Life Without Armour : An Autobiography

Chapter Twenty-four

Heredity is the cause: circumstances only exacerbate, though some years passed before the statement could be formulated. On being told at the demobilization camp at RAF Warton in Lancashire, after an all-night train journey from Southampton, that an X-ray showed sufficient signs of tuberculosis to make it necessary for me to stay on for an unspecified length of time for treatment, it was as if a bolt of electricity had passed through my biological system, to which my brain was indubitably attached.

Such a stunning fact put me into a depression as deep as the euphoria on the ship had been high. Even if thought had been forthcoming, no amount of it, under the circumstances, could turn the clock back. It seemed inconceivable that someone like me should be tainted with the disgusting disease of consumption, yet science, as I had always believed (and was unable to deny it now), did not lie. Up to then I had imagined that you did not go to a doctor unless your limbs were broken, or you were bleeding copiously from numerous wounds, at which you could justifiably be rushed into a hospital. Nor did you visit a dentist unless in agony from a face like a football. It was a matter of: I stand, therefore I’m healthy; and now, still solid enough on my feet, I was said to be fit only for a hospital bed. Simplicity had gone for ever.

My self-esteem was sliced to the quick, a mood metronoming in those first few months between rage and self-pity. The intensity of the shock began a dislodging of tectonic plates that needed half a decade to settle into place. From being, as had been foolishly believed, the master of my fate, I had to acknowledge that Fate was a malicious knock-me-down that would take much living with.

After my friends, with commiserating handshakes, had gone jauntily through the gate with their neat brown cardboard box of demob gear, I was told to go on ten days’ leave, and then return to the camp for more tests. Crossing the middle of Manchester with my kit, outwardly the spick-and-span airman back from overseas hoping for a good time, I could not feel less fit than anyone around me. Even so, homecoming after two years necessarily lost some of its glamour and, as if to muffle my despair — though the habit of discipline absorbed from the age of fourteen was useful to me now — I began to doubt the medical officer’s assumption that I had started to rot inside. The pride-saving possibility occurred to me that X-ray plates had got mixed up, and that all would later be put right.

I told my parents I wasn’t quite fit after my time in Malaya, and that it might be necessary for me to go into hospital for a while to convalesce. This explanation was found reasonable, and no questions were asked. My old girlfriends were married, or gone from home, or otherwise occupied, and I have no memory as to how my leave passed. A habit of noting novels read for that year in a wireless log book listed none for those ten days.

I was not unhappy to get back to Warton, anxious to know whether or not tuberculosis had really struck, and if so to what extent. For three weeks I was isolated in a small ward at the station sick quarters because of possible contagion, much like a leper on Pulau Jerejak. The experience of being cut off from the world was new: a piece of obsolescent equipment for which no one could have any use.

A silent male orderly brought in my meals, and left me to make my bed, and I saw a doctor once on going for more X-rays. Apart from the settled despair, I was glad above all to be on my own, not wanting anyone else to be sequestered in the ward in case I was obliged to talk about my reason for being there. I remember reading Many Cargoes by W. W. Jacobs, The Food of the Gods by H. G. Wells, and a novel by J. B. Priestley, as well as some chapters of my Bible.

In my kit were notebooks and maps from Kedah and, at the onset of evening, the worst part of the day, I drew the bedtable forward and began to write a coherent account of the expedition. For some days I was blessedly unaware of the anguish that had settled on me, reliving the trip into the jungle proving that mental pain ceased to be felt if something could be done that was entirely absorbing. Turned into two people, I chose to be the one which knew no hurt, never in any doubt as to which was more compatible. This first indication that writing could expunge the pain of living was not lost on me.

Further interior photographs at the X-ray machine revealed cavities in my left lung, and the right also as marked with the disease, a map of the moon never imagined in all the wanderings of my fevered topographical dreams. I was more than mystified as to how the affliction had been acquired, because you certainly did not catch it in the jungle, though the effluvia could have been breathed on a bus in George Town. Speculation turned into a circular worrying nag that got nowhere, unless as an anodyne to ease the baffled spirit. At times I thought my head would burst from sheer misery, though an invisible person looking on would have seen no outward evidence of distress, something made sure of by carefully observing myself, but hoping I wasn’t going mad in the attempt.

Told to pack my gear, I was given a train warrant for RAF Wroughton in Wiltshire. The journey, with changes at Crewe (of not too distant memory) and Bristol, was a hiatus of blessed normality. Getting out of the station at Swindon, a coffin containing the body of an airman, who had died of tuberculosis in the hospital I was bound for, was put on the train just stepped from.

At Wroughton, sixteen miles north-east of the radio school, it was found beyond all doubt that I was ‘TB Positive’, which put me into a ward with thirty other men in a similar condition. What had to be accepted, and took much doing, was not being recognized any longer as in first-class health. People who had TB, if they hadn’t died of it, were regarded as finished off, or at best as unemployable pariahs. From wanting to be first-class everything I was suddenly defeated in an area where no trouble had been expected at all. The fact that 25,000 people a year died from what I had got did not worry me, as much as having reached a solid gate on the road forward which had always seemed ready to open on to the infinitely promising beyond.

Now that the evidence of X-rays and sputum tests was indisputable, another kind of normality had to begin, that of two rows of bedridden men facing each other for an unknown length of time, with lovely Queen Alexandra’s nursing sisters and delectable WAAF orderlies gliding along the polished floor to look after us. None of us would have seemed ill had we been walking in the outside world, or so I even now liked to think. Most of the men were younger than myself, their tuberculous condition having been diagnosed during training or before despatch overseas.

The treatment consisted mostly of simple bed-rest, and we were superbly cared for, the excellent diet including a bottle of rich stout set on every locker each morning. Smoking was not forbidden and, lacking my favourite Malayan cheroots, I sent out for 100 small cigars, the little wooden box reaching me in time for Christmas.

On first entering the ward I noticed a man reading History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell, while two others were discussing Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony, to be broadcast on the wireless that evening, which seemed to set the intellectual tone peculiar to the RAF. A set of earphones by each bed was attached to a radio system, and my switch stayed on the Third Programme, so that I was soon becoming familiar with the music of the great composers.

The Times and Daily Telegraph came in every morning, carrying advertisements for surveyors and wireless operators needed by the Colonial Service, each reading like a poetic epitaph on the tombstone of my previous ambition. After mulling on them wryly I turned for compensation to the crossword puzzle, my skill much improved on borrowing a thesaurus from a man several beds along. As for world news, the Russians were no longer brave and with us as during the war, and the Americans and the RAF were trying to break their blockade of West Berlin.

A correspondence course in surveying gave me what was needed to keep my brain sharp. Opening the textbook, and spreading a sheet of graph paper on my bed-table, I drew plans of imaginary streets and country estates, familiar from those given me by Burton as a child. My sister Peggy, thinking me about to embark on a new career, sent an engineers’ diary for 1949, containing interesting mathematical data.

I posted my account of climbing Kedah Peak to Hales, of my old ATC squadron in Nottingham, and it came back typed, with a letter advising me to try and get it published. Some poems and short prose sketches were already written in my wireless log book, so his suggestion did not seem too outlandish, and in January I despatched ‘Kedah Peak’ to the Geographical Magazine and, when it was rejected, to Wide World Magazine, which also turned it down. At the same time I tried getting a poem into a periodical called Everybody’s.

During 1948 the list in my notebook showed thirty-eight novels read, mostly of the escapist sort plucked off the trolley pushed around the ward every few days by women of the WVS. Books of travel and adventure were as much enjoyed as by any bedjacketed explorer, but there was also From Bapaume to Paschendaele by Philip Gibbs (which started my interest in all to do with the Great War), Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, The Guide to Music by P. A. Scholes, and a biography of Chopin.

Though confined to ‘strict bed’ I was soon managing an affair with one of the orderlies, and many of my so-called poems were banal love lyrics written for her, who seemed impressed by them. We met every night after lights out in a store-room at the end of the ward and, luckily enough — but mostly for her — our clandestine love-nest was never discovered.

Frankie Howerd came to shake hands and say encouraging words to every patient in the hospital. Having been out of the country I didn’t realize either his fame or talent, and could think of nothing to say in return. It was unnecessary to do so, of course, but neither was I willing to seem friendly with someone I didn’t know, though it was a generous visit for such a celebrated comedian to make.

My lungs were not responding to treatment, perhaps because the spirit wasn’t yet ready to provide assistance, sulking at the body’s ignominious capitulation to the lowest kind of germ. Squadron-Leader O’Connor, the top medical officer, decided that an artificial pneumothorax might help. This meant a minor operation to cut the lesions that attached the lung to the pleural wall. Once this was done, air pumped by needle into the chest every ten days from then on would be able to flatten the free-floating lung and prevent it doing the usual work. The lung would only be permitted to resume its normal function when, it was hoped, the infection was cured, and in the meantime, which may be for years, I would be able to exist perfectly well with the use of only one lung, provided I didn’t do anything silly like mountain climbing, rowing, cycling or carrying heavy suitcases.

The ingeniously scientific process had improved many people, and the operation itself was little inconvenience. On being put back into bed from the trolley I guzzled a bottle of delicious life-giving stout and puffed at a fragrant shit-smelling cigar, much to the amusement of Sister Monica Jones, to celebrate the first deep cut of my life, before falling asleep.

