The job was a cushy number. Once I had the few hundred photographs sorted into the right envelopes and the envelopes arranged in alphabetical order, all I had to do was sit there in my cubicle, wait until a request came down for a picture of, say, Malraux, and then make sure I didn’t send them a picture of Maurois, Maurras, Mauriac, A. L. Rowse or Mel Tormé. You had to be careful with the Bloomsbury bunch because they all looked the same, as in a horse-breeder’s catalogue. Otherwise it was a doddle. The only drawback was that Penguin’s combined office, factory and warehouse was located in Harmondsworth, near Heathrow. The journey each way had to be done by Volkswagen Kombibus, from and to, in my case, a pick-up point in Cromwell Road. Among the dozen people on the bus there was always the languorously aloof Leslie. The driver of the bus was called Ted and was in most respects indistinguishable from Fred, the feeble-minded fascist of the Holloway Road light-metal factory, except that Ted had a richer source of material, namely the multi-ethnic pedestrian population of the London pavements. Looking everywhere except straight ahead, he never drew breath. ‘Oo, lookit a nig-nog. Nar, ease a greasy wop. Garn, you poxing wog, get out of it …’ The minibus load of liberal young ex-Oxbridge editors cast their eyes resignedly to heaven. Leslie regularly did her best to shut him up but always with adverse results, stupidity being the source of his motive power. If he couldn’t curse, he couldn’t drive. He had to spout his racist filth or the van would drift to a halt. I liked the way it bothered her. Me it amused. He was perfect, and anyway I believed, erroneously, that it was only the quiet men who were the real killers.
The working week took on a nice rhythm. After breakfast with the boys I would catch the bus, listen to Ted, look at Leslie, barricade myself into my cubicle and doze off, stirring only to work on a poem or take a long, slow look at a photograph of T. S. Eliot in order to eliminate the possibility that it was George Eliot in trousers. Lunch in the canteen offered virtually unobstructed views of Leslie. In the warehouse it was more or less obligatory to steal books: there was a pulp box in which you could find defective copies of almost any title, and usually the defects amounted to no more than a few pages inaccurately trimmed. Back to the cubicle for a read and a sleep. Then home in the bus, with the prospect of watching Leslie getting stroppy with Ted. I liked her principles. I liked her wrists.
If the working day had a somnolent rhythm, the nights and the weekends were hyperactive. Even Dave, once he had been helped out of his inky bath, was always ready for the party. The party was never at our place, because Hearty McHale, rather than see us enjoy ourselves, would have called for an air strike to destroy her own house. But there was always a party on at least one floor of the house in Melbury Road. You could hear the music from the end of the street.
Journalists were writing a lot of stuff about the Sixties by that time. Harold Wilson was not only Prime Minister, he was still popular. He was not only still popular, he was almost credible: preaching the white heat of technology, he was Prometheus in Hush Puppies. A nation whose technology was white from frost-bite warmed itself at his words. The glossy magazines carried more articles each month about the new aristocracy of the classless cockney photographers in whose hairy arms the creamiest women of café society lay helpless. The articles were illustrated with photographs of the photographers taken by the photographers themselves. The pictures were very contrasty, making the women’s faces look like Kabuki masks, while the photographers looked like East End criminals. There were pictures of East End criminals looking like company directors. In the text there was invariably a lot of talk about the disappearance of class divisions, the adduced evidence being that a pacey young designer from Tower Hamlets had married a duke’s daughter. There would be a picture of the duke’s daughter wearing the young designer’s designs. Located without any connecting tissue inside the perimeter of the bleached-out facial area, her enormous black-rimmed eyes and grainy grey mushroom mouth looked surprised at her own daring: three blots on white cardboard. The vacant were being given carte blanche to adore themselves. Once the enviable had looked human but hard to get at. Now they looked inhuman and further off than ever.
