The One Eyed Almanac

Just after Bethnal Green the railway line takes a sharp turn before making its final approach into Liverpool Street and it was around about here that I experienced my One Eyed Almanac eureka moment sometime in 2001.  I was on my way to work and deep in the midst of Martin Chuzzlewit when the phrase leapt out at me.

“'You will take care, my dear Martin,' said Mr Pecksniff, resuming his former cheerfulness, 'that the house does not run away in our absence. We leave you in charge of everything. There is no mystery; all is free and open. Unlike the young man in the Eastern tale--who is described as a one-eyed almanac, if I am not mistaken, Mr Pinch?--' 

I’d been tentatively scratching away at an idea for a novel for a few months, sketching out plot and scenes and characters in the evenings, and in various odd moments in cafes and on buses and trains, but thus far it was still a jumble, and a title-less one at that.  Now, all of sudden, I knew that I had my title, something that I could refer to the thing as, if only to myself at this stage, a title that was imprecise enough to mean anything that I wanted it to mean.

The subsequent novel had an over-prolonged gestation as I worked out the problems of what the hell it was that I wanted to do with it.  For over a year, during which I moved twice, it was a first person narrative, written under the boozy influence of Bukowski.

I’ve always liked Bukowski since I first read him, having soon got over the odious Mickey Rourke in the film Barfly, and, although I wish the Bukowski Industry would give over trying to extract every last morsel from his poems and letters, and empty bottles and belches and farts, I still get a good laugh out of reading his Henry Chinaski books – Factotum, Post Office, Women, Hollywood.  Having worked for a number of years in a factory, I appreciated someone who could write vividly and humorously and, yes, humanely, about that life of physical drudgery.  This was where the “I” came from in the first stab at the One Eyed Almanac.

As with most tyro novelists, I think, my subject matter was largely embellished auto-biography.
 

I wish now that I’d had a bit better idea of what I wanted to do with myself when I was eighteen but, since I hadn’t, I don’t regret for a minute not going off to university then.  I did get as far as applying, to “do” Politics at various London polytechnics (now pseudo-universities) but soon gave up on the idea in favour of idling.  It was all for the best, probably, as I’m sure that I would’ve behaved badly and devoted much more time to the student lifestyle than to actual studying.  By the time that I did go off to university, nearly a decade later, I’d had enough experience of being a horny-handed son of toil, and of a certain amount of sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, to fully appreciate the wonderful opportunity to learn, and to work hard at it without being distracted in the, quite natural, way that those fresh from the apron strings usually are.

I don’t know about now, as I haven’t signed-on for over twenty years, but in 1986 it was the easiest thing in the world to do and there were (nearly) no questions asked.  I filled in a form – a B1 – and after that the giros started dropping through the letterbox every fortnight.  I arranged to rent with friends and became quickly acquainted with the intricacies of manipulating housing benefit to gain another tenner a week.

 

Life was both simple and exciting.  It was a time of innocence and desperate cool. Of first love and throwing up on cider.  Of grubbing together enough money to buy a ‘teenth of Leb from a biker and of getting to Woolworth’s just as they re-priced anything that had dropped out of the top 40 that week.  Of cash-in-hand work stripping wallpaper and headlong flight from pringle-jumpered beer monsters. Of record shops and goth nightclubs.

It was this world, this idyll in urban ash-grey, which I returned to after fifteen years when I started to write the One Eyed Almanac.

And I threw everything in the pot at it.  Everything.  Every major incident and theme of those years was recalled and recycled and rendered down onto the pages of the One Eyed Almanac, a circular narrative of the lives of John Atkins and Stefan Adamczyk, that compressed it all into one headlong weekend of doledom, dodgy landlords, monsters on the bus, birds that wanted to know, birds that didn’t want to know, bikers, bedsit-logic, anarchists, acid, the black economy, parties, clubbing and the Maguffin of a vaguely valuable antique bath-tub.

I abandoned the first person for the third.  I began again.  It grew to a monstrous size, over 150,000 words.  30,000 of the (deliberately) purplest of these were devoted to an LSD trip, featuring the Revelation of The One Eyed Almanac and The Visitation of the Cockroach of Knowledge.  I got to the end, had a celebratory beer, took a deep breath and went back over it all once more, tweaking, cutting, pasting, putting in all the twiddly bits. 

 

Most of the dozen or so friends that I showed it to were complimentary, much more so than the twenty or more agents and publishers that I subsequently sent my sample chapters off to.  It would be nice to be able to say that my book was aggressively rejected.  Such was not the case.  It was rejection by pro-forma, and all the more galling for it.  Eventually I took the hint and stopped sending it out.  The postman, at least, must have been relieved.