I borrowed a typewriter so as to see how my poems would look in print, and their appearance, if not their quality, seemed so much improved that I acquired a reconditioned Remington Portable for twenty-six pounds from a salesman travelling the hospital. Touch-typing had been taught at Radio School, and though I hadn’t done any since, the machine was soon rattling away at top speed. My girlfriend brought in ribbons and paper from Swindon, and when my old Nottingham friend John Moult sent a pound note for my twenty-first birthday I asked her to get Auden’s Tennyson Selection, the first English poet I scanned with pleasure and attention.

Half a dozen volumes of modern poetry, none of particular memory, showed the current idiom and themes. I studied the long and detailed appendix on prosody in a Wordsworth selection, then read FitzGerald’s Omar Khayyam, the collected poems of Rupert Brooke with Edward Marsh’s memoir, and some of Coleridge — whatever I could get hold of. For prose I read Wilde’s De Profundis, The Living Torch by A. E., and made an attempt on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason which my girlfriend’s mother had sent me, with works by Edward Lear.

Quality began to predominate, and in the next few months it became more and more possible to make choices, such as A Room of One’s Own, two plays by George Bernard Shaw, In Hazard by Richard Hughes, Voltaire’s Candide, and Bel Ami by Guy de Maupassant. E. V. Rieu’s translation of The Odyssey sent me on a trail, during the next couple of years, through the whole of the Latin and Greek classics. They came from an age that was dead, but I relished the spare language of the histories, the elegant poetry that spoke to and was spoken by the gods, the philosophies which sharpened my mind wonderfully, and plays that re-created legend with such heartbreaking effect.

My Bible — the Jewish Scriptures — appealed to a deeper part, its language entering the bones’ marrow and giving solace during my transition from one life to another. The beauty of the King James’ version, and the sombre rectitude of the Ancient Hebrews, found an enduring response in me.

Mail was important, and I corresponded with Schlachter, Gladstone and others. Coleman wrote from Malaya telling me that the Butterworth Jungle Rescue Team had climbed a mountain from whose summit they had looked down on Kedah Peak, which sent momentary pangs of regret and envy through me.

I woke from my usual afternoon sleep to see my mother and John Moult sitting by my bed. John had won something on a football game, he said, and so paid both their fares. He was still serving with the Royal Corps of Signals as a wireless operator.

The artificial pneumothorax quickly improved my condition and, as the intensity of X-ray shadows decreased, and my blood sediment rate went down, I locked like clockwork on to the progressive stages of time permitted out of bed. Two hours extra were added every few weeks, until one stayed up the whole day except for the afternoon rest. Nothing was more important than this measured return to activity and freedom.

Though not supposed to, I put on my uniform and went out by the store-room window. Patients allowed in the hospital grounds were distinguished by a white instead of a blue shirt and, accordingly dressed, I made my way between the buildings as if by permission, then jinked behind one and went along the fence till finding a place to climb over. Crossing fields, after first using hedges for cover, the smell of herbage was intoxicating, and ‘Greensleeves’ sang at my stolen liberty. Some days I would wander on the nearby Downs, or otherwise during a long summer evening meet my young woman, with her cherubic face and auburn hair, in the village pub.

For want of time the surveying course lapsed, though I was glad of its help and knowledge. Enlightenment gained from reading was rapidly filling the empty spaces, and the ability to write, though still in an uncertain state, provided that sense of purpose without which I had never been able to live.

One book read more than once was The Forest Giant by Adrien le Corbeau, translated by J. H. Ross who was, the publisher’s note explained, T. E. Lawrence. The writer described in 150 pages of stylish and aphoristic prose the birth and death of an enormous sequoia pine — Le Gigantesque. A copy was recently put into my hand by a young woman after a lecture at Nottingham University, and I was caught up again by the beginning:

For years on end it had been rolling, across the plains, through the deep meadow grasses, under the dim echoing archways of the forest. Always, in heat and cold, beneath blue skies, or skies clouded with rain and hail and snow, it had been rolling ceaselessly. One day it would be gilded by the sunlight — but not softened; another day grizzled streaks of rain soaked it — without refreshment. It was buried, to all appearance forever, by drifts of snow — but was not hurt. It had crossed cataracts of light and floods of shadow; it had been rocked by soft winds and hurled dizzily into the air by the shrieking gusts of cyclones; and it had met all these things — the sweetness of the day, the shade of night, the winter, the springs, the summers — with the same submissive, invulnerable apathy. It had waited its hour, ready, if need be, to wait yet much longer.

The content and manner of telling fitted my condition, and had some influence, in that science matched to the mystical was in tune with my own forest experience and the theoretical side of radio. The account of the birth, life and death of the tree included reflections on the turmoil and pain of Man’s existence, which provided me with a kind of perspective when it was necessary that I should have one. I could only agree, for instance, with ‘Memory is activity’s retreating shadow,’ and ‘The play of external events upon our destiny seem as inexplicable as the inherited influences which direct us from within.’ Nor could I deny that ‘In the dark is the beginning of nearly all creative processes,’ or ‘every beginning is an end, and everything ends only to begin again.’ In the back of my engineers’ diary was copied something which seemed even more relevant: ‘If sickness might be called premature age, age might be called a slow sickness.’

Having sufficient back-pay I devised a plan to spend part of my forthcoming leave in a guest house near Exmoor with my girlfriend. Lorna Doone had been going around, and we talked, when not more pleasurably occupied, of visiting places connected to that romantic novel. Unfortunately, on going home for a few days, she mentioned the scheme to her mother, who disapproved so strongly that she convinced her daughter I was dangerous to know, and should be given up. On her return she got herself transferred to another ward, though I think our friendship was lapsing in any case, and she had either fallen in love with someone else, or saw problems too difficult to contend with now that I was back on my feet.

Six weeks’ leave at the end of July provided adequate recompense for my chagrin and disappointment. I certainly felt a new man, standing on the platform for the London train, to the one I had been on arriving at the same station nine months before.

The novelty of civilian clothes was pleasant, and during those summery weeks in Nottingham I visited sentimentally memorable spots trawled over with my girlfriends of another age. On a borrowed bicycle, wearing my shorts from Malaya, I explored the old sights of Misk Hill, the Hemlock Stone, and various places up the Trent Valley. My brother Michael, now aged ten, came with me for company to Clifton Grove, a local beauty spot featured in poems by Henry Kirk White, who died at twenty-one from the disease that had been defeated in me because I had the luck to be born a hundred years later.

My notebook was filling with poems, mostly of the rhyming and scanning sort. I bought The Principles of English Metre by Egerton Smith, the definitive textbook of the time on prosody, and experimented, somewhat rigidly, with all forms of poetics. By using the public library, or culling from Frank Wore’s shop, and by buying paperbacks, I read Aeschylus, both parts of Goethe’s Faust, and Dante’s trilogy of the afterlife (which didn’t convince me that there was such a state to look forward to), two novels by Dostoevsky, A Month in the Country and Poems in Prose by Turgenev, as well as the usual padding of Dumas, Wells, Aldous Huxley and others — rich pickings chosen from a list of Penguin Classics and a catalogue at the end of an Everyman’s Library volume. There was no need for anyone to point out what should be read, or tell me what I ought to think about each book. The feeding of such appetite was easy and cheap, an inborn taste guiding me to the best at a time when only the best was good enough. I never read a book that was not enjoyable and, enjoying everything because it was good, learned more than if I had been told to read or from a sense of duty.

For most of my leave I was carrying on a love affair with a young woman who lived up the street. I’ll call her Joyce, since her real name would only be relevant if she were now known for her work on the stage or in the media, or from gossip in the newspapers, or both. As she is alive and married still, I prefer to pull the curtain of mourning over something wonderful but so long dead.

At the end of September I returned to the demobilization centre and claimed a navy-blue pin-striped utility-style yet adequately stylish three-piece suit, as well as a mackintosh, and a trilby hat that was never worn. In my new guise, meeting George French for lunch in Manchester, we recalled the shin up Kedah Peak like two old sweats, which big event already seemed to have happened a century ago. The train back to Nottingham took a route through the most beautiful landscape of Derbyshire, on a track which no longer exists, seen between glimpses from Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham.

The final goodbye-date of service life, marked in my paybook, was the end of December, and before consigning the tattered booklet to oblivion the question had to be asked: What had I learned in the last four years? Morse, of course, and the facility for reading the music and secrets of the spheres for the rest of my life. In the matter of basic electricity, Ohms Law could never be forgotten, which in its absolute relevance said: ‘The current in a conductor is directly proportional to the applied voltage.’

Drill had been taken on board my body for ever, the ability to stand on my feet for hours and not fall down, which prepared me well for London cocktail parties at some unforeseeable time. I was able to live for the day and not fear unduly for the future, knowing by now what tricks it could play. To exist parsimoniously and by habit had never been a problem, and such basic attributes were to serve me well.

After seven years I was to be eased out of the world of aviation, on ‘ceasing to fulfil Royal Air Force physical requirements although fit for employment in civil life’ — as my discharge certificate said. The air force, through the Ministry of Pensions, would look after me for another decade, and the amusing circumstances of being ‘pensioned off at twenty-one did not allow me to feel in any way physically impaired.

As a reminder to remove myself as soon as was practicable from the country I obtained a passport, which gave my profession as ‘none’, pleasing me by its implication that I might be thought of as someone with a private income. Physical details stated that I had blue eyes, brown hair, and was five feet eight inches in height.

