The great when, p.1
The Great When, page 1
THE GREAT WHEN
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
From Hell
Lost Girls
Voice of the Fire
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Unearthing
Providence
Cinema Purgatorio
Jerusalem
Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic
Illuminations
For Michael Moorcock and Iain Sinclair, both longer in London and there before me
Contents
Map
The Music at the Beginning
1 The Best Way to Start a Book
2 A London Walk
3 Catshit Manor
4 Of Popes and Pot-Pourri
5 Woodenhead
6 Behold Him, Gemmed with Larcenies
7 Self as Hitler
8 A Startling New Calendar
The Old Man at the End
Acknowledgements
Map
The Music at the Beginning
Woodwind: out behind the boarding house, where a low winter sun has spattered gold on towering weeds, two sorcerers are dying over tea and biscuits.
The old boy is birdlike, almost dainty with the neat white Van Dyke beard. Having lost several stone and much of his studied monstrosity, he sits with a plaid blanket draped across his knees, recalling nothing quite so much as a retired art teacher, perhaps one who dreamed himself another Sargent in his youth. Across a folding table and the tea service thereon, his guest restrains a breeze-borne strand from her somehow heroic brow. Near fifteen years his junior, she watches as he pours the steaming twist of burnt sienna into mismatched china cups, hands quaking visibly where was he once the terror of his age.
He passes her the laden saucer, jingling like a milk cart, and regards her quizzically.
‘My dear girl. You are very ill, I take it?’
The high, lilting voice is always a surprise. She narrows her perennially disappointed eyes, impressed despite herself by her host’s divinatory skills, and then at length she laughs.
‘That’s rather good. I almost thought you were a real magician for a moment. But, of course, you know that you are literally the last person I’d want asking me how many sugars.’
Glancing down at the delinquent lawn, he smiles apologetically. She stares at him for a few moments more, broad bulldog features settling into a pensive frown as she considers.
‘Although, following that logic … oh, dear. You as well?’
Above, winds at high altitude drag crumpled bedsheets from an unmade Hastings sky. He shrugs regretfully, deteriorated saint of a rained-off apocalypse.
‘Afraid so. Nothing definite, and if the universe is willing, I might have another year or two. At least, that’s what the cards and coins inform me, but, then, I’m an ancient ruin and such setbacks are to be expected. What of you, though? You’re a mere child, barely in your middle fifties. It just seems such rotten luck.’
Off in the house’s kitchen, the diabolist’s latest and last apprentice anxiously prepares egg and cress sandwiches, all but the bread and cress obtained off-ration, and fastidiously slices them on the diagonal. Outside, the high priestess wrinkles her nose, declining sympathy.
‘Mm. Or possibly the spite of the Almighty. Deo, non Fortuna. God, not luck. A nice thought if you’re doing well, but if not, it’s a bloody stupid motto, and a bloody stupid name. I’m suffering from an incurable disease, apparently. Something to do with bone marrow, I’m told, although I’d never heard of it before. Leukaemia could have been a handmaiden to Hera for all I knew. Now, though, I’ve got a few months for putting my affairs in order, then I’m off to find how much was only theory after all. I hope to last the war, but not unless we’re going to win.’
She hunches into her thick overcoat, chin resolutely at a jut that always makes him think of Churchill. Sitting up, he nods in an attempt at reassurance.
‘Oh, we’ll win. Frankly, I’d be surprised if Germany survives the cricket season. It’s a pity, really. I had such high hopes that this was going to be my Aeon of Horus, stern and radiant, all decked in sun wheels, but it’s not to be. It seems that I was wrong about a lot of things.’
He sips, then sucks the surplus from his yellowing moustache. The woman snorts.
‘Well, as somebody who’s spent half her magical career apologising for the hellish mess you’ve made of yours, I’d say that was a pretty accurate assumption.’ Reconsidering, she softens. ‘Although I suspect my own Age of Aquarius will soon be following your aeon to the junkyard of the eras. Sometimes the etheric voices spout a lot of frightful twaddle, don’t you think?’
