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(This episode is marked as explicit because of strong language.)

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Season 1 Episodes

In this edition Charles Adrian breaks out his Australian accent. Having heard it, some people may wonder if he is in fact an Australian man who puts on an English accent all the rest of the time.

Apart from this, there are treats in the shape of a Point Horror collection, a seminal piece of twentieth century revisionist history and the eighth book in Edgar Rice Burrough’s extraordinary Mars Series.

There is also some amazing music.

The Swiss friend mentioned, who gave Charles Adrian Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, is Marcel Schwald; he is featured in Page One 50.

This episode was recorded at the Wilton Way Cafe for London Fields Radio.

This episode has been edited to remove music that is no longer covered by licence for this podcast.

A transcript of this episode is below.

Episode released: May, 2012.

Book listing:

My Secret Admirer by Carol Ellis

Funhouse by Diane Hoh

William Booth by Minnie Lindsay Carpenter

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Dee Brown

Synthetic Men Of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Links:

Charles Adrian

Episode transcript:

Jingle
It's London Fields Radio.

Charles Adrian
It is indeed London Fields Radio broadcasting from the Wilton Way Cafe in Hackney.

Welcome to a much-delayed second edition of Page One: The First Page Of Second Hand Books. I am Charles Adrian. I should have done this three weeks ago. In fact, I did come into the cafe and do the whole programme three weeks ago but because of technical problems, in other words that I didn't press record on the device, the show was not actually recorded.

Anyway, least said soonest mended. Here I am now and I feel like it's more important than ever to play this track. This is a personal message from me, Charles Adrian, to you, my sixty-three-odd listeners.

Music
[Let's Stay Together by Al Green]

Charles Adrian
Okay, so with the Reverend Al Green's Let's Stay Together ringing in our ears, let's start the show. There is a kind of theme to this one but, ignoring that, I'm going to start off by reading from a Point Horror collection I picked up in Chiswick.

Anyone who was a teenager in the nineties will know that Point Horror delivered what might be called an acceptable thrill for adolescent... well, I was going to say girls and boys but I think probably mostly girls, I suspect. I was an unusual boy, as... as you might have guessed. I certainly enjoyed these.

This is the first page of the first story in this collection. It's called My Secret Admirer by Carol Ellis:

Chapter 1

Jenny never knew what woke her up. One minute she was in the middle of a deep sleep and the next she was wide awake, the lightweight quilt tangled around her legs, and her heart drumming in her ears.
The silence around her was as deep as her sleep had been. It couldn't have been traffic that woke her; the house was miles from the main road. Maybe it was the moonlight. With no other houses close by, they hadn't been in a hurry to put up shades, and a shaft of moonlight spread across her pillow like a milky white ribbon.
Jenny was grateful for the moon tonight. Instead of spending a few seconds in total darkness, trying to figure out where she was, she could see around her well enough to know that she was home.
Home. Well, not exactly. Not yet, anyway. She and her parents had moved into the house two and a half weeks before, and Jenny knew from experience that it would be much longer than that before it felt like a home. If it got the chance to, that is.

So. Yeah, that was My Secret Admirer. I find that suggestive but, in terms of horror, slightly disappointing. So I'm also going to read you the first page of the last story in the collection, which is called Fun House by Diane Hoh. And here the horror factor is, I think, significantly ramped up.

This is Fun House by Diane Hoh:

Chapter 1

Tess Landers would always remember exactly where she was and what she was doing when The Devil's Elbow roller coaster went flying off its track, shooting straight out into the air and hanging there for a few seconds before giving in to gravity and plummeting straight to the ground. The crash killed Dade Lewis, destroyed Sheree Buchanan's face, and separated Joey Furman forever from his left leg. And it sent a dozen other roller-coaster riders and ten passersby on the ground to the Santa Luisa Medical Center in screaming ambulances.
Before the crash, Tess was buying a hot dog. With everything. And fries and a large Coke, at a stand not far from where the multicolored cars were making their labored, rattle-clackety climb up the last and most treacherous leg of their journey. The rattle-clatter didn't bother Tess. She had lived in Santa Louisa all of her life and she was used to the sounds of The Boardwalk, the amusement park lining the oceanfront of the Southern California community. Thanks to a mild climate, the Board...

