On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  After these two efforts I never aspired to further carpentry. I quit while I was ahead. It was the right thing to do. I’m sure I was headed for a botched job. My DIY skills have ever been touch-and-go, with shelves collapsing and lumps of hard glue left bulging behind wallpaper. I suppose it was the ambitious scheme of these two projects which caused me to concentrate more, work with patience (a thing I am not at all good at) and come out with a double triumph.

  The kids started at their schools, Rick going to Shoebury High and Shaney to Friar’s Primary School. Rick came home with a bloody nose the first day. As a ‘new kid’ he’d been beaten up on the way home and naturally he was quite distraught. Annette went storming down to the school the next day, found the culprits, and gave them a yelling in front of their schoolmates. Rick didn’t like this. He’d been bullied on the first day in the past of course, as I well knew, service kids having to join schools where all the civilians’ kids have known each other since birth. On previous occasions he had defended himself vigorously, but sometimes you get overwhelmed.

  However, Annette’s fury worked, and very soon the other boys realised he was a good sportsman and he wasn’t picked on again. There are two ways to keep bullies at bay at school: either become the class comedian or become the school’s best athlete. The first worked for my godson, Luke, now a fashion designer in New York, and the second for Rick. I don’t think Shaney as a girl ever experienced that kind of bullying, though I could be wrong.

  We were very hard up during the first two years of me leaving the RAF. I remember having holes in my shoes and having to cut out cardboard insoles to cover them. We were visited at that time by a New Zealand businessman who owned a fish paste factory in Dunedin. Fred Haslam was a religious man and wanted to turn my short story ‘Let’s Go To Golgotha’ into a play or musical. He stayed with us overnight and professed to be shocked at the standard of living of people like us in Britain, compared with houses in New Zealand. The script for the play was written by a friend of his, but only reached church level at Easter and other festivals, never the West End, or even the East End.

  My work at C&W continued as I learned to do what was required of me. I made new friends. John Tibbles was a young man who knew the communications world inside-out and I learned a lot from him. Phil Monk, Roy Blane, several others. Phil has remained a close friend and often comes to our place in Spain with his wife Judy, another ex-C&W employee. We were all Grade 4 Executives at the time (except Judy, who was a Grade 2 and therefore our superior) and we all worked in the Traffic Department, run by a small thickset tyrant called Tug Wilson. My immediate boss was the section head Ian Bowles, a Grade 1 and a really good man, but above him was a manager who had never thrown off his early habits as a junior clerk. This fellow spent his time eating boiled sweets and correcting the punctuation of our letters.

  I had only been at C&W a month when we had another ex-RAF man arrive in the section. He was none other than my old CO from Strike Command, a flight lieutenant. We were surprised to see each other and I was even more astonished to find he carried round with him a ragged magazine with a science fiction story written by him. The flight lieutenant did not stay long at C&W. I think he found it uncomfortable working alongside an ex-sergeant he had once reprimanded. In the not so distant past an airman on my watch at Strike Command had forgotten to put the words ‘EXERCISE EXERCISE EXERCISE’ on the bottom of a signal and almost launched World War Three. Bomber pilots who received the signal believed the situation was live. They set out to bomb a Russian submarine in the North Sea. I was able to prevent the outbreak of a world war, something even Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain never managed, but since the airman was under my immediate command I was hauled up on the carpet with two of my corporals and reprimanded for not keeping a closer eye on what my staff were doing.

  I never saw another story by the same man and guessed that was his one shot at literary fame.

  On the writing front, I had a letter from another would-be sf novelist, a Robert Holdstock, who asked me if I had any spare unpublished stories. He wrote, ‘I’m trying to get an anthology together entitled Time in Hand. Science fiction stories by new writers with only one or two under their belt, like you and me . . .’ Did I have any unpublished stories? Did Don Juan eschew the life of a celibate monk? Rob and I agreed to meet each other for lunch in Sicilian Avenue, close to Theobald’s Road where I worked. He was working on his PhD at the time, already having a Masters in Zoology, and was employed in doing something unspeakable to mosquitoes in a nearby laboratory.

