The Beiderbecke Connection by Alan Plater (Mandarin 1992)

Prams. Trevor Chaplin decided, were not what they used to be. When he was a lad in the North-East, prams were vehicles of substance, designed by the spiritual descendants of Brunel and Stephenson, and built by time-served craftsmen, wise old welders, blacksmiths and sheet-metal workers with grey-flecked hair. A pram was high, wide and handsome. It would scrape the paintwork on both sides of the hall simultaneously. On the road it would carry, with ease, the designated baby, plus a week's groceries, a couple of footballs, supplementary kids hitching a lift, fish and chips for the family and still have room left over for a bag of coal.

Harpole and Foxberrow, General Publishers by J. L. Carr (The Quince Tree Press 1992)

FOREWORD

My first job was teaching games and Eng. lit in a Hampshire school. The class knew by heart 'The Lady of Shalott' and could explain [to my satisfaction] what Robert Browning had in mind when he wrote 'Karshich, the picker-up of Lemming's crumbs onEpistle.' I awaited a first inspection of my labours with a quiet confidence.

The Headmaster picked up the book. 'Ah! he said, 'A book! Turn to page (i).' They turned to Page One.

'Ah, no' he said patiently, 'Not Page One. Page (i) And tell me who are Faber & Faber. Is he, they, one man or two men or perhaps Mrs & Mr Faber? Is he or they this book's author? And is a person who makes a book a bookmaker? What does I S B N mean and how should I say it? Is © a friend of the author? Is the book dedicated to him? Who are Butler & Tanner of Frome? What is a preface, an epigraph? This Foreword . . . need I read it? Can only William Shakespeare own a folio. Does a quire have a conductor? Can one catch a colophon by too heavy reading late at night? And spell it.'

He went on and on: my class's ignorance was utter. Finally, he pronounced sentence. 'You don't seem to know much about this book. And I haven't got as far as Page One . . .' My pupils looked reproachfully at me. Until that unnerving day I had supposed a book was a cosy arrangement between writer and reader.

And, of course, the brute was infuriatingly right. Books concerns printers, publishers, sales reps, booksellers, proof-readers, professors, illustraters, indexers, critics, text editors, literary editors, librarians, book-reviewers and bookbinders and book-keepers, translators, typographers, Oxfam fundraisers, whole university departments of soothsayers, manufacturers of thread and glue, auctioneers lumberjacks, starving mice, wolves howling at the doors of authors of first-novels, the Post Offices book-bashing machine minder, religious bonfire fuel suppliers and libel-lawyers.

And that this army is camped upon billeted upon one man or one woman gnawing a pen is neither here nor there.

So, by and large, this is what this book is about. It tries to answer Mrs Widmerpool's sister's alarming enquiry at George Harpole's trial, 'What are books? Where do they come from?'

Her 'where do they go to?' is unnanswerable . . . except, quite often - to the head.

James Carr.

Bucket Nut by Liza Cody (Double Day 1992)

There was a little bloke in the aisle screaming his head off. Quite sweet he looked in his grey mackintosh and muffler. His flat cap fell down over one eye.

'Bucket Nut!' he yelled.

I could hear him clearly over the screams and yells. The things they think of to say.

'Shut yer face!' I gave him the finger.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the Blonde Bombshell stagger to her feet. I turned my back.

There was a little old lady in the second row bouncing up and down with rage.

'You big ugly bully,' she screamed. 'Big ugly . . . trollop!'

'Trollop yerself,' I shouted.

The Blonde Bombshell hit me in the back and I fell against the ropes. The front row came alive, bashing me with shoes, programmes and handbags. I rolled away to the middle of the ring.

The Blonde Bombshell crashed on top and twisted my arm behind my back.

The front row went wild.

'Kill 'er,' they howled. 'Have her rotten arm off.'

The Blonde Bombshell grabbed a handful of hair and pulled my head up off the canvas. She is such a wanker.

'Watchit,' I said. 'Mind me teeth.'

She knew I had the toothache. But she bashed my face into the floor. Silly cow.

