The Whispering Swarm

  Maria had pale skin, dark curly hair cut to the nape of her neck, dark eyes, spectacular lashes. She was short but she had the figure of a Greek goddess, over which she wore a scarlet velvet frock. Her high heels matched that frock. Her earrings probably weren’t real pearls and diamonds but somehow they looked real on her. And she wore just the right amount of Shalimar. She leaned against my shoulder while I dealt the cards and she huskily asked me to read her tarot. We were soon in bed, courtesy of Bill, who luckily had his own plans for the evening, as did Colin. She clearly wasn’t the virgin her dad presumed her to be.

  Maria had slept with some pretty useful communists. She knew a lot more about pleasure, how to find it and sustain it, than I did. I was soon more than willing, as Charlotte joined us, to risk the wrath of the most feared communist gangster in North London. But, as the weekend wore on in Charlotte’s little Bloomsbury boarding house room, I understood that wasn’t really the problem. Mr P believed his daughter was visiting family in Cyprus, which gave her a lot of freedom in those days before everyone had a phone. The problem was me. I had fallen in love with a woman who wasn’t in the mood for love and I was, as far as she was concerned, something of a wimp. I thought I came out of it pretty well. I learned how to give her multiple orgasms. I did several kinds of threesome. Drugs were harder to find in those days, but I found them. I refused to let her try heroin or morphine and hadn’t tried them yet myself. Slowly but surely I became protective of her. She was seventeen, bursting out of her convent school full of frustration and ready for everything. And of course, within weeks I drove her away. Now, I can sympathise with her state of mind, but then I was shattered. She simply disappeared. Charlotte didn’t know where she had gone. Her father, of course, told me she was in Cyprus. I think it was at that moment I started to cry.

  My old posh girlfriend Alexandra had been sent off to finishing school almost as soon as we broke up. After Maria, I started seeing Alex’s sister Memphis. Her parents were heavily into Egypt for some reason. Memphis Gupta had to be the coolest name in town, especially in 1958. We had a lot of fun. For a while Alex’s friend Indigo joined us. I wined and dined everyone and drove a few real friends away. I wanted to share my good fortune, that was all. It took me years to understand why they would feel insulted. Some came to dislike me for flashing my money about. Some could handle it. Some wound up despising me. I berated others for their lack of imagination and sensitivity while often completely lacking it myself. Possibly I had come to all this money too soon. Certainly it didn’t occur to me to save it. I could always earn what I needed by writing another Moll story.

  I made even more money by doing the odd bit of guitar work. There were a lot fewer people who could play blues and the like in London at that time. I got around twenty quid an hour. Union rates. Some people liked my weird half-banjo sound. Open G, picking, the bass string as a kind of drone. All sorts of weird tricks. I also got gigs with the little Dixieland bands springing up everywhere. Sometimes I did a couple of blues songs while they took a break. The customers thought of me as some kind of one-man skiffle group. Gradually, though, I got anonymous work on British rock-and-roll records. I was very grateful for the anonymity.

  Then, at last, I began to sell short science fiction to the English magazines. There were three left: New Worlds, Science Fantasy and Science Fiction Adventures, all edited by Ted Carnell. I first met my friend Jack Allard in Carnell’s offices, where we were both delivering stories. I was not overly familiar with his work but one novella, The Vices of Thaym, had struck me as outstanding and I was able to tell him. He took my praise graciously and we began to meet intermittently, sometimes with Barry Bayley, first at a nearby pub and then closer to Jack’s editing job in Knightsbridge. We shared a frustration with the contemporary novel only matched by our disappointment with science fiction. It all looked old-fashioned to us. Nostalgic. We loathed nostalgia and bemoaned its dominance of American and British literature. William Burroughs was our favourite SF writer. I had been introduced to him briefly in Paris and had a desultory correspondence: a few postcards. I introduced Allard to his work one time after I returned from Paris with a bunch of Burroughs’s Olympia Press stuff. He was the only Beat I really liked

