Mother London

by Michael Moorcock

Genres: World War II; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Shortlisted for the Whitbread Award, award-winning author of the Elric series Michael Moorcock offers a captivating and immersive portrait of London from World War II through the 1980s through the eyes of three outpatients from a mental hospital.

In this masterful exploration of the human condition, three outpatients from a mental hospital—a music hall artist, reclusive writer, and a woman just awoken from a long coma—experience the history of London from the Blitz to the late 1980s through a chaotic experience of sensory delusions. Believing themselves to hear voices from London’s past, their fragmented and poignant stories create a tapestry of episodes, snippets, and sidelines that capture the essence of those living on society’s fringes.

What The Guardian calls “a great, humane document,” Mother London is a literary work that transcends time and place and is a must-read for literary and historical fiction fans alike.

Release date: May 20, 2025

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Print pages: 544

Sample

1. The Patients

The Patients

“BY MEANS OF certain myths which cannot easily be damaged or debased the majority of us survive. All old great cities possess their special myths. Amongst London’s in recent years is the story of the Blitz, of our endurance.”

Setting aside his antique fountain pen David Mummery pauses to stick a newspaper picture of the Temple beside the article he is preparing which will again be favourable to the City’s freemasons and must surely guarantee his entrance into their brotherhood; then London’s subterranean secrets will at last be his. Mummery wets his lips with a blue flannel. Lately his mouth has been dry all the time.

Calling himself an urban anthropologist, and with an impressive record of mental illness, Mummery lives by writing memorials to legendary London. Peeling dried glue from his swollen fingers, he glances up at the brass-bound mahogany clock with a mercury pendulum which blends into a wall of miscellaneous but chiefly patriotic images and, lifting the lid of his nineteenth-century clerical desk, replaces the notebook beside an old ear-trumpet which holds his pens. As he gets up he begins to sing what is for him almost a lullaby. Blake, in the main, has a calming effect.

“Bring me my bow of burning gold…”

A crowded museum of ephemera, of late Victorian advertisements, Edwardian crested ware, ’20s and ’30s magazines, wartime memorabilia, posters from the Festival of Britain, toy Guardsmen, Dinky delivery vans, lead aeroplanes, his room’s surfaces are covered by confused and varied strata, uncatalogued and frequently unremembered. Mummery can explain how these are his sources of information, his revelatory icons, his inspiration.

At the centre of this great collage is a framed newspaper photograph of a V-Bomb flying over London. This is Mummery’s private memento mori. He believes it might even be one of the two which almost killed him as a child. He glances past stacks of books and ancient board games on his window sills to the thinning mist outside. Almost invisible, the low December sun is dimly reflected by the cold slate of terraced roofs. After reaching his hands towards the embers of the small fire he lit at dawn in the black cast-iron grate he opens the doors of an old Heal’s wardrobe and begins methodically to dress in four or five layers of clothing; lastly adding a large black bearskin hat to expose only a hint of pink flesh and his unusually bright eyes when he lets himself out onto the dowdy landing and runs downstairs to leave his lodgings where Maida Vale borders on Kilburn and catch his Wednesday bus. Lately he has been feeling painfully cold.

The V-Bomb moves with steady grace before the blustering East wind as it crosses the channel and reaches Brighton, passing low enough over the town for people in the Pavilion Gardens to see it rush by, the yellow fire from its tail glaring against the broken cloud; it will reach Croydon in minutes then in a further minute South London when, its fuel gone, it will fall on the suburb where David Mummery, almost five years old, plays with his toy soldiers. Forty-seven feet long and carrying two thousand pounds of explosive, this sophisticated machine, the combined genius and labour of amoral scientists, serf technicians and slave workers, is about to bring a miracle into my life.

David Mummery is also writing his memoirs. Some of these have yet to be made coherent; some are still in his mind. Some he has considered inventing.

Small and bundled, Mummery presents a shapeless profile as he walks rapidly beneath dark leafless planes to his stop, congratulating himself that as usual he is a few minutes ahead of the main rush-hour crowd which must soon begin its progress up a high street already roaring with traffic from the suburbs. It gives him familiar satisfaction to be only third in the queue when the throbbing scarlet double-decker draws in for its passengers to mount. Finding himself a downstairs seat two rows back from the driver’s cabin he rubs a neat circular spot on the fogged window, peering out with quirky pleasure as the bus approaches grey, unthreatening Paddington.

