‘There’s no speed in these old gas bags,’ said Prattle.
‘Speed!’ snorted Swann. ‘Where’s the advantage in all this speed?’
‘Speed is power,’ said Prattle. ‘One day they’ll build aeroplanes with twenty engines, big enough to fly to the moon.’
‘But where’s the advantage?’ insisted Swann.
‘Advantage, sir?’ shouted Prattle. ‘It’s obvious!’ And he lumbered away to spit in the lake. He wished that the stranded airman had been a fat, young woman. It was such an opportunity. It was such a waste. A fat, young woman who wasn’t afraid to sport her mutton. He peered into the rigging, dreaming of buttocks to fit the saddle. Goggles and gloves. Ascent of the Aviatrix. Companion to Artist, Actress and Acrobat.
‘An airship is designed to float. That’s the secret of their success,’ Stanley Gaunt told Swann. ‘So there’s no limit to the size of them.’
‘I heard the new Zeppelin carried fifteen passengers,’ said Kingdom Swann.
‘Why, that’s just the beginning,’ said Gaunt. ‘One day we’ll be living in floating cities moored high above the earth!’
‘How does it feel to have your head in the clouds?’ grinned Swann. ‘Can you breathe them? Are they poisonous?’
The aviator stroked his chin and stared thoughtfully into the sky. ‘It’s like riding the waves in a fabulous sea,’ he said at last. He smiled. His face shone beneath the turban.
‘What can you see from such a height? I can’t imagine it,’ said Swann.
‘It can’t be described, sir. The words have yet to be invented. When you’re flying high above a village you look down to earth and it’s like staring over an angel’s shoulder. There, beneath you, cluster the cottages, the meadows and hedgerows, ponds and ditches. And you know that people have probably lived in those little dwellings and laboured in those fields for more than a thousand years. But you are the first man in history, the first man in the whole world, to have seen such things from the sky.’ He paused and tossed his lovely head, gazing heroically into the sun. ‘I don’t know. There’s nothing like it on earth. Everything looks so different. Perhaps the soul might catch a glimpse of it, rising from the body at death. It must be the view that God commands of the world. You’re a photographer. You should be up there taking pictures.’
‘The man’s an artist!’ shouted Prattle from the water’s edge. ‘He’s not interested in views!’
‘I think he’ll change his mind,’ said Gaunt. ‘When the Ostrich has finished her trials I’ll take him aloft and show him the world.’
Swann needed no encouragement and, despite his lordship’s strong disapproval, promptly accepted the invitation.
When the Ostrich was fitted with the cabin he would be first to take a ride. Gaunt thought she might be ready at the end of September and promised to keep Swann informed of her progress. Swann took several photographs of the ship and returned to London in high spirits.
17
He tried to imagine dirigibles ploughing the city fogs, ferrying people, parcels and livestock, fleets of them anchored over the Thames. One day every man might have a balloon, moored on a pole in his own backyard. Perfect for parties and summer picnics. Eventually they would build the first transatlantic airships, twice the size of the Mauretania, complete with restaurants and aerial ballrooms.
It was the birth of a new age. The old maps were worthless. You could scratch a national frontier in rock but you couldn’t chalk a line in the sky. How would future wars be fought, now that armies could sail over mountains? Such an army would be invincible! An armada of floating battleships, seen from the ground like specks on the wind, a scatter of deadly seeds. How could you stop them? Perhaps they would try to divide the sky with lines of tethered balloons, marking out the frontiers, British clouds, French clouds, a preposterous national washing line. But if every army took to the air no one would dare to mount an invasion. War would become impossible. Or perhaps the battles would be for the sky? Big airships, armed with cannon, colliding like Spanish men o’ war. The clouds red with blood. The dead and the wounded raining to earth. Absurd! Airships weren’t built for battle. They were fat and gentle traders. Treasure ships for the empire. Galleons to a golden age.
The newspapers that summer were full of the Wright brothers’ tour of Europe. Swann waited impatiently for word from Stanley Gaunt. On the 25th July he received a letter from the aviator. The Ostrich, fitted with her new cabin, would be ready for flight in September. The photographer was invited aboard on the 20th of the month for a voyage from Portsmouth to the Isle of Wight. Sandwiches and champagne would be served.
