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Since Martin Bradley's story is - at least to begin with - entangled with my own, I need to begin by speaking of myself, and of the Soho we both knew in the early 1950s. I came to Soho for the first time in January 1953. A week earlier, I had separated from my wife and our year old son - not because we had quarreled, but because we found it virtually impossible to find lodgings in which babies were acceptable. She returned to my home town, Leicester, to live with my parents, while I found myself a job as a porter in the Western Fever Hospital in Fulham. ANARCHIST INTERLUDE For almost a year I had been loosely associated with the London Anarchist Group, and with another organization called the Syndicalist Workers' Federation. This was not because I was particularly interested in politics, but because I wanted to train myself as a public speaker. On the few occasions I had asked questions after a lecture, I had had difficulty preventing my voice from shaking, and I felt ashamed of this weakness. But the Syndicalists allowed me to use their platform at Speakers' Corner on Sunday afternoons, and I found that the sheer volume required to speak in the open air quickly overcame my nervousness. I had also written an 'anarchist' play, called Twentieth Century Review, and it was in an effort to find amateur actors that I first ventured into the cafes of central London. There was 'The 91', in Charlotte Street, where we could spend hours in the basement, drinking cups of tea (at 2½d a cup) and talking about ideas. There was the 'A and A', a club opposite the Church of St Giles-in-the-Fields, frequented mainly by taxi drivers and would-be bohemians, where I could buy buttered bread and a plate of black olives for sixpence. And there was the Coffee House at the top of Northumberland Avenue - rather more expensive (they charged 6d for a cappuccino), but a pleasant meeting place for bored teenagers who wanted to escape from the suburbs. I never used the pubs, because they were expensive compared to the cafes. MEETING JOHNNY ABRAHAMS One of the friends I made in the Coffee House was a commercial artist named Johnny Abrahams; he had a room in Fellowes Road, near Chalk Farm, and a passion for early jazz - particularly Bix Beiderbecke and the Armstrong Hot Five. Johnny allowed us to use his room to rehearse the Twentieth Century Review - which finally achieved an imperfect performance in a hired hall in Holborn - and later a play called The Metal Flower Blossom, which would achieve its one and only performance five years later, long after our group had dissolved and I had found unexpected celebrity with my first book. Meanwhile, Johnny's large and airy room became a regular meeting place for about a dozen of us, and helped to give us that sense of unity that serves teenagers instead of a purpose in life. Johnny himself had charm and intelligence, but was tormented by a sense of aimlessness, of not quite knowing what he ought to be doing with his life. In retrospect, this is my strongest impression of everyone I knew in Soho in the early 1950s: a desire to 'be' something, to 'do' something, accompanied by an underlying feeling that no one would ever achieve anything of importance, because fame was something that happened to other people. BEING INVISIBLE I suppose, in fact, that the same feeling could have been found in any teenage hang-out in any town in Britain, or in the 'existentialist' cafes of the Boul' Mich: the sense of being 'invisible', of having no real identity, and a longing to belong to some group or club that would provide the sensation of playing a visible part in the adult world. In fact, I had soon come to suspect that most of my anarchist friends were not motivated by a dislike of power so much as an envy of authority, and a desire to become a kind of alternative establishment. And I had also met in Soho one or two young men who had just gone up to Oxford, and who obviously possessed a sense of security that the rest of us envied - a feeling that their university education would turn them into future members of the governing class, and give them a certainty that they were 'visible.' CHICO BRADLEY I had already begun to develop the notion of 'Outsiders' or 'In-betweeners' - people who are too individualistic to want to become 'useful members of society', yet seldom talented enough to achieve recognition on their own terms. My heroes were Nietzsche, Van Gogh, and the dancer Nijinsky, and I was struggling to incorporate all three of them into a huge novel called Ritual in the Dark, which was based upon the Egyptian Book of the Dead much as Joyce's Ulysses was based on the Odyssey. I had also discovered the existentialism of Sartre and Camus, and it seemed to me that most denizens of Soho were examples of Sartre's concept of 'contingency', the feeling that we are 'unnecessary.' Naturally, anyone who seemed to possess a sense of purpose or a talent for self expression was surrounded by a crowd of acolytes. One of these was a brilliantly articulate young Welshman named Bill Hopkins, who had been a protege of Lord Beaverbrook, and written a poem called The Terracotta Boy that had achieved publication in a poetry review and was known, at least by name, to everyone in Soho. I went out of my way to meet him largely because he was admired by a girl with whom I was infatuated - but that is another story. At all events, we formed a friendship that has lasted forty years. I think it was Bill who first mentioned to me a painter named Martin Bradley, who had an amazing gift of languages, and