Holding Hands at Midnight

        My new novel "Holding Hands at Midnight" is resting, like a bottle of good wine. I have edited it and feel it is ready for publication. I have printed it out so can now read it on the page rather than the screen. However, I think that before it is let loose upon the world, I have to read the printed version as if I had just picked up a book from a bookshop and was browsing.

        I tried to do just that, read it. It was impossible. All the characters have inhabited my head for the past three years, day and night, on my walks, in the pub, at my desk, in my dreams, wittering away, pulling my sleeve saying "Give me more lines. I would have said or done so and so."

        "No you wouldn't. I decide what you do and what you say."
        "That's what you think."

        I could not read it. It was too close to home. So I have sent a synopsis to various publishers and am about to give a printed copy to a trusted friend to read and comment, hopefully honestly. It is a difficult book and I suspect some family and friends will not like it. It is set in the 1960's and has four main characters, all in love with each other in various combinations at different times, but all at the end of the day loyal and supportive of each other. Two are women who escape unfulfilled marriages by falling in love with each other. This leads to their outraged husbands casting them out, homeless. They survive by becoming prostitutes, helped by a sympathetic married couple. In time the relationships between the four of them develop in surprising ways, complicated by the two lesbian prostitutes having a child each, and the married couple having two children. So we have a household of four adults and four children. The children are very happy in this menage until questions are asked at school.
        There is a sub plot concerning the daughter of one of the prostitutes. She writes stories for children and has one accepted by the BBC, who turn it into a series for children's television. BBC want to interview her. A ten year old would normally be accompanied by her Mum. But her Mum might be recognised by some of her punters. Tricky.
       Then one of the adults gets breast cancer, and the rather unorthodox household in which she lives, sustains her until she dies, and sustains her children after her death.

I will be asked what do I know about prostitutes and in particular lesbian prostitutes. In my twenties on my way home from the pub I came across a woman lying in the gutter with her face kicked in and her arm and ribs broken. I took her to hospital and looked after her and discovered that she was a prostitute living with her lesbian partner. It so happened that at that time I fell out with my landlord and became homeless and the two lesbian prostitues took me in and gave me a home, and I lived with them for nine months and that was a very happy time. So I do know enough to write about these subjects.
        But I may well be accused of glamourising prostitution. All I can say is this. There have been, probably are still, happy and successful prostitutes. I knew two of them fifty years ago. I was not surprised to read "The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl" by Belle de Jour. Nor was I surprised last year when I met her at the Oxford Literary Festival to discover that the author was Dr Brooke Magnanti, a research scientist specialising in neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology. Very handsome is Dr Brooke. You could see why she was successful as a hooker. I was considerably hooked.
        So that I can separate myself from the characters in my novel, and read it as a new reader, I have decided to divert my mind to other matters. I have made a start on the next book. In fact I am now on page 41. Without telling you what it is about, there are two possible titles at the moment.
        1. "The Floors of Silent Seas." Quotation from T.S.Eliot. "I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas."
        2. "Green in Judgement." I need to look that one up, but I'm sure it was Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra "My salad days, when I was green in judgement."
        Votes please.

Old Age, The Universe must have miscalculated.

There must have been a mistake. I cannot possibly be as old as apparently I am. I stride about, walk for miles, run for buses, cook lovely food, write blogs, do all the paperwork for two pubs, a supermarket in Sheffield, an Oscar winning animator and accounts for a company that will do the signposting at the Olympics. I have just completed a novel and I perform poetry in public to modest acclaim. I cannot be more than 38, in my prime. Though when did I have time to produce all these offspring and descendants?

Sometimes it is fantastic to be as old as I really am, like last Thursday in the pub talking to two other men who were evacuated at the age of 5 or 6 and transported to an alien agricultural world of horse drawn wagons and threshing machines and rabbit stew and no inside toilets. It can be fantastic to be 76.

