On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (21 page)

18. Shoeburyness, Essex

Trinny Sutherland, also new to civvy street, helped me move into my new home and then he went off to a marvellous new job in Germany, working for NATO as a very superior storeman. I think he was in charge of millions of pounds worth of equipment. I know that after what seemed a very short time he had a Porsche and a Mercedes, which left me wondering why I’d gone for the romantic image of a ‘sparks’ instead of a ‘blanket-folder’, but hey, who knew where what would lead?

Of my other close service friends, John Chidlow was still in the RAF and would stay there for some time to come. When he was eventually demobbed he was serving in Portugal just outside Lisbon, working for NATO, and he stayed where he was and he and Grace bought a bar and turned it into a very successful English pub.

Johnny Ball had been demobbed for some time, only doing the minimum twelve years. He first took a course as a welder in Northampton, then went for the first love in his life (after his wife Brenda of course) sport and physical fitness. He became a physical training instructor at one of Her Majesty’s prisons. It was work I think he enjoyed a lot, being a people-person and a fitness addict. When he actually retired, he took a course in sailing and went around the world on a catamaran. I followed his progress with admiration and awe, as he hove into ports all along the South American coast and on through the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and finally back into the Atlantic. One hell of an adventure.

Bill and Lisa Fedden, as I have said, went to Germany. When Bill was demobbed he became an electronics engineer for Currys, testing their new products. He too had found the job he had been born to do. Lisa became high up in security at Heathrow Airport. She used to practise on visitors to the house using trained sniffer dogs and metal detectors as they stepped into the hallway.

I jest.

The first year of travelling up to London every weekday on the ‘misery line’ was not a pleasant one. The early morning trains were packed to the gills, often with rain-damp steaming people. Going up to the city I got a seat, since we were the first station on the line, but returning home in the evening when I was tired and dispirited, I stood most of the time, most of the way. Shoeburyness to Fenchurch Street, then a walk to Bank tube station, and finally a walk from Holborn tube to Theobald’s Road and Mercury House, the Head Office of C&W. When I could I wrote my stories and novels on the train. I used a pad on my knee, scribbling away while others played cards or read books. I was beginning to get stories published in science fiction magazines, but though I wrote two novels they were both rejected.

On that route I met some of my new neighbours, who were good enough people, but they weren’t servicemen and did not have the same sort of camaraderie I had been used to. We did make firm friends with the couple opposite us in Raphael Drive, Pete and Peggy Good. Pete had been in the merchant navy, but was then a butcher in a shop in Shoebury High Street, so he didn’t have the four-hour journeys up and down the misery line. The route was named thus because trains were always being cancelled, or postponed, and thus the carriages were ever late and crammed with irritable, unhappy commuters. It was a decade of union strikes when we would get stranded at some station or other, waiting for Armageddon to end, as the angels and demons were at war.

I was also getting regular migraines at that time, once a month temporarily losing my sight and suffering powerful headaches which left me unable even to move my eyelids without pain. These usually occurred not so much during work days, but at the weekend, when I relaxed, which upset my family who wanted to do things with our spare time. Once I had a flash migraine on Liverpool Street station and I have vague and hazy memories of being carried in the arms of a large black porter to my train and placed gently on the length of the seat. I still love that man.

We furnished the house with G-plan furniture, good solid and inexpensive. Our finances were stretched to the limit with a new mortgage, so I built our first king-sized double bed out of pine planks. I have to say I was surprised at the success of this venture, since woodwork had never been my strong point at school and I don’t ever remember progressing past the cliché of the woodwork class, the ubiquitous dovetail-jointed book shelf. Annette loved the bed. It had two little side-tables attached, for lamps and books, and ladies’ creams, and a headboard which matched.

Buoyed by this astonishing feat, I sent for the plans for a double canoe to be made out of marine plywood. This was an even more difficult and intricate task. It involved steaming and bending strips of plywood, the measurements of which had to be exact in order that they fitted together tightly enough to keep out water. The result was a beautiful canoe (even now I have no idea how I did it without screwing it up) which we treasured for several years. Pete-the-butcher and I won a 9-mile canoe race on the River Crouch two years running in that dear old bark, with nary a wet sock at the end of the run. Annette was absolutely gobsmacked by the double carpentry feat, which was both gratifying and a little irksome too. I was pleased that she was amazed by my skill and rather piqued that she had expected otherwise.

