Fessing up
Suddenly I stopped working. I curtailed a series of paintings, put off the rough sketches for the next and hung up my painter’s jacket. What was I doing? I didn’t know, simply obeying the inner voice.
Outside, life streamed on, missiles flew in the sky, misery rose in the streets. I shut the door and let the walls close in. That’s two days I’m stopped. Why? To slip this in? To do some summing up?
(Self-publishing web mavens say blog about your books so, just this once, I’ll give it a go. If you want to cut to the chase go here).
My relationship with writing began thirty three years ago when I rode MV Baltic Progress into the Baltic. At that time I was known for my graphic artworks, on board I engraved metal plates to print up back on shore. But I also kept a journal and made a booklet, Flagships for New Reaches:
… the darkening sky is supported in a landward semi-circle by wobbling towers of stubble smoke… … on the back of the cabin door a woman does a smudgy dance in a sequence of photographs. She is the lifebelt woman; she does the lifebelt dance with straps and orange pouches… … will they be there hovering over the water half-dissolved as phantom companions as we drown, those life-belt dancers: a formation team of tired glamour-struck shiftworkers …
Life walked in and stole my thunder, it wasn`t until 2008 that I had another wrestling match with text. It came about like this (I don’t know how it is with you but when I get hit by heartbreak I busy myself with charity work) — unpacking a box of books for Amnesty International in Carcassonne, France, right in front of me silver letters on navy blue: Gangs & Countergangs. The book fell open at a photograph of a bunch of people posing with what looked like fake weapons. The negative had been doctored to black out the faces on the print but you could see that some of the people were in fact, well… black. They looked as tho dressed from a thrift shop: crumpled hats, raincoats tied with string and floppy trousers, posed like a corny sculpture in memory of something or other. Something in me clicked and I said: OPERA. I began to write, I inhabited the seven characters to just this side of insanity (full story in Schmopera) but I had an ugly bust up with a composer and laid it aside altho I knew Mau Mau — the Opera was the thing I’d been put on earth to do.
Then I wrote a text part english part french and did a heavy translation collaboration for an exhibition in Pamiers: De La Franqui à Ramonville. It was a companion piece to Flagships for New Reaches but this time on dry land:
… a stele commemorates the fall of a Constellation. The stele evokes the powerlessness of the rescue services: no one could be saved. Fragments of metal lie here and there among the old stones and the houses perched high on the ridge, on the edge of French territory that plunges happily into the Mediterranean.
I imagine a post-war barracks, pilots rushing around at odd hours in racing cars and warmer waters. I am up there, chilled in the dark, a coffee on the gas-camp. My eyes seek to capture the dawn…
… I imagine myself at the controls of a Constellation approaching a hill, the plane packed with listening devices after a routine flight to Albania, and my cohorts struggling, perhaps a twitch or two, before hitting the place where memory slumbers.The scattered belongings are abandoned (no help given), like a meticulously ordered collection before the eyes of the builders of darkness.
Who knows what they saw before they hit the ground? As they began a slow downward turn, would they have been blinded for a moment?
Scotty at the controls, skin taut, sweating, in his itchy uniform. And the other larvae in the metal tube, their bodies gesticulating here and there. A beacon of light then another flares up in the distance. No, they are only the lights of the houses; those of the morning workers who get up to go to Narbonne or Perpignan…
After that I made a clean break, no more picture making, I had to give writing the best shot I could. For the fiction based on fact books I wrote over the next four or five years: Heavy Waters, Tap once if Human, Success=True and From Schtetl to Stardust the only writer I have so far identified on a close path is Francis Spufford with his Red Plenty about:
… the brief era when, under the rash leadership of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union looked forward to a future of rich communists and envious capitalists, when Moscow would out-glitter Manhattan, and every Lada would be better engineered than a Porsche…
Now Spufford, who has written some wonderful factual/literary books, took on in Red Plenty (whose punning title irritates more and more) the business of writing what you might call romantic situations, a problem I avoid by simply being animal and brute. He comes out clumsy and embarrassed but I have ordered his latest prizewinner Light Perpetual, so maybe I’ll find he’s leapt the gap.
I suppose I might have guessed how it would work out for me since, apart from Spufford, I don’t read my contemporaries (a slightly older hand JG Ballard with his ordered extravagancies I can run happily alongside). Boyd, in his Out of sheer rage made me laugh out loud with his virtuoso description of getting tangled up in his trousers but I was like yeah well, you’re over there in your corner I’m over here in mine. And we don’t need to steal current time from each other’s all too brief lives.
