Modem Times 2.0 (10 page)

But he hadn’t distracted the Ranger long enough.

“Were you fucking talking to me?” Mo came gleefully forward.

Jerry sighed. He had a feeling they weren’t going to be leaving as quietly as he’d hoped. He took out his mobile and dialled Didi Dee. He hated to cancel dinner so close to the time.

He looked at his wrists.

“What’s the time? My watches have stopped.”

C
HRISTMAS 1962. SNOW
was still falling just after dawn when Jerry sprung the gate into Ladbroke Grove/Elgin Gardens and walked onto the path, leaving black pointed prints and tiny heel marks. He had never made a cooler trail. Slipping between the gaps in the netting, he crossed the tennis court and stopped to look back. The marks might have been those of an exotic animal. Nobody coming behind him would know a human had made them. Yet they were already filling up again.

He would never be sure he had deceived anyone. He darted into the nearest back garden. From the French windows came the sound of a Schoenberg piano roll. The snow was a foot deep against the brick wall, on the small lawn. Yellow light fell from the window above. He heard a woman’s voice not unlike his mother’s. “Go back to bed, love. It’s not time yet.” He recognized Mrs. Pash. Her grandchildren were up early,pedalling the piano. He caught a glimpse of the tree through the half-drawn curtains.

Jerry stepped softly out of the little garden. A blind moved on the first floor in the corner house. The colonel and his wife were looking at him. Another minute and they’d call the police. Their hangovers always made them doubly suspicious. He bowed and went back the way he had come, back into Ladbroke Grove, back across to Blenheim Crescent, past the Convent of the Poor Clares, on his left, to 51, where his mother still lived.

Humming to himself, Jerry went down the slippery area steps to let himself in with his key. Nobody was up. He unshipped the sack from his shoulder and checked out the row of stockings hanging over the black, greasy kitchen range from which a few wisps of smoke escaped. He opened the stove’s top and shovelled in more coke. His mum had put the turkey in to cook overnight. There wasn’t a tastier smell in the whole world. Then, carefully, he began to fill the stockings from his sack.

Upstairs, he thought he heard someone stirring. He could imagine what the tree looked like, how delighted Catherine and Frank would be when they came down to see their presents.

Outside, the snow still fell, softening the morning. He found the radio set and turned it on. Christmas carols sounded. The noises upstairs grew louder.

Travel certainly made you appreciate the simple things of life, he thought. His eyes filled with happy tears. He went to the kitchen cupboard and took out the bottle of Heine he had put there the night before. Frank hadn’t found it. The seal was unbroken. Jerry helped himself to a little nip.

Mrs. Cornelius came thumping downstairs in her old carpet slippers. She wore a bright red and green dressing gown, her hair still in curlers, last night’s make-up still smeared across her face. She rubbed her eyes, staring with approval at the lumpy stockings hanging over the stove. Behind her peered bleary Frank, Catherine’s huge blue eyes, suspicious Colonel Pyat.

“Cor,” she said. “Merry Christmas, love.” “Merry Christmas, mum.” He leaned to kiss her. “God help us, one and all.”

THE END

Parts of this story originally appeared in
Nature, Planet Stories, The New Statesman, Time, The Spectator, Gardens and Guns, Fantasy Spots, PC World, Wired, The Happy Mag, Boy’s Friend Library, Schoolboy’s Own Library, Popular Science, The Magnet, Nelson Lee Library, Sexton Blake Library, Union Jack Library, Good Housekeeping, Sports Illustrated, Texas Monthly, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Guardian, Novae Terrae
, and others.

T
HERE AREN’T MANY pictures of my childhood London. To get a glimpse of the world I grew up in, I have to give microscopic attention to the backgrounds of English movies made between 1945 and 1955 in the hope of seeing the ruined South Bank in
Hue and Cry
or the remains of Wapping in
Night and the City
. If I’m willing to sit through hours of Cockney stereotypes, I might occasionally catch a few meters of library footage shot through the windows of a tram with Sid James’s head in the way.
¹
My London is fleeting, mysterious, torn down or buried.

