Miracles of Life (16 page)

Then I realised what had drawn me to the National
Gallery. There were very few surrealist paintings on display
in London in the early 1950s. Colour printing was in its
infancy, and there were few illustrated books at affordable
prices. I had unconsciously done the only thing I could –
I had turned the National Gallery into a virtual museum
of surrealist art, and co-opted Leonardo, Raphael and
Mantegna to become surrealist painters for me.

In 1955 there was a modest retrospective of Francis Bacon’s
paintings at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, followed in
1962 by a far larger retrospective at the Tate Gallery, which
was a revelation to me. I still think of Bacon as the greatest
painter of the post-war world. Sadly, when I met him in the
1980s I found, like many others before me, that he was not
interested in receiving compliments or in talking about his
own work. I suspect that he was still sensitive to charges of
gratuitous violence and sensationalism that were levelled at
him in the 1950s and 1960s. He chose as his official interviewer
the art critic David Sylvester, who was careful to steer
clear of the questions everyone was eager to hear answered,
and only asked Bacon about his handling of space and other
academic topics. In his replies Bacon adopted the same
elliptical and evasive language, with the result that we know less about the motives of this extraordinary painter than we
do of almost any other 20th-century artist. At least Crivelli’s
Annunciation
in the 1950s was not screened behind endless
lectures on Renaissance perspective and the fluctuating price
of lapis lazuli.

Bacon’s paintings were screams from the abattoir, cries
from the execution pits of World War II. His deranged
executives and his princes of death in their pontiffs’ robes
lacked all pity and remorse. His popes screamed because
they knew there was no God. Bacon went even further than
the surrealists, assuming our complicity in the mid-century’s
horrors. It was we who sat in those claustrophobic rooms,
like TV hospitality suites in need of a coat of paint, under a
naked light bulb that might signal the arrival of the dead, the
only witnesses at our last interview.

Yet Bacon kept hope alive at a dark time, and looking at
his paintings gave me a surge of confidence. I knew there was
a link of some kind with the surrealists, with the dead
doctors lying in their wooden chests in the dissecting room,
with film noir and with the peacock and the loaf of bread in
Crivelli’s
Annunciation
. There were links to Hemingway and
Camus and Nathanael West. A jigsaw inside my head was
trying to assemble itself, but the picture when it finally
emerged would appear in an unexpected place.

Working as a copywriter at an advertising agency was not as
glamorous or interesting as novels and films suggested. Most
of it was a slog, a dull chore of writing booklets and copy
for manuals. I needed the daylight to write my own fiction,
so I took a job as a Covent Garden porter, working in
the chrysanthemum department of a large wholesaler. We
started early, at something like 6 o’clock, and were through
by noon. When too many sleep-starved nights finally got
to me, I sold encyclopaedias door to door, a job at which
I was surprisingly successful, partly because the
Waverley
Encyclopaedia
was the one I had read as a child in Shanghai

– I knew it backwards and genuinely believed in it.
It was a fascinating time, roaming the Midland towns
with my samples, living in shabby hotels among garment
workers. A modest street of Victorian terraced houses would
hold a universe of differences – cheerful teenage girls bringing
up a brood of small children while the mother slumped
in the kitchen watching TV among the clutter; religious fanatics with barely a stick of furniture and wary daughters
who couldn’t wait to grow up; a man so excited that I worked
for a publisher that he propelled me into his living room and
proudly showed me a piano whose keys were coloured and
numbered, his ‘revolutionary’ system for teaching music that
he wanted me to market for him – by way of proof, he
whistled up the stairs and his amiable 13-year-old daughter
came down and sat at the upright with her sheet music
annotated like a candy bar, then solemnly played the
Moonlight Sonata. I still see coloured stripes when I hear the
melody, and taste sweetness on my lips.

Prosperity of a sort had reached the Midlands, and the
early 1950s was on the cusp of social change. The poorer that
people were, the keener they seemed to be to buy the encyclopaedia,
and I often waived my commission (there was no
salary) to secure for them the hours of intelligent pleasure I
had known as a child. But the better-off residents, especially
those working in the Coventry car plants, had moved
beyond the hallowed notion of education as a gateway to
success. Information came through advertising and the
television set. They would show off their huge new screens,
their wall-to-wall carpeting and their modern kitchens and
bathrooms, taking it for granted that I was genuinely interested
in these features, then politely decline the eight-
volume
Waverley
. Consumerism provided all the bearings
they needed in their lives.

