Miracles of Life (17 page)

Above all, the s-f genre had a huge vitality. Without
thinking up a plan of action, I decided that this was a field I
should enter. I could see that here was a literary form that
placed a premium on originality, and gave a great deal of
latitude to its writers, many of whom had their own
trademark styles and approaches. I felt too that for all its
vitality, magazine science fiction was limited by its ‘what if?’
approach, and that the genre was ripe for change, if not
outright takeover. I was more interested in a ‘what now?’
approach. After weekend trips across the border I could see
that both Canada and the USA were changing rapidly, and
that change would in time reach even Britain. I would interiorise
science fiction, looking for the pathology that
underlay the consumer society, the TV landscape and the
nuclear arms race, a vast untouched continent of fictional
possibility. Or so I thought, staring at the silent airfield, with
its empty runways that stretched into a snow-blanched
infinity.

In early spring, when the last of the snow was falling, we
were told that our flight training would be transferred back to England (within a year RCAF Moose Jaw ceased to be a
NATO training centre). By this time I was confident that my
career as a writer was about to begin. I had written several
s-f stories, which had flowed quickly from my pen, and there
was a queue of others waiting in my mind. I enjoyed flying,
but months in an isolated training base in Scotland or the
north of England would postpone everything I planned.

Accordingly, I resigned my commission, and was soon
installed in my tiny couchette on the Canadian Pacific
Railway train to Toronto, a long journey of endless lakes and
pine forests that I spent with pad and pencil. In a real sense
I wrote my way across Canada, and then across the Atlantic
to England. On arrival I was sent to RAF High Wycombe,
where RAF personnel were demobilised.

It was a cold spring, and we sat in an unheated barrack
room on the edge of a disused airfield, waiting to be called
by the two flight lieutenants who processed our papers.
As the days passed I would strike up the acquaintance of a
V-bomber navigator cashiered for some mess irregularity, or
a pilot who had damaged the undercarriage of his jet fighter
by hitting one too many landing lights. Then ‘Robertson’
or ‘Groundwater’ would be called out, a half-finished
Times
crossword would be pressed into my hands, and my new
companions would vanish for ever.

Since my papers had to come from Canada, I spent several
weeks at RAF High Wycombe, a gloomy place that managed
a convincing impersonation of the end of the world. But I have fond memories of it; firstly, because it was there that
I wrote my first s-f story to be published, and secondly
because I was looking forward to seeing Mary Matthews,
whom I had met in a Notting Hill hotel a month before I
joined the RAF. We had exchanged a few letters while I was
in Canada, but I had no idea if she would still be there.

As soon as I left RAF High Wycombe I travelled straight to
London, and booked myself into the hotel near Ladbroke
Grove where Mary and I had first met. Friends had brought
us together at a party held in the large communal garden
behind Stanley Crescent, an untended wilderness that I
remember as a cross between Arcadia and a jungle-warfare
training range. Today this entire area is dominated by
bankers, hedge-fund managers and television executives, but
in the 1950s it was a warren of shabby boarding houses and
one-room flats occupied by jobless ex-servicemen, part-time
prostitutes, divorcees with small children living on handouts
from their relatives; in short the flotsam of down-at-heel
post-war England who could not even afford to be poor.

Yet respectability kept breaking through, and young
professionals were already beginning to infiltrate the area.
Mary Matthews was one of them. Arriving in London to take
up her job as a secretary at the
Daily Express
, she moved into
the Stanley Crescent Hotel because it advertised a handbasin with hot and cold running water in every room, a remarkable
feature at the time, and as much a sign of middle-class
success as a second bathroom in a suburban house today.

Yet this was Christie country, and Rillington Place (later
renamed), where the ghastly John Christie committed his
murders, was only a few hundred yards away. Back in 1953,
soon after my meeting with Peter Wyngarde at the Mitre in
Holland Park Avenue, I was walking up Ladbroke Grove
when I found a huge crowd outside the police station. They
filled the side street, watching the entrance to the car park
behind the station. A police car approached, siren ringing,
followed by a police van. The crowd drew back, leaving a
woman in a red coat standing in the middle of the side street.
The constables guarding the car park entrance made no
attempt to move her, and she stood her ground, watched
admiringly by the crowd as the police car and van swerved at
speed through the gates.

The woman in the red coat was the sister of Timothy
Evans, a mentally retarded friend of Christie who had been
charged with the murder of his son and hanged in 1950. In
fact, Christie had murdered the infant, and was himself
hanged in 1953. Evans, too late, received a posthumous
pardon in 1966. I can still remember the woman in the red
coat, and her implacable gaze as she stared at the police van.
Inside was John Christie, a now-deranged figure who had
just been arrested for the murders he had committed at
Rillington Place.

My wife, Mary Ballard, in 1956
.

I had originally moved to the Stanley Crescent Hotel after
being driven out of South Kensington, when the weekly rent
for my room in Onslow Gardens rose from 36 shillings a
week to two guineas. South Kensington was beginning to
stir, as old money that had retreated to the countryside for
the duration of the war began to return to its stucco villas. I
preferred Notting Hill, for its general raffishness and unexpected
delights, chief among them Mary Matthews.

