Monday 2ndGEOFF WINGROVE:I remember furiously bashing on Bruce Kidd's door at ten that morning and hearing him shambling gruesomely across the floor. He reads too many MADs. Later, we walked over to the George. What a spectacle met my eyes. Tired and weary fen sprawled all over the Devil's Kitchen, some still trying to drink coffee and eat toast & marmalade - but, strangely enough, none of them asleep. At other times during the morning other fen drifted in and tried to sound cheerful (and sober) as they said "Goo'bye. Shee you nexsh year." Eventually the London Group decided it was time to make a move so we upped our bags and left the hotel - to find Ellis Mills ready to snap us with his cine camera. We chatted for ten minutes outside waiting for the rest of the group before moving off to the station. The last fannish incident I can remember, apart from having to sit opposite the Kidd in the train, was Pete Taylor haring back to the hotel from the station for his bags. ARCHIE MERCER: There are stacks and stacks of people I haven't got around to mentioning yet. Mal and Sheila for instance, who always seemed to be around somewhere without being specifically anywhere. I was always running across them, anyway. Paul Enever, who came up for one day - I forget just which - and returned in the evening. Pity he couldn't stay longer. Same with Ethel Lindsay, who I only saw as she was leaving, and one or two other day-trippers I never actually got to see at all.
Eric Needham, who claimed he could get any woman to kiss him as easy as anything, then promptly gave a demonstration on I think it was Pat Doolan, and got an immediate rebuff; Ted Carnell of course, and the inevitable auctioneer, Ted Tubb; Chuck Harris and Arthur Thomson; John Roles; Jill What'sername; and above all the Clarkes, Joy and Vince who were so busy organising things, straightening out mixups in hotel bookings, etc, that they seemed half dead on their feet at times - which is the biggest pity of the lot. Most of their social life, of course, was spent at the Royal I most certainly hope they had their fill of enjoyment there. In my luggage I took my last year's zap gun. But I never used it once. Never even felt the necessity to use it. I must be growing up, or something. MAL ASHWORTH: Four of us sat in a train compartment and the hot sun stifled in through the window. We sipped Creme de Menthe, brandy and evaporated milk out of half a chocolate Easter Egg to allay our thirst. Ken Potter sprawled in one corner, glooming industriously as he brooded on his impending return to the noble life of a National Serviceman in the army and, every once in a while, vocalizing his misery. "Ghod!", he would say, " I feel as though I've shot an albatross!"
That was Easter Monday and we were coming back from Kettering and the Convention; it was one of the few things about the convention that I can remember now. I do not intend to write a report of the 1956 Kettering Convention. I could not have written one the day after it finished, and I certainly could not do it now. How I felt about the task when I made notes - afterwards - of possible 'angles' from which to write it, can best be judged from the notes themselves: "I lost a weekend. That's not good. But why should it be the weekend of the convention ? A very special-type weekend. Others, maybe, I could spare, but not that one. But I lost it all the same." "Pathetically looking at con-programme to try and find some glimmer of reality? some memory-trigger. Something to convince myself that the convention really happened." "A hazy, unreal bemusement. A shoal of faces, a sea of people and an ocean of puns." That was how I felt immediately after the convention about trying to write about it. I had made notes, of course, of the sequence of events at Kettering. You can judge the immense help I got from these: "When we came out I think we parted from Eric and Terry and the three of us went back to the Royal where Walt checked the register and discovered Lee and Larry in. Or did he? When did we find Jan and Ellis at the desk? And when Vince and Joy? At the same time as Jan and Ellis? When any of them?" Yes, my notes were a great help.
I have now attended three major conventions and each one has faded faster than the one before, but this one was a lulu. It was fading even while it was happening. It's just about dogboned time that someone invented a durable type of convention - one that would stand up to a little wear and tear. Something guaranteed to last for at least three weeks or so. If conventions go on at this rate, next thing we know they are going to have faded even before we get there. After the Supermancon in '54 I wrote a report called MY FIRST REAL CONVENTION. Over breakfast at Kettering this year, Walt Willis, with whom I was sharing a room (for sleeping in, that is, not for breakfast) suggested that I write a report this time and title it MY FIRST UNREAL CONVENTION. The fact that even the lure of using such a beauty of a title couldn't induce me to do it shows something. I'm sure. Considering all these facts, then, I did the easiest and most logical thing and let it drift; I did not write a con-report, which was a very happy state of affairs. Then however, over the months since convention time, I would keep remembering some extremely chucklesome incident, or re-reading some quote that struck me as a distillation of pure genius, and I would think that it would be a great shame if such things got moldered into musty archives and - to all intents and purposes - wasted. Eventually I came up with the conclusion that, even without a coherent account of the convention, these things should be put down somewhere. I considered the most humane possibility of putting them down, say, in a bus and forgetting to pick them up, but I decided against it. You have probably guessed by now where I finally decided to put them down. Prime examples of these Things, for instance, were two remarks of Pam Bulmer's - "We should go into my room and guggle to them through the sink" and " Sit down - you're rocking the bed" (For the peace of mind of the bearded founder of the Bulmer Aqueous Vapour Company - just in case he didn't hear it - maybe I should mention that this remark was made in the middle of an all-night party and the 'you' in the sentence was a plural 'you' applying to roughly six hundred and seventy five people. Then there was Terry Jeeves struggling to break the all-time tea drinking record in one of the cafe's nearby, and breaking off to exclaim "Phew - I shall be glad when I've had enough." Or Lee (Hoffman) Shaw asking Walt, "Walter, why didn't you speak to me when you first saw me?" and Walt replying "you hadn't got a hamburger in your buttonhole." Or Larry Shaw explaining "INFINITY was late because of a genuine, honest-to-goodness shortage of paper" and Lee adding drily "Yeah - the green kind."