I looked up Diane Hoh on Wikipedia and she's quoted as saying: “Writing tales of horror makes it hard...” Wait, I should say this... I should perhaps say this in American accent: “Writing tales of horror makes it hard to convince people that I'm a nice, gentle person. I love rainbows and wildflowers and butterflies and babies, and I wouldn't swat a fly unless it was diving directly into my fruit salad.” It could be, I suppose, that Diane Hoh doesn't sound exactly like that. But, with that in mind, I could well have played you [singing] “Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens” at this point. But, instead, I've decided I'm going to assault your ears with a track by Dr. Dre which is called Hoes. Delicate listeners should look away now.

Music
[Hoes by Dr Dre]

Charles Adrian
I'm going to try and row back from the horror of that track now by reading from Minnie Lindsay Carpenter's biography... I was gonna say hagiography... of Salvation Army founder William Booth, about whom I knew nothing before I read some of this book. This is a Wyvern Books edition from 1957 which is priced two-and-six net.

Rather charmingly, inside the front cover, someone's written in red biro: “cc Liz Burns, cc house party 1965 10th of August.” I have no idea what that means. But you'll realise quite quickly that I ought to be reading this in an Australian accent. Never let it be said that I am one to shy away from a challenge.

So here's the first page of William Booth by Minnie... Minnie Lindsay Carpenter:

Introduction

The first time I saw Salvation Army's founder...

Sorry. Let me start again.

The first time I saw the Salvation Army's founder was in Sydney, Australia. One of his youthful soldiers who had heard the call of his message penetrate into my inland home, I had traveled hundreds of miles to see him. Later, as a young officer under his flag, I gratefully remember his hand laid in blessing upon my head. On his subsequent visits to Australia, I heard his message again and again. In London, during his last year of life, I looked upon that glorious leader, so frail, and at last blind, that he seemed almost a spirit. Yet, with the remnants of his strength, still urging his army to live and fight for the things that endure, the things of the Spirit. Called to his deathbed, I watched the soft breathing that seemed like a gentle breeze bearing the warrior soul over the bar of time into the eternity of God's love. I saw something of the endless stream of people who, day and night, passed to take a last look at his face in death. And some of the million people who watched his casket being carried to the last resting place. The hommage of kings and presidents, the love of peoples of widely differing climes, languages and customs had united to mourn his death.
What was the cause of such a triumph? Once asked the secret of his great success, the founder of the Salvation Army replied: 'I decided that God should have all there was of William Booth.' Surely a reasonable and practical resolve also for all who read this memoir. MLC.

It's time for some more music. Here is The Carpenters with Goodbye To Love.

Music
[Goodbye To Love by The Carpenters]

Charles Adrian
My next book is a more serious choice. This is Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Dee Brown. This was given to me by a Swiss friend of mine. It's a 1981 edition of a book that was first published in 1970. I found it a devastating book and, by its own account, it tells the story not of how the West was won but how it was lost and who lost it. It's still fully typical... topical, sorry... fully topical today and could anyway be about colonial invaders in South America, Australia, Africa, much of Asia. If you want to know about Manifest Destiny and why you should assume that political agreements will only be respected when there is an equality of arms, this is the book to read.