Chapter Twenty-five

Both brothers at school, and often out during the evening as well, the bedroom at home was mine all day to read and write in. I soon learned to disregard the hum and thump of industrial noise from the Raleigh factory at the end of the terrace, thirty-five yards away, or the squealing racket of kids under my window. I was fed for a pound a week, leaving ample from my three pounds eleven shillings to spend on books, postage, stationery and tobacco. The affair with Joyce went on for a while, though was soon to end because I had no intention of becoming engaged and then married.

Poems and stories came back from Argosy, Chambers’s Journal, the Poetry Review, Lilliput, The Listener, and London Opinion. Disappointed but undaunted, on the last day of 1949 I posted ‘No Shot in the Dark’ to the Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian, a story from Malaya about a pi-dog wandering around the wireless hut, which the operator intends to kill as a pest. When the animal is finally in the sights of his rifle he finds he can’t do it, though in the original incident the dog was shot. I worked hard on the story, and must have counted the 1,428 words as carefully as a radio operator totting up a rather long telegram.

Sometime in the autumn my cousins took me to a football match, on a Saturday afternoon when Notts County was playing Bristol City. Never having been to one before (or since), it was interesting as much for the observation of those standing around as for the misty tergiversations of the ball. A man close by could barely make out what was happening on the pitch, and seemed absolutely pole-axed when the local team lost, shuffling off at the final whistle in a dudgeon higher than Mount Everest, so that I hadn’t much hope for the peace of his family when he got home. A month or two afterwards I wrote a story called ‘Cock-eye’, later renamed ‘The Match’, in which the man beats his wife up so severely in his ire that she leaves him.

Books read included some by Arnold Bennett, and more Somerset Maugham, but also Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Insulted and the Injured, as well as the stories of Maupassant. In the classical mode I read Xenophon, Tacitus, Sophocles, Virgil and Lucian, punctuated by books of verse, Russian stories from Pushkin to Gorki, and Balzac’s Père Goriot, making a start at last on the continent of the great and the good, as much to populate the wilderness of my understanding as because the books were such a pleasure to consume.

Assuming that my experiences in Malaya might be interesting to others, I began a chronological account, dividing the series of ordinary events into chapters. I used sheets of lined foolscap for the first handwritten draft, then typed the material to a length of about 50,000 words.

Talking with Hales, in the office of his small hosiery wholesale firm, he suggested my joining the Nottingham Writers’ Club. His wife, the poet Madge Hales, whose book Pine Silence had just been published by the Fortune Press, was already a member. The club assembled monthly, and at the first gathering I took note of how a typescript for a publisher should be laid out, an advantage when in June 1950 I sent The Green Hills of Malaya to Edward Arnold Ltd in London.

I made contact about this time with Frederick, my father’s brother, the lace designer who in the early 1920s had taken his pantechnicon of unpaid-for furniture to London. In 1936 he had given up wife, children, and a good living as a designer of embroidery to return to Nottingham and become the artist he had always felt himself to be. Now going by the name of Silliter, as a precaution against any creditor who might still remember him, he occupied two small rooms as studio and living accommodation at the top of a rundown building in the middle of town.

An entirely self-made man, he had at one time been a Christadelphian (and a conscientious objector in the Great War) but he was now unfettered or unsupported by any creed. Full of enthralling reminiscences, he nevertheless guarded his time, and would not see me often. On one occasion he dismissed me with instructions to take from the library and read Savage Messiah (about the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska) and Age Cannot Wither, the story of the affair between Eleonora Duse and Gabriele d’Annunzio; as well as translations of Verlaine and Baudelaire.

In a relaxed mood he would talk for hours on the lives of great artists and their techniques, and about his own work and ideas, which he illustrated by taking from a shelf those large art tomes of the Phaidon series with their many reproductions. One of his favourite painters was John Constable, and a series of Silliter’s landscapes, now hanging on my wall, showed some influence.

As a young man he had studied Hebrew, and his familiarity with the Bible was remarkable. The skullcap perched on the back of his bald head suggested he might still be a student of the Holy Language. His collection of texts, concordances and commentaries on the two religions filled a bookcase, and he mentioned theologians I had never heard of, it being impossible for me to show interest in people from what then seemed a fusty and bygone age. Nevertheless, I was lucky to find such a man in the family, and maybe he was surprised and in some way gratified at meeting me.

His reiterated advice, as he leaned back in his chair, pushed the cheap spectacles up the bridge of his nose, and gave a leer which in him denoted knowingness and intelligence, amounted to this: ‘If you want to make money as a writer, which is the only indication of success, you’ve got to remember that what editors want is a good short story, but it must be “a slice of life”.’ This was hard for me to understand, since it seemed that every story must by its own definition be ‘a slice of life’, though I later saw more clearly what he meant.

He also told me, without spelling it out, that whoever wanted to know about the soul of a rebel had to study the Old Testament. Perhaps he only said this so as to stir my interest, because I hadn’t up to then informed him how much of it was already familiar to me.

A frail yet compact man of sixty-five, he had a girlfriend who was referred to as ‘my model’. She was thirty years younger, and called Sybil Cotton, a beautiful red-haired woman whose devotion lasted up to his death twenty years later.

Sometime in 1950 I called on Ronald Schlachter, and he took me around London for the day, and then home for a meal and to meet his father, a sympathetic and civilized person of German descent. Being told of my ambition as a writer, he encouraged me by saying it was a hard road to travel, but that I would no doubt succeed if I went on long enough, which at such a time was all I wanted to hear.

I had sufficient energy for cycling, walking, and rowing on the Trent, determined at whatever cost never to act the sick man or the convalescent. The study of books on trees and flowers enabled me to name whatever I looked at, and there was nothing I liked better than roaming the woods and fields, often with my brother Michael. My knowledge and love of music, for which I seemed to have a good ear, increased all the time, and I went to many concerts at the local Albert Hall where first-class orchestras performed, sometimes talking my way by the doorman into rehearsals.

Feeling the need for more varied company, I called now and again on my cousin Jack, who had been a friend almost since birth, and he was still the one sure thread with childhood. He did not see me perhaps as having changed too much, because he had always felt there was some difference between us. To vary my intense pursuit of culture I allowed him to talk me into joining the local yeomanry regiment, the South Nottinghamshire Hussars, and during my two months as a territorial soldier I put in one session at the rifle range, firing a few dozen rounds of my old favourite the Short Lee Enfield. On receiving notification from the barracks, addressed to Gunner A. Sillitoe, that I must take a medical examination before being formally accepted into the ranks, I assumed that the lack of a fully activated left lung could hardly allow an A1 classification, so let my membership drop. In any case, I had come to the conclusion that my joining days were over.

Without apparent occupation, and with no intention of looking for one, having a pension made it seem like being on paid leave for ever. On my walks through the town I would pick up a Times Literary Supplement from a shop by the Mechanics Institute, and take delight in the number of reviews there seemed to be on books with classical themes.

One morning I saw ‘Eddie the Tramp’, my uncle, coming out of the Empire Café opposite the newspaper offices carrying his bag of upholsterer’s tools. He wore the same mildewed cap and shabby raincoat, as if he had been born in them, but gave a welcoming smile at my greeting. The family saw him from time to time, and I had recently heard the story about him being warned off two young girls he had befriended. We talked for a while, and on asking if he needed any money he said no, because he was off to do a job and would get a quid or two there.

Every ten or fourteen days I went to a chest clinic — a name I hated — to get the upper part of me pumped full of air so that the lung could, like its owner, continue the life of idleness to which both were now fairly accustomed. Home from an excursion one day my mother told me that a health visitor had been to the house, to check that I was living in suitable conditions. This social worker intrusion into my privacy so enraged me that I sent a blistering letter to say that one had better not call again, which had its effect because none did.

In July a short story competition was held by the Nottingham Writers’ Club, and I entered one recently written called ‘The General’s Dilemma’, after shortening it to the stipulated length of two and a half thousand words. The judge was Ernest Ashley, a crime novelist who earned his living by writing. He gave it first prize, telling me it was so well written and original that nothing further need be done, and that I should try to get it published.

The story was about a symphony orchestra sent by train to play to the troops behind the front during a war based very much on a future interminable conflict between the West and Soviet Russia. The orchestra is captured in a surprise offensive by an Eastern (or ‘Gorshek’) general, who has standing orders to kill all prisoners no matter what their status. He makes the mistake of demanding that the orchestra play for him, and afterwards can’t make up his mind whether or not to have them executed, hesitation which leads to his downfall.

When The Green Hills of Malaya came back I sent it to another publisher. Shortly afterwards the Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian wrote to say that they had accepted ‘No Shot in the Dark’. The full-page story appeared on 26th August, and with the one-and-a-half guinea payment I bought a biscuit barrel as a wedding present for my sister Peggy.

Though happy to have a story printed so early, I could not regard it as much of a success, since the venue was only local. I wanted to be published by newspapers and magazines in London, unable to realize how many years were to go by before such became possible. Nor did I care for the embarrassment of being known as a writer by the people of the district I lived in, and not entirely because an old school friend teased me at seeing my photograph boxed in the middle of the story and captioned: ‘The Author’. I wanted to travel, and obtain that detachment from such an environment which I knew to be necessary.

I sent ‘The General’s Dilemma’ out several times, but with no success. Of many other stories nothing remains but their titles: ‘The Return of the Crave’, ‘Lucky to be Alive’, ‘The Queer Type’, ‘Dark Stairway’, and ‘The Last Compartment’. I tried my luck with a total of eighty items up to February 1951, after which I stopped taking note.

