The Whispering Swarm (3 page)

UNCLE FRED'S WISDOM

Oxford Street these days, of course, is far too posh for a shabby little amusement arcade like my Uncle Fred's. His lease came up in 1958. There's a tourist shop there now. They pay a fortune for those leases. Mugs and T-shirts. Postcards and miniature Beefeaters. Union Jacks on everything. Red, white and blue bunting. Bags. Hats. Coppers' helmets. Red double-deckers. ‘London,' as my cousin Denny always says, ‘is ikon rich. And that makes
us
rich, Michael, my son.' They move thousands of little Beefeaters and queens on horseback a day, they turn over hundreds of thousands of pounds. Their turnover makes you feel sick. And crowded! Push and shove is the name of the game there now. Roll up, roll up! Can you blame me if I get nostalgic for my boyhood, when it was cheap to enjoy yourself and people said ‘pardon' and ‘sorry'?

‘Years ago,' said my Uncle Fred as we walked home towards Brookgate one night when I still worked for him, ‘we all liked to make money but we didn't feel anxious if we didn't make millions. We just wanted to nod along like everybody else. We thought in terms of equality and fairness. I'm not kidding, Mike. Of course there's always thieves and troublemakers, people who are predatory and live off the weak. The stock market depends on our getting into debt. All this cheap gelt, it's making us into addicts. It's a drug culture and we're mainlining money.'

He was talking about hire purchase. Precredit cards. A different way of getting the poor into debt, but I think he was right. It was nice when ordinary people could take a holiday in Spain, of course, but easy credit is what started the cultural rot. Tourism depends on lots of people everywhere with loads of disposable wealth, which means all kinds of changes go through a place that cultivates it. The real, messy, informative past disappears to be overlaid with bad fiction, with simplified folklore, easy answers. Memory needs to remain complex, debatable. Without those qualities it is mere nostalgic sentimentality. Commodified identity. Souls bought and sold.

‘The more lucrative the story,' Uncle Fred said, ‘the more it gives way to falsification. Barnum knew all about that.' Barnum and Marx were my Uncle Fred's twin saints, his Freud and Jung. ‘My Jekyll and Hind,' he'd joke. If he'd wanted to, Uncle Fred could have brought in a few props and called the arcade Ye Olde Charles Dickens Pennye Emporium or some such and done very well. But
Das Kapital'
s terrible Puritanism reined him back. When Fred's lease ran out he couldn't afford to renew it without borrowing, so he retired on a modest state pension (‘Fair and square,' he always said. ‘You gets back what you pays in'). But of course he also had his savings and his stash of sovereigns to sell when the rate was good and hard times came around. Like all sensible socialists, he hedged his bets in the capitalist world.

Uncle Fred gave me books he was enthusiastic about. His generation had grown up on the Fabians' popular paperbacks of politics, philosophy and history and the Thinker's Library. He had a shelf full of such stuff. Herbert Read's
What is Revolutionary Art?
was one of his favourites and Jung's
Modern Man in Search of a Soul.
Various commentaries on the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita and the Avesta were among the spiritual studies Uncle Fred had read on myth, human belief and the supernatural in general. He was a secular humanist but he was curious. ‘It's always worth knowing what makes people tick, Mike.' He'd read most of
Mein Kampf
by Hitler. ‘If you know your enemy and can see your enemy, you can protect yourself against him. Or at least know when to run for it. Everything that monster did was in his book. You only had to read it. That's when I split with Stalin, when he signed that treaty with Hitler.' Uncle Fred, like most of his contemporaries, spoke in a tone of taken-for-granted scepticism you heard everywhere in those days, in almost all the papers, on the radio and in films. You heard it in the language of those who had been ‘believers' before the war. That tone reflected the common assumption that religion was a thing of the past and it was now time to build a more rational world. The clergy was represented by dotty old Whitehall-farce vicars and unworldly curates. Only Hollywood made a buck or two from God. Religion and the corrupt romanticism surrounding much of that, and the discredited fascist creeds and their actions, had helped create the horrors of the past twenty years or so. The Church of England, which still turned up on Sunday BBC, and was effectively the conscience of Parliament, was associated with the ‘caring' aspects of the paternalistic establishment. Nobody thought much about that. The church created colourful traditions, of course, and probably we were none the worse for having them, but anyone who seriously believed in God as anything but a philosophical abstraction was sadly deluded. Even T.S. Eliot, the Church of England's big catch, wasn't sure Jesus had existed. It was left to romantics like me to ask what a rational world had got for us already if it wasn't Stalinism, Hitlerism and fascism. All of which promised a golden future but without much attention to detail. We would discover romance in a big way in the 1960s.

