Milteer’s Rooms

Colin Bennett 

Part 1

There are characters met in early life who are figures at that gateway of experience when even paving-stones and sorrows are full of fire and magic. These shapes of dawn stamp the lore of an Age upon the young brow, never to be removed. They are remembered through shortness of breath, the first pills on the bedside table, and the flattening curves of compromised inspirations.

            Such a figure to me was one George Milteer, and everyone in the early 1970s knew 56 Regent Terrace, W11, as Milteer’s Rooms. Few in this ancient corner of Notting Hill called it a house. Fewer still called it Milteer’s home. The phrase was always pronounced as if it had a capital R, and the two words smacked of long ago: of small dance-halls perhaps, or of hired halls above the Co-Op with sawdust floors for rural weddings and the permanent smell of fresh ale drawn from the wood. Still deeper in time, certain layers and angles of Milteer’s home (leaning corners, uneven roof, sagging lintel-stones, twisted doorframes) might well have known the old Kensington racecourse, the gypsy market, and the place where the Irish once kept pigs by the Grand Union canal. Perched on this ridge of cultural twilight miraculously preserved from the bulldozers of the modern givers of soup in bowls, Milteer had developed his all-absorbing electromechanical interests for nearly fifty years. Since he never threw anything away, the broken promises of different layers of light-industrial time lay around his house and life like bumps on the graph of a lie detector.

            To see Milteer’s Rooms was to see the early Product Age beginning to run out of steam, with its broken promises, its tired mechanisms, half-dreams, and cultural disappointments. Like the nervous theories of the Age again, here and there amidst lathe-chucks, bicycle wheels, and welding sets, disorderly piles of paper showed Milteer’s half-finished education. Scribbles showed constantly interrupted struggles with strands of electromechanical theories, attempts at interpretation and explanations that, like the theories of the Age again, burst apart on hitting brick-walls made of anomalies, inconsistencies, and contradictions.

            Milteer and long-suffering wife, Doris, looked like some archetypal essence of many of the devices that surrounded them. The man himself had an axle-grease complexion shading from yellow to dun, and his chin was a cogwheel from a mediaeval water mill. His wife Doris had body-energies like old pistons and hot metal, and when she spoke, it was all fire in stone-age earth-ovens. If wind happened to penetrate the draughty Rooms in the right direction, both exuded an air of burnt straw, the tang of hot morning sunlight on caked river-mud. Smelling of centuries, they slept by dismantled carburettors, stripped gearboxes in oil-baths, and abandoned record-players and electrical devices piled to the ceiling; no doubt they made love by the big console valve-radio, whose dial still pointed to the BBC Light programme; they ate by a radiator a foot in width, built for heating an aerodrome hangar, and they bathed (when they bathed at all) in a tin bath by a 1930s. refrigerator framed in polished oak, whose repaired motor sounded like 78 rpm records of the old Coronation Scot steaming into King’s Cross. In the middle distance beyond, lay several models of the first and last British attempt at a personal computer, on which even letter-writing was a daunting adventure, and whose quixotic tape-drives and primitive and faulty software, had long ago disappeared into a new phase of the late 20th-Century British Mystery Cycle. In the far distance, there were “personal” telephone answering machines as big as dog-kennels, and “mobile” phones like military radios. Littering the stained floor were the remains of many forlorn Citizen’s Band radios, which had once offered greater hopes of “community” communication than had the early computers. These offers of power and transcendence also joined the dismembered limbs of early sound-to-light disco systems, boxes of psychedelic oil-wheel filters, and the guts of several jukeboxes. Occasionally, Milteer would give a lantern-slide show to moody and resentful groups from youth-clubs, and sullen troops of scouts and guides, slightly baffled at these what Doris termed ‘videos’ of long ago.

            My name is Elizabeth. I first came to the Rooms as a member of a girl-guide troop. Amused and terrified both, we nudged, kicked, and giggled as we ate Doris’s hamburgers, cooked on a “genuine 1935 hotplate,” and hoped we would not have to risk the blackened cracked porcelain of the ancient candle-lit cellar-lavatory which, said a proud Doris, had been “made” from genuine pieces of old railway conveniences “which had survive two wars.”

            Often smirking and nudging one another, and perched on two rows old tram-seats, we risked Milteer’s mild annoyance, and Doris’s pained eyes, as we held back laughter at Milteer carefully inserting glass slides into something which looked like the cabin of a model steam locomotive. After interminable tinkering, the wide base of a cone of light would tint a white-washed wall with jerky sepia, and we would see Napoleon III in his carriage, followed in hand-insertion time by the coronation of Victoria, and scenes from canal, railway, and bridge-building in the old Empire. It was baffling, bizarre; it contrasted with our clean homes and our perfect videos, and had all the terror of genuine imagination. This inexpensive nonsense was my first disturbing contact with the deep past. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was never to forget that the giving of knowledge was not necessarily dependent upon resources, money, and qualifications.

