The History of the Ginger Man

by J. P. Donleavy

  Edward Connell became my London guide. Born there and knowing the city well, but not well enough to escape in an IRA attempt to blow up Hammersmith Bridge over the Thames. Having got caught before his bomb exploded, spending ten years in a British prison, he acquired and so had a wide reading knowledge, which served him both as a literary critic and a general fixer, having many useful criminal contacts in London’s underworld. Upon passing with him through an area called Walham Green, which one could describe only as possessing a somewhat unprepossessing village aspect, I said to Connell that it was exactly the type of anonymous area that one might choose to settle in. And directly across from the tube station Fulham Broadway, I suddenly saw a cheap freehold house for sale in an auctioneer’s window. It was the strangely nondescript upper-working-class aspect of this part of London in which I felt I could continue a hand-to-mouth struggle. As well as to give my mother-in-law an absolute fit.

  The borough of Fulham possessed within its boundaries 1706 acres and 122,195 residents in the year 1953. And it at least could boast of some proximity to more socially acceptable districts in respect of the British life-and-death concerns with such matters. Plus it had other colorful aspects, which Connell and I observed as we reconnoitered the area and walked past a vaudeville variety theater, called the Granville. Posted at its doors were weekly changed photographs of topless lovelies. And of attractions to come. Proof for certain that one was now many moral miles away from Ireland. There were pubs, cinemas, secondhand furniture shops, a church, a town hall, a large ironmonger, greengrocers, butchers and an entire street full of market stalls and barrows. And you could buy pork pies, fish and chips and jellied eels. With its own tube station and several bus routes threading through it, although an outlying area, it was comfortably accessible to central London. But let me tell you, you’d search long and hard to find a single sign of any pukka folk within its borders.

  However, as I went to investigate the cheap freehold house, things were looking up in other amenity aspects. On a footpath, I made my way across an open grassy space called Eel Brook Common, overlooked by a terrace of small but pleasantly appealing houses. Then I thought all could not be that bad as I made my way farther beneath a straight avenue of cropped poplar trees lining Wandsworth Bridge Road. However, along with the name of the borough, Fulham, every name now of every street sounding socially taboo. But on a corner, I came to the most marvelous Victorian edifice of one of London’s very first cinemas called the Star. Its front elevation like that of a Grecian temple. There was a tiny post office and, directly across the street, a library. I entered a narrow, slightly crooked alley, which emerged into what could distinctly be socially less than your upper-working-class precincts. Now revealed were sprawling acres of drab, small and woefully humble houses, beyond which lay a vast gasworks. Turning right and past a corner bakery and row of shops and a hundred or so yards down the street, I came to number 40 and 40A Broughton Road. Resolutely I entered 40A. Almost knowing already that here within this doorway and up the narrow flight of stairs lay my fate. In this grim little street, which was to play a long and significant role in the history of The Ginger Man.

  With two self-contained flats, one on top of the other, both had side-by-side front-door entrances. The upstairs being vacant, the downstairs flat had already-installed, long-established tenants. Paying a pittance in rent, it was not long before this getting elderly couple told me the place was falling down. And as I got a tour of their rooms, it was not hard to see that they had been discouraging previous buyers with their descriptions of damp and dilapidations and the numerous repairs required. But from my pioneering days in Ireland, I at least had a vague idea as to what made houses stand up and as to what I could do to keep them up and from falling down. Plus Eddie Connell agreed with me that the general premises, with its postage stamp garden and indoor toilet facility of combined basin and bathtub, were sound. Driving as hard a hard bargain as I could, I bought this nonbijou residence for 800 pounds. And again, as I did previously in Boston, viewing the long haul into the future, I once more deposited myself and family firmly on the wrong side of the tracks and in the most blatantly wrong part of town. So wrong, in fact, that with a bare handful of exceptions no one to whom I revealed my address either bothered to write or visit me there. Thus doing my mother-in-law no favor, but she now could hardly complain. Her disapproval shown over the many years one was destined to be there, for while I was in residence I can’t remember her ever making a single visit.

