Suarez Séance 17.07.08

The following is the text prepared by Cathi Unsworth for her introduction performed at the Suarez Séance at the Horse Hospital in July 2008.

(c) Cathi Unsworth 2008

“Whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness, shall be heard in the light.”

When Derek Raymond appeared at the NFT in the summer of 1993 to perform with Terry Edwards and James Johnston the work you will be hearing later tonight, he was asked about the history of Noir fiction and what he considered to be the leading works in the canon. “You could start with The Bible,” he said. The words of Luke chapter 12 verse 3 clearly delineate his motivation. Derek Raymond, the Godfather of British Noir, shone his torch of enquiry into the darkest corners of evil, in an attempt to bring the unquiet victims back into the light.

The books of Derek Raymond – the Black Novels, as he called them – comprise a body of work that ask all the really hard questions. Why are we here? What is the point of all this suffering? Beneath the civilization we strive for, why do we continue to be so brutal?

The author was uniquely placed to pass comment on British society as he travelled through virtually every strata of it. Born in 1931, Robert William Arthur Cook was the son of a textile magnate, destined for Eton at the age of 16. “Terrible bloody place,” he later reminisced. “They were trying to make you into a good all-rounder, a cabinet minister, a bastard.” Although he did eventually find a use for his Eton tie — fronting long firms for Soho gangster Charles da Silva as self-styled ‘morrie’ Robin Cook.

That was after he had completed his National Service as a corporal of latrines, been a war correspondent and an international art smuggler. In the London of the early 1960s he found, “An Eton background is a terrific help if you are into vice of any kind.” Between inveigling funds, running gambling parties around The King’s Road and selling porn in Soho, Cook penned his debut, The Crust on its Uppers in 1962. Its glossary of criminal argot was considered by Dictionary of Slang compiler Eric Partridge to be his best source in 25 years.

For reasons never specified but not hard to imagine, Cook moved to Italy shortly after, where he continued to write vicious satires like Private Parts in a Public Place and Bombe Surprise, ran a vineyard, and was made foreign minister for his local Anarchist collective. In 1970’s A State of Denmark he had a nightmare vision of a future England under the dictatorship of smiling Prime Minister Jobling and his re-branded Labour Party, The New Pace.

Cook returned to London in the 70s, but after trying to make ends meet mini-cabbing, he lost his third wife and a house in Holland Park. He retreated to France, working a vineyard from a medieval tower in the Massif Central. When one of his neighbours pointed out that that was how he looked set to end his days, Robin pulled on his beret, turned again to those distant London streets and was born again as Derek Raymond – so as not to be confused with either the politician or the SF writer of the same name, he took his new ID from the first names of his two favourite drinking pals.

The ‘Factory’ series of books that he began in the late Eighties stand as a benchmark in modern crime fiction. Brimming with violence and disgust, spoken in the language of the street and fired with a fervent compassion for the fate of the victim, they turned the cosy, crossword puzzle confines of the traditional potboiler on their head.

He Died With His Eyes Open, The Devil’s Home on Leave, How The Dead Live, I Was Dora Suarez, Dead Man Upright and Not Till The Red Fog Rises stalk the bleakest corners of a vividly-rendered London “scoured by vile psychic weather”. The casebooks of a nameless Detective Sergeant, most accurately described as an avenging angel, catalogue such crimes as the ex-army psycho who chops up and boils his victims, leaving them all neatly stapled up in plastic bags; the biography of a broken ex-BBC writer, whose lover is plotting to kill him with the help of a maniacal mummy’s boy; and perhaps most devastatingly of all, the story of poor Dora Suarez, who invites her own doom over the threshold and into her bed.

