“We are the Atomic Generation” chorus the crew at Scott’s urging. And so they are. Born after the Hollywood actress and dancer Rita Hayworth became the cover girl for the Manhattan Project. They were born after the first atomic bomb was dropped in an act of aggression. Paul Tibbets who captained the ‘Enola Gay’ which dropped ‘Little Boy’, became famous and infamous at the very same time - for visiting atomic destruction and inferno on Hiroshima. Four-thousand degrees centigrade. Awesome destructive power. Untold thousands of deaths. The first atomic bomb.
Some people say there was a poster of Rita Hayworth stuck to ‘Little Boy’ to greet the Japanese. In truth, it was ‘Little Boy Number 8655’. The atomic bomb was actually named Gilda, in honour of Rita Hayworth, it was actually exploded after the Second World War was officially over, while nuclear testing continued in America …
All children born on and after the sixth of August nineteen forty-five are the Atomic Generation ... If you wander into a Christian church today at Matins and get down on your knees to pray and listen to a clergyman leading his congregation in the Lord's Prayer, you will no longer hear ‘Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, world without end. Amen.’ They have taken ‘World without end’ out of the Lord’s Prayer. No longer can Christian believers be guaranteed that life on Earth is forever and ever ... Hell, the dinosaurs found that out some sixty-plus million years ago. They weren't worried about it, it was outside their comprehension - they didn‘t know what hit them. Days simply turned into one long night and they soon became extinct. Human beings worry, think, and calculate. Which Scott would guess is the saving grace of the human race and the seed of its ultimate destruction. Certain world powers now have the capability to completely destroy the human race, the mystery is why politicians are surprised that a whole generation of Baby Boomers seem hellbent on a rebellion … Scott is happy to explain why
“We are not just Children of the Empire anymore; we are the Atomic Generation. The Truth Dealers.” …
Mister Malacjiak was Scott’s geography teacher in his third year of senior school. He remembers when a particular geography lesson wandered into the current goings on in Cuba. Mister Malacjiak in an agitated manner spent most of the lesson discussing American President John F Kennedy’s ultimatum to the Premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, whereby the withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba was demanded. It was explained to the class in graphic terms that the world was right on the edge of an atomic war. A hair’s breadth away. The world might yet experience an atomic explosion ten-thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined …
For some crazy reason, Mister Malacjiak insisted they all go out to the playground at the exact deadline of President Kennedy’s ultimatum. Scott stood in line with all the other children, patiently awaiting their fate ... Nothing happened. The Victorian buildings of Scott’s Fulham School didn’t start crumbling with intense heat. The afternoon sun wasn't suddenly blotted out. Sirens and alarm bells didn’t start sounding off everywhere. Aeroplanes were not falling out of the skies like drunken dive bombers. Scott’s geography class were the only pupils out in the playground. The rest of the school were having lessons as normal ... the time passed. Mister Malacjiak has stopped studying his wristwatch. He’s smiling. Relieved. He claps his hands together and orders a game of volleyball. Scott and some other boys are dispatched to get the net, the ball and the two green posts. Two teams are chosen by their houses and selected by captain’s pick to play a game of volleyball. Mister Malacjiak calls it the Great Czechoslovakian Game - just as good as football, cricket or rugby. The green posts and the net are put in place in the centre of the school playground. Seven aside is the game. All thoughts of Cuba, atomic missiles, the destruction of the planet Earth and never making it home again for tea are lost in the fast and exhilarating game. Scott remembers how he really liked playing volleyball, how he was a brilliant jumper close to the net, punching the ball away with his fists into oblique corners of the white-lined court. Thankfully, that was the only type of blow the boys experienced that afternoon.