Writing for writing’s sake, I had no set purpose beyond getting published, the only aim being to convince myself I was a writer, which was no great difficulty, since there was nothing else I could be, and to go on until readers thought the same. Small as my income was, I had no idea of earning a living by writing, though knew it would be pleasant to get money from it if I could. Having turned out a book-length manuscript about Malaya, I wanted to start on a novel, and saw nothing to deter me. World events of the time hardly impinged, though when the Korean War began on 25th June I was interested enough to follow the campaign on maps from the Madrolle guidebook Chine du Nord, picked up for a shilling at Frank Wore’s.

My reading for 1950 took in the remainder of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev. I read Flaubert, Gogol, some of Zola, more Balzac, and made a start on Dickens. During the winter I took a course of WEA classes on the modern English novel, reading Graham Greene and E. M. Forster (including his Aspects of the Novel). D. H. Lawrence was also discussed, and I went on to read most of his novels and stories, as well as poems, letters and two biographies. His work was a revelation in showing that great fiction could be written with a local setting, and one that I knew so well.

I pursued my way through Lord Derby’s translation of The Iliad, Pope’s Odyssey, the Dialogues of Plato, and the plays of Euripides, as well as Apuleius and the Histories of Herodotus. The Everyman Smaller Classical Dictionary was culled from end to end for the construction of genealogical diagrams connecting the gods, goddesses and heroes of antiquity, until I was able to recite from memory their crimes, proclivities and misadventures. It was a pageant-like amalgam of geography, history, dramatic folklore and poetry, and philosophical conundrums made plain by reading, an old strange world coming so alive that it wasn’t so much strange anymore as merely a separate recreation ground that the imagination could play in.

I read more Shakespeare, enjoyed Don Quixote, and continued with the Bible, a rate of reading that went on for the next few years, though indeed it has never stopped. When little of importance remained unread I turned back to certain books a second or third time, as well as picking up the few that had been missed. It was self-evident that you could not become a writer unless you had read everything, and learned what you could in the process.

I made some remarks in a letter to a schoolteacher friend about Raskolnikov’s Siberian dream in Crime and Punishment, suggesting that D. H. Lawrence had been influenced by it when he wrote St Mawr, in which there is a similar apocalyptic vision of the night. This letter led him to ask whether I had thought of going to university, because as an ex-serviceman it would not be difficult to get a grant. The notion seemed attractive, but the obligatory study of Latin for six months or so in order to pass the entrance examination decided me against it. I lacked the urge to go in that direction, another instinctive negative never to be regretted. Perhaps I declined out of laziness, though if I’d had Latin already I might have been willing to cut myself off from the world for three years.

My uncle suggested looking around a small and grubby secondhand bookshop as yet unknown to me. The proprietor, Paul Henderson, had in his younger days been a writer, and he told me with some pride that one short story had earned him what to me seemed the enormous sum of fifty pounds. On gloomy afternoons we sat in his back room talking about books and writers, drinking coffee, and warmed by a smelly paraffin stove.

Paul and his wife kept open house on Saturday night, and people came to talk about what they were reading (or writing), such authors as John dos Passos, Hemingway, Sartre and Camus. Or we listened to classical music, and were generously provided with coffee and sandwiches at a time when extra food was not easy to find.

During that hard winter fuel was also difficult to obtain, and I did my share at home by going to various depots for coal or coke. You were restricted to a quarter of a hundredweight at each place, and had to stand half frozen in a queue to get it. I also helped my uncle, for he hardly had the frame to carry much.

Taking my father’s local election poll card from the shelf one day, I went up the street to vote in his place. Nottingham, like everywhere else at that time, was a depressing town. Food was rationed, though the war had ended five years ago, and people were complaining that even a Labour government was unjustified in keeping such scarcities going. Perhaps it was this that caused me to place a cross next to the name of the Conservative candidate, though I don’t suppose he was elected. It may also have been done as a kind of joke against my father, but whatever the reason, my political views were, to say the least, in a state of uncertainty — if it could be said that I had any at all.

On a gloomy afternoon in late autumn I met Ruth Fainlight in the bookshop. After the introduction Paul closed up and drove us into town to have tea at a café. Ruth was a nineteen-year-old American poet, who I thought was Canadian, though I don’t know why, for she had no accent. She had come to Nottingham with her husband, but we fell in love, and began to see each other as often as possible.

Chapter Twenty-six

Sitting in an unheated bedroom in November meant no hardship, since the theme of my novel was of a temperature to keep even a Hottentot warm. I could hardly have gone out of the house for seventeen days, which time it took for the first pen and ink draft of 100,000 words to be written. On 16 January 1951, less than three months from start to finish, which included typing, retyping, and a certain amount of revision, the 400-odd pages were squeezed into two new spring-backed folders and sent as a parcel, with return postage, to a publishing firm which had announced a competition for new novels.

After a quick re-reading of the handwritten version forty years later I can only hope the final typescript was some improvement. Paul Henderson saw it, as did Ruth, but their comments were not positive, and I see why. The story opens with John Landor, modelled perhaps on me, in so far as I was able at that time to know myself, coming home after three years in the army. During that period his mother’s last letter had promised a further one that never arrived, which was to make dreadful revelations about his father, Ralph, who was some kind of businessman. On the first day home John visits Larry, a character who seemed to have been suggested by my friend John Moult, and they sit in a pub discussing the possible contents of the missing letter.

The next chapter described John’s visit to his Aunt Rhoda, who lives in the country (strong echoes of The White Peacock here) and who also intimates sinister behaviour on his father’s part in connection with his mother’s death. John’s old girlfriend Helen is now an art student, and on meeting in the local gallery their conversation is full of callow intellectual chit-chat. Helen takes painting lessons from an opinionated artist called Tom Ransom, based as much on my Uncle Frederick as Helen is on Sybil his girlfriend, and in his studio they talk endlessly in a very faux-Aldous Huxley fashion:

‘In a way, though,’ said John, ‘I like to believe in immortality, but mainly in that of the Greek religion. I like to think that when I die, someone will put a gold coin between my teeth, so that Charon can take my fare when he rows me across the Styx into Hades. I like the Greek religion altogether. As far as I’m concerned, Homer is my bible. The Iliad and Odyssey. The Greek religion is romantic, it is sheer poetry, not sombre like the Christian religion. When I think of God I like to imagine Zeus sitting laughing on Olympus, looking at the antics of the world with one eye, and keeping the other anxiously on Troy and Agamemnon.’

Then: ‘I believe too much in freedom to be sympathetic to communism, though maybe I could believe in it if I was the absolute boss.’ And: ‘In order to eliminate wars we have to get rid of the surplus population by some means of perfect birth control, educate people into having only two children per family.’ And, lastly: ‘People worship God out of pity for Him, not because they need love and guidance.’ And much more of the same kind.

One evening John sees his father in town with a strange woman, suspects him of having pursued an affair with her throughout his mother’s illness. On getting home — this part of the yarn turning very Dostoevsky — he finds his favourite kitten dead, and is convinced his father killed it in a fit of homicidal madness.

The plot begins to sicken, rather than thicken. An account of listening to Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony at a concert has overtones of E. M. Forster, though only in so far as to indicate that nothing has been learned from him. John also has an association with a girl called Ada who works in a hosiery factory. She shows understandable irritation at his self-indulgent talk, her character being the composite of my pre-service girlfriends.

The title By What Road, a phrase lifted from Sir Edwin Arnold’s version of the Bhagavad-Gita, indicates the uncertain direction of the story, but the upshot is that John’s father is given to having sexual intercourse with his wife’s corpse in the graveyard. Moira, his girlfriend, has long been trying to cure him of the habit, but in the end Ralph kills her, and hangs himself. Such a vainglorious mish-mash of terminal horror leads me to wonder whether I read about a case of necrophilia at the time, or if it had been discussed at the Hendersons’, and if so why was it used as the theme of my novel?

Such an avalanche of pages can only be put down to an unbridled Stakhanovite determination to concoct a novel at any price. The mechanism employed was, simply, to begin, and then let rip with whatever thoughts or people came to hand. One situation gave birth to another, with dire results, each character dragging in someone else in conditions of maximum anguish and forcing them also to participate in the progress of the juggernaut.

It must have been on a day off from the fabrication of By What Road that Ruth and I visited Alderman Willie Hopkin at Eastwood. Now nearly ninety, he had been a friend of the young D. H. Lawrence, and I was interested, even eager, to know anything about the great writer. Hopkin had responded kindly to our letter with an invitation to tea, and we sat on the top deck of a trolley bus through the twelve miles of a bleak November landscape of head-stocks and pit villages to get there.

For a couple of hours he answered our questions, and talked about ‘Bert’ as if he still lived around the corner. We had read most of Lawrence’s work, as well as some biographies, so kept the conversation going, while Hopkin added many details, and told anecdotes about the young writer and his friends. Some account of the meeting went into a notebook, which has since disappeared.

At the beginning of April 1951 I went to stay at my Aunt Amy’s cottage near Aylesham in Kent. Her coalminer husband, Richard Richardson, known for some reason in the family as ‘Mimic’, had been killed a few years before on his motorbike, she being injured in the same accident. Four of her eight children were still at home, though now grown up, and I was generously fed and looked after during my stay.

Neither gas nor electricity in the house, I wrote by the light of an oil lamp in one of the bedrooms, left as much to myself as I cared to be, though sometimes going for a walk or a drink with one of my cousins. They were helping to repair and paint old woodwork in the village church, which they still attended on Sunday, having been in the choir as children — a strange life to someone who had grown up even below the religion line.

