The Whispering Swarm (7 page)

In 1950 I was in Gamages buying boxes of Messrs Britains lead soldiers in all their glorious uniforms of empire and by 1970 I was fingering plastic GIs and wondering what had happened to all that gold braid, scarlet and navy blue enameled onto tiny hollow-cast military men. Sometime between 1957 and 1963 the world changed completely. I don't think anyone noticed. After the war our world had been generally dull, poor and safe, much like the Depression 1930s. Even when they became Teddy Boys, the racetrack gangsters hung out in two or three pubs we all knew and avoided. By 1965, when money brightened it up, everything became fantastic and more dangerous. The TV seemed to reflect this. Unemployment was part of the cause. We lost the sweets factory, the Old Holborn factory, Cadbury's chocolate biscuit factory, and the B&H dairies all in a couple of years. No wonder the air smelled so sweet. Then warehouses became worth more than the stuff they stored. Houses and factories became ‘real estate'. We got more crime, but there was also full-colour advertising, headlines on the front page, umpteen supplements, soft porn on page three, extra TV channels, home-grown horror comics, the Vietnam War and Technicolor Hammer films.

Making my way through that particular fog, enjoying it as I always did, I could pretend I was in a movie, especially one of the Hollywood Sherlock Holmes stories. Many of my early memories were actually of movies. Anyone was allowed into the cinemas before they made ‘universal' and ‘adult' certificates. Long before they needed an
X
certificate. The movies were nearly always in black and white and full of fog. It took me years to realise there were other kinds of films. My mother liked musicals, too, but I associate my childhood visits to the local Rialto with a mood of grim melancholy. There weren't too many happy endings in
The Big Combo
or
They Drive by Night
. Mum loved gangster pictures, preferably featuring misunderstood brutes: James Cagney, George Raft, Robert Ryan, James Mason, Sterling Hayden—the kind of men she would never have allowed into our house in real life.

On that evening I quickly became used to the fog. I pretended I wore a fedora and a trench coat like a character in those American thrillers we loved so much. I experimented with the odd menacing cough. And, enjoying the echo of my own footsteps, I made my way accurately home.

My mother still had her pinafore on, the souvenir Brighton one I'd bought her that summer. Our last holiday together. She had been worried sick, she said, though she seemed perfectly cheerful as she got supper ready. She hadn't lost her wartime habits. Her relief at seeing me safe always overcame her anxiety. She needed to stay busy. Her friend, Mr Ackermann, had given her a job working at his toy stall in the market. She sold mostly Japanese tin toys, cheap and dangerous. I think he only kept the thing running so she had something to do.

Mr Ackermann was of a keen-minded, philosophical disposition. He planned for the long term. Mum was intensely material, mercurial and of the moment. A tolerant woman, too, she fought with herself not to trap me. I've mentioned how she had become a superb liar, one who told and retold her lies until they formed an intricate fantasy so twisted through with strands of intense, bleak reality they often seemed thoroughly true. She became hugely anxious that someone would find out that she invented her stories. From fear of discovery she talked too much. If she stopped talking she knew she would die. She was terrified that someone would successfully challenge her accounts. The stories had almost no intended malice in them. They were fantasies to cheer herself up or give authority to her opinions. When she wanted to be hurtful she wasn't all that good at it.

I felt the strain when she lost touch with her audience! She forgot what she'd told to whom. Much of her energy became devoted to keeping one individual from meeting another in an effort to hide equally rich and intricate lies. Her life took on all the desperate intensity of a Whitehall farce. She would close doors on unexpected visitors, hide others in cupboards and talk loudly over a conversation she didn't want you to hear. Comedy in retrospect, but nerve-racking while it took place. Only Mr Ackermann seemed unaffected. Maybe he believed her. His own early life before escaping to England had been equally fantastic as he was pursued across Europe by Nazis.