whose work was influenced by Chinese philosophy. I expressed a wish to meet him, and Bill promised to introduce me sometime. But the opportunity never seemed to arise. One day, when I was drinking coffee with Johnny Abrahams and expounding my ideas about 'Outsiders', which I had developed into a disjointed book of essays, Johnny mentioned that the only Outsider he knew was a painter called Chico Bradley. When he added that Chico was translating the Tao Te Ching, I recognised him as Bill's Chinese scholar, and asked Johnny if he could introduce me to him. It turned out that he was living only a few hundred yards away, in Chalk Farm Road, and he offered to take me there. TYPING ‘JOSEPHINE’ I already knew the area because I had recently spent an afternoon in Chalk Farm Road trying to type out a pornographic novel called Josephine Mutzenbacher for a would-be publisher who hoped to make a fortune selling stencilled copies to dubious bookstores in Soho. I had also hoped to make a fortune, because he offered me £1 an hour, which was approximately five times as much as I was being paid as a hospital porter. But the typewriter, which was very ancient, and weighed as much as a small car, was so battered and inefficient that in two hours I succeeded only in typing a page and a half - it described, I remember, how the schoolgirl Josephine was seduced by her father. I decided that even £1 an hour could not compensate for the boredom, and disappeared without waiting for payment. Martin Bradley proved to live only a few doors away from the basement that had been the scene of my frustrations. I remember that the house had a small front garden, and that Martin and his wife lived in a ground floor room with two children. A FANATICAL SCHOLAR My memory of Joan Bradley is dim - I vaguely recall a pleasant blonde girl with a northern accent and a harassed manner, who ushered the small boy out of the room so the three of us could talk. (There was also a baby somewhere in the background.) But Martin himself I can remember clearly - a very thin, dark young man with a sharp upper-class voice and a manner of speaking which at first struck me as a trifle pedantic. But it was soon clear that this manner masked the enthusiasm of a fanatical scholar, as well as of someone who likes people and enjoys communicating. Martin was highly articulate, and as we drank tea, he gave an amusing account of a recent attempt to live in Cornwall. 'They eat nothing but pasties, and the children have all got pasty faces.' It seemed that his wife had found the West Country depressing, and they had returned to London. He did not add that the main problem had been his drinking and infidelity. I told him about my own interest in Taoism - he corrected my pronunciation and told me it was Daoism - and in Chuang Tsu. This provoked a discourse about Confucius - whom he preferred - and about Chinese calligraphy, of which there were many examples on the walls. There were also a few of his paintings, but they struck me as very 'modernistic' - a blur of colours without visible shapes - and I found them incomprehensible. My taste had never advanced beyond Van Gogh and Cezanne. Did I like Martin? Yes, but this must immediately be qualified by the comment that when two 'intellectuals' meet, their first encounter is a kind of mutual measuring-up rather than a true exchange of ideas. I do not know what he thought of me - and at this distance in time he cannot remember - but I found him impressive and erudite. I had met few people in Soho who spoke several foreign languages and wrote Chinese. But his interest in these things did not seem to be philosophical, as mine was; rather a sort of fascination with all things oriental, which was alien to me. So while I was impressed by him, there was no 'meeting of true minds.' I can also recall asking him about a portrait above the mantelpiece, and being told that it was a French poet called Rimbaud, of whom I knew only the name; Martin went on to recite some of his work - I think it was The Drunken Boat - from memory. Finally, we took our leave, and Mrs Bradley made her appearance to say goodbye. I found them an oddly assorted pair - the practical, down-to-earth northern girl and the obviously impractical Chinese scholar. I said so to Johnny Abrahams when we were outside. He agreed, and commented that he did not know how long it could last... And that, regrettably, is my only clear early memory of Martin Bradley in our Soho days. I recall walking with him towards the Alex in Rathbone Place, and of a conversation in the basement of the '91, but no longer have the slightest recollection of what we talked about. In fact, our paths seldom crossed, since we moved in different circles - Martin spent much time in the pubs, I in the coffee houses and cafes. It was not that I disliked alcohol; simply that I was unable to afford much of it. But since Martin made his living by sketching portraits in pubs, he had the opportunity to drink a large amount - more, it turned out, than was good for him. He moved among artists, who could generally afford a few pints; I moved among would-be writers and 'intellectuals' who seldom had more than enough for a cup of tea and a cheese sandwich. LEGEND-BUILDING TECHNIQUES Some time later - I cannot remember when - Johnny Abrahams' foreboding came true; he told me that Martin and his wife had separated. Johnny made no secret of the fact that he felt Martin had made a mistake in acquiring a wife and children - an artist had enough of a problem simply staying alive. I myself had decided by then that the problem of staying alive would