Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s

Eventually Mrs Y got her husband back. To the delight and benefit of them both.

By then I was preparing to leave Sanders.

I had asked Sanders several times for a rise in pay. He refused. What he dangled instead was the possibility of a partnership in the business when he retired, which, I was given to understand, might be any day.

Then he said to me, taking me aside, ‘You come up and see me on a Friday evening, and I’ll slip you an extra pound. You’re worth it. Just don’t tell anyone else.’

‘No, I’m sorry, I couldn’t accept it on those terms.’

This annoyed him. After work that evening, I took Bill to the nearby Blue Boar Inn. Over a pint, I told him my tale. Bill was completely unmoved. ‘Yes, Frank made me the same offer. I turned it down on the same grounds you did.’

‘What about the partnership?’

‘That’s complete boloney. I’ve heard that tale too. Everyone hears it. The man is a hypocrite.’

‘Christ, worse than that, I’d say.’

‘I would prefer to categorise him as a hypocrite. The man has had a hard life.’

After that, there seemed nothing for it but to leave.

3

Vienna Steak, Heinz Salad Cream

Sanders liked his pint of blood. When he finally retired, he sold the shop, as it happened, to a friend of mine, Kyril Bonfiglioli. By then I had gone.

Those first years in Oxford were a time of intense dark living. I had to come to terms with many incompatibilities. The shop with its desperately long hours was a prison, yet it was also a magic cave, an inspiration, jostling with the personalities of dead authors.

Outside was freedom, of a kind. I was the underprivileged poor, living in a rented room, with little spare time and the crazed impulse to write. Behind everything was the East, which I was sickening for and trying to forget, knowing I should never be able to return there.

The room in which I lodged was on the second floor of a house in King Edward Street owned by a Miss Pond, a learned and sickly lady who taught Spanish and Latin. Even the landladies were learned in Oxford.

It was curious to realise that I knew nothing of England. I had taken part in World War II, one of the biggest initiation rites in history. Here I was at the age of twenty-three, trying to write, trying not to be a savage.

In that dark shop, I missed the sun. Life in the East had mainly been spent outdoors, in the glorious light of the tropics. No wonder Non-Stop concerns people trapped for ever inside the confines of a spaceship going nowhere. This is the metaphorical way in which science fiction is truthful, and has less to do with science than the emotions.

Involved in the bookshop, I became involved to some extent with the university, for which I had, at that time, great respect. Some of my friends were undergraduates, such as Jack Bentley, with whom I had worked in the signal office in Hong Kong. Jack spent a lot of his time in his rooms, reading Thorne Smith. He never took to Balliol.

One of the pleasures on offer was the college play. Most of the colleges had active dramatic clubs; St John’s had the St John’s Mummers, and so forth. At the apex of the college clubs was OUDS, the university dramatic society.

All the clubs performed old plays, particularly plays set for the English curriculum. Merton did Julius Caesar in modern dress, Nazi uniform. It was the first time I had heard of such creative parachronism.

It was possible to see plays which are a fundamental part of English literature but rarely performed, such as Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy and Gammer Gurton’s Needle. I saw one Hamlet performed on the walls of New College, and another, with an actual Dane in the main role, performed in the Town Hall. At the time, I was possessed by Hamlet, imagining myself halfmad. Which I was.

There were Restoration romps by Wycherley, Congreve and Vanbrugh, the latter’s The Relapse being an especial delight. Of course there was plenty of Shakespeare and Marlowe, with a particularly memorable Edward II played in Oriel quad in freezing summer weather, with Neville Siggs as the King. Darkness fell as we sat watching the improvised stage.

The black Jacobean plays of Webster and Tourneur particularly attracted me, with their sense of guilt, revenge motifs and flashes of poetry. Webster, of course, was much possessed by death, and saw the skull beneath the skin, as T. S. Eliot noted. Both Webster and Tourneur remain mysterious figures, about whom little is known; yet their savage entertainments have survived over three and a half centuries. Only recently, we saw a striking new production of The Revenger’s Tragedy at Stratford. The Atheist’s Tragedy contains some fine poetry, though it is rarely performed.

Undergraduate companies had limited resources. One courtier and a curtain were made to stand for the riches of a Renaissance court, while the bad barons of English history padded out their stature with common-room cushions and an extra pair of rugger socks.

Ben Jonson’s marvellously funny Epicene, or the Silent Woman was played in Mansfield College gardens, produced by Frank Hauser, later director of the Meadow Players at the Oxford Playhouse. In the cast were such future celebrities as Robert Hardy, Norman Painting (who, after graduating, went into The Archers), Daphne Levens and John Schlesinger. Jonson’s plays, stodgy to read, come alive on the stage. Epicene was an OUDS production. The OU Experimental Theatre Club put on a stunning Troilus and Cressida, the cast including Russell Enoch (later the William Russell of TV’s Robin Hood fame), Michael Croft and Paul Vaughan – not forgetting a black-clad Ulysses, the future Chairman of British Rail, Peter Parker.

This Troilus was performed in the grounds of Halifax House. The night I attended, Ken Tynan and Alan Brien were in the audience, the two great rivals in with who filled the middle pages of Isis magazine, Tynan on theatre on one side, Brien on films on the other.

The Playhouse – closed in 1989 – boasted a good repertory company in my early days in Oxford. On Monday nights, seats were half-price. I remember in particular a terrific production of Sheridan’s funniest comedy, The Critic, the cast including such regular stalwarts as John McKelvey, Jack Cassidy and John Moffatt, so good in Restoration comedy.

