Moggerhanger

Certain facts the reader might care to know before the novel begins

I, Michael Cullen, have been a bastard most of my life, except for a break of legitimacy when my father the novelist Gilbert Blaskin met my mother again and married her. I was a grown man by then, so will never know why he did, for they parted two years later, and I reverted to my status as a bastard. Not that I had stopped being one, in any case.

I was born in Nottingham — where else for such as me? — but left at eighteen. At the time I was working, if you can call it that, in an estate agents’ office, till a way came of making a bit of ready on the sly. The scam paid off, but the manager rumbled me so I had to leave. Luckily, always with an eye to the future, I made enough to buy a car and set off for London.

I would have done better had my belongings been wrapped in a handkerchief and balanced from a stick on my shoulder, with a mangy cat mewing behind, because the car, which was not only British made but secondhand, dropped to pieces bit by bit on my progress down the Great North Road. After the engine’s massive cardiac arrest at Hendon Station I finished the journey by Underground.

On my way to London I had picked up a hitchhiker fresh out of jail, a sponger from Worksop called Bill Straw, and through him became employed for a while by Claud Moggerhanger, a racketeer who made Rachman seem like a charity worker from Oxfam.

I worked as a bouncer at one of Moggerhanger’s Soho clubs until, ever greedy for cash, I saw more to be made smuggling gold out of the country for an organisation run by Jack Leningrad, who conducted his operations from the inside of an iron lung. This business ended by my being banged up for eighteen months, though not before I had put by sufficient to buy a Beeching axed railway station at Upper Mayhem in the Fen country. Moggerhanger sent me to jail, because he was Leningrad’s rival in the gold trade of that time, but he also put me there on discovering I had been giving too much mutton dagger to his depraved daughter Polly.

When I came out of prison I married an ex-au pair from Holland called Bridget Appledore, and retired to Upper Mayhem, but after ten years of what I considered bliss at my railway station, she left me, and took the children to Holland.

In my despair I lit off for London, and worked for Moggerhanger again, who often took on those he had injured, in the knowledge that they knew the consequences should they be so daft as to do anything against him again.

He judged me wrong, my object being to find sufficient evidence to put him where he had so callously sent me. But he had meanwhile been ennobled into Lord Moggerhanger, and was even more cunning than he was rich. Suspecting my intention of contacting Interpol, he put Bill Straw to follow me onto the ferry at Harwich. Straw found his way to throw the briefcase, of carefully collected incriminations of Moggerhanger’s drug running empire, into the sea.

A few weeks before, I had met Frances Malham, a medical student. She was besotted by Ronald Delphick, England’s foremost performance poet, but I rescued her from him by marrying her, and we lived happily ever after, which is to say, for the last three years.

By that quick thinking, which a picaresque hero such as myself is born with, I had helped her Uncle Geoffrey out of trouble, because he’d fucked the Portuguese maid and made her pregnant. My untruths put him in the clear with his wife, and in recompense he gave me a job at his advertising agency, where he assumed my talent for telling lies would be useful.

Now read on.