After Uncle Fred's lease ran out I got a couple of the better .22 rifles and some boxes of cartridges as souvenirs. He wouldn't let me keep Mystic Mary. She was sold off with the rest. He had a share in the Bucket o' Gold down in Leicester Square, which eventually became a rock-and-roll venue and where I opened with the reunited Deep Fix a few years later. Uncle Fred left six figures when he died not long after he retired. He was eighty-one. Left the lot to the Labour Party, for services rendered he said. The gold he divided amongst us the day before he popped off, singing ‘The Red Flag' in his reedy old voice. Nobody but me joined in. ‘Cowards!' he whispered, and was gone.

 

2

FRIAR ISIDORE

With Fred's death my mum was heartbroken and her nerves began to worsen. Increasingly, she dyed her hair badly and put on her makeup erratically. She rarely got out of the same few cosmetics-stained clothes and gave most of her wardrobe to Oxfam. Mr Ackermann came 'round to console her, but she was never quite the same after Fred died. She had loved Fred and continued to love Mr A. But she and Fred had memories together going back all her life. Fred had understood her and known how to cheer her up. His love was reciprocated. As well as her talent for fiction, Mum had a huge, almost childish, capacity for unconditional love, and, like Fred, she still celebrated liberty and spoke disparagingly of children whose parents clung to them. When I met a bunch of like-minded teenagers and started hanging out in the Soho coffee bars, she didn't try to stop me. She invited us all back and became quite good friends with some of the people I knew.

By 1955 the times were definitely on the change. Especially for me. And it wasn't just the rock and roll. I was getting more ambitious in general. I wanted to write a novel. And make a record. I learned to play a few chords on my cousin's Gretsch guitar. I became a fan of American folk music. I added Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson to my pantheon. A bunch of us in Brookgate had formed The Greenhorns (who became the nucleus of the first Deep Fix line-up) and we were hanging around Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies, who played blues in the jazz clubs and were regulars at a place near King's Cross. For a while my greatest musical heroes were Gene Vincent and Muddy Waters. I met Gene once and Muddy a few times. I wrote to Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger and they replied! At fifteen my literary heroes were almost all alive—P.G. Wodehouse, John Steinbeck, Ray Bradbury and E.R. Burroughs. Burroughs wrote the Tarzan and John Carter of Mars books. He was the first writer I tried to emulate. My enthusiasm for ‘ERB', as his fans called him, would lead to me getting my first editorial job. But for that, I would never be telling this story. I would not have been introduced to the Sanctuary by the old monk, Friar Isidore.

Between the ages of fourteen and seventeen or so I put out an ERB fanzine,
Burroughsania
. The thing was typed without a ribbon so the keys could cut clear impressions in wax stencils which were then carefully placed over the drum of a mimeograph machine. That was how we reproduced things in those days, before Xerox, before computers. The stencils were delicate things and needed to be used with special skill, particularly if you had pictures or display lettering on them. To make sure they had come out right, you held them up to the light. If the typewriter keys had cut cleanly through the wax, you were ok. Pictures could be delicate as paper lace.

Jacob Egg, Mr Ackermann's dwarfish friend, who ran an estate agent's in Grays Inn Road, offered me free use of their big, modern Gestetner machine. ‘Remember who started you off when you get to be Lord Beaverbrook,' he said. He was very indulgent, giving me free paper and stencils. I think he was a little fascinated by me and maybe wanted to be a writer himself. Mr Egg kept copies of all my fanzines—and there were quite a few—and years later would show them, carefully preserved in plastic folders, as from ‘before you were famous.'

I called mine ‘amateur mags' before I discovered they were known as fanzines. I didn't know there were other fanzines being produced until I put an ad in a print version of Craigslist called
Exchange and Mart,
addressing ERB enthusiasts. SF fans wrote from all over the country and people they knew wrote from America and Europe.