London was different up to 1940. From the illustrated books, it often seems tranquil and quaint, full of lost churchyards and hidden courts. There were always places where the traffic noise dropped away and you could enjoy a bit of peace. That was before the firestorms blasted the East End into blazing fragments of people and buildings, when so much of that quaint tranquillity became heaps of rubble, tottering walls, fire-blasted windows, cutaways of people’s private lives: their bathrooms and bedrooms, everything they’d valued, exposed to the hasty curiosity of the survivors.

By 1945, the bodies and the worst of the rubble had been cleared away, and I see from those pathetic scraps of newsreels and pictures from the illustrated magazines the London I really loved and grew up in. Until then it had been a malleable London in which you could leave home in the morning and find your street completely transformed by the evening; where the house next door could become a pile of junk or your best friend could disappear forever. After the war finished, we knew what in some ways was a more innocent London. We hadn’t quite taken in the Nazi Holocaust, let alone the A-bomb. We were a bit bewildered by how, having won, we were somehow poorer than when we were losing. The London in which Orwell wrote
1984
was my first peacetime London.

I wouldn’t much want to live through that period again. Most of those films I give so much attention to were terrible, about keeping a stiff upper lip and knowing your place while facing down the Chaos. We kept replaying that trauma for years. What had gone wrong?

Our general entertainment was mostly dreadful and, like our styles, shrunken cheap imitations of what boom-time America was offering. The decade represents a world which has no representation in the physical world around me, for my ruins have vanished and the unfamiliar, often beautiful buildings erected in their place offer few coordinates from which to calibrate my memories.

By the time I had my first job as a messenger for a shipping company in the City, I could take a bus or a train down to the docks and then walk for miles looking for the appropriate ship or customs office, past grey cranes, redbrick warehouses, endless rust-grimed ships. I never had any idea of where docklands ended. Apart from the offices of great shipping lines, banks and insurance companies, the City was still an area of small businesses. There were scrapyards, independent stationers, booksellers, printers, chop houses, eel and pie shops, tea shops: a London whose variety and complexity you didn’t have to guess at.

Then there were the places where London was simply
not
—a few irregular mounds of grass and weeds with rusted wire sticking through concrete, like broken bones, exposed nerves. This part of London could very easily be identified because almost nothing of it had survived except the larger seventeenth-and eighteenth-century buildings like Tower Hill, the Customs House, the Mint, the Monument. And of course St. Paul’s, her dome visible from the river as you came up out of the delicious stink of fresh fish from Billingsgate Market, a snap of cold in the bright morning, and walked between high banks of overgrown debris along lanes trodden to the contour of the land. We had made those paths by choosing the simplest routes through the ruins. Grass and moss and blazing purple fireweed grew in every chink. Sun glinted on Portland Stone, and to the west, foggy sunsets turned the river crimson. You never got lost. The surviving buildings themselves were the landmarks you used, like your eighteenth-century ancestors, to navigate from one place to the other.

Slowly, the big brutal blocks of concrete and fake Le Corbusier flats began to dwarf St. Paul’s and the Royal Mint, and the familiar trails disappeared, together with the alleys and yards, the little coffee shops and printers. Like an animal driven from its natural environment, I’d turn a corner and run into a newly made cliff. The docks disappeared with astonishing speed. One day the ships were shadows honking out of the smog and the next they were gone. Airfreight and containers were replacing the old systems. Without our heavy exports we didn’t need ships; without the ships we didn’t need the docks.

