My legs are all shattered.”
“You still have to leave here.”
“How?”
“The way you came.”
Both were silent for a while, then the barman asked if he should phone for a taxi. Semple nodded.
While the barman phoned I helped Semple to the door and stood outside with him, though standing seemed as hard for him as walking. I also noticed he was, in a quiet way, very drunk indeed. I know nothing about football, so to make conversation said, “Not easy, eh?”
He muttered something like, “You never know how things will end.”
The taxi arrived, but when the driver saw Semple he said, “Not in my cab,” and drove off. I returned into the pub and asked the barman to phone for an ambulance. He did, then came outside. The three of us waited, and when the ambulance came the ambulance men also refused to take Semple. I had not realised that our public health service now rejects helpless invalids for being drunk, but of course the world keeps changing all the time.
“Nothing for it but the police,” said the barman going back inside.
When the police came they lifted Semple into their van and drove off.
End of story. Maybe they charged him with being drunk and disorderly, maybe they took him to where he lived, or maybe both. I asked a football enthusiast if he had heard of Billy Semple. He said, “Yes. Used to play for Rangers. Definitely a name to conjure with.” Maybe the man was lying about his name but he convinced me.
ENDING
HAVING BEGUILED WITH FICTION until I had none left I resorted to facts, which also ran out.
AT THE MOMENT OF HIS GREATEST TRIUMPH Captain Hook falls into a melancholy that is perhaps familiar to many old Etonians. He then and there decides to give his dying speech, in case the inevitable tick-tocking crocodile leaves him no time for it later. The same vanity has made these endnotes tell more about my life as a fiction writer than I first intended. An astute critic said my last book would bore many readers by its repetition of passages printed elsewhere. Many sentences that follow have also been printed before.
INTRODUCTION
Wordsworth is right to say the younger we are the brighter our world appears. I was born in a pleasant home, a flat in a newly built Glasgow housing scheme with gardens, trees and skies as good as anywhere else, but when these had grown familiar by the age of two I wanted extravagantly different experiences. My parents satisfied this want. I cannot remember not knowing Cinderella, Aladdin and the adventures of other weak or exploited folk helped to happiness and wealth by magic gifts. I then came to enjoy the cosy fantasy of Pooh Corner with its soft toy inhabitants, and the dangerous, more challenging worlds of Hans Anderson. From him I learned that even in magical lands people like me could come to grief and die, and I felt like the main character in every interesting tale, even the Little Match Girl. Fabulous tales free us from immediate, everyday suffering but also prepare us for it. The talking animals known to Dr Dolittle and Toad of Toad Hall are not more fabulous than Aesop’s, but Aesop’s fables (like Beatrix Potter’s) promote common sense, undeluded, Stoical views of life. I was not such a stoic as The Brave Tin Soldier, much as I pitied him. I preferred the unemployed soldier of The Tinder Box who murdered an old woman then became a spendthrift, an abductor of a princess and at last a king.
It is a small step from feeling like heroes or heroines of other peoples’ stories to swaggering through stories of our own imagining. Most children take that step, instinctively editing what they hear, read and enjoy in films and comics into daydreams of the sort Doctor Freud called (when sleepers had them) wish-fulfillment dreams. Experience mostly changes our childish daydreams into what we adults hope and fear for our future. My serial daydream of having a magic gift granting extraordinary power is the basic plot of Superman and must have inspired several presidents of the USA. Most American comics came to Britain at the end of World War Two, fascinating me by their competent outlines, lavish colour and pictures of damsels in distress, but my serial fantasy was active before that war started, and was so satisfying that I sometimes resented its interruption by adults, but not often. Mum, Dad, my sister and me were close together most evenings of the year because only our living room usually had a warm fire. Mum had given me fairytales. Dad showed me The Harmsworth Encyclopaedia, The Miracle of Life and other books with pictures proving there were, or had been, or could be, wonderful realities outside our douce housing scheme that also fed my fantasies. To make these more real I needed an audience and sister Mora became that. I told her my fanciful adventures as we walked to school, then later as we lay in adjacent bedrooms with the doors between open. Like most parents Mum and Dad put us to bed earlier than we thought right because (they said) we needed a good night’s sleep. They may also have wanted more time to themselves. They never interrupted my serial story by shutting the bedroom doors. Mora did not interest me as a person, being two years younger and a girl, but until I was thirteen or more I needed her as much as I have since needed a public for my books.
