On My Way to Samarkand: Memoirs of a Travelling Writer

by Garry Douglas Kilworth

  These were good people, assisting a poorly educated boy who was desperate to be a writer one day. Indeed, although when I left school my grammar had been non-existent, my spelling appalling and my punctuation laughable, I did know about the structure of stories, and how to surprise the readers and hopefully delight them, because I have always read avidly. By the age of thirty I had this burning desire to see one of my stories in print. In those days that was the epitome of my ambition.

  Just before I left the RAF, Annette found an advertisement in the Sunday Times Review.

  ‘There’s a competition,’ she told me. ‘They want a collection of science fiction stories. It’s being run by the publisher Victor Gollancz in conjunction with the Sunday Times Review. You ought to send off some of those stories you’ve been writing all these years.’

  So I did. One of the tales that was in that package had been penned only two days before I posted them. I had written it in my usual fashion, in a school exercise book, while sitting in a car waiting for friend to join me for a game of golf. The friend’s name was John Duke and the story was called ‘Let’s Go To Golgotha’. It was a time travel story about holiday makers revisiting the crucifixion of Christ. In the years to come that story would sell itself to different publications time and time again, including the only fiction that Lonely Planet Publications has published to date, an anthology called Not the Only Planet.

  I have always loved time travel stories, ever since reading H.G. Wells as a boy. There are some absolute gems, including Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Sound of Thunder’ and Christopher Priest’s ‘Palely Loitering’. The idea of time travel has immense appeal to the imagination. I among many others would like time travel to be fact. The first trip I would make would be back to 1735 where I would seek out John Harrison, the inventor of the chronometer, and ask, ‘Excuse me, do you have the correct time?’

  ~

  A New York critic reviewed ‘Golgotha’ thirty years after its first publication and criticised it for being ‘anti-Semitic’. I was appalled and sent him an email pointing out that there were actually no Jewish people in the story apart from Jesus himself. (In my tale Christ had been crucified by Christian time travellers.) So where was the anti-Semitism? After rereading it he eventually agreed he had been over-zealous in his judgement and because the review was still on the Internet, he removed the critical paragraph.

  ~

  In the Spring of 1974 I began to apply for civilian jobs. I wrote to GCHQ, the government ‘listening post’ at Cheltenham. I had good qualifications for that job, having listened for the government in the RAF. They invited me to a day of exams, including Morse and geography. I passed and they offered me a course which would lead to employment with them. The salary was around £1,200 per annum.

  I also tried for two other jobs. The first was for a teaching post at a polytechnic. I failed to impress. The interview involved a lot of forced chat and role playing, which didn’t suit my personality. You had to show qualities of leadership. As I think I’ve already said, I’ve always made a damn good adjutant, but a lousy general.

  The second was for employment with the Immigration Service. I sat the exam along with dozens of graduates then went into a room for the interview. The interviewers, five of them, were ranged on a raised platform and peered down at me over the tops of their spectacles.

  ‘Mr Kilworth,’ said the one in the middle, ‘why do you want to be a Home Civil Servant?’

  ‘A what?’ I replied. ‘I don’t. I want to be an Immigration Officer.’

  He smiled at me in a fatherly manner. ‘No, no, we don’t recruit Immigration Officers directly. If you join the civil service and your work impresses us, you may be selected for training later – perhaps in six years or so – to become an Immigration Officer.’

  ‘Then why,’ I asked, with a smouldering fury, ‘did you advertise in the Guardian for Immigration Officers? The advert said nothing about serving time first. It simply asked for . . .’

  I stopped debating the point. I could see I was getting absolutely nowhere, so I got up and walked out.

  I was both amused and furious when, several weeks later, I received a letter which began, ‘We are sorry to have to tell you that your application for the Civil Service was not successful. If you would like to apply in one year’s time, etc. etc.’ Bloody hell! I’m sure there are a lot of nice people working for the civil service, some of them are good friends of mine, but like elements of the RAF, they have their pricks too.