  Ah, but in many ways that lady was right. For let me tell you, I soon had early second nightmarish thoughts as I spent my first night in Broughton Road. Through the ceiling from below came chronic lung-rupturing coughs. My tenants, otherwise as quiet as mice, seemed to put themselves to sleep with long conversations, which I could hear as uninterrupted muttering. Then at the approach of dawn, one was awakened by a pair of talkative ladies quickly approaching with their click click click of footsteps. Passing as they rapidly would below my window every day but Sunday, the drone of their loud words finally fading at the bottom of the road, where they worked in the laundry called Sunlight. An apt name, as looming massively on the horizon above the rooftop of this cleansing business were the four vast chimney stacks of Fulham Power Station, spewing an endless white cloud of smoke out into the sky above London. And the words one most often heard spoken in this borough of Fulham, which might have applied to the winter foggy air of this vast city.

  “Ere, ere, now, it makes you think.”

  And what made one think was an occasion which came soon enough. Of a fog so thick, turned into smog and prolonged for days, that bus conductors had to walk step by cautious step with flaming torches in front of their vehicles. And one could literally not see one’s hand held up a foot or two in front of one’s face. The fog seeped into the house and formed a white opaqueness across the room. Prize cattle in the then being held agricultural show suffocated to death along with four thousand people. I now knew what my tenants’ lungs had gone through. However, the local electricity power station’s chimneys being so high, its smoke did not offend those so near. Worse was the gasworks to the east, and it was with some relief that I would now hear aircraft pass overhead on their way to the London airport, knowing it meant then that the wind was from the west and not from the gasworks. But now with each breath I took, I despaired for Valerie’s and Philip’s bronchial tubes and my own.

  As a nonsmoker and after the comparatively clean air of the Isle of Man and Ireland, I was appalled over one’s helplessness concerning the vital air one breathed. For the first time, I became politically sensitive to the victimization of a population unable, or worse, disinterested, to do anything about it. And it did provide the one single exception to my not ever looking for a job. Upon seeing an advertisement in one of the better journals for the post of secretary to what seemed to be the first-formed Smoke Abatement Society, I applied but alas received no response. I did, however, over the next few years as a resident of Fulham provide as best I could my own remedies and made every effort I could upon every occasion available to get us away into the pure air of rural climes.

  Meanwhile, I kept submitting the manuscript of The Ginger Man to a small variety of English publishers, and always with rejection as the result. Either turning it down out of hand or someone holding on to the manuscript to wait for an opportune time to show it further up the corporate ladder. But then it always seemed that before that could be effected by such good-intentioned people, one would sense their qualms if not their squeamishness and upon my request the manuscript would be sheepishly returned. But I had now a minutely tiny handful of admirers. And some with literary connections, such as Desmond MacNamara and his wife, Skylla. Plus here and there a literary type or two who pronounced positively upon instead of denouncing the manuscript. Then, after many a barren month went by, things suddenly began to happen to me as a plain, ordinary writer. And finally a solemn day in May dawned in the year 1954. A famed and revered English newspaper, t
he Manchester Guardian, accepted a short sketch I sent them called “My Painful Jaw.” Telling of a brief encounter of sports manship that in fact had taken place in the ring of the New York Athletic Club.

  During this time, I did have, occasionally penetrating beyond the social pale, my few visitors to Fulham. Valentine Coughlin from Ireland came. The only man ever known to be able to pledge a few pounds of your best raw steak in a Dublin pawnshop. And who had now commenced a Robin Hood life of benign villainy in London. Also visiting were two socially stalwart former Trinity men, David Romney and Glin Bennett, who, having qualified in medicine, were now both practicing doctors in London. Desmond MacNamara too braved the social opprobrium and brought his own pillow to cushion his vegetarian-nourished bottom on the hard kitchen chairs. Ah, but few in their social dread dared to tread in this district. Indeed, some of them in becoming suddenly aware of crossing the border into Fulham actually stopped in their tracks and not only retreated but ran. One such doing so, when he thought he was out of my sight, was actually sprinting to get as deep and as far and fast as he could back into the socially safe geography of Kensington. I was so dumbfounded by this that I persisted to witness this incredible phenomenon from the bridge separating the boroughs and watched him till he reached the gates of Brompton Cemetery, where he tripped and, so help me God, fell on his face into a mud puddle.

