Martin Bax

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Biographical note:  Martin Bax is a consultant paediatrician who has now retired from clinical work and is an honorary reader in Child Health at Imperial College, London. In addition to his medical career he founded the arts magazine Ambit in 1959, which continues to this day. Ambit has published poetry, prose and artwork from people such as Fleur Adcock, Peter Porter, Tenessee Williams, JG Ballard, Peter Blake, Eduoardo Paolozzi, Carol Ann Duffy and many others. His novels The Hospital Ship was published by Picador and new Directions in 1978 and Love on the Borders by Seren in 2005. In the 1970s, using text from The Hospital Ship, he developed the Vietnam Symphony with jazz trumpeter Henry Lowther which was performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and broadcast on BBC Radio 3. He has also written for children and his book Edmund Went Far Away, illustrated by Micheal Foremen, was published in the UK and USA.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844714766
ISBN:  9781844714766
Author:  Martin Bax
Title:  Memoirs of a Gone World
Series:  Salt Modern Fiction
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  FNB
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Feb-10
Extent:  136pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  10 mm
Weight:  204 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 8.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Short description/annotation:  This collection of witty, sexually-charged stories takes the reader through four decades of world events, including our present day banking crisis. In stories that are at times surreal, Martin Bax introduces us to the private world of a variety of memorable characters who find themselves in often bizarre and compromising circumstances: copulating couples and naked wrestlers weave their unforgettable tales alongside the heartbreaking experience of Jewish childhood evacuation. Charged with dry humour and sexual drama, these stories show Martin Bax at the peak of his form.

Main description:  This collection of witty, sexually-charged stories takes the reader through four decades of world events, including our present day banking crisis. In stories that are at times surreal, Martin Bax introduces us to the private world of a variety of memorable characters who find themselves in often bizarre and compromising circumstances: copulating couples and naked wrestlers weave their unforgettable tales alongside the heartbreaking experience of Jewish childhood evacuation. Charged with dry humour and sexual drama, these stories show Martin Bax at the peak of his form.

Table of contents:
The Turned-in, Broken-up and Gone World
Le Magasin des Gants
Your Hands do not Permit an Attachment
Seconds Out of the Ring
Beds
Five Hours to Vespers
In the Seventh Heaven
You, Me and the Love-light in Your Eyes
Bible Stories 3 / Songs of Solomon
Journeyings (A Slightly Romantic Tale)
A Trip to Dublin
In the Commonplace Rooms
The Bells are Ringing
When Childhood Ends
Jump Up and Down, Your Majesty

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Excerpt from book:  

Seconds out of the Ring

Henry Jones blinked and rubbed his eyes. He bent forward and fiddled with one of the knobs but the picture did not change. Indeed, as he bent forward, there was a close-up and the disagreeably close female pubis made him start back. He had not listened properly to the usually inane introduction bawled out from the middle of the ring by the man in the dinner jacket. And at his first glance at the screen, he had assumed that this was going to be one of those tiresome matches between women of which he so much disapproved. But as he settled down on the sofa with the whisky he’d collected he saw that this match really was going to be different. The girl — and she really was a girl too, not one of those stringy female fighters — the girl had nothing on. Not even those splendid laced-up rubber shoes that fighters wore and which Henry rather envied. The camera passed lovingly up her. It was at this point that Henry bent forward to adjust the set and at this point that he was so startled by this close-up of naked female loins. He couldn’t help noticing as he hurried back onto the sofa that the hair which was black had been combed out instead of being pressed back flat against the skin — as with his wife, for example — it really was bushy. It caught the arc lights and shone in them, perhaps she had oiled it? By the time he looked again the camera was just moving off the naked and well-developed breasts over the bare shoulders and onto the face. He breathed a sigh of relief to be free of embarrassment and remarked to himself that the girl (with her shoulder-length black hair, prominent cheekbones, slender nose, bright eyes, etc.) was strikingly pretty.

‘Oh! You and your old wrestling,’ his wife’s voice broke in. Henry stood up hastily so that he was between the screen and Debbie, his wife, who was standing at the door of their sitting room.

‘Don’t stay too long now, dear,’ she went on.

