Falco: The Official Companion (A Marcus Didius Falco Mystery) Read online

  The Barkers at leisure

  Grandad and Grandma at the allotment

  Another myth about the working classes is that: the Victorian working man received his wages and his wife might never see a penny. Grandad Davis knew his wife was the money-manager; he used to hand Lil his wage packet unopened. He died before I was born, but Grandma was a huge influence. She had friends everywhere; hers was another house where people constantly dropped in. A motto she gave me was: Never stand when you can sit; never sit when you can lie down. She was a tireless raconteur, a fund of stories. Dancing the tango with ‘Mr Paul’ Cadbury so everybody stopped to watch … Helping a nun run away from her convent … Grandad being chased by a policeman, for speeding (on his bike) all down the Pershore Road … I’m sure there was one about Grandad having once seen a crowd set upon a police constable and kill him. And let’s dispel another cosy myth: even after the Second World War the name of Winston Churchill was never mentioned, because of Gallipoli, where Gran had had three brothers killed, including Charlie, her favourite.

  My parents were a curious pair, made for one another and yet doomed by association. Neither went to Grammar School, though both could have; Mum’s family could not afford it and Dad wanted to be out enjoying the world. So, they both worked at Boxfoldia and their first tryst was on a works outing, behind the summerhouse at Newnham College, Cambridge. They married during the war, in August 1942: 24–8–42 – not only a palindrome, but the probable anniversary of Vesuvius erupting in AD79.

  I wish I had been at that wedding. Grandad Barker was so opposed, it was kept secret from him, but he found out and jumped on a bus to chase after the couple. When the registrar began, instead of ‘Do you, Joan Margaret …?’ he used the wrong name. Even when he got it right, Mum paused for an endlessly long time before answering …

  Nonetheless it happened, as mistakes inexorably do. They lived in Bury at first, as Dad was posted up north; a mouse used to come out and warm itself in front of the fire and Lancashire hotpot became a staple of my childhood. Mum’s brothers had told Dad not to expect any dinner because Mum would always have her nose in a book; she just bought herself a cookbook. Dad was sent to India, running wireless communications on the Khyber Pass. Travel abroad was life-changing, which may resonate in Falco. Mum worked at an industrial company where her work was so secret she never disclosed it. She had a traumatic ectopic pregnancy; no doctor believed her complaints of pain until she collapsed in the street. She nearly died. It happened on her birthday, which from then on she refused to celebrate.

  They were then obliged to wait, but four years after the war ended, my parents produced me. It was a difficult birth; I was three days in an incubator, when Mum never saw me and was afraid I had died.

  Joan and Bill wonder what they have done …

  My earliest memory is when I was just a toddler. We lived briefly in a flat in Snow Hill, the very centre of Birmingham, where every time Mum ran out my nappies on the pulley washing line, they came in black with smuts. She used to take me for air and escape to St Philip’s Cathedral churchyard, where I was equally frightened by tramps and pigeons. Dad, to his credit, gained a degree by correspondence course, some feat with me, a very mardy baby; he became a lecturer at what was then the College of Commerce, teaching public administration and politics. I next remember sitting on the path at our first little house in Ward End, surrounded by wallflowers and butterflies.

  When I was three and a half, my brother Maxwell was born. He and I were always good friends though very different; I think he started taking clocks apart to see how they worked before he could talk. (For a long time he didn’t bother to talk, because I did it for him.) Max had his first toolkit when most children were still on soft toys. He struggled at school; Mum had to help with his reading and I taught him his tables. I had a little blackboard because I wanted to be a teacher; in fact, I didn’t have an ‘imaginary friend’, I had a complete imaginary class, with names, IQs and characteristics, whose careers I followed in real time for years.