There were incidents too, which seemed as though they ought not to be allowed to fade into The Mists of Time - or whatever - without at least a little struggle. There was Ted Tubb Buying A Book At The Auction, for one. He didn't really intend to buy the book - he just bid for it himself (he was also doing the auctioning, of course) to push the price up a little and everyone sat stolidly like good fans and forced him to knock it down to himself. Ever after that there was Ted Tubb wandering around trying to sell a book with a mildly astonished look on his face. And there was a femme fan-type remark - " Ted Tubb doesn't speak to me unless I'm drinking", and a bit in the notes that Sheila made about the convention, which went: "We went to the con hall where Irene was searching for a glass to drink the revolting punch Ted Tubb was concocting and he proffered me a loving cup which I in turn proffered you (what would Laney say?)" It was at Kettering this year, too, that I became Probably The Only Fan Ever To Keep Ghod Waiting On The Doorstep. Like so: As I said, I was sharing a room with Walt. When Sheila and I arrived on the Friday Walt hadn't, so we collected the keys of both our rooms (Sheila's was a single room next door to ours), dumped our luggage and ate a sandwich tea sitting on the window-ledge in Sheila's room, looking down into the street below to watch for Walt arriving. Someone - maybe cleaners, or porters, or rickshaw boys or diamond miners maybe - kept tramping up and down outside in the corridor, but we saw no sign of Walt arriving. After an hour or so we decided to go out and see whom we could, and - what do you know ? - yes, of course you do, Walt had been walking up and down the corridor for about an hour, waiting for me to turn up with the key so that he could get into his room. And there was the fan Who Lost Cathie Youden. We were sitting and discussing odds and ends in our room - several of us - and I had just tried to suggest an answer to Ken Bulmer's wonderings as to how he came to be the second most popular author in the NEBULA poll when he had had only one story published in NEBULA, by offering that maybe it was because he had had only one story published in NEBULA that he was the second most popular author, when, The Fan Who Lost Cathie Youden first appeared. He knocked on the door and asked if Cathie Youden was within. Walt told him no and he went away. Half an hour later he came back. Were we sure Cathie Youden wasn't in there? We looked around; sure we were sure she wasn't there. He went away again. Half an hour later there was a knock on the door. Well, had we maybe seen Cathie at all? No, we we're sorry, we hadn't seen her any place. Another half hour went by and another knock came at the door. Well - rather wearily by this time - did we perhaps have any idea where Cathie Youden might be? Again we were sorry but we didn't. He went away and didn't come back that time, so perhaps he found Cathie Youden after all or, on the other hand, he might have joined forces with Sir Galahad. Certainly Sir Galahad would have found things a lot easier (the Holy Grail in particular) with that fan for company.
There was lots more to the convention than these little things, of course. There were some very excellent all-night parties; or - rather - there were some very excellent sounding all-night parties. Alas and alack-aday, however, - being in the Royal Hotel whilst the main body of the convention was in the George we saw comparatively little of these fine, fabulous, fannish affairs. We stopped by them once early in the evening, and once they actually penetrated up to the Royal, but the courteous and tolerant manager there threw them out with some remark about not wanting any bloody circus in his hotel. We did the next best thing and sat around in the lounge of the Royal - a fairish sized band of us - having a minor party on our own. It was only about one o'clock but the fact that anyone should actually still be awake at that hour obviously horrified the manager. He popped his head around the door, looked around the assembled fans (who were being hellishly decorous for fans - mere sitting and talking, they were), 'tch tched' and went away again. All in all we found the Royal to be strongly recommended - if you ever get the chance to visit Kettering - stay somewhere else. The manager - judging from our stay - will probably be very glad not to see you. Then there was the convention programme. The programme was fine, too. I seem to recall reading somewhere that the height of praise in Cool Cat Bop Type Talk is the phrase "It didn't bother me". That's how the programme was. It didn't bother me. It was good. It was interesting if you wanted it, and unobtrusive if you didn't. And to ask more than that of a convention programme is asking a lot.
One bit of it I do remember was Dave Kyle's outline of the plans for the New York World Convention. His listing of all the committees and sub-committees they had lined up for this affair caused me great doubts as to whether we should have enough fans in Britain to have one on each of these committees if London got the Worldcon in '57 (which, as you know, it did). Things like the all-night parties and the programme were the mainstays of the convention, naturally; the frame around which the rest of it was built. But it is the odd little things which I remember most clearly - Peter Reaney, for instance. Er - Peter Reaney's jokes and the jokes made to and about Peter Reaney, I mean. And remarks like Chuck Harris's "I said I was an Es-sex fiend, I didn't say anything about giving it up", and Ellis Mills's "You have to be in bed by 7am to get your early morning tea", Ken Potter's "middle-aged sandwich spread" and Irene Gore's "You wouldn't want me to get sober, would you?". Those are the parts of the convention I still remember; and added to the fact that I can't remember much more they seem to indicate that the whole thing was pretty terrific.
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