This one-ounce weight blew onto the keyboard of my laptop because, for the last twelve years, I’ve been walking to work at Goldsmiths College past a plaque commemorating the 1944 V-2 attack on the New Cross Road branch of Woolworths. Of the 168 people who died, fifteen were aged eleven or under. The novel is partly written in memory of those South London children, and their lost chance to experience the rest of the twentieth century. You can find their names among the other known victims of the rocket in the Deptford History Group’s 1994 oral history Rations & Rubble. But Alec, Vern, Jo, Val and Ben are invented souls. They do not correspond in whole or in part to the real dead, any more than Joe McLeish ever played for Millwall or you can find the London Borough of Bexford on a map.
I owe thanks and love for this book above all to my in-laws. To my mother-in-law Bernice Martin, sociologist and soprano and quilter, who came with me to Glyndebourne and provided a critical reading of every chapter as I finished it. To my brother-in-law Jonathan Martin, novelist and Millwall fan from the seventies on, who took me to the Den and measured the book against his memories. To my other brother-in-law Magnus Martin, musician, for briefing me on whole-class teaching. To my other other brother-in-law Izaak Martin, for grace under pressure and heroic good humour. To my wife Jessica Martin, priest and scholar, without whom not, in every way: books, life, body, soul, family, art, clear shining after rain. With thee conversing I forget all time. I couldn’t have written a book in which music figured so large without borrowing from all of them, and being connected to all of them.
I’m grateful to friends who read and commented, especially Alan Jacobs, Kim Stanley Robinson, Adam Roberts and Elizabeth Knox; I’m grateful to all those at Goldsmiths from whom I have learned, colleagues and students alike, and most particularly Maura Dooley and Ardu Vakil. The book was written in Hot Numbers, Cambridge, and the Samovar Tea House, Ely. The world convulsed, idiocy ruled in high places, pandemics gathered strength, and my black coffees kept on coming.
Once the book was done, my agent Clare Alexander applied her usual blend of sensitivity and ruthlessness to its fortunes; Alex Bowler at Faber edited it with a tactful hand; and Silvia Crompton again made the copy-editing process … surprisingly enjoyable. (Ellipsis, not dash.)
At the Pelican Club in 1964, the Tearaways are singing ‘Mockingbird’ by Charlie Foxx and Inez Foxx, lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, used by permission. The choir at Bexford Assemblies of Salvation church sing ‘Safe in His Arms’ by Milton Brunson (1986), and the LA Mass Choir’s ‘That’s When You Bless Me’ (1989), used by permission. In 1979, Alec is quoting from the dedication to W. H. Auden’s The Orators (1932), used by permission of Faber & Faber. In 1994, Alec and Vicky sing lines from ‘Nellie the Elephant’ by Ralph Butler and Peter Hart (1956), lyrics used by permission, and Alec reads to Vicky from the very great Mister Magnolia, by Quentin Blake, excerpt used by kind permission.
The book would have been finished sooner had I not taken a detour through the back of a wardrobe. Since I couldn’t, as it turned out, thank in print those who helped me with that, let me make my bow here to all of the Friends of Moonwit: AJ, EK, JM, CA, CJ, AM, MM, RW, FC, SP, SA, AR, JB, JP, AR, MWT, CF, WH, PNH, TNH, JL, AC, FCB. You know who you are.