On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  Apart from my very close male friends, there were some other authors who I felt were kindred spirits in the field. All writers have something in common, but these were people I felt were directly on my wavelength. Lisa Tuttle, the horror-writing Texan from Austin was someone with whom I could discuss all aspects of writing and not run out of conversation. Of her books my favourite is Gabriel, a remarkable novel, but my introduction to her was the collaboration she did with George R.R. Martin, Windhaven. Then there was the ash-blonde Gwyneth Jones, an intelligent and powerful wordsmith, whose novels such as White Queen are outstanding. I also much enjoy her young adult books which she writes under Ann Halam, and of these the one that haunts my memory is King Death’s Garden, which she told me she wrote after sitting occasionally in her local graveyard in Brighton with her then infant son.

  Gwyneth’s husband Peter is a great guy and clever mathematician who writes books on the mystery of numbers and therefore earns my eternal admiration and respect. Peter was the sort of Irishman I hoped my great-grandfathers had been: an amiable and wondrous man who gives the appearance of understanding the meaning of life.

  My first Milford was in 1978. The owners of the Compton used to pass over the place to us (there would be no other guests) and we would be given free rein at the bar, entering our drinks in a book left on the bar. During the day we would variously attack and destroy, or praise and lift, the stories that were brought for discussion. We sat in a circle and took them on one by one, day by day, with frequent breaks for coffee or booze, or the odd walk into town or to the sea front. I found Milford thoroughly inspiring and invigorating, sending me home with a right hand itching to put pen to paper. Some did not enjoy it, it has to be said. One young woman hated it and vented her dislike in a fanzine when she returned home. True, the criticism could be sometimes quite daunting. I remember one story, savaged by Dave Garnett with the remark, ‘I think the title is terrible and the story went down hill from there.’ But for the most part the whole experience was invigorating and energising to people who spent all their working hours alone in a room scribbling down words.

  In the evenings we would play word games (oh, these fatuous authors!) among them a version of the radio show Call My Bluff. John Murry’s famous ‘tappen’ beat everyone. He gave the definition of this word as ‘A wax rectal plug which forms in a polar bear’s anus during the winter months’. Everyone duly laughed and marked it down as ‘false’. It was not. A tappen really is a plug formed out of indigestible mass which prevents a polar bear from crapping itself during hibernation.

  Dave Langford was a master of false definitions which had everyone rocking with laughter. One was of a Gallic-sounding word, which Dave defined as, ‘The French word for vol-au-vent,’ and another which also escapes me now he defined as, ‘A game played at Eton, involving a fish, a small boy and a long pole.’

  Of course, the week got very boozy and smoky, with many discussions at the bar and late-night gatherings. Factions formed and factions died. The intensity of purpose among us, given the proximity of so many egos, grew and grew, until in our heads it seemed the real world existed only within the Compton Guest House, and those outside the walls of the hotel were insubstantial creatures, shadows drifting through an unreal region that was of no consequence. When visitors were finally allowed among us, the last two days of the workshop, I always felt a twinge of resentment, hating to have my precious atmosphere of storytelling and long-distance dreams punctured.

  I always remember Lisa Tuttle saying as we left one year, ‘It seems like we’ve been in there forever. It doesn’t feel real out here. I hate leaving what we had in there behind.’

  Milford was a ship in which we took marvellous voyages.

  Among the many Brits was an author whose literary novels have deep excellence, and who was also to become a dear and valued friend. John Middleton Murry, son of the famous writer and critic of the same name, was probably the most elegant author I have ever read. Along with Bobbie Lamming, John Murry had an enormous influence on my own work, in terms of encouragement and advice.

  John Murry, who used also to write variously as Colin Murry and Richard Cowper, was a man who remembered great names from his childhood, such as George Orwell and D.H. Lawrence. Walter de la Mare used to pat him on the head and call him Johnny. Naturally, I found that awe-inspiring and when I first met him I used to hang on his every word. John was indeed an open friendly man full of smiles and good humour. I walked with him to the Milford seafront the first day I met him. The whole sea strand was covered in huge boulders, dumped there to stop the ocean from invading the hinterland.