It is virtually impossible to separate the life of Derek Raymond from what he put into his novels, and in his memoir, The Hidden Files, he describes the profound impact Suarez had upon his being. He was at a friend’s house in France when he was shown a book of police crime scene photographs. He came to a page that showed the corpse of a beautiful young woman with black hair, who had been stabbed on a sofa and is lying back on it, her arm raised to try and shield herself, a look of terror glazed into her eyes. The same photograph that is reproduced on the album of Dora Suarez. Robin’s immediate reaction to this picture was to jump in his car, go back to the tower and begin writing. Here’s how he describes the process that followed in The Hidden Files:

“The writing of Suarez, through plunging me into evil, became the cause of my seeking to purge what was evil in myself… If I had no guilt to purge I would not have known where the road to hell was, nor how to look for Dora. It was an 18 month journey during which the world of light was no stronger than my belief in it, but it was enough for myself and Dora to find our way back and out of the labyrinth. On my journey I left the world for the page, and the page of hell, and the hope for the return journey. I have returned. I crept terrified into a dark place and struck a light in another’s darkness and I have returned here with the knowledge that Dora’s agony among the lost is over. The squalid atrocity of her death has dropped away from her and she is freed, unlocked, no longer lost and dead to herself, which is what damnation is. That I have never known Dora in life, that she was just the face in a police photograph of a dead, anonymous girl whom I named Dora doesn’t matter; that she should have found her identity is what matters. What matters is that we met in the middle world where the living and the dead meet, and brought each other away from that lightless place.

Suarez was my atonement for 50 years’ indifference to the miserable state of this world; it was a terrible journey through my own guilt, and through the guilt of others.”

Thanks to the work of Robin’s fifth wife, the French filmmaker Agnes Bert, we can now take a look at the author at work in his tower in France, discussing his love of Noir authors Jim Thompson, Raymond Chandler and David Goodis; his hatred of ‘our Great fucking British police force’ and the writing of I Was Dora Suarez. The documentary also reveals his hitherto undiscussed enthusiasm for the songwriting of Shane MacGowan and The Pogues in no uncertain terms.

How The Dead Live intro – Will Self

‘Bad writers,’ Auden remarked, ‘borrow. Good ones steal’ I like to think I’m a good enough writer to thieve – and do so blatantly. I ripped off Robin Cook’s (aka Derek Raymond) title How the Dead Live quite shamelessly, and gave it to one of my own novels. He was dead, so he couldn’t do anything about it. Some Raymond acolyte thought this was a bit much and wrote me an irate letter. Big deal. Besides, I don’t think Cook would’ve given a toss – he was enough of a Wildean to know flattery when it was staring him in the face.

In truth, I never read Cook’s How the Dead Live until it came time to write this introduction to it – that’s how any literary blagger justifies a bit of work: he doesn’t empathise with his victim – he goes in with the sawn-off pen cocked. True, I’d dabbled in a couple of his other Factory novels, the legendarily emetic I was Dora Suarez and He Died with his Eyes Open, but it wasn’t until preparing to write this piece that I gave Cook’s work any serious consideration.

Some say that the so-called ‘Godfather of English noir fiction’ is quite distinct from his American progenitors; that whereas the books of Hammett, Chandler, MacDonald et al. are characterised by lonely heroes who are committed to righting the perceived injustices of society, Cook’s took the detective procedural far further – down the road to full blown existentialist horror.

The nameless protagonist of the Factory novels has no truck with what he perceives as the seedy moral equivocations of the duly constituted authorities; his is a quest for perfect moments of human connection. If this means that he’s condemned to a lurid shadow dance, battling with the shades of good and evil, the so be it. His is a disillusionment of not only tragic – but epic – proportions. In other words: he’s exactly the same as any other middle aged male cynic, stamping his foot because the world’s has gone sour on him, yet unwilling to imagine what his own mouth tastes like.

So, I say Cook was remarkably faithful to the hardboiled genre. If anything How the Dead Live is more Chandleresque than Chandler, right down to the incongruous quotations from Shakespeare, Spenser and Mrs Gaskell (!), and an allusion to Socrates that has to be oddly obscured in order to make it plausible mental content for a sergeant in Met.