Both chuckle at this heresy, surprised to find how much they like each other without all the pantomime of light and darkness getting in the way. Dead-nettles rattle in a brief but sudden gust, with the exhausted whinny of a dray floated from the suburban streets nearby. Feeling an awkward spasm of affection for the quavering devil magnet, she leans in to touch him lightly on the arm.
‘Despite our differences, you’re still the most experienced magician that I’ve ever read. You know that, don’t you? Morally, of course, you’re quite the vilest creature that can be imagined, but in matters of enchantment, I have nothing save the greatest of respect for you, old man.’
Beyond all expectation, he finds this absurdly touching. Both their teas are going cold.
‘Nor I for you, my cara soror. I have always thought you the most gifted of your generation.’
To their mutual embarrassment and without warning, they are at the brink of tears before the woman saves the situation with a head toss and contemptuous sniff.
‘I’m sure that you thought nothing of the sort. What about your “Miss Firth was schooled at Radcliffe Hall” insinuations? And these from a flagrant bugger like yourself ! What you are is an awful, awful man who happens to be very good at magic – although a fat lot of good that’s done for either of us. All those gorgeous robes and here we are, both looking as if we’ve been dressed by the Salvation Army. I mean, are you getting by alright down here? How do you pay your rent?’
The innocence of his expression is a small comedic masterpiece.
‘Why, magically, of course. I have secured my tenure by providing Netherwood’s proprietor with tablets that restore his faltering virility, being infused with my own yogic essence.’
She stares fixedly at him and blinks in puzzlement before unwanted realisation dawns.
‘Oh, for God’s sake. Tell me they aren’t just crushed chalk and your own ejaculate.’
Sheepish, he spreads his hands, skin crinkling like foil and fingernails untrimmed.
‘Would that I could, dear girl. Would that I could.’
Everything drips with history beneath the dog-fought heavens, and across the globe fretful uncertainties resolve to sticky ends. She gapes at him in what, if not for his unsavoury reputation, would be disbelief, and then they’re snickering: a pair of papery and shopworn children. When their mirth abates, the older conjuror stares rheumily into the middle distance and becomes more sombre. Everything is changed, and even the procession of the aeons stumbles. There will never be an afternoon again of this specific cigarette-card blue. After a time, the woman speaks.
‘You know, there’s going to be a frightful crack in England when this bun-struggle is over. I’m not sure my angels helped a bit. The V-bombs go straight through them. And there’s going to be a bloody awful hole in magic when we’re gone. Even if most of our assertions were delusion, we both know of some that weren’t. The occultists that will be our successors have spoken convincingly upon the subject, but have never had that subject answer back. They’ve never had it pulsing right there in the room with them. Their only entities are met in books.’
As if on cue, young Grant emerges from the house’s back door with his film-star looks, Macassar glisten and a plate of sandwiches balanced upon one upraised palm. The pastured Beast regards his visitor with eyes unreadable beneath haw-frosted brows.
‘Do you remember that appalling cat?’
She stiffens in her seat and shoots him a reproachful look. He notes the brief, involuntary shudder that she’s evidently trying to suppress.
‘Of course I do. It came into my house, when Moina Mathers set it on me. It was the most terrifying episode of my entire life.’
The eager acolyte approaches, carrying refreshments, paddling in the shaggy lawn. With lowered voice, the woman volunteers a last remark to her moral antithesis and sole surviving peer.
‘In fact, the other London is a case in point. That wasn’t our imaginations, was it?’
Sharing a rueful gaze, they might be an old married couple. Solemnly, he shakes his head.
‘No. No, it wasn’t. That was real.’
A picnic neither has the energy to eat arrives, and everybody’s shadows are unrolled across the unmown ground, black carpets welcoming midnight celebrities. It’s February, 1945, and a lone songbird bounces rhapsody from off a lowering ionosphere as they sit bickering, amiable and intermittent, in the failing light of English magic.
♫
Brass: a river now of shouts and punches, Cable Street smells like a circus in stampede. Bristle of fist, flag, bottle, poker, shovel, people like pushed paint across the flagstones and why, David Gascoyne thinks, is there not poetry that will contain the passion and intensity of this, its snarl, its cauliflower-eared jazz? Suspended in a sea of shoulders, forced against gabardine backs in angry intimacy, he relinquishes volition to the furious animal in which he has become a component. He can on ly go where it goes, scuffed shoes commandeered into its millipedal shove, a passenger of the affray.
