1
The Smell of Roses and of the Sea
THE DREAM, THOUGHT Harold Blackstone, staring through the grimed glass of his Smoking compartment, has to exist first; only then might one create the actuality. Which, like America, could become quite different in time. How did desire, imagination and memory work? The train had made one of those mysterious brief halts, as if to catch its steam before starting off again. It shuddered, hissed, and waited. He lowered the window to look out. A signal. What did it mean? Here, surely, one reality had already inspired the creation of another.
The train lurched and restarted its journey. He was intoxicated by the proliferation and powerful scent of the wild roses, the hedge lilies and herb robert in the thickly wooded embankments of the single track as the train rattled and squealed and sent smoke through the lush Sussex countryside. Sometimes the insects were so thick in the air he could hardly see past them. The train could be travelling through mythical England. He enjoyed the idea of the red, blue and brass smoke-spouting engine appearing from a grassy tunnel to be greeted by astonished fifth-century Celtic knights. Wasn’t there a scene like it in A Connecticut Yankee? They believed a roaring dragon emerged from its lair. Would they have attempted to tackle it or would they have galloped off in panic? Blackstone had a pretty good idea what he would have done.
Perhaps what we called ghosts were glimpses of the future or past. He had once been impressed by Frazer’s – or were they Wells’s? – fashionable notions about the idea of a fourth dimension, another Universe! Or did we all, as James suggested, each live in a universe of our own, a kind of ‘multiverse’?
The lazy little country train snaked up out of the valley and for a short while ran along a crest of the downs. He saw the sharp blue of the sea beneath the paler sky, a cool horizon with one misty pleasure boat shimmering as if airborne. They were frequent in the summer, often carrying an entire minstrel show for the evening run. He was no snob. The thing was probably quite jolly in the sunset. Now, he thought comfortably, reaching for his newspaper, he could relax and stop thinking about Oxford, Mrs Heaney and all the rest of them. He could forget that wretched paper arguing for MacDonald’s destructive influence on adult fiction. He could get back to his novel or go over a Balzac translation the publisher was shouting for. He hoped he wasn’t turning into a dabbler like his father.
Suddenly the train squealed, shuddered and came to another mysterious stop. Like most of his fellow passengers, Blackstone felt grit, smelled steam and stuck his head out of the compartment window. An expanse of hedges lay ahead. A row of inquisitive heads popped from windows up and down the train. Either they avoided eye-contact or exchanged comradely complaints against the railway company. Somewhere on the horizon the sea joined the sky. The scene froze for a second. The train made an encouraging murmur and shook itself. He sat back in his seat, abandoned his book and checked his watch. A brake from the house would meet him. They appeared to be on time. This was the 3.18 local from Brighton, which hugged the coast until Worthing and now turned inland. To be sure, he took another look at his timetable. He picked up his pocket guide. Lower Wortham was the nearest station to Moat Hinton, all that remained of a walled Anglo-Saxon settlement and its ancient church. Blackstone was looking forward to the excavations.
He had been surprised to receive his cousin Constance’s letter asking him to what she called a ‘family symposium’ at her big house near Lower Wortham, which she had renamed The Follies after inheriting it. Connie was the only one of their branch of the family rich enough to keep it up. Old Sir John showed little interest in his British property. Her one insistent point was that Blackstone should not tell his father about the symposium. Old Doctor Blackstone’s actions and statements had been self-contradictory since the BEF left for France.
“This is about little Nell,” she had said when he telephoned. Little Nell was the last to youngest of Doctor Blackstone’s large English family. Blackstone was Nell’s eldest brother’s son, closer to her age than his father’s brothers. She had always seen him as an ally within the family. He could, as Constance had it, ‘talk’ to Nell. She could be a bit highly strung but so imaginative! Of course they all loved her, though Ethel disapproved of her wildness. Nell had married a rather nice engineer with an old-fashioned Yorkshire name, who drove a sporty two-seater Blackstone rather envied. And now, he gathered, she was with child. That should settle them down. Presumably this event had something to do with Constance’s letter. He fell back in his seat, lit a pipe and wondered if the child would make a good character. An innocent eye on the adults, perhaps? Like James and Maisie. A fresh vision of the world. What might the child be like? Blackstone could only speculate. The second boy, his young cousin, would further complicate his large and rather well-known family. What on earth could this ‘symposium’ be about? Something to do with the War?
