The greasy one grabbed me by my lapels. I feared that at any moment he might reach into my pockets.
I acted on instinct.
I raised my knee, catching him on the side of the head. I had been involved in enough brawls in Spain to know that the important thing was just to get away. That’s all I was intending to do.
As he was falling back I hooked my foot around his ankle and then swung a punch at his head with the side of my fist. He twisted as he went down and it was his face that hit the pavement first. There was a sickening thud. The fat blond then came roaring at me, but I managed to push him off easily, and he too went down. The third man ran off.
The fat blond would be fine: he was just winded and shocked. But the greasy-looking one had gone down hard and had gone very quiet: there was a pool of blood haloed around his head. He did not look at all well.
To repeat, to be clear, and in case of confusion: I had been attacked; I had acted in self-defence; and what had happened was clearly an accident.
In his controversial pamphlet ‘In Defence of Self-Defence’ (1939), a much misunderstood little treatise, Morley sets out the criteria by which a person or nation might justly claim the right to defend themselves. Morley’s criteria are clear, detailed and as follows: self-defence may be permissible only if and when ‘1) a culpable 2) aggressor 3) knowingly initiates 4) an unprovoked attack 5) on an innocent victim 6) who is unable to avoid or escape harm 7) without causing necessary 8) or proportionate harm 9) with the sole intention 10) of defending himself’. Morley then further clarifies the permissible conditions and circumstances with a sentence that subsequently caused him much pain and harm: ‘Even when such conditions are met it is still debatable whether self-defence by a nation or person can ever be considered a moral good.’ His timing was unfortunate. It was a misjudgement: everyone, it seems, even Morley, makes mistakes.
All I would have had to have done at that moment was to explain what had happened to the police. It was perfectly simple. I was an innocent man, admittedly an innocent man with a criminal record, who had recently returned from Spain, admittedly fighting with the communists, and who had found employment with one of the country’s most revered and famous authors, admittedly on rather false pretences, and I had been enjoying a quiet evening in Soho, admittedly in an after-hours drinking establishment, from which I had fled, admittedly owing almost one hundred pounds in gambling debts, and with a pocketful of illegal and expensive powders, which were not, strictly speaking, my own … whereupon I had become the victim of an unprovoked attack by culpable aggressors and had acted with the sole intention of defending myself.
I did not in fact attempt to explain this to the police.
I owed it to Morley not to get him involved.
And, of course, I owed it to myself.
I did what anyone else would have done.
I ran.
RISE AND SHINE AND GIVE GOD THE GLORY
AS DAWN BROKE I found myself wandering up Great Portland Street, onto the Euston Road and along towards St Pancras.
The arrangement had been to meet Miriam and Morley outside St Pancras at 7 a.m. in order to set off on our next adventure. The first of the County Guides – to Norfolk – had been published to a few lukewarm reviews by the sort of reviewers who regarded Morley’s work as beneath contempt. ‘Yet another pointless and whimsical outing from England’s self-styled “People’s Professor,”’ wrote some pompous – anonymous – twit in the Times Literary Supplement (or the ‘Times Literary Discontent’, as Morley called it). ‘A work of enthusiasm rather than of serious scholarship,’ complained some frightful bluestocking in The Times. ‘Essentially frivolous,’ concluded the Manchester Guardian. But Morley was not discouraged. He was never discouraged. He was not, I believed at the time, discourageable. The Grand Project, Le Grand Projet – The County Guides, a complete guide to the English counties, a people’s history, forty or more volumes in all, a volume to be completed every three to four weeks, his mad modern Domesday Book – was not to be derailed by anyone, rich or poor, educated, uneducated, varsity, non-varsity, dead or alive.
During my time with Morley I did my best to share his enthusiasm, and his enthusiasms, but I was really always trying to escape, to get away and to start again. The work was not uninteresting, of course, and our adventures became renowned but I was never really anything more than a glorified secretary. Morley referred to me variously over the years as his amanuensis, his assistant, his apprentice, his accomplice, his aide and, alas, as his ’bo. None of these descriptions were really adequate. For all my work and for all that the photographs featured in the books were mine I was only ever an acknowledgement buried among the many others, the page after endless page of Morley’s super-scrupulous solicitudes. ‘With thanks to the ever-accommodating British Library, to the staff of the London Library, to the University of London Library …’ and to all the other libraries, ad nauseam. ‘To H.G. Wells, and to Gilbert Chesterton, to James Hilton, to Nancy Cunard, to Dorothy Sayers, to Rosamond Lehmann, to Naomi Mitchison, and to dear Wystan Auden …’ and to all of my other famous friends. ‘To the dockers of east London, to the factory workers of Manchester …’ and to the fried fish sellers, to the piemen and piewomen, and the dolls’ eyes manufacturers of this great island nation. ‘To the people of Rutland, of East Riding, of west Dorset …’ and of everywhere else. ‘And to Stephen Sefton, and the Society for the Protection of Accidents, without whom …’ Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Every time we finished a book I vowed never to return. Sometimes I dreamed of going back to Spain, or of going back to teaching, of worming my way into the BBC, of pursuing photography seriously as a profession, of starting again somewhere else. Anywhere else. Anywhere but England. And every time I failed. I was always drawn back, again and again. I never quite understood why.
With St Pancras up ahead and the prospect of another tiresome cross-country jaunt before me I was thinking that this time I might simply trail off into deepest darkest north London, to lick my wounds, clear my head and devise a plan.
And then I saw Miriam.
In one of his very strangest books, Rise and Shine and Give God the Glory (1930), part of his ill-fated Early Rising Campaign – hijacked by all sorts of odd bods and unsavoury characters – Morley advises the early riser not only to practise pranic breathing and vigorous exercise, but also to utter ‘an ecumenical greeting to the dawn’, a greeting which, he claimed, was ‘suitable for use by Christians, Jews, Mohammedans, Hindoos, and peoples of all religions and none’. Borrowing words and phrases from Shakespeare, Donne, Thomas Nashe, Robert Herrick and doubtless all sorts of other bits and pieces culled from his beloved Quiller-Couch and elsewhere, the greeting begins with a gobbet from William Davenant: ‘Awake! Awake! The morn will never rise / Till she can dress her beauty at your eyes.’ I was never a great fan of this ‘ecumenical aubade’ of Morley’s but this morning it seemed to fit the occasion.
Miriam sat outside St Pancras enthroned in the Lagonda like the sun on the horizon: upright, commanding and incandescent. Her lips were red. She had dyed her hair a silvery gold. She wore a brilliant green dress trimmed with white satin. And she had about her, as usual, that air of making everyone and everything else seem somehow slow and soft and dull, while she alone appeared vivid and magnificent – and hard, and fast, and dangerous. Une maîtresse femme. For those who never met her, it is important to explain.