  But I began to more and more understand Nora, my mother-in-law, and what she had said she did not want to have befall her daughter and grandson which had now befallen them. The social status of boroughs and postal districts in London was clearly a matter of pathological concern. Leaving me more flabbergasted than appalled. And I was quickly finding that along with my own status and that of my elegantly beautiful wife and charming little son, that we were all, save for the few visiting stalwarts, truly to be left bereft, abandoned and alone. And I remembered back to the Isle of Man, where I briefly went to write in the lonely silence of a room over a garage, across from the Anchorage, and how, bringing the world of Dangerfield with me, I could find in this snug chamber in this small stone building that it could become in minutes my own world. As did these small ten-by-ten rooms in Broughton Road, where I now worked on an oak table from the secondhand furniture store. And where I was certainly not making any new friends, and was in fact losing even all the old ones, hand over fist. Ah, but then, by God, didn’t there come visiting, two others. Himself, Brendan Behan, with his equerry in tow, Lead Pipe Daniel the Dangerous, also himself. I knew that these two latter had braved the social opprobrium of the borough of Fulham because an indisputable description was given of them as they appeared at the local library, where next day the terrorized porter came up to whisper confidentially to me.

  “Mr. Donleavy, two gentlemen called here at the library yesterday looking for you, saying they knew you and asking for your address. Now by the look of them, I didn’t think they would be friends of yours and I thought the better of giving them your address. They wouldn’t give their names, but they said they’d be back.”

  And finally getting my address, back Brendan did come a few days later. Bringing about one of those signal evenings in the history of The Ginger Man. Himself rarely to be met but by chance, he came calling as he would out of the blue. Rarely too did he ever make an appointment, and if he did you could depend upon it that it would not be kept. Just as he mostly went on his merry way, singing through the anonymous streets of London but always traveling toward a destination where he might cadge money from someone he knew. And without a single passing Londoner knowing what to make of him. Except to usually find what were meant to be friendly remarks, insulting and assisted by a quickly commandeered group of sympathizers, attacking poor Behan on the spot. But if allowed in time to use it, he could, with his cockney accent, fool them into thinking he wasn’t the Irishman they thought he was and was only imitating one. However, after Valerie giving him tea and cake, he seemed more discreet in my company as we went wandering throughout the afternoon together, crossing London and proceeding as if on some strange odyssey as we might have done in Ireland. Behan stopping to chat with and striking up a camaraderie with any workmen he saw at work. Either painting, bricklaying or digging a ditch or fiddling with telephone wires. When Behan’s comments were usually at their best but sometimes not that much appreciated.

  “Ah, now that wire there you’ve got in your hand, I’d know by its royal color of crimson that it would be going straight to the queen herself.”

  On the beginning of our journey, village to village through London and proceeding along King’s Road, we stopped in the pub The World’s End to have the first of many drinks. And farther on into Chelsea. We took a surprising cup of tea at Sloane Square. The occasion being notable as the first and only time I could remember ever being in Behan’s company in a premises not serving alcoholic beverages. Behan making passing quips with the waitresses and chatting across the table to anyone minding his own business. From Sloane Square, along Eaton Square we wandered into Pimlico, somehow in London certain streets attracting one to walk them again and again. Ebury Street being one, which took us past Buckingham Palace. Behan, whose belly had become considerably rotund, was shuffling along in his down-at-heels shoes and over his open-necked, crumpled shirt, he wore a gray sweater that could originally have been of another color. He was at the time staying at the indigent man’s Rowton House. And just as he would sentimentally recall his Borstal days, as if it were a time he’d spent at Eton, Harrow, Winchester or Marlborough schools, he paid lip service to the queen. And it always took one aback as Behan, the anti-British revolutionary, did so in the same fashion as would any well-connected upper-class Englishman.