Then there’s the lexicon of Cockney geezer slang, terms recondite even when Cook was writing in the mid-1980s. With his darlings, loves, shtucks, bunny rabbits, artists, berks and wooden-tops, Cook hearkens back to an earlier era, when ‘the code’ prevailed, and there was a difference between good, honest, working crims, and dirty little toe rags, an aristocracy – believe it or not – of crime, the upper reaches of which his solitary jaundiced hero feels a certain affinity with.

And then there are the lacunae with which these books proceed: the frontal lobe discombobulating occasioned by intoxication. For Hammett it was usually opiates – for Chandler, liquor. Cook’s characters swim in the stuff. In How the Dead Live the drinking begins at 9.30 or 10.00 in the morning and pours on unabated. There’s also coke, smack and dope, but you can sample this boozy stream as if it were contaminated river running through the text: Kronenburg, vodka martinis and plenty of Bells (or ring-a-ding as our man jocularly refers to it), sherry, more whisky. When the bent copper is cornered he tries to buy his way out of it with a single malt, when the villain’s catamite comes out shooting his hand is unsteadied by a tumbler of whisky. When the tragic Dr Mardy’s guerrilla surgery fails, his patient is numbed by morphine ‘on a whisky base’.

This view from the bar of the French House in Soho is compounded by the Cook’s strangely foreshortened perception of England (or ‘Britain’ as he quaintly refers to it). Absent in the 1960s and 1970s, Cook’s Britain is all façade and hinterland with no mid-ground: he simply isn’t aware of the social context within which things happen: there are ‘blacks’ and ‘Africans’ serving in junk food places and pubs. In the shires, bumptious pseudo-squires drive five-door Mercedes, yet the saloon bar is still full of men with military titles, who bang on about evacuating from Dunkirk under fire, while in the public bar, a Falstaffian chorus of drinkers guys the town’s bigwig. This is an un-time, where everything seems anachronistic – whether it’s a computer, an electricity strike – or festering stately pile.

The action of How the Dead Live proceeds through the agency of snarling verbal jousts between the Nameless One and various hated fellow cops, debased stooges, disgusting crims and vilely ugly, whoreish women, alternating with oddly impassioned soliloquies. The only characters he has any sympathy for are his wronged sister, a 10-year-old girl beggar, a suicidal junkie he had an affair with – and, of course, the murderer. His wife went mad, his father and mother became ossified by disease, his straight-copper mates have all been savagely maimed in the line of duty.

Put like this How the Dead Live sounds like a ridiculous gallimaufry – and it would be, were it not for two factors: Cook could write beautifully, when he had cause to; and, more importantly, what he is writing about in this novel are nothing less than the most important subjects any writer can deal with: morality and death.

Like Chandler, Cook’s very weaknesses as a writer are also his strengths – the tipsy sentimentality, the jaded eye, the poetic riff – these, when yoked to an imagination that insists on the most visceral stripping of skin from skull, produce prose of exquisite intensity.

Even Cook’s weird historical perspective – sheered off like the bonnet of a bubble car – comes into its own in this novel: How the Dead Live, first published in 1986, teeters on a chronological cliff: its principal characters are all irretrievably maimed by the experience of the war, and the wholesale death they witnessed. The shades of these dead haunt them, and percolate into the scuzzy atmosphere. It is this profound and now vanished era, when the dead lived among the living of grubby old England, that is Cook’s true subject – the seeming police procedural is just that – and he deals with it masterfully.

As the insane Dr Mardy draws us into his mouldering fantasy and his mildewed madness, we experience a true horripilation, a rising of the hackles that indicates we are in the presence of the human mind pushed beyond the brink. Cook makes us see, that while we may cavort in the sunny uplands of life, the shades are always among us, flitting back and forth, seemingly without purpose, and yet slowly, insidiously, relentlessly, herding us towards the grave.

Nightmare in the Street

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A plain-clothes copper in Paris, Kleber is 40 years old, drinks hard and smokes fifty a day. He is devoted to his young wife, Elenya, a former prostitute whom he rescued from her pimp, but he is embittered by 22 years on the streets, and his sleep is haunted by dreams of death. Kleber has many enemies, and only one friend: a criminal named Mark. When Kleber is suspended from the police force for punching a fellow officer, his underworld adversaries seize their chance to bring him to heel. Down but not out, Kleber will show no mercy to those who harm the ones he loves.

