At Northolt police pound I showed my pass to the guard, custodian of this museum of wrecks. I hestitated there, like a husband collecting his wife from the depot of a strange and perverse dream. Some twenty or so crashed vehicles were parked in the sunlight against the rear wall of an abandoned cinema. At the far end of the asphalt yard was a truck whose entire driving cabinet had been crushed...
Unnerved by the deformations, I moved from one car to the next. The first vehicle, a blue taxi, had been struck at the at the point of its near-side headlamp...
The glamour and poetry of Northolt continues unabated... Is this the car pound?... it backs onto the police station and certainly from google maps, if it is merely a car park then some of the cars appear seriously hemmed in...
What a strange metaphor Ballard applies: "collecting his wife from the depot of a strange and perverse dream..." strange unless we think of Orpheus searching for a Eurydice in an industrial cathone . There is a curious Delvaux quality to the image Ballard conjures.... made all the more pointed by the fact that the police station and car pound? backs onto the railway line, invoking Delvaux's famous painting "Trains du Soir"...
Talking of car pounds, I see the as part of the Forensic Science course at Islington College the students are offered the opportunity to visit the Metropolitan Police Car Pound at Charlton
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