The Chinese Agent by Michael Moorcock

Author:Michael Moorcock [Moorcock, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780575070806
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2013-03-27T20:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

A Professional Family

THE CORNELL ANCESTRAL basement gave off a combination of stenches that only a Cornell could stomach. In a way it acted as a survival factor since bailiffs, Income Tax officials, Health Visitors, National Assistance inspectors, debt collectors and policemen were kept at bay by it. Jerry, who had grown up in the atmosphere, was probably more proof against it than most, but even he retched as he pushed open the door, which hung by one hinge, and stepped into the darkness.

Paying no rent (the landlord had given up trying to charge any and referred to the Cornells as “me own little personal charity case”), no electricity and no gas, the Cornells used candles for light and a paraffin stove for cooking and heating.

The Cornells had been on television six times in the last five years, been photographed for all the Sunday colour supplements, been once each in the Daily Mirror, Daily Mail, The Sun, Daily Express, Daily Telegraph, Daily Sketch and Morning Star, three times in International Times, three times in the Kensington Post, twice in the Kensington News, twice in Help! magazine, once in Nova magazine, twice in Tribune, once in Private Eye (in Christopher Logue’s ‘True Stories’ column), once in the short-lived Notting Hill Herald, twice in Encounter, once in Nursing World, once in Films and Filming (they had been the subject of a documentary that had been deemed too disgusting for public showing) and once in A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (“Cornell: Any debased or depraved action, as in ‘he cornelled the poor old creature out of her pension money’: Dornier & May, The City Has No Conscience, 1959. ‘After that he was considered a bit of a cornell’ [i.e. outcast, pariah, to be shunned even by the lowest]: John Cross, The London Thief, 1951. Orig. doubtful. Mostly southern England: c. 1940.”) There had also been eight separate half-page features about them in The Guardian.

The Cornells were, in short, a Problem Family.

In fact, they were a Professional Problem Family. Their various benefits in the form of unemployment pay, family allowances, National Assistance and the like were augmented from time to time by the money received from the journalists who used them whenever they needed a good bit of squalor to photograph or write about. It didn’t pay the Cornells to live in better conditions. Once they did that, they would lose their public. Their usefulness to the Press would be over.

The Cornells had another important use. When right-wing politicians and councillors were quizzed on why they weren’t doing more to rid Notting Hill of its festering slums and house people decently, they could point to the Cornells and say, “The people there don’t want to live any other way”. In the case of the Cornells, of course, it was true. In the case of the rest, it was not. It was safe to say, in fact, that the Cornells single-handedly had held back the improvement of the district for twenty years.

Thus the Cornells were famous.

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