EXCERPT OF AN EXCERPT

‘AND THEN, OF COURSE, SHE’S A CHASER.’

     The colonel sat forward in his chair over the clubroom fire, while outside a high wind whirled round the hotel and the December sunshine shone down without warmth on the Sussex Riviera.    

     ‘Anything in trousers,’ the colonel said.  ‘During the summer it was perfectly disgusting.  She was staying in the house then.’

     ‘Has she ever chased you?’ Gerard St John asked him.

     ‘No bloody fear!  I think she’s rather frightened of me, you know.’

     The colonel, who was the secretary of the club, spoke in a voice which made credulous people believe he had been to Oxford.  When addressing any of the bridge-members, his accent became especially exaggerated.  He modulated his manner and opinions upon the traditional retired colonel of fiction and the stage. 

 

NOTE:  I have spent a fair amount of time on the Sussex Riviera in mid-winter and would like to return there again, in mid-winter to show my family how truly odd and difficult the slanted-freezing-rain Channel-front weather is, and in mid-summer so that I can finally visit the place "in season."

I love it there, both inside and outside its cities and towns, for walking, thinking and imagining.  

This (like me) is an excerpt of an excerpt -- an unpublished piece of "longer fiction" by Julian Maclaren-Ross, whose Of Love And Hunger is one of the finest Brighton novels.

So many directions -- potential running directions -- but I'm stopped dead and blocked tonight.  It's the change of seasons, I guess.  Perhaps it’s time to stop down, to try to pull it all into focus.

The Zombies: Time of the Season (2011 Performance Link)

Martha and the Vandellas: Nowhere To Run (Link) 

EASTER JUST OVER

    It wasn’t much of a job. Two quid a week less insurance, and commission– if you could get it. After the first fortnight I gave up all hope of getting it myself. For one thing it was the wrong time of year: Easter just over and the summer not begun; all the big boarding houses down by the seafront closed until the season started. Then again all this talk of war put prospects off. You’d think women’d jump at the chance of having their carpets cleaned buckshee, but no: even demonstrations were hard to get those days.  We’d start out canvassing at nine in the morning and be lucky if we finished teatime with four or five apiece. You were supposed to get fourteen. A hundred calls, fourteen dems, three sales. That’s what they taught you at the school. But you didn’t have to be in the game long before you found out that was all a lot of cock.

Excerpt:  Julian MacLaren Ross, Of Love And Hunger, London, Allan Wingate, 1947.

Kirsty MacColl: You Just Haven't Earned It Yet, Baby (feat. Johnny Marr) (Link) 

Note:  If you haven’t yet discovered Of Love And Hunger, you really should.  Reading it allows you to jump into Julian MacLaren-Ross’s extraordinary talent and disordered life at their career zenith.  Penguin republished the novel several years ago and Paul Willetts and Black Spring Press in the UK continued the work of recreating the life, legend and oeuvre of this fascinating writer and man.  I fully expected that by now Johnny Depp would have undertaken a J M-R biopic and there’s still (a little) time for him to do so.  Should this  transpire, I hereby offer my services.  I can handle calls, dems, sales and litigation.