I met the vicar on my way to the post office one day, a handsome angular-bodied man of about fifty who wore spectacles. During a recent sojourn in hospital his dog had died, and he had since written its life story in verse so as to remember their friendship. ‘I used one long and two shorts for the rhythm.’

I put on a suitably erudite expression, yet wondered if he was testing me. ‘Oh yes, dactylic hexameter, if there were six feet to one line.’

‘That was it,’ he smiled, ‘but whose metre was that?’

‘Homer’s?’ I suggested. He queried whether the village of Nonnington had inspired any poems, at which I supposed my cousins had said something about me. ‘Not so far, but it may one day,’ I said.

I saw the films Samson and Delilah and Pygmalion in Canterbury, and from the public library in Dover took out books by James Joyce, Stephen Spender and Karel Capek, as well as Walter Raleigh’s Style and A Treatise on the Novel by Robert Liddell. Poems went to Outposts, but with no luck. The countryside was in the full cool flush of spring, and I walked in fields and woods that were coloured with anemones and celandines, violets and primroses, wood sorrel and forget-me-nots.

One of my cousins worked at a farm, and I helped him — not very successfully — to milk the cows. The family’s brute of a bull terrier called Major had to be exercised, and I got into trouble when it grabbed someone’s pet mongrel and half killed it. Another day it charged salivating across a field after a cluster of sheep and nearly got shot by the justifiably irate farmer.

A group of poems, and ‘The General’s Dilemma’, came back from World Review. To console myself I ploughed stolidly through USA by John dos Passos, read David Gascoyne’s Short History of Surrealism, and C. Day Lewis’s work. I wrote more poems, and a couple of stories, sending poems to The Listener, and ‘The General’s Dilemma’ to Orpheus. The Song of Solomon seemed good to read while in our letters Ruth and I were planning to meet in Folkestone.

Macbeth, and extracts from Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer were read on the Third Programme, my aunt’s wireless powered by an accumulator. I despatched a story to Chambers’s Journal, and received ‘The General’s Dilemma’ back from John Lehmann, who turned out to be the editor of Orpheus, saying that he liked the story but unfortunately the magazine was closing for lack of money.

On 14th May I started The Deserters, a novel which had nothing of the macabre straight-from-the-head fantasy of By What Road, though there were similarities in that a slightly older man than John Landor, now called Brian Selby, comes back from the war and gets entangled in the local bohemian society, my artist-uncle and his girlfriend again being prominent. Other characters, however, were more believable, and there was less pseudo-philosophical verbiage.

In our letters Ruth and I discussed leaving England, south seeming the only direction. On 19th May By What Road was rejected, and I realize now that no editorial reader could have gone beyond the first page, there being so few promising features that anyone would have been justified in thinking that whoever had written such embarrassing rubbish would never succeed as a writer. Even if I had worked over a dozen more drafts in as many years the result could only have been an undistinguished first novel from someone who was unlikely to produce anything further. Knowing this at the time, I had the sense not to send it out again. In any case I had done 120 first-draft pages of The Deserters, and by the end of May the novel had grown to 55,000 words.

Ruth and I made our tryst in Folkestone, and stayed a few days at Mrs Tryon’s boarding house. It was a time of Whitsun heatwave, and we walked seven miles along the clifftops to Dover, reading Matthew Arnold on the celebrated beach. Afterwards we explored the Stalingrad-like ruins still left from the war, and in the afternoon enjoyed the film version of Rattigan’s Separate Tables.

Nottingham seemed dead when I returned at the beginning of June, existence pointless without Ruth, even the convivial evenings at the Hendersons’ a desolation in her absence. I sometimes called to see Paul, and we would talk with knowledgeable Noel Dilks, a dwarfish fifty-year-old with long grey hair who sold secondhand sheet music and musical instruments in a shop just up the road. He had been writing a play for years, perhaps decades, with only Anglo-Saxon-based words, a rigidity which bemused me, for it was like using only a small part of a wonderfully flexible tool. Excerpts read one night at the Hendersons’ sounded fluent and pure, but I couldn’t get much sense as to what it was about, only recalling that one of the characters went by the name of Philadamus. Noel lived alone in a council house on the edge of town, and when he died a few years later his theatrical masterpiece was thrown on to the rubbish dump — as were nearly all my Uncle Frederick’s paintings after his girlfriend died.

Ruth and I arranged to meet for the day in Hastings and, though both of us arrived at the set time, we failed to see each other, as if Fate had taken a hand against us. Circling the clock tower, calling again at bus and train station, endlessly reconnoitring the stony beach, and rechecking the letter to make sure of the time and place, we must have stalked each other’s shadow in the sun just too far behind — or in front — to make the longed-for contact.

Bewildered and cursing, I went back to Nottingham, for a week of solitary walks to burn my anger off. I sat on the bank of the sluggish Trent and wrote a poem called ‘Exfiltration’, about electrical powerlines criss-crossing the fields, that hadn’t existed when traipsed over with Peggy and our siblings a dozen years before.

On 25th August my rather contrived story ‘Two Ways of Thunder’ was published in the Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian. A few-hundred-words description of ‘Mountain Jungle’ was printed in the Scribe, the magazine of the Nottingham Writers’ Club. My first poem was taken by the Royal Air Force’s Association annual magazine (for which half a guinea was paid) concerning the somewhat mystical thoughts of a man in radio contact with an aeroplane going on a long journey over the sea, signed not in my name but as ‘wireless operator’.

In September my Aunt Edith’s sons, Ernie and Arthur, called on me wanting to borrow a map so that they could plan a route around the Eastwood area to go ‘tatting’ in their fifteen-hundredweight lorry. They asked me to come along, the idea being to walk the streets of various mining towns pushing leaflets through doors asking for scrap iron, and explaining that we would call later to see if any was forthcoming. We thought it hilarious when, after knocking on a door and asking a grizzle-haired shirtless collier — looking much like Morel in Sons and Lovers — if he had any old rubbish, he answered fiercely: ‘Ah! Tek me!’ — and slammed the door in our faces before we could take him at his word.

Ruth and I met now and again, otherwise exchanging letters, which often included stories and poems. I was reading Ibsen, Chaucer and Aristophanes, Ovid, Thucydides and Lucretius, and for lighter matter the novels of Richard Aldington. I wrote such stories as ‘The Fall of the Cliff’, ‘The Major’, and ‘Mr Sing’, which did not survive, but also ‘Blackcurrant’ and ‘A Bad ’Un’, later ploughed into Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. A poem was accepted by a magazine called Prospect, and then came the news that my pension would continue until late in 1953. I unsuccessfully applied for the job of editing a magazine put out by the Raleigh Bicycle Company, called The Raleighgram.

Soon to leave Nottingham, it would be necessary to travel light, so I sold most of my books. I grew a moustache, which somehow made me look younger, and in October hitch-hiked around Cornwall, with The Way of All Flesh in my pocket, and a piece of old map from Langar for navigation. The idea was to find a cheap chalet or cottage in which Ruth and I might live for the winter, but either nothing was suitable, or I couldn’t make up my mind on the few houses shown.

Later in the year a yarn called ‘Christmas Treaty’ went to the Observer short story competition, based on an incident at my grandparents’ cottage before the war. The influence of D. H. Lawrence, both in subject and style, was overwhelming, and the prize was rightly awarded to Muriel Spark.

At the end of October Ruth saw an advertisement in The Lady for an unfurnished house to let at forty-eight pounds a year near Menton in the Alpes Maritimes. The estate on which it stood was owned by an Italian called Corbetta, who had an English wife, and when we went to their house in Kensington to be vetted we not only persuaded them of our married state but lied that we had enough income to take on the place for a year.

I had saved some money, though not much, and had to borrow here and there to make up the first quarter’s rent, our train fares down, and something to live on. Corbetta said he would be going at the same time, and provide us with a few sticks of furniture from the attics of the main villa, which would save us having to sleep on the floor. The travel allowance of fifty pounds per person per year was hardly sufficient for any stretch of time, but we couldn’t imagine lasting for more than six months anyway on our resources, and decided that when the money ran out we would skip the rest of the year’s lease and come back to England.

I burned stories, articles, poems, as well as a couple of notebooks and many first drafts — hard to say why, for they could have been left safely enough at home. Perhaps in a primitive way I wanted to signal the importance of the break about to take place. Or maybe to sacrifice something rough yet precious to the gods for the promise of a safe journey and eventual return which, I could hardly have known, would not be for six years.

Stories not put into the conflagration were ‘The Fishing Boat Picture’, about a postman whose estranged wife keeps coming back to his house and borrowing the picture so that she can pawn it and get money for booze. I also kept ‘Uncle Ernest’, based on my Uncle Eddie (the Tramp) and his disastrous friendship with two young girls, as well as ‘The Match’, my one and only football story.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Ruth and I had acquired a kitten known as Nell and, not wanting to leave her behind, mocked up a passport, made her a travelling box into which we threw a raw herring, and took her with us to France. After the steamer trunk was booked through to Menton, and the rest of our suitcases — plus the cat box — was wheelbarrowed on board by a porter at Newhaven, we went into the saloon for a three-course lunch, thus missing the standard ‘Last of England’ vision, painted and written about so many times, as the boat chopped its way out of the harbour.

It was 10 January 1952, and The Flying Enterprise was foundering in the North Atlantic, heaving waves doing their storm-force best to stuff Great Britain up the Skagerrak. Such unfriendly turbulence made me sick the whole five hours across, the first time any sea had done so, a spectacular throwing-up to Dieppe being my no doubt colourful version of ‘The Last of England’, which after all came out in spite of myself, except for the part of it I cared to hang on to by the time the coast of France was visible through the lashing rain, which didn’t seem to be much.

