On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer (26 page)

My favourite short story writer of all time is an Argentinian who lived most of his writing life in Paris. I discovered Julio Cortázar in a copy of an American magazine I used to write for,
Omni
. Ellen Datlow was the fiction editor of
Omni
and she took many of my short stories for its pages, paying what was at the time (and probably still is) a sultan’s fee of $2,000. I didn’t get that much in the ’90s for some of my novels. Anyway, in one of the issues with a short story of mine I found this tale by Julio Cortázar entitled ‘The Final Caress’
.
It was a stunning piece of work that filled me with envy.

I subsequently discovered that Cortázar wrote the short story that inspired the ’60s film
Blow Up
starring David Hemmings: a brilliant movie. There followed readings of ‘We Love Glenda So Much’, ‘The End of the Game’, ‘House Taken Over’ and many many others. I think I’ve found every tale he has written and there are very very few I don’t like. Even just a single line can be impressive. In a story about two boxers in the ring, one of whom is good at ducking and diving his opponent’s blows, Cortázar writes, ‘He was an encyclopaedia of holes.’ Any man who can write a line like that has my undying admiration.

In one of his patchwork-quilt books, just notes and incidents, Cortázar explained, ‘Short stories are word tornadoes and one needs to start in the eye of the wind and write the tale spirally outwards from the centre.’

I
think
I know how the technique should work and I try to apply it when I feel able. I flatter myself that Julio might have liked some of the stories I have written too, such as ‘Hogfoot Right and Bird-hands’, a futuristic tale. Hogfoot was probably one of the weirdest stories I’ve written, and was very difficult to sell. It was eventually taken up by friends. Rob Holdstock and Chris Evans were editing a series of anthologies at the time called
Other Edens
and it was Chris’s idea to publish Hogfoot
along with two other very short stories of mine, ‘The Black Wedding’ and ‘Murderer’s Walk’
under the generic title, ‘Tryptich’. Once published this hard-to-sell story was shortlisted for an award and the connoisseur John Clute described it in a review as ‘stunning’. At a convention later I happened to get into a lift with Stephen Donaldson, famous best-selling author of
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant
, who looked at my name tag and said, ‘Garry Kilworth? I
loved
your story “Hogfoot Right and Bird-hands” – could I republish in it an anthology I’m putting together?’

Could he? Did he even need to ask.

So thank you, Julio, for your inspiration.

Julio Cortázar died in Paris in 1984.

20. Wychwater, The Chase, Ashingdon (First Time)

It was during my last year at King’s that Annette and I decided to move house. We found a flimsy wooden-framed cottage set in two acres of woodland and lawn, with cherry-plum trees, apple trees, oaks, willows, ashes and blackthorns in an Essex village called Ashingdon. Grey squirrels abounded in the wood, along with jays and magpies: they used to squabble over the dry old pears and the sweet cherry-plums that festooned the trees in autumn. There were foxes that crossed the bottom of the garden and badgers not far away up our unmade lane.

It was the squirrels who gave us the most fun. On some days, possibly festivals known only to
Scuirus
and their kind, they would go mad and run, leap, rush at magpies head on, spin and dash up tree trunks. Also, it was impossible to keep them from stealing the food we put out for the birds, even though we had squirrel-proof containers. I’m sure they had studied under Fagin and were immensely cunning and clever. Grey Squirrels are the scoundrels and scallywags of any garden.

The house, down a leafy unmade road, was not much from the outside: a single-storey building made almost of wattle-and-daub, which rested on zero footings. It sort of floated on the London clay beneath it. We were told it had once been a prefab.

Thus we moved to
Greenacres
which we promptly renamed
Witchwater
. We changed the spelling a little later to
Wychwater
after delivery men refused to come up the lane to a place with a pagan name. Nearby Canewdon had always been infamous for its ‘witches’ – they met in the graveyard every Halloween – and many locals were convinced that witchcraft was practised with regularity in the village of Ashingdon and in my grandfather’s birthplace, Canewdon.

Wychwater
had outhouses and Rick was happy to cut from the family and live in one. It was only a few yards from the front door. Annette and I slept in the attic and Shaney had the only bedroom. Our neighbours were mostly settled gypsies, a great bunch, along with a smattering of newcomers like us. There was a lot of garden to look after: trees to trim, a vast hedge to cut, big lawns to mow, ditches to keep clear. There was no mains sewage. We were served by a temperamental septic tank in the garden which never stopped smelling the whole time we lived there. Our one delight was making bonfires in the clearing in our wood. My one abiding image of
Wychwater
is lighting fires in our special place, drinking, and roasting potatoes and sausages at midnight.

Writers and editors were invited once a year to come for a barbecue and it became a regular gathering which still survives today, though at different venues in and around London.

