The Whispering Swarm (4 page)

Still relatively sparsely populated, extremely relaxed and unjudgmental, Paris was one huge vision to me. Never scarred by the war, she had a beauty I could hardly believe was real. Foreigners were slowly drifting back to the city. Ray had a Swedish guitarist friend, Monica Helander, who sang old music hall songs at a little tourist cabaret in Montmartre. On Sundays, she would drive her Citro
ë
n 2CV down onto the cobbles of the quay and, under the golden chestnut trees, would wash it with water drawn directly from the Seine. Today, you aren't even allowed to go there on foot! We would take a bottle of wine and play in the bays under the embankment, where you could get a good echo. I took over from Monica for a gig or two, learning to sing interminable verses of ‘Clementine' and ‘Careless Love', which all the tourists seemed to like and which, happily, I could play. I wasn't great, but you didn't have to be in those more-innocent and less-demanding days. I went reluctantly back to London in an ambitious mood. I would return to Paris at least once a year after that.

My fanzine improved considerably once I was in touch with fandom. Like most British musicians at that time, talented SF people were semipro. The fields didn't pay enough, even to the top professionals. From Gateshead-on-Tyne, Jim Cawthorn started to send me stencilled illustrations of extraordinary quality. From Brixton, Arthur Thomson, who already illustrated the professional SF mags, drew me cartoons and headings. Professional writers who had sold stories to
Nebula
and
Authentic
wrote features as I expanded my fanzine's parameters to include writers such as T.H. White and Mervyn Peake. Thanks to my new contributors I had begun to look pretty professional. I tried to get interviews with more fantasts and ran articles on people like Ray Bradbury, Talbot Mundy and M.R. James. When I told them how close to the Globe the weekly
Tarzan Adventures
magazine was, my fellow fans suggested I interview the editor whose offices were below the rooms where Chatterton died, between Leather Lane and Grays Inn Road, in Brook Street, Holborn. It seemed as if I could live my entire life in a bubble less than half a mile across and find everyone I wanted to meet, everything I wanted to do!

Tarzan Adventures
was a bit of a crossover between a weekly comic book and a text magazine primarily for boys. I enjoyed it better than most but I didn't like every artist who drew the strip and I thought the features and short stories were pretty pathetic. Still, it seemed a good moment to ask the editor, Bob Greenway, for an interview. He was a bit lordly about it but permission was granted and I went to see him in his old-fashioned editorial study at Westworld Publications. Plump, boozy, aggressive, he knew nothing about Burroughs and of course my piece on him in
Burroughsania
reflected this appalling ignorance.

Mr Greenway didn't bother to send back my next submissions. But then, about the middle of 1956, I received a phone call from his young assistant editor, Alistair Graham. Bob had got a new job on
Gardening Weekly
. A tall, gaunt, cheerful, bearded Scot, Alistair had loved my piece. Everyone there had hated Bob. Now the editor, Alistair liked the idea of carrying some features on ERB characters, then perhaps something more substantial later. He was only a couple of years older than me. Soon I was writing short features on John Carter of Mars, Carson of Venus, Tanar of Pellucidar. Alistair was delighted. The readers loved them. Next I was asked to write a Burroughs-style serial. Could, I wondered, another fanzine contributor perhaps illustrate a story? Agreed. Jim Cawthorn, later to sketch out illustrations for Elric, illustrated
Sojan the Swordsman
. I got a guinea and a half an episode for them! I wrote thousand-word features for the same money. At sixteen I was on my way to becoming a full-time professional. I discovered that Alistair played banjo. We formed a skiffle group with his friends from Notting Hill and rehearsed at the office in the evenings. Then one lunchtime Alistair asked me to come and work at Westworld as an assistant editor. Surprised, I wasn't sure. I enjoyed freelancing. I still worked part-time at The Gallery and did temp typing work when I needed to, but my freelance earnings were improving. He murmured that it might be a good idea to accept. When in a few weeks he left to hitchhike round the world with the rest of the skiffle group, I could take over from him. I would be editor. But, I thought, I was only sixteen!

Uncle Fred saw sense in accepting the job, a great start to a career. ‘You'll be editor of the
Daily Herald
at this rate.' He stretched an arthritic hand towards the teapot. After all, he told my uncertain mum, editing was like show business. ‘Still selling illusions,' he said.

