THERE AIN'T HALF BEEN SOME CLEVER BASTARDS - AN OCCASIONAL SERIES

PART ONE:  ANTHONY BURGESS

I'm currently reading part 1 of Anthony Burgess's two-part autobiography. I thought I'd already read the first part, and found a paperback copy already on my bookshelf after ordering both volumes online, but only a few pages in realized I had not, or if I had, had forgotten all of it. I've read most of his novels, having been introduced to "Inside Mr Enderby" back in Paris by an erudite and fatherly colleague.  Quite a challenge, with much vocabulary requiring a good English dictionary close to hand, but a master storyteller.

Born in 1917 into a lower middle class Catholic family near Manchester, he had no support, moral or financial, from his parents for his education, and attended regular Catholic schools, his smarts earning him a place at an elite Catholic college and then Manchester University where he studied English language and literature.  He was fascinated by language and linguistics and over the years learned French, Spanish, German, Russian, Persian and Malay. A self-taught pianist, he saw himself primarily as a musician and composer until his early 40s when he wrote The Malayan Trilogy as an amusement. Between the war (which he sat out pretty much as a nursing orderly and then as an education officer for the troops, a period he describes with scathing cynicism for the authorities) and his stint as an education officer with the Colonial Office in Malaya and then Brunei (1954-59) he was a lecturer in speech and drama, and then teacher of English literature in a grammar school.

Pretty much a functioning alcoholic for most of his life, in 1958 he was mistakenly diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour, whereupon he turned to writing full-time. The first sentence of his novel "Earthly Powers" is for my money the greatest opening of any book I have ever read:

"It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."

Everybody who read it looked up the word "catamite". I went further and based my purchase of a good English dictionary on a list of obscure words taken from Burgess's novels. The dictionary that had the most won - the Collins, purchased reverendly from Foyle's in Tottenham Court Road, pipped the others on "numinous".   I still have it today.

The autobiography is wordy, as you'd expect - after 100 pages we are only up to his early teenage years - with the occasional obscure or arcane word which I no longer look up in the dictionary as I used to with his novels.  It gets more interesting when he becomes an educator in the army, and his rebellious character comes to the fore.  He deplores the level of education of the average squaddie, without vaunting his own intellect, which he downplays considerably. He paints a smoke-stained and stale beer-smelling picture of seedy postwar Soho, a world that my father knew well, and pub crawls with the likes of Dylan Thomas, and occasionally George Orwell.

He was so bloody clever he wrote a novel about Napoleon that mirrored the structure of Beethoven's Eroica symphony.  In total he composed some 250 musical pieces.   But he will be forever remembered as the author of "A Clockwork Orange" (1962), a novella written in three weeks inspired by the rape and beating of his wife in London by American GIs during the Blitz, resulting in a problematic miscarriage, and abysmally misinterpreted by Stanley Kubrick in his highly controversial 1971 film. 

He eventually died of lung cancer (he was also a heavy smoker) aged 76.  His headstone was inscribed in Aramaic.  Obviously.

BOTH SIDES NOW

 

It has been raining for three weeks solid here in Brussels.  We shouldn't complain, we had an unbearable heatwave in June which some countries are still suffering in August,  but we do of course.  BBC's Chris Packham brought us back to Earth (see what I did there) by reminding us that 252 million years ago it rained for two million years.  Thankfully humans hadn't yet been invented, or else we'd have webbed feet and gills now.  Two million years!  Like in Blade Runner.  I would venture that this might have been the Great Flood that the Bible talks of, except how would anyone have known?  More likely one of several more later ice ages which, on melting, provoked Great Floods which made the waters rise.  It makes our current climate crisis look like a blip, and our attempts to hold it back like King Canute commanding the waves to desist.  

The present deluges all over the world are throwing up photos of clouds, which took me back to the annual school journey at primary school where we would be marched out on "field trips" to study aspects of the natural world. 

Manchester and Liverpool sent their kids to North Wales on subsidized holidays. South London had the Isle of Wight. These all-expenses paid jaunts were for kids whose parents weren't wealthy enough to take them on a family holiday.  Foreign holidays were almost unheard of, at least in our demographic.  The ILEA as it was, Inner London Education Authority (1965-90), was a fine socialist organisation that provided grants for holidays and, later, for language stays abroad, of which I was the lucky recipient of two. 

We would be transported by coach to Portsmouth, where we were decanted onto the ferry to Cowes.  This was the first time some of us had travelled by boat, and was very exciting.  Not me, of course, I had been many times on the Woolwich Ferry to North Woolwich and back, so considered myself a seasoned mariner.  We were lodged in guest houses in Sandown and Shanklin, in rooms of 4-6 bunk beds,  all found, for which the guest house owners were no doubt royally paid out of the taxpayer's money.  

We were ordered to write letters to our parents on arrival, which were collected up, stamped and posted by the teachers.  We were allowed one phone call home a week.  It was as much about teaching us a degree of independence as about field education.  We were about 10 years old.

On route marches over the cliffs we would meet kids we knew from other local schools marching in the other direction and unruly banter would break out.  

We were taken by coach to Alum Bay, which is known for its different coloured sand cliffs, formed 60 million years ago by erosion caused by the rising and falling of sea levels bla bla bla ...   and given empty glass test tubes with stoppers which we filled with layers of different coloured sand.  We had to take notebooks and keep records of what we had learned on our field trips.  Types of tree, leaf samples, seashells, nothing too technical for a 10 year old.  On the cloud spotting trip we were taught the names of the different cloud formations and drew pictures.  Thus I learned to distinguish cumulonimbus from cirrus stratus, a piece of knowledge that has proved invaluable over the years. 

Nowadays I hear of children going "with the school" to Thailand or South America!  With a hefty contribution from their parents no doubt.  Although I am far from being a communist fellow-traveller, I must say that the degree of concern and support for families with few resources by the Labour-controlled administrations back in the 1960's was commendable and sadly may not ever be seen again.  It really was a good time to be hard up.