It was the kind of day when minutes were only of value after they had gone by, sensibility fairly void till the train steamed into Paris. We saw our trunk through the customs, then followed a porter with the rest of our luggage to a bus for the Gare d’Austerlitz.

France was strangely familiar, and in the third-class carriage we got what sleep was possible sitting upright. Dazed and in love, imagining she was mine at last and I was hers, we leaned against each other, fair hair and dark, blue eyes and brown, on one level too exhausted to care about what we were undertaking, but on another every impression was sharp and welcome. One lives for the moment at such an age, as if each is an encapsulated raindrop having to change its shape — and in the nature of things it always did — before drying up.

In the morning there was a dining-car breakfast of brioche and croissant, butter and toast, and good coffee after the wartime acorn dust of England. The sky was blue above sharply drawn and ashy-coloured mountains, and the sea didn’t stop till reaching Africa: a transition total and sublime. Lemon and orange trees were in full fruit, and there were clouds of deep yellow mimosa, tricolour fields of carnations close to the railway, neat stations and exotic towns noted on the map in my out of date Blue Guide. The awakening was almost as different as that on the troopship five years before on steaming through the Suez Canal, except that now I was not alone.

Luggage remained at the station so that we could shop for bread, milk and sugar, then walk the short way out of Menton to the gate of the Corbetta estate on the Avenue Cernuschi. The concierge gave us the key to the house, and advised us to cut off the hairpin bends of the cart track by ascending flights of narrow steps with a low stone wall to either side, taking us up the hundred-metre height through eucalyptus, pine, red-berried arbutus bushes, and flowered mimosa trees with their overpowering scent.

The stone-built house, called ‘Le Nid’, was in an olive grove, and had five small rooms, with a grape vine over the door which was to give luscious fruit in late summer. We went out to gather wood, and in a short time stood before a fire drinking tea. The cat lapped at bread and milk, then went to explore its new surroundings. Later in the day I borrowed a handcart from the concierge, and manoeuvred our cases and trunk up the hairpin bends, back to our nest that was cold indeed when sunlight faded from the trees.

Corbetta hadn’t arrived as planned, for his wife had been taken ill on the motor trip down, so in our empty kitchen-living room we pushed trunk and cases together, spread sheets and blankets on top, as well as a hammock which wouldn’t be possible to use till the weather became warmer, and managed to get some sleep. On the third morning we woke from our uneven platform to see a few centimetres of snow over the grass.

An outside staircase led to the upper rooms, and in bad weather one needed a raincoat to go to bed. There was electric light, as well as a fireplace for heat and cooking in the living room. To keep the blaze going I chopped mimosa boughs from a nearby thicket, and we stripped bark from eucalyptus trunks for kindling, filling the living room with smoky fragrance. Water for all purposes came from a pump a couple of hundred yards away, opposite the main villa, and on drawing the first bucket in the morning tiny green frogs fell from the iron spout and hopped across the gravel to nearby bushes, returning to their favourite damp ground after we had gone.

When Corbetta arrived he provided some furniture, but the weather continued damp and cold, downpours as heavy as in the monsoons I had known. One night twenty people were killed on a neighbouring hill, their houses carried away by landslides. It was a fight for survival, anticipated in the kind of goods we had brought with us, yet not quite imagined in the reality, as little ever can be. A telegram came from Ruth’s mother enquiring after our safety.

Not able to afford meat — and I couldn’t stand the thought of horse flesh, though it was quite cheap — we lived mostly on fruit and vegetables, with the occasional egg or herring mixed into a dish of rice. Women selling produce on the pavement outside the market hall by the Old Town gave us good weight, and sometimes put extra vegetables into our basket if we arrived at the end of the morning. We stood in line for stale bread at the baker’s, on days when it was sold at half price.

Someone told us that if we went to Ventimiglia, ten miles inside Italy, people at the station would ask us to change lire into francs, which only foreigners could do on their passports at the bank. In return we were given enough commission to cover our fares, as well as buy pasta, Parmesan cheese, tomato paste and tins of jam. This was a great help to our eating, but after a few weeks the law was changed so that it could no longer be done. On the day we discovered this the young Italian through whom the transactions had taken place told us that if we purchased a ladies’ watch, from a friend of his, we would be able to sell it for twice as much in France.

With the elegant little timepiece in my pocket we walked the fourteen kilometres home, through the finest scenery on the Riviera. The weather was warm, and every flower in bloom, with oranges and lemons on the trees. The route, by the Hanbury Gardens, was the old Roman road between France and Italy, formerly traversed by such notables as Catherine of Siena, Machiavelli and Napoleon Bonaparte. On another day’s ramble we reached the mountain village of St Agnes, where the café proprietor would not let us pay for our glasses of wine.

Visiting Monte Carlo to dispose of our ladies’ watch, we found that no shop would touch it without the required customs clearance certificate, and so we lost some of what had been gained on our money-changing trips, though the watch was good for a few years on Ruth’s wrist. I went into the casino to see the gaming tables, but only as an observer, Ruth having to stay outside because her passport showed she was not yet twenty-one.

The Exchange Control Commission in England, on being informed that I was an ex-serviceman living abroad for reasons of health, allowed my pension to be sent to France as it fell due, thus giving no more worry about travel allowance restrictions. I also convinced the Ministry of Pensions that my move to Menton was for reasons of health, so they agreed to pay for my artificial pneumothorax injections through the British Consular Service.

The local doctor who gave them put me in touch with the English wife of Doctor Schelbaum, who invited us to her Sunday teas, where we met some of the local residents. She also signed a card for us to use the English library in the town, and The Magic Mountain started me on a run through other novels by Thomas Mann. We had brought some Grey Walls Press publications from England, a few Penguin books and poetry anthologies, The Burnt Child (a newly published novel by the Swedish writer Stig Dagerman), Herbert Read’s Knapsack, a Shakespeare and, of course, my Bible.

A chalet, in a more remote part of the estate, was rented by an English writer and painter, Robert Culff, who also lived on little, but we spent some agreeable evenings, talking over makeshift suppers and a glass or two of wine. In warmer weather a German painter, Gowa, rented the tower of the main villa, and his friend Ilse Steinhoff, a literary agent from Paris, stayed there as well for a while.

Since arriving in France I had written Man Without a Home, a novel of 70,000 words, about a young English painter living on the Cote d’Azur who is drawn so deeply into the local expatriate community of elderly people that he is spiritually destroyed by it and has to flee back to the safe anonymity of his bedsitter in London. Ilse Steinhoff liked this, as well as my story ‘Uncle Ernest’, and took both to Paris to try and get them published.

The Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian accepted two articles about expatriate life on the Riviera, which brought in a few guineas, and my poem ‘New World’ came out in the little magazine Prospect, as well as two short pieces about Menton in the Scribe, needle-pricks of publication sufficient to keep hope going. Ruth was also writing poems and stories: we had pens, paper and a typewriter, and managed to put money by for postage and international response coupons. I did more work on The Deserters, so that even the coolest look backwards suggests that when youth and industry are harmoniously functioning hope becomes a natural part of the equation.

On summer evenings we cooked supper against a wall outside, and when it got dark sat in the house writing, or reading, or studying French grammar. We laughed a great deal, especially when I put on a D. H. Lawrence act, pillorying the worst of his turgid Plumed Serpent style, and talking to Ruth in a mock-Nottinghamshire accent. We called it ‘playing Bert and Frieda’, and also made fun of two over-artistic characters in a novel with the title No Peace Among the Olives.

The only noise around the house, apart from the rusty-pump braying of donkeys going up the nearby track into the mountains, came from an Aristophelian chorus of bullfrogs which in no sense diminished our feeling of living, albeit frugally, in a kind of paradise. We washed our clothes in an abandoned laundering trough in a hidden dip of the estate, then took advantage of its cold fresh water to bathe ourselves when no one was about. Mosquitoes were a nuisance in the hot weather, but they did not bite me. Had they done so, we joked, they would have zig-zagged away coughing. For Ruth, who was more to their taste, we had brought an army mosquito net from England.

A Nottingham tyre manufacturer, Mr Boak, who had heard of me from Hales, sent a note to the house asking me to call at the Royal Westminster Hotel in town, where he and his wife were staying on holiday. After a meal and a cigar he handed me, on leaving, a five pound note, which covered the cost of our food for nearly a fortnight. He and his wife Dolly later sent a sumptuous parcel of provisions, also containing a box of cigarettes. Ruth’s aunt despatched clothes and good things to eat from America, while my sisters Peggy and Pearl, as well as my mother, provided the occasional consignment of tea, powdered milk and tinned food.

Autumn came with storms and chill rain, but I had no wish to go back to England for greater comfort, which did not necessarily exist for me there in any case. My feeling was to remain where I was, and manage as best I could, as if more adventures and revelations would come by staying on the Continent.

Ruth decided to leave, mainly to try and get a divorce from her husband, and I was in no fair state of mind to ask her not to go, especially since we both thought she would perhaps come back when the divorce business was finished. After seeing her off from the station in the morning I went back to the house, and gloomily empty it seemed now that I had it to myself. In the afternoon, ever the conscientious advocate of the tidy billet, if not exactly domesticated, I swept the floors, cleaned the windows, and washed the towels. In the evening I lit a fire to cook supper, then put in some work on The Deserters.

