On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  Writers and editors were invited once a year to come for a barbecue and it became a regular gathering which still survives today, though at different venues in and around London.

  At Wychwater I became my grandfather for a while, looking after the land, even buying a scythe like the one he used to use, for cutting down thistles and cow parsley. I enjoyed it. In so far as our garden is concerned Annette has always been the creator, Brahma, and I in turn am Shiva, the destroyer. Going out to clear ditches and hack down vegetation and saw dead branches off trees was a good counterpoint to sitting at my desk and writing books. We still had only one car at that time, which Annette used for work, so I was kind of trapped during the day.

  I walked of course, down to the River Crouch, and to a little row of shops, and also went and sat on the seat outside the ancient church, built in 1025 by King Knut shortly after he had defeated the Anglo-Saxon King Edmund Ironside at the Battle of Ashingdon. Knut adopted Christianity at that time, but it was probably political rather than for religious reasons. Standing on the hill where the church is you can see the river up which sailed the Viking ships. In the near distance is the hill on which Canewdon Church stands. It was there that Knut ranged his horde of wild Viking warriors and it was on Ashingdon hill that Edmund had his Saxon forces. They met in the valley between. Halfway through the battle the king of Mercia changed sides for gold, from Anglo-Saxon to Viking, and thus Edmund was defeated. I have often wondered whether the word ‘mercenary’ came from that treacherous act.

  Danes come over from Denmark every five years in part to celebrate their victory over the Anglo-Saxons. The first vicar of Ashingdon Minster was a man called Stigand, who went on to become the Archbishop of Canterbury and crowned both King Harold and William the Conqueror. The choir wears scarlet cassocks and while we lived there the vicar received a letter telling him that his choir was not permitted to wear red as only ‘royal churches’ like Westminster were allowed that privilege. The vicar immediately penned a letter back to the effect that his church was indeed a royal minster, since it had been built by and enjoyed the patronage of King Knut. Full stop.

  However, that part of Essex, the land behind Wychwater, was a bolt hole for London gangsters. Annette and I have always enjoyed walking but around the River Crouch were large houses surrounded by chain-link fences and patrolled by German shepherd dogs. If we did walk by one of these sinister mansions we could be sure that snarling, slavering canines would fling themselves at their side of the fence, desperate to get us and lock their jaws on some vital part of our anatomy.

  I added a natural clay-based pond to the garden, which I dug out using only a spade and my finely tuned writer’s muscles. I filled it from a hose connected to our garden tap and yet even during the first summer it managed to stock itself with newts, frogs and a grass snake, along with many insects such as pond skaters and water boatmen. I suppose birds and the wind might be responsible for the insects, but the newts and frogs? How do these previously sterile patches of water suddenly populate themselves? Later, I added my own stock, some goldfish, orf and other small fish. You must know of the Peace Rose. I suggested we breed a new type of orf and call it the Peace Orf. (Say it quickly!)

  During the mid to late ’80s Rick left college and had a series of jobs in and around Southend. Rick had by that time eased back on his running in favour of travel. He went to Israel twice, once on a kibbutz and once on a moshav on the edge of the Negev Desert. He wrote to us several times when on the moshav, telling us of the mirages he used to see out in the desert while driving the tractor. Just before he came home he took a trip down the Nile with a friend. They were on one of those boats where there is standing room only and passengers are nose-to-nose with one another. Having little money, he lived on water melons, but said the Egyptians and others he met were extremely kind and often gave him bread.

  To our later consternation he also admitted to drinking Nile water and while he said he had added purifying tablets, we still had visions of liver fluke and other horrible diseases coursing round his young blood-stream. However, he survived without too much damage and went on to do an Art Diploma. Rick finally followed in his mum’s footsteps settling for a long career in social work, after forays as a chef in a golf club, a computer programmer, a worker in a wood yard, a worker in a care home and a hairdresser.

  Having caught the travel bug from his two previous visits to Israel Rick then decided to backpack and work his way around the world, which he did. I admired that greatly. Rick had the spiritual and mental strength to go it alone, working variously in Australia as a fruit picker in Queensland and a baker’s van driver in Melbourne. He spent some time with our friends Pete and Carolyn, who lived in Melbourne. They treated him like one of their own kids, being the most hospitable people in the world.

