I did not know what to do with what I saw. I still don’t really know. But the knowledge that a human being in an office somewhere wrote this to another human being in an office somewhere else terrified me. But more disturbing was the fact that memos like this are still being written in our world. The methods of killing may have changed, but the desk killers are still here – in fact they’re flourishing, they’re all around us. ‘They’, I say instinctively, because ‘we’ is too upsetting.
The comforting dividing line between those two small words …
How to explain the fascination of the London A–Z for me as a young child growing up in the middle of Suffolk? More than fascination, more like an obsession. How I’d take the paperback, with its jaunty red, white and blue cover, from its place on the landing, and leaf through the cheap black and white pages almost furtively. Tracing with my finger the spaces between the football grounds that I recognised, and the very few parts of London that were known to me. So going from Uncle Ian’s near Newington Green, across Petherton Road, up an alleyway, out at Highbury Hill, and then down to the Arsenal stadium. Arsenal, strange name, it didn’t really seem to be a place. ‘Tott-en-ham Hot-spur’, I’d whisper the name to myself, full of something exotic, that curious second part – ‘Hotspur’! No other team in the world could claim that … and their ground, ‘White Hart Lane’. Look that up at the back. Page 52, square E5. My finger negotiating the grids. There it is! Let’s see if I could get from Highbury to there. I wonder how far it is? And what are the Seven Sisters? God, to have seven sisters – one is surely enough … And then I’d suddenly be in central London, and lost entirely. Bewildered by the dipping and curving of the River Thames, and unable to find the place we reached on the boat to Greenwich … my finger tracing north again, ‘Kingsway’ (but a long way from Buckingham Palace; strange name again), the British Museum – where we went to the Tutankhamen exhibition and had to queue for hours. University College, that’s where Mark works, so what’s his nearest Tube station? ‘Euston Square’. Weird word, wonder how you say that? Ee-u-ston? Oo-ston?
And coming up to London in holidays, or at half-terms. Wired. Gripped. Greedily staring at everything, everyone, but trying not to show my fascination (which would mark me out as a visitor). My older brother was almost exactly the opposite; he seemed to turn a shade of sickly grey-green on his occasional excursions to the city, and visibly relaxed only when we were leaving. The train (change at Marks Tey for London) seemed to take for ever. ‘Is it the next stop?’ I’d ask Corinne, my long-suffering mother, again and again. But it was usually Shenfield or Ingatestone or Romford or Ilford … Eventually those deep tunnels of brick arrived (with mysterious doors embedded in them, doors which I never saw a single person enter or emerge from). The darkness of ‘Liverpool Street station’ – again, what an odd name, hundreds of miles away from Liverpool, and not even facing in the right direction! Curious dark metal walkways over the platforms, then down a kind of tunnel, then right, past a war memorial built into the wall, blinking out into daylight, black taxi cabs with orange lights. We’d walk over to a smaller, older building, steps up to Broad Street station and the beginning of the line that took us round to Uncle Ian’s (near Canonbury station). That was three, or maybe four stops round, in the trains with the heavy doors that made a reassuring sound when they swung shut, a kind of ‘thunk’. But if you stayed on you could go all the way to Kew Gardens. That was where Borka ended; Borka: The Adventures of a Goose with No Feathers. My favourite book as a young boy, what a subconscious impact it must have made on me! The sadness of being born with no feathers, of being teased by other geese. And then eventually, after all the other geese had left him behind when they migrated for the winter, he finds his happiness in London, with the other exotic birds living in Kew Gardens, including his special new friend Ferdinand. And how I loved to move from the purplish-browns of the Essex marshes and that sense of abandonment to the warmth of belonging, the burnt golds and rusty oranges of the city, repeating the story to myself. And vowing that one day I’d find my own Kew Gardens and my own Ferdinand …
It wasn’t just the A–Z that captivated me. There was the shelf of books, halfway up the stairs on the landing, with gold and silver writing in capital letters on their spines that opened up worlds in my head. I would brush my hand over these spines as I’d go up the stairs, perhaps hoping that the mystical names would somehow penetrate the skin of my fingers and become a part of me. All these years later I can still see these books in my mind’s eye: Freya Stark, Beyond Euphrates and A Winter in Arabia; Gavin Maxwell, Lords of the Atlas; Arthur Grimble, A Pattern of Islands; Elspeth Huxley, The Flame Trees of Thika; and Gerald Brenan, South from Granada. At the end of the shelf, as if keeping all the others upright, were the two green volumes of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence – who, as I later found out, became better known as Lawrence of Arabia.
Like many children, I guess, I was mesmerised by maps – drawing them, creating imaginary islands, poring over the worlds conjured up by the black and white maps in Swallows and Amazons or The Hobbit, and then going back to the episode in the book and trying to reconcile the narrative with the distance and contours of the map. Occasionally I would find a discrepancy (‘They couldn’t possibly have sailed round that side of the island without being seen by the pirates!’) and try to discuss this with my brother or sister, but neither of them seemed to be as bothered as I was by the lack of cartographic accuracy. The book that most bewitched me, though, was The Ship That Flew by Hilda Lewis. It had been my father’s, and had his name, Mark Gretton, written inside in pencil, his handwriting barely recognisable, his familiar italics then only partly formed in that seven-year-old boy’s hand.
Inside the front cover (terracotta, cloth) was a different kind of map, of a seaside town, not exactly bird’s eye, but seen from above, at an angle: Radcliff-on-Sea. Everything was drawn in blue and white – the bandstand, the Marina Hotel and the cliffs beyond the town, and, beyond those, the house where the children in the story lived. Four of them, two girls, two boys (the eldest one Peter), and as the book opens all of them are gloomy. Their mother is seriously ill – a diabolically clever way to engage the child reader’s heart – and Peter’s father takes him aside to tell him that he needs to be very grown up, and not let on to his siblings the full extent of her sickness. And he wouldn’t be able to take him to the dentist today, so here was two shillings and sixpence (the book was published in 1939, before the advent of the welfare state), he should go by himself, and with the shilling or so left over he could buy an ice cream, and still have money for his bus fare home.
Peter takes this, together with sixpence that he’s saved up. So into Westhill he goes, to the dentist (the perfectly named Mr Frinton). He’s brave, and feels quite grown up as he leaves, liberated by not being with his younger siblings for a change. This puts him in a more reflective mood than normal, more grown up, even the buildings of the little town seem subtly different. And then it happens – the moment of inexplicability. On his way down to the seafront to get his ice cream, he takes a ‘narrow little street and rather dark, with old houses set close together. Peter was rather surprised. He didn’t remember this street.’ And I walked down this street with Peter so many times, thrilled at his perplexity in the face of this unfamiliar lane. He stops outside an old shop with a bay window, and his heart suddenly skips a beat – he’s seen a beautiful ship, carved in wood, about as long as his hand. In the shop an ancient man with an eyepatch appears eventually, and, in response to Peter’s enquiry about the carved ship, tells him that ‘It would cost you all the money you have in the world – and a bit over.’ Peter fishes in his pocket and takes out the shilling for his ice cream and bus fare home and his own sixpence. The ship is his. It doesn’t matter about the ice cream or the bus fare, he’s just so happy to have the boat, to feel it in his pocket. He decides to walk home along the shore, but has miscalculated the incoming tide. With growing horror he realises he’s about to drown, and the water is licking at his feet, when suddenly as he says aloud ‘I wish I could get home!’ the boat reveals its true nature, and rapidly grows into a ship, big enough to step into. And soon he’s flying, Radcliff behind him – the view inside the front cover of the book! And we’re off …