My writers include RL Stevenson, Ford Madox Ford, Kurt Vonnegut and, in another dimension, Ryszard Kapuściński and Nicholas Bouvier. I am one of those who when they read have the voice of the writer playing in my head and the voices of Amis, Rushdie and Self play badly plus I have this ludicrous sense of personal possession of the world they improvise from. Why? I didn’t like to look too closely but somewhere in there is something of what Rebecca West says about the traitor Joyce that he over-prided himself on learning a foreign language not understanding that there were many who had mastered two or three with ease. I was beginning to understand that this was my case, that perhaps university education really is a good idea and that I was hardly even at the starting line and had no notion of the deep work that proper writers had had to do to get were they were. So, as it happened I wasn’t intelligent or honest enough to break thru but it took me until 2019 to find that out.
*
My obsession with the early fifties and my liking for history kept me parked in retro. My first project, Heavy Waters, written in 2014 was strung between three factual complications: the passing out of France of the heavy water used in nuclear research in 1940 during the week of France’s collapse, the career of frogman Buster Crabb and British submarine warfare in the 1950’s. I wanted too sink thru layers of archive, literature of all sorts, memoirs, chronologies, boys action stories, flash comics, technical manuals and land as lightly on the page as possible. The first draft began in 1943 with the crash of Polish General Sikorski’s aircraft at Gibraltar where Crabb has to swim out and do the dirty work:
… just a quick wartime drowning. Just an ordinary wartime anguish. There was no doubt a centre to the anguish. Maybe out somewhere in the Atlantic under deep dark blue fathoms, from where, it was suggested, at wars end people would scramble up, march a thousand abreast up the ocean slopes onto the beaches. The thousands of drowned men, drowned women and drowned children who had passed on meekly come back to us, waving their arms. Came from all over that population did. Sunken Aliens and Lascars and Stokers and Babies just born at sea. No varieties spared. Americans, Africans, Frenchmen, English all went down handily. The legs of a wonderful Chorus, their feathery butts, all mixed together as what have you, dirty wet clothing bundles. They formed a perfect set those dead. They made their way steadily despite everything, the shock of shipwreck, the loss of personal belongings my things mes affaires mes baggages to their improvised Atlantis…
I then skipped to immediate post-war Germany and a trio of scallywags who get recruited to pop agents into the east. I got very caught up in the mechanics of midget submarines and dark echoes in ruined halls of Germany’s end of war technical prowess. The section ends with the agent in place:
… there was a dry, not unpleasant smell. An iron bedstead, shuttered windows. She went in to the kitchen, nearly the smallest room. Fitted shelves with sliding glass. Bachelors rubbish everywhere. She started then and there to get the place in order, to bring Ann-Marie Forstumpf to life. Once she had tidied up and furnished the apartment and got the piano tuned she would place an advertisement in the press. Piano lessons all levels State Licensed. Slowly she would get pupils, discard some and encourage others. She would get a reputation. A network of trip wires would ring bells in her piano teaching parlour. She would have her observations and her short summer tour to the Harz mountains. She did those things, it took time…
In this first draft, I went back to 1940 and the week in Bordeaux when France collapsed. I had the heavy water brought out by Lord Suffolk and General de Gaulle striding round town looking for an out. I went to Bordeaux and paced it all out. This section takes up most space, right at the end there is a maritime disaster and men underwater again (what can it be this drowning obsession?).
… there were between forty and fifty men pitched into the sea when the bow went over. The whaler manages to get twenty five shaken men aboard; they overload the boat. The destroyer, keeping station against the tide, thrashes the water with its powerful propellors and as the whaler gets close it is swallowed in the turbulence. The men are again pitched into the water. Then, (says Wigmore) there were cries of disbelief, of deception. Forty five Canadians had come over the globe to help out. Now they were making their way, hand in hand for comfort, through the thigh high mud of the estuary, past the prickly hedges of magnetic mines and out into the patient Atlantic…
The next section starts in 1955 and picks up Crabb’s career in the Cold (underwater) War. I re-construct his swim to photograph the bottom of a Soviet cruiser. I invent a nuclear blackmail at the time of Suez (a weapon that mimicked a natural catastrophe) — I have Crabb swim away drugged by the Soviets, his metabolism slowed right down:
… for years he floated down an avenue of concrete blocks on which distressed people crowded. People of every hue. Glass domes pulsed by with gay flags flapping. Huge mud storms lashed the sea at night. The sky was full of flying lights. Thick swarms of beetles overcame him, the syringe kicked in, he saw it go. Earth’s pains returned to him. Clouds scudded fast. His chemical engines produced disgusting wastes. He rolled out hungry with the surf and they hung him up to show. Within a week Crabb dried up and died, surrounded by laughing children and elephants carrying crates of toy bananas…
I did all the normal things before publishing it at Smashwords but I got no answer from publishers. I didn’t get the tough back and forth with an editor I needed. Two years later I revised the text and re-jigged the sequence to make the sections run chronologically.