Mister Malacjiak was wholly engaged with the game, blowing his whistle repeatedly and encouraging everyone to greater effort ... A year later with the Cuban Missile Crisis already becoming just another fitful memory. Mister Malacjiak had morphed into Mister Mallory. He’d changed his name to sound English and had become a social climber to try to fit in. As well as geography, he now taught Spanish and this was his true passion. He would harangue his geography classes at the beginning of the year about how all the boys taking French should immediately swap over and join his Spanish class. he patiently explained how millions more people in the world speak Spanish than French, that in the future it would benefit the boys greatly to have Spanish as a second language.
Mister Mallory seemed very pleased with his new name, and was at great pains to re-introduce himself with his new surname at the start of geography lessons for quite a while. He was right, of course. Scott and the boys should have taken Spanish. The French teacher was useless and only interested in touching the boys whenever he could, and telling risqué jokes of a certain nature ... after all, Rita Hayworth was half Spanish, rumoured to have Andalusian gypsy blood. But that didn’t stop Captain Paul Tibbets and the crew of the 'Enola Gay' choosing her as their pin-up girl, though they didn’t actually put her picture on 'Little Boy', it's the name that stuck, for the bomb they dropped on Hiroshima on the sixth of August nineteenth nineteen-forty-five.
It bears repeating, that the legend of Rita Hayworth the actress, who was uncomfortable with dialogue, and whose singing voice had to be dubbed in movies, exploded in some peoples’ minds. Her picture exploded into a zillion fragments that spread over the boiling city of Hiroshima. Rita Hayworth may not have been able to communicate or sing very well, but she was immortalized in the first Atomic explosion. An Atomic Urban Myth. All children born from that fateful moment are the Atomic Generation with little bits of Rita Hayworth sticking to them. They, along with Scott, grew up with the constant daily fear of a nuclear war. The possible extinction of the human race. Obliterated almost without trace, like the dinosaurs who ruled the earth for over two hundred million years. That ceaseless expectation of atomic war changes your outlook on life. The way that you think. Rather like the survivors of the plague in Albert Camus’s depiction of Oran …
Scott makes sure the crew all have the atomic painting on velvet along with the others works. Whenever they produce it from out of the red and black-edged art folders in houses, they don't hold it up to the light and start talking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they don’t have to. The painting says it all for them. They are a part of it. It's in the way they believe, it's in every action, thought, and deed. It resides in their very bone marrow and they are all outsiders. Could well have been the subject of another Albert Camus novel if he had lived ...
So many faces and half-remembered names pass through in these five months on the road with Advanced Art. The time flying by in the wink of an eye. Each of these faces called to mind carrying with them a story, a problem, a disaster, a jest or two. Far too many to mention. Scott just doesn't want to write endless lists of people in The Children of the Empire. Trying to capture moments that were really meaningful. Avoiding the trap of never mentioning the ones that aren’t really famous in some way. Few people are really that famous in the talked order of events. A few archetypes will have to take a bow for the many minor-players …
The Hawaiian Princess can take a bow for many, even though it's unclear whether she's even a member of the Atomic Generation. Her age must remain a discreet mystery, not even to be guessed at. She is possessed of a certain presence that interacted so wonderfully well with the young atomic crew around her. She never did give her name. Scott and the crew just called her Princess ... On a lovely Wednesday afternoon, Scott parks the Paris green Cortina in Beaufort Street, Chelsea. Going down towards Battersea Bridge. Sounding his car horn three times ... toot... toot ... toot ... Scott is parked on the right-hand side of Beaufort Street facing the river. Alongside some red-brick private houses ... The Princess leans out of a window three storeys up. Stark naked, or so it seems to Scott. She shouts down,
“We’ll be five minutes, darling.” Her beautiful head of silky black hair disappears from the window. A passer-by on the pavement has stopped dead in his tracks and is staring up at the now empty window. He's rubbing his eyes in disbelief at what he thinks he just saw. Naked women appearing at the windows of houses on the streets of Chelsea. The passer-by moves away reluctantly. He’s finally noticed the crew in the parked Cortina looking at him. He’s probably thinking about purchasing a camera …
