On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (28 page)

We did go and stay with Jenny at her cottage in Dorset and she fulfilled her promise and took us on a private tour of the castle. My grandfather had a very distinctive nose. None of the portraits were conclusive but in a dark corner of one of the rooms stood a bust which bore his likeness almost exactly.

‘Yes, I’m not surprised,’ murmured Jenny. ‘Captain in the guards. Always a womaniser. This is the bugger who did it.’

Of course, this is not proof of ancestry, nor would I claim it to be, but it was fun. Recently Jenny’s brother has suggested we take a DNA test and make sure. I’m half willing, wanting to settle the issue, but the other half is wondering whether I want to go to my grave still carrying the doubt with me. I always remember one of the last lines of
The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance
. ‘When the myth is more interesting than the truth, stick with the myth.’

At John Murry’s funeral Jenny introduced me to her first husband.

‘I don’t think you’ve met my cousin Garry, have you?’

He looked at me with an expression of astonishment. ‘I’ve never
heard
of a cousin Garry,’ he said with some exasperation.

Jenny’s daughter was also at the funeral. She too thought the story was fun.

As an interesting aside, one of John and Ruth’s two daughters, Helen, married Jamie Rix, son of Brian Rix the actor whose bedroom farces had most of Britain laughing in mid-1900s. John and Brian seemed to get on famously together. At John’s seventieth birthday party the two of them were like a comedy duo, entertaining the guests.

Towards the end of his life John Murry became disillusioned with the writing scene. He always wrote with fountain pen on foolscap paper, even after the rest of us were using computers. To him the act of writing was a spiritual thing: he might have been a monk setting down a sacred script. How one wrote was as important to him as what one wrote. He always said that his writing suffered once he had to stop smoking cigarettes, because that was part of his thinking ritual. One day, halfway through a new novel, halfway through a sentence, John put his pen down. He never again picked it up to write fiction.

‘I realised,’ he told us, ‘that I had said all I wanted to say and one of the worst faults of a writer is to repeat himself.’

He had always painted in his spare time and now he took it up as a full-time hobby. I still have two of his pictures on my wall, a still life and a figure painting. Of course I’m no expert but to me they look every bit as artistically good as his novels. He was a man who took a gentle pride in excellence. Ruth died in March 2002 after a long illness and John, desolate without her, followed almost four weeks to the day afterwards. Neither wanted to live without the other.

I have gone ahead of my chronological narrative, however, and need to go back to the early 1980s. In this era Christopher Priest married the American author Lisa Tuttle. I was a witness at their wedding. They settled down to life in a flat in Ortygia House, Harrow-on-the-Hill, the venue of many parties, gatherings and workshops. The actor John Grillo who appeared in such movies as
Brazil
and
Christopher Columbus: The Discovery
lived in the flat above. John joined us sometimes for Halloween night, when we took along ghost stories and tried to scare the pants off one another. We always promised ourselves that we would produce an anthology of those stories,
Tales of Ortygia House
, a wonderful Gothic title that sadly never came to be used.

Another two writers, not yet mentioned, were usually present at those Ortygia gatherings. Leroy Kettle and John Brosnan, who sometimes collaborated on novels. John was an Australian who had come to the UK as a young man and had, to my knowledge, never bothered to go back again. He wrote both humorous and serious science fiction. John Brosnan died not long after the millennium.

John’s funeral was a wake, with all his friends there to say goodbye. There was a foreign edition of one of his books on top of his coffin and a bouncing rubber dinosaur. John had written a novel,
Carnosaur
, which had been made into a terrible movie in which the prehistoric reptile did indeed look as if it were made of flexible material.

I detest crematoriums. Unlike a church or chapel they have no history and they lack any kind of atmospheric soul. When I leave this world, I want no one to go the crem. Please, please, those of you who wish to say goodbye, just have a memorial service at the nearest Quaker Meeting House. Leave my lifeless corpse to burn alone.

