find her, although they did not look very hard. No heir or surviving relatives otherwise surfaced. The story, too, has many holes. The council evicted him in 2007. In some ways, he needed to be evicted—the tunnels, after more than forty years of digging, were becoming untenable. A nearby chunk of pavement had caved in, revealing, for the first time, the tunnel network to the open air—and to the council. The investigators were shocked to find a veritable burrowing: the tunnels went thirty feet down and spread out sixty feet in every direction. “Well,” they said to themselves, “He was digging for forty years!” The council members did not, however, seize the opportunity to look around in the tunnels, having assessed well-enough from their cursory look that the De Beauvoir neighborhood of Hackney was, due to the network of tunnels beneath it, beyond a shadow of a doubt structurally unsound. It was painful for Dinty to leave 121 Mortimer Street, but to their credit, the council put him up in a rather nice hotel, for three years, at a cost of £35,000. Of course, the taxpayers, when they found out, were not pleased with this, and so the council relocated him to the seventeenth floor of a seventeen-floor high rise, in East London, by Valentines Park. The press liked it very much that the council installed him on the highest floor to preclude any burrowing, particularly when the investigators visited the apartment upon his death and proclaimed that he had “gone back to his old behavior,” as The Independent put it. Dinty had tried to bore straight through the wall that divided the kitchen and the bathroom. One reporter imagined a new entry into the DSM-5, and Dinty’s name listed underneath: perforomania, from the Latin perforare, “to bore/pierce/make a hole/passage/through.” Another reporter, a funnier and less esoteric one, wrote that Dinty was just after “an open concept kitchen.” Dinty gave interviews here and there. He was a known entity. Everyone liked that he was the local eccentric, the Hackney oddity, an underground nuisance banished to the nightmare realm. “I’m a man who enjoys digging,” he told a reporter, once. “And I just wanted a bigger basement.” To multiple reporters, this line: “I thought I’d try for a bit of a wine cellar and found a taste for the thing.” With a sniff, to a particularly bothersome Hackney resident, he said, “Tunnelling is something that should be talked about without panicking.” He moved back to the De Beauvoir neighborhood in Hackney in the 1960s, from Ireland, having inherited 121 Mortimer Street from his parents. In Ireland, where he’d moved as a young man, he’d fallen in love with a butcher’s daughter, and had a daughter himself, and named her Clementine, but his sudden orphaning called him back to London. That, and, the De Beauvoir dirt, whose murmuring had been rising by the decibel by the week. It was loud enough, once he’d arrived in Hackney, to make him forget he had a daughter named Clementine. There’s not so much to say about Dinty’s parents. They had him old and they did not like him so much, or each other. He was a quiet kid. He grew up in 121 Mortimer Street, and his room was on the ground floor, in the back of the house, when the site was still occupied by two modest Victorian terraced houses. When he got home from school, where he was popular enough, he’d greet the yellow façade and stuff wads of cotton in his ears. He’d started doing this in Year Nine, when the quiet whispers, with which he’d become familiar, seemed to join forces with a tugging in his belly, a tugging which jerked his chin towards Anne-from-across-the-street’s Year Eleven hips and ass. So he’d stuffed his ears with cotton and figured out how to loft his bed, six feet above the ground of 121 Mortimer. He was listed as a civil engineer in the phonebook, anyways. The lofting didn’t quiet anything, nor did the cotton. For the last twenty years of his life, Dinty had frequent grotesque swamp dreams, brimming with wild animals and stagnant water. In the hotel he dreamt that snakes descended on him; in the high rise he dreamt that enormous ibises and albatrosses came for the snakes first and for Dinty second. Juna met the Mole Man in 2006, when she was researching the psychogeography of underground environments in London. She was bowled over by the similarities between his thinking and that of the nascent artist: the creation of things that don’t work or have a functional value, and the obsession involved in the act of making. She decided to track him down and find out more about him, hoping to make a film examining his work from an artistic perspective. Her intention was to show him as a model for understanding the artistic impulse and the creative process. She was an undergrad at the New School, and she wanted funding to go to London. He was flattered by her interest but proved extraordinarily difficult to work with. He was racist, misogynistic, and paranoid, and was only really interested in talking about Juna’s sex life. There was nothing between his dream world and his reality. The Mole Man made everything manifest. Quickly, Juna realized that the sexual overtones of their relationship threatened to entirely overtake her project. Years later, she would try and explain him to that reporter from the Financial Times, in her honed art-speak-psychoanalytical idiolect. “There’s the pronounced Freudian aspect of what he was doing,” she’d said, “But there was no ‘purpose.’ It was a game of invention.” Her encounter with this eccentric and aggressive man ended poorly. She subsequently decided to end the project. She took some photos, though: pictures from under 121 Mortimer Street, glimpses of tunnels and scrapyard pieces and wires hanging down like shed snake skins. She never exhibited them, though. They were too unadulterated, and her professor told her there was too much black space in them. She didn’t know how to tell him that her flash simply wasn’t strong enough to penetrate the tunnels, and that she wouldn’t go past where the light reached, not with the Mole Man breathing softly behind her. In his defense, Juna’s sex life was interesting. She was a voyeur. She was drawn to troubled men, and to making art with what they left her. Strange she didn’t sleep with Dinty, and didn’t later find his wiry white hairs and under-the-fingernail Hackney dirt among her clothes, which he would have swiftly lifted from her body. Would they have done it in the tunnels? Maybe next to Juna’s favorite sculpture of his, a concrete Galatea-esque whose hair was made of insulation and whose falling chiton was a blue tarpaulin. Dinty had made it in the 80s, and given Juna a canned quote about it, with which she’d done nothing: “There’s a great beauty in inventing things that serve no purpose.” I need to tell you about the tunnels. He dug them with a spade and a homemade pulley. He dug them with his fingertips, caressing and wild. They took forty years, and, as a council surveyor told the press after the sinkhole opened up, “He’s fortunate a London bus is not in his front garden.” It was a brilliant day, though, when he tapped into a 450-volt cable and the whole of the opposite street lost power. Picture the Mole Man—Dinty. William. He wore a fisherman’s jumper and a waxed beige trench coat. That same precocious Financial Times reporter wrote that eyewitnesses described him as “a slightly shambling, if energetic, presence who became a fixture at local scrap yards and markets.” His finances were good when he died. He was certainly good-looking as a young man. At most, when he died, he smelled musty. And he was an artist, a pull unto himself. When he was underground, the world hummed. No snakes, other than his sculptural ones. He could smell the waterbed. He would not dig into it, would not flood the tunnels. Everyone in the De Beauvoir neighborhood of Hackney knew that Dinty was forging something, Vulcan-like as he soldered and sauntered around. When he first got there, he forced together the two Victorian houses of the 121 Mortimer Street address and was left with a dozen or so small and uneven bedsits. He advertised them in the classifieds, mostly in the Evening Standard, and they were cheap. So the art students and the musicians showed up to 121 Mortimer Street with their Beatles hair and their strange sexual proclivities and once, a young Swedish woman named Ilsa showed up with a harp. She stayed for over a year. Unusually long. His tenants rarely saw him. The house was no social center, just a stopping-over place. It smelled strange and creaked. The 70s and 80s were good to Dinty, though, who did not need to live off of his renters but appreciated nonetheless their voices through the walls and their non-regular monthly envelopes, slipped under his door. He installed a microwave in an alcove he had carved in the wall and a payphone in the yard, one of the few things Vernon-Jones would ultimately keep. Dinty didn’t call anywhere, but the students did, and he liked to listen. The wiring for the phone ran underground. The scrap yards and flea markets were particularly good in those years, too. De Beauvoir, the part of Hackney with which we are concerned, lies between Dalston and Haggerston. “It has always been an outlier,” wrote the reporter from the Financial Times. “A relatively desirable enclave of grand villas and neat semi-detached houses, its land mostly owned by the Wadsworth family, a long line of shrewd, locally minded aristocrats.” So the scrap yards were filled with 19th century junk. Dinty made off nicely, and was particularly predisposed to eyeglasses and spyglasses and timepieces. The reporter from the Financial Times—I might tell you his name is Alan; he’s been coming up an awful lot—spoke to one of the 80s tenants, and another who toured 121 Mortimer Street but opted against renting. Alan described the renter, a certain Zooey Jamieson, as “a taciturn Scouser.” Jamieson told Alan that Dinty got off on his own eccentricity, but Jamieson couldn’t hear the dirt. Jamieson’s final comment noted his attraction to the “area’s slightly neurotic faded grandeur,” so I vote we write off Jamieson. Alan also spoke to