The Clay Dreaming (67 page)

Into the mix I have added considerable flights of fancy, the boomeranging arcs of the imagination. Sarah Larkin, for instance, is a wholly invented character. Much of the Town Malling connection in particular was arrived at via walking around the graveyard there, checking for suitable names and dates on the stones. Lambert Larkin is loosely based on the Reverend Lambert Blackwell Larking, Vicar of Ryarsh; and his wife Frances Twysden of Royden Hall (all but reinvented) also plays her part. In real life this couple produced no children. As regards relatively minor characters such as William South Norton,
Dilkes Loveless, the rest of the Aboriginal team and so on, they represent names co-opted from contemporary records, but their personalities herein are largely fabricated for story purposes. If anyone – cricketing pundits, but in particular living relatives – feels that I have been unfair to their memory in any event,
mea
culpa
, but this is expressly literary fiction with a historical setting, and changing the names of those involved would have reduced the whole enterprise.

Other characters have perhaps unexpected connections in other forms of literature. To any fans of Sergeant Padraig Tubridy (as well as those seeking raucous tales of the Afghan frontier) I hereby refer your kind attention to issue 15 of
Frontline Combat
, and
Two Fisted Tales
numbers 16 and 21 (both titles EC Comics, in print since the 1950s). The handsome sort appearing there I believe to be a close relative of our Tubridy, if not the fella hisself. See also, from DC Comics in the 1970s,
Our Fighting Forces
124, and
Star Spangled War Stories
162 – never reprinted, so a bit harder to find. All stories are by John Severin and Jerry De Fuccio, two very excellent gentlemen resident in the former crown colonies of North America.

TALES OF THE CITY

Robert Vaughan (not the one from
The Man From Uncle
) wrote in 1843, ‘Our age is pre-eminently the age of great cities.’ This novel is very much a portrait of London as I know it, and its people as I know them, past, present and future. I readily confess it to be, much like Lambert Larkin’s sermons, a Frankenstein’s monster: numerous passages stitched together, impressions taken from hugely disparate sources, thanks largely to the splendid collections housed within the British Library (where I spent so much time they could demand rent), all engendered by the spark of truth, and my source of electrical current an original galvanic battery. (Even as Joseph Druce raged and died in a Greenwich hospital, so ran the vitalist debate of 1814–19 on the origins of life itself. This is in part what inspired Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley to create her own
Modern Prometheus
, an early classic of Gothic Romance literature.) Further jump-starts of voltage were supplied by the likes of Peter Ackroyd (in his superb
London: The Biography
) tipping me off to a deluge of quoted sources, from which I was then able to glean choice nuggets. My hat is tipped, too, for their resurrected art and language having brought extra life to my book, to the works of Louis Simond, Blanchard Jerrold, Gustave Doré, Johannes Vorsterman, Henry Mayhew, Henry James, Friedrich Engels, J. E. Ritchie and the Reverend Harry Jones, amongst far too many others to list here.

CURIOUS AND CURIOUSER

Funny things aplenty happened on the way to this forum. Here are just a few: my decision to make Dr Hunt of the Anthropological Society a stammerer, based on a whim, later turned out to be the truth. According to adverts in
The
Illustrated London News
he had written books on the subject. ‘Plum-sucking baboons’ attack Druce within his manuscript on the exact same calendar date that the meeting of the Anthropological Society (a real event) occurred some 51 years later – I couldn’t have arranged it better myself. The name of Larkin that I had fictitiously adapted has, it transpires, a genuine connection with Druce – anyone who knows of the sordid local history establishing the mansions of Blackheath (South London, not South Australia) will perhaps know what I mean. A few days after I wrote an imagined version of the sights taken in on a London to Greenwich boat-trip in 1868 (detail, alas, cut from the final draft), I found them perfectly visualised in a Greenwich Local History Library wall display, ‘PANORAMA (from memory), made by Ernest George Cattermole (15 years old), 1858’ – he would apparently play it out in scroll form for family and friends. Go and see it if you can, it’s lovely. Referring to the layout of Hardwick’s Naval Hospital plan of 1843 (held at the Wellcome Institute, ref: V13339) I discovered the mid-east section of lawn designated ‘Drying Ground for Lieutenant Loveless’, the place where he exclusively was allowed to air his laundry. This turned out to be the exact same spot, down to the yard, in which I situated him on the occasion when we first meet him, enjoying his sandwich lunch – in a passage I had written only a day or two beforehand.

Perhaps it all seems like small-potatoes from a distance, but at the time it really felt as if I was on to something – and it just kept happening. On more than one occasion entirely relevant facts and names would leap out at me, even when whirring fast-forward or back through a blur of microfiche, far too fast for the eye to follow. It took some years for the various threads of my narrative to come together, and several more before the weave began to make some kind of sense. I strove the entire time to understand the compulsion felt to find or else forge connections between characters and events in order to tell these two stories in one. If ever in doubt – and there was plenty of that – I often took reassurance from the confluence of what had seemed at first disparate fact and figures. My efforts, my thoughts, my researches were at times very definitely being directed. Serendipity is one word for it. I followed in footsteps.