be simplified if I bought myself a waterproof sleeping bag and slept on Hampstead Heath, thus saving the cost of a room. When I met Bill outside the Alex and told him what I was doing, he chortled and said: 'That's right, Col - build up the legend, build up the legend.' But I was not trying to create a legend; only to solve the problem so well-known to most of Soho's residents: how to live on almost nothing a day. I had recently returned from an attempt to establish myself in Paris, and was unaware that Martin had also moved there, and been rather more successful than I had. During the period when I was sleeping out on Hampstead Heath, I had spent my days in the British Museum Reading Room, working at my novel Ritual in the Dark. When rain finally drove me indoors again, I found myself a room in New Cross, and during the Christmas of 1954, began working on a book about 'Outsiders.' Early in 1955, my luck suddenly took a turn for the better when a publisher to whom I had submitted an outline of ‘The Outsider in Literature’ expressed an interest in seeing the finished product. I began to work with a new sense of hope, found myself a job as a dishwasher in a coffee house that had just opened in the Haymarket, and had completed the book by early October 1955. The publisher - Victor Gollancz - accepted it, and paid me an advance of £75. A ROOM IN NOTTING HILL The work in the Coffee House - I soon graduated to serving behind the counter - was enjoyable; the place was staffed largely by out of work actors and pretty drama students from RADA, and the conditions were clean and pleasant. Having worked in so many factories, I found it almost luxurious. On a trip to Leicester in the previous winter, I had acquired myself a new girlfriend - named Joy - and we now spent most of our weekends together in a room I had found in Notting Hill. The house, which was bare of furniture and carpets, was run by a girl whose present lover was a painter, and whose last had been a poet; a few years earlier, Dylan Thomas had lived in the basement. A couple of Soho painters called Colquehoun and McBride moved into an upstairs room, and disturbed the rest of the tenants with violent, screaming quarrels that sometimes developed into fisticuffs on the stairs at two in the morning. My own room was bleak and bare - I had to go out and buy cheap second hand furniture - and the wind whistled up between the floorboards. But suddenly, life had a taste of expectation. I had definitely moved beyond the sense of 'contingency' that I associated with Soho. I had no doubt whatever that The Outsider (as it was now called) would make me famous, unaware that most first books sink without a trace. THE LITERARY WHIRLIGIG Against all the odds, I proved to be correct. A few weeks before The Outsider came out, Gollancz told me that Edith Sitwell had read the book, and endorsed it with the comment that I would probably become a 'truly great writer.' An Evening News journalist asked if he could interview me. A literary hostess invited me to a party in Hampstead, where I met Iris Murdoch (who had just published her second novel), Elias Canetti, and a young Scots poet named Burns Singer (who was to die of alcoholism) who told me he thought The Outsider was a masterpiece. I asked with astonishment where he had got hold of a copy, and he said Gollancz had sent him a proof. I began to experience a feeling that the book would be a success. And in fact, on the Sunday before its publication - 26 May, 1956 - it received two excellent reviews by the leading critics of the two serious Sunday newspapers (in those days, there were only the Observer and Sunday Times). Then the telephone began ringing - the BBC, Time magazine, even another publisher. On the following day I was being interviewed on television and photographed by Life. As Bill Hopkins had anticipated, the story of the sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath soon acquired the status of a legend. Within a year the book had been translated into a dozen languages and become a bestseller in America. All this was a strange experience for someone as naturally introverted as I was; it was just a little too abrupt to be enjoyable. After the first pleasant shock, I found 'fame' a little wearing; I was too much of a loner to enjoy all the socialising it involved. Besides, the success brought a fairly swift reaction; within weeks, there was a distinct atmosphere of hostility, and critics were soon declaring that the book was merely a compendium of other people's ideas. Early in 1957, Joy and I moved to Cornwall to escape the bitchery of the London literary scene; we have lived there ever since. Martin Bradley was less lucky; although he was making a living as a painter, and becoming known to the galleries, he was still fighting the 'Outsider's' battle against contingency and 'invisibility.' The marriage dragged on, causing both of them intense misery. Joan wanted the marriage to continue, but she also wanted a 'normal’ husband who would support his family. Martin wanted to escape, which caused a deep sense of guilt; he spent a great deal of time away from home, much of it drinking heavily. By the late fifties, this had turned into full-fledged alcoholism that was wrecking his health. When I asked Bill Hopkins what had happened to him, Bill said that he had disappeared. It would be many years before I heard the extraordinary story of Martin's own slow climb to success - so much longer and more painful than my own. REUNION 1992 That finally happened in October 1992. I was due in Poland to publicise a new translation of The