Derek Raymond’s final book – the typescript was discovered after his death in 1994 – Nightmare in the Street is a fitting finale to a career spent writing about, and indeed living among, the darkest reaches of humanity.

‘A unique crime writer whose functional world was brutal, realistic and harrowing in the extreme’ Guardian

‘A legendary crime novelist’ Sunday Times

‘Raymond is a master of the sharp vignette, the telling phrase, the speech patterns that perfectly describe a character. All the people in his book are vividly alive.’ New York Times

Chris Petit review for The Guardian

I Was Dora Suarez

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An axe-wielding psychopath carves young Dora Suarez into pieces and smashes the head of Suarez’s friend, an elderly woman. On the same night, in the West End, a firearm blows the top off the head of Felix Roatta, part-owner of the seedy Parallel Club.

The unnamed narrator, a sergeant in the Metropolitan Police’s Unexplained Deaths division, develops a fixation on the young woman whose murder he investigates. And he discovers that Suarez’s death is even more bizarre than suspected: the murderer ate bits of flesh from Suarez’s corpse and ejaculated against her thigh.

Autopsy results compound the puzzle: Suarez was dying of AIDS, but the pathologist can’t tell how the virus was introduced. Then a photo, supplied by a former Parallel hostess, links Suarez to Roatta, and inquiries at the club reveal how vile and inhuman exploitation can become.

‘A pioneer of British noir… No one else has come near to matching his style or overwhelming sense of madness.’ The Times

‘If you think of the act of writing as a game of chicken between the author and his talent, then Derek Raymond is one author who achieves his ecstacy by sailing off cliffs. Everything about I Was Dora Suarez shrieks of the joy and pain of going too far.’ New York Times

3:AM Magazine review

The Devil’s Home on Leave

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After a man’s corpse is discovered in a Rotherhithe warehouse, Derek Raymond’s nameless investigator from A14 – the ‘Unexplained Deaths’ division of the Met – is put on the case.

Operating, as usual, with his cunning and sheer nerve in place of adequate resources and contacts, he seeks to uncover much more than the murderer. To the comment from his boss at A14: ‘If you will stay a sergeant, you will always get the shitty end of the stick,’ he replies: ‘Maybe, but I think that’s the end where the truth is.’

The truth is that The Devil’s Home on Leave brilliantly captures with an authenticity rare in British crime fiction.

‘Raymond has prodigious literary gifts as a writer of class low-life London novels.’ New Statesman

‘I cannot think of another writer so obsessed with the skull beneath the skin.’ The Times

Fragment:

‘He droned on, completely – and what was worse, unconsciously – absorbed in himself, and suddenly I realized what hell it meant, not only to be a killer, but a bore. You think nothing of taking life, but your own existence fascinates you, and that’s the imbalance that we mean by evil… This neat, dull man, crouched in a sort of mass over his own hands, that freaked me.’

How The Dead Live

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This, the third novel in the Factory Series, sees Raymond’s nameless detective leave London for a remote village called Thornhill, where he’s meant to be looking into the disappearance of a local doctor’s wife.

How The Dead Live is a haunting, fantastical novel, with a hellish country house at its centre; a mystery with little interest in the mystery, a police procedural with almost no procedure. Instead, and as ever with Raymond, it’s a brilliantly unsettling investigation into love and damnation. This is life seen from the very bottom of the bottle – a fitting succesor to classic noir writers such as Jim Thompson and David Goodis.

‘A sulphurous mixture of ferocious violence and high-flown philosophy’ Prospect

‘Cook makes us see, that while we may cavort in the sunny uplands of life, the shades are always among us, flitting back and forth, seemingly without purpose, and yet slowly, insidiously, relentlessly, herding us towards the grave.’ Will Self

Intro by Will Self.