I have (1) done a consultancy job and (2) attended a meeting in Peterborough. (1) was profitable. (2) was duty but accompanied by and followed by wine, so acceptable. I am now on a train at 10 o'clock at night, speeding through the landscape, passing the amber lights of small towns, factories, dark fields flashing by. Nobody in the whole world knows where I am, whether I'll die or live, not my lovely wife, my 3 children, my 6 grandchildren, my 57 cousins, my many friends. I am alone in the Universe.

As you pass the signposts of life, 30, 40, 50, 60, 65 (when you're supposed to retire) 70, 75 and still alive, and kicking, you realise you have a diminishing number of years left, you start to savour every minute of every situation. So I enjoy being on this train at night. Brilliant. My grandaughter's friend Tilly Cat would say kewl. She tells me that's how you spell it now.

We sit in metal boxes, planes, buses, trains, tubes, all of them inclined to crash, be destryed, fail to land properly. Why do we do it? Why do we risk the possibilty of fire and death just to be somewhere else as soon as possible? Well I don't so much these days. I walk and look quietly at rivers.

But tonight, off the train, on to tube, then bus, all dangerous boxes, but all whizzing me delightfully about. Walked past St Andrew's Church. Notice for Over 60's Club, every Thursday. What do they do? Coffee, bingo, pet stroking? I'd go mad if I had tp spend every Thursday with people my own age. Almost nobody I spend time with is older than me, with a couple of exceptions and I don't care how old they are. They are young at heart. A young man with a clipboard in Villiers Street off The Strand asked me would I like to donate to Help the Aged. Sorry I said, I am the aged, can you help?

Tomorrow I shall catch another tin box which might or might not crash on its way to Peterborough or back to attend the grand reunion of the family of the Kings School Peterborough which I attended more than fifty years ago, so probably everybody there will be younger than me, but that will not matter at all. But I may possibly sup some stuff and reminisce. The Brewery Tap, Peterborough. December 27th. 7.30. See you there.

I'll try and be back in my truckle bed in London by midnight.

Autumn Blog

            Well at 22.07 on a Monday towards the end of October I finished my latest novel "Holding Hands at Midnight." That was great because having finally set it in stone, the characters will now have to stop chattering to me or to each other in my head, all day long, no matter where I am or what I might be doing, prodding my brain as they have done for the past two years. It is finished and they have said all that I will allow them to say. They can now shut up.

            However I have listened to them too much and allowed them to ramble on, as people do in real life. Repetition. We all do it. I must have let them influence me into allowing them to recount the same anecdotes more than twice and once too many. I told my publisher that the novel has 177,500 words. He says that that equates to 680 to 690 pages in a normal paperback format. That creates physical problems with binding, never mind the sheer slog for anyone reading it. I had thought this one was shorter than the last which came out at 537 pages . So I have a severe editing project ahead of me. There is a limit to the amount you can cut. I suspect it will still be a lengthy read.
            Because I have some distractions at home, being part time househusband for many years, cooking, washing, shopping, gardening, window cleaning etc, all OK with me, though now my lovely wife has retired, I no longer (in theory) have to have her dinner on the table when she gets home, but I do most days otherwise she crowds me in my little kitchen (designed by her but mainly operated by me.) I know that sounds mean but it isn't meant to be and I'm not. I just enjoy looking after her.
            A couple of weeks ago I escaped. I rented a caravan for a week to try to finish the novel with no distractions. It was at Winchelsea Beach in Sussex, on the very bleak Pett Level between Hastings and Rye, last bus to anywhere 5.30 pm, so remote, and quiet in October, just what I needed. Anybody interested in trains? I went from St Pancras on a Hitachi Japanese bullet train to Ashford (39 minutes). It did St Pancras to Stratford International in 6 minutes. Then an ordinary little old fashioned stopping train to Rye, then a bus.
            Caravans are brilliant, little boxes fully furnished with everything you need to a high standard and although you are cheek by jowl with lots of other caravans you need never see them or interact with them, and anyway half of them are unoccupied in October. This particular caravan site is next to open fields so open to wildlife. First night I met a fox on my way back from the pub. The next morning I was woken by loud clucking of ducks. I looked out of my front door and there was a duck and a drake and six ducklings gathered round the bottom of my steps clearly expecting to be fed. I fed them. The seagulls took half the bread, driving the ducks to retreat. Of course being a hundred yards from the sea I was not surpised to find we were also plagued with seagulls, but what did surprise me was the rabbits, wild rabbits unafraid of humans. They waited just outside the circle of ducks and ducklings. They also were used to being fed. Later I saw a notice which said "On open ground on this site, beware rabbit holes."
            A caravan is a metal box which means it gets very cold at night in October, but it also has lots of windows and if the sun shines, it gets pretty hot in the daytime in October.
            I took my laptop and tapped away several hours a day with no distraction other than a cheese sandwich for lunch. And there was no internet, no way I could see whether anybody had emptied my bank account or booked two flights to Hungary using my wife's debit card, whch happened once when she left her handbag unzipped in a shop. I just got on with it. It was lovely.
            The internet is a mammoth distraction. I found mysef working at my novel at 9 am. At home it is often nearly 11 am before I have finished checking my emails, looking at my bank account, seeing what everyone is doing on Facebook. Having none of that compulsion I just got on with the writing. It was bliss.
            So it is finished, but of course it is not finished at all. I cannot allow it to be 600 pages long. That is ridiculous. Somehow I have to edit 50,000 words out of it. So I have printed it and am editing it, not on screen but on paper, crossing out unnecessary verbiage with a red pen. I got rid of 150 words on page one, so it may be possible to get it down to a reasonable size.
            I have now laid it aside for a week while we have our living room decorated. The decoration includes a certain amount of plastering and sanding down, so life is full of dust. I don't do breathing dust if possible, so I have spent some time walking the Thames Path - of which more another day.

