A Slip of the Keyboard (29 page)

Obviously on that first day the secret of algebra had been disseminated. Later on I would dream that I might understand algebra and have mastery of the world, but ten years ago my friend Ian Stewart, professor of mathematics at Warwick, sat down with me after a university dinner and scrawled all over the napkins the sheer and obvious understandability of the basics of the quadratic equation, with sweat beading on his brow, to which I sadly reacted with the philosophical equivalent of the word
duur
. (I had to teach my speech engine to understand the word
duur
, you know, yes, I had to teach a computer to be dumb. A project for a rainy afternoon.)

And so, once again I settled down to being halfway down the class, doing enough schoolwork to survive, and no more. My true education was still coming via the library, and amazingly from the science fiction books I was consuming like sweets. Bliss it was in that space-age dawn to be alive, but unfortunately my only reliable source of first-class secondhand American science fiction magazines was called the Little Library, and it was in a shack in Frogmoor, a tiny part of High Wycombe, in which a very nice elderly lady dispensed cheer, the occasional cup of tea, and pornography. However, in order to justify the name and presumably to have some wares that she could put in the window, she also sold decent SF and fantasy from secondhand cardboard boxes, below, how shall I
put it, the pinker shelves, which were not at that time of particular attraction to me. How could you turn your eyes upwards when there was a Brian Aldiss that you hadn’t read yet, and something by Harry Harrison, and the third book in James Blish’s
Cities in Flight
trilogy? I consumed, and became such a habitué that I was guaranteed a cup of tea twice every week, after which I would leave with my satchel bulging, possibly to the bewilderment of any regular bystander, who might have been unaware of the SF booty I called my own.

I recall scrabbling around happily one day after school when the door was abruptly pushed open and in came a man who by the look of his efforts not to look like one was clearly, even to me, a plain-clothes policeman. He pointed angrily at me and demanded of my hostess, who was a dear old soul, “What is he doing in here?”

Gleefully, she brandished a mint copy of Robert Heinlein’s
Stranger in a Strange Land
, which I certainly was, and said, “Honni swarky marley ponce, Geoffrey,” which, astonishingly, he didn’t understand but seemingly accepted. And for those of you with little French, it broadly translates as “He who sees any evil in this is a ponce.” Game, set, and match to her, I fancy, and she was a decent soul, a nice friend to this kid that she considered was her only legitimate customer. She never encouraged me to become a patron of the pinker shelves, and nor did she offer me any of the slim envelopes which, when she thought I wasn’t looking, she handed to the serious and somewhat furtive connoisseurs of the dirty raincoat persuasion, who were always embarrassed by my presence. I think at the time I thought they probably contained mint-condition, and therefore expensive, science fiction. (The penny dropped about a year later, when so did other things.…)

She was a widow and I don’t think I ever knew her name. In a way she was one of my tutors because the growth of the author requires many varieties of compost and I needed that because I wasn’t working at school and school wasn’t working for me.

It was a decent school, the teachers were the usual bunch (usual at least in those days): some enthusiasts for their subject, some who could inspire, relics of the war, the needlessly sarcastic, and, of course, the madman, the latter a general favourite with every boy in the school.

My fellow pupils, too, were from Central Casting, most with their eyes firmly on their A levels and a good job, a few who shouldn’t really have been there, the bully, the weird kid, and the troublemaker, which was me.

It was the worst of times, it was the … no, let’s stick with what we’ve got, it was definitely the worst of times, because I was the troublemaker. Picture the scene: the 1960s were moving sluggishly into High Wycombe and, regrettably, my headmaster considered himself a stalwart against sixties behaviour.