  During her sixth form year Shaney was Head Girl at Shoeburyness High School and left with A-Levels. She was the only one of our family to pass in mathematics, a considerable achievement. Shaney decided against tertiary education and went to work as a PA to a company director, a job for which she was extremely well-suited. Shaney is a great organiser and makes a brilliant PA. At that time she bought a Mini car and met her future husband, Mark, who was coincidentally the Head Boy at Shoeburyness High the year before she was Head Girl. The two were married in Ashingdon Minster.

  Mark was a real go-getter who worked for a large investment bank in London and the two of them set out on a life voyage together from which neither of them has jumped ship. They are, now in their late forties, still a loving, loyal couple, unerringly attached. Mark had been partly raised in Italy and I think the fact that they were both ex-pat brats gave them a lot in common. Indeed Mark and Shaney would go on to live for several years in Canada, in Singapore and in Australia. There would be three grandsons for Annette and I, all very sporty kids – subaqua, football, rugby and cricket – who would go on to university educations. Conrad, Christian and Jordan are fine young men and of course their grandparents are inordinately proud of them.

  However, we are still back at Wychwater, the house in which I have lived the longest. During those years my friendship with Rob Holdstock deepened. He and his wife, Sheila, had parted by mutual consent, Sheila going on to live in Holland with a new partner. After a period of being ‘single’ again, Rob met Sarah. They enjoyed many things together, such as hill walking and camping. We often joined them along the ridges of Derbyshire and Wales, walking up and along Mam Tor, Kinder Scout, Offa’s Dyke, Froggatt Edge and many others. During one of those walks Rob suggested we do at story together. He had a theme in mind and expounded it gustily while striding along. It sounded great to me and later we began working together on The Ragthorn, meeting once or twice a month in pubs, mostly North London, where Rob now lived with Sarah, to discuss the sections of the work.

  The Ragthorn progressed slowly but surely, a novella which included many small, previously unseen chunks of verse and prose which the protagonist unearthed with diligent research. Fragments by Shakespeare, St John the Divine, Chaucer, and several other writers. These pieces of poetry and prose, hidden from humankind by necessity, contained the secret of the ragthorn, a unique magical tree that was the gateway to immortality. Rob would write a section, send it to me, and I would revise it. Then I would write the next section and he would revise that. Rob was happier doing the contrived prose pieces supposedly written by famous authors, while I did the poetry. Together we wove the story into a fine piece of fiction which eventually won several literary prizes and was translated into many different languages. It was great fun and it was a wonderful exercise. I have never managed to duplicate that experience and now our Rob has gone, I doubt I ever will.

  It was around this time that I realised my science fiction would have to be supplemented by other books from a more popular genre, since I could not live on the money that was coming in. I still wanted to write sf, but it would have to be short stories and novellas, rather than novels. I couldn’t do full length novels in
two genres at once.

  I turned to animal fantasies and here I found much greater commercial success. I wrote a book about foxes from the fox point of view which became a reasonable success, enough for the publisher to put on my future animal fantasies ‘By the author of the bestselling Hunter’s Moon’. Hunter’s Moon was the result of a synopsis I sent to Jane Johnson at Allen and Unwin. The smart and lovely Jane snapped it up and I was at last paid a large advance, ten times the amount I had ever received for a science fiction novel. Hunter’s Moon then went into the Reader’s Digest abridged books and made even more money, along with translations and audio books, and other spinoffs. I immediately followed this book up with a wolf novel along similar lines, entitled Midnight’s Sun.

  In these novels the animals do not wear clothes or talk to humans. They are as animalistic as I could make them. Yes, they communicate, but don’t animals communicate with one another anyway? The template was Adams’ Watership Down. William Horwood, of mole fiction fame, telephoned me years later. He had just written a book about wolves and had afterwards been told about the existence of Midnight’s Sun. He asked how my wolf novel had done on the market.

