The Whispering Swarm Read online

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  For

  JEAN-LUC FROMENTAL

  and a thousand long lunches at the Goncourt

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  Book One

  1. My Realities

  2. Friar Isidore

  3. The Fish Chalice

  4. The Abbot’s ‘Cosmolabe’

  5. Protecting the Protector

  6. Moll

  7. Looking in to Life

  8. Literary Life

  9. Romance

  10. The Stolen Albino

  11. Engagement

  12. Scenes from Urban Life

  13. Marriage

  14. Children

  15. Christmas Day 1966

  16. Succumbing

  17. The Temptations

  18. Rallying the Troops

  19. The Larks

  20. Retreat

  Book Two

  21. Comrades All

  22. My Games

  23. My Ghosts

  24. Something Like Remorse

  25. The Chinese Agent

  26. The Mysteries

  27. Counting Losses

  28. My Inductions

  29. Mrs Melody

  30. English Diversions

  31. American Diversions

  32. Rolling in the Ruins

  33. Dicing with the Deity

  Book Three

  34. The Absence of Memory

  35. Another Fine Christmas

  36. Stolen Breath

  37. Natural Philosophy at the Abbey

  38. Commitment

  39. Knowing

  40. Melancholy Baby

  41. Puritan Clothing

  42. Cocke o’ the Heap

  43. Preparing

  44. The Shadow of the Scaffold

  45. Setting the Compass

  46. Secrets and Surprises

  47. Pursued by Puritans

  48. A Death

  49. The Fall of the Axe

  50. Conference

  51. All for One …

  52. Soldiers at the Gates

  53. Across the Ice!

  54. Remember!

  Tor Books by Michael Moorcock

  About the Author

  Copyright

  “We do not move in one direction, rather do we wander back and forth, turning now this way and now that. We go back on our own tracks…” That thought of Montaigne’s reminds me about something I thought of in connection with flying saucers, humanoids, and the remains of unbelievably advanced technology found in some ancient ruins. They write about aliens, but I think that in these phenomena we are in fact confronting ourselves; that is our future, our descendants who are actually travelling in time.

  —ANDREI TARKOVSKY

  Through profound metaphysical meditation we reach fulfillment of our deep desires. First comes death; then comes the unending dream.

  —WHELDRAKE, THE PINES OF SPARTA, 1913

  And Cyrus recalls that from our hopes and fears

  We conjure creatures who shed true tears.

  —WHELDRAKE, THE BABYLONIANS

  BOOK ONE

  For all forlorn was the Bride of Morne,

  And sare alone were she,

  She sailed that night from Flete’s narren sleets,

  So to flee the whispering swarm.

  —FOURTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH BALLAD (COLL. CHILD)

  1

  MY REALITIES

  Every day of my life, after all I have learned and the many dangers I have survived, I still reflect on the circumstances which drew me to that part of the City of London I know as ‘Alsacia’, which her inhabitants call ‘the Sanctuary’. I learned that magic is as dangerous as we are told it is and that romance can be more destructive than reality. Worse, I came to know and fear the fulfillment of my deepest desires.

  I suppose I’m a pretty typical Londoner of my generation. Born at the beginning of the Second World War, in 1940, I was brought up in Brookgate between Grays Inn and Leather Lane. We never moved away, even when the whole city surrounded us in yelling flame. By the time I was born, my family worked chiefly at the lower end of the entertainment business. People had to go on making a living as best they could. And they wanted to be entertained. We were settled Roma intermarried with Jews, cockneys, Irish. Culturally, we were metropolitan Christians. We had barely heard of Alsacia, which was no more than a bit of local folklore. There was plenty of that in London.

  SEEING GHOSTS PROFESSIONALLY

  From the age of eleven in 1951, I earned my own living, first in The Gallery, Oxford Street, then, after I left school at fifteen, as a journalist (mostly a stringer for the Evening Standard) and writer of fiction. As an early reader, I especially enjoyed P.G. Wodehouse, Edgar Rice Burroughs and George Bernard Shaw, and when I first began writing I habitually used my middle initial because I thought the best authors all had three names. I had been telling stories since I was four or five, mostly as little one-act plays. Adults said they were amazed at my imagination. I had the sense not to tell them that I could see ghosts as well. I knew I could impose images on the air and taught myself not to be frightened by them, that they were a phenomenon which could be explained. Occasionally, I glimpsed trails not much wider than a high wire, stretching off into shivering emerald and silver. I took it for granted that this was some occasional trick of the eye. It went away soon enough. As I grew older and read Jung I became even more convinced that what I saw wasn’t real. Not, at any rate, in any other shared reality. Jung had analysed perfectly rational people who believed they had travelled in flying saucers. I was a perfectly rational person and I didn’t believe in flying saucers or any of the other stuff Jung wrote about. It soon became second nature to check when I saw something odd and remember that only crazy people had visions.