After these two efforts I never aspired to further carpentry. I quit while I was ahead. It was the right thing to do. I’m sure I was headed for a botched job. My DIY skills have ever been touch-and-go, with shelves collapsing and lumps of hard glue left bulging behind wallpaper. I suppose it was the ambitious scheme of these two projects which caused me to concentrate more, work with patience (a thing I am not at all good at) and come out with a double triumph.

The kids started at their schools, Rick going to Shoebury High and Shaney to Friar’s Primary School. Rick came home with a bloody nose the first day. As a ‘new kid’ he’d been beaten up on the way home and naturally he was quite distraught. Annette went storming down to the school the next day, found the culprits, and gave them a yelling in front of their schoolmates. Rick didn’t like this. He’d been bullied on the first day in the past of course, as I well knew, service kids having to join schools where all the civilians’ kids have known each other since birth. On previous occasions he had defended himself vigorously, but sometimes you get overwhelmed.

However, Annette’s fury worked, and very soon the other boys realised he was a good sportsman and he wasn’t picked on again. There are two ways to keep bullies at bay at school: either become the class comedian or become the school’s best athlete. The first worked for my godson, Luke, now a fashion designer in New York, and the second for Rick. I don’t think Shaney as a girl ever experienced that kind of bullying, though I could be wrong.

We were very hard up during the first two years of me leaving the RAF. I remember having holes in my shoes and having to cut out cardboard insoles to cover them. We were visited at that time by a New Zealand businessman who owned a fish paste factory in Dunedin. Fred Haslam was a religious man and wanted to turn my short story ‘Let’s Go To Golgotha’ into a play or musical. He stayed with us overnight and professed to be shocked at the standard of living of people like us in Britain, compared with houses in New Zealand. The script for the play was written by a friend of his, but only reached church level at Easter and other festivals, never the West End, or even the East End.

My work at C&W continued as I learned to do what was required of me. I made new friends. John Tibbles was a young man who knew the communications world inside-out and I learned a lot from him. Phil Monk, Roy Blane, several others. Phil has remained a close friend and often comes to our place in Spain with his wife Judy, another ex-C&W employee. We were all Grade 4 Executives at the time (except Judy, who was a Grade 2 and therefore our superior) and we all worked in the Traffic Department, run by a small thickset tyrant called Tug Wilson. My immediate boss was the section head Ian Bowles, a Grade 1 and a really good man, but above him was a manager who had never thrown off his early habits as a junior clerk. This fellow spent his time eating boiled sweets and correcting the punctuation of our letters.

I had only been at C&W a month when we had another ex-RAF man arrive in the section. He was none other than my old CO from Strike Command, a flight lieutenant. We were surprised to see each other and I was even more astonished to find he carried round with him a ragged magazine with a science fiction story written by him. The flight lieutenant did not stay long at C&W. I think he found it uncomfortable working alongside an ex-sergeant he had once reprimanded. In the not so distant past an airman on my watch at Strike Command had forgotten to put the words ‘EXERCISE EXERCISE EXERCISE’ on the bottom of a signal and almost launched World War Three. Bomber pilots who received the signal believed the situation was live. They set out to bomb a Russian submarine in the North Sea. I was able to prevent the outbreak of a world war, something even Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain never managed, but since the airman was under my immediate command I was hauled up on the carpet with two of my corporals and reprimanded for not keeping a closer eye on what my staff were doing.

I never saw another story by the same man and guessed that was his one shot at literary fame.

On the writing front, I had a letter from another would-be sf novelist, a Robert Holdstock, who asked me if I had any spare unpublished stories. He wrote, ‘I’m trying to get an anthology together entitled
Time in Hand
. Science fiction stories by new writers with only one or two under their belt, like you and me . . .’ Did I have any unpublished stories? Did Don Juan eschew the life of a celibate monk? Rob and I agreed to meet each other for lunch in Sicilian Avenue, close to Theobald’s Road where I worked. He was working on his PhD at the time, already having a Masters in Zoology, and was employed in doing something unspeakable to mosquitoes in a nearby laboratory.