‘You need your head examined!’ said Marsh, when he heard the news. ‘You’re far too old to risk life and limb in some half-witted aerial stunt. A man your age should have some respect for his self.’
‘You’re never too old for adventure,’ said Swann. ‘I’m surprised you haven’t tried flying machines – you’re a devil for the motor car …’
‘That’s different,’ said Marsh. ‘I like to keep my feet on the ground. That’s the way God planted ’em.’
Swann grinned and peered at the stage through the camera. They were working on The Dreams of Hercules or Classical Temptations. Hercules, wearing nothing but helmet and sandals, was sprawled asleep in a bed of straw while a naked succubus knelt over him. The part of the succubus was played by Gladys Pickles. Hercules was played, without conviction, by a coalman called Lanky Parsons.
He was a lugubrious individual with pointed ears and a penis the size of an exhibition salami. No one could remember exactly how Lanky had first been persuaded to wave his penis in public. It wasn’t something he liked to talk about. He found its tremendous dimensions neither practical nor ornamental, it was a burden to carry, a devil to conceal and his wife would have nothing to do with him. She always maintained that had she but known his secret before the wedding night she would never have entered the marriage. He felt very bitter towards his Creator. He was still a virgin and making a spectacle of himself was his only satisfaction.
‘Ain’t frigging nature cruel enough without men dreaming of growing wings?’ he demanded from his bed of straw.
‘Go back to sleep,’ ordered Swann. ‘You’re supposed to be dreaming of Gladys.’
Lanky grunted and let the helmet fall over his face. ‘You can’t expect men to stir up the clouds without something nasty happening,’ he muttered. ‘They’re going to do some damage with all their frigging contraptions. The sky is a very delicate skin – it’s like a big blister around the earth – and once it gets punctured all the oxygen will escape. They’re flying their machines too high. That’s what’s happening. One day we’ll hear a deafening fart and then we’ll die of suffocation. The weather has changed since they started flying. You can’t deny it. I’ve never known such weather. You can’t fiddle with nature. If you fiddle with nature you breed frigging monsters.’
‘Look at you,’ said Cromwell Marsh, by way of illustration.
‘Look at me,’ said Lanky Parsons, pulling on his salami.
‘Well, I think it’s wonderful!’ piped Gladys, suddenly jumping to her feet. Gladys, in contrast to Lanky, had grown rather proud of her attributes and considered herself to be the outstanding nude of her generation. She walked up and down the stage, sticking out her chest and striking provocative poses. ‘I think Mr Swann is such a brave man!’
‘You’ve got a brain like a frigging cauliflower!’ shouted Lanky Parsons impatiently.
‘And you’re a very ill-tempered man,’ returned Gladys, cupping her hands to her breasts. ‘You’re coarse and cheap and I’ll thank you not to point your anatomy at me.’
‘It’s not my fault,’ said Lanky. ‘That’s the way it grows.’
‘Let’s get back to work,’ said Swann, clapping his hands. ‘If we don’t catch it soon we’ll lose the light.’
‘Tell him to stop waving his anatomy, Mr Swann,’ demanded Gladys. ‘He’s making me feel queasy.’
‘It�
��s the frigging straw,’ grumbled Lanky. ‘It’s scratching me something wicked. I just can’t seem to get comfortable.’
‘Now I’ve lost the mood, I’m so upset,’ said Gladys, stamping her foot and threatening to leave the stage.
‘Would you like me to fetch you a glass of water?’ said Swann.
Gladys shook her head. ‘I’d like a cup of tea,’ she said, hopefully, ‘and perhaps a small slice of cake.’
‘No time!’ shouted Cromwell Marsh, anxiously watching the shadows as they spread across the studio floor. ‘We’re wasting the light. Go and torment Hercules.’
‘I can’t bear to look at him,’ said Gladys, but she clambered back into the straw.
‘Perhaps he’s right,’ said Marsh, as the company settled down again and the first of the plates had been exposed. ‘You can’t expect men to float in thin air.’
‘Nonsense!’ grinned Swann. ‘One day we’ll all be cresting the clouds.’