As a matter of fact, mostly the kids really just wanted to get their qualifications, just as I did. But when I brought in a copy of
Mad
magazine I was apparently a bad influence. Me! The kid who would spend so much time in the library that he would have to blink before he could get used to daylight again. I was astonished, and I have to say that
Mad
magazine in those days did some remarkably well-observed parodies of Broadway shows, often with a soupçon of harmless political humour and downright comic book fun, but to the headmaster it appeared to be a harbinger of the breakdown of society and indeed his society was under threat. But I just liked the magazine, and then on another occasion I was caught with a copy of
Private Eye
, apparently another crime against society. In fact, I was an amiable if somewhat talkative kid who liked reading anything and didn’t even own a Bob Dylan record, making me possibly unique among my peers. In truth, Harry Ward was probably a good teacher, although I don’t think that he was a good headmaster, or at least one who understood that adolescents were going to be, well, adolescents and very few of us were really any kind of a problem. We all carried a knife, a penknife, much better
than a pencil sharpener if you had to do, as we did, a lot of technical drawing. I can only recall one occasion when one was actually proffered in a fight, and that was by the weird kid, who left shortly afterwards. But Harry made the classic mistake of the tyrant, seeing rebellion in the most innocent transgression, and transgression in the most innocent activity or none at all. I recall a boy I shall call Charles who had the misfortune to be born with an amiable disposition and a face which automatically composed itself into a cheerful grin. Its only other expression, as I recall, was a mild kind of sullen puzzlement when a cheerful grin got him into trouble. And so the suspicious atmosphere of the school meant that he was seen as either a clown or exhibiting dumb insolence. The influence of Harry got him coming and going.

As a natural idiot I was also in permanent trouble with the bully, because I preferred to use my voice in an argument and he preferred his fists, but a friend of mine from those days gleefully recalled to me the day when I lost my rag and ran at the kid down the length of the room, hitting him amidships so hard that he went down and cut his head open on an iron fireplace. After that I became apparently invisible to him, there wasn’t any trouble. The schoolboy code was that short of murder you left authority out of it.

Recently a fellow pupil from those days told me that long after I had left (earlier than expected) he spoke as a sixth-former with the headmaster and learned that the man had been affected by the dreadful scenes he had witnessed during the Second World War, and was sure that this contributed to the man’s itchy trigger finger. I can’t say.

Knowing now the theatre he had been in, I can sympathize, but how could I have done so then? Besides, I was at worst a clown, and by heavy-handedness the man created what had not been there in the first place. But I thank him in absentia for firming up my decision to quit school before taking my A levels, a previously
unthinkable occurrence. I knew I wanted to be a writer. I’d won a prize in a
Punch
competition, and sold two short stories to science fiction magazines. But being the son of my parents, I researched, and realized that the odds of making a living as a writer were, for practical purposes, zero, whereas a newspaper journalist gets paid every week. Still at school, and lined up for the head librarianship, I wrote to the editor of the local newspaper, the
Bucks Free Press
, asking if there was likely to be a vacancy in the following year, and he wrote back instantly saying, “I don’t know about next year, but we have a vacancy right now.”

Thanks to Harry Ward, I went to see him on the following Saturday and on Monday walked to school and handed back all my schoolbooks, and left by the door that could only be used by prefects and visitors, a delightful sensation. The school could be a petty place, and my decision was prompted by the knowledge that Harry was publicly adamant that I could not have the prefectship that traditionally went with being the head librarian. I learned this by nefarious means. I had been spending every Thursday evening tidying up the library and repairing books, and this was an act of malice, sheer malice. Having been a prefect looks good on a CV, and might have come in useful; on the other hand, Arthur Church, editor of the
Free Press
, gave me the job right there in the interview. In recollection, he said, “I like the cut of your jib, young man.” Did he really say that? It would have been in character. But remember, my subconscious is that of an author and a former journalist, and probably believes that every quote would benefit from a bit of a polish by an expert. As I believe Douglas Adams once said, sometimes after talking about yourself so often you’re not exactly sure how real some things are.

