The Thing Itself

was nice enough. She had a big thirst.

There was quite a lot of those types in the party — people who’d failed in life and were now trying to get in through the back door. I got friendly with a young chap called Martin Charteris who was at both meetings. He worked as an attendant in the public lavatories at the Brighton railway station — that’s what I mean about the BUF being open to everybody.

He was a sharp bloke, a couple of years older than me, with a quick sense of humour. He said he split his time between Brighton and London. He couldn’t wait to get his uniform. Mosley had designed a black shirt based on a fencing jacket — he fenced epee for Britain even though he had a gammy leg. Mosley thought the shirt reflected ‘the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’. Charteris just fancied prancing around in his shirt and his jackboots.

The first meeting I attended, in London, Peter Cheyney gave a talk. I fancied myself as a writer — I was always scribbling on whatever piece of paper came to hand, even if it was only my diary — so I got chatting to him. He wrote crime novels. Not those Agatha Christie country house ones, though. These were what were later called hard-boiled. American pulp. Lots of violence.

Anyway, Charlie, Philip and I didn’t want to join under our real names because we were bobbies. When I told him I wanted to be a writer, Cheyney suggested I join under the name Victor Tempest, which had a good sound for a crime writer. So that’s what I did and the name stuck.

I actually went to a dance hall with Charteris in Brighton one evening. Shelleys. We both met girls and went our separate ways, and I didn’t see him again for a good few months. I took the girl to a show at the end of the pier and Kaye and Kaye were on down the bottom of the bill. They didn’t set the stage alight.

I spent most of my time off in Brighton on the seafront or I’d nip up to London. The line got electrified in 1933 and a third-class return fare was only 12s 10d. I liked the seafront best, though. The smells — all the seafood stalls and the fish-and-chip shops. The bustle — locals going about their business and visitors in big, screeching gangs.

I remember fortune tellers’ booths decorated with pictures of Tallulah Bankhead; waxwork dummies in amusement booths; cafes with signs saying ‘Thermos flasks filled with pleasure’; and my favourite — the booth promising ‘Ear piercing while you wait’. As if, at other booths, you had to leave your ears and come back when they were done.

I used to hang out in the Skylark, a cafe that was rough but attracted a lot of girls. Around September 1933, I got chatty with a regular in there called Jack Notyre. Only about five feet seven and he had a stutter, but the girls seemed to like him. In fact, he had to fight them off.

I was a bit younger than him — he was in his early twenties — but we were both single and enjoyed a joke and liked a game of cards for pennies. Then one day it turned out he wasn’t exactly single. An older woman turned up, a bit the worse for wear, and sat with him. He seemed a bit embarrassed, she being so much older. He introduced her as Mrs Saunders. They lived together.

I recognized her, though she didn’t recognize me. She’d been Tony Frederick’s dancing partner and ‘wife’.

THIRTY-TWO

Victor Tempest exercise book one cont.

I was a bit wary of the Blackshirt organization by now. Mosley had made a big thing about not being anti- Semitic. That suited me as I’d no time for such stupidity. But I’d heard him give a speech about a month after I joined at which he’d responded to hecklers by calling them ‘three warriors of class war, all from Jerusalem’.

I mentioned that to Charlie Ridge but he shrugged it off.

‘Do you know who Mosley has hired to teach self-defence to the stewards? Former welterweight champion of the world, Ted Kid Lewis.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘Ted’s real name is Gershom Mendeloff. He’s a Jew from Whitechapel.’

But I was hearing other things that were both disturbing and funny. The Brixton branch was organized as a brothel. The secretary of one of the Newcastle branches had been convicted of housebreaking. The first national leader of the women’s section had been caught with her hand in the till and kicked out.

Then there was the violence. The minute Mosley organized his defence force on military lines and put his men in jackboots, he was making it clear he was out for trouble. In the cities Blackshirts were driven to meetings in armour-plated vans.

When he set up the New Party in 1931, Mosley said he would defend his meetings with ‘the good clean English fist’. He was a good boxer himself, with a straight left that had knocked hecklers out cold a couple of times, so the stories went. I was fine with that — as I’ve said, I was used to getting stuck in whilst on duty, especially when the pubs called time.

However, party members didn’t just rely on their fists. I read in the papers that Blackshirts in Liverpool had clashed with rival fascists — the Social Credit Greenshirts — and used knuckledusters and leaded hosepipes.

I wasn’t sure about the classless thing either. Although I never knew him, my dad had been a weaver in Blackburn. He died in the Great War. My mum was a teacher. So I suppose I was a working-class/lower-middle- class mix. The BUF magazine — Action! — had quite a lot of posh society stuff alongside the uplifting political sentiment. It was edited by A. K. Chesterton, the cousin of G. K. Chesterton, the author of the Father Brown stories. There was a regular gardening column by Vita Sackville-West.

I read an article once saying that Mosley’s wife, Cimmie, wanted to turn Sousa’s Stars and Stripes into a fascist anthem with words by Osbert Sitwell. William Walton was asked to write the music. This all sounded a bit highfalutin to me.

As a read, I much preferred Wide World, the magazine I got second-hand for sixpence on Brighton market. It was full of stories of adventure from all over the world. I liked the monthly column at the back of the magazine written by ‘The Captain’ called ‘Man and His Needs — a monthly causerie of matters masculine’.

In March 1934 Martin Charteris turned up again. He was vague about where he’d been. Turned out he knew Jack Notyre and the three of us hung about a bit. Charteris wasn’t working but he always seemed to have money on him. He was definitely a chancer. He was staying with Notyre and Mrs Saunders.

I didn’t tell them I was a copper but someone saw me in the white helmet and word got back. They got stand-offish. We still played cards in the Skylark and I saw them down the dance halls, but they pushed me out a bit. I’d always been a bit of an outsider with them anyway as they’d known each other in London.

Then a funny thing happened at the end of the month. I was off-duty and went into the Bath Arms in the middle of the Laines for a pint. I could hardly see for the fug in there. Pipe and cigarette smoke hung in a solid grey mass below the ceiling and billowed down over people’s heads. It was as if a heavy sea fret had come through the door.

It was noisy too. Quite a few street girls came in here and they were hogging the bar now, screeching and laughing about their clients. I forced my way through to the counter and ordered a pint of mild.

I made a space for myself at the bar and took a sip of the beer. I could see Charteris over in the corner.

He was with a man in his early forties. Clipped moustache, hair plastered back, check sports jacket, striped tie. They were sitting at a table, so I couldn’t see his legs, but I guessed cavalry twill. Ex-army officer. And I guessed white socks. He was one of the brown-ring boys, I could tell.

There were a lot in Brighton. Brighton Pier gave its name to them in rhyming slang: Brighton Pier = queer.

I watched Charteris. He didn’t notice, although he kept flicking his eyes round the pub. He and the captain kept a certain distance between them. All very respectable. Two men talking in a pub. But I knew.

One of my first jobs when I joined the police was going to a crime scene in Hove. A queer suicide pact. I didn’t know what it was about Brighton that attracted all the back-room boys, then another bobby told me it was all the bloody thespians down here.

‘They prefer backstage to front-of-house,’ he said. ‘Half of them are fairies and half of them pretend to be,