Charlie Dyer, who had been living in Islington when he picked up the Evening Standard. Dyer had never been to the De Beauvoir neighborhood. The locals frightened him; they were chapped and bundled and bitter, despite its being summer in Hackney. But a cute brown-haired girl without a bra—Dyer liked to think she was a dancer—opened the door at 121 Mortimer Street and welcomed him inside. She told them Dinty dropped her post through a crack in the ceiling, and that the floors all wobbled a bit, and that she was perfectly happy. Dinty’s tour of the property concluded, Dyer told Alan, with a brief visit to the garden, where Dinty explained the mounds of freshly ploughed soil as part of a jacuzzi-building project. Neither Jamieson nor Dyer really understood Alan’s passion for figuring out the Mole Man, or why the Financial Times was paying him to do such tedious reporting on such long-buried things. Merve, though, one of the women who lived there in the 80s, she understood Alan. She’d stayed in touch with Dinty after moving out of 121 Mortimer Street and always liked him. Liked to chat with him and hear about what he was building. Sometimes she’d go down into his basement flat, to look through a spyglass or help him with the accounting. She followed his 2010s news with unease, and was glad to talk to Alan, and to tell him that Dinty was not insane. That she could hear the dirt sometimes, too. When Merve told Dinty she was moving, that she had to get away, he offered her the flat on the top floor. A romantic gesture? Impossible to say, but a few years later, Merve bumped into him doing her shopping, with her infant son Milo asleep in the stroller. Dinty grumbled. Alan imagines he said, “another one ruined.” Maybe he did. Merve couldn’t make it out. Juna was not the first photographer attracted to Dinty, nor was Alan the first writer. There was a trainee journalist at the Guardian—now the head of investigations—who met Dinty in 2006, when he ran into the newspaper offices, trench coat billowing, and demanded to be heard. “They’ve evicted me for burrowing!” So the journalist hailed a black cab and went to Hackney. His story in the paper was ultimately charming; Dinty was just quirky. An oddball whom the neighbors more than tolerated. The journalist, who did not go down into the tunnels, wouldn’t say any more, at least in his re-telling of the story to Alan. After the council evicted Dinty, he had to sneak through a hole in the newly put up fence to return to his fiefdom and katabasis. The writer Basil was brave, and went down with him, in pursuit of another chapter for his 2009 Hackney book. Basil writes himself as the foolish Fortunato, and Dinty as Montresor, strange and dark and romantic. Dinty’s hair, almost lit from within, was like a beacon in the dripping darkness of the tunnels. Something natural was missing from him. The Hackney-based photographer R. March also found himself dealing in figurative language and in absences. Alan notes, somewhat unnecessarily, in that very long Financial Times piece, that March ran into Dinty after eating at a Vietnamese restaurant nearby 121 Mortimer Street. They made a plan to take some portraits and sneak through the hole in the fence, but Dinty never appeared at the designated time. By this time, though, the tunnels in Hackney had got their hooks into March, and he ran wild with just the idea of the Mole Man. He brought in a white-haired bum he’d found at Charing Cross and built a backdrop of tunnels out of foam. The photograph he created is startling. “Dinty”—the bum—is leaning against a foam boulder, into which claw marks have been carved. Facsimile Dinty presents plainly to the viewer the pleasure he so obviously receives from working in the dirt and the stone below Hackney. And it’s almost too good, the quote March gave to Alan: “It became like a Greek myth to me. A man trying to drag us to Hades. The Patron Saint of Hackney.” March lived in Hackney for a long time. In the early years, in the squats, he was always trying to restore things, to polish the walls enough to see that grandeur Jamieson noticed. “But the Mole Man did the opposite. It always seemed a form of creative destruction, to me.” Channel 4 tried to do a documentary feature on him. The reporters spooked him, and he in turn annoyed them, with his circuitous story-telling and protectiveness over the tunnels. The tapes have been lost. Alan tried to find them, believe me. We have to round off things with Juna. I’ll tell you the final image, which Alan got out of her too, despite her having become rather wary of interviews—of all language—in her forties. It was this: Juna, at the abandoned Tube station at Aldgate East, in 2006. Her hair is streaming behind her, made wild by the sudden passing of a train. And she is alone, because Dinty had jumped onto the conductor’s car as it passed and exhorted the astonished driver to whisk him to safety. In his hands were the tapes and a roll of film, the physical evidence of these grueling weeks, the sounds and the pictures of Juna and the Mole Man underground, in