Outsider - the first had appeared in 1957 - and we decided to begin with a three day visit to Martin in Bruges. A few months earlier, he had telephoned me to ask if I would be interested in writing the text of a book on his work. Bill Hopkins had already written a small book about Martin, and had told me that he was now a highly successful painter on the continent of Europe, where he had lived for many years. I liked the book and the paintings in it; so when Martin telephoned me, I immediately agreed to write a 'definitive study.' We arrived in Bruges by train, and were met at the station by Martin and his Japanese wife Tatsuko. His first comment was: 'Ah, we're both old men now.' Since we were exactly the same age - 61 - there was some truth in this; but I certainly didn't feel it, and Martin, in spite of a mop of grey hair and a paunch, didn't look it. Within minutes - as Tatsuko drove us out to the suburb of Sint Michiels - I had recognised that he was still the same old Martin: the same flow of enthusiastic talk - he seems to have a passion for communicating information - delivered in the same oddly precise voice, but with the old sense of underlying warmth and humour. Sint Michiels is very much a middle class suburb, the last place I would have expected to find Martin. Their large bungalow - on a corner - had a sign in Chinese outside, and two fishponds in the front garden. Tatsuko, a pretty girl who spoke French but little English, produced us a magnificent lunch of raw fish - for which I had acquired a taste in Japan - and I drank beer. When I asked Martin whether he was not going to drink, he explained that he had not touched alcohol since taking 'the cure' in the early 1960s. After lunch, in these very comfortable surroundings, with the sliding glass doors open on to the terrace - it was a day of brilliant sunshine, as warm as midsummer - Joy went off with Tatsuko to look at the sights of Bruges, and Martin and I finally settled in facing armchairs, with a tape recorder between us. During the next forty eight hours, with interruptions for meals, trips back to our pension, and visits from Martin's friends and agents, we recorded five ninety minute cassettes. At the end of that time, Martin said he felt exactly as if he had paid a visit to a psychiatrist and poured everything out of his system. I felt as if I had made a journey into someone else's life, and recorded a story that could have been incorporated, without change, into The Outsider. PIPE DREAMS OF GAUGUIN When Martin was in his early teens, he told his guardian, whom he called 'Nine Nine', that he wanted to become a painter. Commander Cussen-Spencer 'blew up', and told him that painters were disreputable people - like Maugham's Charles Strickland in The Moon and Sixpence - who were destined to sink to the bottom of society. There were exceptions, of course, like Lord Leighton, who managed to make a good living, but they were rare. In fact, Commander Cussen-Spencer showed sound common sense and some foresight. Martin's life would be more like that of Charles Strickland - based on Gauguin - than Lord Leighton. He would suffer as much as Maugham's hero, and would cause others to suffer. He would be driven by a compulsive obsession that he himself did not understand, and that even now he only partly understands; I think I have never come across anyone driven more completely by a compulsion. LIVING ON SUFFERANCE When I say that Martin's story could be incorporated into The Outsider, I do not mean that it would make a good 'biopic', like Irving Stone's Lust for Life. The Outsider was fundamentally a book about 'existentialist' philosophy - about the question of why human beings are alive, and what they are supposed to do now they are here. The book began with a man who spends his days looking through a hole in the wall of his hotel room, at the people who come and go in the next room, and who says: 'I am nothing and I deserve nothing.' It goes on to discuss the character in Sartre who suffers from 'nausea', the sudden overwhelming conviction that life is totally meaningless. He is writing a biography of a historical character, yet feels that it cannot be done without imposing a false meaning, a meaning that was not present in the life as it was actually lived. Life is too real to have a 'meaning.' All human beings experience this sense of 'contingency' to some extent - the feeling that they are living only on sufferance, and that life may get tired of them and dismiss them at a moment's notice. The existentialism of Sartre, Camus and Heidegger is about the attempt of the individual to impose some sense of meaning on this flux of meaninglessness. A COMPULSION What struck me as I listened to Martin was that he has been driven by a compulsion that was like some hypnotic command, but that his problem has been to reconcile this compulsion with suffering, guilt, self-destructiveness and a sense of being 'unnecessary.' In other words, his life has been a conflict between his compulsive obsession and his sense of contingency - a conflict that was nowhere more apparent than in his sudden decision to give up painting and join the Foreign Legion. Finally, the compulsive obsession has won, and some of its meaning is beginning to emerge. Yet even at this stage, I cannot claim to grasp what it was all about. Let me state clearly what I mean. At the age of eight or nine, in the library of his prep school in Croydon, Martin came across the article on Chinese Language in Encyclopaedia Britannica. 