Frequently Mummery imagines the city streets to be dry riverbeds ready to be filled from subterranean sources. From behind the glass he watches his Londoners. This fabulous flotsam. They come from Undergrounds and subways (their ditches and their burrows) flowing over pavements to where myriad transports wait to divert them to a thousand nearby destinations. The mist has dissipated. A cold sun now brightens this eruption of souls. Through streets enlivened by their noise small crowds flow: through alleys and lanes and narrow boulevards. At this distance Mummery loves them: his impulse is to remove his woollen gloves, reach through his overcoat, his muffler, his jacket, his cardigan, find his notepad and record how the sunshine glitters off worn stone, new concrete and dirty red brick, off frozen flesh; but he makes his hands remain at rest in his lap: presently he has no need of scenery: he must devote himself to the Masons. Having delivered his latest manuscript (Five Famous Whitehall Phantoms) to his publisher on the previous Monday he is free from any immediate financial considerations and now desires almost painfully to be back near his canal and his old women, with his personal nostalgia. As the bus passes a curved metal railway bridge and runs under a white flyover he thinks of the millions of predestined individuals driving or being driven in a million directions, their breath, their smoke, their exhausts softening the sharpness of the morning air.

Momentarily Mummery feels as if London’s population has been transformed into music, so sublime is his vision; the city’s inhabitants create an exquisitely complex geometry, a geography passing beyond the natural to become metaphysical, only describable in terms of music or abstract physics: nothing else makes sense of relationships between roads, rails, waterways, subways, sewers, tunnels, bridges, viaducts, aqueducts, cables, between every possible kind of intersection. Mummery hums a tune of his own improvising and up they come still, his Londoners, like premature daisies, sometimes singing, or growling, or whistling, chattering; each adding a further harmony or motif to this miraculous spontaneity, up into the real world. Oh, they are wonderful like this, today.

“… but she’s only a beautiful picture, in a beautiful golden frame!” An old song as ever on his delicious lips, Josef Kiss mounts the footboard of the bus, much as a pirate might swing himself into his victim’s rigging. Eccentric clothes swirl about his massive person. Advancing into the body of the vehicle he appears to expand to fill up the available space. He plucks off his leather gloves, unbuttons his Crombie, loosens his long scarf. Watching him partly in reflection, partly from the corner of his eye, Mummery half expects Josef Kiss to hand the garments to his conductor, together with a generous tip. Mr Kiss places himself across the left front seat and sighs. As a matter of principle he makes everything he does a pleasure.

At Mr Kiss’s back an orange-haired woman with chapped skin and a nose rubbed red by coarse tissues reassures herself, speaking to her friend: “I thought I’d better see the priest. It couldn’t do any harm. Well, I saw him. He said it was all nonsense and I wasn’t to bother myself about it and to have nothing to do with Mrs Craddock. That suited me down to the ground.”

Really lovely eyes and hair but she’ll kill herself at this rate.

“All aboard, please. There you are, love. Mind that bag, sir, if you please. Thank you, thank you very, very much. Thank you, sir. Thank you, madam. Thank you, thank you, thank you very much.” With insane patience, his face hanging in regular folds under his grey hair so he resembles a natty bloodhound, the conductor scurries about his aisles and stairs. “Cheer up, love, it’ll all be over by Christmas. There’s going to be a whip-round for my retirement. Keep talking, that’s the secret, Mr Kiss. You know that as well as I do.” He speaks in a quiet moment between Westbourne Grove and Notting Hill. Grey, massive houses, monuments to the optimism of the late Victorian bourgeoisie, once multiple-occupied, the background to a scandal which destroyed lives and careers and rocked a government, slowly being reclaimed from the exploited immigrant by the upwardly mobile whites, go slowly by on both sides, behind trees. “But this is nothing. The tourist routes in the summer are murder. They never know where they’re going. You can’t blame them for it, can you? Imagine what we’d be like in New York. Or Baghdad. And how’s your sisters?”

“Hale as ever, Tom. Oh, very well.”

