The Whispering Swarm Read online

  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 Ophüls. 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.

  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.