On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (23 page)

It was around this time that I decided to step aside from science fiction for a moment and write an autobiographical novel. The result was a manuscript entitled
Waterwitch Country
. Rob read it for me, and so did Chris Priest, who suggested I alter the title to read
Witchwater Country
, the hard first syllable giving it a smoother and more positive launch off the tongue. It is to date the only novel that I’ve put aside and completely rewritten without reference to the first draft. Most people say it’s the best of all the novels I’ve written, but then most people have not read the dozens of other novels that followed.

I would argue that the
Navigator Kings
trilogy is better and that
House of Tribes
is at least its equal. My agent Murray Pollinger didn’t think much of
Witchwater Country,
a novel about a 1950s childhood in and around the Essex marshes. He felt it should have been written in the third person. This made me look at his agency differently and think about finding someone who was on my wavelength, for clearly this particular novel needed the first person narrator.

Around this time I was invited as Guest of Honour at Novacon, the November science fiction convention, similar to the Eastercon which I had gone to, to collect my literary prize. Novacons were traditionally held in Birmingham and the Big Name Fan from Birmingham, who was also an sf bookseller, was a man named Roger Peyton. I liked Rog, who was now selling quite a few of my novels and I think it was he who put my name forward as the GoH. I enjoyed the con enormously, meeting and talking with an even wider number of authors and fans, Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison among them. Brian was especially encouraging and always has been. A great man and a great writer. I also met Pete Crowther, who was to become important to me much later in life, when he and his wife Nicky had established PS Publishing, and he was good enough to bring out two collections of short stories, neither of which sold well, but which to me were immensely important.

The GoH at a convention gives a speech on any subject he considers important or funny enough to interest the fans. He or she also takes part in discussion panels, readings and book signings. The first two of these can be a pleasant uplifting experience, but unless you are a famous author the third will easily put an upstart writer in his place. Almost all the book signings I have done have resulted in massive sales of up to six or seven copies and for the most part I have sat behind two towers of my lovely new novel smiling at customers hurrying past the table, talking to shop assistants and saying yes to yet another coffee. I was once at a book signing alongside Terry Pratchett. Terry’s queue wound out of the shop and halfway down the road. There were three people in my queue and the first one, a woman, asked me, ‘Are you Terry Pratchett?’ She was gracious enough to buy one of my books and I amused her by writing the old chestnut, ‘
In memory of our one night of forbidden ecstasy!’
on the title page. She then hurried away to join the other queue.

Two more GoH invitations followed this first one. One for a convention at Imperial College London and one for Essex University. I went to a number of conventions in the ’70s and ’80s, some of them Worldcons, with 4,000 to 6,000 attendees. They were good fun and I got to meet American authors and editors, as well as French, German, Dutch and other Europeans in the genre. Later the Czechs and Poles would attend too, after the break-up of the Soviet Union.

More recently I was invited to the Czech Republic convention in a town outside Prague as the Guest of Honour, after Rob Holdstock’s year there. I strongly suspect I have Rob to thank for that invitation. He was well-respected by the Czechs and Finns, but most especially by his Czech translator, Petr Kotryl, who has since become a good friend of mine too. On that tour I spent some time with an elderly Russian science fiction author, Igor Mojieko, who was an extremely interesting man. We visited local castles and buildings together. I was sad to learn later that he never made it back to Moscow, dying of a heart attack on the way. At Chotĕbŏr Annette and I were also introduced to Františka Vrbenkśa, an expert on Czech mythology and I managed to fill a whole notebook chatting to Františka, the result appearing in my young adult fantasy book set in Bohemia,
The Hundred-towered City
.