  I took to the man instantly. He was very tall and dark-bearded, not lean exactly, but not overweight either. He wore glasses that he constantly pushed up his nose. He laughed a lot, was amazingly enthusiastic about writing, and in short he became my closest friend. Rob was one of those people whose charismatic personalities ensure that a whole swarm of friends are always buzzing around. We talked about our plans for getting published and he talked about Christopher Priest, a young writer who was already being published by Faber and Faber. Rob knew just about everyone in fandom and in the sf writing world.

  Rob took me along to a pub in Farringdon called The Globe where science fiction writers and fans gathered once a month. The bar was always packed with sf enthusiasts and alive with talk that centred around what had become my favourite genre. I met dozens of people who were desperately interested in sf and fantasy writing and indeed these meetings further served to fire my passion for the field. Later the venue moved to another pub, the One Tun and continued to thrive with the same level of high energy as it had at The Globe.

  ‘The science fiction editor at Fabers is a woman called June Hall,’ Rob told me one evening. ‘I’ve already chatted with her about getting a novel published. You should send something to her.’

  I left Rob that day buzzing with ebullience, dying to get home to write the next chapter of my new novel Beloved Earth, set in the far future where the earth has exploded into small asteroids and those humans who have migrated to other planets seek pieces of it to put in lockets and wear around their necks and close to their hearts. My hero was a spaceman who searched the solar system for such ‘gems’ that would make homesick humans feel they had a chunk of the Old Planet next to their hearts. A prospector, if you like, a frontiersman, a happy-go-lucky guy who was always getting into trouble with the spatial police for trespassing in forbidden areas.

  June Hall didn’t exactly hate it, but she thought it was pretty naff and told me to go home and write another novel.

  That wasn’t an easy task for a working man. As I have said, I wrote on knee-pads. My longhand was typed by an elderly woman who had sixteen cats who slept everywhere, especially on nice warm sheets of paper. I had to air the manuscripts when they came back to me, to get rid of the feline smell. I kept writing to Rob, though Time in Hand never saw print, despite his furious efforts to get it to the right people. Eventually I finished a new novel entitled In Solitary about a human who had been under the domination of alien invaders of Earth since birth and whose human colleagues were trying to foment rebellion. My hero is finally unable to shake off Stockholm Syndrome and the book ends with him shooting off in a space ship with his girlfriend. It’s not a bad first novel and I’ve always held it in affection.

  By the time the book was finished June Hall had left her job and my rather lean science fiction manuscript was read by the Chairman of Faber and Faber, a man who was a publishing legend.

  Charles Monteith was a giant intellect and a tremendous personality: the Zeus of the book world. A colleague of T.S. Eliot, Charles was the first to publish a whole host of brilliant writers: William Golding, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, Samuel Beckett, John Osborne, Seamus Heaney, many more. A massive array of talent in fiction, poetry and playwriting. And now me. He had decided to publish Garry Kilworth, the secondary modern school boy whose English was still raw in many ways and whose confidence could be shattered by even the slightest of criticisms. I was awestruck by the news that Charles l
iked my book and wanted to see me to tell me he would publish it.

  Apart from everything else, Charles Monteith was the kindest person in the world, but I always felt like a schoolboy entering the Headmaster’s study when going into his office. He would beam at me with his round face and say, ‘Come in, dear boy, come in. Sit you down. You look nervous. Don’t worry, I have good tidings – did I ever tell you that story about T.S. and the crossword puzzle . . .’ Charles had a large spool of anecdotes involving famous writers, which he would love to reel out while I sat there sipping coffee and feeling fuzzy, being in the presence of a Titan of the literary scene. A man who spoke to me as if I knew these great writers and was a member of their pack. You don’t get published by a house like Faber and Faber unless you impress someone with your work. I had impressed Charles Monteith, an achievement that still leaves me feeling staggered by the enormity of its import.