Surrendering to brute consensus brings an unexpected sensuality – excited human heat and movement rubbing up against his own, the colour-flood of an October palette smearing on overcast doorsteps, symphony of boot-stamp, beaten dustbin lid and florid Yiddish curse. ‘Hang yourself with a sugar rope and have a sweet death!’ He’s nineteen until next Saturday, had his third book out just a month or two ago, and brimming with the moment; jittery with history. Howling women, nippers flinging bricks, but mostly a determined crush of men in their cologne of cigarettes and haircut rum and Sunday dinner, up for trouble. He has never felt more Jewish in his life than in this pungent rush of elbows, and the one thing he’s afraid of here is an erection.
With the uproar’s crunch perhaps a hundred yards ahead, his chest’s a ringing anvil. Past the tide of shaved necks and turned heads in front of him, he sees the scuffers in their navy greatcoats, some of them on horseback, swinging truncheons through skull-cracking arcs into the ancient face of the East End. This storm of bruises has its purpling and half-closed eye right outside Gardiner’s department store, which seems to have already lost one of its sheet-glass panes. Here are the boys in blue with boiled-ham jaws, gazes like marbles pressed in lard, concussing schoolteachers and haberdashers to protect the chinless thoroughbreds a little further down the road: the boys in black.
Pallid as ghosts, these flinch from every clatter, startled and incredulous at their Whitechapel welcome, the heart-stopping scale of it. By David’s reckoning, there look to be a thousand or two fascists, although shrinking in together like they’re doing makes it seem like fewer. Perhaps twice that many bludgeoning police, but even if you count the black shirts with the blue shirts, dirty shirts have them outnumbered ten to one. From upstairs windows either side, mothers and wives hurl chilling epithets; coal; putrid vegetables; boiled water; turds from chamber pots or chamber pots themselves; a weather front of missiles. With all things considered, 1936 has been a funny year.
Amongst the thrust and clamour, he remembers Dalí’s frantic mugging through the dusty faceplate, terrified and suffocating with his moustache bent, during the London International Surrealist Exhibition that David had helped to organise this June just gone. The artist had insisted on appearing in a deep-sea diving suit, then realised he could neither get the helmet off nor breathe. Only by David’s intervention with a spanner were burning giraffe herds and inverted elephant-swans spared extinction. Looking at the mortal boil about him now, his luminous moth eyes incredulous, the poet wonders if surrealism tries too hard, or doesn’t try enough. A furious young girl who only has one arm is brandishing the limb of a shop manikin in her remaining hand, and there’s some toothless alter kocker with an evil eye, dragging a sack of lion shit cadged from the zoo to bolt the coppers’ horses. Breeze blocks and bowel movements hang suspended in the autumn air. This is above real, sur-real, what the word meant before André Breton fiddled with it. This, he thinks, is the true fire that melts the clocks. This is the memory that persists.
Something is happening near the epicentre, some new current spiralling into the maelstrom. From torn scraps of dialogue blowing through the crowd, he pastes together what is going on. ‘It’s Spotty!’ ‘Spotty’s coming!’ ‘Here comes Spotty and his lads!’ This, he presumes, is local mauler Spotty Comer with his kosher cosh-boys, lending a veneer of anti-fascism to the horrific violence that they’d have been perpetrating anyway. Glancing above the struggling statuary busts surrounding him, he sees the frighteners steaming in with cloth caps, crowbars, anthracite expressions; getting on a hundred of them; a grey wedge of noisy damage hurtling at the police with Comer roaring at its sharp end, swinging something heavy and ornate that David will learn later is a lead-filled sofa leg. The bellowing meat locomotive throws its weight into the wall of constables, with as much blood as possible its only politics. This is a thrilling if uncomfortable allegiance, all its ethics in explosion.
