I first met Heathcote Williams in the early 1960s, just as his brilliant book The Speakers was published. I had sent a piece of writing to the Transatlantic Review, where he was an editor, which was, to my amazement, accepted.
About three weeks later, there was a ring on my front doorbell in Cornwall, and there stood a young man of my own age with a head of electrically effervescent hair, wearing a brown pinstripe suit with flared trousers, who introduced himself in a transatlantic accent: “Hi, I’m Heathcote Williams from the Transatlantic Review.”
He had a magnetic, mercurial quality. We fell out for a couple of decades, during which time I lived in America and Japan. On my return to the UK, one afternoon the telephone rang, and a voice on the other end said: “Who’s this, then?” Of course, I knew instantly who it was. With his generosity of heart, he had reconnected, and we carried on as though one of us had merely passed from one room to another, and back again.