18
On the 18th September, two days before Swann’s flight, Stanley Gaunt took the Ostrich from her moorings at Glastonbury and set sail for Portsmouth. A brass band was playing and a crowd of several hundred spectators assembled to see the airship launched. Gaunt made a speech about aviation for the benefit of the Glastonbury Weekly Observer. A barrel of beer was tapped for the benefit of the crowd. At one o’clock, sharp, pocket watches were consulted, a pistol was fired and the Ostrich took to the sky.
The weather was fine with a brisk wind. Visibility was perfect and for a few glorious hours cooks looked up to Gaunt’s beef gravy. But the Ostrich never reached her destination. Twelve miles from Ringwood she abruptly lost height and ran against a church spire. The balloon exploded. The cabin collapsed. Stanley Gaunt fell to earth in flames.
‘The bugger fell down!’ hooted Cromwell Marsh, when he read the account in the morning paper. ‘I told you it was too good to be true. The bugger fell out of the sky!’
The shock of the disaster nearly put an end to Kingdom Swann. He had missed an appointment with death by a whisker. His suitcase was packed and his flying clothes waiting. He’d purchased a portable camera especially for the flight. An airship was designed to float. That was the secret of their success. He had seen it with his own eyes. You couldn’t sink a dirigible. He couldn’t believe Gaunt had gone.
‘What a bloody performance!’ said Marsh, pulling the spectacles from his nose.
‘There must have been an electrical storm,’ said Swann. ‘That’s the only explanation. Or the ship was attacked by birds.’ Who knew what horrors were hiding from men in the turbulent mountains of cloud? ‘It’s terrible. Terrible. He was a fine, brave man.’
‘He was mad!’ brayed Marsh.
‘I’ll not have you speak with so little respect for the dead!’ shouted Swann, angry to find that his hands were shaking.
‘A man must speak his mind,’ returned Marsh. ‘And he was a danger to himself and everyone he encountered.’
‘He wanted to fly. He wanted to give men the gift of wings. He died like a British hero.’
‘He broke his neck,’ said Marsh, flatly. ‘And he nearly managed to take you with him.’
Swann was invited to the funeral at Gaunt’s beef gravy factory in Bristol. He bought a new set of mourning clothes and had a crêpe ribbon stitched to his cap. Once Stanley Gaunt’s bones were recovered they were rendered down to a fine black pepper and sealed in a crystal bottle. A priest held a service over the bottle and then it was placed in a niche twenty feet up in the factory wall and a tablet set in the stone. It was a very grand occasion. The workers had been given a holiday, with an extra sixpence in their wages, to mourn the death of the aviator. At the end of the day the guests were sent home with souvenir hymn books and complimentary bottles of gravy.
When driven by their enemies to defend such eccentric arrangements, the family announced that they thought the gravy works to be as close to a house of God as any regular church. The building had turned so much blood into money they reckoned it must be a miracle. God was surrounded by mystery but he’d clearly shown his fondness for gravy.
Swann was inclined to agree with them. The factory was like a cathedral with its vaulted ceilings and elaborate stained glass windows. The windows depicted The Twenty Merits of Honest Labour and the ceilings were buttoned with bosses, carved in the shape of bulls’ heads. The crystal bottle displayed in its niche might well have contained the dust of some distant, foreign saint.
When Swann returned to London he felt exhausted and depressed. He couldn’t concentrate on his work and closed the studio for a week. He had a photograph of the Ostrich mounted in a black silk frame and put on display in the window. He spent the days sitting quietly at home and tried to recover his spirits. But sometimes at night he dreamt he was falling, head over heels, through the boiling clouds that separated the earth from the heavens. The clouds would dissolve to reveal the rushing spires of London, thousands of broken and rusty swords, and then he would startle awake with a shout, his body spread-eagled on the mattress and his big beard spangled with sweat.
19
The following year Blériot flew the English Channel.
‘The aeroplane is at Selfridges,’ said Marsh. ‘They’ve put the machine on display in the store.’
‘They’d make an exhibition from a monkey and a tattooed lady if they thought it would make ’em money,’ said Swann.
