The Whispering Swarm Read Free

Labour Party was the builder of our courageous new world. Labour leaders had their eyes on a visionary future. I always had some elder to give me tips, tell me books to read, explain how to make a radio or shoot a gun. The British Museum was ten minutes away. I spent hours there, looking at the icons of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Strange, beast-headed deities for whom I felt an odd affection. There were film theatres of all kinds. Art galleries from Whitechapel to the Tate. Every day I was introduced to a new book, a painting, a film. At sixteen I was reading Huxley, Camus, Beckett, Firbank. The International Film Theatre showed Kurosawa, Bergman, Resnais, Truffaut and Cocteau as well as the likes of Fritz Lang, René Clair and Max Oph ü ls. And then there was Brecht, Weill, The Threepeny Opera . Lotte Lenya live on stage at the Royal Court. Ionesco absurdist plays a short walk from home. Camus’s Caligula at the Phoenix, Charing Cross Road. Merce Cunningham or the Royal Ballet at Sadler’s Wells, just down the road from where we lived. There was nowhere better to be in the world than London. Society’s last injustices were being taken care of. Slowly, not always graciously, we were giving up the Empire. Abortion- and homosexual-law reform were on their way. In my romantic imagining London was the centre of the cause of the White Lords of Law and I was at the centre of London. It was so good to be a Londoner in those days as we came bouncing up out of the damp, dull decade of the austerity ’50s, when we all wore grey and were too cool to smile at the camera. And we had the reality of the Blitz, our defeat of Hitler, only recently behind us. The Gallery had remained open all through the war.
    THE GALLERY
    Long and narrow, marinated in the fumes of tobacco and gunpowder, stinking of sweat and damp, the Oxford Street Penny Arcade and Shooting Gallery was an old-fashioned game emporium with a selection of dowdy slot machines and noisy pinballs whose nicotine-stained chrome and gaudy lights promised a bit more than they delivered, and a couple of cranes in glass boxes where you operated a grab to try to pick up a toy, all bundled in there bright as licorice allsorts. We had a Mystic Mary fortune-telling machine, whose paint was faded by the daily sun, a couple of ‘dioramas’ where you paid a penny to turn a handle and make a few creaky dolls go through their spasmodic imitations of life against some forgotten or unrecognizable historical drama browned by cigarette smoke on cracked linoleum.
    AUNTIE ETHEL AND THE CARDS
    For a while Mum’s sickly eldest sister, Auntie Ethel, gave tarot readings in a curtained-off corner of The Gallery. She believed in what she did. ‘The trick is to put yourself in touch mentally with the person you’re reading for,’ she told me. ‘It’s something you do with your mind. Sort of telepathy. Empathy, really. It’s only guessing, Mike, but I’d swear you’re in touch with something. You tune them in. It’s the way they sit or talk. You can either read them or you can’t.’ I got the hang of it. The readings would sometimes exhaust her. Shortly before she stopped she let me dress up in a bit of a costume with a veil and do a couple of readings on my own. People were impressed and grateful. I got a strange feeling off it. Then Auntie Ethel disappeared. Uncle Fred said she had serious cancer and didn’t want anyone to see her. I think she died soon afterwards.
    THE GALLERY
    The shooting gallery itself was in semidarkness at the back wall. Rows of cardboard ducks and deer cranked their shaky perpetual progress through a paper forest while men, with skinny cigarettes sending more smoke up to cling against the murky roof or spread, thick as enamel, across hardboard surrounds, leaned the elbows of their greasy demob suits on the well-rubbed oak and killed time banging at the birds with post-1914 BSA .22 rifles. It always