The Whispering Swarm

by Michael Moorcock

  I always delighted in my friends, for whom I frequently felt an unconditional loyalty. I began seriously to cultivate an interest in others, beyond being generally sympathetic. I wanted, in a dumb sort of way, to alleviate their discomfort or pain but still had only the vaguest sense of why they were hurting. If I had been a dog I would have brought them my best bone.

  I was not thin-skinned. Because I had been raised with considerable self-confidence I could take quite a lot of banter, criticism or insults. Helena was really the only one who could hurt me because I had so much emotion invested in her. God knows what it was I did to her! Looking back, I wonder about my own casual verbal cruelties. I rarely lied and must have been horribly frank. I joked about the most profound experience. Having been brought up among strong women I only felt comfortable with women who generally gave good account of themselves. As an autodidact I was in awe of Helena’s formal education, her ability to learn and understand things for their own sake. I taught myself to watch and listen more acutely, studying what lay beneath any surface not because I was driven by shame or regret but because I was curious and needed to improve my range. To that end for a while I read only modern writers. T.H. White had told me to read everything I could learn from. Sometimes I’m astonished at how lucky I was to have known such writers as a child. Commercial writers and literary writers, including my aunt’s genial neighbour, the thriller writer Edwy Searles Brooks. He began his career combining fantastic subjects, with the traditional Wodehousian school story set in a Sargasso Sea populated by the descendants of pirates. In my school holidays I stayed with Auntie Connie and used to go to tea with Mr and Mrs Brooks. They lived in a leafy southwestern London suburb, which always seemed magical to me. Those suburbs were endless. Brooks had written dozens of Sexton Blake stories which he now turned into his Norman Conquest thriller series published by the prestigious Collins Crime Club. He gave me a lot of practical advice. Mervyn Peake, though, was probably my greatest mentor. The Peakes lived not far from Brooks, in Wallington. Around 1960 the family moved to Kensington. Peake encouraged me to be dissatisfied with the mediocre and to hoe one’s own row. In some ways it helped me create several subgenres, but it made me a slave to the conventions I’d put in place.

  My worst faults I only saw in retrospect. I was arrogant and blunt but apparently my sense of humour and self-deprecation made up for it. I remained supremely self-confident and somehow had the ability to take others with me. Maybe our mutual curiosity had something to do with it, too. And there was something about our chemistry. We were, after all, in love.

  I remember racing to get something sorted before the baby was born. While I hammered out scripts and features and novellas and novels for money I also studied form and narrative method. Hoping to train my eye to see overlooked details of every kind, I probably did develop a greater sympathy and humility. I doubt if any of this showed in my work, most of which was melodrama: SF, fantasy, allegorical stuff, maudlin autobiography. But I was determined, by the time I was thirty, to have faced the devils driving me and take a broader interest in the world in general. I admired writers like George Meredith, Angus Wilson, Elizabeth Bowen and Elizabeth Taylor, all of whom could do what I couldn’t. I wanted to write moral novels of character dealing with important social issues. I needed to understand others better. In particular I wanted to make my love for Helena into something positive and useful to her. I did my honest best to learn how to support Helena emotionally during her terrible brooding silences but I suppose I was at root too selfish myself to be of any fundamental help. And then I betrayed her. The worst thing I could have done to counteract anything positive I had tried to do. Pregnancy, of course, didn’t help. I began to feel serious anxieties about my ability to provide properly for a mother and child.