I had big hopes for my next book, less research so more room for discoveries. Originally titled Robot’s Reptiles & Rezistants I finally called it Tap once if Human. I wrote this book because of my interest in exploring that funny frontier in the mind where you reach in but there’s something you can’t grasp — this happens pretty quick for me with mathematics. I wrote myself into the huge, airy, upper spaces inside ourselves available for automating. The book kicks off with cuts from the work book of a cctv monitor:
… stint twelve
nothing doing Holsten — Alhambra parking is a four segment screen bottom left car runs over somebody’s groceries, mess all over. I call out the cleaner. Hey, it works! Cleanermate enters top right orange light blinking — pop-up incident report — Cleanermate rolls on bottom left zoom, perfect scrape mop spray. Off they go happy.
stint thirteen
highway hoppers queue for cars, selfie wavers, look-alike masks, odd-goblins. Bottom right barrier disorder, high voices, pop up warning script,
“Marjorie, thats right, Marjorie, put your arms down Marjorie”
stint fourteen
Old Tom came round we beat up eggs and talk about using it in the colour stain. Business on the side. Got the sweat shirt squeegee going, fifty pulls blood red green monk money monkey, fifty pulls blue white sang song sung, fifty pulls ochre pink god is busy can I help? Dried them on the roof. They say they want them for the lab teams…
I cut in a speech from Stokely Carmichael. Why? I think he’ll live. I introduce work being done on an automated beggar. I’m pleased with the smoother style I’m getting after the stiff clunk clunk of Heavy Waters:
… beggar is going to have a smart reply for whatever the mark says as they go by. We’ll have a decoy with his shirt hanging out a few steps off ready to play into the money if it shows, sell the goods, the bootleg. Hopefully a man in blackskin, out of respect for Dr Obo, if we can get one from Messlin. Buy our own danger.
Penny comes into the hut with some cakes, it’s generally about now. She gets data from my screens, in return I’m one of the animals she feeds. I always try to guess which wig it well be; this time it’s the curly bubbles black job. I slup up the cream and lead her on a bit. She flicks her skirt as she sits and she’s off. She’s got a brain has Penny…
The book winds on to the endless battlefield in the east (prophecy uptick) where I do a time-mix medley:
… at night the noise doesn’t stop, we’ve been here a week. Lights sweep the bedspace, concrete pins twenty feet thick are being planted into the hillside. The Permanent Battleground is a special place, I’m glad not to miss it. We took what we had of the Beggar with us, people looked at us with favour since the cases with the dimpled silver sides gave us a technical air. We were crew. Going by bus took us three days, knees up, knees down. Each day towns, straggling villages; the countryside got darker, flatter, colder and the bodies of the people thickened out. Began to go against streams of them pushing against us on the backs of lorries, then we came to the emptied, broken sidewalk villages where we picked up officials. Sometimes they had the Mayor handcuffed and blindfolded — a diehard.
Peasant boys at the Front. They have never seen anything like it. Not that peasants don’t know what mud and hard labor is, but it is the novel mixtures — mud with blood with brass fittings. The biplanes slicing along fifty feet up, their fat banging motors, the black fountains of earth and the blink of pass the point of no return shells. They have an absolutely front seat those Indian peasants, those Chinese coolies throwing crushed rock to help the trucks grip — and what do they say about it? We tuned into the feeds, one by one:
Winter, the hide fears the iron tongue, the camel snarls when it sees its load.
Shuttled off to the Grand Gayre in all khaki kit, ship train lorry ditch heavy dig, stop tent chain am-bu-lance horse nurse, face moon cloud rain gun-fire thun-der boot, shoe sock band-age blood knee, leg arm tum-my tom-my shit dog eat, stables pig juice chimney stove frenchie.
