Modem Times 2.0

  Jerry stepped softly out of the little garden. A blind moved on the first floor in the corner house. The colonel and his wife were looking at him. Another minute and they’d call the police. Their hangovers always made them doubly suspicious. He bowed and went back the way he had come, back into Ladbroke Grove, back across to Blenheim Crescent, past the Convent of the Poor Clares, on his left, to 51, where his mother still lived.

  Humming to himself, Jerry went down the slippery area steps to let himself in with his key. Nobody was up. He unshipped the sack from his shoulder and checked out the row of stockings hanging over the black, greasy kitchen range from which a few wisps of smoke escaped. He opened the stove’s top and shovelled in more coke. His mum had put the turkey in to cook overnight. There wasn’t a tastier smell in the whole world. Then, carefully, he began to fill the stockings from his sack.

  Upstairs, he thought he heard someone stirring. He could imagine what the tree looked like, how delighted Catherine and Frank would be when they came down to see their presents.

  Outside, the snow still fell, softening the morning. He found the radio set and turned it on. Christmas carols sounded. The noises upstairs grew louder.

  Travel certainly made you appreciate the simple things of life, he thought. His eyes filled with happy tears. He went to the kitchen cupboard and took out the bottle of Heine he had put there the night before. Frank hadn’t found it. The seal was unbroken. Jerry helped himself to a little nip.

  Mrs. Cornelius came thumping downstairs in her old carpet slippers. She wore a bright red and green dressing gown, her hair still in curlers, last night’s make-up still smeared across her face. She rubbed her eyes, staring with approval at the lumpy stockings hanging over the stove. Behind her peered bleary Frank, Catherine’s huge blue eyes, suspicious Colonel Pyat.

  “Cor,” she said. “Merry Christmas, love.” “Merry Christmas, mum.” He leaned to kiss her. “God help us, one and all.”

  THE END

  Parts of this story originally appeared in Nature, Planet Stories, The New Statesman, Time, The Spectator, Gardens and Guns, Fantasy Spots, PC World, Wired, The Happy Mag, Boy’s Friend Library, Schoolboy’s Own Library, Popular Science, The Magnet, Nelson Lee Library, Sexton Blake Library, Union Jack Library, Good Housekeeping, Sports Illustrated, Texas Monthly, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Novae Terrae, and others.

  MY LONDONS

  THERE AREN’T MANY pictures of my childhood London. To get a glimpse of the world I grew up in, I have to give microscopic attention to the backgrounds of English movies made between 1945 and 1955 in the hope of seeing the ruined South Bank in Hue and Cry or the remains of Wapping in Night and the City. If I’m willing to sit through hours of Cockney stereotypes, I might occasionally catch a few meters of library footage shot through the windows of a tram with Sid James’s head in the way.1 My London is fleeting, mysterious, torn down or buried.

  London was different up to 1940. From the illustrated books, it often seems tranquil and quaint, full of lost churchyards and hidden courts. There were always places where the traffic noise dropped away and you could enjoy a bit of peace. That was before the firestorms blasted the East End into blazing fragments of people and buildings, when so much of that quaint tranquillity became heaps of rubble, tottering walls, fire-blasted windows, cutaways of people’s private lives: their bathrooms and bedrooms, everything they’d valued, exposed to the hasty curiosity of the survivors.

  By 1945, the bodies and the worst of the rubble had been cleared away, and I see from those pathetic scraps of newsreels and pictures from the illustrated magazines the London I really loved and grew up in. Until then it had been a malleable London in which you could leave home in the morning and find your street completely transformed by the evening; where the house next door could become a pile of junk or your best friend could disappear forever. After the war finished, we knew what in some ways was a more innocent London. We hadn’t quite taken in the Nazi Holocaust, let alone the A-bomb. We were a bit bewildered by how, having won, we were somehow poorer than when we were losing. The London in which Orwell wrote 1984 was my first peacetime London.

  I wouldn’t much want to live through that period again. Most of those films I give so much attention to were terrible, about keeping a stiff upper lip and knowing your place while facing down the Chaos. We kept replaying that trauma for years. What had gone wrong?