For those of us with our noses pressed to the glass, the reality of the swinging new era was a dance party to which you brought your own bottle. But as the news about the allegedly effervescent London reached Australia, ship-loads of would-be revellers and social revolutionaries came sailing towards the putative action. Inevitably they all ended up at the bottle party. People I had left Australia to get away from started turning up in bunches – intellectuals who had read three books; writers who had read no books at all and would never write one either; pub singers who would forget the words of their sea-shanties unless you were unlucky. They filed on to the buses at Southampton and debouched into Earls Court by the well-drilled platoon.
Less organised on principle but no more reticent, those members of the Downtown Push who were still young enough to travel arrived in dribs and drabs. The woodwork was the whole world thick but out of it they came crawling, still full of theories about the repressive mechanisms of a society which allowed them to indulge their every whim. Grecian Ern Papadakis arrived, his famous book on Trotsky as yet unpublished, mainly because it remained unwritten. Not far behind him came Ross Peters the Prestige Pie-eater, an expert on Reich’s orgone theories who had once received a letter from Reich himself. There men were legends and had the women to prove it: lank-haired, taciturn creatures with approximately depilated bare legs, their shoulders hunched from constant listening.
One night at Melbury Road, half cut and wholly content in the midst of the writhing throng, I had just finished shaking to a Beatles track when I was horrified to hear the actual living squeal of Johnny Pitts, the Push folk-singer who had for ten years unsuccessfully attempted to emigrate from Australia so as to go to South America and – I quote the wording of his passport application – fight for anarchy. At last they had made the mistake of letting him out, and now he was here. As usual he thrashed his guitar, whined a few bars about bad working conditions in some American correctional facility, and fell sideways. Somebody put the Beatles back on and the crowded room danced again, but it had been a bad moment. Sitting exhausted in a corner with a woman kneeling at each arm and another soothing his forehead from behind, Dalziel suddenly looked haunted. The past was catching up.
But you could always outrun it. One place we ran to was the Iron Bridge Tavern, deep in the East End. Queenie Watts and a friend of hers called Shirley sang jazz there every Saturday. We used to go down there in Dingo Kinsella’s apology for a car. Dingo was a spidery journalist serving a one-year stretch in the London bureau of one of the Sydney newspapers. This meant that he was being paid an Australian salary, which in turn meant that he was, by our standards, wealthy. If he had drunk less seriously he would have been driving a Facel Vega at the very least. As things were, he locomoted in what must have been the last roadworthy example of the old upright Ford Popular. A car that had never been popular with anybody I knew of, it held all of us in acute discomfort. Dingo drove the way he drank, as if he wanted to die. But since the Popular’s top speed wasn’t much higher than that of a walking man, we were all agreed that it was worth the risk. Every Saturday, Dingo would give three toots on the horn and we would all pile out of the house to go looking for the car in the next street. Hearty McHale refused to let him park the machine even momentarily in front of her salubrious establishment, lest property values should be lowered still further.
On the way down the long East India Dock Road to the pub the car would weave from side to side in a sine curve of about ten feet amplitude and a hundred feet pitch. At the Iron Bridge we would listen to the happily shouting trad band until time was called and we were thrown out. On the road home the car ran straight and level, because when Dingo got blotto beyond a certain point he seized up solid. Turning corners remained a problem, which we could sometimes solve by getting him to close his eyes and talking him through it. In a faster car this would have be
en fatal. To us it was just part of what Bruce Jennings might have called a Rewarding Experience for the Young People.
15
The Green Gladiolus
Dressed as a deliberate caricature of an English gentleman from the late gasolier period, Bruce Jennings had been in London longer than anyone and was both appalled and delighted that the rest of Australia now seemed bent on joining him. He was appalled because, without being in any way servile, he had submitted himself to Europe and was by now ten years deep into a love affair that the new arrivals looked determined to consummate in five minutes. He was delighted because they provided him with raw material. I suppose Reg and myself were included in his field of observation. But Jennings’ interest in Dave was more than just clinical. He recognised a fellow talent. His memories of home sharpened by exile, Jennings was the first Australian writer-performer to exploit the Australian idiom for its full poetic value. He had a fine ear and the learning to back it up. Dave, though an avid general reader, had only the ear. But Jennings valued Dave’s ability to fish a phrase up out of childhood and throw it flapping on the table. ‘Fair suck of the pineapple,’ Dave would say in protest when I tried to hit him for a quid at Wally’s, and Jennings’ eyes would go shiny. He’d forgotten that one.