The year after John’s death, Annette and I, accompanied part of the time by our friend and editor, Lesley Levene, went to Australia. Annette and I stayed six months, Lesley joined us for a few weeks. We drove around Victoria state looking for a suitable place to deposit the Australian half of John Brosnan’s ashes. We found a vineyard in view of the Outback and a distant range of dark hills. The wine merchant, an Aussie named Rod Stott, called his vineyard Dulcinea, after the lady who Cervantes’
Don Quixote
doted upon. We thought it a suitable resting place for an author who loved to write and who was also fond of a glass of wine.

We got a bit of stick from John’s Aussie fans and friends, for not inviting them to our ad hoc ceremony. But as we explained, we had no idea where we were going to do it, when we were going to do it, and simply waited for the right place and time to present itself. To get them all there within the hour would have been impossible. I think they understood in the end, for we had nice evening with them, drinking and talking of John, and the state of Australian science fiction in general.

The years at
Wychwater
, before we went to Hong Kong – 1983 to 1988 – were a tangle of worry, hope and joy. My friendship with Rob Holdstock continued to thrive, as did my affection for this man. By far the vast majority of people who met Rob developed an instant liking for him. A tall amiable fellow, he was full of life, generous and big-hearted, with a magical way of enthralling you with his talk. He was passionate about everything and anything, but most especially about masks, trees and mystery.

I spoke with Rob on the phone every few days, during which he was always encouraging. We shared a great deal of favourite subjects in common, but most especially poetry and the history of ancient Greece and Rome. Once or twice a month we would meet up and have lunch and talk over what we were doing and where we thought we were going.

Rob’s attachments to people were ever strong and he made many feel that he thought they were special. And to him they were, for he was the kind of man who opened himself to everyone he met. Shortly after his death I visited the Spanish optician who provided Rob with glasses when Rob was on holiday at my apartment.

‘I was devastated to hear of your close friend’s sudden death,’ Jose said to me. ‘He was such a nice man, and so talented. A very great loss to us all.’

Now Jose had only met Rob during the course of business, yet he had felt an immediate affinity with him. A few weeks ago I had the need to contact my French translator, a woman who also translated Rob’s novels. Sandra had never met Rob, had spoken with him only on the phone, yet she told me, ‘When I go walking now, and I see a bird on its own, I name it Robert, after our dear departed friend.’

When it came to practical work, such as fixing a broken toilet or repairing the car, I never saw Rob do any. If something needed mending, he turned to someone else. Likewise, if he was expecting a plumber or electrician to do work in his house, he postponed writing for the whole day, saying he could not think properly while he was expecting a workman to call. To look at him you would think he could build a house. He appeared strong and capable. Indeed, when his immigrant neighbours fell to fighting – and I mean fighting, sometimes with knives – or the house across the street was being burgled, Rob stepped up and stopped or challenged the troublemakers. He lacked no physical courage. Indeed, his navigating skills with maps were unbeatable. I would trust him to lead me across the Gobi without a false turn. A strange mixture, this man, of the competent and the inept, when it came to practicalities. I believe one of the reasons why he found some very ordinary everyday issues difficult was because he had never really been in the workplace. He had obtained his Bachelor’s degree, then his Master’s, and had then gone on to his Doctorate. Indeed, he did for a while work in a laboratory studying tropical diseases, but he never finished his Doctorate and from that point on worked at home, writing, writing, writing.

~

My friendship with Andrew Hall, the school teacher, also continued to be very important to me. He was, is and always will be a Venetian nut. He loves Venice to distraction and if the money were available, he would live in that exquisite city and never leave. His knowledge of the place is infinite and some of his zeal and fervour for its architecture, its customs and culture, its festivals and carnivals, have rubbed off on me. His house is decorated with pictures of Venice, even the toilet, and Vivaldi’s music fills the rooms. Long talks on our Friday night visits to the house – for thirty-five years now Annette and I have been going to Andrew and Cheryl’s for a curry at the end of every working week – have eventually resulted in a young adult novel
The Silver Claw
, in which Venice is populated by water rats whose government sends for a German otter, an ‘unraveller’ of mysteries, to solve a conspiracy against their rulership.