  Our general entertainment was mostly dreadful and, like our styles, shrunken cheap imitations of what boom-time America was offering. The decade represents a world which has no representation in the physical world around me, for my ruins have vanished and the unfamiliar, often beautiful buildings erected in their place offer few coordinates from which to calibrate my memories.

  By the time I had my first job as a messenger for a shipping company in the City, I could take a bus or a train down to the docks and then walk for miles looking for the appropriate ship or customs office, past grey cranes, redbrick warehouses, endless rust-grimed ships. I never had any idea of where docklands ended. Apart from the offices of great shipping lines, banks and insurance companies, the City was still an area of small businesses. There were scrapyards, independent stationers, booksellers, printers, chop houses, eel and pie shops, tea shops: a London whose variety and complexity you didn’t have to guess at.

  Then there were the places where London was simplynot—a few irregular mounds of grass and weeds with rusted wire sticking through concrete, like broken bones, exposed nerves. This part of London could very easily be identified because almost nothing of it had survived except the larger seventeenth-and eighteenth-century buildings like Tower Hill, the Customs House, the Mint, the Monument. And of course St. Paul’s, her dome visible from the river as you came up out of the delicious stink of fresh fish from Billingsgate Market, a snap of cold in the bright morning, and walked between high banks of overgrown debris along lanes trodden to the contour of the land. We had made those paths by choosing the simplest routes through the ruins. Grass and moss and blazing purple fireweed grew in every chink. Sun glinted on Portland Stone, and to the west, foggy sunsets turned the river crimson. You never got lost. The surviving buildings themselves were the landmarks you used, like your eighteenth-century ancestors, to navigate from one place to the other.

  Slowly, the big brutal blocks of concrete and fake Le Corbusier flats began to dwarf St. Paul’s and the Royal Mint, and the familiar trails disappeared, together with the alleys and yards, the little coffee shops and printers. Like an animal driven from its natural environment, I’d turn a corner and run into a newly made cliff. The docks disappeared with astonishing speed. One day the ships were shadows honking out of the smog and the next they were gone. Airfreight and containers were replacing the old systems. Without our heavy exports we didn’t need ships; without the ships we didn’t need the docks.

  West London, where I got my next job, is a lot easier to identify from 1950s Rex Harrison comedies. Almost everything was dark green and brass: motorcars, front doors, porters’ uniforms. Everything else was bright yellow (driving caps, cars, frocks). Smart young voices imitated Noël Coward and Gertie Lawrence. and their owners buzzed about in MGs and Mayflowers. I worked for people rather like them. They completed my education. They gave me my taste for good food and wine and introduced me to T. S. Eliot and Proust. I was regardedas a bit of an enfant terrible and they encouraged me to write. I hardly had to work at all. For a while it was always maytime in Mayfair and spring in Park Lane. By the time I was seventeen, I was back in Holborn, editing Tarzan Adventures, where I’d sold most of my early work. But I’d added quite a lot to my social and literary education.

  By then, too, I’d found Soho, jazz and skiffle, and had actually twice played washboard with the Vipers, who became the Shadows. I’d cut a demo (which set my musical career back for years) and I was hanging out with people who introduced me to Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Terry. I learned Woody Guthrie licks from Ramblin’ Jack Elliot
and corresponded with Guthrie and Seeger, under house arrest as un-Americans. I became more critical of politicians. My digs were in North Kensington and Fulham, which had sustained a bit more of the Blitz and were full of poor immigrants. There the streets were grey, dirty, hopeless, and often violent. I did wonder why all the posh bits of London were only what you might call lightly bombed, and why all the working-class suburbs were piles of ashy rubble. When Churchill (as he explained later) was sending back false intelligence about the Nazi strikes, suggesting that Streatham was the centre of our steelyards, he didn’t seem too eager to give the impression that Belgravia was an industrial beehive. But I don’t hate him for it. He did, after all, give me a lot to write about and a strong sense that nothing is permanent.