Those were years of revelation for me. Every day brought new discoveries. I fell into books in my eagerness to catch up on all those years lost in the sun. History, philosophy, psychology, biography, literature, art: the bookshop became my library. When Sanders promoted me to buyer of new books, I ordered from publishers whatever interested me. I believed that if I filled the shop with books I liked I would have no difficulty in selling them. It was intoxicating to stock up with any book I wanted. Sanders must have been crazy to give me my head as he did.

Many writers I have loved since that time, among them Lewis Mumford, Benjamin Robert Haydon (I was directed to him by Aldous Huxley), Logan Pearsall Smith, Kafka – on, the list goes on – and two poets who were at that time Oxford favourites, John Donne and T. S. Eliot. Donne and Eliot have proved of lasting interest, poets who can always be turned to. And there were others, some of whom have failed to gain universal approval, like Roy Campbell. A line or two of Roy Campbell went into Helliconia Spring, just as Tourneur went into Eighty-Minute Hour.

There was much to please. And a dilemma. Reality consisted of several conflicting umwelts partially overlapping. It might be codified as four boxes. The top box contains Bookshop, Commerce, Prison; the rest contain ideas of University, Science Fiction, Freedom, Creativity, Travel.

I was in the top box. How was I to gain possession of all four boxes?

A frantic division of energies filled those few hours when I was free of Sanders. Food, women and writing were in competition. In the room at 13 King Edward Street, I generally worked on worthless poems and verse plays under the one central light. I had several girlfriends, most of them as poor as I, most of them content with a visit to the cinema and an hour or two in a snug waste-paper house accessible at the end of Sanders’ side passage, to which fortunately I had a key.

The need for food was pressing. When I arrived in Oxford, several British Restaurants were in existence. They disappeared one by one as their task of catering to a wartime workforce was fulfilled. One restaurant stood on an old coal wharf by the canal which was later filled in to become part of the ground on which Nuffield College now stands.

The British Restaurant in the Town Hall was always well attended. Queues sometimes stretched down the imposing staircase to the entrance doors and beyond, into St Aldate’s, but they moved quickly. Many students ate there. It was a good place to pick up girls. Everyone was friendly in a sort of post-war way, and the ladies who served there knew their regulars. A three-course meal cost 1s. 3d. (pronounced one-and-three, or seven pence by present currency).

What was the main course? Sometimes it was Vienna Steak. We have all adapted to change. Even what goes into our stomachs has changed. Today, the Vienna Steak is extinct. The term was a euphemism for rissole. It came with thick gravy and mashed potato and an unheard Strauss waltz. As night gives way to day, so the Vienna Steak gave way to the Hamburger.

And the question I asked myself was, whether I was stuck for ever in Sanders’ shop with the taste of Vienna Steak in my mouth. There was no one to rescue me, unless I could make those marks on paper make sense.

Those restaurants were very utilitarian, more like 1984 than one cared to mention. When Indian restaurants opened in England, they were thrice welcome. They did not make you ashamed of frayed cuffs, assuming from the start that you were poor and needed something peppy under your belt. When I first saw Indians and Chinese in Oxford, I followed them down the street, for the mere pleasure of the sight of them among all the pale Caucasian faces.

So I wrote. At one of the first Faber parties I went to, I met John Bowen, now a big name in television. Bowen is a clever writer with a flair for fantasy; an early novel of his, After the Rain, was a successful science fiction novel. But he warned me at that party that there was no money to be made in writing SF. I remember his words: ‘You don’t want to have a bottle of Heinz salad cream on your table all your life, do you?’

Often when I pour walnut oil or lemon on my salad, I think of Bowen – and that naughty, corrupting question of his.

4

Imaginary Diaries

Here is how my first book came into being. A publisher stepped forward and asked me to write it. I never papered my room in King Edward Street with rejection slips. I don’t know what a rejection slip looks like. No wonder I have been so difficult ever since.

Always have a change of scene with a new chapter. So here is another bookshop: Parker’s of Oxford. Sanders has fallen away underfoot. Parker’s paid fair wages and let its staff go at five thirty. I gained ten extra hours of liberty per week. Parker’s closed down in 1988, to make way for Blackwell’s art shop.

I called a halt to poetry writing, and launched into short stories. Using the extra free time as an investment, I began to write a novel entitled ‘Shouting Down a Cliff’.

‘Shouting Down a Cliff’ took up two summers and all the time in between. It was written in two large hard-covered notebooks, in longhand, with one of those fountain pens containing a little rubber tube to hold the ink, predecessor of today’s cartridge pen. What rendered those pens obsolete was the dawn of cheap air travel in the sixties. At 30,000 feet, the old rubber-interior pens, under change in air pressure, would discharge their contents into one’s pocket.

If ‘Shouting Down a Cliff’ is not a title which springs to mind as readily as, say, David Copperfield or Lord of the Flies, this is because it has never been published. I never even typed it out from the notebooks. It was never offered to a publisher. I was convinced before it was finished that it was scarcely up to scratch. A critical faculty is not the least of a writer’s gifts.

Where ‘Shouting Down a Cliff’ differs from the novels of many other unpublished novelists working at that time in Oxford – everyone seemed to be at it – is that I finished it. It was complete. Eighty thousand words. Finito. I had seen it through.

If I had written a novel I could do anything.