You looked like so many ants plundering a heap of grain. Here they come, a dark column of Lanyons: cousins, aunts, family hangers-on, hauling their spoils along a narrow track through the grass! Some heave with their shoulders against a large seed. Some push. Others tighten the ranks and punish delay. A whole river of expectation flows down the Calder, pouring you east and south, through the irradiated country’s strip-mined middle into London: Do us proud, son!
It was all you could do to stop your mum from marching all the housewives of the terrace to the station to wave you off. As usual, the train sat there for ages, but no one moved, no one left. They wouldn’t leave you alone.
‘Get some fresh air, lad, if you can.’ Your father’s sound advice.
At last you were away. Beneath you, the wheels squealed and rattled over a set of points. You closed your eyes, relieved, took a breath, then stood up and leaned out of the window to wave goodbye.
Do you remember it?
Your mother, your father, the people of your street are tiny swatches of cloth, twitching and shivering in the morning cold. High above the station the valley wall impends, and above that, rising into the clouds, clear as soft pencil on tracing paper, runs a line of thick black smoke.
TWO
4
Felicine’s father, the celebrated surgeon Georgy Chernoy, had no more time for chickies than any other Bundist. At a public dinner, one warm night in May, he made his views plain. Memories of the dinner have stayed with me, partly because this was the first time I met him in the flesh; mostly because this was the night I met his daughter.
The dinner was held in a corner of Windsor Castle. It was one of those uneasy cultural gatherings meant to preserve backchannels between London as it had been, and the Bund which was effectively colonising its eastern part.
I was still in the first year of my studies at the Bartlett and absurdly underqualified for this gathering. But I was not alone: scattered among the dignitaries – and, come dinner, sat one to a table, as a sort of mascot – London’s young ‘creatives’ (choreographers, actors, comic book designers, musicians) found themselves being told how they might, by their civic engagement, ‘foster dialogue’ between the two ever-separating halves of the city. We were also here (according to my invitation, embossed on heavy card) to celebrate our ‘promise’, which in my case consisted of a paper plan for a park-like green bridge across the Brentford arm of the Grand Union Canal. I looked forward to an evening spent representing Architecture. When I explained my evening’s mission to him, Stan Lesniak suggested I arrive dressed as a wall.
I caught the train from Waterloo to Windsor at dusk, read a while, then glanced up and stared in mild disbelief as the floodlit castle came into view, perfectly symmetrical, perched above the lamp-lit town on its conical and lonely hill. This imposing yet straightforward structure conformed so exactly to my picture-book idea of what a castle should be, I wondered if every childhood castle might not be traced, through influences both trained and untrained, conscious and unconscious, back to this one foundation.
The climb to the castle, past shuttered shops and cheery pubs, was taxing. I am not fond of physical exercise. A soldier examined my invitation and let me through the wicket gate.
Electric lights bedded in the lawn marked a discreet but clear path across the inner court of the castle. I doglegged around a cloister, passed through a gift shop (which took some of the shine off the adventure) and came to the back of a short queue. A man older than my father offered to take my coat. Entering a timbered, book-lined room, I was handed a glass of British méthode champenoise and an earnest woman in flat shoes eagerly introduced me to representatives of Dance, Literature and the Plastic Arts. We had absolutely nothing in common, and – aside from money, or rather the lack of it – absolutely nothing to talk about.
The Bund as a culture is not famous for its cultivation of dialogue. In place of a nuanced give-and-take, its members tend to substitute power or, in a softer setting, volume. Georgy Chernoy’s voice, neither deep nor shrill, nonetheless cut through lesser conversations as though tuned to a wavelength unused by anyone else. ‘It is,’ he announced, ‘simply a matter of limits.’
An opinion, expressed with patrician self-confidence, has a seductiveness of its own, unconnected with its content.
‘These limits are real. They are not imaginary, and they are not theoretical.’
Wrapping my fingers inexpertly around my glass, warming it, I worked my way through the growing knot of listeners while, away from the throng, men and women in kitchen whites entered through disguised doors in the bookcases to gather abandoned glassware and arrange the supper tables.
‘At what point – this is what we have to ask ourselves – at what point do we assign a painful pejorative like “pollution” to a living thing? Oh no—’
(Impossible, at this distance, to tell whether Georgy Chernoy was responding to a genuine interjection or to a rhetorical one of his own devising.)
‘—I do not dispute for a second that chickies are living things, with as much “right” (as you might say) to life as any other ordinarily evolved thing: a horse or a house plant or a human being. Though the Bundist interpretation of some terms here have wider philosophical implications than the definitions we find operating elsewhere. Terms like “rights”. And “life”.’
‘He talks as if he just stepped off the boat.’
Surprised, I turned to my right. The young woman standing next to me came barely up to my shoulder. She had expensively cropped blue-black hair and so many bright studs in her ear, it had at a glance the appearance of a single jewel. I had assumed her words were meant for me, but she was not looking at me. She did not seem aware of my presence at all. Words burst from her, softly but with an extraordinary intensity, as though she were drawing little knives and hurling them in Chernoy’s direction. ‘He was born in Beckton, for crying out loud.’
‘Yet when it comes to the beings you call “chickies”—’
‘Oh, for crying out loud.’
‘—we find ourselves struggling for an appropriate vocabulary. Their human provenance – the way they bubbled up from the blasted earth of the War’s greatest and most terrible battlefield – inflicted upon all parties in that wasteful conflict a trauma that has yet to be fully appreciated, let alone understood, and not at all healed. I would go so far as to say that historians of the future will dub our present age as the Great Shock. If one considers – as we almost never do – that these creatures emerged from the death-throes of doomed soldiers, what does one feel, what can one feel, but a great numb pressure, such was the enormity of the German mistake? Meaning to bring the dead back to life, they brought something new into the world. And in an attempt to contain that mistake, they then tried to put the new thing to use. The industrial utility of the chickie is beyond dispute: our economy thrives and our culture is fed and watered on an infrastructure built by these easily regulated sub-men. But this easy regimentation veiled from us the other half of their nature, what I might call the Dionysian half of their nature, which ultimately brought an end to the German industrial project and led to our current, uneasy stand-off.’
This was Chernoy’s circumlocutory way of referencing the way the Ruhr Valley’s entire industrial workforce, who by 1937 had been labouring alongside chickies day in, day out for years, were finally overcome by an insatiable lust, downed tools and spent the entire summer and most of the autumn of that year frolicking with these so-called ‘sub-men’ in an orgy that all but broke the nation’s economy. Similar, sometimes grotesquely violent ‘outbreaks’ across Europe brought an end to all grand experiments at the industrial regulation of the chickie population. Left alone at last, the chickies simply melted away. And as Chernoy charmingly put it, ‘Who can say how many of these oh-so-easily-organised work animals conduct affairs of which we know nothing, in places hidden from us: the crannies of our derelict spaces, our edgelands, our abandoned outhouses?