The Whispering Swarm (14 page)

After dropping in on my mum's stall to tell her I was fine, I strolled back down to Fleet Street, Carmelite Street and, eventually, into Carmelite Inn Chambers. I almost burst into tears when I realised what was happening again. The gates had gone. As if the buildings of the square had somehow drawn together and made them vanish! For the life of me I could not find the way back into the Alsacia. I felt strangely helpless, as if a terrible trick had been played on me. If I kept staring at the building standing where the gates should be, I would eventually be arrested and taken off to the loony bin. I became confused and enlightened at the same time. There was only one explanation: I had experienced some sort of hallucination. I had better keep it to myself in future. I wouldn't even tell Barry or Pete.

But my senses still believed it had all been real. Wouldn't Barry confirm it? He had been so hungover, he might not remember. I knew exactly what a shrink would tell me. Because of my very active creative gift I was, when tired, very good at imposing my imagination on the world around me. Probably, they would say, I had found that gate precisely because I had wanted to find it. By ‘closing' the gate, my mind was warning me that I shouldn't try to go through it again. I really had suffered an incredible hallucination! But Friar Isidore was real, surely? If I met him again next week at the typesetter's wouldn't he tell me the truth? Had I conjured those two Puritan rascals out of whole cloth? To scare
myself
? As a child I had been able to see ghosts. Even then I had been aware that I was imposing the images on the world, because my imagination was stronger than most. I was baffled, yet oddly reconciled. I had a nagging association at the back of my mind which recalled that last encounter at the gates. What
was
‘the oak leaf'? Something to do with the Jacobites?

When I got back home the daily papers had been delivered. They were late as usual. One of the magazines was
The New Scientist,
which had started coming out a year or two earlier. I flipped through it, intending to take it to my room and put it on top of the stack to read later. And then, looking at a brief article on the future of psychiatric drugs, it struck me. LSD! It was just becoming generally known. The talk of those Soho friends who reflected the zeitgeist would be all about
The Doors of Perception,
Aldous Huxley's description of his experiences with mescaline and his rather mystical reflections. Later he said that LSD was superior. The only thing stopping us trying the stuff was the price and difficulties of getting it from John Bell and Croyden in Wigmore Street, the retailer who stocked it. It was not illegal and not that hard to get a prescription. A few people had taken it and described its effects. I recognised the symptoms. Although I had not experienced intensified colour and so on, I had lived out those last hours and days functioning perfectly well but, in my time off, I had experienced a detailed waking dream in which I had done all those strange things. It was 1958. LSD-25 had been around since 1938 but only in recent years had Sandoz put it on the market as Delysid. I had read about it somewhere else, perhaps in one of those American magazines I found in second hand shops. Everyone agreed that LSD was a drug which could quite literally change your view of reality.

I felt a sickening sense of loss when I realised that truth. I had been the target of a trick or possibly even a well-meant experiment. I was the victim of an hallucinatory drug which someone (perhaps that so-called monk?) had slipped into my tea. On Monday I would probably learn from friends that I had been babbling at them, believing I was in an eighteenth-century highwayman's hostelry or riding to hold up a long-distance tram!

Moll Midnight had no doubt been simply a creature of my secret desires. No wonder I was fascinated! She was my waking dream. Everything I wanted in a sexual partner. I was suddenly deeply depressed. Moll was an illusion. I would never ride beside her again while she challenged me to dare what she dared, taste what she tasted—the thrill of the pounce, the relish at making the powerful suddenly powerless, the chance to right wrongs and reverse injustice! Even now, as I went up the stairs to my room, I saw her standing regarding me with quizzical humour. I knew what that was, or thought I did. I must still have been experiencing flashes of memory, of moments in her company. What on earth did I think I was doing? I was yearning for a woman I had invented.