I took to the man instantly. He was very tall and dark-bearded, not lean exactly, but not overweight either. He wore glasses that he constantly pushed up his nose. He laughed a lot, was amazingly enthusiastic about writing, and in short he became my closest friend. Rob was one of those people whose charismatic personalities ensure that a whole swarm of friends are always buzzing around. We talked about our plans for getting published and he talked about Christopher Priest, a young writer who was already being published by Faber and Faber. Rob knew just about everyone in fandom and in the sf writing world.

Rob took me along to a pub in Farringdon called The Globe where science fiction writers and fans gathered once a month. The bar was always packed with sf enthusiasts and alive with talk that centred around what had become my favourite genre. I met dozens of people who were desperately interested in sf and fantasy writing and indeed these meetings further served to fire my passion for the field. Later the venue moved to another pub, the One Tun and continued to thrive with the same level of high energy as it had at The Globe.

‘The science fiction editor at Fabers is a woman called June Hall,’ Rob told me one evening. ‘I’ve already chatted with her about getting a novel published. You should send something to her.’

I left Rob that day buzzing with ebullience, dying to get home to write the next chapter of my new novel
Beloved Earth
, set in the far future where the earth has exploded into small asteroids and those humans who have migrated to other planets seek pieces of it to put in lockets and wear around their necks and close to their hearts. My hero was a spaceman who searched the solar system for such ‘gems’ that would make homesick humans feel they had a chunk of the Old Planet next to their hearts. A prospector, if you like, a frontiersman, a happy-go-lucky guy who was always getting into trouble with the spatial police for trespassing in forbidden areas.

June Hall didn’t exactly hate it, but she thought it was pretty naff and told me to go home and write another novel.

That wasn’t an easy task for a working man. As I have said, I wrote on knee-pads. My longhand was typed by an elderly woman who had sixteen cats who slept everywhere, especially on nice warm sheets of paper. I had to air the manuscripts when they came back to me, to get rid of the feline smell. I kept writing to Rob, though
Time in Hand
never saw print, despite his furious efforts to get it to the right people. Eventually I finished a new novel entitled
In Solitary
about a human who had been under the domination of alien invaders of Earth since birth and whose human colleagues were trying to foment rebellion. My hero is finally unable to shake off Stockholm Syndrome and the book ends with him shooting off in a space ship with his girlfriend. It’s not a bad first novel and I’ve always held it in affection.

By the time the book was finished June Hall had left her job and my rather lean science fiction manuscript was read by the Chairman of Faber and Faber, a man who was a publishing legend.

Charles Monteith was a giant intellect and a tremendous personality: the Zeus of the book world. A colleague of T.S. Eliot, Charles was the first to publish a whole host of brilliant writers: William Golding, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Samuel Beckett, John Osborne, Seamus Heaney, many more. A massive array of talent in fiction, poetry and playwriting. And now me. He had decided to publish Garry Kilworth, the secondary modern school boy whose English was still raw in many ways and whose confidence could be shattered by even the slightest of criticisms. I was awestruck by the news that Charles liked my book and wanted to see me to tell me he would publish it.

Apart from everything else, Charles Monteith was the kindest person in the world, but I always felt like a schoolboy entering the Headmaster’s study when going into his office. He would beam at me with his round face and say, ‘Come in, dear boy, come in. Sit you down. You look nervous. Don’t worry, I have good tidings – did I ever tell you that story about T.S. and the crossword puzzle . . .’ Charles had a large spool of anecdotes involving famous writers, which he would love to reel out while I sat there sipping coffee and feeling fuzzy, being in the presence of a Titan of the literary scene. A man who spoke to me as if I knew these great writers and was a member of their pack. You don’t get published by a house like Faber and Faber unless you impress someone with your work. I had impressed Charles Monteith, an achievement that still leaves me feeling staggered by the enormity of its import.