            As I grew and changed, the Rooms did not. As I took down the posters of long-haired pretty boys with guitars from my bedroom walls, the Rooms were miraculously still there, the only item of interest remaining in acres of cleaned-up and corporate-rationalised boredom. As an eighteen-year-old doing my A-Levels, I still visited the Rooms occasionally, though now as an enthusiastic science student. Of course I began to see it all with older eyes. To me, Milteer became a kind of  electromechanical Faust, akin to the first two multimedia heroes of my reading at that time: the techno-Pope in Baron Corvo’s Hadrian IV, and the very first 78 rpm disc-jockey of 1914, Herr Castorp in Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

            Though he refused to sell anything, genuine enquirers were allowed to wander the Rooms at will. I remember encountering dreams old and new stored in the Milteer’s kitchen, upper bedrooms, bathroom, cellar, garage. Here were the bones of many and various fallen idols, which it appeared had promised anything in order to be born from some menagerie of unconscious forms. I always liked to suppose that within the shapes of various era-gods, a switch had been pressed, a wheel cranked, an influence activated, and the idols had spoken to Milteer and his devoted wife as they had spoken from the Age of the steam-engine of Hero of Alexandria to 19th century clockwork mouths, and with almost the same message. The gods muttered of the efficiency that could be achieved by this, the money which could be made by that, the entertainment, enlightenment, not to say education or improvement which could be obtained by structured thought based on scientific principles. Now dusty and yearning for spare parts on makeshift benches and shelves, still the structured half-forms of fabricated automata preached old industrial parables of what a purchaser could do with this, what a customer could do with that. I suppose that the same voices again produced the panoramic pantomime described in Balzac’s Goriot, Jacquet-Droz’s musical android, or de Vaucanson’s air-propelled singing duck of the eighteenth Century, or the “six-transistor” radio “integrated” into an ironing-board-cum “creasing system” which was one of Milteer’s most precious possessions.

            Of course the old grease-devil Milteer tried to seduce me a couple of times. His hands would wander to my thighs, but he was easily diverted to explaining the mysteries of old military radio-equipment, gyroscopes, crude robotics, hot-valve biasing, relays, and push-pull amplifiers. In every sense, Milteer was the last Solutionist. Thirty years, and mountains of devices later, he still preached the great message of positive mechanical improvement, a mythological tale if ever there was one, long gone with the nuclear power stations and the cures for cancer, vanished with the Space Race, the cartridge-player, communism, and the democratic dream of positive improvement through the application of social-scientific principles. But still this great shaggy Mancunian bear preached on of wonders to come; he spoke of devices to extend human years indefinitely, of starships, possible time machines, somewhat daunting passenger-carrying rockets to Australia, and the inevitable moon-colonies, full of scientific boy-scouts and their push-pull toys.

            To myself then, as a budding science student, such technological and scientific inspirations always smacked of the marvellous, if only because we, like all budding technologists, assumed that one thing would naturally follow from another. Many before us had also believed this, and surrounded by cursing wives, curious children, annoyed neighbours, envious friends, and mocking and suspicious relatives, men like Milteer had tinkered. They made improvements which were not improvements, they reasoned with facts which were not factual, they discovered truths which were a maze of often sneering deceptions. Inspired, still they soldered, cut, and drilled and hammered, well on into the snows of the 20th Century. As Laboratories and Corporations largely institutionalised the tinkering, the sheds and attics with their nests of wires and resistors soldered to cocoa and tobacco-tins were extremely hard to find, and the lore of winding your own medium-wave aerial-coil became almost as one with the mystique of rigging Elizabethan Men O’War.

            As each system bled vital consumer heat, and lost ground on some high frontier of advertising, Milteer’s rooms were a perfect mirror to Nature as that catastrophe of the marvellous whose tragic beauty lured humans on to madness and death. Never was there a time like ours, so full of devices. They will be found eventually, I suppose, pressed into the Earth’s crust like an infinity of tree-fossils and molluscs, and probably burned for fuel. Twenty years on from the days of Milteer’s Rooms, I felt that the out-advertised half-shadows of generations of fallen consumer expectancies had fled to be received by Milteer and his devoted and silent wife, like wounded animals seeking sanctuary. The pair presided over the dissolution of lost and fallen empires of past buying-frenzies, each intellectual geography of which represented some fallen attempt at imposing order, some outgrown experiment in establishing new levels of communication and transcendent delight. And somehow these wounded decorations of the first generations of mass-culture limped their way to Milteer, and with Doris handing him tools as if she were a nurse at an operating table, he amputated and operated. If all failed, they both became those dark figures who usher all and everything to the waters of oblivion.