Introduction

SINCE the exploratory journey of Lewis and Clark to the Pacific Coast early in the nineteenth century, the number of published accounts describing the “opening” of the American West has risen into the thousands. The greatest concentration of recorded experience and observation came out of the thirty-year span between 1860 and 1890 - the period covered by this book. It was an incredible era of violence, greed, audacity, sentimentality, undirected exuberance, and an almost reverential attitude toward the ideal of personal freedom for those who already had it.
During that time the culture and civilization of the American Indian was destroyed, and out of that time came virtually all the great myths of the American West - tales of fur traders, mountain men, steamboat pilots, goldseekers, gamblers, gunmen, cavalrymen, cowboys, harlots, missionaries, schoolmarms, and homesteaders. Only occasionally was the voice of an Indian heard, and then more often than not it was recorded by the pen of a white man. The Indian was the dark menace of the myths, and even if he had known how to write in English, where would he have found a printer or a publisher?
Yet they are not all lost, those Indian voices of the past. A few authentic accounts of American western history were recorded by Indians either in pictographs or in translated English, and some managed to get published in obscure journals, pamphlets, or books of small circulation. In the late nineteenth century, when the white man's curiosity about Indian survivors of the wars reached a high point, enterprising newspaper reporters frequently interviewed warriors and chiefs and gave them an opportunity to express their opinions on what was happening in the West. The quality of these interviews varied greatly, depending on the abilities of the interpreters, or upon the inclination of the Indians to speak freely. Some feared reprisals for telling the truth, while others delighted in hoaxing report...

The track I'm going to play now... Well, I'm... I'm pretty sure, although I have no definite information... I'm pretty sure that this was inspired by Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee. It's Elton John's Indian Sunset. I'll warn you that it does contain factual inaccuracies.

Music
[Indian Sunset by Elton John]

Charles Adrian
I'd like to end on a lighter note today. My last book is called Synthetic Men Of Mars and it's by Edgar Rice Burroughs. This is number eight in the Martian series. He also wrote a Venus series and a Moon series and many others. It was first published in 1939. And my edition, which features a mostly naked woman on the cover, who appears to be handcuffed, is from 1976.

I got this maybe three years ago and I'd never heard of Edgar Rice Burroughs so imagine my surprise when, only a month or two back, a film came out based on his book John Carter Of Mars, which is the first book in the Martian series. I haven't seen the film. But this book is so much fun. The names alone make it worth reading.

SYNTHETIC MEN OF MARS

CHAPTER 1

WHERE IS RAS THAVAS?

FROM PHUNDAHL at their western extremity, east to Toonol, the great Toonolian Marshes stretch across the dying planet for eighteen hundred earth miles like some unclean, venomous, Gargantuan reptile - an oozy marshland through which wind narrow watercourses connecting occasional bodies of open water, little lakes, the largest of which covers but a few acres. This monotony of marsh and jungle and water is occasionally broken by rocky islands, themselves usually clothed in jungle verdure, the skeletal remains of an ancient mountain range.
Little is known of the Great Toonolian Marshes in other portions of Barsoom, for this inhospitable region is peopled by fierce beasts and terrifying reptiles, by remnants of savage aboriginal tribes long isolated, and is guarded at either extremity by the unfriendly kingdoms of Phundahl and Toonol which discourage intercourse with other nations and are constantly warring upon one another.
Upon an island near Toonol, Ras Thavas, The Master Mind of Mars, had labored in his laboratory for nearly a thousand years until Vobis Kan, Jeddak of Toonol, turned against him and drove him from his island home and later repulsed a force a Phundahlian warriors led by Gor Hajus, the Assassin of Toonol, which had sought to recapture the island and restore Ras Thavas to his laboratory upon his promise to devote his skill and learning to the amelioration of human suffering rather than to prostitute them to the foul purposes of greed and sin.
Following the defeat of his little army, Ras Thavas had disappeared and been all but forgotten as are the dead, among which he was numbered by those who had known him; but there were some who could never forget him. There was Valla Dia, Princess of Duhor, whose brain he had...

Jingle
You're listening... you're listening to London Fields Radio.

Charles Adrian
And so to my theme, to wrap up the program today. Sharp-eyed listeners may have noticed that, apart from the Point Horror and Dr. Dre diversions at the beginning, we've been in something of a nineteen-seventies house today. All the other books would have existed in some form or other in that decade and... and all of the music, apart from Dr. Dre, was written in either 1971 or 1972. So, I think, three bonus points if you spotted that. There's one more piece of music coming. There's very little else I could have played, I think, at this point.

I've been Charles Adrian on London Fields Radio from the Wilton Way cafe in Hackney. This has been the second edition of Page One. And this, from 1972, is David Bowie with Life On Mars?

Music
[Life On Mars? by David Bowie]

[Initial transcription by https://otter.ai]