I pined for a day or two and then other things began to distract me. I told myself I could keep Moll in my company for as long or as little as I liked. If she was a product of an overactive imagination I'd channel it all into something practical. I would do it by writing about her in a new series of stories. I just wished I could lose the murmuring in my ears, so faint that I was only aware of it when I remembered it. I had begun to wonder if I shouldn't perhaps leave my steady job and go over to Paris for a bit. Ray Napoleon was still there and I was sure he would help me find an apartment. I could write just as easily from there. Cheering up a little I decided to get my artist friend Jim Cawthorn, who had just moved from Gateshead-on-Tyne to London, to draw her with an unsheathed sword swinging in a soldier's harness from her pretty shoulders. Maybe a four-part serial in the back pages of
Tarzan
. ‘
Sweet Polly Oliver
…' I sang. ‘
When sweet Polly Oliver lay musing in bed / A sudden strange fancy came into her head
.…'

On my slow way to my own bed I wrote the first tale in my head. It would be conventional enough to begin with. By day she was sweet Polly Oliver, whose father once owned the Cross Keys until shot by hirelings working on crooked thief taker Jake Jekyll's orders. As Meg Midnight she was determined to bring the killers to justice. No one along the Ratcliffe Highway or beyond laughed at Meg Midnight nor took her lightly. Her threats and her wits were spoken of from Land's End to John o' Groats. She brought justice and hope to the poor. Although no more than seven and ten, she was fêted by the best of them. Forever seventeen, forever riding with the wind in her hair and her enemies far behind, a merry laugh on her lips, she would enter the consciousness of a million boys and girls as soon as I found her a publisher. I would link her adventures to actual history and set her story around 1745 so I could deal with an interesting time in British history, as Scotland and England merged and tensions flared between French and English and their native allies on what would become the Canadian border. Jacobite plots and complications in India. I was too impatient to wait for Jim. I'd do a text story first.

I looked forward to getting back to my sturdy Imperial 50/60, a wartime utility typewriter I still own, winding a sheet of quarto and carbons onto its platen and starting the first story: “Queen Of The Road”! But by the time I woke up a few hours later I was depressed. It had dawned on me that my imagination had provided only a passing consolation. I had to accept the fact: whether she was real or imaginary, the invention of my ideals and desires, I would never ride with Moll Midnight again!

 

7

LOOKING IN TO LIFE

My mum said I wasn't getting out enough. I was pale and ‘nervy', she thought, conditions I now know she associated with masturbation. What, she asked, had happened to all those ‘nice girls' I'd been seeing? ‘Quite a few used to come chasing round here.' (It had been two and they were just mates from school, Vera Small and Marie Booker. Both their dads had shops in the market.)

I didn't feel ill at all. And I wasn't wanking myself to death. I was depressed and trying to come to terms with the idea that I might be crazy. I read a bunch of books on hallucinations and how they affected people. I wondered about the faint persistent murmur I had heard since riding out with Moll. I missed my uncle Fred. I wanted to talk to Mr Ackermann but he was in Austria visiting his remaining relative, a cousin. Mum would be too worried if I told her what I thought had been happening to me. Should I find a psychiatrist? But, over the next few weeks, my natural good humour returned. I joked that I was too shallow to have a serious mental problem. But I did plan to leave
Tarzan
and live in Paris for a while. As I anticipated my trip, memory of Moll slowly faded and Barry Bayley helped convince me the gate had been partly an illusion and what I'd seen behind it a waking dream. He had a lot of theories. Barry always had a lot of theories. But he got me refocused on the skiffle group, which was slowly turning into a blues band and would soon be an R&B band. I wrote a bad song, ‘Galloping Mary', and put the Alsacia behind me. We performed the song at The Princess Louise, just down the road in High Holborn. That was where I met Alexandra Taylor, a posh girl whose Pakistani stepfather was a dentist in Belgravia and only let her out at weekends. Sandy was beautifully blonde and not very bright. Eventually she got to be a model and was actually on the cover of
Vogue
. Before that, however, she told me a funny story about how her stepdad had caught a man flirting with her mother and had arranged it so that the man woke up one morning without a tooth in his head.