The world outside my fantasies imposed itself. The 1939 war evacuated us from Glasgow. For a few years I enjoyed a privileged childhood in Wetherby, a Yorkshire market town where I explored the countryside, climbed trees and played with other boys. Our main game was finding or making dens — secret places in bushes, up trees or in odd huts or buildings where none suspected us. I recall nothing remarkable done in our dens or even stories associated with them, apart from one. I discovered a den by myself in an isolated outhouse, one of several in the munition workers’ hostel where Dad was manager. It must have been an auxiliary furnace room, to be used if one of the hostel’s other power sources was damaged. I could not open the door or window but found at ground level a low shutter and slid it up far enough to let me crawl under — a hatch through which fuel could be raked from an outside heap of coke. Within was a cement floor, bare brick walls, the cold furnace and a secrecy I much appreciated, for I had a notebook in which I meant to write a story of my own. It was inspired by a booklet in a series, Tales for the Young Folk, each of which cost thruppence, and were often so puerile that I easily imagined improving on them. Why did I want secrecy to write this one? To discourage exhibitionism my parents never praised my writings and drawings, but I knew they approved of them — Dad had typed silly verses I had written under the inspiration of A.A. Milne. I suspect my version of this tale gave it a cruel twist Mum and Dad would dislike. I now recall nothing of the story I attempted, but in that outhouse came a glorious conviction that one day I would write a book that many would read. After that I think every interesting story or experience was regarded, often consciously, as potential material for fiction. This happened when I was eight or nine, because for what seemed years after I meant to astonish the world with a book completed when I was twelve — the first of my many failed literary projects.
Life seemed more confined when we returned to Glasgow after the war. Dens could not be made in our back green or the nearby public park. My schoolmates’ outdoor games were kicking balls about, which I did not enjoy. Riddrie Public Library became my second home, visited at least four times a week as I often read a book in a few hours. Many males graduate to maturer fiction through tales about sportsmen, detectives, cowboys, soldiers or spies licensed to kill. I could not imagine dominating events by violent action so kept to tales of magic most children lose interest in earlier, finding slightly more adult forms in Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Rider Haggard’s She, novels by H.G. Wells. His early science fiction shows impossible worlds in such intelligently imagined detail that they are excellent social criticism, no more escapist than Gulliver’s Travels, Brave New World or 1984. One summer morning when ten or eleven I stood in a shop among a crowd waiting for a delivery of morning papers to Millport on the Firth of Clyde island where my family was on holiday. On the counter I saw a little paperback book with no author’s name or picture on the cover. In 1945 such booklets were the only non-periodical literature sold in newspaper and tobacconist shops, the contents always being highly sensational, popular, out of copyright stuff. Nearly all the tales I had so far enjoyed had been illustrated, so only boredom led me to open this booklet and start reading The Pit and the Pendulum. With the first few sentences the surrounding friendly crowd seemed cut off from me. I believe my pulse and skin temperature changed. The adjacent talk seemed a distant hum or buzzing, as the voices of the inquisitors sounded in the ears of the narrator condemned to die by torture. This was my first experience of being badly frightened by a story, if I ignore a few chilling episodes in Disney’s Snow White and Pinocchio. It was not my last. Back at home in Riddrie I found my parents had a little set of books, one of them Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, one of them Kipling’s From Sea to Sea and one of them Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Alone in our comfortable home one sunny evening after returning from school I read The Fall of the House of Usher, and for a while grew afraid to look behind any familiar article of furniture, from fear of seeing something dreadful.