The Whispering Swarm (2 page)

To this day I still love London. There's nowhere else worth living, even knowing what I know. Holborn Viaduct, that monument to art, science and industry, connecting the West End to The City, spans what used to be the Fleet River, now Farringdon Road, from Brookgate to Smithfield. I liked to stand on the viaduct, looking towards the Thames, inhaling health-preserving fumes from the traffic below. There was Blackfriars Bridge and the rich waters of the river, marbled by rainbow oil, poisonous and invigorating, buzzing like speed. What immune systems that environment gave us! It was an energy shield out of a science fiction story. The city lived through all attacks and so did we. Our bit of it—almost the eye of the storm—was scarcely touched. I grew up knowing I would survive. We all knew it.

BROOKGATE

I think the Blitz only killed twelve people in Brookgate. Thirteen at most. That's luck. And London's still lucky for me. Its familiarity gives me a feeling of security. Repetition is important, too, so when I go through Brooks Passage at lunchtime, Ron the escapologist and his dwarf wife are always there, drumming up trade from the office workers. Gamages decorated their display windows every Christmas. Tinsel and coloured glass and cotton-wool snow. They had a Santa inside. So did Ellisdon's, the big joke emporium on the corner where little drawers of practical jokes stretched from floor to ceiling:
False noses (sm.); nail thru thumb. Blackface soap, bad doggy (lge), black eye, edible goldfish.
Endless entertainment for generations. We went there for dress-up clothes, too. For under a pound they would rig you out as a highwayman, a princess, a pirate, a cowboy or a nurse. Both big stores are gone now.

Few children could have enjoyed growing up quite as much as I did. I lived more or less on the cusp of East and West London, where ‘Town' ended and The City began. Everything was in walking distance—cinemas, theatres, restaurants, shops, museums, art galleries, antique places. Pretty much everything you might ever need. And behind the rebuilt main streets there were the endless ruins.

In the '50s London was still characteristically navigated by bomb sites, rather than her midden heaps and church steeples. Almost every little red-brick street had at least one gap in it from some sort of bomb. In the east, people had trodden paths between shoulder-high stretches of rubble. Our hedges were broken brick, stone and burst concrete out of which shot branches of rusted steel rods, vibrating like fresh shoots.

THE DOCKS

The South Bank of the river was even more of a wasteland, with hardly a warehouse standing. It didn't matter. Better roads began to bring goods to the nearest train stations or even to the growing airports. But the Pool of London was still packed with ships, wharf upon endless wharf. You had to take trains between so many docks. For one summer during the school holidays I'd worked for Flexhill Shipping Company delivering bills of lading. But the commercial, trading heart of the city was already beating slower, anticipating the death of the trades which had created it.

Piles of blackened and soil-smeared remains, blazing with purple fireweed, lay between Billingsgate and the Royal Mint, between the Bank and the Monument, Katharine Dock and Smithfield, everywhere Bow Bells pealed. As if God in his mercy had left us at least a tourist trade. They showed clearly how the city had been designed before Charles Dickens's time. Much of it was seventeenth century, from the Glorious Revolution. If this had happened forty years later they would not have rebuilt it. They would have preserved it as a theme park. Much more profitable. Ye Olde London Towne World. Wrenland. Hawksmooriana. Only the dead worked in London-land.

THE PRESS

There was enough work for everyone. The back pages of the papers were thick with job ads. All the little twittens and lanes around Fleet Street yelled and clattered with the sound of linotypes and printing machines. They sweated ink and pissed hot air, stank of oil, sweat, exhaust fumes and beer. So many had survived, working through the war, the Blitz and the V-weapons.

There was hardly a basement without a roaring rotary press thumping out multiple editions of national and weekly newspapers, linotypers whirring and rattling away. The entire area ran on electricity and alcohol and was dedicated to the printed page, turning fact into fiction for the magazines and fiction into fact for the newspapers. Interpretation and prejudice; sensation and sobriety; a quarter filled with services for publishers and printers, for block makers, photographic developers, typographers.