‘They say we’ll soon be flying to France, regular as clockwork,’ continued Marsh. ‘The Channel steamers are finished.’
‘I’m not interested!’ shouted Swann impatiently.
‘I am surprised,’ grinned Marsh. ‘And you so anxious to try your hand at aerial photography.’ He enjoyed taunting the old man. It rankled that his master should be infatuated with something as dangerously modern as flight when he, himself, could not find the stomach for it. He had taken the news of Stanley Gaunt’s death with all the bitter satisfaction of a man who has proved himself a prophet. He had known, all along, that it wouldn’t work and it must only be a matter of time before the daft, French Blériot broke his neck.
But Swann was cured of his interest in flight. It was the last time he looked to the future for inspiration. He ignored the news of Blériot and devoted himself to his work.
He stalked the streets in search of fresh women to feed to the hungry camera. At the pawnbroker’s shop in the Edgware Road he encountered a beauty with mocking eyes and employed her help in The Judgement of Paris. One evening, walking in Brewer Street, he found Susannah selling bowls of jellied eels to a crowd of beer-soaked Elders.
Every woman had something about her person that made her beautiful. He fell in love with their ears or their hands or the shape of their curving mouths. He adored their teeth, their dimpled knees or the colour of their nipples. A woman could hide nothing from his penetrating stare. He owned such a greatly experienced eye that he found he could measure their private parts at a glance, without so much as ruffling a feather.
His method of approach was simple: he stopped the women of his choice and asked them to pose for him. He compared them to works of art by famous, fancy foreigners, described them as a Greek or Roman goddess and begged permission to take their portraits. This frank approach at first amused and then intrigued them and led them, at last, to his studio. Swann looked so blissfully innocent and his old-fashioned clothes so peculiar that women never failed to be seduced by what, they supposed, must be an artist of genius. If modesty finally held them back he found that flattery, alone, could pull the laces from their corsets. They couldn’t resist this huge, old bear in voluminous pantaloons.
He picked up Annie Potter in a florist’s shop in Baker Street. She was a heavy, clumsy girl with brooding eyes and a plump, lascivious mouth. She looked ugly in her boots and apron but Swann could tell, at once, that he’d made an important discovery.
Marsh was dismayed when she first arrived at the studio. As far as he was any judge she looked as plain as a ha’penny loaf. But stepping out
on the stage, without the disguise of her miserable clothes, she was found to be the most magnificent nude he had ever seen in his life. She was a voluptuous beauty with broad shoulders, generous hips and a waist that pinched her body into the shape of a violin. She wore her hair loose, falling in ringlets against her neck. Her breasts were round and set very high. Her skin was as white as moonlight and gave off the scent of heliotrope.
Dressed in her working clothes she had seemed dull-witted and hesitant but without them, walking the little stage, she moved with a splendid arrogance, concealing nothing from their gaze and even asking for some almond oil to put a shine on her whiskers.
We beg to inform our friends, Marsh wrote in the catalogue, of the latest astounding triumphs in the realm of artistic photography. A new set of scenes, only recently completed, depicting Hagar the Concubine Anointing Herself for Abraham. No expense has been spared to bring the Old Testament back to life and the connoisseur will marvel at the strength and vitality of the scenes. The dusky slave is one-and-twenty, built very big and, once revealed in the undraped condition, is found to lack nothing but modesty. Here the viewer finds himself cast in the role of Abraham while Hagar, completing her beautification, prepares to excite his carnal desire.
Also available: A Christian Girl at the Roman Games and The Pharaoh’s Dancing Daughter.
We must caution the collector that all these historical illustrations are true to life in every respect and should be purchased by none but the most experienced voluptuary.
20
Towards the end of the year Swann was approached by Golden Beehive, a printing house in the Strand. The publishers wanted seventy plates to decorate a new cloth edition of a book called The Fresh Air and Sun-Bath System. The system, based largely on nude gymnastics, would be illustrated with photographs. Should the Swann studio prove satisfactory, there was work waiting on The Body Beautiful and several other titles. The publishers called it the Modern Woman’s Art Library and since, as Violet had always maintained, ‘art is not hairy’, all the photographs would be retouched.
Kingdom Swann: The Story of a Photographer Page 7