'It was almost like being hit by a thunderbolt. Something shook the very foundations of my whole being - as if it were trying to show me something. With feverish enthusiasm, I started learning all the Chinese ideograms in the article, along with their pronunciation. The fever wouldn't stop; it was a prelude to what the Venerable Shin Guan taught me - that every ideogram was a treasure. Within a couple of weeks or so, I knew all the Encyclopaedia could offer in the way of knowledge of Chinese.' I asked Martin if he had any previous knowledge of China. It turned out that his nanny had once pointed out that three men in baggy blue clothes were Chinamen - hardly an explanation of this sudden passionate interest in the language. When I heard this passage about ideograms on a cassette he sent me, I commented to Joy: 'It sounds like reincarnation.' Of course, since he is a Buddhist, Martin finds it easy to accept that explanation. He also recalls clearly a childhood dream of placing his head on a block, and a black-clothed headman's axe coming down, 'and then suddenly feeling - and becoming - all red.' This was followed by a 're-play' of some life-scene, with people dressed in clothes with a great deal of lace. 'It was true that my head had really been cut off.' REINCARNATION In recent years, as a result of my own interest in the paranormal - a fairly late development - I have studied the evidence for reincarnation and decided that, against all our western instincts, it deserves to be taken seriously. So I can accept that the axeman dream may have been a flashback to some previous life. (What strikes me as curious about it is that most of us wake up when some dream-catastrophe occurs; Martin went on dreaming that he was 'all red', and then had a flashback to people dressed in the fashion of 17th century cavaliers.) But even if we dismiss all this as a childhood nightmare, the matter of the ideograms is more difficult to explain. Martin has said elsewhere that he is mathematically illiterate; the mere sight of a page of figures is enough to make his mind go blank. Most children would feel exactly the same on confronting Chinese ideograms. So why the feeling that he had been 'hit by a thunderbolt'? And why did he use that significant phrase 'I felt they were trying to show me something'? This clearly implies that the ideograms were speaking to him, in a language he was not yet able to grasp. He has said that, ever since then, oriental languages have come to him easily and naturally, as if he knew them already - in other words, as if it was re-learning rather than learning. We may explain it in terms of some natural aptitude - many children who are born into families of musicians or painters find that they are playing the piano or drawing perfectly at the age of three. But there are also curious examples of children with no family background in the arts who are compulsively attracted to the violin or paintbrush when they can scarcely speak. In these cases, the scientific explanation that suggests itself is a genetic inheritance from an ancestor. But if there is such a thing as a genetic inheritance that produces a sense of being hit by a thunderbolt when a child sees Chinese ideograms, then it sounds so much like the eastern idea of reincarnation that the distinction begins to blur. WORLD REJECTION - AN IMMATURITY? The same, it seems to me, applies to his obsession with Buddhism. From the moment he came to London, Martin began to hang around the Buddhist Society and to read Buddhist sutras. Now an interest in oriental philosophy does not imply reincarnation, as I can testify. I became fascinated by the Tao Te Ching at the age of sixteen, having discovered it in a compilation called The Bible of the World in the school library. For some reason I can no longer recall, 'Tao' seemed to me to signify primeval nothingness, and I had already reached the conclusion that nothing, far from meaning the absence of something, was the basic concept that lay behind all existence. (Boehme meant the same thing by Ungrund.) From the Tao Te Ching I moved on to the Bhagavad Gita, which came as a revelation, perhaps the profoundest of my life. I learned the basic technique of meditation, which lifted me above the turmoil of adolescent frustrations and miseries, and brought a sense of mastery and freedom. The Dhammapada - the basic Buddhist scripture - was a natural next step, and I read Younghusband's Some Sayings of the Buddha, and saved up to buy an anthology called A Buddhist Bible. But Buddhism for me was merely a symbol - a symbol of the notion that the mind should be the master of life rather than its slave. Eventually I came to feel that the Buddhist attitude of world-rejection was a kind of romantic immaturity. It has always seemed to me that Nietzsche's Zarathustra, with his total acceptance, is closer to the truth. WE LIVE ALL SPACE, ALL TIME But for Martin, Buddhism clearly means a great deal more than world-rejection. It is a way of thinking and feeling and being that corresponds to his profoundest intuitions about reality. He dismisses the charge that it is negative, and speaks of the feeling that 'we live all space, all time, simultaneously, effortlessly, yet in this relative dimension.'