Miracles of Life

In the very comfortable mess, virtually a four-star hotel, I would sit by the picture windows and watch the snow carried horizontally by the icy wind. Walking to the mess from our barracks, I would sometimes find small contact lenses on my cheeks – ice dislodged from my eyeballs when I blinked. We lived on turkey, waffles and ice cream, and drank the bar out of its bourbon and gin. There was no taboo about flying and drinking – one of my Canadian instructors always boarded our plane with a cigar and two bottles of beer.

Then the weather would clear, brilliant blue skies above the silent snow, and we would get in a few days of pilot training. I enjoyed flying the heavy Harvard T-6, with its huge radial engine, retractable undercarriage and variable-pitch propeller, but the training was continually hampered by the weather. Ice crystals in the air produced extraordinary atmospheric effects, such as the triple suns that would blaze through the frozen haze. The British trainees were happy to loaf around, but the French and Turkish trainees demanded to be sent home. They were older and senior in rank to many of the RCAF instructors. At one point the French staged a mutiny, refusing to eat the food served in the mess, which they claimed was fit only for children. The Turks, all experienced army officers, declined to accept orders from any RCAF instructor junior to them. A senior French liaison officer had to be flown in from Ottawa, and was told to climb up the nearest flagpole.

With a great deal of time on my hands, I wrote a few short stories and tried to find enough reading matter to keep me going. The regional newspapers carried no international news and consisted of nothing except reports of curling and ice hockey matches. Magazines such as Time were regarded as intensely highbrow and were difficult to get hold of in Moose Jaw, which was then a dead-end town with two filling stations and a bus depot. Its main function was to supply tractor parts to the huge wheat farms that covered the whole of Saskatchewan. Most of the paperbacks in the bus depot were popular thrillers and detective stories, but there was one type of fiction that occupied a lot of space on the book racks. This was science fiction, then enjoying its great postwar boom.

Up to that point I had read very little science fiction, apart from the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon comic strips of my Shanghai childhood. I would later realise that most professional s-f writers, British and American, were keen fans from their early teens, and many began their careers writing for the fanzines (amateur magazines produced by enthusiasts) and attending conventions. I was one of the very few who came to science fiction at a relatively late age. By the mid 1950s there were some twenty commercial s-f magazines on monthly sale in America and Canada, and the best of these were in the Moose Jaw magazine racks.

Some, like Astounding Science Fiction, the front runner in both sales and prestige within the field, were heavily committed to space travel and tales of a hard-edged technological future. Almost all the stories were set in spaceships or on alien planets in the very far future. These planet yarns, in which most of the characters wore military uniform, soon bored me. The forerunners of Star Trek, they described an American imperium colonising the entire universe, which they turned into a cheerful, optimistic hell, a 1950s American suburb paved with good intentions and populated by Avon ladies in spacesuits. Eerily, this may prove to be an accurate prophecy.

Luckily, there were other magazines like Galaxy and Fantasy & Science Fiction, where the short stories were set in the present or very near future, extrapolating social and political trends already evident in the years after the war. The dangers to a docile public of television, advertising and the American media landscape were their terrain. They looked searchingly at the abuses of psychiatry and at politics conducted as a branch of advertising. Many of the stories were droll and pessimistic, with a surface of dry wit that hid a quite downbeat message.

These I seized on and began to devour. Here was a form of fiction that was actually about the present day, and often as elliptical and ambiguous as Kafka. It recognised a world dominated by consumer advertising, of democratic government mutating into public relations. This was a world of cars, offices, highways, airlines and supermarkets that we actually lived in, but which was completely missing from almost all serious fiction. No one in a novel by Virginia Woolf ever filled up the petrol tank of her car. No one in Sartre or Thomas Mann ever paid for a haircut. No one in Hemingway’s post-war novels ever worried about the effects of prolonged exposure to the threat of nuclear war. The very notion was ludicrous, as absurd then as it seems now. Writers of so-called serious fiction shared one dominant characteristic – their fiction was first and foremost about themselves. The ‘self ’ lay at the heart of modernism, but now had a powerful rival, the everyday world, which was just as much a psychological construct, and just as prone to mysterious and often psychopathic impulses. It was this rather sinister realm, a consumer society that might decide to go on a day trip to another Auschwitz and another Hiroshima, that science fiction was exploring.

Above all, the s-f genre had a huge vitality. Without thinking up a plan of action, I decided that this was a field I should enter. I could see that here was a literary form that placed a premium on originality, and gave a great deal of latitude to its writers, many of whom had their own trademark styles and approaches. I felt too that for all its vitality, magazine science fiction was limited by its ‘what if?’ approach, and that the genre was ripe for change, if not outright takeover. I was more interested in a ‘what now?’ approach. After weekend trips across the border I could see that both Canada and the USA were changing rapidly, and that change would in time reach even Britain. I would interiorise science fiction, looking for the pathology that underlay the consumer society, the TV landscape and the nuclear arms race, a vast untouched continent of fictional possibility. Or so I thought, staring at the silent airfield, with its empty runways that stretched into a snow-blanched infinity.

In early spring, when the last of the snow was falling, we were told that our flight training would be transferred back to England (within a year RCAF Moose Jaw ceased to be a NATO training centre). By this time I was confident that my career as a writer was about to begin. I had written several s-f stories, which had flowed quickly from my pen, and there was a queue of others waiting in my mind. I enjoyed flying, but months in an isolated training base in Scotland or the north of England would postpone everything I planned.

Accordingly, I resigned my commission, and was soon installed in my tiny couchette on the Canadian Pacific Railway train to Toronto, a long journey of endless lakes and pine forests that I spent with pad and pencil. In a real sense I wrote my way across Canada, and then across the Atlantic to England. On arrival I was sent to RAF High Wycombe, where RAF personnel were demobilised.

It was a cold spring, and we sat in an unheated barrack room on the edge of a disused airfield, waiting to be called by the two flight lieutenants who processed our papers. As the days passed I would strike up the acquaintance of a V-bomber navigator cashiered for some mess irregularity, or a pilot who had damaged the undercarriage of his jet fighter by hitting one too many landing lights. Then ‘Robertson’ or ‘Groundwater’ would be called out, a half-finished Times crossword would be pressed into my hands, and my new companions would vanish for ever.

Since my papers had to come from Canada, I spent several weeks at RAF High Wycombe, a gloomy place that managed a convincing impersonation of the end of the world. But I have fond memories of it; firstly, because it was there that I wrote my first s-f story to be published, and secondly because I was looking forward to seeing Mary Matthews, whom I had met in a Notting Hill hotel a month before I joined the RAF. We had exchanged a few letters while I was in Canada, but I had no idea if she would still be there.

15 Miracles of Life (1955)

As soon as I left RAF High Wycombe I travelled straight to London, and booked myself into the hotel near Ladbroke Grove where Mary and I had first met. Friends had brought us together at a party held in the large communal garden behind Stanley Crescent, an untended wilderness that I remember as a cross between Arcadia and a jungle-warfare training range. Today this entire area is dominated by bankers, hedge-fund managers and television executives, but in the 1950s it was a warren of shabby boarding houses and one-room flats occupied by jobless ex-servicemen, part-time prostitutes, divorcees with small children living on handouts from their relatives; in short the flotsam of down-at-heel post-war England who could not even afford to be poor.

Yet respectability kept breaking through, and young professionals were already beginning to infiltrate the area. Mary Matthews was one of them. Arriving in London to take up her job as a secretary at the Daily Express, she moved into the Stanley Crescent Hotel because it advertised a handbasin with hot and cold running water in every room, a remarkable feature at the time, and as much a sign of middle-class success as