The Upper Pleasure Garden

by Gordon M Williams

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Out of the workaday rounds of a provincial yellow journalist, Gordon Williams has scraped together an occupational ambiance as definitive as dirty fingernails... a yeasty mixture of character and social climate...

New York Times Book Review

The flavour of this sort of journalistic life is caught as well as in any novel I can remember.

Sunday Times

Of the factual trickery of foot in the door reporting I'm more than willing to be convinced by Gordon Williams. His hero's belief that the world is as down to earth and dirty as the newspaper business also seems consistent with the events and personalities in the novel.

New Statesman

A most entertaining and intelligent novel.

London Evening Standard

Everything throbs with life, vibrates with individuality... for sheer elan vital it's the next best thing to surf-bathing.

Irish Times 

My best anecdote – until I checked it

By Colin Dunne

You’ve probably heard the story about the writer Gordon Williams and his late-night telephone call from film director Sam Peckinpah.

It went like this. Novel just published, no great reaction, Williams goes to bed in sombre mood. Awakened by phone call. ‘This is Sam Peckinpah here.’

What a joke. Tells caller to push off and smashes down phone. Rings again. ‘This really is Peckinpah here, Mr Williams.’ It actually is. Offers zillions for the film rights for his novel. But insists that the title, The Siege of Trencher’s Farm, must be changed. Says Williams: ‘At that price, you can call it Goody Bloody Two Shoes if you want.’

Book became Straw Dogs. Zillions in the bank.

You’ve probably heard it because although I’ve never met Williams, I’ve been telling this story for nearly 40 years. It was told to me either by Jim Dalrymple (ex-Indie and Sunday Times mag writer), or by John Taylor (editor Tailor and Cutter, witty magazine columnist: no longer with us) in the French pub.

Over the years, I’ve told a highly polished version in reporters’ pubs and even related it to writers’ groups as an example of how good fortune may sneak up on us.

So you can imagine what a pleasure it was to talk to Gordon the other day on the telephone and to relate the story to him, just in case he’d forgotten. He was most amused. There was, he said, not a word of truth in it. He’d never actually spoken to Sam Peckinpah. With that brief response, he thoughtlessly destroyed my finest writers’ anecdote.

The truth was that although they never met, there was a misunderstanding between Gordon and Peckinpah. When the film came out, the plug for his book was left until the last second. When Gordon Williams and his wife saw it in London they were the only ones left in the cinema as everyone else fled to avoid the national anthem.

His next book, although it attracted less attention, and no doubt less money,  The Upper Pleasure Garden, published originally in 1970 and republished now by the Ranters’ own Revel Barker Publishing, was based on his time working in local newspapers in Bournemouth.

How I’ve missed it all these years, I have no idea, because it is a great newspaper classic. Ming is a young Scottish reporter ripping his way through a south-coast English town with the delicacy of a grave-robber and the ethics of a pickpocket.

You know him: the tabloid terror on the way up, unhampered by a conscience which he clearly had removed at birth. In other words, everything you’d want in a trainee hack.

Leaving others to polish up their shorthand and cover council meetings, Ming the Merciless, as he’s known, specialises in tricking his way past closed doors and unlocking sealed lips.

‘It’s the Scottish accent,’ says his editor. ‘You sound honest.’

Shady local politics and big (ish) business, he dances through it all without putting a foot wrong and still has the energy for a sex-life conducted up against an oak tree in the Pleasure Garden – and never was a park better named. This buttock-burner, as he calls it, has left his girl-friend with a bun in the oven – the seventies slang is spot-on – but he still manages to oblige his disgustingly obese landlady as she lollops on to his bed in her straining corsets.

‘It’s not exactly Antony and Cleopatra,’ he says, with uncharacteristic delicacy.

Sex, booze, and stories pack every hour of his life. Ming’s end is frequently placed where it belongs – away; the stories tumble from his notebook, and this is all accomplished on a tidal wave of booze. Looking back, I did work with one or two young reporters who could run Ming a close second. However, if this isn’t exactly how it was for you in reality, it’s probably how it was in your dreams.

Ming switches his affections from a civilian to a reporter with a declaration that comes close to poetry. He junked her because ‘she didn’t know about angles, intros, nut-fronts, single-column down-the-pagers, fiddling expenses, griping subs, good quotes and punchy phrases… she didn’t know about Charlie Hands who was made news editor of the Mail for a day and sent everyone off to the pubs where the interesting stories were… she didn’t know about Sefton Delmer who heard the tramp-tramp-tramp of the jackboots… she didn’t know Cassandra’s real name or that Arthur Christiansen replated the Sunday Express for the R101 disaster and became a star overnight…’

It’s a love story all right. But it’s not the girl he loves or even the buttock-burners or the pints: Ming’s love is… newspapers. If you’ve forgotten why you went into this silly, tacky, wonderful trade, Gordon Williams’ book will remind you. And the roaring spirit of those days blazes through every line.

He’s one of those talented writers who made the leap from newspapers to novels (over 20 of them, including being short-listed for a Booker) and television. But his journalistic CV is just as impressive: After Bournemouth, he shared an Earls Court flat with Ian Woolridge and Michael Clayton, who became editor of Horse and Hound. He wrote for John Bull, Men Only, Weekend, and was Acker Bilk’s press agent. He was once jabbed in the back by Cassandra and knew David English – ‘the most ruthless journalist I ever met.’

Like any decent old hack, he hates to knock a good story. I can, he promised me, go on telling my Peckinpah story and he won’t complain.

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