Long Time No Blog

I said in May that I would have a rest from blogging until I had finished my new novel. I have now completed revision/edit/part re-write number five and it still needs more work, so lets have a rest and indulge in a bit of bloggery.

While I have been tapping my keyboard (years ago I would have said scribbling) in Walthamstow, in order to keep my heart muscles functioning, to keep my elderly body alive, I have continued with the walking every day when it isn't raining.

So, from my house fifteen minutes and across Chalk Bridge over the River Lee to Wild Marsh West. Then you have a choice between a well laid out fine gravel footpath, or a grassy swathe that heads off through the scrubland. It has been mowed, presumably by the Council, and I think it is probably designed for horses to gallop along. Any way I decided to walk along it rather than the path, and to be in East London and so near to home, walking on grass by trees and water, is so much better than pounding pavements, which I have been doing for the past five years. Even sandy footpaths are not as soul resting as grass.

Being an ignorant city dweller, I have no idea what all these wild flowers and plants are called. I wish I had some knowledgeable person to walk with me and say "That is bird's foot trefoil" or "Betty's slipper" or whatever.

Everywhere there are blue flowers, purple flowers, yellow flowers and of course, here and there, a crumpled beer can. A reminder of where we are. The East End of London. Anyway, this grassy track is better than the towpath because there are none of Boris's hooligan cyclists on it.

Wondering who left beer cans in this delightfully peaceful place, I came across a group of anglers sitting on the river bank fishing. And what else were they doing? They were drinking cans of beer, at eight o'clock in the morning. Angling is a serious sport, needing lubrication, much like darts no doubt. But it reminded me of May Morning many years ago, sitting in a punt below Magdalen Bridge in Oxford, waiting for the dawn, waiting for the choir of Magdalen College to sing whatever beautiful song it is they sing at dawn on May 1st, and drinking champagne at six o'clock in the morning, so judge not that ye be not judged, as the Good Book says.

In the punt with me was the poet Adrian Mitchell of dear and happy memory and two girls whose names I have long forgotten. They also would probably have been poets, because in that year 1953 I wanted to be a poet and only mixed with people who wanted to be poets.

The grassy path leads to Stonebridge Lock, where the narrowboats and houseboats have permanent moorings, with little gardens on the bank, white picket fences and furniture with umbrellas, lawns, footballs and of course red gas cylinders and occasionally greenhouses. There is a new narrowboat I haven't seen before called "Ten Bob Note" with at least half of its roof solar panels, very enterprising.