  To be a child in the 1950s was a mixture of opportunity and austerity. Birmingham had lost much of its housing stock, but now we lived in a new three-bed semi-detached, with metal windows, small gardens front and back, kitchen, bathroom, inside lavatory – even French windows. There was no central heating; in winter we had chilblains, we got dressed under the bedclothes, Jack Frost whitened the window glass, washing came in from the line solid with ice. Behind our row of houses lay ‘the little field’ – remains of a bomb site, a haven to play in. We were tough and sensible. Fathers just went and checked any new fly-tipping. Besides, it was nowhere near as dangerous as the flooded clay pit in the brickyard or the railway lines …Our play was grounded in imagination; toys were scarce, only given at Christmas and birthdays, though aunts and grandmas, or even close family friends, would slip a child some coppers, maybe even half a crown (you hid that, or it was ‘saved’ for you). I don’t remember sweet-rationing, though I do remember it ending. Birmingham children had the benefit of Cadbury misshapes, which came in plain brown bags and were always the wrong ones – Turkish delight and toffee, never strawberry creams.

  My class at primary school had forty-four children. Everywhere was painted green. Sometimes they still tested the air-raid sirens. We cut pencils in half to save money. For art we had a print of The Laughing Cavalier in the hall. Music was covered more ambitiously; members of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra would visit, and enormous radios would be brought into class for Time and Tune and Music and Movement (we’d be in anguish that the radio wouldn’t warm up in time for our favourite song). Although we preferred belting out ‘A Song of the Western Men’, we also learned to read a score, and studied ambitious pieces – Smetana’s Vltava, Stravinsky’s Petrushka. We learned things by heart; we did mental arithmetic and spelling tests. For general knowledge we had booklets stuffed with tables of weights and measures, or Kings and Queens of England. We’d collect the I Spy or Observer series; even as a townee, I knew my ragged robin from my cow parsley. Rosebay willowherb was easy, because of the bomb sites.

  As her leg was made of wood

  And she did not want it known

  At the point on which she stood,

  She had fixed a rubber cone …

  I was encouraged to read. Mum still liked her nose in a book, mainly from the library, though we did own books (more Left Book Club than classics). I was a rapid reader. I hated the Birmingham library policy that children were allowed only one fiction ticket to two non-fiction; you could cheat if your parents lent theirs, which must have been how I once read three Biggles books in a day. Mostly I liked books with strong young heroines, orphans who fought off adversity, like the Anne of Green Gables Mum passed on, Hodgson Burnett’s Little Princess and The Secret Garden. Other orphans were Edith Nesbit’s well-meaning Bastables, which I preferred to The Railway Children even though, like Little Women, it had a female writer, with the insidious suggestion that you could earn money that way …

  Is Falco Biggles? – Discuss.

  We had books …

  I came to some books through the radio: Noel Streatfeild, Tom’s Midnight Garden, Lorna Doone (Lorna Doone still means Butterworth’s Banks of Green Willow), The Hobbit (‘Kaschei’s Dance’) – and eventually Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth: Sometime about the year AD 117 the Ninth Legion, which was stationed at Eboracum where York now stands, marched north to deal with a rising among the Caledonian tribes, and was never heard of again … Marcus set the bundle carefully on the table. ‘We have brought back the Hispania’s lost Eagle,’ he said, rather muzzily, and very quietly crumpled forward on top of it. Ever since The Flight of the Heron, I have known I do not belong to my parents but am Bonnie Prince Charlie (except when being Hornblower).

  I cannot over-stress the importance of radio. My family rarely went to the cinema, and due to a mix of meanness and liberal principles, we did not acquire a TV until I was fourteen. I grew up with classical music in the evenings, the
Light Programme at Grandma’s, music-hall numbers, Kathleen Ferrier – and radio drama, which is intricately bound up with written fiction for me. Saturday Night Theatre would introduce me to classic detective stories. Perhaps that’s why the Falco novels are told in the first person, as if he is talking to us in a radio play.

  … we had radio.