The Princess is Hawaiian royalty. She has an angelic quality to her. Very attractive. When she shouted down to Scott her voice had a lilting grace to it ... Best not to mention her age, but he's surmised that she won’t see forty again. If Scott was casting a film, he'd probably study her neck and her hands. Always the tell-tale signs of aging. No matter. She’s a princess. Her man is Graham. A chunky twenty-three-year-old student type, with very long, brown curly hair and a bushy beard which is part black in places. He's the same age as Scott though the crew leader still persists in telling everyone he’s twenty-four. He believes that the extra year adds ballast to his sense of leadership. Graham is clearly in thrall to the Princess, captivated by her Hawaiian charms and waits on her hand and foot. They hold hands all the time in the back of the Cortina. She entertains the crew with amazingly colourful stories in that melodious voice of hers …
The crew are heading off to the North Downs on their way to sell in the Maidstone area. The Princess thinks the crew should steer clear of English greasy spoon cafes and stuffy public houses. They should all picnic in the fresh air and sunshine. She has brought along with her today a brown wicker basket which sits by her feet and Graham's. She proudly says it contains a large flask of coffee which holds six good cups. A chocolate cake in a white cardboard box, a plastic container with cooked German sausages in it, a pot of Dijon mustard, six wholemeal bread rolls, little pats of salted butter, a tablecloth embroidered with red roses and paper serviettes and cups. All this preparation by the Princess for a picnic is to be applauded. The crew are unable to resist.
“There,” the Princess sings out.
“Right there!” She's pointing majestically with her right arm. Scott stops the Cortina sharply and all the crew lurch forward. They are pulled up by a field near the top of the North Downs.
Graham and Scott get out of the car and go and stand by a gate to a field. It has barbed wire across the top and entwined down the sides of it. A big, red sign nailed on in the middle of the gate further clarifies the situation: NO TRESPASSERS ... No matter ... The Princess demands it ...Graham and Scott clamber over the barbed wire gate by placing an old blanket from the car boot, across the sharp wire. Once over the gate, they manage to help all the other crew members over. Some torn clothes and a couple of slightly scratched hands are cursed. Graham climbs back over the gate. Leads the Princess up to the barbed gate. Then proceeds to climb on top of it, turning to face the Princess. At his urging she wraps herself in his arms. He lifts her up and manages to half turn. Lifts the Princess up and over into Scott’s waiting hands, who’s supported by Tom and Eric. Graham cuts himself quite badly on his hands and knees in the process but seems not to care. Anything for his Princess. She smiles graciously and produces a small bottle of iodine from out of her gold-coloured handbag, stating she brought it along for just such an eventuality ... Graham winces as she dabs the iodine on his cut and scratches with her white handkerchief. She laughs and tells him not to be such a big baby …
From the looks of the land inside the gate, this is a working farm. Way over in the next field a herd of cows are grazing. The Princess surveys her choice of picnic-site. There is a splendid view. She selects the picnic spot and proceeds to spread the tablecloth on the grass under a large May tree. She says the rose-embroidered cloth is Hawaiian. Scott looks closely at the Hawaiian tablecloth, half expecting to see surfers pipelining off Waikiki Beach, Japanese aeroplanes circling Pearl Harbour in formation. Dorothy Lamour with a rose-flower in her hair, singing a Hawaiian love song in a grass skirt, with a small ukulele in her lovely, slender hands ... but no ... none of these images are included in the design.
They sit on the short grass on the edge of the tablecloth. The Princess, Graham, Eric, Tom, washed-out Linda and Scott. They are having their picnic under a welcoming May tree. Three quarters of a cup of coffee each in the plastic cups. The cold German sausages and mustard get messy. Graham gets Dijon mustard on one of his nasty scratches which hurts. Washed-out Linda looks for a while like she's experimenting with yellow lipstick. Then, of course, the chocolate cake from out of the white cardboard box. The Princess is annoyed. She confesses she forgot to pack a knife. Graham to the rescue. Attempting to cut the chocolate cake with the blade of a Swiss Army knife. Not entirely successful. It doesn't matter to washed-out Linda. She’s got chocolate cake smeared all over her mouth. The Princess laughs. Circling birds are showing an interest. An army of ants are on the march. The chocolate cake crumbs would represent a feast. It's all getting a bit mucky and fun. Graham rolling a joint.