  John surveyed the ugly scene with narrowed eyes and finally said, ‘Garry, dear boy, we’ll have to come back in fifty million years – this will be a lovely sandy beach by then.’

  All authors are asked at some time, by people they meet casually, what they do for a living. When a stranger learns I am writer and asks my name, I invariably get the answer, ‘Sorry, I’ve never heard of you.’ It gets boring. John found it especially boring, since he had his famous father’s name, which actually should have been recognised. John used to tell the story about being on holiday in Cyprus with his wife, Ruth. When he was asked for the umpteenth time, ‘Oh, an author, what’s your name?’

  To Ruth’s consternation, John replied firmly, ‘Graham Greene.’

  The man stared at him while thinking hard, then came out with, ‘No, sorry mate, never heard of you.’

  John wrote at least two books which should have won the Booker Prize: The Golden Valley, a novel based on his childhood in Norfolk, and The Pathway to the Sea. His science fiction novel Clone, written under his Richard Cowper pseudonym, was one of the first New Wave science fiction novels that I read, before I met the author, and it was both heart-warming and humorous. You just knew from reading it that you would like the author if you ever did meet him and that he would be a gentleman and a scholar. Corny as it sounds, that was John Murry to the core. He was amiable, generous and absolutely genuine. Not only that, he had a wife of Russian origin, Ruth, who was warm and lovely, and always welcomed us with a wonderful smile. They would invite Annette and me, first to their thatched cottage in Dittisham on the banks of the River Dart in Cornwall, and later to their house in Brighton. We would come away at the end of a weekend feeling that as long as there were people like the Murrys in the world, life was good.

  To one of our annual garden parties at Wychwater, John and Ruth brought a guest. The woman who accompanied them was Jenny Rowe, the niece of Lord Digby of Sherborne Castle. In fact, Jenny had nursed Lord Digby on his deathbed. Jenny, whose mother was an Anglo-Irish baroness, had heard the story of my chambermaid great-grandmother being seduced by one of the then Lord Digby’s sons. John Murry had met Jenny Rowe at the United World College in Wales, where he taught English. There are two of these great free-thinking schools, the other being in Singapore. In one of those ‘small world’ scenarios I learned later that Gwyneth Jones’ husband, Peter, had taught at the Singapore UWC.

  ‘We must be distant cousins,’ Jenny said, smiling, as she shook my hand. ‘You must come and visit. Bring a photograph of your grandfather and we’ll study the portraits on the castle walls and see if we can find out which of the buggers was responsible for his birth.’

  We did go and stay with Jenny at her cottage in Dorset and she fulfilled her promise and took us on a private tour of the castle. My grandfather had a very distinctive nose. None of the portraits were conclusive but in a dark corner of one of the rooms stood a bust which bore his likeness almost exactly.

  ‘Yes, I’m not surprised,’ murmured Jenny. ‘Captain in the guards. Always a womaniser. This is the bugger who did it.’

  Of course, this is not proof of ancestry, nor would I claim it to be, but it was fun. Recently Jenny’s brother has suggested we take a DNA test and make sure. I’m half willing, wanting to settle the issue, but the other half is wondering whether I want to go to my grave still carrying the doubt with me. I always
remember one of the last lines of The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance. ‘When the myth is more interesting than the truth, stick with the myth.’

  At John Murry’s funeral Jenny introduced me to her first husband.

  ‘I don’t think you’ve met my cousin Garry, have you?’

  He looked at me with an expression of astonishment. ‘I’ve never heard of a cousin Garry,’ he said with some exasperation.

  Jenny’s daughter was also at the funeral. She too thought the story was fun.

  As an interesting aside, one of John and Ruth’s two daughters, Helen, married Jamie Rix, son of Brian Rix the actor whose bedroom farces had most of Britain laughing in mid-1900s. John and Brian seemed to get on famously together. At John’s seventieth birthday party the two of them were like a comedy duo, entertaining the guests.