Wally’s was the greasy spoon in a lane behind Warwick Road. It served plates of fat. You could have sausages in your fat or fried eggs in your fat. You could have the sausages and the fried eggs together, but it meant you got more fat. We ate at Waliy’s most evenings because the price of cooking at home was a stream of protest notes from Hearty McHale about noise, smells, smoke, fire and the lettuce leaf so vandalously trodden into the hallway carpet. Wally’s was a strange place to find the fastidious Jennings – who was known to take luncheon at Rules in the company of his admirer, John Betjeman – but he dropped in a couple of times during the period when he and Dave were discussing the possibility of a movie. I secretly laughed this possibility to scorn, not yet having realised that the ability to plan in the long term, while retaining the capacity to tell a long-term plan from a wild dream, is crucial to success in any of the collaborative arts. I thought they were both a bit nuts.
Jennings left you in no doubt of his brilliance, though in some fear that his monologues might never end. A career drinker, he would stand balefully in the middle of a party, the only man present in a Turnbull & Asser shirt, antique Chavet tie, pin-stripe double-breasted Savile Row suit, Lobb shoes, black fedora and a monocle. ‘Des is the name,’ he would loudly confide to an invisible interlocutor, ‘Des Esseintes.’ And indeed he was the hero of A Rebours to the life, a Count Robert de Montesquiou de nos jours, creating himself as a work of art. He didn’t have the living tortoise inset with turquoises but no doubt it was on order. Meanwhile he had everything else, and I was wide-eyed even as he stood there swaying. When he fell to the floor he would usually take a couple of people with him. Laid to rest on a sofa, he would sleep until the party thinned out. Then, with just the right-sized audience, he would start a closed-eyed, resonant muttering which might consist of nothing but brand-names and radio jingles from the far Australian past. ‘Rosella Tomato Sauce … Twice As Nice If Kept On Ice … Sydney Flour is our flour, we use it every day … I like Aeroplane Jelly, Aeroplane Jelly for me … You’ll sleep tight ‘cause you’ll sleep right, on a Lotusland inner-spring mattress …’
Years later I was to realise that this was the most original side of his mind talking. He was rediscovering and reordering an Australian language which had never had any pretensions beyond the useful and had thus retained an inviolable purity. It was the language written on bottles of cough medicine and packets of junket powder: a vocabulary without any value beyond common currency, and therefore undiluted by aesthetic pretension. With a sure instinct reinforced by his dandyish collector’s erudition, he had realised that not all the ephemeral was evanescent – that there was such a thing as a poetry of trivia, uniquely evocative for a country whose art was hag-ridden by a self-conscious striving towards autonomous respectability. Jennings was already well embarked on a salvage expedition to raise a nation’s entire cultural subconscious. The obtuse among his country’s intellectuals – a high proportion – thought he was lowering the tone, and belittled him accordingly. He armoured himself by polishing his façade still more brightly, Delacroix, said the doomed Jean Prévost in his wonderful book about Baudelaire, was a dandy not because he wanted to impose his superiority but because he wanted to defend it. Similarly Jennings retreated ever further into his own effulgence, taunting his detractors with the dazzling pages of an open book – the lexicon of their lost youth.
At the time, however, I couldn’t get interested in any of that, since it concerned Australia, and Jennings’ Australia, through being so vivid, only lit up what I was still trying to leave. It was Jennings’ Europe that attracted me. Jennings could tell you what Satie had said about Ravel. I knew what Hemingway had said about Gertrude Stein, but Jennings knew what Gertrude Stein had said about Picabia, because he owned the letters. He also owned a Picabia. For Jennings, the side-trails of the old international avant-garde were a stamping ground. I thought then, and still think now, that it is more important to be familiar with the major artistic works than knowingly conversant with the minor artists, but Jennings wasn’t as easy to fault there as one might have thought. Just because he knew a lot about Honegger didn’t mean that he was an ignoramus about Haydn. Jennings was formidable. I didn’t envy him his talent, being conceited enough to believe that I had some of my own. I did envy him his well-stocked mind. Actually I should have envied him his talent too: stocking your mind isn’t the same as stacking crates in a warehouse. It’s a gift.