“What do you think you are doing!? Can't you read? No trespassers!” An irate farmer in a tweed hat and large black boots with a hungry-looking collie dog at his heels is confronting the Princess and the crew in the late May sunshine. He’s appeared from out of nowhere and crept right up on them. The pleasure of picnicking and lazing in glory under the protection of the large May tree is threatened. Graham springs up.
“We’re not doing any harm!” The ruddy-faced farmer bristles at that.
‘This is private property!”
“You don’t own this land. It’s been here for thousands upon thousands of years. You can‘t possess it! You're just a custodian, that’s all!” The Princess is smiling and Scott gets the impression that the crew are about to clap Graham which will only go to inflame matters. The tweed-hatted farmer has gone very red in the face. He storms off with the collie dog at his heels. The crew are laughing about the exchange.
The general feeling is that Graham told him what for. The Princess and Scott are not so sure. Everyone continues with what’s left of the picnic. Smoking a joint. A tiny amount of coffee is left. Washed-out Linda removing the last crumbs of the chocolate cake. Graham has become the crew’s champion for a while and the Princess is beaming.
“Isn’t this just much better, darlings, than trapped inside all those smoky cafes!” ... She’s right, it is. But for how long? ...
Sure enough, here comes the land-owning, ruddy-faced farmer. He’s striding towards the picnickers purposefully. A man on a mission. The slight breeze in the May tree has lulled everybody into a false sense of wellbeing. The farmer has discarded his tweed hat and has gained another dog along with the collie. To Scott’s alarmed eyes, it looks like a vicious crossbreed between a Doberman Pinscher and a short-haired Alsatian. They await the farmer’s attack instructions. More worryingly, he has a double-barrelled shotgun under his right arm ... No introductions this time. He means business.
“Now get!” Graham laughs a bit too loudly for comfort and washed-out Linda finishes the very last handful of crumbs of the chocolate cake.
Without more ado, the belligerent, ruddy-faced farmer grips his shotgun in his hands, squeezes the trigger and fires off one barrel towards the top of the May tree. Bang! A mass of startled birds take to the air. Frightened rabbits run for cover. The astonished Princess leaps up and moves towards the shotgun-toting farmer ... With amazing coolness, in the heat of the moment, she royally declares right in front of the angry-faced farmer.
“We shall go before you kill us all, darling, with your gun and your ugly dogs. But remember this, your actions betray who you are ... love and peace be with you, darling.”
If anything, the land-owning farmer with his dogs waiting to pounce and his loaded gun, seems even more incensed. It may have been the love and peace that did it. It may have been the control and sheer class of the Princess. He doesn’t know that he’s being addressed by a Hawaiian Princess, who can trace her lineage back many hundreds of years. This ruddy-faced farmer, if he did but know it, is in the presence of Hawaiian royalty …
The crew all clamber up and over the barbed wire gate, helping the Princess and washed-out Linda over first. The malevolent farmer releases the two dogs who snap and bite at Graham and Scott’s heels ... A picnic in the Garden of England that is Kent on a godsend of a hot May afternoon. It seemed such a good idea ... The Princess takes it all in her Hawaiian stride. The rest of the crew have become agitated, angry and political. The Princess has some of that old world grace and charm. She is not of the Atomic Generation. She is possessed of ‘World without end’ and royal lineage blood. She could glide effortlessly, with her silky black hair, through the Great War, the Spanish Flu epidemic, the Great Depression, the Second World War and the Plague in Oran. Scott realizes, smiling at the lovely Princess in the Cortina rear view mirror, that the Atomic Generation are secretly insecure underneath all that New Age bravado. They may well be the wished for and desired Baby Boomers, but what are they going to inherit? Atomic bombs and nuclear destruction. They've lost forever ‘World without end’. They don't possess the confidence of the Hawaiian Princess. They are not guided like the Princess from Islands of the Aloha paradise …
Big Dave was only with the crew for a week or so. He has very long, light-brown hair, almost touching his coccyx. He is trying to grow a beard, but so far has only managed bum-fluff. One evening he invites all the crew back to his house in Harlesden. He lives with his mother. She’s away at present visiting her sister in Margate or Ramsgate or some such. The crew sit in Dave’s nineteen-fifties style lounge smoking joints, drinking the cans of beer he's generously provided. There are three yellow ducks on the wall over the mantelpiece, and they seem to be flying west … Big, burly Dave puts Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde on the radiogram. One side of the double album is just made up of the track Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, '... my warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums, should I leave them by your gate or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?’ ...