Just as I don't know the names of the flowers, I'm afraid I don't know whether it was a coot or a moorhen, diving down below the surface, leaving an expanding ring on the water, coming up several minutes later, sometimes on the far side of the river, then diving again, and again, until finally it came up with a fish in its beak. So there are fish in the River Lee. Perhaps anglers don't just go there for the beer.

This walk with wisps of mist rising from the river is so remote from the rest of my life, yet so close that in twenty minutes I will be unable to cross the road because of the volume of traffic.

I seem to have a more interesting life since I retired. Later that day I walked along Royal Hospital Road in Chelsea to the Army Museum to be interviewed by an author, Julie Summers, who is writing a book about experiences of evacuation in the 1940's. When it is published, chapter 9 will be called Norman Andrews.

Next week I shall be at the meeting of the Waltham Forest Poetry Stanza, reading my poems and listening to other people's poetry, and sampling the excellent range of ciders always available at Ye Olde Rose and Crowne in Hoe Street. As Doc Johnson said, who needs to be bored in London?

Piebald horses graze the Thames Water land around the reservoirs. They look like gipsy horses to me but no sign of travellers. Anyway they have a new foal today and I watched it stagger to its feet. It can only just have been born, still wobbling a bit on its splayed spindly legs.

Corny it may be, but here birds sing undisturbed by technology or agriculture. You might be in the middle of nowhere. On the horizon of course you can see the erections of industrial East London, but it doesn't matter.

Sorry no blogs for while.

I have lots of ideas for future blogs, some I have made notes, some are recorded on the little voice recorder I carry about with me on my daily walks. But I have to concentrate on the novel I am desperately trying to finish, so no blogs for a while. I probably won't even write any poems. I'm tied to my wordprocessor, working my way through my fifth revision. So see you all later in the year.

Oh, here's a snippet. Great Northern Hotel, Peterborough. Me: "What kind of red wine have you got?" Barman looks at the refrigerated display cabinet, opens it, picks out a bottle.

"I think you'll find all the wines in there are white. The reds are out on the shelf over there." He looks bemused, goes along the shelf, and comes back with three bottles for me to choose. One is a Taylor's Late Vintage Port. The second is a Harvey's Amontillado Sherry. But the third is a bottle of South African Pinotage.

I said "I'll have a glass of that one please." Should I have told him about Port and Sherry? I think not.

See you all later in the year, unless I feel a sudden urge to untie myself from my desk. The novel is called "Holding Hands at Midnight." It is a very complicated four-way love story. Watch this space.

Long time no blog, so here's a poem to be going on with

This poem is in memory of Joe Palmer, a splendid man, one time landlord of the Crown Inn Elton, where I had my wedding reception, who died holding a glass of scotch at the bar of the Flying Services Club, Peterborough, many years ago. I hasten to add that although the manner of Joe's death (which he would have said was a very good way to go) was the inspiration for the poem, Joe himself was nothing like the character in the poem. He was a character who haunted the bar of the Bull Hotel when I was a trainee manager there. Finally, the poem was born from my overhearing two ladies on the bus discussing a funeral. One said to the other "He was one of three brothers you know." "Was he really?" said the other. Such trivia are often all that is needed to inflict yet another poem on the world.


ONE OF THREE BROTHERS



One of three brothers, she said, as if
that made a difference to the fact that he was dead.
One of an ancient unity, a faded photograph, now brown
with history, the silence of a distant past.
No sound comes out of photographs.

I knew him as a hobbling gnome, his head
shook and his gnarled hands found it difficult
to hold the beer glass which was central
to his life. He used the pub that I used,
waved his stick at me, at any human being
who acknowledged him, and grinned
his toothy gratitude to all who bought him beer.

An old man waits for death with shaking hands.
He hobbles through the wilderness of age,
his close-knit childhood, like a wave of strength
has rolled him to this hoary beach alone.
He is the last sad trickle of his family stream.
He waits the next great wave to bear him home.