hell, in Hackney, in the De Beauvoir neighborhood. Juna was obsessed with underground spaces, with German Romanticism and the relationship between the underground and human psyche. Naturally, Dinty’s story called to her, as it had to so many others. To Alan, Juna posed a question: would he prefer the romantic version of the story, or the “truth of my fractious, months-long collaboration with him?” I don’t need to tell you which option Alan went for. So, sitting in a café in Notting Hill, fingering a well-worn piece of red glass in her pocket, she told him that Dinty was initially flattered, if wary. He promised her a series of filmed interviews, but when she’d sit him down in front of the camera, he’d clam up and make no sense. She needed the interviews to happen in the yard, above the winding tunnel network—there simply wasn’t enough light underground, and she wanted her professors to see his face and his hair and his trench coat. His stories to her off-camera, though, as they navigated just the beginnings of the tunnels, were perfect, and Juna was convinced that he was an intelligent and sensitive man. Sometimes he’d lose himself a bit in the stories, and in the telling, wandering somewhere she couldn’t follow, talking more to his sculptures than to her. The camera put him off, Juna tried to explain to Alan. He was always running out of the frame, hiding behind his creations. And he became very angry very quickly. He’d turn the interview around, asking Juna about her former lovers, commenting on her features. “Why do you have blue eyes?” he asked her, often. She’d stay seated behind the camera, waiting patiently for him to run through the tunnels and touch the ends of the dead ends, and climb the staircases to nowhere. “He saw the physical media as a bargaining chip,” Juna told Alan. “But I just let go. The project had revealed itself to be impossible.” Juna wanted Alan to understand that Dinty was just a man. Not a storybook character. Still, the photographs she does have—the film roll that was still in her camera—she keeps close to her chest. She likes to look at them through the red glass, and see the tunnels come alive again. Dinty gave the glass to her—I’m sure you’ve figured that out. A relic from his 1980s collecting. Alan wishes to have the last word on the Mole Man of Hackney, having interviewed every tenant and reporter who passed through his life. He, like me, and like Juna, does not like what Vernon-Jones has done with the place. In her basement studio, built into Dinty’s tunnel network, it is impossible to picture him ever listening to the dirt and touching it, letting it tell him where it wants to move. This hellish katabasis has almost crushed us. The story falls apart, when we get to Vernon-Jones’ white walls. Dinty does not want to be put into words, or filmed, or photographed—the dirt is shifting, and the single concrete staircase Vernon-Jones has left, alongside the disconnected payphone, is leading to nowhere. Juna went to the funeral and recognized no one. She wasn’t sure why she went. Merve was there with Milo, and so was Basil, and the head of investigations at the Guardian, and Charlie Dyer, who had moved back to neighboring Islington. Alan had not yet learned about the story, about the textures of Hackney, but he soon would, and as we know it would consume him. Why did he refuse to let it go? The story was like a fairytale, sure. Dinty—William Dinty, the Mole Man—was a succubus and an Irishman, Rumpelstiltskin and Vulcan and Pluto wrapped up together and writhing around in the dirt. Clementine, Dinty’s daughter, whom the council eventually found, mixed his ashes with water, when they arrived to her home from Hackney. She transferred the mixture to a copper pot, and brought it to 121 Mortimer Street from Ireland, checking the texture of the paste all the way, holding the pot in her lap. In the years since her father’s death, she’d done far less investigation into him than Alan did for the Financial Times. She did not want the house, and besides it was much too late, after the contentious auction and the hundreds of skip-loads. Standing outside of the Vernon-Jones monstrosity, she squinted to see the bones of 121 Mortimer, where her grandparents had died, where her father had grown up, where artists and dancers and Juna and the dirt had whispered to him. She stuck her hand in the mixture she’d brought along and felt around in it, until even the hidden skin under her nails was coated with it. She walked up to an outer wall of the house and dragged her hand, dripping with the ash paste, across its whiteness. Stepping back to survey her work, she tripped over the copper pot and it tipped. The ash and water mixture eked out into the ground. The house creaked. The dirt sighed, loudly, and Clementine looked around, unable to locate the genesis of the sound. Unnerved, she left. Later in the week, returning to Hackney from Paris Fashion Week, Vernon-Jones shrieked when she saw the handprint on her wall. Sasha Tucker is from New York City. She's currently living in southern Germany.