The con took place in Bohemia, but after it was over Petr took Annette and I to his home town in Moravia and there we met his family and stayed with his parents-in-law. His ma-in-law worked for a shoe shop and immediately we arrived at their modest house, a three-bedroom terrace, she took Annette to the shop and invited her to choose a pair of shoes. It was ten o’clock at night and the world was just going to bed! In the meantime pa-in-law invited me to look at his vegetable patch, but actually I was taken to the garden shed and introduced to slivovitz, an alcoholic beverage that almost took off the top of my head. This pa-in-law, when Petr finally got him to take a holiday in Majorca, took a whole suitcase full of his favourite beer with him, terrified he would not be able to get that particular brew in a Spanish resort. They were lovely people, treating us as family, and later we were able to return the hospitality when Petr and his family came to stay with us in Suffolk and in Spain.

~

However, we are still back in the late 1970s and at my day job I had just been appointed as a member of a project committee. C&W were laying an undersea telephone cable between Japan and Hong Kong, going through the Philippines. At one time Cable and Wireless owned the only ocean cable-laying ship in the world, which just happened to be Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s
Great Eastern
, built in 1858 and the largest ship of its time. I felt a great sense of history working for a firm that had owned such a celebrated craft, built by such a celebrated man.

Anyway, this particular project was to be shared between ourselves and a Japanese firm. The cable junctions would be in Osaka, Luzon and Hong Kong. Thus we named the cable, using two letters from each of the cities. Our Japanese friends always sat rigidly formal on the other side of the long conference table, while we tried to emulate them on our side. Clearly there were cultural differences to overcome, protocols and formalities, with which we were not familiar, so of course we tried to bone up on them and bring ourselves to the table aware of the rituals and manners necessary to conduct the meeting well.

Still, we were aware by the third meeting that something was seriously wrong. The Japanese were not happy. Yet it was difficult to discover just what it was that had put them out of sorts. We could not ask them directly, for that would indeed be a loss of face for them. And they on their part seemed reluctant to give us any clues as to the reason for their gloom. Every time we mentioned the project by name our partners on the other side of the table winced. Finally we got a Japanese member of our own staff to attend, and he whispered in the chairman’s ear after only a minute, ‘The name you have given the cable. It’s a very rude word in Japanese.’ So, at last we had it. We had called our cable project after a Japanese curse. They had been too polite to ask for a change.

Of course we did change it and things went swimmingly from that point on. We even went on an outing with them, which included wives and girlfriends, to Winston Churchill’s birthplace, Blenheim Palace. Luckily, on the tour of the house, no one mentioned the war.

My time at C&W was coming to an end. Fully automatic switching centres were coming in. I was put in charge of planning an automatic exchange for the West Indies (who didn’t want it, because they used their operators as a source of news and gossip between the islands) and though I went out to the Caribbean once more, to help settle a local strike, I knew the time was near when I would leave C&W. I knew next to nothing about planning exchanges, my experience didn’t cover that kind of engineering, and I was forever relying on others to provide me with information to enable me to do my job. I had been at C&W for nearly eight years now, I’d built up a reasonable pension in this time, and the company generously added two of my RAF years to that total, to equal those men with the company who had done National Service.

Two developments helped me make up my mind about leaving C&W.

One, the company was changing. It was the late ’70s and privatisation was sweeping the land under Maggie Thatcher’s eager control. C&W was one of the first to be sold by the Tory government. At around the same time C&W’s overseas business, running the telecommunications in the old colonies, began to shrink as a consequence of new technology, combined with governments abroad developing an eagerness to shed foreign influence and run their own telephone services. Satellites were coming in, fully automatic systems, fibre optic cables: all these were revolutionising the communications industries. New directors at C&W wanted to branch out into manufacturing and supply. Wireless telegraphy (Morse) and the sending of telegrams had already slipped down the ladder of desired skills to the same level as that of a farrier shoeing horses. Our old-world talents were becoming superfluous. C&W wanted to let people go and offered voluntary redundancy terms which were very appealing.

Two, I was sent on a management course at Cranwell at this time, to improve my business and engineering skills. One of the things we did on that course was take the Myers-Briggs test. This consists of around a hundred or so questions to be answered honestly, out of which an analysis will show to which profession the person taking the test is best suited. I took it with nineteen other C&W executives and they all ended up in the ‘engineering management’ corner of a white square, while my lonely dot was down in the ‘creative’ corner.