  The fiction we visualised should be presented in a large, slick-paper format to reproduce good art, in a magazine with an up-to-date title designed to appeal to a modern, educated audience. Not SF as such, but borrowing from it. I showed Allard some mock-ups I’d done for a new kind of publication. I couldn’t think of a decent title. We were looking for a fresh vocabulary to explain our special experience as the postwar generation which had known the war as children and were embracing modern scientific ideas, computers, psychosexuality, new social interpretations and so on. Allard was older than me and his ideas of how the magazine should look were in my view a little outdated. He seemed to think my visual notions were driven by fashion rather than the zeitgeist. I thought his a bit 1940s. We argued but rarely fell out because we agreed in general. We joked that if we ever got what we wanted we would be like Trotsky and Lenin, quarrelling over who knew best, who should have the most power. The amiable, superbright Barry, who chuckled approvingly at our ideas but saw no chance of them reaching any kind of fruition, said that as long we wanted to take his stories, rejected by Carnell, we had his support.

  I admired Camus, to whose work I’d been introduced in Paris along with stuff by Jarry and Ionesco. I thought Philip K. Dick was a bit like that but I was disappointed by the rationalisations he provided to please his publishers. Allard liked Bradbury, noir films and the Nouvelle Vague in French cinema. I joked with him that if he hadn’t been tone deaf he would have liked bebop. But existentialism and absurdism were in the air we breathed. He loved surrealism. I loved pop art. We would have long, fierce, friendly arguments about all this. He had read very little, preferring to get his culture via the screen or from the radio, but this didn’t stop him having strong opinions about literature. I had grown up between two great public libraries in a neighbourhood and surrounded by secondhand bookshops. I had been an early reader. He had read mostly American comics and science fiction magazines. We didn’t even have the same tastes in those!

  After the liberation of Guernsey, where he had grown up under German occupation, Allard had gone to posh schools and Cambridge. I had barely been educated formally after I was fourteen. But we got on well and were soon warm friends. Allard was married with two little children so we rarely met in the evenings. We talked a bit about the unusual stories we had written and how there was nowhere to sell them now that Lilliput was a shadow of its former self. We looked eagerly for particular markets. We kept on submitting to Argosy and the posher monthlies, like Encounter, which occasionally bought imaginative fiction. Whenever we were rejected we comforted ourselves that we were proving how out of touch those editors were. He spoke of Kafka’s rejections. I said they only accepted what they could recognise. Even when Allard sold to Argosy he claimed it was one of the most ordinary stories he’d ever written, thus underpinning his argument.

  I didn’t much share Allard’s enthusiasm for the New Wave French film-makers and he didn’t share mine for Vian, Cendrars, Henry Green and the American avant-garde. I eventually realised that the only fiction he liked was his own. Meanwhile, he wrote brilliant, lyrical stories which were a bit like Ray Bradbury, a bit like Graham Greene and were as original as anything the genre had ever seen. By contrast, I found a profitable facility for reviving the pulp sword-and-sorcery story for which I still had a fondness and which Carnell began to commission from me.

  I was a great Mervyn Peake fan and publicised his work whenever I could. I had known Peake for a couple of years and his health was failing but we all held hope for his recovery. I didn’t really think of his work as fantasy. To me he was closer to absurdists like Peacock and Firbank or Maurice Richardson, whom Allard also loved. Peake had a better sense of narrative than any of them but his grotesque Dickensian characters dominated his work. There w
as nothing supernatural about it. Some people called it Gothic, I think because it was set in a brooding castle, while others compared him to Kafka or even Lovecraft. Peake was a vorticist with a sense of humour. But manifestos weren’t his thing as I’d discovered as I came to know him. Gormenghast was an intensely personal response to the world, eschewing movements yet having much in common with the surrealists or even the pataphysicians. I’d never read Lord of the Rings which seemed a somewhat reactionary response to the modern, having much in common with Germanic folklore and most American SF, and probably the secret of its success. There was something about Tolkien’s comfy, conspiratorial tone which reminded me of the Daily Mail, BBC Children’s Hour or Winnie the Pooh, and actually repelled me.