When Robert Culff and the Corbettas went back to England, and Gowa departed for Germany, I had the estate more or less to myself. Between work I roamed around like a man of the woods, though kept my hair short by sufficient visits to the barber, and never went down to the town unless in good clothes and wearing a tie. As far as was possible I followed a routine, much as an old soldier might, and cooked a simple meal every evening.

A concierge guarded the estate at the main gate down on the avenue, and a caretaker lived with his family in a small bungalow near the main villa. Madame Boeri, the housewife, was a dark little woman who had two pretty daughters, and I suppose she took pity on what was thought to be my lonesome state, for she would occasionally appear at the door with a steaming dish of something good in her hands, which saved me cooking for a day or two.

A crop of succulent-seeming mushrooms grew in the meadow behind the house, and I plucked a dozen to cut up and fry in olive oil for supper. Quite soon after eating I was spectacularly sick, stricken throughout the night till nothing was left in my stomach, proof perhaps of an organism healthy enough to jettison whatever poison had been imbibed, though at certain moments it felt as if a Roman and lonely death might be on the cards. The experience made me realize that, after a Lucullan feast at the Borgias, those able to belch must have done so with smiles of more than ordinary relief.

By now I had written 250 pages of The Deserters. Ilse Steinhoff asked for more Nottingham stories, so I posted ‘Saturday Night’, about a barman’s view of a Bacchanalian working men’s booze-up, and ‘Blackcurrant’, concerning a black West African soldier who spends Christmas with a rough Nottingham family, and at the end of his stay begins to wonder whether or not they can be considered civilized.

In the same letter Ilse told me that someone in Paris, after reading ‘Man Without a Home’, had remarked that I was ‘a gifted writer’, causing me to hope that my luck was about to turn. In a further letter she wrote that the editor of Carrefour, a magazine which printed work by leading French writers, had asked for ‘Uncle Ernest’ to be translated so that it could be brought out the following year. She was also trying to get ‘Man Without a Home’ published in France, Germany or England. No one ran down those hundred or so steps with more hope than me, to see if there was any mail in the little tin box bolted to the gate on the road.

Long letters passed between me and Ruth, she also sending books, a little money now and again, newspapers and, on one occasion, two pair of shoes. English tobacco went into my pipe when it could be found, and I smoked an occasional cigar. Sometimes bored even with reading, elaborate red and black plans of imaginary cities were devised on the typewriter. I was learning how long twenty-four hours could be when living alone in an isolated place, but one day on the beach I made friends with Brenda Muldon, a fair and interesting young woman who worked at the Foreign Office. She was having a fortnight’s holiday with a French family, and after taking her to see the house where Katherine Mansfield had stayed in Garavan she came back to my place for tea.

A poetry reading was advertised in the library, to be given by Stan Noyes, a young American later to publish a novel based on his experiences in rodeo. He drove a car, and lived with his wife and child in a furnished villa in Nice. Also in the audience were John and Dorothy Tarr, John being about sixty and recently retired from the Monotype Corporation. He had published many articles, and a book called Printing Today, as well as several manuals on how to write Chancery script. During the years I was to know him he was working, though so slowly that progress was almost invisible, on a project called The History of Printed Letters.

As far as I know he had never been a member of the Communist Party, but vociferous left-wing views led him to refer to George Orwell as a traitor to the working class (whatever that’s supposed to be, I thought) for having written Animal Farm, though I told him the book made good enough sense to me. Later he would be infuriated when I teased him by saying that anyone who went on strike should be shot, which of course I didn’t believe.

Brought up as a Roman Catholic — one of his sisters was a nun — he was militantly anti-religion, which occasionally made his talk tedious. Later in Spain he took some interest in church affairs even if only, from his insider’s knowledge, to say more outrageous things about it. While still in France, he seemed much bemused by the fact that I was re-reading the Jewish Scriptures — from a Bible given to me at school.

Dorothy, a dark-haired bird-like woman ten years younger than John, had written a novel, yet bitterly resented his extravagance in spending the enormous sum of sixty pounds to have his library sent from London. Apart from John’s pension, extra income came from letting out rooms of their house in Kensington.

My allowance was sometimes late coming through, and the food intake had to be reduced. Ruth would send, illegally, an emergency pound note rolled in a New Statesman, or I would get food on credit from a small shop on the main road, rather surprised that they trusted me. By the middle of December I had no stationery, and used the backs of bookjackets to write a story called ‘Canning Circus’, later to become part of a chapter in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

John and Dorothy, who lived in a rented flat, were friendly with a Russian-born man called Nick Nicholas, and his English wife Muriel. They took in boarders, and I had Christmas dinner there, paying the same nominal fee as the residents, enjoying my first glasses of vodka. Muriel had written a novel about her pre-war college life in England, which had a vaguely lesbian theme. Nick was in his fifties, a naturalized Englishman, of medium height and with steely blue eyes, who had spent twenty years as an officer in the Merchant Navy. He made violins as a hobby in a workshop behind the house, and drove a large black Jaguar.

He gave me his memoirs to read (everyone seemed to be writing or to have written a book) and in the chapters about life in Odessa before the Revolution I found certain passages questionable because they implied that the Jews of that time had left Russia voluntarily and not as a result of pogroms, and that the pogroms had in any case been greatly exaggerated. This I knew to be different, and John to his credit thought the same, though in saying so our remarks were brushed aside with a sly kind of humour.

Meanwhile in my solitude at Le Nid I read George Eliot’s novels, and went slowly through the single volume edition of Frazer’s Golden Bough, while François Mauriac’s Thérèse left me depressed. In almost every letter to Ruth I tried to persuade her to come back and live with me, but already in December I was thinking of going to Majorca, the Tarrs having left for Barcelona on their way there.

Ilse Steinhoff wrote to say that Carrefour wanted stories dealing with football, so I sent ‘The Match’, saved from the flames before leaving England. Around this time I wrote ‘The Criminals’, about a woman in Nottingham taking a hot bath and drinking gin in order to get an abortion.

By January 1953 seven stories, six poems and a novel were going the rounds, efforts which filled me with sufficient expectation to go on writing. Three stories were to become part of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning some years later, and these, I knew, had a surer touch of style than much of the other writing, as well as possessing that ‘slice of life’ which my Uncle Frederick had said my work must have before editors would show any interest. The themes were close to the people I had lived among, but about whom I felt as if looking across a deep chasm, at an existence which Fate had steered me away from. The rest of my writing, necessarily persisted in, was a cul de sac, but one in which accumulated a mass of material as humus out of which my true voice would eventually emerge, though I was not to know that at the time.

The last four months in Menton were a rollercoaster of misery and elation. On dank late autumn and winter evenings I sat in my warm and shuttered living room, well fed after supper, smoking contentedly, and reading, or writing at something or other. When the wind was still, silence was complete, sooner or later disturbed by the purr of the cat on her jumping to my knees, the scratch of my pen, the turn to a new page, or an involuntary cough from myself, otherwise a room void of sound — until the newly rising wind was strong enough to shake the trees in the olive grove. For a year I heard no music, a malnutrition of the soul unrealized at the time, but in all respects it was ever true, as Robert Burton wrote in his incomparable The Anatomy of Melancholy, that ‘fishes pine away for love and wax lean,’ and ‘love tyrannizeth in dumb creatures’.

Despair that struck would be made plain in the current letter to Ruth, but the tone was generally softened by the end. Stuck in a box in the middle of nowhere, and hardly knowing why, I was more alive than I had ever been, because that was where I lived and where I had no alternative except to be. Ruth was my lifeline, and suffered an avalanche of nearly eighty letters spilling from a rite of passage which, like all Fate’s turns of the wheel, was known to be necessary, and certainly not wasted — as one sees afterwards that nothing ever is.

Ruth did not know when she would be able to come back, so having money for my fare after weeks of frugality, I decided to go to Majorca. John and Dorothy Tarr, installed in a fully furnished villa for six pounds a month near the port of Soller, advised me to move there as well, since living was half the cost of France.

Hard to say how it happened, but there wasn’t enough luggage to hold all my goods, so I borrowed tools from the concierge and made a large wooden chest, complete with locks and handles. It was a job I enjoyed, thinking I might at last have inherited something from my clever-handed father. Apart from this, I had a steamer trunk, a large pigskin suitcase bought in Malaya, my faithful Remington typewriter, and Nell in her box to be carried by hand. For some reason I was unable to leave her behind.

Having secured a Spanish visa in Nice, I trundled my belongings downhill to the station in the same way that they had come up. I walked out of a clean house, and left Menton owing nothing, closing the door on memories I preferred to forget. A final visit to the doctor showed my weight to be 130lbs, even less than when I came out of the jungle.

Chapter Twenty-eight

On the evening of Thursday 28 January 1953, at the age of twenty-four — such facts are important as the underpinnings of an otherwise slipping by of time — I left on the all-night express for Spain. In my raincoat pocket was Baedeker’s Mediterranean, 1911, sent by Ruth some weeks before. Having lived four months alone, and being again on the move, the feeling of adventure barely outdid the flutter of uncertainty as to what would be found on arrival. After the frontier the train went at a slower speed, but time passed in talk on all topics (including religion) with an amiable and bespectacled priest who knew some English, though we conversed mainly in French.