  Soho was coffee bars and formica signs, formica table-tops. Formica hid all the old shop signs and looked at least superficially modern. Rock and roll, sex and drugs. Trad jazz became skiffle and skiffle became blues or R&B. I played guitar for a while in a whores’ hotel. There were no proper threads in the shops. Just grey suits, tweed jackets, and corduroys. We took old stiff detachable collars and wore them with thin black ties, adding a car coat, white shirt, trousers stitched tight to our legs. My children say I was a Mod. I say those were the only clothes we had.

  Around 1963 my wife and I moved to Colville Terrace,where our next-door neighbour, a big knife-fighting whore called Marie, was regularly and noisily arrested nightly at about 2 AM. I took over New Worlds magazine, determined to lift from science fiction some fresh conventions, which J. G. Ballard, Barrington Bayley, and I felt were needed to reinvigorate English fiction.

  My main contribution to this period of experiment was Jerry Cornelius, his name pinched from a greengrocer’s sign in Notting Hill. As Mike Harrison pointed out, he was as much a technique, a narrative device, as a character.2 Like me, Jerry relished ruins. Unlike me, he enjoyed making more of them. Through that era we called “the ‘60s”—which really ran from about 1963 with the Beatles first No. 1 single to around 1978 with Stiff’s second tour—we continued to experiment in almost every field and genre. One of the reasons that period can’t be reproduced is precisely because we hardly knew what we were doing. Now we probably know too much. We moved to a wonderful flat with a big leafy square behind it.

  It was a wonderful time to have kids. I took them to music festivals and to little parks and museums, my secret boltholes like Derry and Tom’s Famous Roof Garden where little old ladies met for tea after doing their shopping. None of these places had yet become self-conscious or been persuaded to exploit their “features.” I knew we were enjoying a golden age that couldn’t last, but I was determined we should get the most out of it. Even with strikes and hard economic times, we had the first Notting Hill Carnivals, numerous open-air gigs and a general improvement in local morale.

  But we could already see the end coming. One afternoon I was in my back garden when a Liberal solicitor asked me if I was coming to a newly formed “gardens committee” meeting. When I told him I wasn’t, he cheerfully informed me that that was my right. I told him that I knew what my rights were. I also sensed that this was definitely the beginning of the end.

  By 1980, the Famous Roof Garden had become a private club. While it was still possible to lunch there, its casual nature had changed. Slowly I began to feel a stranger in my owncity. I had, of course, been part of the gentrification process, but I didn’t like the way people from the country and the suburbs were actually beginning to displace the locals. I like my classes mixed. We sold up and moved to Texas.

  For all those years I lived around the Portobello Road, I learned that what people want more than authenticity is a provenance, a narrative. It wasn’t enough to sell a modern flowery chamber pot as “Victorian,” it had to be Oscar Wilde’s chamber pot. The developers and remodelers soon learned this lesson. The formica signs were stripped away and old buildings were made to look older.

  Good, innovative writers like Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd with White Chapell, Scarlet Tracings, and Hawksmoor, aware of our need for authentic as well as virtual memory, linked the past with the present to show how the city shaped us. The media, particularly TV, picked up on the idea and soon had created “London,” the character: golden-hearted London, whose dark spine was the Thames, whose dark soul was the Thames. This character appeared again and again, in all those sequels to famous Victorian novels or pastiches that spoke fruit-ily of Limehouse and Wapping.

  Ackroyd played into this image, filmed for TV, lit from below, a bearded Dickens impersonator trotting in his wake, but Sinclair was having none of it. The first of London’s psycho-geographers, he headed for the M25, daring anyone who followed him to make something romantic from motorway cafes and discarded Big Mac boxes. While Ballard reflected on the curve of the Westway mirrored in suburban reservoirs, Sinclair peered into the bays underneath, searching for the remains of the population.

  The rise of psychogeography was in some ways an impulse to rediscover those old natural paths I and others like me had trodden through the ruins, to find ways of rediscovering serious memory, something which Peter Ackroyd, Alan Moore, and Will Self understood.

