In 1945, just as the war was ending, my family moved from the middle of an iron-age camp in Essex to an Arts and Crafts house in a Cotswolds valley, five miles from the nearest town. The furniture arrived on VE Day, a week after my tenth birthday. It had to come down a narrow lane from the village, then across a field (with Sam the donkey, who came with the property) and down again to the house, which was almost enveloped in the beech woods that covered the steep slope to the stream. The village itself had the telephone, but no electricity or mains water. However, we had a smelly engine which puffed away all day to give us light and heat, though my mother complained that the damp was so great, if you left a pair of shoes in a cupboard they would come out green in a fortnight.

The whole area was owned by the local lord, which made it profoundly old-fashioned, almost feudal. And though my father worked in London, we had a couple of cows, a couple of pigs, various hens and ducks, and a snake in the compost heap. All but the snake, I think, were a fraud on the exchequer, somehow making us into an agricultural holding to be set against tax.

I loved the place at once, and when, a year or two later, after various minor illnesses, I was taken away from my horrible prep school for a term and given a pony to help me get better, I rode for miles around, till I felt the whole district was mine. As a result, though I have lived most of my adult life in London, I still think of myself as essentially a countryman.

Half a mile away from the house there was a vast park which stretched all the way to Cirencester and was full of eighteenth-century follies – King Alfred’s Hall, Pope’s Seat and so on. Cirencester itself had once been Corinium, and the Roman amphitheatre was just next to the maternity hospital. There was also a glorious medieval church, and a huge high hedge behind which the lord’s family lived, invisible except at meets of the hounds, when we children had to go and take off our hats to his mother, who had broken her back in a hunting accident before the war. She continued to follow the hunt in a chauffeur-driven Jeep and was supposed on occasion to give a lead to anyone having difficulty persuading his horse over a stone wall. For the rest of their lives my parents never lived more than a few miles from the town, but as children we were not encouraged to go there. The cows and pigs and hens and ponies were there for us to grow up with good food and fresh air at a time of austerity and rationing, and we were allowed to go to one of the two Cirencester cinemas only once a holidays (usually for a Marx Brothers picture).

We never had regular pocket-money, only what we could keep from the change when we were sent on an errand. (My younger brother, later a successful businessman, was very disappointed to discover that Monopoly money wasn’t legal currency.) Nonetheless my mother had to go into ‘Ciren’, as we called it, on ordinary shopping trips, and usually took one or more of us with her, and when I came to write the first story in A Disturbing Influence, it was Cirencester which was the model for the town that I had first wanted to call Carterton. The name, I hoped, would suggest Britain’s past as an import–export country, based on a large merchant navy, now sadly dwindled. I don’t think anyone ever got that idea, but young writers should be ambitious. It turned out there was a real Carterton, so I had to change it to Cartersfield. The story was published in 1960 in a Faber and Faber anthology called Introduction.

By then I knew Cirencester like the back of my hand; that is to say, its surface appearance only. There was a shoe-shop with an X-Ray machine in which we could put our feet and watch the bones wiggling in an eerie green light; God knows what Health and Safety would say about that today. There was the fishmonger, owned and run by Charlie Barnett, who opened the innings for Gloucestershire and England, and whose children were in the Pony Club with me. There was the Corn Hall, where the local tailor would measure us for our sports jackets. There was the independent local brewery where my father would buy the pint of ale which we boys were allowed to drink at dinner. And there was the garage where we filled up with petrol, when we had the coupons, and where I would gaze longingly at the new cars in the window. All the shops of Cartersfield are modelled on those I knew in Cirencester, but removed forty miles or so to the A4, somewhere between Maidenhead and Reading. I suppose this sort of transformation is completely ordinary among novelists. Why invent a town when there is a perfectly good one to draw on?

But if I knew the shops, I didn’t know the shopkeepers or their customers – in fact I hardly knew the people of Cirencester at all. Yet its branch of W. H. Smith provided me with some of my earliest literary influences. There were, for instance, cheap editions of Dorothy L. Sayers in the primrose and purple uniform of Gollancz; so for a while Lord Peter Wimsey was my hero. And I could also, occasionally, get a copy of the Saturday Evening Post, ordered for an American airman at Fairford, I assume, and never collected. What I most liked about the Post at first was the advertisements. They suggested a world of dazzling wealth and colour, especially those for exotic cars like DeSotos and Nashes and Packards. Then I began to read the stories, and though I can’t say I remember any of them at all, I think they must have created my first desire to go and see the American wonderland for myself.

I read very little fiction while I was at Oxford, partly because I preferred to read poetry, and partly because I worked quite hard at History, and there seemed much less time for ‘pleasure’ reading than there had been during the tedium of national service. But then I began writing short stories which were published in the Isis, the more literary of the two undergraduate magazines. I found they came quite easily – more so than poems – and was soon writing one a term. ‘The Schoolmaster’ was probably the last of these. I had been deeply impressed by a photographic exhibition about the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And though I never actually joined CND – I am not by nature a joiner – I went on the Aldermaston March at Easter 1959, and of course wanted to write about it. The creation of a basically conservative schoolmaster who helps make the march pass through a town which (more ambitious symbolism) had been bypassed, may reflect my own uncertainty on the issue.

That autumn I started two years in America, which turned out to be very unlike the Saturday Evening Post, though the tail fins of the cars were even more flamboyant than in the 1940s. Travelling from library to library, I began to read American novels, and, thanks to a Harvard professor, started on William Faulkner, who became something of an obsession. More of his influence can be found, perhaps, in the breathless style of one of the narrators in Imaginary Toys, but when I started writing stories again, the idea of peopling a small world like his Yoknapatawpha County was very much in my mind.

The schoolmaster had been based, at a very long distance, on one of my own masters, and I used him again when I wrote ‘The Brigadier’ – I didn’t need a particular brigadier to model mine on, Gloucestershire was full of them. I may even have imagined the schoolmaster as being the narrator for other stories, just as the sewing machine salesman is the narrator of so many of Faulkner’s. But as the book developed, I realised he was too limited for my purposes. So I created a troubled vicar, not based even at a distance on anyone I knew. The girl who worked for him and had an illegitimate baby, though, was someone who had worked for my mother, but I’m sure if she ever read fiction – which she didn’t, as she went to the cinema twice a week and could never remember the plots – she would not have recognised herself. The young man scattering gravel as he imagined himself as Stirling Moss was, of course, myself, obsessed with motor-racing for a few months in my teens and perhaps not very kindly recreated here. The man who operates the petrol pumps in the long final story was based on the man who did just that in Cirencester. But when I say ‘based on’, I didn’t actually know him at all except to say ‘Good morning’ and ‘Fill her up.’ He was simply a familiar figure, about whose life I knew nothing, a starting point for my imagination. The magical yew avenue was taken from a house near where we lived.

I very much enjoyed writing the new stories, but having invented Cartersfield as a stand-in for Britain, I wanted to show it under threat, as I felt Britain was, feeling it even more strongly perhaps now I was in America. So I began the long story which made up the second half of the book, in which the rather comfortable, even cosy life of the first, is challenged. I thought of the disturbing influence himself as looking like Elvis Presley, without having any idea that this would be quite prescient. The book came out in 1962, the year of The Beatles’ debut single; great changes in society, accompanied by pop music, were just beginning, and many people were to be disturbed, usually for the best. Whether or not A Disturbing Influence is really a novel I’m not sure, given the way it developed. But I don’t honestly care. I still have great affection for it, and if I had gone on writing fiction, I like to think I would have used Cartersfield and its imaginary inhabitants over and over again.

Julian Mitchell
March 2013