  Towards the end of his life John Murry became disillusioned with the writing scene. He always wrote with fountain pen on foolscap paper, even after the rest of us were using computers. To him the act of writing was a spiritual thing: he might have been a monk setting down a sacred script. How one wrote was as important to him as what one wrote. He always said that his writing suffered once he had to stop smoking cigarettes, because that was part of his thinking ritual. One day, halfway through a new novel, halfway through a sentence, John put his pen down. He never again picked it up to write fiction.

  ‘I realised,’ he told us, ‘that I had said all I wanted to say and one of the worst faults of a writer is to repeat himself.’

  He had always painted in his spare time and now he took it up as a full-time hobby. I still have two of his pictures on my wall, a still life and a figure painting. Of course I’m no expert but to me they look every bit as artistically good as his novels. He was a man who took a gentle pride in excellence. Ruth died in March 2002 after a long illness and John, desolate without her, followed almost four weeks to the day afterwards. Neither wanted to live without the other.

  I have gone ahead of my chronological narrative, however, and need to go back to the early 1980s. In this era Christopher Priest married the American author Lisa Tuttle. I was a witness at their wedding. They settled down to life in a flat in Ortygia House, Harrow-on-the-Hill, the venue of many parties, gatherings and workshops. The actor John Grillo who appeared in such movies as Brazil and Christopher Columbus: The Discovery lived in the flat above. John joined us sometimes for Halloween night, when we took along ghost stories and tried to scare the pants off one another. We always promised ourselves that we would produce an anthology of those stories, Tales of Ortygia House, a wonderful Gothic title that sadly never came to be used.

  Another two writers, not yet mentioned, were usually present at those Ortygia gatherings. Leroy Kettle and John Brosnan, who sometimes collaborated on novels. John was an Australian who had come to the UK as a young man and had, to my knowledge, never bothered to go back again. He wrote both humorous and serious science fiction. John Brosnan died not long after the millennium.

  John’s funeral was a wake, with all his friends there to say goodbye. There was a foreign edition of one of his books on top of his coffin and a bouncing rubber dinosaur. John had written a novel, Carnosaur, which had been made into a terrible movie in which the prehistoric reptile did indeed look as if it were made of flexible material.

  I detest crematoriums. Unlike a church or chapel they have no history and they lack any kind of atmospheric soul. When I leave this world, I want no one to go the crem. Please, please, those of you who wish to say goodbye, just have a memorial service at the nearest Quaker Meeting House. Leave my lifeless corpse to burn alone.

  The year after John’s death, Annette and I, accompanied part of the time by our friend and editor, Lesley Levene, went to Australia. Annette and I stayed six months, Lesley joined us for a few weeks. We drove around Victoria state looking for a suitable place to deposit the Australian half of John Brosnan’s ashes. We found a vineyard in view of the Outback and a distant range of dark hills. The wine merchant, an Aussie named Rod Stott, called his vineyard Dulcinea, after the lady who Cervantes’ Don Quixote doted upon. We thought it a suitable resting place for an author who loved to write and who was also fond of a glass of wine.

  We got a bit of stick from John’s Aussie fans and friends, for not inviting them to our ad hoc ceremony. But as we explained, we had no idea where we were going to do it, when we were going to do it, and simply waited for the right place and time to present itself. To get them all there within the hour would have been impossible. I think they understood in the end, for we had nice evening with them, drinking and talking of John, and the state of Australian science fiction in general.

  The years at Wychwater, before we went to Hong Kong – 1983 to 1988 – were a tangle of worry, hope and joy. My friendship with Rob Holdstock continued to thrive, as did my affection for this man. By far the vast majority of people who met Rob developed an instant liking for him. A tall amiable fellow, he was full of life, generous and big-hearted, with a magical way of enthralling you with his talk. He was passionate about everything and anything, but most especially about masks, trees and mystery.

  I spoke with Rob on the phone every few days, during which he was always encouraging. We shared a great deal of favourite subjects in common, but most especially poetry and the history of ancient Greece and Rome. Once or twice a month we would meet up and have lunch and talk over what we were doing and where we thought we were going.