  MY MUM AND SHOW BUSINESS

  My mother, who let people think she was a widow, seemed to understand. She loved me unreservedly but didn’t spoil me when I was growing up. She was the first to understand what my ‘visions’ really were and try, with her friend Mr Ackermann’s help, to channel that imagination. She ran a tent show in Brookgate Market, where it widens, near the church, putting on melodramas like Sweeney Todd or Rookwood to audiences of the elderly and lonely. ‘And the downright creepy,’ she’d laugh. But it kept a few old actors in work. She was a kind-hearted if eccentric woman whose own life, in the telling, was a bit of a melodrama. When I was eight or nine my friends and I grew bored during the school holidays so she let us perform a couple of my pieces on slow afternoons. To the applause of an audience mostly made up of other market traders, Red Swords of Mars starred me as the hero, my friend Keith Rivers as the villain and a bunch of little girls we’d recruited in all other parts. It ended with everybody dying, including the hero and heroine. My first successful stab at pulp SF, with the accent on the stab! Mum had encouraged me to channel an overactive imagination into a useful craft. But Mum’s shows weren’t to last. Public taste changed, so she switched to running mostly short silent film comedies and cartoons until TV got into its stride. Then it was over.

  Mum’s brother, Un
cle Fred, who lived upstairs next to my room, owned The Gallery. This was long before Centre Point was built. The place was bang next door to Tottenham Court Road tube station, round the corner from Charing Cross Road and opposite the Lyon’s Corner House where a ‘gypsy’ orchestra still performed for lunch, tea and supper. They played selections from Maid of the Mountains, The Desert Song and The Bandit King, as well as In a Monastery Garden and In a Persian Market. Cheap romantic music to go with cheap romantic adventure books and films! My mum used to say I was born out of my time. She loved taking me to the revived silent classics at the National Film Theatre and the Dominion.

  MY MUM’S SENSE OF DRAMA

  In order to pay for the extra archery and fencing lessons my friend Keith and I took at Brookgate Institute, I worked for Uncle Fred after school and at weekends. I gave change or cashed up the slots. Our family had survived the Blitz but Uncle Fred got a gammy leg at Dunkirk. My dad, a radio operator on Lancaster bombers, was shot down over France in 1943 and hidden by a French family for the duration. He became so comfortable that he stayed on there after the war, with the daughter of the house. My mother said she hadn’t minded much—she wasn’t cut out for marriage. She had me and the business, which, she said, was actually all she wanted from the bargain. I’ve never known how much of that was really true but I’m pretty sure I benefited by his absence, and it meant I spent my holidays with Dad in Toulon and Paris when most of my contemporaries were lucky to have a few days at Butlin’s every year. I had to tell strangers that I was visiting a family friend. Our immediate family knew the truth about Dad leaving her, but my mum, though sweet-natured, was an habitual fantast. To hear her tell it, she’d travelled all over the world. Actually, she’d hardly been out of Brookgate. She went abroad once, on a day trip to Boulogne, and didn’t like it. All foreign food, she would proclaim afterwards, was greasy, fantastic and inedible.

  They used to say that Mum would climb a tree to tell a lie rather than stay on the ground to tell the truth. Nobody believed most of her stories. Only Uncle Fred and Mr Ackermann, a local tailor who spent quite a lot of time in our front room, visiting, continued to be sympathetic and supportive of her. Mr Ackermann had lived in Czechoslovakia before the war. A tall, slender man with pale, ascetic features, he dressed like a prewar dandy. His voice was very soft, his face gentle, with long jowls and large brown eyes that gave him the appearance of droll melancholy. He was very well educated. He had been a scientist doing something with radium but he needed fresh qualifications in England, where they were suspicious of him as an ‘alien’. He eventually took over his cousin’s thriving bespoke tailoring business at the Theobald’s Road end of Brookgate Market. He was a kind, rather introspective man, who also gave me books to read. Years later I came across his rather frustrated love letters to my mum. I wasn’t shocked. I’d known he loved her and I think, by association, me. He had left all his family behind. Few had survived. He was the only man I ever told about my ‘ghosts’. He was sympathetic. ‘When they begin to tell their stories, that’s when you should be worried.’ He smiled.

  LONDON SEASONS

  Keith and I got bored with the archery but we kept up our fencing, particularly after seeing The Prisoner of Zenda at the Rialto, Clerkenwell. I broke my mum’s favourite chair trying the trick James Mason played on Stewart Granger and Keith wasn’t allowed to see me for a week. Soon after that his mum and dad moved the family out to Epping. They said our neighbourhood was getting too rough. I felt very sorry for Keith, being so far from the centre of things. He wasn’t even living in a suburb of London. He was in the country!

  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 loudspeake
r 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 cafés 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.