‘You should be a writer, dancer or a painter,’ said the analyst. ‘You’re in the wrong job.’

Too right I was. And now was my chance to get out of it. I couldn’t dance or paint, but I could certainly write.

My last visit to the West Indies was a swansong. When I landed at Montserrat I found I could not enter the company offices because a big West Indian was sitting on the step with a big stick in his hands. He was, all by himself, a picket line. I sat next to him and after a long silence between us I asked if I could go inside.

‘No,’ he replied.

I asked, ‘Why not?’

‘Because we’re on strike.’

I told him I appreciated that, but I wasn’t there to break the strike, simply to talk to people in the building.

He turned to me and glowered. ‘My grandfather,’ he said, ‘was a slave of the white aristocracy.’

I was glad he added the last word to that sentence.

‘Funnily enough,’ I told him, ‘so was my grandfather.’

He looked me up and down, as if searching for some colour on my lily-white skin.

‘What do you mean?’ he finally asked.

‘Well, my grandfather, and the great-grandfathers before him, worked as a farm labourer. He lived in what we call a “tied cottage” which meant that he paid rent to the farmer who employed him. The rent was almost always more than he earned, so he could never leave his employment. That gentleman farmer had him by the short and curlies, and wouldn’t let him go. You could say he was a slave too.’

My companion looked at me searchingly.

‘Not the same thing,’ he said at last.

‘No, it’s not the same thing at all, but I just wanted you to see that not all Englishmen are lords and masters.’

His big hand came down on my knee and he gripped it hard, before he grinned saying, ‘Good enough. You can go in, man – but we ain’t endin’ the strike, even though your grandaddy was nearly a slave.’

On that trip I had been sent to discover why, every year, a new main cross-island cable was requisitioned. No one had ever asked before and they looked surprised when I did. I was told that the cable was laid over the sugar cane field. After the cane had been cut, the stubble was set alight, thus burning the cable and cutting off all the telephones on the island.

‘What about an aerial cable,’ I suggested, ‘which would escape the fire?’

‘Yes,’ they said, nodding, ‘that would work.’

One evening I watched some locals playing football and one young man, obviously mentally unwell, ran around the pitch alternately playing an invisible violin and trying to kick the ball. The other youths and men put up with this behaviour, though clearly it was disrupting their game. They seemed prepared to tolerate their less fortunate men and women on those islands and did not seem to need mental institutions.

It made me think of my Aunt May, who had been in Runwell Mental Hospital since the age of around thirty. May had married a policeman and they had a baby. When May suffered post-natal depression, which regressed into something deeper and darker, she was institutionalised. Her husband immediately divorced her. May remained in Runwell for most of her life. Indeed, until the State decided that people like her were best served by being out in the community.

I lay no blame because I do not know the full facts, but I know her illness meant a life of incarceration. The policeman went off with the daughter to Wales and married again. I was to meet May’s daughter, my cousin, much later in life under very unusual circumstances and learn that when May's ex-husband died his daughter went through his papers and found to her astonishment she had a biological mother living in a mental home in Essex. She set out to find her mother and May was reunited with her daughter for the last few years of her life. They had some happy times together. I suppose it's true to say that my father and his siblings did not have wonderful lives. Besides Aunt May's misfortunes, Uncle Peter became a recidivist, Uncle Charlie committed suicide by drowning himself in Sydney harbour and my father died young. Only Aunt Amy lived a reasonably long and happy life.

When Aunt May was finally released into the community she continued to repeat the fantasies I had heard from her before, that Hitler was living next door, that she, May, had written to the Queen to inform her of that fact; that there was a kind and loving man called Stan, who had looked after her two daughters (so far as we knew there was only one daughter, but there may have been a stillbirth) who would one day come and take her home with him. Stan was not the name of May’s ex-husband. Some of May’s other fantasies were just as strange and compelling, but actually for 98 per cent of the time she was completely sane, she simply lapsed into her favourite fictional stories every so often, always beginning with the words, ‘This is true, really it is . . .’