The track is over fifteen minutes - Scott has checked the record sleeve. The track plays and Dave listens so intently he has to be touched by Eric to accept a joint. When the Sad-Eyed Lady finally fades, Big Dave praises it to the skies. He then puts it on again. The crew are wordlessly sitting around, cross-legged on the thick, blue pile, carpeted floor - ignoring the delights of the comfy-looking armchairs and sofa. Scott loves the track. Dave’s played it once. Great. Twice in a row, well ...Okay ... Three times, well, what the hell? Four times is definitely excessive. Devotion beyond the call of duty. Dylan can have that effect on some aficionados. The crew are all but halfway out the front door before the track is through again. Big Dave doesn't want them to go. But enough is enough even of Mister Zimmerman …
Big, bear-like Dave only ever sells one painting on velvet, The African Warrior, who seems to manifested directly from a Rider Haggard novel. Dave dropped out after that. He left wondering why the crew walked out on him that night in Harlesden. ‘Sad eyed lady, should I wait?’
The flotsam and jetsam of the Atomic Age come and go, to and from Advanced Art. Their names, faces, reasons, and specific peculiarities, all blur after a while. Some though, stand out through sheer strangeness, like Faith Stubbs. She has ash-blonde, shoulder length hair. She’s lean and angular with a slightly cavernous face. Pinched in at the cheeks. Extremely well-spoken. She seems to like wearing tweed skirts which are too short and ride well up above her bony knees. She says she’s on a years’ sabbatical from Exeter University where she has been studying law. A compelling talker once started, she tells Scott that her parents own properties on the Algarve in Portugal, and live out there the year round. When Faith Stubbs is not living on campus at Exeter University, she stays with her grandmother in Totnes ...Just what the hell is she doing here? Looking for action, Scott guesses ... Some little things are worth noticing, but Scott can be slow on the uptake sometimes. All the sales, driving, drugs and non-stop action can take the edge off acute observation - especially on hot summer days. Faith Stubbs always wears a long-sleeved jumper, either red or green. Strange. After she’s been with the crew a couple of days, Scott comes out of a house in Bracknell after a successful sale and walks down the road to where he has parked the Cortina. When you’re selling door-to-door never park the car close to the property. Always keep your distance ...