  Finally I went for an interview with Cable and Wireless, the international telecommunications company that operated in almost fifty countries, mostly ex-colonies of Britain. C&W was an old-fashioned kind of firm, a civil service type company whose only shareholder was the Treasury. It was very like the RAF, with cousins and uncles working side-by-side, and thousands of overseas employees.

  I was interviewed by the man who would be my immediate boss, Ian Bowles, who ran the International Telephone Section of the Traffic Department. (Telephone traffic, not road traffic.) He explained that C&W were like British Telecom. They didn’t make or sell things, they provided a service. They owned and operated telephone, telegraph and teleprinter networks abroad.

  ‘For example, Hong Kong Telco.’

  ‘Yes, I did know that – I’ve been posted to such places in the past,’ I told Ian.

  ‘Have you ever worked with erlangs?’ he asked me.

  I had no idea what ‘erlangs’ were, but he explained patiently that they were a measurement of telephone usage and that the erlang formula was used to calculate the number of circuits needed for an international or indeed national telephone route.

  ‘Nope,’ I replied, crestfallen.

  ‘Oh well, never mind. How about Strowger?’

  ‘Automatic telephone exchange,’ I replied, ‘invented by the American undertaker, Almon Brown Strowger, who was convinced that the telephone operator in his town was giving a rival his business by redirecting calls from potential customers. The telephone operator’s husband was also an undertaker and was therefore without doubt given preferential treatment by his wife. We’ve been using Strowger exchanges since the late 1800s, haven’t we?’

  Ian smiled. ‘Well, you’ve got that off pat, haven’t you?’

  ‘It’s a good story,’ I replied. ‘I like stories.’

  The subject had also formed part of my telegraphist training in the RAF.

  ‘We’ll soon teach you all about erlang formulas – and a lot of other stuff. I’m impressed you went out and got an HND at your age. Shows initiative and a willingness to learn. You’ll come into the company as a Grade 4 Executive. That’s where our bright youngsters straight out of uni and school start, but I’m sure you’ll surge ahead, with all your previous experience in telecoms. All right?’

  The salary, at £2,600, was over twice that offered by GCHQ.

  I took the job.

  ~

  I went back to Strike Command and was demobbed within a few days. I had grown a beard which upset the Station Warrant Officer. I also found I had gone one day over the rental week and they wanted rent on the married quarter for my final single night in the married quarter. I had served nearly eighteen years in the RAF and they were chasing me for one night’s rent amounting to two pounds! It revealed a particular meanness which is endemic in any large organisation.

  Just before Easter 1974 I left the service with one month’s salary of £250 to begin a new life. I was not entitled to an immediate pension, for I had not served the minimum of twenty-two years. However, they had also arbitrarily changed the rules on the long-term pension which I should have got at sixty years of age. They (the faceless ones) had decided that they would not give a long-term pension to anyone who left the service before 1975. Any airman who had served for the same time alongside me and left a year later received his long-term pension.

  Bitter? Moi? Certainly.

  Just before we left RAF Strike Command, High Wycombe, I was lying in bed asleep when Annette burst
into the room.

  ‘Garry!’ she shrieked.

  I woke with a horrible start, after one hour’s sleep, having been awake for twenty-four hours doing my last night shift.

  ‘What?’ I cried, fuzzy-confused. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘You won!’ she said, her voice now a profound whisper. ‘You won the short story competition.’

  I sat up, electrified. ‘I did?’

  ‘Here’s the telegram,’ she waved a piece of paper at me. ‘They want you to phone them immediately.’

  Thoroughly awake now I ran down to the telephone booth and called the number in the telegram.

  ‘John Bush, Gollancz.’

  ‘Mr Bush, my name’s Garry Kilworth.’

  ‘Aha!’ he said. ‘One of the prize-winners. Congratulations. You’re sharing the prize with another writer. We couldn’t make up our minds between you, but still, very well done. Half-a-thousand pounds. How does that grab you? And we’ll be publishing the story. I think it’ll also be published in the Sunday Times Review.’