‘Er, no,’ said Henry, eyeing her sadly. Same old bloody mug of Horlicks and faded hot-water bottle in its cover, it’s that tickly knitted cover Mrs Pettigrew gave us the Christmas before last — ‘No. No, I shan’t be long. I just thought I’d have a peek and see what was happening before I came up.’

‘All right then dear, but it’s gone eleven now.’ Debbie wrapped her rather shabby dressing gown around her somewhat dumpy body and stumped out.

Henry flopped back again into his seat as the door shut. She’d knock on the bloody ceiling too if he didn’t go up soon. Oh well, he glanced uninterested at the screen again and suddenly remembered but all seemed back to normal. A tall, chunky and not unhandsome man was just climbing through the ropes. He had a magnificent dark dressing gown with ‘Hole in One’ embroidered across the back. Strange for a wrestler, thought Henry. Then the man shrugged off the gown and Henry saw he was quite naked too.

The camera was giving him the same all-over treatment that the girl had received and Henry, slightly less startled now, was able to take in the commentator’s soft burr, ‘Well! Here is the great Alex Kennedy, as sexual a hunk of manhood as you’re ever likely to meet. Tonight is his forty-third professional match. He hasn’t lost in his last twenty matches and drawn only once in the famous disputed match with Lysenkova. Three or four have gone full distance but there’s usually a submission to Alex. Ah! There are his genitals and, as you’ll see, he’s circumcised. Well, I’ve no need to go over that well-known argument. Suffice to say that Alex swears by his circumcised one: he was telling me in the dressing room that it is not only in action that it’s superior but he says it looks more attractive and excites the girls more. Ah!’

‘Seconds out of the ring,’ says another voice.

‘I’m worried about Henry,’ says Debbie Jones to Celia Johnson.

‘Oh dear.’

‘He works so hard, you know.’

‘So does John.’

It was true that Henry always managed to bring home papers from the office. The evening had a sort of pattern to it. He got in 7.30 to 8.00 p.m. and in reply to a question would mutter, ‘Very busy day again.’

‘I’ll have your supper on in a moment, dear, then.’

‘No hurry,’ Henry would say and he’d hasten off to the gin cupboard. Summoned to the table he’d sigh heavily as he sat down: not that it actually discouraged her talking but it did mean she didn’t ask him to talk. She’d prattle away about the price of peas while he munched his way solidly through the meal. It was only after coffee that he permitted himself an almost affable remark.

‘Well my dear, ‘fraid I must go and get at those papers.’

‘Could you leave it just one night?’

‘Never do to get behind, old thing.’

And he’d trudge off into their other room and spread the papers out on the table. They were the same papers that he’d been bringing home for years. They came from the bottom drawer of the desk of a colleague who’d retired
and Henry was supposed to be looking over them to see
if there was anything important there. But everybody had forgotten them and what Henry actually did was to play a complicated word-game with them which he’d devised himself. You started with eight piles and tried to get them all into one pile. He always told Debbie his papers were confidential so she’d never looked at his pre-war letters and long out-dated insurance policies.

Actually, he was fairly bored with the game now (just as he was fairly bored with his job). What he relished about the papers was the chance to be alone. The chance to dream! He’d spread the papers, slump into his chair and out would come his pipe. It was difficult to say precisely what he dreamt about, probably mostly of being able to sit all day in a chair, smoke his pipe and dream. Round about eleven, when she’d gone up, he’d slip across and watch late-night television, hoping it would go on until she was asleep.

‘Of course,’ said his wife, ‘he has got a position to keep up.’

As the referee drew his hands away, they went into a deep clinch. Their legs were working hard together but the camera closed up on their lips. Henry had never seen such a kiss! They seemed to be trying to eat each other. Suddenly the girl drew back and with some quick flick of her feet tripped the man onto his back. Then flung herself on him wriggling round into what Henry thought the most extraordinary position.

‘How beautifully she went into that soixante — ‘ said the commentator.

Unpublished endorsement:  Martin Bax is one of a kind. His fictional world is unsettling, cosmopolitan, erudite, curious in all the best senses. His stories are formally adventurous, modern and post-modern, sometimes very droll, and often distinctly filthy. Isn't that enough for anyone?

Geoff Nicholson