Meanwhile, my writing was still stuck. I had sensibly abandoned my efforts to go one better than
Finnegans
Wake
,
and knew that I wasn’t muscular and morbid enough to
emulate Hemingway. My problem was that I hadn’t found a
form that suited me. Popular fiction was too popular, and
literary fiction too earnest. A spate of World War II memoirs
and novels was being published, but surprisingly it never
occurred to me to write a novel based on my own wartime
experiences. Even the grim events I had witnessed as a child
in Shanghai could never match the genocidal horrors of the
Nazi death camps.

By now, seven or eight years after the war, I had begun to
switch off my memories of Shanghai. Very few people had
shared my experiences, and the European war was still everywhere
around us in a hundred bomb sites. I had always
detested nostalgia, and the attempt by British politicians of
all parties to assert Britain’s importance in the world, when
in reality we were nearly bankrupt, by harping on our wartime
role and our pre-war empire, reminded me of the
danger of dwelling too much in the past. The Shanghai years
would never return, and it unsettled me whenever I met
friends of my parents and former Lunghua internees who
were detached from the present and living entirely within a
cocoon of China memories.

Flying still interested me, and I began to notice advertisements
for short-service commissions in the RAF. The
flight training was in Canada, an added attraction. My years
in Lunghua had exempted me from National Service, and as an officer I would be able to leave the service if I was
reassigned to ground duties, as happened to so many pilots
and navigators. A change of scene, from grey and overcrowded
London to the vast spaces of central Canada, would
give me time to think and with any luck be a new spur to my
imagination. I was still only 23, but my career as a novelist
showed no signs of ever beginning.

I signed on at the RAF recruitment offices in Kingsway,
passed the assessment tests at RAF Hornchurch, near
Dagenham, and started my three-month basic training at
Kirton in Lindsey, in Lincolnshire. I enjoyed my time there,
a mix of army-style drill and square-bashing, basic navigation
and meteorology, weapons training with the Lee-
Enfield rifle, Smith & Wesson revolver and Sten machine gun
(I turned out to be a fairly good shot), lessons in officers’
mess etiquette (we would be Britain’s ambassadors around
the world as well as becoming nuclear bomber pilots), and
experts at self-diagnosing the first symptoms of VD, thanks
to hours of instructional films that gave a rather odd impression
of our future role as serving officers of the Queen.

In the autumn of 1954 we sailed for Canada on one of the
Empress liners, and then spent a month at an RCAF base
near London, Ontario, not far from Detroit and Niagara
Falls. The intention was to ‘culturally relocate’ us within the
North American way of life, and wean us off the enticements
of cricket, warm beer and toad-in-the-hole. Needless to say,
we were all eager to embrace the North American way of life from the second we stepped off the Empress boat. Canadians
were generous and hospitable, without any of the rough
edges that can make America jar. The country was vast and
sparsely populated, and virtually under a blanket of snow for
six months of the year. The Canadians had the natural
warmth towards strangers of a desert people.

We arrived at our training base in Moose Jaw,
Saskatchewan, as the first snow was falling, and I think it was
still falling when I left the following spring. NATO pilot
training took place in Canada as part of the country’s contribution
to the alliance, but a wilderness of ice and snow was
not the best location for a flying school. The fierce isolation
of the Canadian winter, and the white world that surrounded
the airbase ten miles from Moose Jaw, meant that
for long periods we had nothing to do but sit in the flight
rooms, reading magazines and watching the snow fall on
the buried runways. Now and then a moose would leap the
perimeter fence and gallop off into the mist. In the very
comfortable mess, virtually a four-star hotel, I would sit by
the picture windows and watch the snow carried horizontally
by the icy wind. Walking to the mess from our barracks,
I would sometimes find small contact lenses on my cheeks –
ice dislodged from my eyeballs when I blinked. We lived on
turkey, waffles and ice cream, and drank the bar out of its
bourbon and gin. There was no taboo about flying and
drinking – one of my Canadian instructors always boarded
our plane with a cigar and two bottles of beer.