  ‘That’s-bloody-marvellous!’ I said, hardly able to catch my breath. ‘Bloody marvellous.’

  ‘So glad you’re pleased. The prizes will be awarded at the annual Science Fiction Convention a bit later on this year. Anyway, congratulations again and we’ll be seeing you soon.’

  Like Alison, in Peyton Place, I danced up the street on my way back to the house, shouting hoarsely, ‘I’m an author! I’m an author!’

  Lisa came out of the house and gave me a hug and told me ‘Well done, Garry.’

  It was the third best day of my life to date, if you count getting married and having two kids, both of which are a given.

  I went into High Wycombe and saw Westworld at the cinema and bought the latest Carpenters’ LP, the one with the terrific guitar riff in the middle of the song ‘Goodbye to Love’.

  My eyes were opened wide when we attended my first science fiction convention in Newcastle in 1974. This particular convention was called ‘Tynecon’. There’s an organisation called the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA), but they do not formally arrange science fiction conventions. This is done by groups of science fiction fans, who by the by, never use the term ‘sci-fi’but abreviate science fiction to ‘sf’. For the first time I realised their was such a thing as ‘sf fandom’ where enthusiasts of the genre gathered like an outlawed clan.

  Around 400 people were at the convention, including famous writers like Brian Aldiss, Bob Shaw and Harry Harrison. There were respected publishers and editors too, but for the most part the clan consisted of like-minded fans. Some were fairly geeky, quite a few really when I think about it, but others were serious scientists. Of the fans, many produced ‘fanzines’ in which sf was discussed, reviews of novels were printed, and the slings and arrows of outrageous insults were employed. The convention itself harboured second-hand booksellers, had an art show, had Guests of Honour (usually writers and artists in the genre), showed movies, had panels and talks, and a fancy dress evening (though many fans wore space suits or Conan-the-Barbarian loin cloths the whole period of the three days) but mostly consisted of groups of fans sitting in the bar downing alcohol and talking about their favourite genre.

  I met the Gollancz publisher, John Bush, and he was very complimentary and enthusiastic about my future as a writer, which filled me with confidence. I was also given my prize cheque at the banquet which is always held at such cons on Saturday night. The man or woman who wrote the story ‘The Hibbie’ under the name James Alexander, who shared the prize with me, did not attend and to my knowledge has never been seen or heard of again in the book world. I have long since pondered on who it might have been, given that the story was probably written under a pseudonym. Why does the winner of a prestigious award simply disappear without a trace without ever showing his or her face, or writing another piece of fiction under the same name? I have tried googling ‘James Alexander – Science Fiction’ without the remotest success. There is a James B Alexander, an American author listed in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. JBA wrote one work which might be regarded as science fiction. This gentleman was born in 1831 and unless time travel has become fact, the mystery remains unsolved.

  There were two writers who shared a prize for the best science fiction novel competition too. I remember the Scottish guy letting out a rebel yell when he went up to get his prize. I wish I’d done that, but I was quite shy among all these ‘academics’ and ‘professional writers’. I would soon get to befriend many of them, become one of them, but in those days I was still Sergeant Kilworth, a military man and the antithesis of most of those attending the convention. They were more likely to be New Age, Goths, tarot card readers, pacifists, bearded booksellers, left wing Ban-the-Bombers (well, I was too, though they didn’t know that) or NASA people. I was out of my comfort zone, even though all those I met were warm and friendly and didn’t really care whether or not I was the Marshal of the Royal Air Force.

  18. Shoeburyness, Essex

  Trinny Sutherland, also new to civvy street, helped me move into my new home and then he went off to a marvellous new job in Germany, working for NATO as a very superior storeman. I think he was in charge of millions of pounds worth of equipment. I know that after what seemed a very short time he had a Porsche and a Mercedes, which left me wondering why I’d gone for the romantic image of a ‘sparks’ instead of a ‘blanket-folder’, but hey, who knew where what would lead?