Guardian review

He Died With His Eyes Open

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When a middle-aged alcoholic is found brutally battered to death on a roadside in West London, the case is assigned to a nameless detective sergeant, a tough-talking cynic and fearless loner from the Department of Unexplained Deaths at the Factory police station. Working from cassette tapes left behind in the dead man’s property, our narrator must piece together the history of his blighted existence and discover the agents of its cruel end. What he doesn’t expect is that digging for the truth will demand plenty of lying, and that the most terrible of villains will also prove to be the most attractive.

In the first of six police procedurals that comprise the Factory series, Derek Raymond spins a riveting, and vividly human crime drama. Relentlessly pursuing justice for the dispossessed, his detective narrator treads where few others dare: in the darkest corners of London, a city of sin plagued by unemployment, racism and vice, and peopled by a cast of low-lifes, all utterly convincing and brought to life by Raymond’s pitch-perfect dialogue.

‘A crackerjack of a crime novel, unafraid to face the reality of man’s and woman’s evil’ Evening Standard

‘A mixture of thin-lipped Chandleresque backchat and of idioms more icily subversive’ Observer

‘A pioneer of British noir… No one has come near to matching his style or overwhelming sense of sadness… Raymond’s world is uniformly sinister, his language strangely mannered. He does not strive for accuracy, but achieves an emotional truth all his own.’
Marcel Berlins, The Times

‘Cook’s prose can make amazing stylistic leaps without once losing its balance… He anticipates James Ellroy and David Peace, among others, in this terrifying determination to disclose the skull beneath the skin… a supreme example of how nasty Britain actually is.’ Time Out

‘Witty, perceptive and well written’ Big Issue

Intro by James Sallis
Time Out review

A State of Denmark

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It is the 1960s. England has become a dictatorship, governed by a sly, ruthless politician called Jobling. All non-whites have been deported, The English Times is the only newspaper, and ordinary people live in dread of nightly curfews and secret police.

Richard Watt used all his journalistic talents to expose Jobling before he came to power. Now in exile in a farmhouse amid the cruel heat of the Italian countryside, Watt cultivates his vineyards. His remote rural idyll is shattered by the arrival of an emissary from London.

Derek Raymond’s skill is to make all too plausible the transition from complacent democracy to dictatorship in a country preoccupied by consumerism and susceptible to media spin. First published in 1970, Raymond’s brilliant satire is as dark and frightening as ever.

‘Raymond’s novel is rooted firmly in the dystopian vision of Orwell and Huxley, sharing their air of horrifying hopelessness’ Sunday Times

‘A State of Denmark is carried out with surgical precision… a fascinating and important novel by one of our best writers in or outside of any genre’ Time Out

‘Alternative science fiction on the scale of Orwell’s 1984’ Q

Stewart Home review at 3:AM Magazine.

The Crust on Its Uppers

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First published in 1962, The Crust On Its Uppers, Derek Raymond’s first novel (aka Robin Cook) is a gripping tale of class betrayal. With ruthless precision, and a great deal of humour, it brings vividly to life a London of spivs, crooked toffs and bent coppers.

‘Tremendous black comedy of Chelsea gangland, written and set in the early Sixties, on the cusp of swinging London’ The Face

‘Peopled by a fast-talking shower of queens, spades, morries, slags, shysters, grifters and grafters of every description, it is one of the great London novels’ New Statesman

‘The Crust on its Uppers is the kosher article by a man who was on the down-escalator all his life’ Sunday Times

‘A breathlessly good read… funny, relevant and resonant’ Literary Review

Fragment:

I MUST warn you that everything that follows emanates from the following figure: sacked from the most super public school in the country at the age of sixteen. Puzzled. Sacked from crammer the following year, with clap caught from the Greek maid. Still puzzled.

