A special shout-out is due to my pal the sublime John Coulthart for his mesmerising multi-period isomorphic map of the Boroughs, for doing all that loving and painstaking research, and for being the only person I could talk to about the mind-and-eye-destroying obsessive madness that comes with drawing hundreds of eccentrically-angled rooftops and chimneypots. Thanks, John, and I hope that you’re recuperating in a world of scintillant colour that is wrought from nothing save organic shapes and psychedelic arabesques. For the photographs heading the book’s three movements, I have once again to thank Joe Brown for his image manipulation skills in the montage of the Destructor looming over Bristol Street (no clear available images existed of the local chimneystack, necessitating the import of an identical model from, appropriately enough, Blackburn), and my colleague the diamond-eyed Mitch Jenkins for his photographs of the Archangel Michael with snooker-cue (some modern anti-pigeon spikes were airbrushed out, in accordance with the book’s generally pro-pigeon sensibilities), and of that door halfway up the wall of Doddridge Church with its inexplicable bolt on the outside. Your evidence that not all of this is invented was gratefully received.
I should also like to thank Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock for their continuing friendship, inspiration and encouragement — or eloquent nagging — regarding this novel, and apologise to them and anyone else who’s been called upon to abandon their families and read it, which I know includes my vastly knowledgeable but physically frail pal Robin Ince, who reports that he and his postman are both now disastrously ruptured. I must also mention my old friend and accomplice Richard Foreman, one of the co-authors of the excellent Northampton Arts Development publication In Living Memory, where I found some exotic details of Boroughs life that had managed to escape my attention during my upbringing, and without which Jerusalem would be missing some of its best stories and characters. A sweep of the sombrero in your direction, gents.
With everyone acknowledged who has been part of the creating of this novel (I think), I must now turn to those people who have had their lives and identities plundered and distorted to provide its contents. Foremost among these, obviously, is my younger, supposedly better looking, but far, far shallower brother Mike, so lacking in depth that he signed his soul away to me, aged twelve, during a game of Monopoly that was going badly for him. I still have it. I thank him for the memorable industrial accidents and near-death experiences that have made this book so much fun, and also thank my sister-in-law Carol and my nephews Jake and Joe (one of whose names I changed and one of whose I didn’t, for no explicable reason) for their supporting cameos. And to all the rest of my far-flung family members, living and dead, thank you for providing me with such rich substance, and also for any chromosomes you may have contributed. Particular thanks go to my cousin Jacquie Mahout (the arty, bohemian one who married a French communist) for all of the most startling fragments of family history included here, though even she had no idea where I’d got Mad Aunt Thursa from.
Huge acknowledgements and perhaps apologies go to all of the non-relatives who have been travestied herein, usually without their permission or knowledge, especially those whom I’ve grossly misrepresented without even going to the trouble of changing their names. The actor Robert Goodman, who in real life is beautiful in mind, body and soul, probably tops the list here, although Melinda Gebbie and Lucy Lisowiec may also wish to consult their lawyers. The same gratitude, and the same squirming disclaimers, go to my friends Donald Davies; Norman Adams and Neil; Dominic Allard (and his late mother Audrey); the late, great Tom Hall and all who sailed in him; Stephen “Fred” Ryan, who I hope hangs on long enough to read this, and his late mother Phyllis Ryan, née Denton, who served me tea and biscuits and gave me the entirety of Phyllis Painter from her boa of decomposing rabbits to the Compton Street Girls marching song. These are all lovely people, and any perceived flaws to their characters as presented here are entirely those of the author.
Otherwise unmentioned in Jerusalem, for providing a major part of this novel’s motivation, I should like to thank my wonderful daughters, Leah and Amber (along with their equally wonderful partners, John and Robo), and particularly my astonishing grandsons Eddie, James, Joseph and Rowan. Your nana Melinda called this book “a genetic mythology”, and for better or worse it’s part of yours, too. While I’m sure that the future you’re running into the breakers of will be as strange as anything in this book, remember that this is the peculiar landscape a bit of you came from, and that along with everybody and everything you’ve ever cared about, we’re all still there in Jerusalem.
I thank the deaf, mute stones of what is left of the Boroughs for all of the work that they have done across the centuries, and all that they have borne. When they at last slump, exhausted, into the dusty sleep of rubble, I hope that this may serve them as an entertaining, vindicating dream.
And lastly I thank both the Meaningful Concept of Death and the English Novel for having been such thoroughly good sports about all this. You guys are the greatest.
Alan Moore