All the sailors sang shanty shanty, all the boulders up the hill carry carry, the Cypriot mule team gave us no peace, onto us all the time, sit in padded rags and goggles mildly drugged.
We humped tents from dawn all day long hundreds and by flambeaux long into the night. This morning I found the trunk of amie his orifice (hole) was black and bloody.
Butchery beef from Argentine piled up, brokers came out from Paris in their millionaire fedoras, we hollowed out cold stores, hospitals, rocks bursting with dead, with dying.
Hooves sounding in the rain, the big greys skidding a little on the cobbles HUP! HUP! the squad of English riders bent forward at the waist push on by, hardly rocking in the saddle, we go on working.
Was I getting anywhere? Where was the mathematics I’d promised? I set it in a tent at a children’s fair:
… Bayes waits for the one in a hundred children who have the courage to hover and then say something like,
“I would like to say Nolly, but I ought to be able to count in the brute wins and losses, let me think”
And some actually do, there and then with chin in hand, and this is when it helps that they have a brain that can hold both the head and the tail end of a thought at the same time, that way they can tie a knot and come out with,
“As I see it there are four pictures: one, Nolly winning when it rains, two, Nolly winning when it doesn’t rain, three, Nolly losing when it rains and Nolly losing when it doesn’t rain. If we put in the figures from what we know happened we get…”
That child does now concentrate. Watch what happens to the muscles of his face under the need to direct the blood flow in his brain: bends his head, screws his fists in his eyes and looks up,
“… Nolly’s probability of winning, given that it is now raining, is 3/4, or 0.75, or 75%, however you like to write it”…
It’s all a bit strained, hoarse throated, pushing and shoving at the narrative to get somewhere, dropped in couple of adolescent love passages but a nice clear ending in a doomed flight:
… Penny was done punching buttons, arguing with the pilot. She looked out thru the thick plexi. White streets sprawled in every direction, cutting the blocks into jagged piles. Tiny humans streamed together, broke off, joined again. She was being entered into the scrap side of the equation by the triggering of the golden glitch — a random operating contradiction that was not fail-safe. Twitchy crowds round smoking wreckage was what it was all about, and accelerating people into bonus vacancies on the organigram. It had come out of the unpredictable equals fair discussions. She had even taken part,
“…Looks like I’ve lucked out anybody listening… anybody listening…”
There was just the rush of silent unforgiving air and the reeling off of numbers no longer needed here, rushing to more urgent designations. Another voice broke in, Old Tom,
“… we’re going in, we’re going in… o mother…”
On the ground bright kids in rags who’d never get a job looked up at the whoooosh. They snatched a view of heads just above the window line, switching from left to right as tho they could do something. They caught the eyes. Golly, were they round. Then they saw the puff of stupid smoke. No one went near, not their job, the word went round tho — a blue one’s gone in. Charge it to Humfall.
They’d seen it go in from the grey water housing complex clamped to the Delta. Half the folks here live in boats or pile homes. The black panels of the battery chargers arc out across the idling scumtide and junked containers lay wrecked and opened. The Drop boxes stop here in a crazy pile up of makeshifts tumbling in to the river and indeed right out over it where the handier residents gouge a living from fish farms whose leaks are plugged with carpet in long forgotten floral styles…
It was getting silly, writing with no feedback. All the time, in between, I was re-drafting the libretto of Mau Mau — the Opera. This too had only refusals. The voice saying not good enough was getting louder altho with the libretto I knew a political factor was mixed in there (white man write black man no). I needed something to hang onto, I took my father’s letters from POW camp out of hock and whizzed together a neat little ebook in 2016, embellished with net-ripped photos and linking passages:
… Roger Hilton was an English gentleman ranker in 6 Troop 3 Commando and was captured during the exploit at the Berneval gun site, part of the Dieppe Raid on Occupied France in 1942.
He later became a leading British exponent of modern art, representing his country at the Venice Biennale and being made CBE. Beneath the cheeriness the letters show how an out of the common man wrestles with the common misfortune of being a prisoner of war. Illustrated…
I nearly got deal with the Commando Association. To date I’ve sold nine copies.