  Most of what I learned about Helena’s early life came from her mother. Mrs Denham had married a director of Vickers-Armstrong, the arms and aeroplane company. They made the VC10. The best jetliner ever. Helena always said her dad was an arms manufacturer. She had been his firstborn and his favourite. She had adored him. She was fourteen when he died listening to Bach at the Wigmore Hall. Mrs D said her husband had Jewish blood on his mother’s side. ‘And they’re prone to heart problems, aren’t they? As well as brooding.’ Helena’s ma was at once fascinated by and suspicious of anyone who might be Jewish. Or anyone who wasn’t Anglo-Saxon, for that matter. At six foot two, with blond hair and blue eyes, with my professional background, I fit her bill perfectly. No matter what I told her about my heritage, she was profoundly convinced of my racial purity. Before I came along, Helena’s succession of small, neurotic men (‘Jews, Scots, even Australians!’) before me hadn’t suited Mrs Denham. I had never lied to her. She insisted my family history was speculative. We had an authentic family story of how my grandmother’s Jewish parents had mourned her as though dead, not because she married a goy but because she married a secular Jew. Mrs Denham insisted the story was myth and that my grandmother had made it all up! I was genuinely puzzled by these mental convolutions. In London, in the middle of the twentieth century, only loonies cared about your racial origins. Shortly before I was fired, Mrs Denham stood for Dulwich as Liberal MP and missed by a narrow margin.

  To make life as stable for Helena and the baby as I could, I did my best to earn more money, upping my output of Meg Midnight stories and a new character, time-travelling Jack O’ London. I also did ‘The Man From T.I.G.E.R.’ for, you guessed it, Tiger. I took on ‘Danny and His Time Machine’ weekly for Lion and started a weekly feature, ‘African Safari’. I wrote scripts for the monthlies, Buck Jones, Kit Carson, Dick Daring of the Mounties, Dogfight Dixon, RFC. I wrote features for Look and Learn. I did Zip Nolan and Speed Solo stories for the regular weeklies, Karl the Viking and Olac the Gladiator and historical features for the annuals—anything I could write to start saving a bit of money so we might at least make Colville Terrace a little more congenial. I wrote fantasy novellas and science fiction short stories for Carnell. And the rest of the time wasn’t too bad. We were a couple. Helena kept her job for as long as she could. She also planned to freelance. We started to see a lot more of the Allard family and others. He and I would sit and talk literature together while Helena and Shirley talked of more serious matters and wondered if they were ever going to be able to afford a holiday.

  In those days I loved Notting Hill and Notting Dale for their increasing diversity. Everybody rubbed along. Only occasionally would a few white lads from the predominantly Irish population go wild when they perceived their girls were being lured into the life. The girls weren’t being lured but they did prefer the sweet ways of the West Indians. A few bottles thrown with the insults, a few oy oys and a bit of a tussle was usually the worst it got and then there were the manly exchanges of compliments. Shouts in the street at night. Checking it out from darkened windows.

  We did all we could to get ready for the baby so that when she came she was very welcome. September 1963. In those days mothers counted off the months just to make sure a child had been conceived in wedlock. I still relied on AP and other periodicals for most of my income but I was writing more for Carnell all the time. I began doing more science fiction novellas for Science Fiction Adventures and New Worlds. I even began a feature in Science Fantasy calling on writers to raise their horizons. My own ambitions were growing all the time.

  14

  CHILDREN

  At twenty-three I’d sold my first real SF novel as a serial and Sally was born that same September. The year 1964 brought another two novels, a demo and Kitty. Kitty took so long coming that the hospital sent me home. Sally was being looked after by my mum. To keep awake until the hospital rang I played poker with Barry, Max and a couple of other blokes. At dawn I walked to the hospital next to Wormwood Scrubs and there was Helena and another scowling miniature Capone. I had lost all my cash at cards. I had to ask Helena to find her purse and let me have my bus fare home. Of course, she never forgot that.

  Now I was defini
tely Father, but not my father. Helena was Mother, not my mother. I was determined not to become my father, whom I didn’t much like. I loved my mother, Helena, my daughters. I wanted to be with my family forever. I took on that job. I wanted to be all they wanted of me, Father. I loved them; delighted in them. I bought a massive, industrial-strength, battleship-grey pushchair so the children could sit one behind the other, as if they were in the cockpit of a DH-4 biplane. I dreamed of fixing a Lewis gun on the front as I rushed them through the streets at great speed, through the crowds of Saturday tourists in Portobello Road, up to Holland Park and Hyde Park where we’d settle. As they became toddlers, they could run about on grass while I read or wrote and gave their mother a rest. I got ideas for stories in the parks and up on top of Derry and Toms department store, which had a huge roof garden, unknown by most Londoners. Many a character description came from the people I saw there, many a background scene was from something I’d observed. I loved being with my girls and they were always an inspiration. Twice, what I swore was the same raven I had last seen in the snow turned up, perching on top of the fake wishing well and on the wall of the Tudor Garden. It turned its head and seemed to wink at me. I suppose I should have thought it sinister, even when he hopped along the wall staring at the girls, but to me he was only comical. He seemed a happy soul for a carrion bird. I had always felt an affinity for crows, who are among the smartest creatures on the planet.