If this sounds like sour grapes it isn’t meant to be.  I had a ball writing that book and I don’t regret for a minute all of the time that I spent upon it.  Sometimes, when the juice really flowed, I got truly high from the adrenalin of bashing the words out onto the page and of seeing the thing take shape, chapter by inexorable chapter.  Even at its best, writing has never been quite like that again.

Now, The One Eyed Almanac, in all its many scribbled and scrawled drafts and re-drafts, squats, untouched in quite a while, in several shoe boxes on the shelves in my spare room.  I’ve moved on through periods of glut and drought and distraction and blockage and through several other writing projects that have, I’m sure, bettered the Almanac in lots of ways but never again properly matched it for that first heady flush of juice.

Mentioning The War

Funny lot the Germans.  I’ve only been there once and then only briefly, on a work-related visit to Dusseldorf (sans umlaut) – a largely unattractive city that reminded me of nowhere so much as Coventry, probably on account of the large amounts of concrete everywhere that seems to have been the default pan-European response to area-bombing.

‘What was it like?’ a pal asked me afterwards.

‘Even the barking dogs in the night-time sounded sinister,’ I told him.  Though this was untrue and I only said it for comic effect in the pub.  In truth, Dusseldorf and the Germans were blandly inoffensive, right down to the shady looking drunk who stopped me on the bank of the Rhine to ask for “cigarretten bitte”.

The only exception to this insipidity was on the flight over.  I thought it was a bad enough start when I traipsed out onto the apron at City Airport and saw that the aircraft that I was going to fly on had propellers.  I suppose you’re just as doomed plummeting from 20,000 feet in a jet, it’s just that it didn’t make me feel very safe and secure (though it  did provide me with another gag-line in the pub afterwards about Dorniers, Heinkels and Junkers).  As we flew across the night skies of Europe and I mused about Guy Gibson and his unmentionable dog, the stewardesses came round and asked what I wanted and I didn’t hear them properly and they had to repeat themselves.  All air stewardesses possess a nasty streak in my experience, except the Singaporean ones, but these ones had a really nasty flash in their eyes that could not help but bring the word Camp to mind.  And not in the, good, gay sense either.  After that I couldn’t rid myself of the fear of being met off the plane by the Gestapo.

My only youthful reading that really touched upon the home-front of the Third Reich was in those sections of the Sven Hassel books that saw the fictive members of the 27^th (Penal) Panzer Regiment either on duty or on drunken debaucherous leave back in the Fatherland.  At the time, I blithely bought into the anti-war/anti-Nazi aspects of the stories.  Now, although I haven’t picked one of them up in maybe twenty years, I rather suspect that this was done as a necessary leavening for what basically amounts to a whole load of gratuitous Gun-Porn.   At some point I got rid of the dozen or so Hassel books that I owned, probably on the very sensible grounds of sexual-aesthetics i.e. the sort of bookish girls that browse your bookshelf aren’t going to be too taken with a load of volumes titled Assignment Gestapo, OGPU Prison, SS General, and the like, and it might well have reflected poorly upon one’s chances, even with Pride and Prejudice sitting there alongside them in mute mitigation.

At university I read a great deal more about AH and National Socialism and all that went with it, more than enough to sate me on the subject for a number of years and too much for my peace of mind.  At the time the great debate was around Goldhagen and the extent to which, I paraphrase, The Germans Were Up For It. (And by “It” I mean the really big bad IT).  At the time I was also very taken with The Tin Drum, of which I’ve forgotten almost all of the details except for some nasty business with eels…

Since then I’ve tended to shy away from reading more of the same, though I’m sensible of the privilege of being able to read the Klemperer diaries and I wholeheartedly recommend Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze, especially to anyone who still retains a lingering belief that the revolting Speer was basically a good chap who got caught up with the wrong crowd.

One fact that I did remember from my studies, and which came back to mind when recently reading the magnificent Alone in Berlin by Hans Fallada, was just how few, how thinly spread, the Gestapo were, and how much they relied upon the willingness of the German citizenry to denounce their erstwhile friends and colleagues and neighbours.  And willing they were, whether through fear or fervour, although all the evidence seems to suggest that this rings unfortunately true for all authoritarian/occupied states.

Against this pitiless background, where fear and avarice and bullying rule, and a single mistake could lead to torture and death, the dignity of the human spirit is redeemed by Otto and Anna Quangel’s campaign of dropping anonymous postcards across Berlin, denouncing the regime and its crimes.  Unable and unwilling to put it down, I read the book in two long sessions.  To be sure, it’s a bleak and harrowing read but also an extraordinary one, words which do not drop lightly from this ‘pen’ at least.  Read it.