I know one or two of Mum's brothers believed she and their other sisters were putting on airs and graces, but they were just the innocent affectations of the petit bourgeois and easily understood and forgiven as mere wish fulfillment. My mother was Sarah Bernhardt compared to the others. Both her sisters were envious, afraid and amazed by what she made of them all. They were simply characters in a mighty novel she carried in her head and, to be fair, her heart. She created a
Com
é
die Humaine
of her own, longer by far than
Gone with the Wind.
My mother was flattered when men said she looked like Vivien Leigh. They soon discovered she was as confused and vulnerable as Leigh was said to be. And then they tended to fade away, back into the crowded pubs of Brookgate.

Mum went to bed. ‘Good night, love,' she said. I stayed up reading. There was no late-night telly in those days.

Before I got ready for bed I looked up the Carmelites in my dad's old
Encyclopædia Britannica
. He had bought it on the installment plan when he had thought to better himself before the war. Mum had made the rest of the payments. It's where she got the details of all the foreign trips she told everyone she was making. It was almost brand-new and the thin pages were a bit damp, tending to stick together. But I found all I wanted to know. The order had grown up as some sort of loose community of hermits on the flanks of Mount Carmel. They might be originally pre-Christian, but Abraham, the prophet Elijah and Mary Magdalene all gave them spiritual guidance. Driven from the flames of Mount Carmel by one of Islam's sudden and passing puritanical waves, they were forced to find patrons amongst Europe's nobles. Slowly they grew reconciled to the loss of the Middle East as European fiefdoms. They came to London in the first quarter or so of the thirteenth century and had lived there according to their own laws since 1241. Anti-Semitic Henry III, with his reputation for piety, but unable to distinguish a Jew from a Mussulman, had welcomed a great many Christian refugees during his reign. And sure enough there had been an abbey on the site near Fleet Street for centuries and Alsacia (or Alsatia) had been built on the monks' land. According to the
Britannica,
London historians generally agreed that, under the charter of King Henry III, the Carmelites were granted their grounds and priory on land bounded by the old ‘Flete' River to the east, the Temple to the west, Fleet Street to the north and on the south by the Thames. Their cemetery abutted the river.

Sometime after 1800 the friars and their abbot had been moved to St Joseph's, Bunhill Fields. They left some dissenting brothers behind, probably due to a schism involving the Jesuits or the Jacobites or the Jacobins or someone. Those monks had apparently been seduced from the paths of righteousness by inhaling an evil miasma coming from beneath the original abbey's foundations. Clearly the various arguments in the church were all about ordinary politics. My own political viewpoint was based on the writings of Prince Peter Kropotkin, the mutualist Uncle Fred admired.

Next morning, I looked through the collection of miscellaneous prewar boys' weeklies I still picked up whenever I came across them. The other fanzine I did,
Book Collectors News,
was mainly for story-paper collectors. I remembered an issue of
Claude Duval
from the 1900s which mentioned some sort of thieves' quarter near Fleet Street. I only had two issues and I found them easily.
Claude Duval
weekly, Issue 6, Price One Penny,
The Armed Men of Alsacia,
10 January 1903, with a fine blue-and-red cover by ‘R.H.'. The Masked Cavalier himself! Claude on horseback in all his cavalier finery leaping over a massed pile of barrels while his enemies, corrupt but pinch-lip'd Roundhead redcoats, shoot and slash at him without apparent harm to the laughing highwayman who defiantly doffs his splendidly feathered hat and passes effortlessly over the barricade. A great story, part of a continuing serial, printed in eight-point type, which most adults could only read with a magnifying glass, but from long practice was perfectly legible to me! Claude was in Newgate, awaiting execution, having posed as Lord Wilde, the king's confidante, in order to let the real lord escape. I began to read it during breakfast until my mother stopped me. It was bad manners to read at the table. I started to tell her of the Sanctuary. In
The Armed Men of Alsacia
the quarter seemed to occupy a lot more space than the one I had visited. But she wasn't really listening. She talked about some problems my Auntie Molly was having with her suppliers and the rotten little Court kids coming over to nick stuff off the stall, thinking she was born yesterday.

Before I left for work, I lied to my mum. I said we had a heavy press day, putting together a special issue. I planned to revisit Alsacia. I had promised to meet the abbot for tea but more importantly I hoped for another glimpse of that beautiful, spirited girl who'd ridden into an innyard calling for an ostler! Now my best guess was that she worked for Bertram Mills' Circus. They stabled a lot of their animals across the river in Battersea.