  Of my other close service friends, John Chidlow was still in the RAF and would stay there for some time to come. When he was eventually demobbed he was serving in Portugal just outside Lisbon, working for NATO, and he stayed where he was and he and Grace bought a bar and turned it into a very successful English pub.

  Johnny Ball had been demobbed for some time, only doing the minimum twelve years. He first took a course as a welder in Northampton, then went for the first love in his life (after his wife Brenda of course) sport and physical fitness. He became a physical training instructor at one of Her Majesty’s prisons. It was work I think he enjoyed a lot, being a people-person and a fitness addict. When he actually retired, he took a course in sailing and went around the world on a catamaran. I followed his progress with admiration and awe, as he hove into ports all along the South American coast and on through the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and finally back into the Atlantic. One hell of an adventure.

  Bill and Lisa Fedden, as I have said, went to Germany. When Bill was demobbed he became an electronics engineer for Currys, testing their new products. He too had found the job he had been born to do. Lisa became high up in security at Heathrow Airport. She used to practise on visitors to the house using trained sniffer dogs and metal detectors as they stepped into the hallway.

  I jest.

  The first year of travelling up to London every weekday on the ‘misery line’ was not a pleasant one. The early morning trains were packed to the gills, often with rain-damp steaming people. Going up to the city I got a seat, since we were the first station on the line, but returning home in the evening when I was tired and dispirited, I stood most of the time, most of the way. Shoeburyness to Fenchurch Street, then a walk to Bank tube station, and finally a walk from Holborn tube to Theobald’s Road and Mercury House, the Head Office of C&W. When I could I wrote my stories and novels on the train. I used a pad on my knee, scribbling away while others played cards or read books. I was beginning to get stories published in science fiction magazines, but though I wrote two novels they were both rejected.

  On that route I met some of my new neighbours, who were good enough people, but they weren’t servicemen and did not have the same sort of camaraderie I had been used to. We did make firm friends with the couple opposite us in Raphael Drive, Pete and Peggy Good. Pete had been in the merchant navy, but was then a butcher in a shop in Shoebury High Street, so he didn’t have the four-hour journeys up and down the misery line. The route was named thus because trains were always being cancelled, or postponed, and thus the carri
ages were ever late and crammed with irritable, unhappy commuters. It was a decade of union strikes when we would get stranded at some station or other, waiting for Armageddon to end, as the angels and demons were at war.

  I was also getting regular migraines at that time, once a month temporarily losing my sight and suffering powerful headaches which left me unable even to move my eyelids without pain. These usually occurred not so much during work days, but at the weekend, when I relaxed, which upset my family who wanted to do things with our spare time. Once I had a flash migraine on Liverpool Street station and I have vague and hazy memories of being carried in the arms of a large black porter to my train and placed gently on the length of the seat. I still love that man.

  We furnished the house with G-plan furniture, good solid and inexpensive. Our finances were stretched to the limit with a new mortgage, so I built our first king-sized double bed out of pine planks. I have to say I was surprised at the success of this venture, since woodwork had never been my strong point at school and I don’t ever remember progressing past the cliché of the woodwork class, the ubiquitous dovetail-jointed book shelf. Annette loved the bed. It had two little side-tables attached, for lamps and books, and ladies’ creams, and a headboard which matched.

  Buoyed by this astonishing feat, I sent for the plans for a double canoe to be made out of marine plywood. This was an even more difficult and intricate task. It involved steaming and bending strips of plywood, the measurements of which had to be exact in order that they fitted together tightly enough to keep out water. The result was a beautiful canoe (even now I have no idea how I did it without screwing it up) which we treasured for several years. Pete-the-butcher and I won a 9-mile canoe race on the River Crouch two years running in that dear old bark, with nary a wet sock at the end of the run. Annette was absolutely gobsmacked by the double carpentry feat, which was both gratifying and a little irksome too. I was pleased that she was amazed by my skill and rather piqued that she had expected otherwise.