“I thought that was where you were coming from. Give them my best when you see them. Tell them I miss them. Tell them I’m retiring. I’ll be in Putney, though. Not too far.” Tom winks as he steadies himself on the vertical chromium rail before the bus takes a lumbering turn, putting the renamed cinema and the Bhelpuri House at its back. Both will be gone in a year, making way for some empty title, a new development.

“They say they can’t afford London Transport any more, Tom.” Josef Kiss regards their surroundings with the greed of someone who has regretted too many disappearances and losses. His gentle smile suggests resignation.

The conductor shifts his money bag in order to sit down on the seat across from Josef Kiss. His response is to chuckle. His chuckling helps him maintain his equilibrium. “They could buy and sell the Duke of Westminster.”

Mr Kiss’s smile indicates a broad consent. He glances casually back and does not recognise Mummery.

There is no dishonour in flight. There is no blame in failing to enter the fire. I did nothing to harm her. But he could not know he was my rival. In some distress, Mummery rises, disembarks and runs, an awkwardly animated stuffed beast, for the Tube at Notting Hill, taking the steps two at a time, careering through the barrier, waving his weekly pass, flying down the escalator in time to force himself through the doors of a Circle Line train for High Street Kensington where he changes to a Wimbledon-bound District Line and sits alone as the carriage sighs and rumbles as far as Putney Bridge where he jumps out, dashes through the exit into Ranelagh Gardens, momentarily claustrophobic amongst the oddly arranged terracotta houses, to the trees and steeples and undecorated slabs, the hullabaloo of the bridge where traffic jostles to cross the Thames, and there before him is a Number 30 bus heading South. He leaps to the platform just as the bus moves forward again and the river is revealed, beyond it the Star and Garter and all the other rosy English Domestic brick behind tall bare trees on the further shore. For a moment the light turns the water to quicksilver. Gulls rise and fall around the bridge. Mary Gasalee is aboard, seated on the bench behind him, next to Doreen Templeton. They are patients at the same Clinic. Neither woman acknowledges Mummery. Perhaps his big hat disguises him. Mummery lapses into the comfort of despair. He imagines himself falling before their eyes into the water, describing an exceptionally beautiful curve, his expression beatific; he begins to radiate forgiveness, a profoundly elaborate form of self-pity.

“Mary Gasalee, that boy’s in pain.”

There’s no pain in the fire, she thinks, but she turns her head. The boy stands on the platform waiting to get off. The water seems reflected in his grey pallor. He holds the handrail with all his strength. His face is thin; those might be spots of fever below his dulled eyes. Dumbly he challenges her glance. He’s not mine, she thinks and looks out at the passing shops, at McDonald’s, Mothercare, at W.H. Smith and Our Price. As the bus continues up Putney High Street, the boy jumps free. His mustard-coloured duffel coat flaps like useless wings. He’s not my yellow doll.

Doreen Templeton gets up first. They have reached their stop. Mary follows her. They step down to the pavement. “Couldn’t you feel his pain, Mary?” Again and again Doreen Templeton wraps herself in her coat. They walk slowly up the hill towards the open Heath, a few bushes, some scruffy trees. “I could. But I’m very oversensitive, as you know. Maybe I imagined it.”

Mrs Gasalee is no longer responsive. She believes Doreen Templeton’s apparent concern for others is merely another way of getting attention. Doreen’s sensitivity is at best mere imposition, a sentimental exercise, for she never does anything about her “intuitions.” While Doreen is not stupid (she sometimes admits her self-deceptions) she is completely selfish. Mrs Gasalee has now disliked her for five months. Doreen has yet to notice; she continues condescendingly to describe her own highly tuned mental condition and its effect on the less blessed, like her family and her former husband. Mrs Gasalee’s replies to Doreen are from old habit ritualistic, only apparently engaged. Content to have mere confirmation, Doreen never questions them.

They reach the green gate of the converted vicarage, the NHSS Special Clinic. Mrs Gasalee begins to tremble out of many causes. Doreen sighs. “Well, love, here we go again.”

From the débris flies the Black Captain, his hands stretched towards the infant Mummery immovable amongst brick and plaster, one of the V2’s few survivors.