One of three brothers? Well I never thought
there could be duplicates of him, the evil
letcher, sizer up and down of lovely girls.
He never harmed them and they laughed at him.
Their laughter made his gnarled heart leap
and showed the gaps between his nicoteeth.
He quivered with excitement and desire.

The girls all flirted with him, listened to his tales
of life that ended when their mothers had been young.
They kissed his cheeks and held his hands.
He cursed them for tormenting him.

Then one day Henry raised his glass, about to say
“Cheers,” but died before the word came out.
The girls he had just verbally abused cried, “Oh.”
The man who bought his last pint, unconsumed,
said nothing. Henry made no sound, as he
fell backwards on the beer soaked ground,
but as he fell his hand reached out and placed his pint
upon the bar. It sat there steadily, brim full,
and no hand reached for it.

Somewhere across the Universe,
perhaps two brothers welcomed him,
and handing him a foaming pint
said “Cheers!”

Oxford Literary Festival

Last month I spent four days in Oxford, staying in rooms at my old college, became a student again, a slightly surreal experience. My rooms were in the same quad, the same staircase, though not the same rooms I had in 1953. The bathroom looked much the same as it did when I shared it all those years ago with the Earl of Longford. I think in those days he was called Lord Pakenham. As I booked in to the porters lodge I found myself standing next to Robert Winston, sorry Lord Winston. Then on my way to my rooms I passed one of the Dimblebys. You meet all these illustrious people all the time in Oxford.

Staying in college is better than staying in a hotel. You get two large rooms, a bedroom and a study sitting room, with a desk to work at, with internet access. There is no television, but I didn't really want that at a literary festival, dd I? In fact to some extent I'd gone there to escape TV. My front window looks out at the quad, but my rear window is above an enclosed garden with daffodils in full bloom. It costs £55 per night and includes breakfast in the Great Hall of Christ Church, which was used as Hogwarts Hall in the Harry Potter films.

Sunday morning was Joanna Trollope, charming, witty and incisive as one would expect. Interesting to me as a writer was the discovery that she writes all her novels longhand. She says that she sees her subject matter as a series of pictures in her mind, so the act of writing is like scribbling as fast as you can a description of a film while you are watching it. I bought her latest book which she very kindly signed for me, not just her name, but a three line message, but then she does write in longhand.

Sunday afternoon in complete contrast it was Dr Brooke Magnanti, otherwise known as Belle de Jour, author of "The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl" portrayed by Billie Piper in the recent television series. As I was queueing up to get in I found the person infront of me was Annika Rice. I recognised her from behind of course, but later confirmed from the front view and her voice, that my assumption was correct. I can report that close up Anneka is as lovely as ever. But back to Dr Magnanti. Surprisingly, most of the questions from the audience were about writing rather than prostitution. She was asked about her experience of sudden fame. She said she was not often recognised because there is nothing very distinctive about her appearance. She sits on a tube train in London wondering which of her fellow passengers looks most likely to be a hooker. She says in any carriage there are likely to be two or three, but she is not one of them. She is in fact a research scientist, very smartly dressed. I have to say I found her very sexy indeed. I am sure she was a success in her other chosen profession. If I ever found myself in a brothel being offered the choice of a line-up of attractive ladies, it is more than likely I would choose Dr Brooke Magnanti rather than Billie Piper.

I am actually writing this blog as I walk along the river bank. Being Oxford, no one is surprised to see an elderly gent walking by the river, among the snowdrops and spring daffodils, speaking earnestly into a hand held voice recorder, probably a professor composing his next lecture. On the other hand the recorder does look a bit like a mobile phone. I did not much like Oxford when I went there as a student, being the only boy in Christ Church who came from a state school. But these days it has become one of my favourite places. I go to Oxford at every opportunity and it feels like coming home.