Soon after ending the affair with Sandy, I began writing the Meg Midnight adventures in earnest. They grounded my fascination for the girl in the Alsacia until I could scarcely tell my character from the Molly I had dreamed about. By now, in spite of aching all over the following day, I had convinced myself that it had been nothing more than a dream. Meg Midnight would now become one of those dreams that keeps on earning the cheques. Her adventures were the best story-paper work I had done so far. In those days there was a shrinking market for text fiction as opposed to comics but a few papers took a typeset story or two because it offered them some sort of respectability with schools. Amalgamated Press's
Comet
and
Sun
seemed to like the older style and at the same time were the comics the department was proudest of. When I had finished the first two Meg Midnight adventures I showed them to the editor Dave Gregory. ‘Authentic history,' he said. ‘Teachers and parents love that.' Everyone was looking for that edge: to be a comic, like
Eagle,
which parents tolerated. AP had at one time used a female highway thief-turned-thief taker in their Jack O' Justice series, so Len Matthews, one of Dave's bosses, who had written them, was also reassured.

If Clark Gable had lived and gone to seed, that was Bill Baker, the hard-drinking Irish-Canadian, who edited Sexton Blake Library and who had introduced me to Dave and the others. Outside, he wore a snap-brim fedora and a trench coat–style mackintosh. Sometimes at work he chewed a cigar, wore a green eyeshade and held his shirtsleeves back with special bands. He called you ‘sport' if he liked you and ‘chum' when you were in his bad graces. He had known little of Sexton Blake when he started and got his mate Jack Trevor Story to collaborate on one. An odd mixture. Jack's pastoral comedy like
The Trouble with Harry
mixed with Bill's mean streets and casinos. In the end Jack became a better friend of mine than Bill was. Bill loved the old story papers he had read as a boy—
Magnet, Gem, Popular, Union Jack
and
Thriller—
and was very enthusiastic about Meg. She would be perfect, he decided, to feature in one of the remodelled comics they were bringing out.
Lion
and
Tiger
would take over from
Comet
and
Sun
. She was exactly right for them. These comics carried about six to ten series strips a week. Bill planned to run a text serial and two shorts based on recurring characters or themes. They were trying to make the paper broaden its appeal to girls. Meg would be a great character for the ongoing series of shorts. I turned them in and they sold very well from the start. Circulation jumped whenever Meg appeared. I got to write a text story in
Sun
every week, then a two-page serial strip in
Comet
.

Of course, what I really wanted to write for AP was a Sexton Blake novel, only because Blake was the last continuous character they had from before the First World War. I had collected
Union Jack,
‘Sexton Blake's Own Paper', during my story-paper phase. The Sexton Blake Library had lasted the longest. SBL published two issues a month and paid £150 for a story, usually paid the week after acceptance. Thirty-five to forty-five thousand words—about half a hardback novel. A small fortune. You relinquished all rights by signing the back of the cheque. AP could retitle your stories, rename your characters and alter the plot to suit an editor's whim over and over forever. But for about half the time it took to write a full-length novel, the pay was so much better than a trade publisher's first advance of between £75 and £100. When that was the only concern there was little incentive to worry about who owned what rights. Jack Story would take a Sexton Blake tale he'd done, change the name, make Sexton a solicitor, sell the novel to Secker and Warburg and get great reviews. I learned from him that most reviewers didn't judge you by your writing but what format your story appeared in. Most Blake novels only ever saw one edition. Many AP writers, myself included once or twice, kept themselves going by recycling and resetting stories and giving characters new names. Once I sold the same story to three magazines as a western, SF and historical tale. In comparison, literature, as my fellow hacks were fond of saying, did not pay.

Meg Midnight soon made me one of the best-paid scriptwriters at Fleetway and Odhams. I specialised in the posher scripts and nonfiction. I became the go-to bloke for ‘historicals'. With a little name change, to satisfy an ever-tolerant Fleetway Publications (these were the days when corporate execs thought a feast was as good as a feeding frenzy), I also sold Midnight Moll adventures to World Books as paperbacks—
Midnight Moll, Moll and Turpin, Moll o' the Road
. She was a more grown-up version of my magazine character. The same plots, a little modest sex for the ladies. As a highwaywoman she had amorous adventures in what became a more specific eighteenth century, using real people for walk-on parts. I called myself Kathleen Barclay and they sold exceptionally well to a mainly female audience. Yet I felt increasingly as if I were betraying a real person.