City of Spades - By Colin MacInnes Page 0,97
gates, to get a best bed on my ship before the other seamen come there. But by the river side, where our strong, dirty, little boat is by its mooring, I find that Laddy Boy is waiting for me.
He took my arm, and pulled me behind the shed. ‘Listen, man,’ he said. ‘They sign on Whispers.’
‘Sign Billy on?’
‘Yes. As one of the five crew. I did not know. Shall I go see the captain and try to stop this?’
‘Why, man? Why you do that?’
‘Why? You know why.’
‘Let him come travel home with me if he wants to. Why should I stop him go?’
‘Johnny, is he stop you. This man will kill you on this voyage.’
I laughed now out loud at Laddy Boy. ‘No one will kill me, countryman!’ I cried. ‘This is my city, look at it now! Look at it there – it has not killed me! There is my ship that takes me home to Africa: it will not kill me either! No! Nobody in the world will kill me ever until I die!’
About the Author
COLIN MACINNES (1914–76), son of novelist Angela Thirkell, cousin of Stanley Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling, grandson of Burne-Jones, was brought up in Australia but lived most of his life in London, about which he wrote with a warts-and-all relish that earned him a reputation as the literary Hogarth of his day.
Bisexual, outsider, champion of youth, ‘pale-pink’ friend of Black Londoners and chronicler of English life, MacInnes described himself as ‘a very nosy person’ who ‘found adultery in Hampstead indescribably dull’ and was much more at home in the coffee bars and jazz clubs of Soho and Notting Hill.
A talented off-beat journalist and social observer, he is best known for his three London novels, City of Spades, Absolute Beginners and Mr Love and Justice. His other books include To the Victor the Spoils, a disenchanted view of the Allied occupation of Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War, June in Her Spring and England, Half English. Colin MacInnes’s essays were published in Out of the Way in 1980 and a selection of the best of his fiction and journalism is available in Absolute MacInnes, edited by Tony Gould. MacInnes died of cancer in 1976.
By Colin MacInnes
City of Spades
Absolute Beginners
Mr Love and Justice
Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
13 Charlotte Mews
London W1T 4EJ
First published in Great Britain in 1957.
This ebook edition first published by Allison & Busby in 2012.
Copyright © 1957 by THE COLIN MACINNES ESTATE
The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–1205–2
ALSO BY COLIN MACINNES
London, 1957. Victoria Station is awash with boat trains discharging hopeful black immigrants into a cold and alien motherland. Liberal England is about to discover the legacy of Empire. And when Montgomery Pew, assistant welfare officer in the Colonial Department, meets Johnny Fortune, recently arrived from Lagos, the meeting of minds and races takes a surprising turn …
Hilarious, anti-conventional, blisteringly honest and fully committed to youth and vitality, City of Spades is a unique and inspiring tribute to a country on the brink of change.
Frankie Love, new to his profession as a ponce, seems to run his illegal life on strictly fair principles. Ted Justice, recently appointed member of the vice squad, finds his upholding of the law complicated by love for his girl …
Love is travestied in the activities of the prostitute, justice mocked in the procedure of the vice squad, as Colin MacInnes writes with an authenticity which only an intimate knowledge of the seamier side of life can deliver. It is a world in which motives, friendships and values are never as simple as they seem.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
PART I: Johnny Fortune hits town
1 Pew tentatively takes the helm
2 Johnny Macdonald Fortune takes up the tale
3 The meeting of Jumble and Spade
4 A pilgrimage to Maida Vale
5 Encounter with Billy Whispers
6 Montgomery sallies forth
7 Montgomery at the Moorhen
8 A raid at the Cosmopolitan
9 Introduction to the Law
10 Hamilton’s sad secret
11 The Moonbeam club
12 Foo-foo in the small, late hours
FIRST INTERLUDE: Idyll of miscegenation on the river
PART II: Johnny Fortune, and his casual ways
1 Pew becomes freelance
2 Misfortunes of Johnny Fortune
3 Pew and Fortune go back west
4 Coloured invasion of the Sphere
5 The southern performers at the Candy Bowl
6 Theodora lured away from culture
7 Voodoo in an unexpected setting
8 Theodora languishes, not quite in vain
9 The Blake Street gamble-house
10 In Billy Whisper’s domain
11 Back east, chastened, in the early dawn
12 Splendour of flesh made into dream
13 Inspector Purity’s ingenious plan
14 Mobilisation of the defence
15 Wisdom of Mr Zuss-Amor
SECOND INTERLUDE: ‘Let Justice be done (and be seen to be) !’
PART III: Johnny Fortune leaves his city
1 Tidings from Theodora
2 Appearance of a guardian angel
3 Disputed child of an uncertain future
4 Back home aboard the Lugard
About the Author
By Colin MacInnes
Copyright