[I am very pleased to present an article that just arrived by post from David Boutland (a.k.a. David Rome), whose stories have been the subject of review several times. It marks the first time this fanzine has been graced with presence of a current SFF writer. It is written in the form of a retrospective, at the big end of a 55-year long telescope…]
by David Rome
In Chester I went exploring the remembered years, turning left into a cul-de-sac of terraced houses and here is the corner shop on the right and ahead the low brick wall topped by the rusty spiked iron railings.
And on the other side of the railings the railway shunting yard with shrill whistle of shunting engine.
A clatter of running feet, two small boys racing each other and the echo of my own voice ringing out after the troops returned from the war and my old man had quit his job at the dairy, taken us out of Sodhouse Bank Gateshead, and brought us here to start a new life.
And I stand looking at number 8 Gresford Avenue then walk the few strides to the end of the street. How short the distance and how small the houses. I look down over waist-high rusty spikes into the place of old adventures. A trickling flow of what couldn't even be called a stream scummy with weed and rubbish and along there where the old gasometer had been that kid went fishing with jamjar on a long string and had fallen screaming and drowned under stagnant water.
I turned my back on the railway wasteland and stood looking at the little windows of crowded little houses. How different to the low, tiled bungalows of the Great South Land. Maybe I don't belong here. Maybe I don't fit.
But I found a flat over a butcher's shop and settled in. Early each morning I was woken by the pounding of cleavers as bloody carcasses were dismembered. Nightly, the tv set showed scenes of protest in Trafalgar Square where truncheon-wielding London bobbies were doing what cops all over the world do, enforce the will of their masters. They charged into peaceful crowds of CND demonstrators with thudding truncheons.
In Russia, America, and Britain missiles with atomic warheads stood ready to end all war.
And in the U.S. Kennedy told Khrushchev to get his missiles the hell out of Cuba. Khrushchev's reply was go to hell. Kennedy blockaded Cuba.
There's a kind of hush
was the mood.
The Earth spins through space. Our home. Infinite space surrounds us. No known habitable world to escape to. The tests of the pre-Cuba crisis had already exposed half a million people to radiation as politicians and glory-hungry generals sought to gain the edge. Two million workers in nuclear weapons plants were preparing to seed the environment with life-wasting emissions. Human guinea pigs were reported to have been tested in the Nevada desert. Their skin peeled loose and their hair fell out. Kennedy urged Congress to build fallout shelters.
The world turned.
While murder was contemplated on a scale beyond human imagination. While secret underground bunkers were readied for our Rulers so the Administration could preserve what it always preserves: itself.
Meanwhile a judge sat on high and looked down on the likes of James Hanratty, a young petty criminal convicted of shooting dead another young man and raping his victim's girlfriend before shooting her, and leaving her paralyzed. His trial went on for twenty one days, the longest and one of the most expensive in the history of murder in England. The jury took almost ten hours to bring in their verdict of guilty. Hanratty was put to death.
And even as nuclear stand-off in Cuba paralyzed the world, new evidence emerged that persuaded many of us that Hanratty was a victim of a state killing and was not a murderer.
Killers must be brought to account. What nightmare scenario would the fat cats, the smug politicians and their privileged families – privileged to live – look upon when, how many years afterward? they emerged into the landscape of a once green and pleasant land?
And when they walked out into the radiation-glow of endless night would we take the only weapons we had left to us to stab and club and hang those who commited the ultimate crime of laying an entire planet to waste?
In the blood-scented world above the butcher's shop I wrote comics now as well as pulp crime and science fiction.
On the pages of Romeo a young girl ran across a mystic country to meet her boyfriend orbiting overhead in starlit night in his space capsule. Mutating butterflies in a child's garden were a prelude to the changing world of The Pink Peril. Featured in Thomson Leng's Judy was Phillipa's Friend Finny, a porpoise tamed before the bottle nosed stars of television leapt across the screen. The war was fought in the air across Europe, and in the jungles of New Guinea, in Fleetway's Battle Picture series.
Millions of words sweated out, to earn a living, but no market be it pulp or comic-book that wasn't approached with respect.
Working on a comic script I used the carpeted floor of my upstairs flat to lay out roughly sketched pictures which, redrawn by an artist, would illustrate the story. I could shuffle their order, add 'boxes' at top or bottom, scribble in lines of dialogue, put in thought bubbles.
One morning I heard a sound I was attuned to, the clack of the letter box, and I broke off and went to the top of the stairs.
Rejections in their self-addressed manila envelopes lay on the doormat.
I opened the door and watched the postman moving away. We were into summer but a bleak wind was blowing down the street. I closed the door again and went into the kitchen and made a cup of tea.
I thought of my time here, and of the stories I had written. Some, a few, I had thought were special. Lately, I'd sold Foreign Body to New Worlds, the story of a science fiction pulp writer whose acceptance cheques stop arriving. The mag had come with the rejections and I opened it to the contents page, feeling nostalgia at the memories it evoked: of writing my first-ever story for Pocket Man, six years ago, of selling Time of Arrival to New Worlds, and of selling Parky in America.
Good days.
Now – New Worlds was in its seventeenth year of publication. It had been started by writers and fans who invested money and time, and dragged up by its bootstraps by the legendary editor John Carnell to become the front-ranking professional British science fiction magazine.
But the truth was that, like the pulp crime magazines, its days were coming to an end.
You've gotta have luck. Was mine running out?
'58, I rode aboard the men's magazines, learned my trade, comics earned a dollar when a dollar was needed. But now the market for short stories is on the skids.
I put the magazine aside and took up the letter I had left until last. A blue airmail letter from Sharon, the girl I had left behind in the land of Oz. I'd written and told her I was thinking of coming home, that I was near broke, and her reply was measured, and understanding, and held out hope that we might try again. She had her job at the bank, still, and was saving money, and maybe she could help me to keep writing.
And as the wider world closed in on me, I watched the anti-segregation marches in Montgomery Alabama, fire-hoses turned on blacks, kickings and clubbings; Governor George Wallace:
'"– Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever – "
1960's. Freedom and Insanity in the air.
(Read more at David Rome: Pulp Writer!]
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