Bucket of Tongues by Duncan McLean (W. W Norton 1992)

Open the door and out, out and away, he doesn't mind, he doesn't care: time for a cup of tea before the next victim. Hope it's that lassie with the screaming infants ya bass. Through the waiting-room: those about to, we salute you. Somebody reading a book for fuck's sake, bad move, looks like a student: get to the back of the queue wanker, make way for the genuine article, you'll get a grant cheque in three months anyway, whadya needa giro for? Totally unjustified assumptions there, totally unfair one is being, but who can blame one? I blame society. Down the stair and out into the rain. Which has now stopped. I blame sobriety: if I could be drunk more often, or maybe all the time . . . but in this day and age thirty-seven pence purchases absolutely no alcoholic beverage of any amount or kind whatsoever, except for those wee bottles of Dutch lager well there you go my point proven, except in France or Spain of course where you can take your billycan along to the vineyard and they'll pour out the vino for you straight from the fucking tap, what a place, and no need for a roof over your head either: sleep rough without your extremities turning blue.

(from 'Loaves and Fishes, Nah')

Strip Jack by Ian Rankin (Minotaur Books 1992)

'Are you an Inspector of Hospitals?' he asked.

'No, sir, I'm a police inspector.'

'Oh.' His face dulled a little. 'I thought maybe you'd come to . . . they don't treat us well here, you know.' He paused. 'There, because I've told you that I'll probably be disciplined, maybe even put into solitary. Everything, any dissension, gets reported back. But I've got to keep telling people, or nothing will be done. I have some influential friends, Inspector.' Rebus thought this was for the nurse's ears more than his own. 'Friends in high places . . .'

Well, Dr Forster knew that now, thanks to Rebus.

' . . . friends I can trust. People need to be told, you see. They censor our mail. They decide what we can read. They won't even let me read Das Kapital. And they give us drugs. The mentally ill, you know, by whom I mean those who have been judged to be mentally ill, we have less rights than the most hardened mass murderer . . . hardened but sane mass murderer. Is that fair? Is that . . . humane?'

A Firing Offense by George P. Pelecanos (Serpent's Tail 1992)

I first met Karen in a bar in Southeast, a new wave club near the Eastern Market run by an Arab named Haddad whom everyone called HaDaddy-O.

This was late in '79 or early in 1980, the watershed years that saw the debut release of the Pretenders, Graham Parker's Squeezing Out Sparks, and Elvis Costello's Get Happy, three of the finest albums ever produced. That I get nostalgic now when I hear "You Can't Be Too Strong" or "New Amsterdam" or when I smell cigarette smoke in a bar or feel sweat drip down my back in a hot club, may seem incredible today - especially to those who get misty-eyed over Sinatra, or even at the first few chords of "Satisfaction" - but I'm talking about my generation.

Fever Pitch by Nick Hornby (Riverhead Books 1992)

Social History

Arsenal v Derby

29.2.72

The replay finished nil-nil, a game with no merit whatsoever. But it remains the only first-team game that has taken place at Highbury on a midweek afternoon during my Arsenal time: February 1972 was the time of the power workers' strike. For all of us it meant sporadic electricity, candlelight, occasional cold suppers, but for third-year football fans it meant visits to the Electricity Board showroom, where cut-off rota was posted, in order to discover which of us were able to offer The Big Match on Sunday afternoons. For Arsenal, the power crisis meant no floodlights, hence the Tuesday afternoon replay.

I went to the game, despite school, and though I had imagined that the crowd might consist of me, a few other teenage truants, and a scattering of pensioners, in fact there were more than sixty-three thousand people there, the biggest crowd of the season. I was disgusted. No wonder the country was going to the dogs! My truancy prevented me from sharing my disquiet with my mother (an irony that escaped me at the time), but what was going on?

For this thirtysomething, the midweek Cup-tie (West Ham played giant-killers Hereford on a Tuesday afternoon as well, and got a forty-two-thousand-plus crowd) now has that wonderful early seventies sheen, like an episode of The Fenn Street Gang or a packet of Number Six cigarettes; maybe it was just that everyone at Upton Park and Highbury, all one hundred and six thousand of us, wanted to walk down one of the millions of tiny alleys of social history.