Joined the army because still too green to knock. Glowing career at Mons, blinded by the toothpaste smile reflected from my boots at adjutant’s parade? Certainly not. Latrines corporal. Still puzzled. Illegitimate child in Weymouth, now about nine – one of the few things that made sense in those days, because the punishment fitted the crime: Daisy was a right old boiler. Demobbed with the following report: Officer potential, nil – N.C.O. potential, nil. C.O.’s comment: a very poor soldier indeed, with a nice smile. What next? Oxford and turn over a new leaf? No, no, morrie, I was beginning to learn . . . to the north, full, of demon energy – to London – a proper ice-cream to look at, only I assure you I’m all about trout, aged twenty-eight with a hard apprenticeship behind me since those army days: two years in Spain flogging hot tape-recorders, a year in France busy vanishing; I lived on the Left Bank subsisting on ten poundses my mother sent me in Illustrated London Newses, taking Civilization at the Sorbonne and penicillin for clap, living all that year like a sort of Lucifer among the scabs and crabs, with a record player roaring out skiffle and trad jazz on the end of the bed. Odd period in London – but come to a rub: nishte. Then off to Rome where I had a right touch teaching at a languages school; nipped off on the plane with Anzac Jack, a dead young grafter, leaving a whole load of angst behind. Anzac played it cool out there: I believe he still is in New York, married to a watches heiress and fooling them all on Madison Avenue. Anyway, having copped on to this job in London and been flown out by the old darling who ran the joint, at first it was dead boring, playing the half-wide mug on ten bob an hour; but we soon got organized and grafted four ton apiece from the old dear and got to the States. Looking back I’ve done some odd things, but all down to learning; I’ve done the lot, in a way, from tutoring a British commercial attaché’s son in Latin and Greek to moody rabbits in Spanish bars with my heart going like an outboard motor and my eyes running about in my head like ball-bearings, with plain-clothes Seguridad watching me and a stack of those dodgy tape-recorders outside in the motor. As to form, though, nothing, though that isn’t to say that ripples don’t pass over the ganglia of the boys down at Chelsea nick every time they clock my boat. And that’s not just down to experience, me not having done any bird – just a weird sort of instinct which tells you when enough’s enough. My old man? Well he’s a sort of dustman, as you’ll see.

And what do ice-creams like us add up to? Ah, well, that’s a question I’ve often asked myself and the rest of the morries. But nishte. If I knew the answer I daresay I’d be laughing. We all would. ‘I can give you the facts,’ I’d say, like a super Lord Morrie dictating from his seat in a 707, ‘but you’ll have to draw the conclusion yourselves.’ All I know is I’m a modern, mixed-up, metamorphosed phenomenon, like the other morries, and maybe something’ll come out from what’s to follow, though I don’t know, because I don’t know what’s to follow myself. As for the other two morries, I was at school with one of them – another point in this strange new world of 1962: there are still only two good schools to come from – and you can guess which they are. All the best Anglo-Saxon grafters come from mine, and the Bubbles and the Indians from the other – what you might call the creme of the ice-creme. All the rest of the so-called kosher establishments are really down to the snob angle, trying to Moody through to the royal enclosure on the knock, like the slag in the King’s Road. The point to grasp is that if you’re a morrie you really sit up there. You plan. If you live near the King’s Road it’s just a nasty coincidence. Nothing to boast about. You know how you hear the slag in the Cavalryman rabbiting about the morries pub, the Tealeaf up in Park Lane Lord This and Morrie That – well, that’s how the slag gives itself away. The real morries never do that. Don’t have to, do they? They’re all about trout, flying dodgy kites with each other at bent spielers till the punter, for very shame, outs his kiting-book too and scribbles a straight one, sort of not to be outdone. And even when the old firm’s going a bit unsteady morries never hock their gold kettles and never walk or bus it like the slag do. Always the XK or the three-point-four, never the Sprite or the knocker’s aged small-boot Bentley or the A30 van.