. On my second day in Bruges, I arrived at the house while he was still occupied in his morning devotions, and as I sat there, listening to the sound of distant chanting, it occurred to me that Buddhism plays as important a part in his life as the Mass does in that of a Catholic mystic. This is certainly not a reaction based on world-weariness and a desire for simplicity; on the contrary, he gives me the impression that his Buddhism, like his obsession with Chinese ideograms, springs from some deeper level of his being. I do not know whether all this points to reincarnation, but it is clearly the most important thing about him. A DISADVANTAGED START Obviously, a discussion of anyone's life and work has to begin from his childhood. But Martin has shown - to put it mildly - extreme reluctance to talk about his childhood. The account he gave to Bill Hopkins is, while not actually untruthful, rather misleading. Hopkins comments: 'The circumstances of your childhood were rather grim, I know', and Martin replies: 'Let's say that as an illegitimate orphan I was more than somewhat disadvantaged... Having no visible parents and no visible means of support, I was placed in an orphanage and subjected to enforced discipline, rationed food and emotional paralysis. My earliest memories were that.' And when Hopkins asks: 'Did you find out who your parents were?' Martin explains: 'My mother was Flemish. She apparently died soon after my birth... My father was an extremely wealthy business man who turned up years later and formally adopted me, representing himself as a disinterested philanthropist... I was kitted out with an expensive wardrobe and despatched forthwith to an exclusive public school for privileged children of the upper classes, with a different regime of enforced discipline, rationed food and emotional paralysis... Immediately I reached the legal school-leaving age, I ran away to sea.' This last statement is certainly true; he commented to me that he regarded his flight from school and his first trip to South America as the real beginning of his life. He clearly has no desire to talk or think about his childhood. But this in itself is a good reason for wanting to know about it. It was the revolt against childhood that catapulted him into the life of a galley-boy, then a painter. Why was he so anxious to leave it behind? AN ‘AGATHA CHRISTIE’ CHILDHOOD The fuller version of his childhood, which I extracted from him during the interviews, explains why he wanted to forget it. His mother, whose name was Gladys Koekoek, did not die soon after his birth (in Hammersmith on April 11, 1931), but when he was seven. His father, who was wealthy, set her up in a Victorian house in Richmond, complete with chauffeur, cook, housemaid and a nanny. He describes it as an 'Agatha Christie childhood' - that is, like that of the upper-middle class in Agatha Christie's novels of the '30s. He had a pleasant yellow-painted nursery, with a chestnut tree outside, and the nanny's bedroom next door. It was while out walking with his nanny that Martin saw a pavement artist, and was immediately fascinated. 'It struck me', he commented later, 'as a very good way of making a living.' He dates his own desire to become a painter from this experience. The only man who made regular appearances in the house was Commander Cussen-Spencer, whom Martin accepted as a kind of uncle figure; it only occurred to him years later that he must have been his mother's lover, and almost certainly his father. So the first seven years of Martin's life were physically and emotionally secure; although he saw less of his mother than most children, he seems to have had no doubt that he loved her, and was loved by her. Then came a time when his mother was away for longer and longer periods, and he heard the word 'nursing home.' Finally, he was told that his mother had died. In some way, he says, he already knew this, although it is not clear whether he overheard the servants talking about it, or had some premonition. A KIND OF ORPHANAGE And, very abruptly, life changed. His 'guardian', Commander Cussen-Spencer, sent him off to a boarding school - he describes it as 'a kind of orphanage' - called Wells House, on Epsom Common. He found this fairly traumatic: 'dropping from the world of the nursery into the world of hot baths, cold baths, running around fields and doing lessons.' French he found very easy to learn, but objected to the attempts to discipline his talent for drawing by making him sketch buckets and vases, which he found a bore. After two terms, he was withdrawn from the school and 'farmed out to various relatives.' Then he was sent to another boarding school, the Warehousemans, Clerks and Drapers School in Croydon, where, as already described, he discovered Chinese ideograms in the library. Later still he was sent to the St Paul's School in London, where Commander Cussen-Spencer hoped to turn him into a creditable member of the British middle class. There he learned Latin and Greek, which he disliked at the time, and chafed increasingly at the idea of being prepared for a career in the Foreign Office, Civil Service, or armed forces. But at St.Paul's school he also discovered the water-colours of William Blake - reproductions of which were hung on the walls - and such 'modern' painters as Van Gogh, Cezanne and Roualt. (He pays tribute to the art master - a man called Steer - and 'the only person who really tried to educate us.') He also acknowledges the impact of Maugham's Moon and Sixpence, which directed his attention at Gauguin. ('It seemed to me that Strickland had a pretty good time.') The image of electric-blue skies, hazy mountains and golden-skinned girls aroused a nostalgia for 'faraway places', and reinforced the ambition that had been at the back of his mind since he saw the pavement artist with his nanny. In retrospect, the decision to run away to sea seems virtually inevitable. SECURE BUT EMOTIONALLY BARREN All this, I think, explains his reluctance to discuss his childhood. The early part was secure enough, but