  ‘Not as well as my foxes,’ I wrote back, ‘I think there’s less sympathy for wolves. Historically, they’ve had bad press.’

  But I added that William Horwood was a much bigger name than Garry Kilworth and would probably carry the day.

  One of the nicest things that’s ever happened to me as an author was when I attended a Murder Mystery evening in Hong Kong. The hosts were a policeman and his wife. I’d never met them before and when we were introduced my friend said, ‘Garry is an author, you know.’

  The lady of the house said the usual ‘How interesting’.

  I made my usual reply. ‘What are you reading at the moment?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, becoming very animated, ‘I’m just in the middle of a fantastic novel about foxes, called Hunter’s Moon, which I bought at Changi airport.’

  This is the first and only time such a thing has happened to me, and I said rather shyly, ‘I wrote that. My surname is Kilworth.’

  A loud shrill squeal rent the air which probably shocked all the foxes within ten miles.

  ~

  Jane Johnson, who at the time lived with the rock-climbing science fiction author M. John Harrison, author of the Viriconium books, was a very encouraging editor, one of those who became a friend as well as my publisher. Jane suggested more of the same kind of book. I was more than happy to oblige, since my advances had quadrupled. Thus other animal fantasies followed, with a hare book entitled Frost Dancers (which keeps getting advertised as Frost Dangers due to an ear of a hare half-blocking the c of Dancers) and House of Tribes. The latter is one of my best works and it is centred on several tribes of mice living in a large house: the Library Tribe, who nibble on books and then come out with literary phrases they don’t understand; the Kitchen Mice, who are the fattest of creatures and also the most fierce, having the larder to defend against forays by less fortunate tribes; and several other groups and individuals, including a terrible rat named Kellog and a pet white mouse called Little Prince. It is quite a complex novel, with lots of twists and turns, and in the front where an explorer’s map might be is a floor plan of the house drawn by an architect friend. I had hoped for Hollywood interest, which indeed did stir but never actually fully woke up.

  I had already had one of my science fiction novels optioned for a movie, by the playwright Dennis Potter, who wanted to turn my The Night of Kadar into a film entitled Cradle Song or Orphan Star. The movie was never made so the final title was never needed. Potter wrote the script but the project, with Twentieth Century Fox, never came to fruition. When I last checked the script was still in Fox’s archives. At the time I wrote to Dennis Potter and asked him how he came across my science fiction novel. ‘I found my son reading it at the breakfast table,’ he wrote back, ‘and took it away from him until he had finished his meal. I read the blurb on the dustcover and found myself getting interested in the theme of the plot.’ There you go, I influenced the great Mr Potter just a little, before his illness took him away. There are two pages of Dennis Potter’s biography (Humphrey Carpenter) covering The Night of Kadar.

  ~

  During the late ’70s Rob Holdstock encouraged me to go with him to a writers’ workshop group called Pieria which had been formed mainly by Oxford graduates. There were several intellectuals in the group, David Langford possibly being the most powerful brain among them. There were also Diana Reed, Kevin Smith, Andrew Stephenson, Mike Scott Rohan, Allan Scott, Chris Morgan, Bobbie Lamming, Joseph Nicholas and John Jarrold (who later became an editor and then an agent), and one or two others before my time. Here is a typical list of people and the stories they brought for Pieria 23, held at my own house in Shoeburyness on 10 March 1979.

  Garry Kilworth: ‘Dragons of the Mind’

  Robert Holdstock: ‘Attachments’

  Kevin Smith: ‘Multiple Reflections’

  Bobbie Lamming: ‘Stairs and Jimmo’

  Andrew Stephenson: ‘The Artisans’

  Diana Reed: ‘The Woman Tempted Me’

  Chris Morgan: ‘Left Hand, Right Hand’

  Allan Scott: ‘Thorgrimm’s Saga’ (Excerpt)

  David Langford: ‘Genocide for Fun and Profit’

  Mike Scott Rohan: (No story recorded)

  I remember a wonderful feeling of being among real writers at last and the immense valuable contribution they made to my sense of being a writer myself. Yes, sometimes my stories were hacked to pieces, probably deservedly so, but on other occasions praise was forthcoming, the criticism and advice always eagerly accepted. Over time I became aware that these offerings were only opinions and I had to make up my own mind whether or not to take them seriously or to heart.