  One of Charles’s tales was about his discovery of William Golding. He told me that the manuscript for Lord of the Flies arrived on his desk having been rejected by at least a dozen other publishing houses. The front page of the MS was stained with coffee rings and on the title page someone had scribbled in pencil ‘Some rubbish about boys on a desert island’. Charles published the book and of course Golding went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, as did Seamus Heaney. I don’t know if there were any others, but with two Nobel prize winners under his belt Charles must have been immensely proud.

  Charles Monteith was also able to create anecdotes for others to chortle over. I remember once there was a lecture in Holborn for writers and editors. The man delivering the lecture was Jerry Pournelle, who has in the past co-written sf novels with Larry Niven (the Pohl and Kornbluth duo of the second half of the century) though Jerry Pournelle is also a respected science fiction author in his own right. In the middle of the talk Jerry Pournelle told the audience he had a friend writing a vampire novel, but lacked a good title. ‘Since we have a roomful of editors and authors of sf and fantasy, perhaps someone here can make a suggestion?’ He then continued with his lecture, which contained a deal of serious scientific speculation. In the meantime Charles Monteith had leant over and whispered in the ear of the person next to him, ‘How about Carry on Sucking?’ There were shrieks of laughter from the crowd around Charles, and Jerry Pournelle, who had not heard the aside thought the hilarity was aimed at his propositions. His face clouded over with anger and he continued delivering his talk in a strained and disconcerted tone.

  Also working at Fabers at the time was a woman by the name of Sarah Biggs, who was later to become Rob Holdstock’s partner for life.

  Fabers published In Solitary around the same time as they published Rob’s first sf novel, Eye Among the Blind. I remember seeing a review which took in both our novels. The critic wrote, ‘I predict that if Garry Kilworth continues in this vein, he will become a very good writer, but Robert Holdstock will be a great writer.’ I was a little piqued by coming second best at the time, but the feeling has long since subsided. Rob’s fame has indeed risen higher than my own, since he found his seminal novel early in his career and Mythago Wood is indeed a brilliant and wonderfully imaginative work. I have not managed to capture the readership that has clustered around Rob’s novels, though I would not be a writer with a fervent faith in my own ability if I did not believe I have equalled his achievement in terms of literary worth.

  The other writer I met at this time was Christopher Evans: no not one of the really famous ones, but even more talented than his celebrity namesakes. Chris is from the Welsh valleys, a graduate in Chemistry, an all-round great guy and a writer with a lot of psychological depth to his novels. Chris joined Rob and me at Faber and Faber with a novel entitled Capella’s Golden Eyes. Like my In Solitary and Rob’s Eye Among The Blind, Capella was Chris’s way of plunging into the science fiction with what we called a really ‘skiffy’ book. That is, a novel which is most definitely in the science fiction genre, involving aliens, space travel, distant planets, far suns, etc. Some of Chris’s later works, The Insider, for example, are much more on the edge, driven by psychological probing of character, indeed by the character probing himself. The Insider is closer to Kafka than to Asimov or Clarke and is a fine novel.

  Chris Priest had been at Fabers for some time and already had Fugue for a Darkening Island and two or more others under his belt, when Rob, Chris E and I joined him. I believe it was Maxim Jakubowski who began calling the four of us the ‘Faber Mafia’. I don’t know what Chris Priest thought of this attempt at creating an sf Bloomsbury set, but the three newcomers thought it had élan. It kept us apart from the Gollancz writers, who tended to be hard core sf men producing stories about future machines and space travel. We were full of ourselves in those days and certainly going to turn the literary world on its head with our amazing futuristic novels. Publishers would be fighting to have us on their lists before the decade was out.

  Ha!

  There was a fan around at the time, who worked as a part time reader for John Bush at Gollancz. Malcolm Edwards was a bright young man and keen to become an editor himself. He wrote reviews in fanzines and even perhaps the nationals. In Solitary is not a long novel at 131 pages and 40,000 words. As I have said, the writing of it was physically not an easy task and I could never have produced something the length of Lord of the Rings without first giving up the day job. Malcolm’s very clever and erudite assessment of my initial venture into novels ended with ‘Kilworth seems to have verbal anorexia’.