Low Life

I never knew the old Soho, before the clean-up of the sex-trade, before the all-day opening hours that did strange and sometimes terrible things for the dynamics of drinking, before the blandification.

Sometime in my twenties, through reading and television, I started to become vaguely aware of Soho-as-cultural-epicentre: the Soho of Bacon and Farson and Muriel Belcher and what not.  But I was living in the North then and rarely visiting London.

A digression:  I did have a, personally very memorable, encounter with brash unashamed sleazy Soho way back in the 1970s.  I was nine or ten or so and I’d been in London for the day with my parents.  I think we went round Madam Tussaud’s but I can’t remember anything else about the day except that, as evening fell, we went into a café in Windmill Street.  My parents sat down with their backs to the window and I was opposite them, looking up at the, frankly, gynaecological image displayed on the front of the Windmill Theatre.  This was something of a revelation for me, in those innocent days when porn wasn’t just a few clicks away.  I recall trying to appear unconcerned and at the same time doing my very best to get a good eyeful so as I could properly tell the tale of my discovery at school on Monday.

It was only in the late 90s, by which time I was living on a major arterial road in an outer zone on the far fringe of the East End, that I began drinking in Soho on a semi-regular basis.  The French was my first pub-of-choice and I revelled in the half-pints and the gittanes and the theatricals that ensued whenever anyone had the temerity to wield a mobile phone.  With a gay friend, The Greek, I visited most of the pubs and bars on Old Compton Street, and wondered why they all seemed to have Red Stripe on draft.  I found my way across Oxford Street into Fitzrovia, to the Wheatsheaf, the Marquis of Granby and the Black Horse, and the company of the shades of Orwell and Dylan Thomas and Julian Maclaren-Ross.  Then there was the Coach & Horses.

It’s a shadow of its former self now, in my opinion.  The décor is the same. The gents is still pretty foul, and the transient European bar staff remain as clueless as ever.  But there’s a different, more self-conscious, crowd in there now and more tourists than ever before.  And they have sing-alongs twice a week...  

I count myself lucky to have caught it in the dying days when it was still populated, at least in part, by rogues and riff-raff and old soaks and interesting drinkers.   One day, seated at the bar, I found myself in conversation with a Moroccan tailor and a seedy little man who gave impersonations of the sliding doors on different metropolitan transport systems.  I offer this by way of a for instance.

Norman Balon was still in charge then.  A looming presence, even when not actually there behind the bar shouting at people to ‘get out of my fucking pub’, which seemed to occur on a more or less nightly basis.  Drunk, I left my bag behind once and rang up to see about it the next day.

<Sharp voice> ‘Hello?’

<Timid> ‘Is that the Coach & Horses?’

‘Yeah.  What have you lost?’

A recent Oxfam find was Low Life by Jeffrey Bernard, a collection of his columns for The Spectator.  An original Grumpy Old Man, Bernard’s mythos was intrinsically linked with Balon, ‘my friend, mentor and bank manager, Norman Balon, in whom we trust,’ and the Coach.

When you’ve had a hard, frustrating, unsatisfying day at work and you feel as if you’ve nothing to look forward to but more of the same tomorrow and the day after that, till death us do part, I find that a spoonful of spiced bile goes down a treat a bedtime.  At worst, you fall into the arms of Morpheus safe in the knowledge that you’re not alone in your ennui.  In that respect Low Life has cheered me up no end and I can do no more than offer up a random quartet of examples of Bernard’s sour musings.

‘If the age of consent was raised from sixteen to fifty, lunatic asylums would be empty.  I came to that conclusion ages ago and long before reading Monday’s Daily Mail , in which some young people agreed to be interviewed and express their idiotic opinions on such trivia as life, love, sex, marriage divorce.  Normally I wouldn’t dream of reading the opinions of pipsqueak teenagers but I was killing the longest half hour of the day, 10.30 – 11a.m., and someone had left the Mail on the table of the patisserie I use as a waiting room.’

‘For a moment I thought I was going mad.  There I was, sitting quietly in the Coach & Horses minding my own business and having my 11 a. m. gargle, when this man walked up to me and said “D’you remember Peter the Pole who worked in the dirty bookshop in St Anne’s Court?  You know, the bloke whose father is an ear-nose-and-throat surgeon in Warsaw?  Well anyway, he’s just moved to Hounslow.”   There’s no answer to that.  It has to be the most extraordinary address I’ve ever had aimed at me.  Not only do I not know Peter the Pole, have never even heard of him, nor care greatly how his father scrapes a living, I also have very little time for a man who moves to Hounslow and wouldn’t trust him an inch.  But what an amazing thing to walk up to someone out fo the blue and ask them that.’