*
Researching Heavy Waters I’d hit the story of German scientists being flown to America at the end of the war. I’d also stumbled on some stuff about LSD and (more interesting for me) the story of how the container transport revolution took place. I thought that would be enough to start a book about the United States. What else to call it but Success=True. That was 2016 accounted for and this was the blurb:
… time is there so that everything doesn’t happen all at once, so things have room to move out of each other’s way. But it does happen all at once — or at least enough of it does doesn’t it? Coincidence often beats time to the punch. You think it’s a plot? Well maybe it is — but it’s the only one we got. You take those islands out there in the water, the ones on every cheap atlas. They’re American aren’t they? Don’t you think that? Puerto Rico, Hawaii and the troublesome one — Cuba. And of course New York where a surprising number things happen at the same time. Then take a day, any day, take April 13 1950 go on, take it, there’s no trick, its magic — watch as Florida sourced wrestler Dot Dotson comes out of a cabin above the ring at the El Palacio de los Deportes Cuba and steps down the wooden stairs for her match with Beverly Lehmer as Wallace Howell, his British-type tweed jacket flapping, climbs down from a Grumman Goose flown around the Catskills dropping dry ice to give New York the water it has had its tongue right out for months. And as comely Dot steps thru the ropes into the ring with the all around shirt-sleeved crowd, deep dark throated flicking handkerchiefs, at that moment in Hawaii in shipping firm Matson’s executive Guest Lodge, a sweat stained Montgomery Clift look-alike wakes with a start to drifting thunderclouds seen thru the monkeywood slats of the custom blinds and gets intellectually fit to grapple with pineapple chunks and as Dot’s manager, (who had hooked her by provoking her when she was an Orlando taxi driver to see how tough she was) turns his crooked promoters grin on her bobbing under the rope a Negro playwright in Puerto Rico looks down into the garden of his rented apartment rightly fearing surveillance by the FBI and wondering whether his sloppy at home costume would be reported as indecent. To start with…
I got Success=True all the way from 1945 to 1963 and ended on a note I thought was ok:
… ex-Vice President Richard Nixon general legal counsel to Pepsi-Cola was listening to the steady rain drum the roof of his cab, one of a line of yellow bubbles jerking out from under the arrivals canopy at Idlewild. He caught the sneer at the edge of his mouth and did the exercise those television people had shown him, Nixon had learnt to keep his hate for New York under control, he’d fielded all the hurt he needed. At the impromptu press call on the fringe of the Pepsi-Cola conference in Dallas the night before he’d been fresh and peppy and, holy smoke, he had Joan Crawford’s knickers in a legal envelope, tucked into his alligator attache case. Then the lunchtime picture broke, a spark jumped around from person to person, started to twitch and holler. Nixon watched a painter come scrambling down a ladder, there was a tinkle of glass as one cab ran into another, a man carrying two heavy cases swung right round and walked back into the airport building. People weren’t hardly coming out any more and Nixon’s cab line had froze. He caught a woman’s eye, a hostess in a dove grey quarter cloak. She stood there, her face stretched in every direction and more so when she placed the curve of his dome and the heavy jowls. Nixon found the plastic peg by the armrest and touched it. The glass slid down.
“Oh Mr Nixon, turn your radio on. They shot the President”
Nixon held her a couple of beats with his mouth turned down, watched her hands came up to her cheeks, a shake of the American Airlines bonnet then he closed the window and sank back into the seat his hands locked round one charcoal suited knee. He spent a long second admiring his strong wrists with their tight curled hair, he was alive and Kennedy was dead, that’s the difference folks. Then he clasped his hands in what as kids they used to call making a steeple …here’s the church and here’s the people… he ran things thru, teasing himself, even at that very elementary stage… so Lyndon, but two terms? Who next, Humphrey? The pharmician? I can beat that boy, who’s the other favorite? I’m going to walk America out of this… Aloud he said,
“Let’s have that radio on driver and take me to CBS will you”
I had roughed out waypoints for part two taking the story up to 1977 but I got an offer to develop my opera libretto for a UK arts centre. I dropped part two and never went back to it. 2017 got eaten up back and forth to UK and no show at the end of it and of course I wasn’t getting any better as a writer, how would I expect to in isolation, hauling rough cut slabs of factual material across my desk with short nervous runs of imagination to string them together. Only once or twice maybe did I get that strange booming feeling of doing my own voice. Not that I was downhearted but I was beginning to see I couldn’t be a bookwriter.
