The Beat Years

By Ken Champion

There are all the joys of Ken Champion’s writing here – a vivid depiction of time and place created with painterly skill, telling humour and characters both bound by and railing against society’s expectations. This is a world rich and busy with the banter, camaraderie and cruelty of daily life, with painful truths beneath.
At its heart is the story of Ben, coming of age in the East End of the fifties, whose encounter with the adventurous, liberated Beat Years is merely glanced in the pages of Kerouac’s On The Road. His struggle to move beyond the grey predictability and stifling life mapped out for him is shown through his drifting friendship with Johnny who shares his urge to escape and the desire to explore beyond the limits of what’s expected. But both learn that freedom isn't so easy; chances glide past, becoming the roads not travelled as Ben’s life is defined by the choices he makes.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9780244983253

Book preview

The Beat Years

THE BEAT YEARS

A novella

KEN CHAMPION

First published November 2015

© Ken Champion

The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of the work.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

ISBN  978-0-244-98325-3

Cover: On The Waterfront – photo by Ken Champion,

PENNILESS PRESS PUBLICATIONS

Website :www.pennilesspress.co.uk/books

For

Tim, Steve, Toby

By the same author

Fiction

Keefie

The Dramaturgical Metaphor

Urban Narratives

Poetry

But Black & White is better

Cameo Metro

African Time

Cameo Poly

Keefie

‘This is a splendid novel of the London Blitz that captures life mostly through the eyes of a bright and creative working class boy.  Keith’s

knowledge of what is happening is limited, but his experience leads us deep into a time and place – and the lives of ordinary people – with more power than any history book could convey.’

Meredith Sue Willis, Hamilton Stone review, USA (2015)

Urban Narratives

‘His realism is enriched with imagination, the most real of all qualities.’

Meredith Sue Willis, Hamilton Stone Review USA (2014)

The Dramaturgical Metaphor

‘An existential thriller which sees psychoanalyst James Kent embark on a disturbing European journey, capturing a sense of time and place that transport us to his host locations whilst also slightly dislocating our commonsensical assumptions. Think Jean Paul Sartre reimagining Alastair Maclean.’

Chris Connelley, Hastings Independent (2014)

The Beat Years

‘In his latest novella, Champion returns to the distinctive territory of family, work and identity as experienced in the aftermath of war in the grim, treeless, rubble-strewn terraced streets of a still mono-cultural east London.

It tells the story of Ben Stevens as he undergoes the rite of passage from boy to man, shedding light on a long lost world of black and white television, rigidly defined gender roles and, most importantly, the suffocating straitjacket of class.

Though informed by these serious, timeless, even epic themes, Champion’s descriptive strength comes from his exquisite minituarism and his ability to capture the intimate detail of routine domestic settings. His characterisation is pretty faultless too.

Champion’s stark and sometimes disturbing stories, told often with anger and a dust-dry wit, manage to reach out to the general reader whilst also generating plaudits from critics and peers. And he is not only prolific, he is near as dammit pitch-perfect as he turns in yet another assured narrative that effortlessly snares the reader and draws us into its grainy, lost world.’

Chris Connelley, Hastings Independent (2015)

CHAPTER 1

The same battleground. Smells of cooking fat, polish, disinfectant, oven heat and new coconut matting fill the cramped scullery, pushing their way into the living room and beyond. The sounds of slippered feet, an agitated hand wiping a brow, the squeal of a fork inside a saucepan, the knocking of crockery, all become a familiar whole. His mother, tall, with a thin face and worried eyes, and clothes which despite their age are still neat and well pressed, shuffles from the kitchen with two laden plates and hurriedly places them on the table, almost dropping them. With a sharp intake of breath she urgently sucks hot fingers then, shaking her hands, wipes them down the front of her apron. Back in the kitchen she pulls the window sash down then returns to the table where, seated at last and with quick nervous gestures, pats her black, greying hair.

Sitting opposite her is his father, grey eyes small and bulbous, nose creased and causing his upper lip to bare an expanse of gum and a ragged line of nicotine-stained teeth. He bends his knife, pushes it around the plate to harvest the gravy, places it between his lips and slides it out with a sucking ‘pop.’

‘Sid, must you make so much noise?’ She tries to ask the question pleasantly, only a glimmer of disapproval showing. When no response comes she leans forward with her wrists resting on the edge of the table, her knife and fork raised at the same angle as her body leaning towards him.

‘Must you make so much noise?’

A disinterested mumble comes from under his nose, the munching noise increasing. With a sigh of fatalistic acceptance she begins to eat. It doesn’t occur to Ben that she is an unwilling captive. It’s 1950. He is sixteen years old.

His father has one of the previous Sunday’s papers spread out on the table to the side of him and in between scooping large mouthfuls of food into himself he inclines his head to one side, reading the cartoon page slowly and carefully, his cheeks bulging, lips silently forming the captions. Occasionally he stops chewing and frowns, his mouth hanging open. Understanding comes with a sucking laugh, a shake of the head and a tut of pleasure. Looking down at his plate, he flicks small particles of food from his bottom lip and, sticking a fork through a new potato and cube of meat, guides the heaped piece of cutlery into his mouth and turns his attention to the paper again. After a few minutes he jerks his head up, frowning again, looking across at his wife.

‘You gon’ ask young Dennis to come down for his meal?’

Looking at him as if he were a child, and stressing every word she says, ‘I told you, he’s up in his room with his friend and doesn’t want anything.’

He mumbles something about not remembering her telling him and for a long while there are only the scrapes, the taps, the sounds of eating.  

Trying to accept the predictability of this almost nightly re-enacted scene from the nearby armchair Ben hears his mother ask him why he’s home so early and why he, also, wants no food. His father, apparently not realising his son has been sitting in the same room for the last ten minutes, asks disinterestedly where he’s been. He doesn’t answer.

‘What’s the matter then?’ asks his mother, as if these episodes are new to her.

The tone of his ‘Nothing.’ implies that no further conversation is wanted and Ben continues staring at the earthenware butler sink four yards away while their meal is finished in silence. Leaning forward he pushes a hand under the cushion he’s sitting on, pulling out an old evening newspaper. He slumps back and with aggressive interest begins to read. After clearing the table his mother opens the door at the side of the scullery and through the net curtain he watches her open the outside lavatory door. Out of the corner of his eye he sees his father lean across to the television. He tenses. The quick look at his son before the flick of the switch tells Ben the mood his father’s in.

Drawing his breath, Ben shakes the paper noisily and deftly folds it outwards, running thumb and forefinger down the length of it, determined to concentrate on reading it. His father, half sitting and gripping the underneath of his chair, turns it and himself around to face the set. The room lightens as the blue-grey glow appears. Ben looks across despite himself and sees a detailed close-up of a small, fat hand with tiny tapering fingers and hears a smooth voice explaining that it’s a detail from ‘… one of his greatest works, ‘Madonna And Child.’’ He doesn’t know who ‘his’ is, but wants to find out. The hand disappears into the bottom of the set and the finely executed folds of a garment with minute cracks interlacing the whole painting