Absolute Beginners (26 page)

But as I was moving off, old Vern delayed me, and said he had to talk to me alone. I said I was very tired, but he pulled me out the back where I used to have my darkroom, and shut the door, and locked it, and said, ‘You got to hear your father’s secret.’

I asked him what.

He didn’t say, but out of a corner he got the old metal box – the one you may remember where Dad used to keep the G. & S. gramophone records – and from it he took a large paper parcel, and he said, ‘This is your Dad’s book, he told me to give it to you personal if anything should happen.’

I opened it up, and there it was – hundreds of sheets all grubby and altered and corrected, except for the first
one, where he’d written on a single page, ‘
History of Pimlico. For my one and only son
.’

Well, then I broke down. I sobbed like a boy, and Vern left me alone a bit, but I could see he hadn’t ended, and he dragged the tin chest out and said, ‘Look inside,’ and there, on the bottom of it, were four big envelopes, and I opened them, and they contained stacks of pound notes.

‘What’s this?’ I said.

‘Your father’s fortune. He saved it year by year.’

I looked at Vern. ‘What did he say to do with it?’

Vernon swallowed a bit, didn’t look his best, and finally said, ‘Give it to you.’

‘All of it?’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘And it hasn’t been touched?’ I said.

Old Vern looked really narked at this. ‘You little bastard!’ he said. ‘You don’t trust your own brother!’

I didn’t answer that, but just looked at all this loot, and imagined Dad hoarding it and hiding it. ‘And he managed to keep all that from Ma?’ I said. ‘Well, one up to old Dad!’

Vernon said, ‘You know all this should go into the estate?’

‘It should?’ I said.

‘That’s the law,’ Vern told me.

I picked up two of the envelopes, and handed them to Vern. He hesitated, then took them. ‘Aren’t you going to count it?’ he said.

‘You want to?’

‘Oh, no.’ He frowned. ‘This is quite all right with you?’ he said, very dubiously.

‘I’ve given it to you.’

‘And you won’t tell Ma?’

I grabbed my two envelopes, and the
History of Pimlico
, and I held out my hand and said, ‘Not if you don’t, brother,’ and he shook it, and managed to raise a smile, and then I beat it out of that house forever.

Up by Victoria, I bought a holdall at a lost luggage, and put in the book and money, and made it to the Air Terminal. Because what with this all, my present feeling was I’d leave Dad’s body to Ma, and Suze to get over loving Spades, and me, I was going away for a while, and perhaps not coming back.

At the Air Terminal, all was bustle. I went into the gents, and sorted out the loot which, so far as I could see, sitting counting it on the pedestal, was about two hundred, plus or minus. Then I had a wash, and grabbed my holdall, and went up to the wicket and asked for a single ticket to Brazil.

Where in Brazil? the cat asked me.

I said, anywhere.

He said, could he see my passport – and I whipped it out, and he said I hadn’t got a visa.

I asked him what the hell a visa was, and he said it was a thing you couldn’t fly to Brazil without, and I said, okay, where
could
I fly to without a bloody visa? And the cat answered, quite politely, not to South America, but to parts of Continental Europe, I could, so I say okay, give me a ticket to one of those.

The wicket number told me this was the wrong terminal for Europe, I’d have to go up to Gloucester Road, and I said, okay, and went out and got a cab, and drove there, and on the way, I’d decided I’d go to Norway, because I’d often heard from seamen Spades that they were nice to them up there.

Well, at Gloucester Road, everything easy. They gave me a ticket to Oslo, and by now I was getting crafty, and said how much loot could I export there? and they said up to
£
250, but I’d better get a bit of local currency, so I did that at another wicket, and found I had an hour to wait, so I had a cuppa and a meat pie, and read the morning newspapers.

The Napoli thing was big stuff all right that morning. They had it all over the place, and most of last night’s occurrences, and a lot of columns in the leader sections. They were still on about unrestricted immigration, and how unwise it was, just as if it wasn’t they who’d allowed it in the first place, and patted themselves on the back for the old mother country’s generous hospitality, so long as everything went swimmingly. They said Welfare was an urgent consideration, and what was needed was a lot more experienced welfare officers to iron out awkward misunderstandings. A bishop had said on the radio, Home Service, that ‘various tensions and taboos divide us almost as strongly as those of race and creed in other countries.’ There’d been some charges made at last, and the magistrate had advised people to stay indoors at night: meantime, the coloureds, it said, were having to get white friends to do their shopping
for them. Ministers were going to fly in from the Caribbean, and from Africa, to scan the scene, and the High Commissioner of somewhere had protested. Best news of all – really heartening – was that the cabinet minister in charge of home security had received reports of all these happenings at his country house, and was studying them closely, and said the utmost strictness will be observed in the impartial enforcement of the law. Always ‘enforcement’: never condemning! As for me, I always thought laws had some idea behind them, some sort of principle, and it was this you should shout out above, not police courts.