  As well as friends and relatives, who are also memory, weare equally dependent on the geography of our cities for the myths and rituals by which we live. Without conscious ritual we have only buried tram tracks, some vague ideas of what still lies under the steel and concrete cladding, and a few bits of film.

  I have nothing against virtuality. We create virtual identities for London. We create them for ourselves. We seek options allowing us to survive and, with luck, be happy. Jerry Cornelius knows, as he strolls in clothes just recently back in fashion, through virtual ruins, virtual futures, that it’s the only way we’ll survive, as long as we’re fully conscious, so that when fashions like Dickens World cease to suit the tourists, we’ll have another city standing by. I’m hoping for a London that neither swings nor sags, is neither grim nor gay, but rises defiantly, a fresh guarantee against the dying of our memories.

  NOTES

  1. South African comic actor known mainly for playing a London cockney.

  2. But can’t the same be said of Elizabeth Bennet?

  “GET THE MUSIC RIGHT”

  MICHAEL MOORCOCK INTERVIEWED BY TERRY BISSON

  Why Texas?

  I was on the run. Looking for some fresh mythology.

  You have played a central role in science fiction since the editorship of New Worlds magazine in the 1960s. How has that role changed from then to now?

  I suppose I was more of a gadfly in those days where SF was concerned. I’d read almost none of the so-called “Golden Age” (1950s) SF. I bought a long run of Astounding when I became editor of New Worlds because I thought I ought to look at it, and found most of it dull and unreadable. This was also the experience of J. G. Ballard and others who had expected far more of American SF than it actually delivered (apart from a relatively small amount found mostly in Galaxy).

  American 1960s “New Wave” was about improving the quality of SF, but we Brits were less interested in that than we were in using SF methodology to look at the contemporary world. SF magazines were the only ones that liked our ideas, but we had to provide rationalizations to those stories, more or less. Explication dulled down the vision.

  Fritz Leiber, whom I greatly admired, told me that he and several of his contemporaries like Bloch and Kuttner had thesame problem in their day. So you’d write, say, an absurdist story but you could only sell it if you added: “On Mars …” or “In the future …” and then stuck in a boring rationalization.

  Anyway, we could only really publish in the SF magazines.

  But we also felt contemporary fiction was anaemic and had lost the momentum modernism had given it. Most fiction we saw had no way it could usefully confront modern concerns— the H-bomb, computers, engineering and communications advances, space travel—not to mention changing social conventions and consequently language, politics, warfare, th
e altered psyche in the face of so much novelty of experience.

  Almost all the literary fiction we read was actually retrospective (Durrell, Heller, Roth, or Bellow) or only pretending to tackle contemporary issues in a novel way (Selby, B. S. Johnson, the Beats, and others who saw themselves as the most interesting subject matter).

  The reason we liked William Burroughs (Naked Lunch) was because his language focused on modern times and drew much of its vitality from modern idiom. We were inspired by him and Borges rather than influenced by them.

  Many of our heroes (French existentialists, nouvelle vague movies) read SF and the Galaxy writers in particular (Bester, Dick, Sheckley, Pohl and Kornbluth, and, of course, Bradbury). In the 1950s there was far more acceptance of American SF in European intellectual circles than in the United States itself, where that retrospective tone spells “literature” to the New Yorker reader and in my view is the bane of American fiction, especially when linked to regionalism/provincialism.

  Emerging from World War II into Austerity Britain, it was easy for us to see 1984 all around us. The three New Worlds writers generally linked in those days (and I was even then more writer than editor) were myself, Ballard, and Brian Aldiss. I’d come out of the London Blitz, Ballard from the Japanese civilian prison camps, and Aldiss from the war in Malaya, and we all had reason to welcome the A-bomb, perceiving it with far more ambiguity than most.

  Post-1946 modernity was a bit on the grim side, but we felt that as writers we’d been given an amazing box of tools, an array of subjects never before available to literature, and we used those tools and subjects in ways that tended to celebrate postwar experience rather than denigrate it.