  Mysteriously, and for a short while after both children were born, I first heard the Whispering Swarm. That faintest of distant murmurings in my ears would briefly grow into a torrent of unfamiliar, whispering voices. I made out no words, but after a while I thought I heard something, because of certain repeated notes. I would lie in that old double bed worrying what was best for the baby, where we should move and so on, and before I knew it the Swarm would begin to whisper in my left ear. I thought at first that it was Helena, but she always slept on my right. I hardly heard it at first. Perhaps she was snoring? I washed my ears in case I had picked up a virus. But the whispering voices—and I was now convinced they were voices—were just as insidious. I tried hard to detect words but heard nothing coherent. And then, in the darkness, they went away, leaving a questioning silence. At night I was in no doubt that they represented some kind of intelligence. By daylight, however, they became an irritant, a minor hallucination: I thought it might be acid-reverb, when LSD taken months earlier suddenly kicks in again. Or maybe a subconsciously originated distraction from my responsibilities?, suggested Arthur Paine, the local shrink, when, at the pub one night, I told him about the Swarm. He hardly listened, though. He wanted to talk about his son. Dr Paine had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. ‘A suicide!’ the boy declared.

  I took my responsibilities seriously enough, though it meant a lot of hackwork. I never regretted having our children so relatively young, but Helena and I weren’t prepared for babies, especially two in less than a year. We knew so little about what to do. Mothers offered conflicting advice. Other wisdom sounded like superstition to us. Thank god for Doc Spock.

  Abortions were still illegal. Helena had a horrifying one via the old boyfriend so that wasn’t an option. But at that moment in our lives a third young child would have been ruinous, both financially and emotionally for everyone. Just in time, female contraception became widely available. Of course we accepted our responsibility as parents, buying the special foods, the books and the clothes, negotiating the convictions of well-meaning relatives, doing the best that could be done by conscientious, uninformed young people. I wasn’t exactly a New Man, but I did more than most men of my generation to take on my share of the domestic work.

  The children were never a burden, though it wasn’t easy in our two rooms, a bath in the kitchen and a toilet downstairs on the landing, but we managed reasonably well. We had been raised during austerity and were used to making do. There was virtue in it. We had a TV. Although Len Matthews and I had fallen out at the end of my time with AP, I still freelanced for all his editors. They just asked me to contribute under Helena’s maiden name because Len had put it about that I was some kind of commie agitator, maybe because I knew too much about his ruthless careerism. My freelance earnings were reasonably good and we had only minor money worries. I had given up music for the time being. Our girls were huge, healthy and generally happy even though their cot was a little close to a record player constantly broadcasting the Beatles and Beethoven, which preserved our sanity. That flat couldn’t have been more than three hundred square feet. For a bit I rented a daytime room from my brother-in-law, where I could work. It was miles away in Southwark. I started looking for a bigger flat we could reasonably afford, but for eighteen months we lived in very-cramped, somewhat-noisy conditions as the babies became toddlers with their own increasingly complex personalities.

  Colville Terrace then was a mixture of brothels, bohemians, old people and young parents. Two years earlier we had the so-called race riots, running fights between Teddy Boys and West Indians. Now the neo-Nazis were trying to exploit the situation from their headquarters in Princedale Road. We had a steel band rehearsing next door. Outside, at three AM every weeknight, a big whore called Marie got drunk and wielded a giant kitchen knife and needed three policemen to wrestle her down and take the weapon away from her before she killed her pimp and her client. The cops never charged her. They were too scared. Nobody accused Marie to her face. She was the sunniest of neighbors when sober. But she always carried that knife.

