Published: 18 August, 2011
by HANNAH LOWE

JEREMY Worman’s debut collection of short stories is a collage of sketches, portraits and anecdotes that chart his journey from middle-class boyhood to his youth as a dropout squatting in Hornsey Rise and on to a more ordered and stable existence as a writer, teacher, husband and father.

Many of the tales are set in Hackney and explore the complex relationships between people and place and the ever-changing landscape of the inner city.

Worman is at the heart of the collection but re-invents himself as “Simon”, a strategy, he says, “to distance myself from the purely autobiographical”.

The title, Fragmented, refers to Worman’s sense that his life has not followed a linear path.

The stories revisit these fragments and range across time and space: the Egham of Worman’s childhood where his comfortable existence is undercut by his mother’s alcoholism; the Hackney of the 1970s where anarchists, junkies and intellectuals co-exist in a “hippy dream”; and the modern-day multicultural Hackney, where Worman still resides.

The stories about the squats and the social idealism of those that lived there are compelling and testify to a lived history that Worman feels is “important to chronicle”.

In 1975, Hornsey Rise was reputed to be the largest squat in Europe and Worman’s time living there, albeit short, had a clear impact on his life, leading him and a like-minded group to set up Hackney Community Housing.

In Fragmented we meet a range of real-life characters: the kindly Irish Paul who helps Worman navigate the social life of the squats; damaged and addicted girls who embody free love, thought and action; and Candyman, the benevolent cannabis dealer who is eventually murdered.

The idealism of this community is inevitably shattered and Candyman’s murder stands as a metaphor for the descent into violence and disorder, accompanied by increased political factionalism and self-interest.

The council’s threat of mass eviction prompts most of the “good people” to leave and the rest to exist like a “pack of wolves”.

A strong thread running through the stories is Worman’s sense of his place and belonging. He writes of a younger self that “hovered on the edge of other people’s worlds” and clung to a “fictionised sense of myself”.

In the middle and end sections of the book, Woman’s world seems more coherent.

He is now a university teacher, pursuing his writing seriously, and has become a father.

The stories about his daughter Myfanwy – “the most perfect baby in Hackney” – are tender and charming, particularly Me and My Baby in London Fields, which depicts Myfanwy’s first trip through the urban landscape of Hackney’s Mare Street with its “multi-coloured litter” and “third world pavements”.

Like this one, many of Worman’s stories encapsulate a moment in time like a photograph, often embodying both place and the emotion attached to it, in the literary mode commonly termed “psycho-geography”.

Worman tackles the dynamics of race in modern-day Hackney in the honestly rendered Breaking, which sees the narrator chasing and catching an egg-throwing youth in a headlock.

The surrounding boys shout accusations of racism at the narrator, a term he finds deeply unnerving: “‘Racist’ unsettled me, sprang at my head, gashing open my forehead, which further scrambled my sense of self.”

A dreadlocked man intervenes, telling him: “Look, it’s hell all ways you look – why make it worse?!”
Worman’s dialogue sustains an impressive naturalism throughout the collection, making the stories very readable and often humorous.

In The Party, the narrator is a misfit at a party of the well-heeled and is constantly mistaken for someone else, only managing to utter a word to contradict them before he loses their attention.

In Simon Carver Looks At Life, Worman depicts the abusive relationship between mother and son.

“Darling, you’re always rich as long as there’s enough money for a dry Martini in the cocktail bar at the Savoy,” the mother tells the young narrator.

Worman characterises her as an actress, one of the few derivations from the truth of his life.
She is cruel to her son when he complains about her drinking: “What a perfect little drama queen... you stupid little boy”.
The stories range from the very personal to more impersonal portraits of local residents.

Worman’s observations are detailed and believable, told in distilled prose. Only in the last story, A Lancashire Tale, does he take us into the realms of clear fiction when he imagines a confrontation between his deceased mother and her grandfather, moving back to the themes of family which open the book.

Overall, this is an impressive collection which evokes local detail with great skill.

In narrating his own fragmented relationship to the urban landscape, Worman invites his readers to reflect on their own understanding of time and place.

• Fragmented by Jeremy Worman. Cinnamon Press, £8.99