  Another great feature of radio, then later TV, was comedy. My tastes are unfashionable; I preferred Michael Bentine of the Goons and never took to Monty Python, loathing the deep misogyny of male comics dressing up as hideous caricature women. I did my weekend homework with The Navy Lark and Round the Horne, before Pick of the Pops; and I loved the Pythons’ radio predecessor, I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again. The point about these is that they had zany, quick-fire sketches, irreverence, non sequiturs, songs, in-jokes and catchphrases. Radio can do it, with a lightness of touch TV lacks; books do it. The facility to draw on all aspects of cultural life, firing a glancing shot then passing on rapidly, is special to the radio generation. Think of Terry Pratchett or Douglas Adams. Certainly think of Falco.

  A vast behind! … I think I am a slice of rhubarb tart …

  My folks were upwardly mobile. The College of Commerce became Birmingham Polytechnic. We moved to a middle-class suburb, a 1930s house with dry rot and treacly brown paint that had to be burned off; we acquired central heating, a coke boiler that often jammed and blew off steam, bringing ceilings down and making the dog shit in terror all over the breakfast room (my brother had a dog; our new house had a ‘breakfast room’). What we didn’t have were friends. My father always had his colleagues at work but Mother was losing her contacts; my brother was put in a prissy primary school where the headmaster was over-keen on little girls and Max overheard a teacher sneer, He’s not as clever as his sister. The rot had set in.

  Author aged ten

  I had passed the exams to King Edward’s, the Girls’ High School. There I was given a superb education, made friends I still have today, was taught by wonderful women – and was provided with a base of my own outside the family. It was understood that to be female was irrelevant. If you were given the tools, you could master any discipline; if you had the talent, you could become anything you chose. I would be, indeed I still am, shocked to discover that the world does not always accept those principles. Clearly they underpin everything I have done as a writer.

  My school was the making of me intellectually, and when things fell apart at home, it was the saving of me too.

  Things had begun to change when we moved. My mother discovered that my father – gregarious, popular, spoiled and self-centred – had a long history of philandering (he always pooh-poohed this, but I heard his confessions to Mum). My mother – once gregarious and popular herself – became isolated and secretive. Divorce was rare, and carried a stigma. Instead, once Max and I were in bed, my parents quarrelled – shouting, slamming doors. I lay awake in dread, night after night, through most of my teen years. Eventually my mother had a nervous breakdown. Psychiatric treatment entailed barbiturates and a stay in hospital where she had electro-convulsive treatment. Now I know what that entails, I can hardly bear to think of it being imposed on a human being. If ‘electric shock treatment’ was given to prisoners of war, it would be denounced as torture. Psychiatrists say it works. I suggest it ‘works’ because patients who can do so, simply close down and look obedient to make the experience stop.

  Mum came home. Her true personality was lost. We carried on. That was what you did. Families kept secrets. Even my brother and I never spoke about it; I never knew if he heard or understood what happened.

  I passed my exams – though with very mixed results, a rarity at King Edward’s which, then as now, excelled at training girls to pass. My results could be due to undiagnosed hay fever in the exam season, laziness about subjects where I needed to work, or my unhappy home life and lack of sleep. I mention it because these days when only rows of A*s count, people like me must suffer. Instead, I stayed for an extra term to do the Oxbridge entrance exams and Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford accepted me. So I went to the best university and now carry out a profession where I use scholarship and serious creativity. Think on, foolish grade snobs!

  I had elected to read English because I was better at it, rather than History, which would have been my first choice. This proved right. My course was ‘English Language and Literature’; I revelled in both parts equally. However much attention is paid to the history, Eng Lang and Lit are the true underpinnings of my work. I write novels first, historical novels second. Despite experimental moments, they are in the tradition of English fiction. Their important constituents are plot, character, dialogue and narrative approach. My tools are grammar and vocabulary. Selection of detail is a vital element, and that may be historical, but without the rest, everything would be banal. Plenty of banal novels are published, but you read mine because you have better taste.