  During the day people were generally friendly to young couples with children who shopped in what then was a cheap Portobello Road market. In a pushchair solid enough to go up against a Sherman tank, Sally and Kitty sat chuckling and waving as their massive, wheeled battering ram charged through knots of tourists adding our junk-and-antique market to their itineraries. Secure in their machine, the girls were a big hit with the local shopkeepers, especially Mrs Pash who, with her companion Mr Skinner, ran Elgin Music in Elgin Crescent. We spent a lot of time in Mrs Pash’s. She loved the kids. Mr Skinner had opened the shop in 1905 when he closed his father’s old place in Kilburn. ‘It was all banjos and ukes until the 1930s,’ he told me, looking at a fretless banjo I’d picked up in the market. ‘This is off a minstrel show, isn’t it?’ He admired the sunburst surround, the gold-and-scarlet resonator. ‘We saw a lot of these once.’ He loved the Epiphone guitar I found. ‘They used to tune these classical,’ he said. ‘Bit of a mistake. Because of classical orchestras, that’s all. Always best in G, though.’ The Epiphone had a huge resonator on the back and was used for dance-band work before electric amplifiers. He talked of old customers, of Jack Jackson, Carol Gibbons and his Savoy Hotel Orpheans. He wasn’t aware that half the most famous popular musicians in the world were now hanging out in his shop. One afternoon I walked in to find Jeff Beck, Jimi Hendrix and Martin Stone all there together.

  After Mrs Pash’s husband died in the 1940s Mr Skinner moved into the basement and ground-floor flat at 87 Ladbroke Grove, W11. Mr Skinner had taught her grandsons to play every fretted instrument there was. One of them, David, became a guitar prodigy and appeared on the cover of BMG. Mrs Pash was as enthusiastic about Sally and Kitty as she was about her own grandchildren, one of whom was a foreign correspondent. Cheerful, enthusiastic David worked in the shop part-time. I admired his classical training, he envied me my self-taught idiosyncrasies.

  Meanwhile for a series of articles on fantasy fiction for Science Fantasy I immersed myself in nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. Bayley and I were still making most of our money from journalism while Allard kept his day job as editor of Science and Industry. We needed every penny we earned.

  When Science Fiction Adventures folded suddenly it was the writing on the wall. We weren’t surprised when Carnell told us his magazines, which had put a bit of jam on our bread and butter, were under threat of extinction. We started looking for more work. We sent a few stories to Argosy and American magazines and had them accepted, but thos
e markets, though they paid a little better, were even more conservative than New Worlds. We had no market for our ambitious fiction.

  Next, to my surprise, Ted Carnell phoned me to say New Worlds and Science Fantasy had been bought. He would not continue as editor but he had named me as his successor because of my editorial experience. It turned out, however, that Kyril Bonfiglioli, the accomplished fencer and art dealer, had been suggested as Carnell’s replacement by Brian Aldiss. Like them, the new publisher lived in Oxford. They all used the same pubs. I was almost relieved, certainly reconciled, that I would not be editing the mags. I had lost any enthusiasm for commercial SF and most fantasy and was hardly reading it any more. I had a different sort of novel to write.

  In the end a compromise was proposed: Impact Books offered me first choice of the magazines. Against expectations I picked New Worlds. It was the best vehicle for what I had talked about doing. The title was at least a little ambiguous. And so began what others would call the ‘SF New Wave’. While Bon followed a policy similar to America’s Magazine of Fantasy And Science Fiction concentrating on improvements in characterisation and more sophisticated writing, I was determined, with Burroughs, some British poets like George MacBeth and the British pop artists, to take what we needed from SF but drop some genre clichés and rationalisations, moving on to create our own kind of fiction. Using methods developed from both modernism and SF, the work remained rooted in popular traditions but also encouraged innovation. I wanted the general reader. I wanted women like Helena to buy it. I wanted art paper, large quarto, colour. They let me have a bimonthly paperback magazine printed on already disintegrating cardboard—the nearest thing an English magazine of its type ever came to actual pulp.