At
Wychwater
I became my grandfather for a while, looking after the land, even buying a scythe like the one he used to use, for cutting down thistles and cow parsley. I enjoyed it. In so far as our garden is concerned Annette has always been the creator, Brahma, and I in turn am Shiva, the destroyer. Going out to clear ditches and hack down vegetation and saw dead branches off trees was a good counterpoint to sitting at my desk and writing books. We still had only one car at that time, which Annette used for work, so I was kind of trapped during the day.

I walked of course, down to the River Crouch, and to a little row of shops, and also went and sat on the seat outside the ancient church, built in 1025 by King Knut shortly after he had defeated the Anglo-Saxon King Edmund Ironside at the Battle of Ashingdon. Knut adopted Christianity at that time, but it was probably political rather than for religious reasons. Standing on the hill where the church is you can see the river up which sailed the Viking ships. In the near distance is the hill on which Canewdon Church stands. It was there that Knut ranged his horde of wild Viking warriors and it was on Ashingdon hill that Edmund had his Saxon forces. They met in the valley between. Halfway through the battle the king of Mercia changed sides for gold, from Anglo-Saxon to Viking, and thus Edmund was defeated. I have often wondered whether the word ‘mercenary’ came from that treacherous act.

Danes come over from Denmark every five years in part to celebrate their victory over the Anglo-Saxons. The first vicar of Ashingdon Minster was a man called Stigand, who went on to become the Archbishop of Canterbury and crowned both King Harold and William the Conqueror. The choir wears scarlet cassocks and while we lived there the vicar received a letter telling him that his choir was not permitted to wear red as only ‘royal churches’ like Westminster were allowed that privilege. The vicar immediately penned a letter back to the effect that his church was indeed a royal minster, since it had been built by and enjoyed the patronage of King Knut. Full stop.

However, that part of Essex, the land behind
Wychwater
, was a bolt hole for London gangsters. Annette and I have always enjoyed walking but around the River Crouch were large houses surrounded by chain-link fences and patrolled by German shepherd dogs. If we did walk by one of these sinister mansions we could be sure that snarling, slavering canines would fling themselves at their side of the fence, desperate to get us and lock their jaws on some vital part of our anatomy.

I added a natural clay-based pond to the garden, which I dug out using only a spade and my finely tuned writer’s muscles. I filled it from a hose connected to our garden tap and yet even during the first summer it managed to stock itself with newts, frogs and a grass snake, along with many insects such as pond skaters and water boatmen. I suppose birds and the wind might be responsible for the insects, but the newts and frogs? How do these previously sterile patches of water suddenly populate themselves? Later, I added my own stock, some goldfish, orf and other small fish. You must know of the
Peace Rose
. I suggested we breed a new type of orf and call it the
Peace Orf
. (Say it quickly!)

During the mid to late ’80s Rick left college and had a series of jobs in and around Southend. Rick had by that time eased back on his running in favour of travel. He went to Israel twice, once on a kibbutz and once on a moshav on the edge of the Negev Desert. He wrote to us several times when on the moshav, telling us of the mirages he used to see out in the desert while driving the tractor. Just before he came home he took a trip down the Nile with a friend. They were on one of those boats where there is standing room only and passengers are nose-to-nose with one another. Having little money, he lived on water melons, but said the Egyptians and others he met were extremely kind and often gave him bread.

To our later consternation he also admitted to drinking Nile water and while he said he had added purifying tablets, we still had visions of liver fluke and other horrible diseases coursing round his young blood-stream. However, he survived without too much damage and went on to do an Art Diploma. Rick finally followed in his mum’s footsteps settling for a long career in social work, after forays as a chef in a golf club, a computer programmer, a worker in a wood yard, a worker in a care home and a hairdresser.

Having caught the travel bug from his two previous visits to Israel Rick then decided to backpack and work his way around the world, which he did. I admired that greatly. Rick had the spiritual and mental strength to go it alone, working variously in Australia as a fruit picker in Queensland and a baker’s van driver in Melbourne. He spent some time with our friends Pete and Carolyn, who lived in Melbourne. They treated him like one of their own kids, being the most hospitable people in the world.

During her sixth form year Shaney was Head Girl at Shoeburyness High School and left with A-Levels. She was the only one of our family to pass in mathematics, a considerable achievement. Shaney decided against tertiary education and went to work as a PA to a company director, a job for which she was extremely well-suited. Shaney is a great organiser and makes a brilliant PA. At that time she bought a Mini car and met her future husband, Mark, who was coincidentally the Head Boy at Shoeburyness High the year before she was Head Girl. The two were married in Ashingdon Minster.

Mark was a real go-getter who worked for a large investment bank in London and the two of them set out on a life voyage together from which neither of them has jumped ship. They are, now in their late forties, still a loving, loyal couple, unerringly attached. Mark had been partly raised in Italy and I think the fact that they were both ex-pat brats gave them a lot in common. Indeed Mark and Shaney would go on to live for several years in Canada, in Singapore and in Australia. There would be three grandsons for Annette and I, all very sporty kids – subaqua, football, rugby and cricket – who would go on to university educations. Conrad, Christian and Jordan are fine young men and of course their grandparents are inordinately proud of them.