Behind them, hesitating until he sees them pass through the gate, David Mummery looks back down the hill to where Josef Kiss turns the corner; today his has been the slower route. Mr Kiss always comes by the same bus but Mummery usually varies his own journey since it is one of his few ways of relieving the tedium of overly secure habits which, even when they torture him, are preferable to uncertainty. Mummery craves the familiar as an alcoholic craves drink but dignifies these cravings as an example of his own nobility, of his enduring love. Thus he still nurtures his passion for Mrs Gasalee, preferring to yearn for her rather than risk a new romance; holding on to familiar and simple childhood verities and letting the past remain golden, tarnished only by the unthinkable shadow of others’ needs and ambitions. He longs for the emotional intimacy he knew with Mary Gasalee and is determined, though she will not return to him again, never to experience the same intimacy with another woman: his enduring love, his self-congratulation, is a deception presenting itself as a definition.

“Mr Kiss.” Mummery lifts his hat. “Can you eat fire?”

Josef Kiss throws back his head and roars.

“My dear boy!”

With his usual mixture of trepidation and pleasure David Mummery waits for his rival’s generous arm to enfold him so that side by side they may enter the doors of the Clinic. His misery subsides, as he knows it must, for he is recognised at last.

Upon the dark green and cream walls, a postwar hangover, are pictures of Cornwall by R. Wintz, chiefly pastels and gouaches of St Ives before the formica signs engulfed it. Some of the brown steel-framed armchairs contain other regular patients. They call themselves The Group and are unusual only by virtue of certain individuals.

From his corner seat Mr Faysha’s benign smile greets Mummery and Mr Kiss. The tiny muscular African is about sixty, his beard and hair both grey, his skin so youthful he resembles a schoolboy preparing for a rôle in a nativity play. Hardly able to glance up, as if frozen in mid-dive, Ally Bayley is poised on the edge of the next chair. She is the youngest of them, hiding under a weight of curly brown hair, her clenched fingers revealing fresh scabs. Reading with gloomy arrogance from a fairly recent number of Country Life, Petros Papadokis, a Cypriot, ignores her. He attends the Clinic only, he insists, under pressure from the Islamic Mafia who run his local medical centre. Beside him an older man with red curly hair and the slightly bloated good looks of a 1950s English film star, an empty pipe gripped in his mouth, sports the corduroy suit, woollen scarf and Fairisle pullover of a vanished bohemian Soho. Admitting it is not his real name, the older man calls himself “Hargreaves” because he fears a publisher will discover his attendance at the Clinic and stop commissioning his paperback covers. “Hargreaves” is particularly wary of Mummery, whom he has run into once or twice in editors’ offices. “Morning, old boy.” His reluctant courtesy amounts to a snub.

Doctor Samit, in his usual grey pinstripe three-piece, throws open his office door and grins out at them revealing strangely even teeth which are probably cosmetically treated. “Hello again! We’ll be ready in a minute. I saw Miss Harmon coming up the road. Is everybody here? What terrible cold weather, eh?”

“That new chappy, the pie-shop chappy, hasn’t turned up yet.” Doreen Templeton believes he lowered the tone last week. “And we’re waiting for Old Nonny as usual.”

“But where’s our Mr Mummery?” Doctor Samit is surprised. “He’s always on time. Oh, do forgive me. I didn’t recognise you, David.”

Apologetically, with a trembling hand, Mummery removes his hat. “I’m a bit paranoid about keeping warm this year. I don’t want another dose of flu.”

“And Mrs Weaver’s probably off sick again.” Doreen Templeton reports the remaining absentee. “She was looking seedy last week, you’ll remember. Her bronchitis gets to her around Christmas. I can’t recall a Christmas it didn’t.” She enjoys reminding them that she has been “In Group” longer than anyone apart from Mrs Weaver herself who nowadays only comes for the company when she feels like it.

Cold air blows in as the outside doors are opened and they can smell the powerful scent of lavender before they see Old Nonny, whose clothes in spite of the weather remain bright blue, lilac or violet, even her hat, even her eye-shadow. She has wound several chiffon scarves around her neck and wrists wherever her skin shows outside her blouse and cardigan. “Stay!” With almost theatrical command she addresses her invisible Lulu. As optimistic and as ebullient as her mistress, the Pomeranian will wait in the drive. “Good morning, everybody.” She has the strangest of accents, ancient London English on which are layered a thousand other influences and aspirations. “Good morning, Doctor Samit, darling. And how’s our dusky quack?”