Well, then the loudspeaker said it was all aboard for Oslo, and the strangest bundle of cats you can imagine got in a sort of bubble-coach which was half
double-decker
, and I sat up in the arse part and surveyed the streets of London as we sped. Goodbye, old town, I said, good luck! We passed quite near Shepherd’s Bush, where everything seemed free from tensions and taboos, and we made it out to the airfield which, I must say, was a splendid spectacle.

But I hadn’t all that time for spectacles, because they fed us into a sort of sausage-machine of escalators and officials, and I had to think fairly quickly, because my idea was, to try and find where the Brazil flight began and, if I could, dodge the Oslo flight, and get on the Brazil one instead. Because experience has taught me that the more highly planned a sausage system is, the easier to feed yourself through the wrong part of it, if you keep your nerves about you.

So we went through the customs, where they seemed surprised I had only a holdall with a handwritten book in it, but I said I had an auntie out in Norway to look after me. And at the currency check, they said wasn’t that a lot of money for so young a feller, and I said, wasn’t it just! and got by that one. And at passports, they said was this my first passport, and I said my very first, and how did they like the photo, I’d taken it myself, and didn’t I look a zombie? And after that, we all went into a great hall thing, overlooking the airfield through huge glass panels, and the loudspeaker announcing departures, and me keeping my ears skinned.

I got a Coke, and went and gazed, and it certainly was a sight! All those aircraft landing from outer space, and taking off to all the nations of the world! And I thought to myself, standing there looking out on all this fable – what an age it is I’ve grown up in, with everything possible to mankind at last, and every horror too, you could imagine! And what a time it’s been in England, what a period of fun and hope and foolishness and sad stupidity!

Then they announced the flight to Rio. I joined the wrong queue, just like I was a regular traveller to there, and we had no check at the exit, nor when we walked across the tarmac to the aircraft, until we met a chick who stood with a board beside the staircase, asking people their names as they got on. I put myself in between a family, hoping they’d think I was cousin Frank or someone, and the chick asked my name, and I pointed at her list to a name she hadn’t ticked, and
she said, could she have my embarkation card, and I said what embarkation card? and she smiled politely and said one like all these, and so I gave her up mine, and she said, tut, tut, wasn’t I a silly boy, that one was for the Oslo flight, and I’d better hurry back or I might miss it.

But I stayed down there, and watched the great plane taking off for Rio. And just as it became airborne – crash! down came the rain in torrents out the heavens, and I held up my arms in it, and opened my mouth and cried, ‘More! More! More! That’ll stop it up at Napoli! That’ll do what the ruling olders can’t do! That’s the only thing to keep the whites and blacks and yellows and blues of Napoli indoors!’

Well then, just as I was going to get back into the sausage-machine to reconnect with Oslo, in taxied a plane, quite close to where I was standing, and up went the staircase in the downpour, and out came a score or so of Spades from Africa, holding hand luggage over their heads against the rain. Some had on robes, and some had on tropical suits, and most of them were young like me, maybe kiddos coming here to study, and they came down grinning and chattering, and they all looked so damn pleased to be in England, at the end of their long journey, that I was heartbroken at all the disappointments that were there in store for them. And I ran up to them through the water, and shouted out above the engines, ‘Welcome to London! Greetings from England! Meet your first teenager! We’re all going up to Napoli to have a ball!’ And I flung my arms round
the first of them, who was a stout old number with a beard and a briefcase and a little bonnet, and they all paused and stared at me in amazement, until the old boy looked me in the face and said to me, ‘Greetings!’ and he took me by the shoulder, and suddenly they all burst out laughing in the storm.

C
OLIN
M
AC
I
NNES
(1914-76), son of novelist Angela Thirkell, cousin of Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling, grandson of Burne-Jones, was brought up in Australia but lived most of his life in London about which he wrote with a warts-and-all relish that earned him a reputation as the literary Hogarth of his day.

Bisexual, outsider, champion of youth, ‘pale-pink’ friend of Black Londoners and chronicler of English life, MacInnes described himself as ‘a very nosy person’ who ‘found adultery in Hampstead indescribably dull’ and was much more at home in the coffee bars and jazz clubs of Soho and Notting Hill.

A talented off-beat journalist and social observer, he is best known for his three London novels,
City of Spades, Absolute Beginners
and
Mr Love and Justice.
His other books include
To the Victor the Spoils
, a disenchanted view of the Allied occupation of Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War,
June in Her Spring
and
England, Half English
. Colin MacInnes’s essays were published in
Out of the Way
in 1980 and a selection of the best of his fiction and journalism is available in
Absolute MacInnes,
edited by Tony Gould. MacInnes died of cancer in 1976.

City of Spades

Absolute Beginners

Mr Love and Justice