Miracles of Life

a second bathroom in a suburban house today.

Yet this was Christie country, and Rillington Place (later renamed), where the ghastly John Christie committed his murders, was only a few hundred yards away. Back in 1953, soon after my meeting with Peter Wyngarde at the Mitre in Holland Park Avenue, I was walking up Ladbroke Grove when I found a huge crowd outside the police station. They filled the side street, watching the entrance to the car park behind the station. A police car approached, siren ringing, followed by a police van. The crowd drew back, leaving a woman in a red coat standing in the middle of the side street. The constables guarding the car park entrance made no attempt to move her, and she stood her ground, watched admiringly by the crowd as the police car and van swerved at speed through the gates.

The woman in the red coat was the sister of Timothy Evans, a mentally retarded friend of Christie who had been charged with the murder of his son and hanged in 1950. In fact, Christie had murdered the infant, and was himself hanged in 1953. Evans, too late, received a posthumous pardon in 1966. I can still remember the woman in the red coat, and her implacable gaze as she stared at the police van. Inside was John Christie, a now-deranged figure who had just been arrested for the murders he had committed at Rillington Place.

My wife, Mary Ballard, in 1956.

I had originally moved to the Stanley Crescent Hotel after being driven out of South Kensington, when the weekly rent for my room in Onslow Gardens rose from 36 shillings a week to two guineas. South Kensington was beginning to stir, as old money that had retreated to the countryside for the duration of the war began to return to its stucco villas. I preferred Notting Hill, for its general raffishness and unexpected delights, chief among them Mary Matthews.

When I first met Mary, shortly before joining the RAF, she was working as a secretary for Charles Wintour (father of Anna, the ‘tyrant’ of Vogue; he later became editor of the Evening Standard, but was then a senior editor at the Daily Express). Born in 1930, Mary was the daughter of Dorothy Vernon and her husband Arthur Matthews, who were well-to-do landowners in Stone, Staffordshire. Mary’s father served in the Honourable Artillery Company during the Great War and was invalided out. At the time I met them in 1955 they were living in a modest cottage in Dyserth, a village near Prestatyn in north Wales. They grew their own vegetables and had a simple and pleasantly provincial life together. Like Mary and her two sisters, Peggy and Betty, they were extremely generous people with strong moral principles.

I think Mary was the most adventurous of the sisters, the youngest but the most ambitious, and the only one who wanted to live and work in London. She was enormously optimistic, and confident that anything was possible if enough willpower was brought to bear. She was tall, with a striking figure and great presence, a woman whom men immediately noticed. In many ways she remained a girl from the Potteries, and at times appeared to be a dizzy brunette, something of an act, as she was quick-witted. All my men-friends liked her enormously, and she was generally popular at the Express. She had enjoyed a very active social life in Stone, a world of big houses, prosperous farmers driving Armstrong Siddeleys, lavish private dances and several very dashing suitors.

What she saw in me I still find it difficult to work out. I was probably rather ‘lost’ in her eyes, but she knew that I was ambitious. I lived on the floor below her in a wing of the hotel, and I worked hard at making myself useful. We began to spend increasing amounts of time in the pubs along the Portobello Road, getting pleasantly tight together. For some reason I delayed telling her about my Shanghai background, which I was afraid might appear a little like a criminal record. In some half-conscious sense it was. Mary was not impressed to hear that I was joining the RAF, but her eyes widened a little when I said that I was writing a novel, a rare phenomenon among the point-to-points and hunt balls. ‘Have you nearly finished?’ she asked me, to which I replied, truthfully: ‘No, I’ve nearly begun.’ She saw the joke, but also the serious point lurking somewhere behind it.

What rather raised me in Mary’s eyes was the modest part I played in the Mrs Shanahan incident. This on- and-off prostitute lived in a room above Mary with her 7-year-old daughter. When times were low she would bring back customers from the Portobello pubs, for some reason always large and tired men who would climb the stairs past Mary’s door as if on the way to the gallows. What disturbed us was the presence of the daughter, who would be dressed in a grey silk Marie Antoinette dress and hat, carrying a little baroque umbrella. Blank-faced and unsmiling, she would remain in the Shanahan room while business was transacted.