The conditions of a trainee newspaper reporter in the mid-sixties were somewhere just above slavery; you could live at home and not be beaten with chains. On several occasions I worked every day of the week, including most evenings; and certainly Saturdays,
especially in the summer, were seldom my own. There was a mystical beast known as the “day off in lieu.” But it was seldom seen until later in my career. I was an apprentice, a genuine apprentice, my father even had to sign a copy of my indentures, a mediaeval-looking document. Basically, it sold my soul for three years, in return for which you were taught the rudiments, tricks, dirty jokes, suspicious folklore, and clichés of local newspaper journalism. If Johnny Howe was your subeditor, you got all the dirty jokes very quickly, because Johnny was blessed with a wonderfully dirty mind; he needed it, oh yes indeed. A subeditor, on a local newspaper at least, needs a pin-sharp apprehension of every inadvertent double entendre. Did a correspondent once send in a report about a Women’s Institute flower, fruit, and vegetable show that actually included the bit about the naked man streaking through the marquee, “causing disarray among the tarts before he was caught by the gooseberries’? Johnny, the spit and image of the late Stubby Kaye, looked me firmly and trustingly in the eye, and almost certainly, I suspect, lied. Any writer needs an eye for the double entendre in the same way that the gamekeeper has to have the mind of a poacher. The deliberate double entendre, on the other hand, is not to be sneezed at; I myself once perpetrated a treble entendre, and I suspect that if sufficient grant money could be made available, the quadruple entendre should not be beyond our grasp.

Whereas Johnny was short and fat, Ken Burroughs (called Bugsy behind his back), the saturnine news editor, was tall and thin, and when the two of them headed off down to the pub at lunchtime it looked like the number 10 going for a walk. Bugsy taught me to get my copy in on time, check my facts, and never to try to put one over on him. George Topley, Chief Reporter, and the best natural journalist I have ever met, taught me the uses of the truth and some useful secrets about human nature. And finally Arthur Church, local boy, editor of the local paper, who took the affairs of High Wycombe very seriously, taught me honesty and self-respect
and not, if at all possible, to offend the Methodists. A decent man, the sixties were puzzling him in the same way as they did my recent headmaster, but the sixties were okay with Arthur provided they included High Wycombe. When the first Apollo mission to the moon sent back those glorious pictures of the earth seen from its satellite, Westminster Press, owners of the paper, got hold of some of these and looked around desperately one Thursday to see which of their papers with colour capability was going to press soonest; and how they must have groaned when they worked out that somebody would have to ring up Arthur Church and tell him to clear the front page and two others at least. Probably, the Chiefs tossed a coin, but us reporters listening at his office door heard his agonized voice as he defended the interests of High Wycombe against those of the universe. And he had a point; every national newspaper next day would carry the pictures of the moon, but only one newspaper would carry the affairs, the important affairs, of High Wycombe, not to mention Marlow, Lacey Green, Loosely Row, West Wycombe, and Speen. It was a Chestertonian moment, and there was no doubt that he was right, but although they were asking, he recognized an order in disguise after a fairly lengthy tussle, and we set to work clearing the decks while he walked about grumbling, very nearly in tears. After all, the moon was just a lump of rock, right? And then suddenly the issue was happily resolved in his mind as he beamed and said with good grace, “Well I suppose the moon shines on High Wycombe just like everywhere else.” We nearly cheered!

Next day the
Bucks Free Press
sold out within minutes, even in Speen, and Arthur’s phone was constantly off the hook because local dignitaries were ringing up to congratulate him on his wonderful coup. High Wycombe had approved! He very nearly bought us all a drink, he was so pleased.

The editors of local newspapers were—and probably still are, insofar as they still exist, many having given way to the useless
and suspect local government “information sheets”—often accused of parochialism. But a sense of the parochial is needed for the job. Everybody in the world knows how John F. Kennedy died; somewhat fewer would want to know about the demise of some luckless citizen found dead in his car, in his garage, with a pipe from the exhaust through a partly open window. Murder, probably not, suicide quite likely, but their town or neighbourhood should know the truth and in those days it was conveyed to them by me because I had sat there glumly in the coroner’s court taking down the facts of the matter as deduced by the coroner in reasonably good Pitman’s. We did not like to do it; people find many and varied ways to end their lives abruptly, and all of them are nasty, especially for those who have to deal with the aftermath—because suicide really needs practice, and there lies the problem. Pierrepoint the executioner knew how to hang a man swiftly, and knew how long the rope should be and where on the neck the knot should lie to ensure a merciful end. Most people don’t. And one day, the relative of a particularly gruesome suicide asked the coroner to tell the newspapers not to publish the finding of the inquest. He said, quite correctly, that we were entitled to be there by law, and all would have been well had he not added something on the lines of “although I sympathize with you and sometimes I myself have wished that the press was at the bottom of the sea.”