‘I don’t know why, but recently I’ve been wondering what on earth it must feel like to be a guide dog.  I don’t much like dogs but I do love Labradors.  They’re the only digs that are kind, soppy, forgiving and kind to children.  I’d willingly guide a blind Labrador.  I had one once – a bitch – I called her Smedley and she was pretty extraordinary.  One day – during a period when I was desperately skint – she ate an entire weekend’s shopping when my back was turned.  A shoulder of lamb, some chops, six herrings, the lot – you name it.  I kicked hell out of her and she merely retreated to a corner and gazed at me with adoration, wagging her tail ever so tentatively and slowly.  You could half kill a dog like that but it’d still love you.’

‘It’s been another silly week, I’m afraid, and one punctuated with some very strange judgements.  On one day, I forget which, a woman who inflicted sixteen cigarette burns on the hand of her baby was sent to prison for six months.  On the same day, a man who stole £25,000 from his firm was sent down for four years.  And what is £25,000?  Pieces of paper.  Then there was the Miss World contest which I think may have been judged by blind eunuchs.  Miss Trinidad and Tobago, the one with the Cleopatra-style hair, was head and shoulders above her rivals but came nowhere.  But why stop at head and shoulders?  And why the hell should the result irritate me so much?  God knows, but it know how much the contest irritates some women.  It shouldn’t.  If I had the chance of winning £10,000 by walking around a stage wearing swimming trunks I’d jump at it and I’d thank the men’s liberation movement to mind their own business.’

Low Pressure

The Fates, or possibly The Controllers, have seen fit to decree that I should devote a good proportion of my precious life to commuting by train to and from central London.  In addition to this, as an inveterate non car-owner, my frequent trips to the North and holiday journeys elsewhere in England are also, invariably, undertaken by rail. 

 

Delays, cancellations, fare rises, and misinformation apart, it has its upside.  The train takes the strain, to quote the old Inter-City advertisement, and as the over-familiar scenery flashes or crawls by, I’m usually deep in a book, troubled only by those fellow passengers who feel impelled to share their telephone conversations and/or musical preferences with everyone within earshot.  As well as a book I often have a TLS or LRB in my bag, ansd usually a notebook to capture fleeting inspirations and overheard conversations lest they are lost forever.

Going at it mornings and evenings, the average novel is usually completed within a week or so.

 

(‘Average’ does not include the big three-decker beasts of Trollope, Dickens, and their whiskery ilk.  It’s entirely possible to pass slowly and seamlessly from one season to the next in their, usually pleasant, company before the finally drawing in to the great dénouements of marriages and bequests and revealed truths.)

  

The size and weight of much non-fiction is reason enough to keep  it to the home.  Then too, there’s a certain gaucheness in being seen in public with books about the Nazis or the Third Battle of Ypres or the Age of Sail, or whatever.  People might get the wrong idea. Or the right one.  And biographies, letters and essays always seem most cosily suited to being read late at night, propped up in bed, with just a lamp on and only the occasional wail of an urban siren to disturb.

I’ve never been a true railway enthusiast, though I did have a Great Western themed Hornby layout for a few years.  And I have never been a train spotter.  (Why are there always so many of them at Doncaster of all places?)  I must’ve passed through York on a hundred occasions without, yet, taking the time to venture across to the National Railway Museum, though that might change in the near future.  But what with spending so much of my time on the permanent way, and being of an enquiring mind, and having used pretty much all of the major British railway stations at one time or another, I haven’t been able to help but be vaguely interested in how the network developed into its current state.  

Why, for instance are all of the main London termini situated in a circle about the city centre?  Why, other than the Thameslink route, aren’t there any other lines through the capital?  Why is it so difficult to travel across the country?  Why is it so bloody expensive?  My season ticket now amounts to some 10% of my gross salary.

Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain by Christian Wolmar, which I received as a Christmas present, and pretty much read from cover to cover in a single snowbound tea-fuelled sitting, answered all of these questions.  What they teach now in school I have no idea, but in my younger days it was impossible to avoid learning all about the Stockton-Darlington and the Rainhill Trials.  From my Hornby era I was familiar enough with the Big Four and hungover afternoons in front of cable television had acquainted me with just about every significant civil engineering project of the nineteenth century.  But the visions and the commercial schemings and shenanigans of the great period of Railway Mania had always remained somewhat hazy to me until now so I’m grateful to Wolmar for introducing me to the life and career of the superbly Balzacian George Hudson and the vainglorious tale of the Grand Central.  The sad tale of the past sixty or so years is worth reading too, from Nationalisation through Beeching to Privatisation to the present pretty pass throughout which period expenditure upon roads has invariably been portrayed as an "investment" while spending on rail amounted to (dread word) "subsidy".

Venturing precariously out into the ice and snow over the yuletide period, I undertook a tour around the bookshelves of a few charity shops in the course of which I picked up a copy of The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin. I’d been aware of this book for a while and it had piqued my interest, though not so much so as to buy it new.  Based upon one of the odder manifestations of railway-mania, the London Necropolis Railway  , this is a superb rendering of early Edwardian London and of the sounds, sights, smells and arcanery of that vanished world of steam.  It’s just a shame that ‘murder mystery’ plot doesn’t match up to the atmosphere. 

 

Frankly my dear, I didn’t give a toss who dunnit.

Sub-Standard

When I was still living at home with my parents, in their semi-detached house on a sprawling 1930s estate, I was only a few minutes’ walk away, down the alleyway that ran along the side of the Co-op, from the local library.  Searching online today, I see that at some point in the intervening quarter-century it became a (dread word) Community Library but, that sin aside, I’m sorry to see that it’s listed as one of those under threat of possible closure because, you see, I feel indebted to that library for helping to set me off along the never ending yellow brick road of books. 

 

Why do some people become voracious readers and others don’t?  Is there a reading gene?  I began with Enid Blyton and Ladybird and have never looked back such that now, if I don’t have a book or a newspaper or a magazine to hand when I’m eating my breakfast, I sometimes catch myself reading from the cereal box.
 

From the age of about seven I was in and out of that library two or three times a week, usually borrowing up to my maximum limit, reading, reading, always reading.  Biggles was my earliest crush and they had books in that library that were long out of print, unavailable in the shops, which I borrowed over and over again.  Biggles was such a major part of my early reading life that he’s deserving of a piece all of his own so I’ll say no more for now.  I don’t remember, now, what else I was reading from the children’s section of the library but at some point I must have tentatively wandered across the way into the collection proper.  It was probably science fiction at first and then the dread Tolkien but from then on I was off the leash, grazing eclectically through the whole place, fiction and nonfiction alike, stumbling upon unfamiliar corners of classification, little realising that the fates would eventually set me to working as a librarian for a good few years.

Sometime in my teens I picked up a copy of Good Times, Bad Times by Harold Evans.  I had little idea at the time about what went on in broadsheet newspapers – we took the Mirror at home – and it was a window upon the hitherto unknown world of journalism: Thalidomide, Biafra, the dying days of the old Street of Shame, and the inexorable rise of the Dirty Digger.  I’ve never re-read it – perhaps I ought to – but something about it must have stuck in my mind as I often recall it whenever I’m reading anything else about newspapers.

There’s little doubt that, Scoop is the non plus ultra of novels about the profession  and I dare say that Michael Frayn must have had it much in mind when he wrote Towards the End of the Morning, a recent read of mine.  Christopher Hitchens’ piece on Fleet Street's Finest in the Guardian from a few years ago makes a great deal of Frayn.  More, I’m afraid, than I could.

 

Social history apart, the first few chapters of the book are a genuinely very funny representation of a vanished world of long liquid lunches and hot metal.  I caught myself laughing out loud on the train.
 

“…do you remember Pavey-Smith?  He got the canteen manageress with child, obtained a refrigerator by fraud, charged dinner for eight at the Savoy to the paper, and then – mercifully – absconded with three months’ salary in advance.”

There’s a good little novel about newspapers in there but it’s sunken beneath the stodgy weight of the tedious, querulous, never resolved, personal demons of protagonist John Dyson and his friends and family, that makes up the rest of the book, never rising much above the average of early-middle Amis (Snr).

 

I gave up on the Sunday Times years ago, after I realised that I was throwing three quarters of it away unread.  Was it Orwell who said something about shifting from one newspaper to another like a sick man trying to get comfortable in bed?  Unsatisfactory though it often is – and I could live for a thousand years and still not miss ever seeing another piece by Hillary Mantell – I’ve long settled upon the Guardian on Saturdays for its Review section and the Observer on Sundays.

As for the ‘Community’ library, I shall be keeping my beady eye upon developments. I dare say that it will do little good but I will be flinging a few missives in the direction of the council should the worst be announced.