            But though this was an inspiring time for me, the Rooms already generated the first serious doubts of my youth. I remember that by a wrapped loaf which poured its curling slices over open cans of pork & beans, a gas-ring, and festering bottles of milk, there stood a small letter-press platen just by a cannibalised 1920s DC-voltage vacuum-cleaner. The press proudly announced on a riveted brass plate that it could “run off a light bulb.” This was a phrase that summed up all the last consumer-promises of 1960s attics, squats, and demos. Many more such vacant promises lay around. A pile of prewar copies of The ClockMaker and Amateur Engineer supported a de-gutted IBM golfball composer-typewriter, whose 1-kilobyte magnetic cards extended and lifted attic-hopes for the generation of the Gestetner offset press.

            I began to realise that by the time a useful technology arrived for those (ever few) with thinking sap in their veins, the advertising horizons had burst like soap bubbles, and all attic hopes had fled, hunted by monthly payments and bills for supplies, spare parts, maintenance, and repair. It was as if that enemy of all attic-hopes, the Corporation, was throwing out clouds of skunk-gas to blind, stifle, dazzle, and mislead all such inspirations. When a suitable technology finally arrived for subversive trestle-table thoughts present in eternal youth, the Corporations were ahead. They left a wake of tumescent temptations for the scaled-down versions of the new liberating device, which of course would further enable an aspect of this to be realised, or open the possibilities of that to be created.

Milteer looked upon these mechanisms as others looked upon dinosaur bones and the Dead Sea Scrolls. In a similar sense, he could draw patterns of complex evolution from them. These were to him primordial seams in base rock, compressed forests which could be decoded into lives and days and embryo thoughts of mankind. He would talk of the return valve and the steam condenser as other talked of some vital stage in the development of mystical theology. Indeed, he saw them as such…

            I could not help getting the impression that here, in Milteer’s Rooms, was a technological Day preparing itself neatly and tidily for Night. I saw this Day as a phase of knowledge itself being the carefully-prepared body of a dead-warrior for Death. Like a Pharaoh, this Warrior, great in his time, was surrounding himself with items which he had known in life and would accompany him through the transformations of soul which was not Western death, that Woolworth’s contraption of stained-mattress agony, but a passage through to a transfer of spirit. Through these dead and dying machines, I was beginning to grasp something of what was meant by progress of a soul as a body of knowledge moving to the next set of paradigms. This disturbed me if only that it suggested strongly that physical death was more complex than ever we thought. It meant that even in death the whole corpus of responsibilities and indeed destinies, though transformed utterly, were all still quite intact.

            Throughout their life, the Milteers aroused great affection. People from all over the world sent them items worth small fortunes. These various odd bits of ancient technological apparatus were kept in a secure room, and one day he gave me the key, and with a rare twinkle in his eye, told me to have a look around. I unlocked the door and entered a family tomb. There, on a bench, was a Hertz coil, a Lodge Coherer, and an early Crooks X-Ray tube. To examine these dusty items with the Mozart playing off-stage distance was to look into the very heart of the early death and resurrection of my society, my coming profession, and indeed myself. Somehow I had helped make these almost completely forgotten foundations of our culture. To touch them was to lovingly fondle offspring. To look at them it was to dive deep and see through the misty dark, massive artificial pillars upon which the land above rested. All the attics of all lost innocence were here, and beyond. There were some early Marconi transformers, and a single bright-emitter Forest triode valve, but it all seemed to stop there, round about 1906. Beyond was someone else’s country, some other gnome, who was guarding the later and more complex developments. I often smiled to think that perhaps there was an attic in Glasgow or New York full of stuff of a much later date, glimpsed by young enthusiasts such as myself, intertwining human and mechanical love with the promises of big summers yet to come.

            There were some items in this room I could hardly look at. There was a priceless Faraday coil, a bobbin of unevenly wound rust which made my mind spin. I could only guess where Milteer had got such a thing from as he told me that there were some even earlier Leyden jars and Leclanche cells in boxes under the benches He began to drag out apparatus so ancient for a moment I felt I was under the Great Pyramid amidst the lost possessions of great kingdoms of the infinite Past. The claustrophobia was so great I could not look. Faraday was deep enough. Going deeper, I would have been overcome with the remembering of such forgotten hosts as would completely devastate any person alive. I would be looking at myself moving through several lives and  deaths. The entire place was self-hypnosis, self-analysis, though exactly who or what exiled part me was receiving this treatment, I did not know.

            I had made these experiments, I had burned my fingers with chemicals, and almost fainting with historical shock, I shut the door on hands that reached from graves, and I did not go into that room again.

            That night there was moonlight on my pillow, and I hear voices calling. Whole families of ideas, utterly lost without me, were crying out like dying tribes in deserts: save us! save us!

End of Part 1.