So, when a few weeks later Alistair left to travel around the world, busk with his friends and write mysteries, sure enough I was the editor! I must admit I wasn't especially flattered by the wage offer. I was to get six pounds a week. His face scarred by fire from the downed Hurricane he had flown in the war, Donald F. Peters was primarily a commercial printer who had sought higher profits in publishing. That dream had faded by the time I turned up. He knew I was prepared to work for a much lower wage than an older journalist! My enthusiasm might prove profitable. As it turned out, he was right!

I was responsible for the whole magazine. I didn't just make the old American Sunday
Tarzan
comic strip pages fit our quarto format, sometimes with drastic surgery and amateurish redrawing, I also commissioned features, fiction, illustrations and our back-pages comics serial, sometimes bought from Italy, sometimes commissioned. Through my fanzine contacts I had a large pool of talented semiprofessionals to draw from. They soon started appearing regularly in
Tarzan
. By 1957 I was producing a semijuvenile version of the US pulp magazines I loved and which were dying in the US. The circulation began to improve. Donald Peters cheered up a little.

They gave me an assistant, a septuagenarian Fleet Street man, a subeditor all his life who hated everything I did. He particularly hated fantasy and science fiction, believing it ‘unwholesome'. He came in twice a week to Brook Street and took the office at the farthest end of the narrow building piled with bales of Westworld's unsold publications and divided up into mysterious spaces whose original function was only remembered by the accounts people and Donald F. Peters, our sad-eyed boss, who had designed them in more optimistic times. Sometimes, if I was alone in the office and had a bit of a hangover, I slept on top of unsold bales of
Marvelman,
Pecos Bill
and various reprints of other Italian comics stored in the basement. I can smell their musty, yellowing paper to this day! They hadn't been a great success in the UK market.

My ancient assistant's name was Reginald ‘Sammy' Samuels. Mostly he did paste-up. His scissors and can of Cow gum seemed a comfort to him. He used shirt suspenders and the green eyeshade Bob Greenway had left behind. He wore a dark suit, shiny at knees and elbows, a frayed shirt, a greasy bow tie and a tobacco-stained waistcoat. He smelled a little sour. He had a long, unhappy face and was bent over with scoliosis. His skin fell in long, discoloured facial curtains which the nicotine from his cigarettes, smoked in long holders, had tanned kipper-gold. I think they paid him less than I got. I found it a little awkward, being the boss of a much older man, and he didn't much like it, either. I would introduce him as our senior editor. He taught me some of the tricks of the trade but probably his most useful tip was how to survive on very little money. At lunch, for instance, he would order two rounds of toast at our nearby greasy spoon round the corner in Grays Inn Road. When the toast arrived he shook salt onto one piece and sugar on the other. ‘There you are,' he said, ‘the savoury course and the sweet course, and all for threepence!' When broke I frequently used his tip. I already knew how to make a cheap sandwich from a bread roll and a portion of Branston pickle in Lyons teashops!

I seemed to have a knack for the work. I could quickly eyeball a piece of copy and know how much of the page it would fill. Even Sammy couldn't do that as well. He showed me how to draw a title and embellish it to look professional, if a little old-fashioned, and passed along his prowess as a proofreader. I learned the trick of bulking out a short piece and cramming in a long one.

We got our typesetting done by Olympic in Old Bailey. They occupied a basement not far from the courts. I would deliver next week's copy on Wednesday and check it over on Thursday. The typesetters would photograph it and send it to our lithograph printers in St Albans. They would already have the pictures and layouts. The printed copy had to be turned around quickly to coincide with the existing pasted-up pages.

Which was how I met Friar Isidore.

Because I was editor
and
printer's devil, every Thursday I went down to Old Bailey and checked the proofs. I was getting great experience. When copy was late and we were short of time I learned to read type straight from the frame in reverse, making corrections without the type being ‘pulled' off on paper, by rolling ink onto the frame, putting a sheet of cheap paper on top of that, then rolling over it to make an impression. If copy was too long I could cut in an instant and if not enough, I could write a short article and have them set it on the spot. They had a couple of typewriters on a high desk so you could type standing up. I was born to the job. I could turn an issue around so quickly, I usually took an hour or two off before going back to the office. On a good day, I didn't have to go back at all.

During these extra hours there was time for a stroll by the river, or a walk to the Tower of London, to watch the Tower Bridge open for shipping, explore the alleys and courts off Fenchurch and Liverpool streets, or cross the river and dive into mysterious Southwark or Bermondsey. The Blitz had destroyed those Victorian boroughs more thoroughly than the Restoration buildings. Councils were putting up great blank blocks of modern flats where the old alleys had been.