emotionally rather barren, spent mostly in the company of nannies - he recalls only one outing for lunch with his mother and Commander Cussen-Spencer - and without playmates. Then even this security vanished with the death of his mother. I find it hard to believe that boarding schools like Wells House and the Warehousemans, Clerks and Drapers School were quite as much like Dotheboys Hall as he seems to recall; but they must have been traumatic enough for an illegitimate orphan who needed more, not less, emotional security. The craving to become an artist, and the conflict with his guardian, explain why he took the drastic step of running away to sea when he was fourteen and a half. Most children daydream of running away from home - like Tom Sawyer - but unless there is extreme unhappiness at home or school, few are prepared to exchange even moderate security for total insecurity. That Martin Bradley decided to do so at the age of fourteen says something about his feeling of rage, misery and frustration. LIFE WITH THE CUSSEN-SPENCERS Nearly half a century later he can no longer recall the precise cause of the crisis that made him decide to run away. He was living, at the time, in the home of Commander and Mrs Cussen-Spencer in Ealing, a large Victorian house with a maid and gardener and cook, and travelling to school as a day-boy. He felt like an unwanted guest, and the upheavals of puberty, the increasing interest in schoolgirls, guilt about the sin of masturbation, all contributed to the craving to escape. (At the all-male St Pauls, even to talk to a schoolgirl was considered as sinful.) He was also terrified by the thought of a future in the army, navy or Foreign Office, which would merely be like another kind of public school. Like so many public school boys, he seems to look back on it as a kind of hell. For a long time he had been questioning the Christian religion, to which he seemed to feel a natural antipathy - the school chaplain had finally lost patience with his questions and told him to shut up. A few doors away from the house in Ealing there lived a woman who was a 'spirit medium' and a member of the Spiritualist Church; the Cussen-Spencer's derided her, yet when Martin talked to her, what she had to say struck him as interesting and reasonable. On the other hand, the High Church he had to attend with the Cussen-Spencers every Sunday left him feeling bored and sceptical. He later said that he planned his escape with the care of a prisoner of war escaping from a prison camp. THE SEAMAN’S POOL But the decision to run away to sea was not as sudden and violent as it sounds. His interest in Chinese had often led him to play truant and explore the Chinese quarter in the East End. There he soon learned about the seaman's 'pool', and about the possibility of finding a job as a cabin boy. With the arrival of his fourteenth birthday - April 11, 1945 - it was time to put the plan into operation. At this time he was a day-boy at St Paul's School, and was living in his guardian's large Victorian house in Ealing. One grey morning at the beginning of winter, 1945, he left home as usual for school, leaving a letter for his guardian explaining why he was running away. If he was unable to find a ship, he would be home in time to make sure the letter was not discovered. Instead of heading north, he took the underground to Aldgate East, then a bus to West India Dock Road. At West India Docks, he walked on board a Liberian ship called the Fort Gloucester and spoke to the captain, claiming to be sixteen; the captain gave him a chit and sent him for a perfunctory medical examination which consisted basically of signing a certificate declaring he was healthy. That evening, as the ship left harbour, Martin was already in the galley, washing up dishes in a vast metal sink. Later, exhausted but deeply satisfied, he retired to the cabin he shared with two other sailors. A LIFE AT SEA The Fort Gloucester was on its way to Galveston, Texas with a cargo of timber. As the galley boy, Martin was 'the servant of slaves'; his job involved potato peeling a hundredweight of potatoes before breakfast, and working through until 8 p.m. He was among sailors of many nationalities, and quickly began to pick up Dutch and Spanish. An encounter with a homosexual fireman left him in no doubt that he had no homosexual tendencies and - as far as participating was concerned - disliked the whole idea. In Galveston, with $10 in his pocket (a lot of money in 1945), he hurried to Post Office Street, the brothel quarter, where he lost his virginity with a very young Mexican girl called Nelida. Martin was a natural romantic who would have enjoyed a relationship that involved some intimacy and tenderness; but for Nelida it was strictly a matter of business, and she objected even to kissing - Martin had to be contented with what was known as a 'sailor's pussy fuck.' He was determined not to return to the ship; he did not like his shipmates - particularly the fireman - and the long hours left no time for anything but sleep. NEW ORLEANS TO MEXICO When his money ran out he took to begging and doing odd jobs, like dishwashing. He met a Mexican called Arturo Salazar, and together they decided to hitch-hike to New Orleans. There he did more odd jobs, then moved on to Houston, Texas, from whence he and Salazar decided to hitch-hike to Mexico. For Martin, the main motivation was to perfect his Spanish, which seemed to him a badge of his freedom. Crossing the border - at Del Rio - was easy; it merely involved wading across a muddy stream which was, in fact, the fabled Rio