Now for a quick lamp over the slag. Ever had someone put some snout ash in your rosie? Makes you put on that wry face, doesn’t it? Well, that’s what the slag does. Everything they’ve ever read in a linen or a clever-clever book held upside down they’ve got – all wrong. Go into the Cavalryman – it’s the slag’s Boodle’s. Ever seen the super card-grafter got up from head to toe in Woolworths? Well, he’s there, ordering half a bitter in the corner, trying not to look at himself in that scrubby old mirror with ‘Draught Guinness’ written on it. Mothy old waistcoat (with a sort of fob thing, dear God!) a string tie, chef’s spongebags with three creases in the front (probably slept on them in Waterloo Station and had a nightmare). But hear him talk – and Jesus! he’s got four long ones in the bank and a baccarat game all set up for tonight (come to a rub, though, you’ll find it’s somewhere along the Baize), the lot. Then there’re all those terrible old birds in black slickers got up like the wild ones or the bad seed or something, crackling and popping like damp firelighters, dim, boozy old bosoms all jumbling and flooping about like elephants at feeding time – or else the trim sort, gone all prim and coy because they’ve made it (do you mind!) living with the superthinker leaning against the pillar over there, some grubby Rachmaninoff scrubbing his ginger beard with a claw like a Victorian paperweight. The terrible thing about the slag, though, is that they actually survive, down to the Yanks and French being such pushovers and thinking this must be London’s left bank, when it’s nothing but a grafter’s paradise. . . . Oo, I get so livid listening to the slag trying to pass itself off as grafters: they couldn’t graft their way out of a wet paper bag – they’ve never done an honest day’s graft in their lives. They’d turn up at the Ritz to see a punter with last week’s socks on, they’re that daft. I tell you, it’s the slag that’s made Chelsea a dirty word. Left to the morries, it really would be something. Mind, I’d have nothing against the slag if it’d just stick to its silly old daubing or drooling out Rimbaud at a snap party. But oh dear no. Graft’s the new gravy train so the silly things have climbed aboard – last – and then when they’ve broken all the springs and brought it all to a grinding halt they stare around like moody old brontosauruses and want to know where the graft is! Anyone’d think it was the Klondike gold rush all over again; you can’t just kindly tell them to keep off the grass, that this thing needs brains . . . oo, I get so effing cross I could go moodying on for hours about them!

But for the morries, as I was saying, it’s gold kettles, the jam-jar and a kosher pad: keep going till the next touch, no matter what, and a good solid heavy like Chas to deal with the writ-servers. . . . The point about the morries is, they’ve got brains and initiative . . . none of this moodying about in bed all day like the layabouts, dreaming about the withering away of the state or something. Morries are sharp to bed at 6 a.m. and up at noon, no larking about. The thing is, we’ve had this expensive education; Marchmare even made Oxford for a couple of terms, and the Archbubble got a kosher law degree. So you see what we can do.

And we’ve got contacts, though we take a rather odd attitude to them, maybe. Marchmare summed it up best when he said to me one day: ‘You know, morrie, there’s never any point in remembering who anyone is unless it’s down to biz and they’re rich enough to be really worth hating . . . it’s extraordinary how they come drifting downstream and fall straight on to that hook.’

I never knew anyone who could hate quite like Marchmare. I remember we were doing some biz near Munich last summer and we were on our way to the Czech frontier for something we hadn’t got and had to have. One morning we got a flat tyre (we were using my lag) so we took it to the garage and told the krauts to get at it; then we nipped smartly off for a bevvy. Once we’d got well bevvied up Marchmare let go. Leaning forward he told me: ‘How I hate everyone, morrie.’ Very thin, is Marchmare, and very elegant and young and kosher-looking – a gemini same as me, with a boat-race that can slip straight from looking like an angel’s to a snake’s. I believe he really could palm a dodgy kite on the Assistant Commissioner or stick a fork (but he did this once) into the hand of a moody punter at a chemmy game while the latter was scooping up the chips saying well, well, fancy, eight beats nine.