* * *
With a sigh, the brave Merchant Ventura Pearl Peru straps herself back into her gene-harness and, flipping toggles, swings the omniphone to her gorgeous lips. Screens are coming up jazzed or blank and her ship has suddenly developed an itch. “Calling in and calling out. Peru, Peru. Multiverse, are you hearing me? We have time and gravitational upheavals not 18-bars from Ketchup Cove. No sight of our Spammer. I don’t think public readings of The Stranger are going to do it for this one, mes pards. I’m coming in! Fix me a bit of that Moroccan fudge. Oh, you’d better hope you have some of that White Album left. We need a conjunction.”
ACHTUNG, DAHLIA GARDENS!!!
AND HERE I am, trying to tell the truth, really. I was born at 18 Dahlia Gardens, Mitcham, South-west London, on 18 December, 1939, delivered by Dr Dylan. You couldn’t have been born into a more suburban suburb. We were twenty minutes from Trafalgar Square. Detective stories abounded with frustrated, mild-mannered, usually homicidal, clerks who lived where I was born. P.G. Wodehouse had respectable romantic novelists and pretty actresses lodging in ‘Dahlia Gardens’. The name was synonymous with bourgeois and petit bourgeois. By the end of the war the Germans had sent more rockets our way than anywhere else. We thought they understood where the realm’s power was but actually they were rerouted by MI5. I slept securely in a Morrison shelter. My mother held me up to the window. Chuckling, I watched the dogfights. Ruins everywhere. My mum laughed and joked so I smiled, too. Thanks, MI5.
With all my imagination, all the resources Nature gave me: sturdy peasant genes, a taste for travel and reading, a certain London intelligence, a good visual imagination, a talent to entertain, not because I was needy but because I probably wasn’t. I suspect it does have infantile roots. I enjoyed the mutual fun of it. All together now! No tragic mask hidden here. My reading tastes were already broad. Unfortunately George MacDonald, and most of those ‘child-speakers’ who were directly influenced by him, left me feeling irritable and condescended to. My working life would be more successful than I had ever expected. My only disappointment is that I never made it into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
At school I loved to make people laugh by hamming up a bit of Shakespeare. Everyone enjoyed it. Belmont, my tiny nearby prep school, was run by a pair of terrifying dykes in tweeds and pudding-bowl haircuts. At least they weren’t cruel. And they weren’t into B&D or I would know it now by the very bad knots they tied when in exasperation they secured me to the bannisters. Belmont was a day school, exactly a mile from home. I got thrown out of one boarding school for keeping kids awake with my stories but at Belmont I just encouraged the other kids to bunk off, having discovered that the first class was the only one which took roll-call. After lunch, the world was your oyster! We were eventually exposed by a toady we’d let in on our truancy scheme.
At eleven, having failed my 11+, I was sent to Pitman’s College to learn how to become a journalist. I had known that I wanted to write since I was eight or nine and I worked to that specific end through the last four years of my schooling until I only specialised in typing English and a little French. At fifteen, having said I would work evening classes to get to university, I went to work for Messrs Balliere, Tindall and Cox, publishers of medical books, in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, next door to Victor Gollancz Ltd, publisher of angry lefties and myself from the ’80s until now.
I lasted a day. I wasn’t used to the foul language and badinage of the post room. By the following week I had abandoned publishing to the sink of depravity and got a job in the City. I went to work as a messenger for Flexhill Shipping Company. Every morning I took a train or a bus to grey London Bridge, about thirty-five minutes door to door from our somewhat posh leafy suburb of Norbury, where Kingsley Amis and Martin Stone grew up, where my mother and I lived for the rest of my childhood and where I formed a lasting friendship with Brian Alford, who became a brother. In 1961 they discovered the London to Brighton Roman Road. Legions had marched past the wondering yokels of Croydon town’s north borough. We had known relatively undramatic security, progress and civilisation for at least fifteen hundred years.
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