When I first met Mary, shortly before joining the RAF, she
was working as a secretary for Charles Wintour (father of
Anna, the ‘tyrant’ of
Vogue
; he later became editor of the
Evening Standard
, but was then a senior editor at the
Daily
Express
). Born in 1930, Mary was the daughter of Dorothy
Vernon and her husband Arthur Matthews, who were well-
to-do landowners in Stone, Staffordshire. Mary’s father
served in the Honourable Artillery Company during the
Great War and was invalided out. At the time I met them in
1955 they were living in a modest cottage in Dyserth, a village
near Prestatyn in north Wales. They grew their own
vegetables and had a simple and pleasantly provincial life
together. Like Mary and her two sisters, Peggy and Betty,
they were extremely generous people with strong moral
principles.

I think Mary was the most adventurous of the sisters, the
youngest but the most ambitious, and the only one who
wanted to live and work in London. She was enormously
optimistic, and confident that anything was possible if
enough willpower was brought to bear. She was tall, with a
striking figure and great presence, a woman whom men
immediately noticed. In many ways she remained a girl from
the Potteries, and at times appeared to be a dizzy brunette,
something of an act, as she was quick-witted. All my men-
friends liked her enormously, and she was generally popular
at the
Express
. She had enjoyed a very active social life in
Stone, a world of big houses, prosperous farmers driving Armstrong Siddeleys, lavish private dances and several very
dashing suitors.

What she saw in me I still find it difficult to work out. I
was probably rather ‘lost’ in her eyes, but she knew that I was
ambitious. I lived on the floor below her in a wing of the
hotel, and I worked hard at making myself useful. We began
to spend increasing amounts of time in the pubs along the
Portobello Road, getting pleasantly tight together. For some
reason I delayed telling her about my Shanghai background,
which I was afraid might appear a little like a criminal
record. In some half-conscious sense it was. Mary was not
impressed to hear that I was joining the RAF, but her eyes
widened a little when I said that I was writing a novel, a rare
phenomenon among the point-to-points and hunt balls.
‘Have you nearly finished?’ she asked me, to which I replied,
truthfully: ‘No, I’ve nearly begun.’ She saw the joke, but also
the serious point lurking somewhere behind it.

What rather raised me in Mary’s eyes was the modest part
I played in the Mrs Shanahan incident. This on-and-off
prostitute lived in a room above Mary with her 7-year-old
daughter. When times were low she would bring back customers
from the Portobello pubs, for some reason always
large and tired men who would climb the stairs past Mary’s
door as if on the way to the gallows. What disturbed us was
the presence of the daughter, who would be dressed in a grey
silk Marie Antoinette dress and hat, carrying a little baroque
umbrella. Blank-faced and unsmiling, she would remain in the Shanahan room while business was transacted.

I still prided myself on the thought that I had seen everything
in Shanghai, but this completely shook me. What on
earth did the daughter do in her Petit Trianon outfit while
her mother and the customer had sex? Did she take part? I
prayed not, and I guessed that all she did was watch, or sit
behind a curtain, twiddling her umbrella. Mary didn’t care
what she did, but wanted the whole horror stopped. She
bought little presents for the child, which made Mrs
Shanahan effusively grateful, and she was overly keen to be
our friends, forever offering to cook meals for us; she told
Mary that I was far too thin. I suspect that a wall divided
her mind, separating her affectionate, everyday life with her
daughter from the spectral moments imposed by necessity.
Pressed by Mary, I spoke to the manager, a tired Pole
exhausted by climbing the stairs to badger his tenants for the
rent. I threatened to call the police, something I probably
would never have done, I regret to say. The next day Mrs
Shanahan and her daughter had gone, and Mary assumed,
with her good nature and high principles, that this was a
happy ending. I hope it was.

When I left High Wycombe, the RAF now behind me, and
booked into the Stanley Crescent Hotel I found that nothing
had changed. The same tired tenants were still there, one of
the lost tribes of Britain’s post-war world, among them a retired RAF squadron leader and his very posh wife, Peta,
who was always boasting in a loud voice that she had
‘checked out on twin-engines’ (was authorised to fly twin-engined
aircraft) before her husband. To her annoyance, he
was never able to pay the rent, and I think she knew that her
husband had given up hope. The Polish manager would
linger in the breakfast room (breakfast was never served,
except to cash-on-the-nail tenants), waiting until Peta was in
full twin-engined flight with another guest, and then step up
to her, saying in a loud voice: ‘You are three weeks behind
with your rent, Mrs…’ Peta would flounce away, angry that
I had witnessed this little humiliation. Only a few years
earlier they had been stationed in Cyprus, with a large house
and servants. She was lost in post-war England, but a perfect
symbol of it.

There was a wartime Navy lieutenant who had captained
a motor torpedo boat. He lived in one room with his amiable
wife and baby daughter, and spent his time building model
seacraft. Some years earlier, he had damaged his brain by
diving into the wrong end of a swimming pool. I became
good friends with him, and would help carry the picnic
equipment to Kensington Gardens and watch him sail his
models in the Round Pond. All these people, like myself,
would have been classed as misfits, casualties of war who had
lost their way in the peace, but at least we all accepted each
other and there was never any rivalry. Today that one-star
hotel would be full of financial hustlers, celebrity hunters, people with huge expectations and aware that a lack of any
real talent was no handicap to success. Any novice writer
would flee in horror. I remember the old Stanley Crescent
Hotel with affection.

Above all, of course, because Mary was still there. I left
my suitcase in my old room, luckily vacant, and knocked on
the door of Mary’s room. It was opened by a middle-aged
woman in a nursing sister’s uniform. For a few seconds my
heart died, and I realised why I had left the Air Force and
travelled all the way from Moose Jaw. Then I learned that
Mary had moved to a larger room on the first floor.

I think we were surprised, a little wary but almost relieved
to see each other again.