West London, where I got my next job, is a lot easier to identify from 1950s Rex Harrison comedies. Almost everything was dark green and brass: motorcars, front doors, porters’ uniforms. Everything else was bright yellow (driving caps, cars, frocks). Smart young voices imitated Noël Coward and Gertie Lawrence. and their owners buzzed about in MGs and Mayflowers. I worked for people rather like them. They completed my education. They gave me my taste for good food and wine and introduced me to T. S. Eliot and Proust. I was regardedas a bit of an
enfant terrible
and they encouraged me to write. I hardly had to work at all. For a while it was always maytime in Mayfair and spring in Park Lane. By the time I was seventeen, I was back in Holborn, editing
Tarzan Adventures
, where I’d sold most of my early work. But I’d added quite a lot to my social and literary education.

By then, too, I’d found Soho, jazz and skiffle, and had actually twice played washboard with the Vipers, who became the Shadows. I’d cut a demo (which set my musical career back for years) and I was hanging out with people who introduced me to Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Terry. I learned Woody Guthrie licks from Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and corresponded with Guthrie and Seeger, under house arrest as un-Americans. I became more critical of politicians. My digs were in North Kensington and Fulham, which had sustained a bit more of the Blitz and were full of poor immigrants. There the streets were grey, dirty, hopeless, and often violent. I did wonder why all the posh bits of London were only what you might call lightly bombed, and why all the working-class suburbs were piles of ashy rubble. When Churchill (as he explained later) was sending back false intelligence about the Nazi strikes, suggesting that Streatham was the centre of our steelyards, he didn’t seem too eager to give the impression that Belgravia was an industrial beehive. But I don’t hate him for it. He did, after all, give me a lot to write about and a strong sense that nothing is permanent.

Soho was coffee bars and formica signs, formica table-tops. Formica hid all the old shop signs and looked at least superficially modern. Rock and roll, sex and drugs. Trad jazz became skiffle and skiffle became blues or R&B. I played guitar for a while in a whores’ hotel. There were no proper threads in the shops. Just grey suits, tweed jackets, and corduroys. We took old stiff detachable collars and wore them with thin black ties, adding a car coat, white shirt, trousers stitched tight to our legs. My children say I was a Mod. I say those were the only clothes we had.

Around 1963 my wife and I moved to Colville Terrace,where our next-door neighbour, a big knife-fighting whore called Marie, was regularly and noisily arrested nightly at about 2 AM. I took over
New Worlds
magazine, determined to lift from science fiction some fresh conventions, which J. G. Ballard, Barrington Bayley, and I felt were needed to reinvigorate English fiction.

My main contribution to this period of experiment was Jerry Cornelius, his name pinched from a greengrocer’s sign in Notting Hill. As Mike Harrison pointed out, he was as much a technique, a narrative device, as a character.
²
Like me, Jerry relished ruins. Unlike me, he enjoyed making more of them. Through that era we called “the ‘60s”—which really ran from about 1963 with the Beatles first No. 1 single to around 1978 with Stiff’s second tour—we continued to experiment in almost every field and genre. One of the reasons that period can’t be reproduced is precisely because we hardly knew what we were doing. Now we probably know too much. We moved to a wonderful flat with a big leafy square behind it.

It was a wonderful time to have kids. I took them to music festivals and to little parks and museums, my secret boltholes like Derry and Tom’s Famous Roof Garden where little old ladies met for tea after doing their shopping. None of these places had yet become self-conscious or been persuaded to exploit their “features.” I knew we were enjoying a golden age that couldn’t last, but I was determined we should get the most out of it. Even with strikes and hard economic times, we had the first Notting Hill Carnivals, numerous open-air gigs and a general improvement in local morale.

But we could already see the end coming. One afternoon I was in my back garden when a Liberal solicitor asked me if I was coming to a newly formed “gardens committee” meeting. When I told him I wasn’t, he cheerfully informed me that that was my right. I told him that I knew what my rights were. I also sensed that this was definitely the beginning of the end.

By 1980, the Famous Roof Garden had become a private club. While it was still possible to lunch there, its casual nature had changed. Slowly I began to feel a stranger in my owncity. I had, of course, been part of the gentrification process, but I didn’t like the way people from the country and the suburbs were actually beginning to displace the locals. I like my classes mixed. We sold up and moved to Texas.