Modem Times 2.0 - Michael Moorcock [32]
Slowly, the big brutal blocks of concrete and fake Le Corbusier flats began to dwarf St. Paul’s and the Royal Mint, and the familiar trails disappeared, together with the alleys and yards, the little coffee shops and printers. Like an animal driven from its natural environment, I’d turn a corner and run into a newly made cliff. The docks disappeared with astonishing speed. One day the ships were shadows honking out of the smog and the next they were gone. Airfreight and containers were replacing the old systems. Without our heavy exports we didn’t need ships; without the ships we didn’t need the docks.
West London, where I got my next job, is a lot easier to identify from 1950s Rex Harrison comedies. Almost everything was dark green and brass: motorcars, front doors, porters’ uniforms. Everything else was bright yellow (driving caps, cars, frocks). Smart young voices imitated Noël Coward and Gertie Lawrence. and their owners buzzed about in MGs and Mayflowers. I worked for people rather like them. They completed my education. They gave me my taste for good food and wine and introduced me to T. S. Eliot and Proust. I was regardedas a bit of an enfant terrible and they encouraged me to write. I hardly had to work at all. For a while it was always maytime in Mayfair and spring in Park Lane. By the time I was seventeen, I was back in Holborn, editing Tarzan Adventures, where I’d sold most of my early work. But I’d added quite a lot to my social and literary education.
By then, too, I’d found Soho, jazz and skiffle, and had actually twice played washboard with the Vipers, who became the Shadows. I’d cut a demo (which set my musical career back for years) and I was hanging out with people who introduced me to Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Terry. I learned Woody Guthrie licks from Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and corresponded with Guthrie and Seeger, under house arrest as un-Americans. I became more critical of politicians. My digs were in North Kensington and Fulham, which had sustained a bit more of the Blitz and were full of poor immigrants. There the streets were grey, dirty, hopeless, and often violent. I did wonder why all the posh bits of London were only what you might call lightly bombed, and why all the working-class suburbs were piles of ashy rubble. When Churchill (as he explained later) was sending back false intelligence about the Nazi strikes, suggesting that Streatham was the centre of our steelyards, he didn’t seem too eager to give the impression that Belgravia was an industrial beehive. But I don’t hate him for it. He did, after all, give me a lot to write about and a strong sense that nothing is permanent.
Soho was coffee bars and formica signs, formica table-tops. Formica hid all the old shop signs and looked at least superficially modern. Rock and roll, sex and drugs. Trad jazz became skiffle and skiffle became blues or R&B. I played guitar for a while in a whores’ hotel. There were no proper threads in the shops. Just grey suits, tweed jackets, and corduroys. We took old stiff detachable collars and wore them with thin black ties, adding a car coat, white shirt, trousers stitched tight to our legs. My children say I was a Mod. I say those were the only clothes we had.
Around 1963 my wife and I moved to Colville Terrace,where our next-door neighbour, a big knife-fighting whore called Marie, was regularly and noisily arrested nightly at about 2 AM. I took over New Worlds magazine, determined to lift from science fiction some fresh conventions, which J. G. Ballard, Barrington Bayley, and I felt were needed to reinvigorate English fiction.
My main contribution to this period of experiment was Jerry Cornelius, his name pinched from a greengrocer’s sign in Notting Hill. As Mike Harrison pointed out, he was as much a technique, a narrative device, as a character.2 Like me, Jerry relished ruins. Unlike me, he enjoyed making more of them. Through that era we called “the ‘60s”—which really ran from about