  Rob’s attachments to people were ever strong and he made many feel that he thought they were special. And to him they were, for he was the kind of man who opened himself to everyone he met. Shortly after his death I visited the Spanish optician who provided Rob with glasses when Rob was on holiday at my apartment.

  ‘I was devastated to hear of your close friend’s sudden death,’ Jose said to me. ‘He was such a nice man, and so talented. A very great loss to us all.’

  Now Jose had only met Rob during the course of business, yet he had felt an immediate affinity with him. A few weeks ago I had the need to contact my French translator, a woman who also translated Rob’s novels. Sandra had never met Rob, had spoken with him only on the phone, yet she told me, ‘When I go walking now, and I see a bird on its own, I name it Robert, after our dear departed friend.’

  When it came to practical work, such as fixing a broken toilet or repairing the car, I never saw Rob do any. If something needed mending, he turned to someone else. Likewise, if he was expecting a plumber or electrician to do work in his house, he postponed writing for the whole day, saying he could not think properly while he was expecting a workman to call. To look at him you would think he could build a house. He appeared strong and capable. Indeed, when his immigrant neighbours fell to fighting – and I mean fighting, sometimes with knives – or the house across the street was being burgled, Rob stepped up and stopped or challenged the troublemakers. He lacked no physical courage. Indeed, his navigating skills with maps were unbeatable. I would trust him to lead me across the Gobi without a false turn. A strange mixture, this man, of the competent and the inept, when it came to practicalities. I believe one of the reasons why he found some very ordinary everyday issues difficult was because he had never really been in the workplace. He had obtained his Bachelor’s degree, then his Master’s, and had then gone on to his Doctorate. Indeed, he did for a while work in a laboratory studying tropical diseases, but he never finished his Doctorate and from that point on worked at home, writing, writing, writing.

  ~

  My friendship with Andrew Hall, the school teacher, also continued to be very important to me. He was, is and always will be a Venetian nut. He loves Venice to distraction and if the money were available, he would live in that exquisite city and never leave. His knowledge of the place is infinite and some of his zeal and fervour for its architecture, its customs and culture, its festivals and carnivals, have rubbed off on me. His house is decorated with pictures of Venice, even the toilet, and Vivaldi’s music fills the rooms. Long talks o
n our Friday night visits to the house – for thirty-five years now Annette and I have been going to Andrew and Cheryl’s for a curry at the end of every working week – have eventually resulted in a young adult novel The Silver Claw, in which Venice is populated by water rats whose government sends for a German otter, an ‘unraveller’ of mysteries, to solve a conspiracy against their rulership.

  Conversations with Andrew have resulted in a number of plots for stories and novels. He has the kind of original dreams for which a writer would give a fortune. Some of them, it is true, have been so mundane they would bore the dullest of men. Andrew once dreamed he was a polystyrene tile stuck to a kitchen ceiling. ‘The worst part of it,’ he confessed, ‘was that they had stuck me upside-down, so I could see nothing of what was going on below me.’ Other dreams have had much more of a sense of wonder to them and it is from these I have gleaned one or two very good plots for short stories. Andrew would never use them. He is a conceptual artist by nature, producing among other things wonderful mobile works of art for his wife on each Valentine’s Day, all different, all ingenious in their way.

  It was Andrew who introduced me to baroque music and I have since come to need my weekly, if not daily dose, of Purcell, Charpentier, Vivaldi, Telemann, Scarlatti, Bach and others. It’s the only kind of music I can work to without it interrupting my train of thought. It’s pleasantly unobtrusive in that respect, yet again I can sit down and listen to it fully and appreciate its wonders and glories. Baroque has filled a great hole in my life. I love rock, and more especially, jazz both cool and hot, and folk, and sea shanties, and several other forms of music, but baroque I need as food and drink. The only type of music I really don’t take to is Country and Western (Garth Brooks may be the exception) which according to Woody Allen is ‘Music for fascists who don’t understand Wagner’. Hmm, yes, don’t like Wagner either.