The doctor straightens his perfect cuffs and offers her his habitually sardonic bow. “The better for seeing you, Mrs Colman, thank you.” Nonny claims to have wedded Ronald Colman in 1941, just before the church and all its records were bombed. “How,” he asks laboriously, “are you, is more to the point.”

“Fighting fit as always. Strong as a horse. I’m not here, doctor darling, because of my health. I’m here because like most of us it’s the only way I can stay out of the bin. There’s nobody sick here, as you well know, unless it’s poor Mrs T. Good morning, dear.” And laughing in the face of her declared enemy she turns her back. “What ho, Mr Kiss!” She winks. “Had any good parts lately?” She was, she said, on the stage herself before the War, as Eleanor Hope. She met Ronald Colman through Alexander Korda when she auditioned for Hearts of Oak. “He should have got the OBE, at least, for what he did.” She turns to a startled Mr Papadokis. “The sisters wrote to the King, you know, but never heard back. Did they, Mr K?”

Embarrassed, Doctor Samit utters a professional chuckle. “Well, well, well.”

Old Nonny waves her chiffon in eccentric patterns. “Stuffy in here, isn’t it?”

Doreen Templeton’s thin features become whiter and narrower, her lips tighten and her eyes are furious slits. Even Ally enjoys her dramatic discomfort, for Old Nonny never loses in these exchanges, which is why Doreen chooses to address her next remark to the ceiling. “She really should get rid of her pans. I blame those home helps.” Several times Doreen has offered the theory from Reader’s Digest that Old Nonny having contracted Alzheimer’s Disease from ingesting too much aluminium therefore has no business at the Clinic.

guts nobody bitch all blood me no salt doss ist eine ferbissener

Mary Gasalee frowns and becomes startled, grateful when Josef Kiss, noticing her reaction, rises in stately fashion to be beside her. “I suppose it’s time to get my prescription again,” she says. “Are you okay?”

He presses the hand she lifts into his. “Oh, dear. Oh, dear, Mary.”

Glancing across at them Mummery pretends to notice nothing. Long ago, when he was a teenager and she in her thirties, she gave him up for Josef Kiss whose tolerance, security and variety of experience Mummery at any age was incapable of providing. Even now, considering himself no longer a child because he has endured the discomforts of treatment and therapy, Mummery’s insights are merely conventional and his attempted sympathy lacks understanding. He means well, but his fear makes him ungenerous. He can say only what he feels will please her since she is his main chance of returning to the golden past where he briefly enjoyed being the object of her romantic idealism: her twin soul. Her enthusiasm had made him feel of value in the world. At one point it had seemed she might go back to him, but no doubt she had only been getting her bearings. Yet he lived in hope. For him hope had always been preferable to reality. Mary Gasalee had realised what it would mean to be the perpetual source of Mummery’s self-esteem and had refused that burden. Only dimly aware of her reasons, Mummery enjoys the sensation of sadness rather than jealousy while continuing secretly to envy her intimacy with Josef Kiss, who at different times had commended the Clinic to them both. Mummery wonders why Mr Kiss is shaking his head.

pork all leave Jerusalem pork all go into Babylon

The retiring actor visits Mrs Gasalee once a week, on Saturdays, when he likes to help her with her week’s shopping. On Sundays she sees her friend Judith. Wednesday is Mary Gasalee’s only other constant. Mr Kiss’s physical life, however, is one of strict routine which he refuses to change. His routine and his own particular medicine are his protection against a chaos he is willing to risk perhaps three or four times a year and then usually only in the controlled environment of the Abbey, his costly asylum. Each year he saves for his few weeks’ sabbatical. He is divorced.

Dobrze! Czego Pan chcesz? Lord Suma fought the Cockney Bulldog that night, beyond Waterloo, but fell like a collapsed barrage balloon. The Bulldog had him stuffed, they say, and used him as a couch in his Blackheath mansion. It was raining. I was so miserable I almost went back to the tattoo parlour. There’s some comfort in those needles. But it’s a habit, too. I’ve seen people just like Lord Suma. Not an inch of skin left. He was a Londoner, it turned out, from Uxbridge. Could have fooled me. She’s got that scent back. Is it natural or does she put it on?