Then the weather would clear, brilliant blue skies above
the silent snow, and we would get in a few days of pilot
training. I enjoyed flying the heavy Harvard T-6, with its
huge radial engine, retractable undercarriage and variable-
pitch propeller, but the training was continually hampered
by the weather. Ice crystals in the air produced extraordinary
atmospheric effects, such as the triple suns that would blaze
through the frozen haze. The British trainees were happy to
loaf around, but the French and Turkish trainees demanded
to be sent home. They were older and senior in rank to many
of the RCAF instructors. At one point the French staged a
mutiny, refusing to eat the food served in the mess, which
they claimed was fit only for children. The Turks, all experienced
army officers, declined to accept orders from any
RCAF instructor junior to them. A senior French liaison
officer had to be flown in from Ottawa, and was told to climb
up the nearest flagpole.

With a great deal of time on my hands, I wrote a few short
stories and tried to find enough reading matter to keep me
going. The regional newspapers carried no international
news and consisted of nothing except reports of curling and
ice hockey matches. Magazines such as
Time
were regarded
as intensely highbrow and were difficult to get hold of in
Moose Jaw, which was then a dead-end town with two filling
stations and a bus depot. Its main function was to supply
tractor parts to the huge wheat farms that covered the whole
of Saskatchewan. Most of the paperbacks in the bus depot were popular thrillers and detective stories, but there was
one type of fiction that occupied a lot of space on the book
racks. This was science fiction, then enjoying its great postwar
boom.

Up to that point I had read very little science fiction, apart
from the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon comic strips of my
Shanghai childhood. I would later realise that most professional
s-f writers, British and American, were keen fans
from their early teens, and many began their careers writing
for the fanzines (amateur magazines produced by enthusiasts)
and attending conventions. I was one of the very few
who came to science fiction at a relatively late age. By the
mid 1950s there were some twenty commercial s-f magazines
on monthly sale in America and Canada, and the best
of these were in the Moose Jaw magazine racks.

Some, like
Astounding Science Fiction
, the front runner in
both sales and prestige within the field, were heavily committed
to space travel and tales of a hard-edged technological
future. Almost all the stories were set in spaceships or on
alien planets in the very far future. These planet yarns, in
which most of the characters wore military uniform, soon
bored me. The forerunners of
Star Trek
, they described
an American imperium colonising the entire universe,
which they turned into a cheerful, optimistic hell, a 1950s
American suburb paved with good intentions and populated
by Avon ladies in spacesuits. Eerily, this may prove to be an
accurate prophecy.

Luckily, there were other magazines like
Galaxy
and
Fantasy & Science Fiction
, where the short stories were set in
the present or very near future, extrapolating social and
political trends already evident in the years after the war. The
dangers to a docile public of television, advertising and the
American media landscape were their terrain. They looked
searchingly at the abuses of psychiatry and at politics conducted
as a branch of advertising. Many of the stories were
droll and pessimistic, with a surface of dry wit that hid a
quite downbeat message.

These I seized on and began to devour. Here was a form of
fiction that was actually about the present day, and often as
elliptical and ambiguous as Kafka. It recognised a world
dominated by consumer advertising, of democratic government
mutating into public relations. This was a world of
cars, offices, highways, airlines and supermarkets that we
actually lived in, but which was completely missing from
almost all serious fiction. No one in a novel by Virginia
Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in
Sartre or Thomas Mann ever paid for a haircut. No one in
Hemingway’s post-war novels ever worried about the effects
of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war. The very
notion was ludicrous, as absurd then as it seems now. Writers
of so-called serious fiction shared one dominant characteristic
– their fiction was first and foremost about themselves.
The ‘self ’ lay at the heart of modernism, but now had
a powerful rival, the everyday world, which was just as much a psychological construct, and just as prone to mysterious
and often psychopathic impulses. It was this rather sinister
realm, a consumer society that might decide to go on a day
trip to another Auschwitz and another Hiroshima, that science
fiction was exploring.