I was still reading when I headed down New Fetter Lane which led into Fleet Lane which joined Fleet Street. I took
Claude Duval.
Courtly, graceful, handsome and daring, he was a virtuoso on the flageolet. He once played a duet with a lady whose coach he was robbing. He then offered not to take a penny from the coach if she would only grant him a dance. Which she did while her coachman played. Frith had done a famous painting of the scene, much copied by story-paper artists.

I was hardly aware of my real surroundings as I read Claude's adventures, keeping half an eye open so I didn't bump into anyone. Before I knew it I had reached Carmelite Inn Chambers and stood looking up at the great iron-bound door in the far corner. With a sense of anticipation I stepped forward and pushed hard on the left side. It didn't budge. I tried the right. Nothing. Stuffing the magazine into my jacket pocket I tried hammering on the doors but only succeeded in hurting my hands. I looked around for someone to ask if the gates opened at a certain time. But Carmelite Inn Chambers was almost deserted. A delivery boy was leaving on his bike. I called ‘excuse me' without any luck. Lights began to burn in offices. I hadn't noticed a morning fog drifting in from the river. If I didn't get back up to Fleet Street there was every chance I'd have to waste time waiting it out in a pub. I started to hurry.

Of course, I was soon lost in that maze of little streets snaking around one another, more or less paralleling the Thames. It took me half an hour to find the Temple and by the time I reached the Strand, heading for Trafalgar Square, the sun blazed in a clear, pale winter sky. I knew what had happened. Somehow I had chosen the wrong square. It wasn't Carmelite Inn Chambers at all!

So I got my hair cut in St Martin's Lane and went back to look for another square like Carmelite Inn Chambers. An old Inn of Court where lawyers worked and often lived. That part of London is still full of them. Some sensible monarch set them up when he was reforming the law. The lawyers, of course, soon departed from the spirit of the institution. Rumour had it that most of the apartments were now occupied by mistresses of barristers or the barristers' mothers.

Remembering that I was due to have tea with the abbot I did everything I could to find the place. Now I felt guilty as well as frustrated. I went back to the Old Bailey, to the typesetter, but they were closed. For hours I tried to find a square that resembled Carmelite Inn Chambers, but I discovered nothing nearby. The more I returned to it, the more I was sure I had been right the first time. I tried pushing on the gates. I asked passersby what they thought was behind them. Most said they had been sealed up since before the war. Others thought there was a boatyard back there, or some kind of junk business. Some of the chambers appeared to look onto the Sanctuary, but, when I asked to see, I was told those windows had been bricked up since before the war. What sort of delusion could I have suffered? I returned to Fleet Street and had a glass of claret at El Vino while I sat and refused to believe what was happening. When people I knew came in I was cheerful. I didn't say anything about my obsession. There is nothing like an obsession to keep food off the table. I decided to wait until Pete Taylor and Barry Bayley could come with me.

I also decided to keep trying periodically but not to spend my life on it. If I continued to insist on searching for the mysterious gate, I'd really go crazy. However, I was suspicious of comparisons to those stories about vanishing shops or houses, so popular with readers around the end of the nineteenth century. In my world, if a house suddenly vanished it was because Hitler had dropped a bomb on it. Those gates had to be somewhere! Could I be experiencing a trick of the fog?

Although I felt awkward about missing that teatime appointment, I was still mainly intrigued by the young woman I had glimpsed riding into the innyard. She was around my age. Wonderful in her tricorne hat and thigh-high boots, she was quite literally my dream girl. Every time I was in the Fleet Street area I looked out for her.

Three days later Bayley came round to return a
Science Fantasy
he'd borrowed. We went to the Globe, then back to his place. I kept him up all night, going through my little trauma over and over again, showing him the copy of
Claude Duval
. He listened mainly, he admitted, because I was buying. Early next morning I dragged him back to Carmelite Inn Square to look for the gate. Barry's hangover had been growing worse. When we reached the gate he pushed it open easily, much to my surprise, and immediately stepped back, holding his nose. ‘What a bloody stench!' Then he turned around and began to throw up in the gutter.