Being Sunday I decided to have Sunday lunch and being a poor pensioner, the most economical place to have it, available until 10 pm, was Wetherspoons. The Oxford Wetherspoons is called The Four Candles after Ronnie Barker. Fantastic value, roast beef, lamb, pork or chicken with all the what nots for £6.59 including a pint of this that or the other, or a glass of wine. And it was superb. The beef was not as rare as I would have liked it, but slow cooked and so tender you could separate it with a fork. And the wine is good quality and good value. If ever I find myself in a strange town I look for a Wetherspoons. Their breakfasts are excellent. Is this an advert? Unfortunately not, or I would be getting paid for it.

University towns have a greater concentration of young people than most places. There seem to be many more pretty girls than I am used to. When I was young in the forties and fifties, girls generally wore skirts and dresses. You could see their legs from the knees down and imagine the rest. Then came a long period when they wore what we used to call slacks, then came trousers and jeans. Now suddenly they're not exactly showing their legs again, but encasing them in black woolly tights with skirts so short their legs go right up to the bum. I was overtaken by an exceptionally tall young girl in Broad Street and as she passed me, her delicious little buttocks, fashionably encased in their black tights, were bobbing up and down right in front of my eyes, enough to put an old age pensioner off literary festivals for ever.

On my way back to college, in St Aldates was a large black slip-on shoe, not a very fashionable design, but it looked brand new, lying on the pavement by a bus stop. How can anyone lose one shoe? And did he get on to a bus still wearing the other one? Alas we shall never know.

When you are old and within reasonable sight of death, and if you do not believe in an afterlife, it is very salutory to be reminded that even though we do not survive as individuals, the human race does survive, and some of the thoughts and ideas of those who have died live on in the minds and hearts of those who follow. Walking across the quad in the moonlight I thought of my tutors Robert Burchfield, editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, and Professor J.I.M Stewart who wrote detective stories as Michael Innes, both now departed this life, and earlier that day along cobbled streets between ancient walls, I was conscious of all the others who have taken similar steps over the same stones, over hundreds of years. I once lived in the village of Eyam in Derbyshire. Walking home from the pub I knew I was walking the same village street as the people of Eyam who in 1666, locked themselves away from the world, letting no-one enter or leave their village for more than a year, to prevent the spread of the plague to the rest of Derbyshire. Nearly half of them died, but their deaths are all recorded on little plaques on the walls of the cottages they lived and died in, still in use today.

But this is supposed to be about the literary festival. Of course I went to other talks and seminars and readings and chatted to some authors and poets, but there is time in between to walk by the river, be a tourist, go to the pub and chat to interesting people. Not in the pub, I met Julie Summers author of "Stranger in the House" about the experiences of women whose husbands returned home after an absence of four or five years in the Second World War. She is writing a new book about the experiences of children who were evacuated in the 1940's. I am going to meet her sometime soon to talk about my experience.

In the White Horse in Broad Street, excited people bark and chirp. I listen and realise they are American men trying to speak Spanish, to chat up two Spanish girls. They seem not to have noticed that the girls speak excellent American. One of the Spanish girls who clearly knows the law, asks the waiter if she could please use the candle on their table to light a cigarette? Looking a bit doubtful he says yes. He looks alarmed when she lights her cigarette from the candle still right in the middle of the pub. He need not have worried. She knew the law all right. She inhaled deeply so that her cheeks bulged with the smoke, then rushed for the door so that no smoke was exhaled inside the pub. She didn't notice she had blown the candle out, but she knew the law.

The law banning smoking in pubs was passionately opposed by millions of smokers, though welcomed by some other millions of non smoking pub users. But from the day it became law, it was adhered to and complied with almost universally. Nobody smokes in pubs. They stand outside and suffer even if it is raining. Shortly after it was introduced, I was in my local pub when a very old man walked in smoking a cigarette. He went up to the bar still happily puffing away and ordered a pint. The hubbub in the pub had become an aghast silence. The barmaid was horrified. "Put it out! You'll lose me my job." The whole bar remained silent with shock that someone had smoked. There are not many controvercial laws which achieve that level of immediate acceptance. Look at the ban on driving a car while using a mobile phone. You see people flouting that law every day.

Oh yes, I did go to lots of other things at the Festival. I was there for four days. But you don't really want to know about all that. Heavy stuff and very literary.