Then one fell into my lap. I was compelled. The fire at Grenfell Tower in London. A reportage, following the first stages of the inquiry on television. Why? I grew up ten minutes from Grenfell and I had been ten years a fireman so I could smuggle some Yorkshire memoir into the intro:
… I had been on Red Watch at Halifax Fire Station West Yorkshire for a matter of a month or so. Just after change of shift one morning we got a call to a block of flats. Persons reported as the delightfully flat language has it. My second shout as an operational breathing apparatus wearer (BA). My partner in the back of the V8 Dennis was “Chobbles” Thurlow a ladykiller and part time window cleaner. We stormed down Skircoat Moor Road swung out onto Huddersfield Road and left again to a seven storey block. It was that quick. A woman in a housecoat met us saying she’d smelt smoke and couldn’t get an answer. Was it the fourth floor? Thurlow and I break the door and go into dense smoke just as we are, without water. I will have gone into the curious motion used for searching blind, feet swinging as wide as possible hands windmilling, shouldering open doors. Now I’m coming into a tunnel of heat with a centre. Exploring the floor on my hands and knees hitting something, a corner a bed and then I put a hand out and burn myself on something I know straight away is human. I must have forgotten my gloves. I will have shouted into my mask for Chobbles. I was grappling mentally with whatever I might have to do when the smoke began to lift and so did my rescue. She came off her back in a jerky rise eyes shut straggly hair. A long psssst came from her mouth then she fell back. The smoke cleared from the four or five of us round the bed including Divisional Officer “Rocky” Mountain in the shiny riding boots he’d smuggled thru from the old Halifax City Brigade. I don’t remember any first-aid rites. Old woman smoking in bed the smoke built up all night taking her with it, the air we let in raised the temperature enough for her to spasm and give me the fright of my life. We went back to the Station and had the chicken dinner…
My main interest in What colour was the smoke? was the language of the participants. I covered the hearings of fire brigade, police, bereaved and survivors witnesses. As I write this article the inquiry itself has just ended with no evident guilty party which leaves the judge the delicate job of indicting the system. I concluded my ebook like this:
… the spirit of heroic failure hovered over Notting Dale that night, Scott of the Antarctic, the little boats of the Dunkirk evacuation. How weird that sentiment must seem to the intercontinental diaspora of immigrants searching simply for domestic well-being who made up a goodly proportion of the folk roosting and roasting in Grenfell Tower that night. Normally the catastrophes of the money ethic (they call it creative destruction don’t they?) happen off-stage or in penny packets but at Grenfell Tower they were gathered up in one blast on a wartime scale of destruction and loss of life. From the outsourcing of LFB training with its reliance on desktop packages to the slip-shod fitting out of the refurbishment the finger prints of profit taking were everywhere despite the protective gloves of corporate double speak. The error that swamped the margin firefighters might have had to work in was the error that clad the building in wrongly fitted combustible material, like a feckless uncle’s Christmas parcel.
As Watch Manager Paul Watson from Hammersmith put it,
“… once the fire caught the cladding, and surrounded the building, we could have had a lot more firefighters on the ground but we wouldn’t have put that job out. It moved so fast. The building didn’t do its job and the building beat us. I came away thinking that we lost the battle and the building beat us”.
The Inquiry is receding into the future, it is growing dim. There will be no sessions this year because there are so many submissions to read from the lawyers for the builders and architects and council planners before Phase Two can begin. It is going to be very difficult for Mr Millett and his team to clear a way thru the endless technicalities, to flush out wrong doers. The building may well get away with it…
My most recent ebook, BOMB, went on to French site Librinova. This was the book that most writers start with: disguised autobiography, taking my avatar Johny Lightfoot from his mother’s womb to his marriage and counterpointing (or interfluxing) the history of BIND — Britain’s independent Nuclear Deterrent. The summary runs:
… Johny had a horror of disappearing without saying what he’d seen, not the H bomb bursting over Hiroshima of course but its effects in England. If you are lucky enough to have been alive on November 22 1963 you will remember what you were doing when you heard the news that the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated. Johny Lightfoot was picking glass out of a ballerina’s foot. Using scientifico politico moments from the story of the British Independent Nuclear Deterrent and the opposition to it, Johny uncovers his life. He crosses other players: prime minister Edward Heath, comedian Tommy Cooper, film star Hildegard Knef and war hero Leonard Cheshire, whose bearing on the theme of the shadow of Bomb is imaginatively re-constructed. BOMB moves between London and war time Berlin, between remote islands in Scotland and in the Pacific. We visit Japan and New York, with side trips to Australia, Austria and Morocco. The time span is 1933 to 1983. Frequently deeply puzzled or squashed but never definitely beaten Johny smuggles his genetic identity thru the shifts of English culture and invests wisely it just before BOMB ends…
On my desktop now is a wandering in the French hills long essay to put up free to download and a folder titled ebook 8. Inside is the trunk and maybe a leg of something titled From Schtetl to Stardust. But I doubt it.