LAST WRITES

No question about it, the days of Industrial Revolution were a ‘bleak age’ to pass through. Most of its workers subsisted in conditions of extreme poverty. ‘Till the Bishop of London called the attention of the public to the state of Bethnal Green,’ wrote the Reverend G Alston, ‘I believe that about as little was known at the West-end of the town of this most destitute parish as the wilds of Australia
or the islands of the South Seas.’ This quote, from radical paper
The Weekly Dispatch
, was reprinted in the Chartist newspaper
The Northern Star
No.338, 4 May 1844.

By this time a half-century or so of European incursions had all but eradicated the Australian Aborigines in the very regions Alston evoked, where they had lived undisturbed for at least 50,000 years. The statistics, where they are recorded, are truly terrifying. Jardwa people (also ‘No’) formed the nucleus of the Aboriginal cricket team. They had suffered an 80 per cent reduction in population in less than ten years (between 1836 and 1843), effectively decimated year on year. The Australian Gold Rush, starting in 1851, only served to escalate matters – the processes of attrition having already been well established. By 1857, 139 Jardwa remained out of an estimated 3,000 at the time of first contact (all figures are taken from
Aboriginal Languages and Clans, 1800-1900
, Monash Publications in Geography). As the novel indicates, many players were already the last remaining members of their clan groupings (moieties, or ‘mobs’). We are dealing, by the 1860s, with the remnants of a nomadic culture wherein entire language groups have already been extinguished. In the words of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859): ‘Here civilization works its miracles, and civilized man is turned back almost into a savage.’

Brippoki was Wudjubalug, or Wotjobaluk, of the Wergaia (when it comes to adapting phrases from a strictly oral culture into Roman alphabet, the results are at best gestural – something I have attempted to suggest by rendering the word differently each time it is mentioned in the text, according to the differing speakers; the Jardwa Dick-a-Dick, Captain Lawrence, and Brippoki himself). He is said to have come from lands around the Wimmera River, then a fertile region of Southeastern Australia, around Adelaide. I have endeavoured to suggest a regional dialect and manner of speaking analogue to surviving Wudjubalug phrasing, wherever I could find it, but I make no pretence towards accuracy. In all honesty, he exists – within the framework of this story – chiefly as a work of imagination. I heard another author say in interview, when challenged because she hadn’t included the point of view of indigenous characters in her story, ‘That’s not my story to tell.’ Brippoki’s isn’t my story to tell either – but I can’t let that stop me from trying. He came to London and died here. He’s lying there in the ground, somewhere beneath my feet. Since he’s no longer around to tell his story, and was probably never given the opportunity, I’ve attempted to tell one for him. I very much hope that he likes it.
Budgere pella
?

To sum up, then: Andy Croft, radical poet and publisher, in
Now Or Never
14, confidently declared: ‘the most important theme for writing to explore is […] the possibilities – and the limits – of being human in your time and place’. He also expressed his theory of ‘moral vocabulary – the need to bear witness, to testify on behalf of the speechless against the Pharisees; the powerful, the hypocrites and the liars’. I came to these words having already completed my book, but they neatly encapsulate for me the fuel that powered my narrative engine, and what it was that through it all drove me on to the finish line.

Where were you born and where did you grow up?

North London born and raised (Southgate, Barnet, Finchley); East London settled (Stepney, Mile End and now Wapping). I love being close to the river, cycling canalside, and the sense of being firmly embedded in (an ongoing) history – Captain Bligh lived on the next street over for a time, Flinders House is the next block over; the painter William Turner had an affair in my local pub. I hope to.

Did you read widely as a child?

Any books would have been hand-me-downs from older siblings.
Ferdinand the Bull
was an early favourite. My first word was ‘diplodocus’. And I caused a stir at school for paraphrasing Wordsworth at about 6 years of age (‘I wandered lonely as a grain of sand…’); precocious little lordling – I must have been insufferable. I was also very big on comic books:
Tintin, Asterix
, moving on to
Conan the Barbarian, Spider-man
and such (President Obama and me, we’ve so much in common). Still read them today – as well as produce them, of course.

What was your favourite subject at school?

Art, probably, because my ability at drawing made me popular. English, and History. That’s all pretty much stayed with me. I hated Thursdays – Physics and double Maths.

What was your career before you began the novel?

…it says here – as if that’s all over! I’m a comic-book creator by trade: writer and artist, editor, and sometime tutor. And it’s not so much a career, more a catalogue of misfortune relieved by the occasional happy accident. After 23 years at it, I do at last seem to be reaping some sort of reward for dogged persistence – or else sheer longevity.

Which authors do you most admire?

Vladimir Nabokov for his cruel, fond heart, wordplay and tendency towards wilful obscurity; Richard Condon and Walter Mosley for their pulp majesty; Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for their vocabulary and imagination. Film-makers are as big an influence: Terrence Malick, Powell and Pressburger, Ridley Scott, Anthony Minghella and Gillies Mackinnon.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Bed.

Also known as the artist ILYA, Ed Hillyer was editor of
The Mammoth Book of Best New Manga
(3 Volumes, 2006–2008), and his books include the award-winning graphic novel series
The End of the Century Club
, noir anthology
It’s Dark in London
and, most recently, a daring adaptation of
King Lear
for Manga Shakespeare.

Ed Hillyer is a Hawthornden Fellow and was writer-in-residence in September 2004.