However, we are still back at
Wychwater
, the house in which I have lived the longest. During those years my friendship with Rob Holdstock deepened. He and his wife, Sheila, had parted by mutual consent, Sheila going on to live in Holland with a new partner. After a period of being ‘single’ again, Rob met Sarah. They enjoyed many things together, such as hill walking and camping. We often joined them along the ridges of Derbyshire and Wales, walking up and along Mam Tor, Kinder Scout, Offa’s Dyke, Froggatt Edge and many others. During one of those walks Rob suggested we do at story together. He had a theme in mind and expounded it gustily while striding along. It sounded great to me and later we began working together on
The Ragthorn
, meeting once or twice a month in pubs, mostly North London, where Rob now lived with Sarah, to discuss the sections of the work.

The Ragthorn
progressed slowly but surely, a novella which included many small, previously unseen chunks of verse and prose which the protagonist unearthed with diligent research. Fragments by Shakespeare, St John the Divine, Chaucer, and several other writers. These pieces of poetry and prose, hidden from humankind by necessity, contained the secret of the ragthorn, a unique magical tree that was the gateway to immortality. Rob would write a section, send it to me, and I would revise it. Then I would write the next section and he would revise that. Rob was happier doing the contrived prose pieces supposedly written by famous authors, while I did the poetry. Together we wove the story into a fine piece of fiction which eventually won several literary prizes and was translated into many different languages. It was great fun and it was a wonderful exercise. I have never managed to duplicate that experience and now our Rob has gone, I doubt I ever will.

It was around this time that I realised my science fiction would have to be supplemented by other books from a more popular genre, since I could not live on the money that was coming in. I still wanted to write sf, but it would have to be short stories and novellas, rather than novels. I couldn’t do full length novels in two genres at once.

I turned to animal fantasies and here I found much greater commercial success. I wrote a book about foxes from the fox point of view which became a reasonable success, enough for the publisher to put on my future animal fantasies ‘By the author of the bestselling
Hunter’s Moon
’.
Hunter’s Moon
was the result of a synopsis I sent to Jane Johnson at Allen and Unwin. The smart and lovely Jane snapped it up and I was at last paid a large advance, ten times the amount I had ever received for a science fiction novel.
Hunter’s Moon
then went into the Reader’s Digest abridged books and made even more money, along with translations and audio books, and other spinoffs. I immediately followed this book up with a wolf novel along similar lines, entitled
Midnight’s Sun
.

In these novels the animals do not wear clothes or talk to humans. They are as animalistic as I could make them. Yes, they communicate, but don’t animals communicate with one another anyway? The template was Adams’
Watership Down
. William Horwood, of mole fiction fame, telephoned me years later. He had just written a book about wolves and had afterwards been told about the existence of
Midnight’s Sun
. He asked how my wolf novel had done on the market.

‘Not as well as my foxes,’ I wrote back, ‘I think there’s less sympathy for wolves. Historically, they’ve had bad press.’

But I added that William Horwood was a much bigger name than Garry Kilworth and would probably carry the day.

One of the nicest things that’s ever happened to me as an author was when I attended a Murder Mystery evening in Hong Kong. The hosts were a policeman and his wife. I’d never met them before and when we were introduced my friend said, ‘Garry is an author, you know.’

The lady of the house said the usual ‘How interesting’.

I made my usual reply. ‘What are you reading at the moment?’

‘Oh,’ she said, becoming very animated, ‘I’m just in the middle of a fantastic novel about foxes, called
Hunter’s Moon
, which I bought at Changi airport.’

This is the first and only time such a thing has happened to me, and I said rather shyly, ‘I wrote that. My surname is Kilworth.’

A loud shrill squeal rent the air which probably shocked all the foxes within ten miles.

~

Jane Johnson, who at the time lived with the rock-climbing science fiction author M. John Harrison, author of the
Viriconium
books, was a very encouraging editor, one of those who became a friend as well as my publisher. Jane suggested more of the same kind of book. I was more than happy to oblige, since my advances had quadrupled. Thus other animal fantasies followed, with a hare book entitled
Frost Dancers
(which keeps getting advertised as
Frost Dangers
due to an ear of a hare half-blocking the
c
of
Dancers
) and
House of Tribes
. The latter is one of my best works and it is centred on several tribes of mice living in a large house: the Library Tribe, who nibble on books and then come out with literary phrases they don’t understand; the Kitchen Mice, who are the fattest of creatures and also the most fierce, having the larder to defend against forays by less fortunate tribes; and several other groups and individuals, including a terrible rat named Kellog and a pet white mouse called Little Prince. It is quite a complex novel, with lots of twists and turns, and in the front where an explorer’s map might be is a floor plan of the house drawn by an architect friend. I had hoped for Hollywood interest, which indeed did stir but never actually fully woke up.