*
Some people say that writing is a way back to a lost paradise — do they mean innocence? An innocence corrupted by language? What of those few years before speech — what thoughts went on and how? Who is this howling to be not heard? At the back of the house in North Kensington where I lived from the age of two until the age of sixteen was a garden or a yard. In a memoir of my father included in Roger Hilton. Writings on Art (Adrian Lewis forthcoming) I pictured it thus:
… below in the scabby garden that stretches twenty yards behind the four storied terraced house on the border between highlife and lowlife West Eleven we kids straight out of Beano go amok amongst the surf of objects, the grand intermingling of the indoors items and their frosty earthy garden relations around a boat shape, a healthy construction of cupboard doors and vast wedgey grey wood pieces…
The boat shape was the ship I sailed in the dreamy contentment of physical well-being. Invited on board were odd bods from round abouts.
The garden was my blackboard upon which I wrote many theories. It had three walls. The right hand wall divided us from the Crows:
… the Crows had a vegetable stall on Norland Market, their life was rich in satisfying smells and grunted low Cockney and Johny would lap it up wondering if the elder son John would keel off the sofa in one of his fits. John was epileptic, he had got it from shellfire in Korea. Old man Crow would say,
“…that shelling on that effing ridge up by dom bang sang kok or whatcha you may call it…”
Queenie the wife would put her great bulk down on the floor and hold her sons head away from the furniture. Johny marvelled at how John Crow with his clean white shirt open and his braces and his red face took up space in such a different way, gibbering about on the marmalade carpet.
Johny Lightfoot watched This is your Life and Rawhide on the eleven inch black and white set and chewed his thumb as he waited out those precious pre-teenage years when dreams were still hard currency. He still had the hopeful sign blinking on his forehead but there was a nasty shadow coming on. He wondered what he was going to make of himself. There didn’t seem a likely way up and out. He tried tracking handsome Jim the younger Crow son who was in the Navy and who came home on leave hugging a white canvas kitbag. Jim went on to model for Bachelor cigarette advertisements and to drive a sapphire blue E-type Jaguar. He began to make a name as a crooner and then ho lummy! They say he robbed the post office at Clarendon Road and got locked up for a goodly time. Old Mr Crow looked sadder than ever, only Queenie his wife kept him up…
The left hand wall had the Bakers behind it. The Bakers were childless. Wilf was an architect or perhaps an accountant and Eve had dark, deep set eyes. They adopted a black girl called Jasmin. Behind the end wall was the garden of a house that faced onto St James’s Gardens — grander houses. Curiously enough another architect lived there — a bully called Spencer-Smith whose wife gassed herself.
There was a complication I haven’t mentioned. The right hand wall which separated me from the Crows had a dog leg of ground at the end belonging to someone else. Someone else who had a garage opposite the Holland Park Synagogue with waste land running up to our wall. The garage was mostly empty and at a certain age a fatty called Nicky and I would get the Spencer-Smith girls in there. There was something there that must have caught, getting your leg over (the wall). I crossed the wall — transgressed — even later when I would go into the garden at night and climb over that end wall onto the garage waste, shivering with anticipation, to wait for the woman over the way, next door to the Spencer-Smiths, to float into her bedroom all in white and set herself up with pillows behind to masturbate.
What kept me sane and half-way decent was Mrs S I like to think. The Slattery’s were a childless couple from Cork who had our basement. Kitty had suffered burns and was scarred about the chin. Dressed in black she cooked regular meat and veg for me and my sister when our Mum was out working in the evening. Jerry would mend his labouring boots by their basement gas fire while Kitty and I conducted our understated romance. This photograph was probably taken by Jerry when he was laying flagstones in the garden.
By that time innocent fuel was being burnt by me as fiercely as I could but somehow over the wall was only ever experimental, to all intents and purpose I remained, have remained, in the garden hence the writing and the life are fatally bounded. I did not become me.