  I found my heroic fantasy masters in the pulps, old and new. They were almost all American. Robert E. Howard was their king and Fritz Leiber the most literary. I loved Jack Vance’s Dying Earth and Frank Owen’s strange pseudo-orientalism. I struggled a bit with James Branch Cabell but enjoyed Lord Dunsany. Lovecraft and horror fiction in general had no attractions. Lovecraft’s contemporary, Seabury Quinn, who was his greatest rival in Weird Tales, was much more to my taste. Allard had no interest in any pulp but Black Mask. Galaxy was his favourite contemporary SF magazine, as it was mine. No spaceships. Lots of dystopias. I don’t think either of us read the other when we weren’t doing something unusual, but we pretended we had. For me literature had to be thoroughly stunning (like Eliot) or pleasantly numbing (like Sexton Blake stories). My enthusiasm for SF faded when so little of it was exciting. I wasn’t interested in middlebrow or middle-class tastes. That was what kept us friends, our lust for the excellent and the extraordinary. And Barry read everything we did, as I read his. He and I even wrote a few stories together, the most ambitious of which anticipated miniature computers and M-theory as well as largely metaphysical worlds and ideas. We had the most intense intellectual conversations and then earned our bread as best we could by writing Gothics for the comics. Allard remained editing his trade magazine but flirted with the idea of selling an SF novel to the US and getting a thousand dollars, enough to chuck in his job, as long as he worked rapidly. Barry and I wrote mostly educational stuff for Look and Learn, Did You Know?, and Bible Story and every so often I did another Meg Midnight story for Fleetway.

  Dave Gregory at AP soon wanted more ‘historicals’ as these costume melodramas were called, so I came up with The Phantom Cavalier: a cloaked and hooded vigilante before the Restoration. Remembering Claude Duval I made my hero an exile from France and a loyal servant of the Stuart Cause, so that many of his adventures could be lifted whole from Stevenson, with a few tweaks, reversing the political polarities, setting them in Cromwellian England and making them over-the-top romances in the spirit of the ‘bloods’ I began to search out in second hand bookshops.

  The bloods had titles like The Blue Dwarf and Colonel Jack, The Gentleman Highwayman, The Brotherhood of the Heath or Black Bess—dozens of them. The Gothic was one of the most popular genres of the nineteenth century and I revived the writing of it single-handed, to be lauded as something of an innovator in the world of comics and fantasy fiction. I saw that stuff as directly in the Gothic tradition. Doing a great deal of lucrative hack work, I was still in a slightly uncertain position, since freelancing, while well paid, was unpredictable. At that point—1959—Bill Baker asked me to come and work on his editorial team. I liked the idea. Keeping a steady ten-to-five editing job and, with luck, selling the odd feature would give me time to take a crack at a proper novel. But I couldn’t write a novel until the rent was paid, and the freelance work could always dry up without warning. The editorial job on Sexton Blake Library solved my dilemma. Really, I was just delighted at the chance to work on the last of the AP story papers!

  So of course I took the job. In loyalty to my younger self, if nothing else. It was my last dream come true! And the work scarcely proved to be arduous! Bill explained that, because there wasn’t really a full-time job on Blake and because of my experience with type and text layouts, I would also be doing some other editorial work, mostly on the annuals. These were hardcover versions of the weekly comics. I found I could write a good many text stories and some comics when not doing editorial work, and be paid good rates for them. The annuals paid more. It was all pretty easy work after the one-man band I’d been on a weekly magazine. The surrounding offices were crammed with young editors, all with enormous literary ambition. They were my professors. They loved lecturing me. They knew all kinds of stuff: foreign films, untranslated literary masters, obscure English writers and painters. With my patchy cultural background, I brought out the worst as well as the best in them, but they were great enthusiasts and hugely well educated. Having started so young as an editor, I was at least three or four years their junior. New Fleetway House was my university.

  Soon after I got the editing job, Dave wanted to know if I could give him two more Meg Midnight stories a week—one in text for Tiger and the other a strip in Lion, the new versions of Sun and Comet—to see which form was going to be the more popular. I agreed, even though they’d already reprinted one of my long stories as a serial, with a bulked-up Turpin in place of Moll. They also turned her into first Turpin’s girl pal then Jack o’ Justice’s girl pal, who loved investigating the paranormal. The department head, Len Matthews, had earlier created his own girl highway robber who had not been as successful as Meg, but he seemed perfectly happy with my version. She had settled into the role she would make her own. My The Haunted Blade sold twice as many as any other issue of Thriller Picture Library. This was a big break for me, since Fleetway generally paid much better and quicker than any of the other publishers. I was rather relieved they’d taken my rejigged character back into the fold.