“Come along everyone.” Miss Harmon throws wide the double doors to the Meeting Room. “Let’s get stuck in, shall we?”

Obedient they rise, merge and in single file enter a room with dark blue carpet and grey velvet curtains. On the eggshell walls hang more pastels of the seaside, the Cotswolds, an alp. A coffee table, some floral easy chairs, three straight chairs and a sofa are at facing angles on the carpet. Taking their usual places, with the exception of Ally Bayley, they appear to relax.

I should have looked up that healer he recommended. This is doing me no good I don’t know about him but it’s right across London there isn’t even a tube stop for Temple Fortune is there it’s all mock Tudor it gives me the shivers they say he’s very good, though. The electric shocks did nothing but make my hair fall out.

Mummery positions himself to look through the tall window onto the chilly Heath with its miscellany of ugly trees, road signs and ruined grass. By comparison the interior is pleasant.

One V-Bomb landed on the common. Nobody realised it would be followed so closely by another. By mine.

Placing his pencil and notebook on his chair’s arm and acknowledging Miss Harmon, Doctor Samit opens the session. “So what have we been doing with ourselves since we last came together? Who wants to begin?”

Gently Miss Harmon leans forward. “How about you, Ally? What happened to your hand?”

At once Ally begins to sob. “He just left me,” she says. “Broken milk bottles over the step and I couldn’t stop bleeding. The people from the pub came out with flannels. I was so ashamed.”

Ally’s stories make them all uncomfortable. She cannot find it in herself to leave her husband.

“He’s subhuman, Ally.” Old Nonny’s eyes glitter with outrage. “He’s a beast. He’s worse than most. He should be put away. Can’t you get into one of them shelters?”

“He came after me.” Ally returns to her private tears, rocking herself silently in her chair. They are unable to disturb her. Mr Faysha’s own eyes are filling. He puts a tiny hand near her on the next chair, in case she should find it useful.

“And what about the rest of us?” Miss Harmon’s hair hangs in dark, lank slabs at the back and sides of her long head. Her prominent nose and chin help her cultivate a crudely Pre-Raphaelite appearance. She wears a dress of William Morris material normally used to cover furniture. Occasionally, when half dreaming, Mummery will start awake, convinced that one of the armchairs has come to life. “How have we all been?”

Under Miss Harmon’s and Doctor Samit’s conduction, some eagerly, some reluctantly, some resentfully, some gladly, the others recite accounts of their week or tell stories of adventures which have the ring of truth or else are clearly invented. Mr Kiss enjoys these sessions. His tales are anecdotal and frequently sensational, even humorous. He cannot easily stop himself from entertaining whereas Mrs Gasalee recounts as a rule something she has heard from an acquaintance, sad stories concerning small injustices and frustrations, how she feels the help she gave or offered was inadequate. Sometimes she will admit having overheard people telepathically, but she knows this tends to make a few patients, and certainly Doctor Samit, embarrassed. Old Nonny tells of famous friends, unlikely events, incredible gatherings, chance meetings with household names, not a few of whom are long dead, and requires no response save the occasional nod or exclamation. Doreen Templeton listens through all this with disbelieving resignation and then discusses how badly people behave towards her even when she tries to help them. Mr Papadokis, in a low murmur which makes them strain to hear, if they make the effort at all, with eyes on the ground, speaks chiefly of troubles with his wife and mother, with his three children, his brother, his sister-in-law. “She says such filth. She asks about my girlfriend’s knickers. She can’t be clean. She’s not Greek. You know.” Only occasionally does his voice rise, taking on a note of rhetorical protest. “What is it? How can I be responsible for that? Am I Superman? I said.”

With a shrug Mr Faysha accepts his turn. “Oh, it’s just the usual old stuff.” The movements of his hands and shoulders are apologetic. His smile is perpetually gentle. “But what am I to do?” For forty years he has been married to an Englishwoman. They still live in Brixton but are thinking of moving. For years they suffered the prejudice of their white neighbours; now it is the young West Indians who give them most trouble. Mr Faysha is inclined to dismiss his personal problems and drift into a general philosophical argument. “What can you do about it?” he asks The Group. “We’re definitely victims of history, I’d say, wouldn&rsq