So is being a landlady. Either you run the show, or the show runs you. Hearty McHale was determined to be mistress in her own house. It followed ineluctably that we were on borrowed time. We were careful to have no parties. We rarely cooked anything more complicated than half a pound of frankfurters. But we were an epicentre of unpredictability. Hearty McHale’s mental equilibrium depended on a silent house full of closed doors, with nothing moving except rent. The only acceptable noise in her establishment was the restrained clamour made by money as it transferred itself from the tenant’s wallet into the owner’s bank account. From there, according to rumour, the loot went to Spain and was sunk into a block of flats affording a view of the sea to any British mountain-climbing holiday-maker equipped with powerful binoculars.
Such was the system which our mere presence disturbed. If we had been trainee Trappists we might have lasted longer. As things were, the crisis came closer every day. In the evenings I would stagger upstairs with heaps of Penguin books for my growing library. When one of these heaps collapsed in my arms, an extruded copy of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life inflicted minor but detectable damage on the hallway rubber plant. Hearty McHale reacted as if I had thrown a phosphorous grenade. She had already warned me that the beams under my area of the floor were not designed to hold up the British Museum reading room. Books, however, were a negligible irritant compared with women. Reg had a very quiet Australian girl-friend whom he planned to, and subsequently did, marry. Mostly he visited her instead of she him, but she turned up in Warwick Road on two occasions and for Hearty McHale two meant two hundred. Robin came to me at least once a week because it was not practicable for me to take to her the clothes that needed ironing, darning, mending, replacing, etc. Unless these missions of mercy could be accurately timed by the synchronisation of watches and the use of semaphore from the top window, they necessarily entailed the ringing of the downstairs front doorbell, which Hearty McHale interpreted as the prelude to nuclear attack.
But it was Dave’s female admirers who tipped the already precarious balance. When he loved them and left them, some of them failed to get the point, and came looking for him. Reg and I spent a lot of time sitting in the kitchen with a lissome yet decidedly hysterical actress called Bambi who was reluctant to believe that Dave had had to depart sudde
nly for Easter Island. Leaving one cigarette still smouldering in the ashtray on the kitchen table, she would light several others while compulsively searching the flat. Reg would trail her, catching the ash in his cupped hands before it hit Hearty McHale’s moth-eaten though purportedly invaluable carpet. Dave was curled up in the loft above the bathroom. He was so tired after a day’s work at Cornwall’s Erections that he didn’t care where he slept, so it was all right for him. But it was tough on us, and finally we rebelled. Perhaps we were offended by what he could afford to turn down. An evening came when we declined to stall Bambi and she caught him still in the bath. It was the luxury bubble-bath we gave him each Friday. Friday was pay-day and we would count his money as he lay in deep foam after another dedicated week of selfless toil. Taking the sponge from me and the loofah from Reg, Bambi arrogated to herself the task of cleansing and anointing the exhausted hero. Reg and I retreated to the kitchen for half a bottle each of Woodpecker cider, a few hands of gin rummy and some ill-disguised fits of jealousy. When Hearty McHale burst in, her pulsatingly veined feet were about six inches off the linoleum, thus indicating the speed she had attained going up the final flight of stairs. She evinced the special fury reserved for when it was Dave who was receiving the female visitor. Brushing our feeble reassurances aside, she headed for the bathroom, with Reg and me close behind her and making as much noise as possible so that Dave might take warning. The bathroom door was locked from inside but Hearty McHale had a ring of duplicate keys, like a warder. She threw open the door. Bambi was nowhere to be seen. Dave sat there in deep white suds looking suitably shocked. Some of the items in his pile of discarded clothes were suspiciously diaphanous at a second glance but otherwise there was no sign of anything untoward. Had he lowered her out of the window on a rope of knotted towels?