  The name Pieria was derived from the home of the ancient Greek Muses. I’m told that Rob wanted the workshop to be called The Flat Mars Society, which would have been much more fun and obviously much less pretentious. That said, Pieria came at a great time for me, having worked alone until that point. Here I could discuss methods and ways of writing, the technical details of writing and creativity.

  At this point it might be interesting to the reader to learn what became of all these bright young meteors of literature.

  Andrew Stephenson published several science fiction novels and then went on to become a name in graphic novels.

  Mike Scott Rohan published many novels, mostly fantasy fiction.

  David Langford published several novels but is most well-known for his science fiction fanzine (still going strong) Ansible.

  Robert Holdstock wrote a multitude of science fiction and fantasy novels and is best known for the marvellous Mythago Wood.

  Kevin Smith and Diana Reed married each other, had children, and so far as I am aware are still writing when they find time.

  Chris Morgan began to write and perform poetry and in the new millennium became Birmingham’s Poet Laureate.

  Allan Scott slipped below my radar and I have not heard of him since the ’80s.

  Bobbie Lamming published several science fiction and fantasy stories, then went on to publish exceptionally fine literary novels, my favourite of which is The Notebook of Gismondo Cavalletti. R.M. Lamming is without a doubt a writer whose work should and hopefully will survive the centuries. Her books are few, due I believe to the fact that each one is wrung from her creativity with extreme care and effort.

  She has become one of my closest friends in the writing world and I value her advice immensely.

  My forays into workshops with Pieria led on to larger annual writer’s workshop at the Compton Guest House, Milford-on-Sea, attended not only by Brits, but also by foreign science fiction and fantasy writers. The French authors Marianne Leconte and Patrice Duvic, the Americans George R.R. Martin, Scott Baker, Lisa Tuttle (now more of a Brit than a Yank), J.W. Schutz and one unforgettable young itinerant Australian, Randall Flynn, a travelling disaster
who managed to throw enough spanners into the Milford works to devastate many years of carefully nurtured relationships.

  Other attendees at these workshops over the years, for those interested in names lesser and greater, were Ken Bulmer, John Murry, David Wingrove (who wrote the eight-volumed Chung Kuo series), Gwyneth Jones, David Garnett, Christopher Priest, Roberta Lamming, Chris Evans, Pip Maddern, Robert Holdstock, Tony Richards, Andrew Stephenson (whose immaculate records gave me the names and dates of all the Pieria and Milford meets), Alan Farmer, Dave Langford, John Brunner of Stand On Zanzibar fame, James Goddard, David Redd, Maxim Jakubowski, Rachel Pollack, Bob Shaw the inventor of slow glass, Kevin Smith, Malcolm Edwards, Diana Reed, Geoff Ryman, Neil Gaiman (Neil still remains accessible to his old friends despite his massive commercial success), Richard Evans, Mary Gentle, Pamela Boal, Kathryn Buckley, Duncan Lunan, Bruce Sterling.

  There were others too, before my time, who were great names in science fiction. I know James Blish attended one or two Milfords, and Anne McCaffrey who on first meeting John Murry stared intently into his eyes and exclaimed, ‘My God, you have the eyes of a prune.’

  John was shocked by the attack and henceforth avoided this fierce American writer of the Dragons of Pern books.

  It was of course a misunderstanding. Apparently what Anne had actually said was, ‘You have the eyes of Elune’, but John had misheard and did not learn of his mistake until much later. Not having read Anne McCaffrey’s books I’m uncertain as to what or who ‘Elune’ refers to, but I imagine he or she is one of her characters.

  Samuel R. Delaney was another well-known author from over the pond who was at the earlier Milfords: he who wrote Dhalgren, the novel with the wonderful first sentence ‘. . . to wound the autumnal city.’ And the last half-sentence, ‘I have come to’ which seems to almost complete a wrap-around, if you remove one of words.