I had known Fleet Street, of course, since childhood. I spent more time there once I had decided to become a writer. I drank and ate the atmosphere. It enriched me. It was the stuff of life. I had developed an unbeatable immune system from it. I had gone there for as long as I could remember but now I was fully part of it! I was a pressman, treated as an equal by most who knew me (though because of my youth some still took me for an office boy), including the other editorial staff members who congregated around the typesetters early on Wednesday afternoons when we put our charges to bed. I carried a pica ruler, which we called an em-stick, for measuring type. I knew the number of words which would fill two or three columns on a quarto page, how to mark up and turn an illustration into a reduced block, how to prepare a picture. We understood the same trade jargon. We were brothers (sisters were not yet even a novelty) of the typewriter. Most of my fellow pressmen only had time for a quick familiar nod as they rushed in and out, but one rather eccentric regular, Friar Isidore, shared my hours and was willing to pass the time of day, to ask me an opinion, to offer a thought of his own on the news as I presented it, addressing me with a kind of mild, respectful goodwill which was as welcome as it was unfamiliar. His smile, if a little distant, was infinitely benign.

I was fascinated by Friar Isidore. A tall, scrawny, hunched, pink, bright-eyed man, he would push back his hood to reveal a tonsured, stubbled skull. Carefully rolling up his habit's sleeves, he tackled the sheaf of proofs the setter took out of the pigeonhole for him to read. His magazine looked a bit dull to me, mostly closely printed text in double columns with mysterious titles which meant absolutely nothing, using unfamiliar words in Greek, Latin or Hebrew. Some were even in Arabic, he told me, pointing to what looked like shorthand. And Aramaic. The title was equally meaningless:
The White Friar
. I had no idea what a white friar was. Judging by Friar Isidore's appearance, he surely had something to do with religion.

Religion, in a view shared by the majority of my fellow Londoners, was something mostly associated with our superstitious past. All the Jews I knew were nonbelievers. Occasionally I saw an Hasidic oldster in Hatton Garden but as often as not, he was from Amsterdam. I had never met a Moslem. I knew no one who went to church. In common with most of my contemporaries I thought people needed to invent a creator to give authority to their ignorance. Our remaining churches were chiefly empty, their congregations almost entirely made up of growing numbers of tourists; impressive architecturally and artistically, but essentially alien mausoleums. Westminster Abbey was reserved for royal pomp, also considered a pleasant exercise in nostalgia. Yet I think we were proud of our ‘red' priests and outspoken archbishops. We still heard them on the radio every Sunday. We used an Anglican church, if we used one at all, for weddings, christenings and funerals, yet continued to see St Paul's as the proud ikon of our wartime survival. We'd tell you we were agnostics, mostly to appease any potential Mormon or Seventh-day Adventist on the old door-to-door.

The holidays we kept were essentially pagan with pretty much the same measure of sentimentality reserved for Easter chicks, the baby Jesus and watching the Queen's Speech on Christmas Day. We were vaguely tolerant of others' beliefs, remembered most of the words of well-known hymns and carols, shared the common views about ‘low' and ‘high' churches (Baptists went to chapels and were tightfisted and Catholics were more generous but bred like rabbits). The few prominent Anglicans who appeared in the media probably had greater moral authority than equally prominent politicians.

I knew only a little about my ancestors. My mother's father had died of drink in a pauper's hostel. My grandmother had thrown him out years before. He'd been a journeyman newspaper journalist of some kind, a stringer. His family was Jewish anarchist. Hers was strictly Orthodox. The gypsies were on my father's side, just a generation or so back. I was rather proud of my Jewish heritage, through a daughter of Isaac D'Israeli, the great nineteenth-century scholar and writer, father of Benjamin, the novelist and politician. Until I hitchhiked one summer from Stockholm to Hamburg, I never encountered anything I recognised as anti-Semitism. Brookgate slang was full of Yiddish. We were on the edge of districts traditionally occupied by tailors, clockmakers and diamond merchants. We had a synagogue across the road from us. Admittedly it was attended less and less, but so were the churches. Very few Jews were culturally any different by now from their neighbours. Clerkenwell, and Brookgate in particular, pretty much forced socialism, secularism and self-schooling on us all. We supplied London with a lot of her best taxi drivers, too. I had three uncles who were cabbies and had the traditional left-wing populism and self-education London cabbies were famous for. I have to this day a horror of undertipping, listening as I did to my uncles' opinion of stingy customers. In general, though, the old men cultivated a rather tolerant view of their fellow creatures.