Equipped with loudspeaker horns to announce their arrival, newspaper vans ripped through already lively streets or waited with chomping engines for the latest editions to come off the presses before hurtling away to train stations and distributors. Men in crumpled, grey three-piece suits and trilby hats stumbled straight from offices to pubs and chop shops, tearooms, self-service caf
é
s and automats and back again. Swapping gossip. Putting a bit on a horse. Scouting for a job. Boys ran up and down the streets carrying satchels and bundles or rode their big sit-up-and-beg delivery bikes through the traffic, whistling at the office girls, shouting insults one to the other—noise which became elements of its own symphony as certainly as Messiaen's birds were elements of his. It only stopped on Saturday afternoon and Sunday. By Sunday night it had started up again.

If cynics sitting at bars foretold the death of print, when radio and TV would deliver all the news on three or even four channels, their environment contradicted them. Fleet Street and her surroundings were dedicated to the printed word, to thousands of morning and evening daily newspapers published almost hourly; Sundays; weeklies; fortnightlies; monthlies; quarterlies; magazines; comics; pamphlets; textbooks; paperbacks on newsprint, pulp paper, art paper or vellum, printed by letterpress; offset; photogravure; fuzzy black and white; sepia; vibrant colour. Each publication had its individual scent and texture. I can recall every sound and smell, every glimpse and panorama of a world now utterly vanished.

MEMORY AND IMAGE

For me, linear time continues to be measured by the circulating seasons in St Giles's churchyard, where big chestnut trees drop bright, bronze leaves on gravestones in autumn or stand stark against the grey stone in winter and swell with blossoms in spring and summer. London is the smell of tar from hot streets. Licorice. Melting vanilla. Sudden quiet falling over Clerkenwell Green on early closing day. The reflecting rain on pavements, the wet-dog smell of piled snow, veined with mud and topped with dust in St James's, Piccadilly. Blooming spring in Hyde Park, the early daffodils, the scent of summer roses, sight of glinting conkers in autumn. These sights and smells carry me on uncontrollable moods, deep into vivid memory. That smell is a powerful drug, able to drag me back to specific times and places. Too painful. Not fair, that pain. I was a child of the innocent '60s and '70s, we thought we'd abolished misery, when it seemed so little effort was needed to build utopia.

When altruism wasn't silly. Or didn't cost you your life.

LONDON AFTER THE WAR

We had done so much for ourselves since the war. In Britain hunger had been abolished and health care was available to all. Manpower was what we needed. Unemployment was a thing of the past. Poverty was a lifestyle choice and everyone could have a free university education. Best-fed, healthiest, best-educated generation anyone ever knew! We were proud of that. The postwar Labour Party was the builder of our courageous new world. Labour leaders had their eyes on a visionary future. I always had some elder to give me tips, tell me books to read, explain how to make a radio or shoot a gun. The British Museum was ten minutes away. I spent hours there, looking at the icons of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Strange, beast-headed deities for whom I felt an odd affection. There were film theatres of all kinds. Art galleries from Whitechapel to the Tate. Every day I was introduced to a new book, a painting, a film. At sixteen I was reading Huxley, Camus, Beckett, Firbank. The International Film Theatre showed Kurosawa, Bergman, Resnais, Truffaut and Cocteau as well as the likes of Fritz Lang, René Clair and Max Oph
ü
ls. And then there was Brecht, Weill,
The Threepeny Opera
. Lotte Lenya live on stage at the Royal Court. Ionesco absurdist plays a short walk from home. Camus's
Caligula
at the Phoenix, Charing Cross Road. Merce Cunningham or the Royal Ballet at Sadler's Wells, just down the road from where we lived. There was nowhere better to be in the world than London. Society's last injustices were being taken care of. Slowly, not always graciously, we were giving up the Empire. Abortion- and homosexual-law reform were on their way. In my romantic imagining London was the centre of the cause of the White Lords of Law and I was at the centre of London. It was so good to be a Londoner in those days as we came bouncing up out of the damp, dull decade of the austerity '50s, when we all wore grey and were too cool to smile at the camera. And we had the reality of the Blitz, our defeat of Hitler, only recently behind us. The Gallery had remained open all through the war.

THE GALLERY

Long and narrow, marinated in the fumes of tobacco and gunpowder, stinking of sweat and damp, the Oxford Street Penny Arcade and Shooting Gallery was an old-fashioned game emporium with a selection of dowdy slot machines and noisy pinballs whose nicotine-stained chrome and gaudy lights promised a bit more than they delivered, and a couple of cranes in glass boxes where you operated a grab to try to pick up a toy, all bundled in there bright as licorice allsorts. We had a Mystic Mary fortune-telling machine, whose paint was faded by the daily sun, a couple of ‘dioramas' where you paid a penny to turn a handle and make a few creaky dolls go through their spasmodic imitations of life against some forgotten or unrecognizable historical drama browned by cigarette smoke on cracked linoleum.