Conversations with Andrew have resulted in a number of plots for stories and novels. He has the kind of original dreams for which a writer would give a fortune. Some of them, it is true, have been so mundane they would bore the dullest of men. Andrew once dreamed he was a polystyrene tile stuck to a kitchen ceiling. ‘The worst part of it,’ he confessed, ‘was that they had stuck me upside-down, so I could see nothing of what was going on below me.’ Other dreams have had much more of a sense of wonder to them and it is from these I have gleaned one or two very good plots for short stories. Andrew would never use them. He is a conceptual artist by nature, producing among other things wonderful mobile works of art for his wife on each Valentine’s Day, all different, all ingenious in their way.

It was Andrew who introduced me to baroque music and I have since come to need my weekly, if not daily dose, of Purcell, Charpentier, Vivaldi, Telemann, Scarlatti, Bach and others. It’s the only kind of music I can work to without it interrupting my train of thought. It’s pleasantly unobtrusive in that respect, yet again I can sit down and listen to it fully and appreciate its wonders and glories. Baroque has filled a great hole in my life. I love rock, and more especially, jazz both cool and hot, and folk, and sea shanties, and several other forms of music, but baroque I need as food and drink. The only type of music I really don’t take to is Country and Western (Garth Brooks may be the exception) which according to Woody Allen is ‘Music for fascists who don’t understand Wagner’. Hmm, yes, don’t like Wagner either.

One day in Southend-on-Sea I was in a shop buying a tennis racket and I heard on the shop’s music system a wonderful piece of opera. I asked the guy behind the counter whether he knew what it was. ‘Dunno mate,’ he replied, dully. ‘I just sell tennis rackets.’ I rushed out of the place and went straight to a record store and hummed the tune. The assistant stared at me blankly. Fearing I would lose the music in my head I ran for a phone booth (yes, that’s what we had in the days before mobile phones) and called Andrew. Again I hummed the melody and Andrew, bless his cottons, said immediately, ‘That’s Puccini’s
Turendot
.’ Thus I came to enjoy a certain type of opera, though some operas still grate on the cultural nerves formed during my working class upbringing.

Andrew and Cheryl have been firm and constant friends for nearly forty years now. Ex-schoolteachers now retired they are and always have been a deeply religious couple, the Anglican Church being all important to them.

Cheryl is an attractive slim brunette with a tremendous dress sense. A Masters graduate, she understands good English and is often upset with those who are casual with our language. When our daughter needed a tutor for her A-Level English, it was to Cheryl we turned. She did an excellent job and Shaney got the grade she hoped for. When Cheryl was very ill she showed tremendous courage and my estimation of her, high as it was, went even higher still.

Andrew is a man with a deep intellect and a broad knowledge of many subjects. He has his idiosyncrasies, some of which I would endorse and copy if I could. One of them is that he handles books he is reading so carefully they keep their newness intact. He tries to keep them as perfect as they were when he bought them. Even paperbacks.

Andrew and Cheryl Hall are kind, generous people, the sort the Church needs as representatives. Their friendship has been invaluable to Annette and me. They have two children, Bryony and Luke. Bryony got a First for Classics at Bradford University and Luke got a First for Art and Fashion at St Martins. Bryony is in education management. Luke Hall is a fashion designer in New York. We are godparents to Luke.

There is still one young man I need to write about.

Christian Lehmann came into my life during the late seventies. In 1977 the author Mike Scott Rohan married an American who I know only as Debs. They kindly invited Annette and me to the wedding, which because Debs was a Quaker was conducted according to the custom of the Religious Society of Friends. It was a nice ceremony and probably sowed the seeds for my later conversion to Quakerism. At the wedding was a cousin of Mike’s, a tall, dark-haired young man often wearing a quizzical expression. His name was Christian Lehmann, a French youth from Paris, and he questioned me earnestly about writing science fiction and its sister genres, fantasy and horror. We talked a bit and got on well together.

I met Christian again at Skycon in ’78 and Seacon in ’79, two science fiction conventions, and again he engaged me in earnest conversation. He was by this time on his way to becoming a doctor, but told me he was desperate to also become a writer. Indeed, after our third meeting he visited our house and thereafter visited and stayed with us countless times, becoming a fifth member of the family. I remember that as well as learning to love Annette’s custard – he and Rick used to fight over the dregs after an apple pie meal – Christian also developed a taste for sweet mince meat, which he could not get in France, and took jars of the stuff back with him to Paris in his suitcase.