  “Mike, there are many more times when I’d have to say that being at Borstal were some of the very happiest days of my life. I’d be as loud as any of them singing “God Save the King” and, bejesus, I’d be at the same time trying as well not to be as sincere. Of course, in me own Dublin accent, I’d be making it known to other paddies for the same decent royal family to go fuck themselves. But speaking for myself now, Mike, I often thought I’d like to be invited in there to the palace to have a cup of tea and maybe then knock back a few balls of malt with herself. And I would too, only that I’d be shot for it by the IRA unless I had with me a bomb hanging between my legs instead of a pair of balls. But Jesus, Mike, walking now through here, this St. James’s Park they call it, with no Irish gobshite ripping up the tulips or drunkenly pissing on the petunias or trying to steal and eat the pigeons, you’d have to say this was a fucking civilized city and place.”

  Praising as we went, Behan even waxed lyrical as we wandered past Churchill’s wartime bunker, where at last I was able to tell Behan something, concerning Gainor having this war leader’s private number to ring during the hostilities. Then under Admiralty Arch and across Trafalgar Square and through the swarms of pigeons fluttering and shitting everywhere. Behan continuing like a tourist guide. Announcing that we were now at Charing Cross, which marked the center of London. And that the vast edifice of Bush House, in which part of the BBC was housed, was the largest office block in the world. Behan still stopping to make quips or to talk with any stationary workman at work we passed. At the same time seeming to carry with him in his head a word count of the manuscript of The Ginger Man. Its numbers of chapters and its characters. And able to recall its incidents, always referring again to his own cameo appearance in the novel.

  “Mike, I’m proud to appear in your book, as fictionalized and as minor as I am. For bejesus, if you told any of the major facts of my life, I’d have to sue you. But, Mike, as a writer and achieving the quality you have, you’ve caught up to me in age and it would make me that bit concerned now that I’m the three years older. And you’ve already appeared in two well-thought-of journals, Punch and the Manchester Guardian.”

  In reaching Fleet Street, we visited the London office of the Irish Times, which seemed to be regarded as an Irish literary outpost in London, and a steppingstone to gre
ater things. Behan being well known to, and knowing, the various reporters on the Irish newspapers as well as one or two investigative journalists on the Sunday tabloids. And with any of whom he would go to drink in the pubs. Fleet Street also seemed a place for Behan to rendezvous with other Irish who’d taken up to living in London, where somehow this famed thoroughfare gave them a sense of being where it mattered. And anxious as they were to raise themselves up by their bootstraps. Behan explaining his own attraction to this canyon inhabited by Britain’s national newspapers.

  “Mike, it would give you the feeling being here with the presses trembling the ground beneath your feet, that you’d be at the center of the universe with the news coming in from every corner of the globe and then sending it out again twice as bad-sounding as when it came in. And it would give you an awful urge to go in somewhere fast and have a drink. And to stay there and not to worry about the world going on outside. For if it fell down, blew up or if it went off on a tangent into the nether regions of the universe, or if the Irish discovered they were Jews, and had six-sided stars instead of three-leafed shamrocks coming out their arses, you’d be the first to hear of it and ask fast for another bottle of stout.”

  And ask for another bottle of stout we did. Desmond MacNamara turning up briefly but unlike the rest of us always meticulously pursuing and keeping intact his careful life-surviving routines. He was probably one of the world’s best perfectionists regarding the poison-free quality of food, nothing but nature’s pure best ever passing his lips. MacNamara on this day had been on his cycle to Billingsgate to buy the freshest of fresh fish for his cats. And before the night was out, he would also head to Covent Garden for vegetables just in from the countryside. But this slight build of a man who by all appearances wouldn’t hurt a fly, was possessed of a formidable temper, and was Dublin’s first Bohemian who had long provided the hub around which apprenticing Bohemians clustered. He was also marvelously adept at inciting people’s wrath and getting their goat, which he seemed to do innocently enough by merely repeating the truth. He was, however, tolerant of all, especially Gainor, and was also one of the very few to whom Behan would ever defer and about whom Behan never had a harsh word to say. A friendship that always seemed to me astonishingly strange as it was enduring and continued to exist as this night roared on. The drink flowing till the money ran out. With Behan confiding to me as we drank our last round.