  Memphis went on a cruise with her grandmother and I briefly went back to seeing Sandy. Mr Gupta seemed to like me. He saw me as young, ambitious and destined to be a good breadwinner. He started talking about marriage. I was already the son he’d never had. So that was the end of my association with that family. Their upper-class assumptions and opinions had become increasingly hard to take anyway.

  By now, of course, I completely blamed LSD for what had happened in ‘Alsacia’. Life was getting very full for me and Alsacia had dropped below my horizon. I talked about it sometimes, but only to illustrate the power of LSD to create hallucinations.

  By 1959 I had written, with Jim, the Sexton Blake story I always wanted to do and was working regularly for the British SF magazines. I was also still in Killing Floor, a skiffle group-cum-blues band. But now I was more into Carter than Cash. I played banjo and sang some Guthrie songs, which I quickly discovered wasn’t sexy, even though I wasn’t bad at it. I went through a bluegrass phase. I bought a Gretsch guitar on hire purchase payments but kept the G tuning, dropping a string so I could carry on fingering the same as the banjo. I wasn’t bad. Slide guitar is pretty easy with that tuning and gave Woody some beaty phrasing. I could stop a show with ‘Pretty Boy Floyd’ or ‘This Land is Your Land’. People said I put real emotion into my singing. For a year or more we earned a bit of money on the side doing small gigs, pubs and dances, briefly becoming a C&W band before we morphed into The Big Six, a moddy R&B band doing Chicago blues and Chuck Berry hits. Your influences and your tastes change rapidly when you’re young. It was a familiar route.

  In those preswinging days everyone seemed to wear grey. It was when I first understood fashion as not just a passing Ted thing. We had Italian suits, rayon, pale grey bum-freezer jackets, overcoats to the knee, Italian shoes, short pudding-bowl haircuts. Slender, knitted ties, sharp collar and cuffs. Earlier, as when I first dressed up to meet Moll Midnight, I wore a buff pullover, corduroy bags, chukka boots and a duffel coat identifying me as a beatnik. My only touch of originality was the black ex-army ski cap on my head. I wore it because it represented Woody Guthrie’s railroad-man’s hat. There’s a picture of me at Tarzan wearing it! Later Bob Dylan would put on much the same outfit. I
wrote to Woody. Woody wrote back. But Bob made the physical pilgrimage.

  Later we changed to black. Cool blokes wore black. Black car coat, tight charcoal trousers, Cuban-heeled pointed shoes, old-fashioned detachable white collars and shirts with links, showing a fair bit of cuff below the sleeve. Early mod my children call it. For a while it was The Who, Faces, The Action and us. Can you guess who didn’t get a record deal?

  Through the late ’50s we performed in Soho venues like Bunjies, Sam Widges, The Skiffle Cellar, The Gyre and Gimble at Charing Cross and The Nucleus in St Martin’s Lane, just across from the As You Like It where John Baldry and Reg Dwight used to go. Both of them could belt out blues in those days. I was with John when we met Willie Dixon. John was at least a couple of inches taller than me. Known as Long John, he could belt out blues better than any of us. Now we were on the Rik Gunnell circuit, playing the Flamingo, the Railway Hotel and Eel Pie Island. And Moll rode on, to almost impossible popularity in the years when WW II’s Battler Britton was taking over everything except soccer. I’ve often wondered how things would have gone with the band if I’d been able to put my whole talent behind it.

  Amongst my writer colleagues there weren’t many I bonded with, apart from my closest friends Allard, Barry, Pete and Max Stone. Allard, as noted, was of an older generation and tone deaf as well. A bit suspicious of ‘yoof’. Max the dandy had become a cartoonist and an outstanding Django-style guitarist. He could play anything. Pete played what he called classical washboard. Barry had become self-conscious and dropped out, taking his harmonica with him. With Max on guitar we had a nifty little trio with me on bass, sometimes doing banjo where appropriate.