Suddenly, at sixteen, I was part of international science fiction ‘fandom'! I was invited to attend an informal meeting of fans which was held on Thursday nights at the Globe pub, Hatton Garden, about five minutes from where I was born. Almost everyone there produced or contributed to SF fanzines! I was astonished. I had never read a word of contemporary science fiction and precious little Verne and Wells and now, at sixteen but tall enough to pass for older, I stood holding my pint of bitter and chatting to the amiably posh John Wyndham, Arthur Clarke, with his benign intelligence and strange Somerset-American accent, C.S. Lewis, all benign Oxbridge behind his good-humoured pipe, and a bunch of others whose work, like theirs, I had hardly heard of. My heroes were at that time Firbank, Aldous Huxley, T.H. White and Mervyn Peake. I had a correspondence with White and would visit Peake later that year, as I would Tolkien, with Lewis's help. Perhaps they liked me because I was enthusiastic but didn't fawn. Before he died, Wyndham said they were all in awe of me, though I was so young, because of my energetic dynamism. I can only guess what he meant.

I was soon on first name terms with the SF editors, too: Ted Carnell of
New Worlds
and
Science Fantasy,
dapper in his fashionable casuals, with a Ronald Colman moustache; rangy, six-foot-three-inch raconteur Ted Tubb of
Authentic
and bookish little Peter Hamilton of
Nebula
with his heavy Scots accent. Useful contacts? It didn't necessarily pay to know them. Barry Bayley got on well with them all but took years before he sold to Carnell and that was by changing his name. More useful contacts for me in those days were the Fleet Street newspapermen like Peter Phillips or John Burke, who knew when a bit of quick copy was needed. I remained a working journalist for years before I saw myself specifically as a fantasy writer.

At the Globe I became close friends with Barry, Pete Taylor and John Brunner, all recently demobbed from the RAF. Brunner, I think, had been an officer. In those days young men inducted into the national service were, if reasonably intelligent and technically savvy, sent to the RAF to be trained as wireless operators or electrical engineers. The theory was that you came out with a skill. Sadly, the only skill we all shared was the one they'd gone in with, as writers. Barry, the spitting image of Voltaire and not much above five feet high, was a clerk at Australia House and all brain. That twin of the great French comedian Fernandel, Pete Taylor, like me, got work as a supply typist between jobs. We were both superfast, which made us always employable. Only John Brunner was self-employed, somehow running a flat in Hampstead, a Morgan sports car and a Gibson guitar. Maybe he had money. He was rumoured to be from a posh background. His voice was the exaggerated bray of a RAF officer. He wore a Vandyke beard and moustache, an ascot, a maroon velvet jacket and baggy flannel trousers and smoked expensive cigarettes from a tortoiseshell holder. As the outspoken American writer Harry Harrison put it, John had got himself up in the complete Hampstead left-wing intellectual set. He had a CND button in his lapel. He was a socialist. He had written the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's marching song ‘Don't You Hear the H-bomb's Thunder?' and was famous for following the Aldermaston March in his Morgan. He wrote science fantasy with tremendous brio. His first,
The Wanton of Argus,
came out in the pulpiest of pulps while he sold sophisticated hard SF to the prestigious
Astounding
. His posh drawl, however, unlike Wyndham's or Allard's, got people's backs up. He had a way of treading on their toes. He never meant to be rude, but he wouldn't learn. I tried to tell him he irritated people. He explained how I was wrong. He would die of a heart attack at an SF convention in Glasgow, an embittered shadow of his former self.

Another friend made through ‘fandom' was Ray Napoleon, a kind of modern-day remittance man. Ray's parents had sent him to Europe after he'd refused to marry a girl he had made pregnant. He'd been told to stay there, on a modest stipend, until he matured. The logic was a bit strange. Ray was perfectly happy with the arrangement. He said he had been sent away to save his mother and father embarrassment. From San Francisco, Ray was heavily built with dark, Italianate features. I remember meeting a Bay Area folk-singing couple who brought their baby to a London gig. I asked the man if they knew Ray. His face clouded. ‘Ray's not our kind of people,' he said. The woman merely smiled. When I looked into the carrycot, there was a miniature version of Ray looking back at me. At sixteen I went to stay with him in Paris. That was my first big step towards becoming an adult. I met a whole bunch of writers and musicians in the couple of weeks I was there. I even had a brief vision of the four musketeers walking arm in arm out of the Luxembourg Gardens, coming down Boulevard Saint-Michel towards me. I wasn't fazed. I'd had similar flashes all my life. I always knew that these visions weren't real. They were just something I could do.