  The discovery of this review was tempered by a call on the same day from my new literary agent. Murray Pollinger, a man who instilled the same sort of awe in me as did Charles Monteith, but without the warmth of the Fabers editor, telephoned me while I was at work and announced, ‘With regard to In Solitary. Paul Sidey of Penguin Books has offered an advance of £300 for the paperback rights? What do you say?’ What did I say? First Faber and Faber, one of the most prestigious hardcover publishers in London, and now Penguin Books, the paperback giant? These people wanted my little book. I said YES, very loudly, and woke up half the C&W Traffic Department.

  Three hundred pounds. Plus the advance from Faber and Faber. I was going to be rich and famous before very long.

  Hah! And double-hah!

  Hollywood and other dream factories would have the public believe that almost every book that’s written is set to become a best seller. If it doesn’t, the writer is a failure and should never lift another pen or tap another typewriter key. No account is taken of ‘middle-list’ writers. Men and women who make a living out of writing books, who never become household names or even close to it.

  These days even publishers have come to regard the middle list as a waste of print and are forever seeking that magical money-maker, the best seller. It’s not easily recognised, otherwise publishers would know when they’ve got one, which they seldom do. Harry Potter was turned down by several agents and publishers and finally published without any great expectation of sales. Indeed it had a very small print run. Watership Down was turned down by over a dozen publishers. The histories of many if not most other best sellers, going back as far as Moby Dick, are altogether similar in their courses.

  So, two great publishers under my belt. I was over the moon, and stars, and the sun too. I knew then that I could look forward to the day when I could give up the day job and write full time. Rob had already abandoned his PhD and was writing furiously. We both had wives who were also working, for Annette had now obtained her Teaching Certificate and was at a primary school, and Sheila, Rob’s beautiful Irish wife, was in full-time employment. So the early years of writing, which are always the hardest, could be cushioned by steady earners.

  Annette soon got fed up with teaching infants and took another post at a tough secondary school on the other side of Southend. Several of her pupils were the children of gypsy families and a very interesting bunch of kids they were too. In the course of her career at the school they brought to school with them, variously,
a cockerel, a horse, a cat and a rabbit. Henry, her favourite student among these wild ones, was a big lad, very difficult to teach. Henry wasn’t hostile, but he seemed unable to imbibe academic knowledge. English and maths were forgotten by the next day. He was a favourite because he was very protective of his teacher when other boys were giving her trouble.

  Annette always thought she had failed Henry, but he turned up years later on our doorstep and gave her a kiss from his towering six-feet three-inches of height, then an estimate for a new lawn. After a quick glance at the area that needed grass, Henry told her, ‘You’ll need 230 strips for that, Miss,’ (like all ex-pupils he continued to call her ‘Miss’), ‘and at ninety-five pence a strip that’ll come to 218 pounds and fifty pee.’ Nothing much wrong with Henry’s spatial concepts, or his maths when it came to the business of making money and earning a living.

  Still working at C&W, I gained promotion to Grade 3 Executive by applying for internal jobs. This worked again when a Grade 2 position came up in the Tariffs Department. The head of Tariffs was Len, who was a tennis player like myself. We used to play together at the firm’s tennis courts in Kingston-on-Thames. Len called me into his office and said, ‘Look, do you actually know anything about satellite communications, Garry?’ I confessed my knowledge was very limited, ‘But I’m willing to learn.’ ‘Never mind that, I’ll give you the job – but you’ll only have it until you get back into your office.’

  Len was right. I had only just sat down at my desk again when I received an order to report toTug Wilson’s office, immediately. The department heads were rivals and they hated men going from their department to that of another. Len had ensured that news had travelled fast and Tug was obviously beside himself that one of his men wanted to leave his Traffic Department for Len’s Tariffs Department.