Either the unstable atmosphere or David’s brain ignites. The trampling squeeze he’s in slops forward and then back, a shifting fluid mass that takes him with it, gasps its terror and excitement. Placards dip and slice around him, cutting vision, time and continuity to coarse-grained photos from tomorrow’s newspapers, inexpertly collaged and difficult to make much sense of. Someone’s broken the police line, could be Spotty Comer, and is caving in the ribs of the six-foot gorilla next to Oswald Mosley. A police horse rears to split the head of a tailor’s apprentice, and for no apparent reason a soiled bedsheet has been set alight. He’s lost in the cascading images, as in a poem without discipline. The year, the day, the instant swell up like a heart attack or chord inside him, and the snapshot swirl kaleidoscopes against his assailed retina: a small boy limping with one shoe gone, hurtling furniture, the burning sheet reflecting filthy orange from the upper glazing, shock-haired cats, knocked-over braziers spilling rubies to the dusk, an obscure viscount cowering and weeping, fish-gut rain, the giant woman, apoplectic rabbis, hard-faced little girls with billhooks, sparking hobnails, military veterans, frantic dogs, birds flying the wrong way as though through an eclipse …
The giant woman.
Moving through the mob, she’s nine or ten feet high at least, and nobody is seeing her. They turn away right on the brink of apprehension to look somewhere else, appearing vaguely troubled. The horde parts to let her through, and does not seem to be aware that it is doing this. It is as if the world cannot allow her. Belly-deep in communists and paupers, she steps unconcerned amid the multitude, where David reels and thinks he might be dying. A bright scarlet cap atop the molten copper of her tumbling hair, a garment crumpling white and red across one shoulder – scarf or sash or toga, he can’t make it out – so that her breasts are bare, not as a provocation but as token of unanswerable authority. Above the highest lampposts that beatific countenance, fond eyes demurely downcast at the baying insurrectionaries that brush her skirts, smiling and dimpling with maternal pride at all the wound and weapon. On her coral flesh, the shadows shifting in her motion appear steel-engraved and, God, she’s taller than a house! Why isn’t anybody screaming, running, worshipping? Why doesn’t anybody notice? The barrage of pelting debris all sails wide of her. She wades a tide of fistfight, where the screwed-up faces are preoccupied by their fierce effort to remain oblivious to what’s amongst them, holy and unbearable, so lovely that even the blazing linen dare not touch her.
Doubling over, David spews into his turn-ups. He’s seen metaphor itself, enormous in a London lane and now his ears are ringing, his eyes watering the world into a squirming blur. From lips once slick with lyric, bile depends in tensile threads, and when he lifts his head again she’s gone, perhaps a trick of light on the soot-mottled walls; perhaps continuing her promenade down the hysterically blind avenue. In the months following the riot, he joins the Communists, he goes to Spain and more than ever is convinced in poetry, but on sanity’s floorboards is thereafter apprehensive, having felt their sag and heard their threatening splinter.
♫
Timpani: ‘Black man for luck, white man for pluck,’ he yells, his voice like church bells, the imaginary African. A schoolboy sun is crayoning the downs with simple, happy colours as he navigates the Epsom throng, a piece of solid music chiming in the titfers and the toppers by the track. The titfers offer cheers of recognition and the toppers condescending smiles, but all of them are marvelstruck as if he was to English eyes a rhino, or an orchid, or a continent. ‘Spion Kop first, the others nowhere,’ he proclaims, this teak flamingo, and a June breeze lifts the roquelaure trimmings of his waistcoat in embroidered wings.
They touch him as he passes, rub the horseshoe or the lion’s claw he wears around his neck and stroke the suns, moons, stars and shamrocks stitched into his robe, the turf messiah come to cure a leprosy of poor equestrian decisions. He’ll profess to reading certainties in tea leaves, stars or zebra entrails if that’s what’s required, then cheerfully admit it’s nonsense and that inside knowledge is his only spirit guide, though this admission is, of course, itself a lie. ‘Whoh-hoh-hoh-hoh,’ he booms from leather lungs amid the pretty frocks and pinstripes. ‘Spion Kop to win the Derby!’ White blouse like a swollen sail and lurid ostrich feathers at his masthead, he parades from out of the empire’s dreams across the course’s crew-cut margins, tilts or sways or quicksteps through the tinkling conversation and the summer mumbles.