Grande. In a town called Piedras Negras he found a job in the local slaughterhouse, and took cheap lodgings with an Indian family; the overworked housewife never saw his rent, which was promptly drunk by his landlord. When Mexico palled, he made his way back to Del Rio, where he would cross the border again; but this time he was arrested as an illegal immigrant and thrown into jail. It was small and overcrowded, and space was so limited that it was necessary to carefully guard the area where you lay down to sleep. The diet was monotonous - red beans twice a day. In jail he was subjected to the exhortations of American evangelists who were allowed into jail to try to convert the prisoners to a better life; the experience left him with a lifelong distaste for missionaries. (Nearly half a century later he was subjected to the same nuisance in Bruges when Jehovah's Witnesses knocked on his door, apparently convinced that someone with Chinese symbols in his front garden was in need of conversion.) DEPORTED At the end of three months, apparently guilty about keeping a child in jail, they deported him back to Galveston. The British consul there showed himself unhelpful, refusing to give any money. So Martin found himself another berth, this time on a Panamanian cargo ship. This sailed to the Cape Verde Islands, then on to Antwerp and Hamburg - whose dock area was still a waste of ruin from wartime bombing, and where Martin had a 'sexual orgy.' After that it was back to Antwerp, where he found a boat headed for Cardiff. Back in Britain after only a few months, he had lived through more experiences than many have in a lifetime. (My own life seems by comparison extraordinarily tame.) But it would continue in much the same way for the next three years - for most of which he was on Panamanian ships plying between Europe and Central and South America. The life suited him; he liked the freedom, the association with many nationalities and the unstressful life of a deck-boy and mess-boy. In a sense, he is merely stating the truth when he says that his life began when he sailed in the Fort Gloucester to Galveston. He even acquired himself a new name - Chico, (meaning 'boy') by which he was still generally known when I met him in London. He picked up foreign languages easily and quickly - French, Greek, Dutch and Spanish (a language that still gives him a 'sense of freedom.') In the company of English-speaking sailors, he learned to cover up his public school accent with 'something transatlantic.' He also learned to take care of himself in brawls - sailors seemed to enjoy starting fights in bars - and after one of these, had the satisfaction of hearing someone comment approvingly: 'Did you see the cabin boy slug that old bugger with a chair?' BLANK CREATIVE PERIODS But life at sea also included long blank periods. It was to while away the time on month-long voyages that 'Chico' began drawing and painting. The paintings were mainly portraits of crewmates. And although the school lessons had left him with a preoccupation with 'getting things academically right', there was still a sense of release, of 'externalising' something inside himself. Most of these portraits were given away. It is possible that he might have remained a sailor and an amateur painter - the carefree life suited him, and the ships gave him a sense of belonging that he had never experienced at school. But the Russians saved him from this commonplace destiny. The Cold War produced a commercial recession, and when Martin found himself back in Limehouse in 1948, he was unable to find another ship. As the days drifted by in the Salvation Army Hostel in East India Dock Road, he began to feel, with the characteristic impatience of an 17 year old, that he might be there for the rest of his life. AN APPALLING SENSE OF FRAGILITY Then came the crucial night that changed the direction of his life. After weeks without a berth, he spent a whole night in the hostel lying awake in a state of anguish, wondering about his future. It was not simply the fear of unemployment, but a kind of religious crisis about the problem of human existence. He had heard many stories from sailors who had fought during the war and seen comrades killed. All this produced an appalling sense of the fragility of human life - how easily it could be snuffed out. Now, with the prospect of another war with Russia, he felt it was time for a reassessment of his life. There was an overwhelming sense of how precious life is, and how it needs to be used in the right way. There was also the wry recognition that a sailor's life can be just as monotonous as a bank clerk's. 'When I first ran away to sea, I was too naive to realise that, whether you go to Galveston or Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro or Antwerp, it's exactly the same bars, exactly the same customers, exactly the same women... The dock workers may be slightly different, but essentially it's all the same.' The vision of faraway places that he had found in The Moon and Sixpence and the paintings of Gauguin was basically an illusion. Yet there had to be some other way of living that would answer his sense of purpose. At this crossroads in his life, he felt the need to make urgent decisions. Was it time to return to his guardian, apologise for running away to sea, and think about some respectable middle-class career? That idea was dismissed as quickly as it came. The revulsion that had made him run away from public school was as strong as ever. Then how could he make a living? He was almost broke, and he found begging humiliating. (from ABRAXAS 13) |