Faith Stubbs is sat on the bonnet of the Paris green Cortina, in full view as the sun goes down. Dangling her gamine legs and waving at Scott ... He dropped her off on prop a quarter of a mile away. Faith Stubbs has tracked him down. She seems to have become obsessed with him. The way that some patients cling to their psychiatrists, school children get hooked on a teacher, sick people worship their doctor. Scott assumes it’s all in a day’s work. Faith Stubbs does this on three occasions. It wouldn’t be so bad if she could sell. Or maybe stop jabbering on about herself all of the time, no matter how compelling her voice. She’s insistent. Scott has to deal with it. Fresh problems arise every day. The best way to treat them is to let them run and don't avoid what you have to do. The Atomic Generation are proving needy. Behind all the rebellion, New Age ideals, philosophies taken from the East, a desperate search for meaning, enlightenment and resolution, to counter the daily threat of world destruction. The lost age of innocence. A farrago of Eastern religions, mysticism, fake philosophies, the breakdown of the family structure. Using drugs as a shortcut to illuminated consciousness. A subversion of the old ways. Nothing lasts for long …
Faith Stubbs is staying in a flat in Stoke Newington with two nurses, Val and Jo. Val is the sister of a student on the same legal course as Faith at Exeter University. Hence the connection … Scott can’t drop Faith Stubbs’s early in the crew sequence at night. Eric lives by Holland Park. Tom somewhere in Hammersmith. Carole Bishop is staying with Earth Mother Martha at Elgin Avenue. Faith is always the last one out the car, living in Stoke Newington. Every time she gets out of the Cortina she invites Scott in. Finally, after more than a week, he capitulates one night. She takes him up into her room, closes the door. Scott turns around in the centre of the room to see that Faith Stubbs has started taking her clothes off, displaying that angular body of hers. Though surprisingly, she's not as skinny as she appears clothed …
“We must take drugs together.” A bizarre line, muses Scott as she removes her knickers to stand naked. Scott finally realizes Faith Stubbs means heroin. Her scabby looking arms are a dead giveaway.
“You will look lovely on heroin. Everybody should take heroin, it's the ultimate drug. I’ve seen vivid dreams of us making love and coming together. I’ll shoot you up. You'll love it. We can be together as one in ecstasy.”
“I can't stand needles.”
“Oh, come on, Scott. Just close your eyes. I won’t hurt you. You’ll love it.”
“Heh, look Faith, I like dope, coke and acid. But as regards heroin, speed and opium, I draw the line. I'm not what you think I am.”
Scott is backing slowly towards the door. Faith has a spoon out and is cooking up the luscious brown liquid.
“Look, Faith, if Aleister Crowley, a man so strong mentally, could get hooked on heroin for twenty-five years, what chance would I have!” Faith is concentrating on the heroin bubbling in the spoon and Scott seizes the opportunity and is out the door in a flash. A close shave ... Remembering what William Burroughs said:
‘A junkie will steal all your clothes as you lie sleeping and sell them for the price of a fix.” …
Faith Stubbs turned up at Hollywood Road one more time. Never sold a dime. When Scott came to drop her off last that final night in Stoke Newington, she was insistent he wait for her to come back out. Three minutes later Faith reappeared and gave Scott a massive colour poster of Bob Dylan, a manic-looking, rubberized gonk, an album by the band The Fugs and a large plume of peacock feathers. Scott never saw her again after those despairing gifts ... He dropped by on a Sunday the following week just to see how she was keeping. The nurse Jo said Faith Stubbs had disappeared. Stolen money and jewellery from them. They rang her Grandmother's telephone number Faith had given them for Totnes and the number didn't exist. She only left her dirty washing behind and a broken needle. Of late, she’d taken to hiding herself in her room most nights when she got in. Val and Jo were so busy working at the nearby Whittington Hospital that they hadn’t realized that Faith Stubbs was a heroin addict. She was very crafty, a thief and a pathological liar. Yet a very compelling communicator, with a beautifully modulated voice and always so reasonable and secure in what she was saying. Never trust a junkie, they would flog their own grandmother for a fix. Cut your heart out as you lay dying in the hope of selling it to a hospital. As Old Uncle Bill says, ‘Don’t touch the stuff!’ ...
We are the Atomic Generation, writes Scott in the lengthening manuscript of his novel. The Children of the Empire ... 'all bursting out of our cocoons, clutching our dog-eared, paperback copies of Albert Camus, Herman Hesse and Kurt Vonnegut. Heading for glory on a train bound for destruction …'