  In my second year at Oxford, a terrible event occurred. My brother Maxwell had always struggled at school; his genius was technical, not academic. We were both painfully shy in company, gauche with the opposite sex, crushed by failures. I at least always had a very sharp sensitivity whereas he was other-worldly. When he hit puberty he became depressed, ran away ‘to think’, complained of suicidal feelings.

  Strings were pulled to get him into the psychiatric unit where my mother had been treated. He had the same regime of drugs and ECT. Staff thought he was recovering and allowed him to go by himself to a day room, to play his guitar. The unit was on the fifth floor. It had safety locks on the windows, but Max simply unscrewed one. He went out and died of his injuries. He was seventeen.

  My mother was prostrate. I accompanied my father to the inquest. The coroner concluded, He just had a hard time growing up. The verdict was simply that he killed himself. My parents were told that the unit would be moved. It wasn’t. Some years later when other patients committed suicide there, I wrote to the psychiatrist, who used the tired justification When people really want to kill themselves, they will. It seems to me that with young people at least, whose problems are put down to adolescence, strenuous efforts to keep them safe might help them outgrow their difficulties and survive.

  When I returned to college, I sat alone on my bed and thought, Nothing will ever be as bad as this again.

  Sometimes I write about those whose lives are changed for ever by the actions of other people, and I do so with feeling. I probably had no inkling immediately that as a result I would never marry or have children, both of which I wanted. Men fled. I don’t blame them; my family looked mad and I became a strange person for many years. Any who were strong enough to cope were too strong and would have swamped me. I won’t ever write a misery memoir; I pity the people who do and those who are connected with them. But in a discussion of my work, this is a defining issue.

  I don’t say a writer must live alone; that is clearly untrue. But it helps. I always enjoyed writing and would probably one day have tried it, but I doubt if I would have left the civil service if I had had responsibilities. The poverty and uncertainty I then lived in for nearly five years could not have been imposed on others. Getting first published is so hard, I needed to work at it full time. It took four years to my first book – and as I was always refusing to follow trends, that was actually quite good going.

  Most definitely, I have written the Falco series at one book a year, which is a very tough schedule. They are dense books, longer than some novels; such production was possible only because I had long quiet periods for writing. Richard and I had the closest companionship for over thirty years but I remained single; I did most of my creative work at times when I was alone in a quiet house.

  I reject ‘writing as therapy’; you need to filter and mould. What I know of life shines through my work, but no book of mine is intended to be autobiographical. It’s partly ironic that the Falco series is so much about families. That said, my work has consoled me for grief and disappointment. My books will be what justify my
existence. They gave me, too, financial independence to match the personal independence I had been forced to acquire.

  When I was a small child, before my mother lost her happiness, she used to send me to sleep with lullabies; one was a Paul Robeson song that included the words Do you want the moon to play with? The stars to run away with? They’ll come if you don’t cry …

  She did know what I became, and it was a solace for her. For me, from the moment I held the first copy of the first book, I was playing with the moon and stars.

  Being a Writer

  Although I had always wanted to write, and knew that I wanted to write historicals, it was only in my last year as a civil servant that I began. That was in the dark days of Thatcher’s Britain, when the career I had chosen, which once had been well-paid and respected, turned into something different. Those of us who should have been overseeing how taxpayers’ money was spent and advising the government on policy issues were viewed only as numbers – unwanted numbers. Outside ‘consultants’ were brought in, with a remit to destroy systems and dispense with staff. We were distrusted, with our careers under threat and our rewards slashed.

  I had let slip that I myself wrote for relaxation. Always a mistake. People want to know if your work has been copied up by scroll-sellers, or if you have given readings socially. Saying no shrinks your standing; saying yes makes their eyes glaze defensively. Though I mentioned that I sometimes toyed with the idea of hiring a hall to give an evening of my love poems and satires, it was said ruefully. Everyone, including me, was convinced it was a dream. [TFL]