Marchmare’s had more publicity in the linens down to general larking and going ahead than you could shake a stick at, and his real speciality is the old international moody. When he’s in London he leaps in and out of the bath at Rome Street, S.W.3, our gaff (but he’s never dirty, Marchmare isn’t, not even when he’s been all night with a bird – very sinister, somehow), and then he likes to put on a bit of flash, so he goes swimming up and down the King’s Road in his Chevvy convertible with the electric hood, throwing fireballs at the slag, parking this dreadful great orange-and-cream jam-jar (‘thoroughly nasty and vulgar, dear’, as my grandmother would have said) slap under a no-parking sign … more front than Buckingham Palace. He hates the law, and, believe me, it’s mutual. Never done bird, our Marchmare, but sus clings to him like an aura. There was one time the law thought it’d got him down to kiting, and it went all the way up to the High Court, but the judge was his mother’s cousin and a lot of strings were pulled nearly out of their sockets, so it was no go for Old Bill.

Besides, he was only nineteen. But, see what I mean, the difference between the slag and the morries? Anyway, back to this day in krautland: I’m a bit older than Marchmare so I lecture him a bit, because I think he sometimes pushes the boat out a bit far when he’s off on this hating kick and saying things like the above.

‘Oh, shup,’ he says to my lecturing, ‘moody old you.’

‘Shup shelf.’

‘Oo, how I do hate everyone!’

‘But why, morrie?’

He doesn’t know, though, except obscurely it’s all down to Mum, who certainly does, from what I can hear, seem to have dragged him up a bit strange.

‘Listen,’ he says, ‘how much is your father worth!’

‘I don’t know,’ I say, moodying; ‘about eighty grand.’

‘Habits?’

‘What do you mean, habits?’

‘You know what I mean,’ he says, all impatient; ‘where’s his office, what time does he reach it, what time does he leave. See what I mean! Slip it into him in the street.’

‘No, morrie.’

‘Yellow streak down your back, morrie.’

‘Maybe.’

‘I would.’

‘Why don’t you, then!’

‘Not enough reddy in it in my case.’ He sighs. He isn’t joking. A real morrie conversation in the heart of the Tirol.

Moments like these, though, when we’re relaxing in the sun, life feels good. We’re a team. Down to biz there’d never be any grassing. We’d never grass on each other even at the end of time, nor even long after time had run out, as it threatens to sometimes: we’re not like the slag, who start grassing even before they’ve been whacked, soon as they get their collar felt – not even after a right punch-up from the law in a little granite room, not for a ten-stretch. Would you believe it, I think it’s something to do with being gentlemen – the last relics of romance, which always looks a bit grubby close up like the Spanish Civil War or something – out with the flashing rapiers and all that Errol Flynn stuff. Anyway, it’s kicks: Drake with his genes turned upside down, inside out; a new sort of Drake with pressure on him from all over the manor – pressure from the law, the income-tax boys, from the middle classes who hate us and the working classes, not to mention the oafos, the things who hate us . . . they all want to squeeze out the upper classes, strip us, put us out of our agony. We’re supposed to be in an impossible situation nowadays, too useless to exist: products of our parents who live on the shreds of their inheritances like Marchmare’s and mine do, and keep up a pointless front. But just because we’ve absorbed all that doesn’t mean to say us morries are the same. Maybe we’re a bit rotten (maybe: do you mind!) but we’ve still got our energy, brains, education – we’re all dressed up and nowhere to go, and they’ve taxed us out of our loot, but we’ve got expensive tastes and we need the loot so out we go and get it. Mind, that’s not to say I’ve got much sympathy for most of the ice-creams I was at school with, who keep on pretending that something that doesn’t exist any more still does. Would you believe it? I’ve known squares I was at school with (prefects, monitors, scholarship-winners, all that crap) take jobs in INDUSTRY, as management trainees! Oh, morrie, do me a favour, will you? You know what that is? It’s a formal death sentence. I don’t say one or two of them don’t make it, but oo the convulsions! No, no, Marchmare, the Archbubble and I – we know we can’t win, but we’re going to make sure we don’t lose. The game we play, it’s got its risks, but it’s a heady, intoxicating game; better than nine-to-fiving it and sex, cocktails and rows in a pseudo-tudo cottage near Sevenoaks. At least we’re living. So life’s a jungle. So it’s a terrible thing.