AUNTIE ETHEL AND THE CARDS

For a while Mum's sickly eldest sister, Auntie Ethel, gave tarot readings in a curtained-off corner of The Gallery. She believed in what she did. ‘The trick is to put yourself in touch mentally with the person you're reading for,' she told me. ‘It's something you do with your mind. Sort of telepathy. Empathy, really. It's only guessing, Mike, but I'd swear you're in touch with something. You tune them in. It's the way they sit or talk. You can either read them or you can't.' I got the hang of it. The readings would sometimes exhaust her. Shortly before she stopped she let me dress up in a bit of a costume with a veil and do a couple of readings on my own. People were impressed and grateful. I got a strange feeling off it. Then Auntie Ethel disappeared. Uncle Fred said she had serious cancer and didn't want anyone to see her. I think she died soon afterwards.

THE GALLERY

The shooting gallery itself was in semidarkness at the back wall. Rows of cardboard ducks and deer cranked their shaky perpetual progress through a paper forest while men, with skinny cigarettes sending more smoke up to cling against the murky roof or spread, thick as enamel, across hardboard surrounds, leaned the elbows of their greasy demob suits on the well-rubbed oak and killed time banging at the birds with post-1914 BSA .22 rifles. It always surprised me how many of those blokes who were at Dunkirk and Normandy didn't seem comfortable without a rifle in their hands. Shooting back as they hadn't been able to do? A funny, distant look in their eyes. Was it some unresolved terror? Were they trying for what people these days call ‘closure'? They played the slots with the same intensity. We had an ancient cast-iron post office red
What the Butler Saw
machine and that was about it. Uncle Fred reckoned his granddad had been a successful travelling showman, putting on circuses and fairs all over the country. He had a few faded posters to prove it. My favourite was MOORCOCK
'
S TREASURY OF ANIMALS
,
actually a rather tame-looking menagerie. ‘We go back, our people, to the time of the mummers,' Uncle Fred said. He was deeply and widely educated, my Uncle Fred. All from books, of course. His wasn't the last self-educated generation of his kind (mine was) but his might have been the best. He kept his wisdom and knowledge to himself, only answering when asked. Except within the family, naturally. At work, his longest and most frequent response was ‘Right you are, guv'nor.'

He took the
Daily Herald
every day and read the
New Statesman
from cover to cover every week. He gave me my first nonfiction books, like Winwood Reade's
The Martyrdom of Man
or Wells's
Short History of the World
. He was an atheist but his mind wasn't closed. I read Huxley's
The Perennial Philosophy
from his library. All my inspiration comes from those books my Uncle Fred recommended. We'd discuss Shaw's
The Apple Cart
on the morning walk to the Arcade but spoke in professional monosyllables all day at work. ‘Cuppa?' ‘Ta.' Or to a regular customer ‘Chilly today, eh?' or whatever the weather happened to be.

MY MUM AND THE WELFARE STATE

My mum kept her wealth of common sense but she got a bit weirder as I grew up. Uncle Fred and Mr Ackermann tried to counsel me, told me not to feel guilty. Her upset was inevitable, they said, as she sensed me making my own life separate to hers. So I stayed away from home a bit longer, just for the peace. Sometimes I went home via the Westminster Reference Library where you sat and read without interruption because nobody was allowed to take books out. We were all serious readers, sitting on wooden chairs at rows of lecterns, turning the pages, united in mutual love of isolation.

I had been born into a world that had learned to value important things. The Tories didn't dare mess with that infrastructure. An air of equality and tranquility filled my world. Class would still be with us for another generation but it was disappearing and the evidence was everywhere. Cheap travel. Cheap credit. Cheap and gentle little black-and-white comedies. Holidays abroad. As a result of our first great socialist government, we became the freest people in the world, if not the richest. Sometimes you had to make the choice between a nice meal or a trip to the West End cinema. The wealth was spread, the country became stronger and, bit by bit, better off. For a while I saw working-class London grow happier, better educated and more optimistic. Before they took it all away again.