I still prided myself on the thought that I had seen everything in Shanghai, but this completely shook me. What on earth did the daughter do in her Petit Trianon outfit while her mother and the customer had sex? Did she take part? I prayed not, and I guessed that all she did was watch, or sit behind a curtain, twiddling her umbrella. Mary didn’t care what she did, but wanted the whole horror stopped. She bought little presents for the child, which made Mrs Shanahan effusively grateful, and she was overly keen to be our friends, forever offering to cook meals for us; she told Mary that I was far too thin. I suspect that a wall divided her mind, separating her affectionate, everyday life with her daughter from the spectral moments imposed by necessity. Pressed by Mary, I spoke to the manager, a tired Pole exhausted by climbing the stairs to badger his tenants for the rent. I threatened to call the police, something I probably would never have done, I regret to say. The next day Mrs Shanahan and her daughter had gone, and Mary assumed, with her good nature and high principles, that this was a happy ending. I hope it was.

When I left High Wycombe, the RAF now behind me, and booked into the Stanley Crescent Hotel I found that nothing had changed. The same tired tenants were still there, one of the lost tribes of Britain’s post-war world, among them a retired RAF squadron leader and his very posh wife, Peta, who was always boasting in a loud voice that she had ‘checked out on twin-engines’ (was authorised to fly twin-engined aircraft) before her husband. To her annoyance, he was never able to pay the rent, and I think she knew that her husband had given up hope. The Polish manager would linger in the breakfast room (breakfast was never served, except to cash-on-the-nail tenants), waiting until Peta was in full twin-engined flight with another guest, and then step up to her, saying in a loud voice: ‘You are three weeks behind with your rent, Mrs…’ Peta would flounce away, angry that I had witnessed this little humiliation. Only a few years earlier they had been stationed in Cyprus, with a large house and servants. She was lost in post-war England, but a perfect symbol of it.

There was a wartime Navy lieutenant who had captained a motor torpedo boat. He lived in one room with his amiable wife and baby daughter, and spent his time building model seacraft. Some years earlier, he had damaged his brain by diving into the wrong end of a swimming pool. I became good friends with him, and would help carry the picnic equipment to Kensington Gardens and watch him sail his models in the Round Pond. All these people, like myself, would have been classed as misfits, casualties of war who had lost their way in the peace, but at least we all accepted each other and there was never any rivalry. Today that one-star hotel would be full of financial hustlers, celebrity hunters, people with huge expectations and aware that a lack of any real talent was no handicap to success. Any novice writer would flee in horror. I remember the old Stanley Crescent Hotel with affection.

Above all, of course, because Mary was still there. I left my suitcase in my old room, luckily vacant, and knocked on the door of Mary’s room. It was opened by a middle-aged woman in a nursing sister’s uniform. For a few seconds my heart died, and I realised why I had left the Air Force and travelled all the way from Moose Jaw. Then I learned that Mary had moved to a larger room on the first floor.

I think we were surprised, a little wary but almost relieved to see each other again.

Mary lent me her typewriter, and over the next few weeks I typed out all the stories I had written on the way back to England. She read them very carefully, was clearly impressed by them, and not in the least put off by the fact that they were science fiction, which she had never read. She strongly urged me to press on, though most of her friends regarded science fiction as beyond the pale. But she sensed that there was something original and fresh about this apparently modest genre, that it was optimistic and positive, and drew on qualities within my mind that had been repressed since my arrival in England. The wilder side of my imagination was its strength, and I needed to tap that, at least for the time being. From the very beginning she was convinced that I would be a success as a writer.

Here she differed completely from my parents, who were convinced that I would be a failure. Looking back, I am puzzled by their lack of support, but they may have believed that the wilder side of my imagination needed to be repressed, not released. Mary tried to be charitable, but she disliked my parents. As it happened, we saw little of them in the coming years, and I now had all the emotional support I needed.