A phthisical-looking man at the station in Barcelona transported my goods by handcart to the wharf, for which work I paid him well, since the taxi drivers considered my handmade chest too big and heavy for their dilapidated vehicles. Sixty-five pesetas at the shipping office secured a third-class berth on the Rey Jaime Primero. After wandering a while around the Old Town I sat down to a plate of paella and a bottle of wine at a workmen’s café, and talked the bartender into providing a saucer of bread and milk for Nell in her box. By nine o’clock I was asleep in my bunk, crossing the calm Balearic Sea to Palma. At half past six the dawn was chilly, and Majorca seemed to be sliding by the ship like some new geological world emerging from the womb of creation. The light of Dragonera winked on the western tip, and a blue tinge in the east made the summit-line of the mountains more and more distinct, the dark sea lightening into dull green, deep yellow, then orange, until a spread of sun above the horizon showed houses along the shore in sharper detail. A few soldiers who had spent the night on deck shivered in their drab khaki, and the ship’s engines were so quiet it might almost have been pushed along by the current alone. Such a palpable new day went deep into my spirit, and the endpapers of Ruth’s copy of The Knapsack were covered with notes.

A taxi took me by the cathedral, and up the main avenue to the station for Soller, a town twenty miles north through the mountains. The ticket clerk, a tall good-looking young man with fair hair and brown eyes, spoke some English, and proudly brought out the grammar he was studying, which had as its bookmark a postcard from a girl in England called Kitty. Helped by a packet of Chesterfields bought at the frontier, we talked for a while, until he registered my heavy baggage, charging only half price, and installed me with the rest into the waiting carriage.

The train toy-trumpeted between acres of almond trees in white bloom, and soon the foothills drew us into a long tunnel under the island’s watershed. Elbowing down to Soller through cuttings and shorter tunnels, wide views revealed a large valley sheltered by mountains except for an opening to the sea on the north-west, the north-eastern side blocked by the main peak of Majorca rising to 4,739 feet. At lower levels fragrant air from lemon and orange trees came through open windows till the train hooted between the backs of houses and drew into the little station. Waiting for a tram to take me two miles to the port, a woman came out of the pork butcher’s with a household chair for me to sit on.

The Tarrs invited me to stay at the Villa Catalina, paying my share of food and general expenses. The room John used for his library had a table I could write at, though my first days passed in walking the beach and exploring the byways of the valley.

Two letters from Ruth were waiting, as well as one from the Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian requesting a couple of articles about Majorca. Notification also came from the BBC to say they would like me to go to London and read my talk ‘Kedah Peak’ on the wireless, for a fee of eighteen guineas. I had sent it to them as little more than a forlorn hope, and was encouraged by what seemed my first real acceptance. The promised payment was more than I had so far been offered, but because it would barely cover my return fare to London and a night or two in a hotel I asked for the piece to be held till I had other reasons to go there.

I continued studying French, made a desultory attempt at Spanish, and started a notebook on the Majorcan dialect. John, with his quick and flexible mind, was endlessly zestful at unravelling the meanings and derivations of words in almost any language, causing a lot of discussion. Knowing that an understanding of Romance languages would enable my own to be more thoroughly comprehended, I tackled a novel by Simenon, and translated poems by Verlaine and Baudelaire. I also read, though as yet in English, Proust and Stendhal.

At the British Consulate in Palma I obtained the name of a doctor, and arranged payment for the pneumothorax refills, which system made me a private patient with my own waiting room. The nurse, Francesca, was so attractive and charming that I in no way objected to being looked on as a gentleman-invalid sent out by doting parents from England to recover health and strength in a supposedly more benign climate.

Despite my easygoing attitude to the tuberculosis that had undoubtedly been more positive than it was now, there was always the possibility that, if I didn’t take care, symptoms would reappear and, with insidious speed, reduce me to a state of real illness. For some weeks there had been snow on the surrounding mountains, and the valley of Soller was dull and cold from continual rain. Heating at the house came from a small woodstove in the living room, and I was plagued by one cold after another, each with an ominous cough that made my good lung also feel somewhat sluggish. Tests which the doctor gave showed that my blood sediment rate had gone up to twelve from almost nothing since leaving France. This was a bad sign, he said, but added with a smile that it was sure to go down once the good weather came, which it in fact did. Fortunately my instinct and self-indulgence coincided so neatly as to suppress all worry.

My articles for the Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian described Majorca as being fifty years behind the times, a place where one could live on little because rents were cheap, decent wine was sixpence a pint, and tobacco twopence an ounce. The people were honest and hardworking, and there was little or no poverty, the island being blessed with much fertile land and a fairly short winter — most of which was true enough. A short piece printed in the Scribe later in the year, about a car trip over the hills to Palma, was my last publication for some time.

At the Villa Catalina I worked desultorily on The Deserters, and talked with John about our writing an up-to-date guidebook for foreign visitors, a project which never got beyond the synopsis. The only available map of the island was a rudimentary one for tourists. Proper survey maps were unobtainable, which proved, if proof was needed, that Spain was an undemocratic country, since a refusal to sell large-scale topographical maps to ordinary people signified a fundamental lack of other human rights. During the worst of the weather I enlarged an existing map to a scale of 1:50,000, on four big sheets which were fitted together after John had scripted in the place names. Details were added from the map in Baedeker, and I also put in data from my own explorations.

One afternoon, with not so much as a knock on the door, a stout priest in full canonicals entered the house, followed by several altar boys decked out in white surplices. To John’s anti-Catholic consternation they began intoning a hymn of blessing for the place, the priest swinging a heavily smoking censer which sent fumes into every room. All John could say when they left was thank you, but I think he was rather pleased about it, even while saying he was glad to have wasted their time.

A poem I wrote called ‘Carthage’ was suggested by a few lines in my Baedeker, but more time was spent on a several-page sequence called ‘Toni Moreno’. He was a character in one of the Majorcan folk songs I had translated, and I turned him into a mixture of Adonis and Don Juan who was unable to draw back from his fate.

On Saturday nights the Tarrs and myself went to a hotel at the port and watched the spectacle of the Soller folklore group Brot de Taronger (Branch of Oranges). Maria and Catalina, the star dancers, did a thrilling Maenadic version of the Jota Mallorquina, arms out full length as if in ecstasy, and long skirts swirling just high enough to show white stockings and give a glimpse of their cotton drawers.

The tunes had some Moorish or perhaps Jewish influence, and I learned the words to their songs so as to translate them into English, terms I wasn’t sure about being explained in Spanish by Andreu or Gaspar Nadal, the directors of the group.

John, a man of many parts, sat at a piano by the bar after the performance and hammered out tunes from Tosca or La Bohème, as well as traditional English songs. Instead of sand falling through a glass to keep account of time we had bottles of wine or brandy, which often saw us still there at two in the morning, though with only a few hundred yards between us and the house.

We became friendly with an itinerant middle-aged scholar who came to Soller to work on a book about Nietzsche and ‘The Will to Power’. John, in a bullish mood, would drag him down in ferocious argument on the ethics of such a project, and of what he thought of Nietzsche in general, at which I sat on the sidelines till boredom drove me away.

An amiable streak in both men let them forget their controversies on Shrove Tuesday Eve, and the four of us went by tram to see the fiesta-like goings-on in the town. We found seats in a crowded café, and I danced with one or two of the pretty local girls, atlotas in the island language, otherwise I sat at the table smoking and drinking, and writing a poem sent unrevised in a letter to Ruth the following day:

Quasi-philosophical and literary discussions, of the sort heated by wine, took place between John, the Nietzsche scholar and myself. Their range was as wide as civilization seemed to be long, and could have gone on for ever without resolving anything. Occasionally losing them in the tentacles of convoluted speculation, I fell back behind the palisade of my own basic tenets, which convinced me that creativity and intellect need not go together, that talk was one thing and writing another, and that Art promised to be more effective when unencumbered by theoretical baggage.

Parallel to the pursuit of a voice peculiar to myself, which blind faith told me must be sought, was the more compatible approach, and this suggested that the longer I went on, the more certain was an aesthetic system to show in my work, if it was necessary that one should be there at all. Continual striving and practice was the only way forwards, during which any originality of structure or content would build itself in more effectively than by conscious artifice.

A string of fine days seemed to indicate that winter was over, and during an afternoon of balmy and inspiring breezes I wrote ‘Mr Raynor’, about a teacher at my old school who used to sit on his high stool and, rather than give attention to the rowdy uneducable twelve-year-olds before him, look out of the window and across the road at buxom young women serving in a draper’s shop. The story was set off by a line from Baudelaire’s poem ‘Les Métamorphoses du Vampire’, which kept going through my mind: ‘Timide et libertine, et fragile et robuste.’

I thought it obvious that such so-called ‘Nottingham stories’ lacked nothing of the standard and interest for publication, and when ‘Mr Raynor’ was rejected I merely assumed it was a matter of the roulette dice not dropping into the right place to produce its modest jackpot. The engines of hope were fully churning, and it seemed that the future could not be anything but better than the present, of which in any case, even with the anxiety that came of living from hand to mouth, I had little to complain about.

At the end of March I met a young woman medical student staying at a nearby hotel and, after a few days of unremitting pursuit, she came with me on the ship to spend a weekend in Ibiza. She told me that she in fact preferred making love with women, and on replying so did I, we ended up in bed, dolphins leaping around the ship on our return. The affair inspired a few poems, but came to an end when she left for England.

Several wireless telegraph messages in code were taken down in my notebook from the shortwave band of a radio rented by the Tarrs. Perhaps I was lucky not to have been picked up as a spy in fascist Spain, or anywhere else for that matter, especially since the house was within half a mile of a naval base. When we heard on the radio that Stalin had died John’s face turned rather pale.

In the same notebook, after comments on Proust, E. M. Forster, and the three-volume autobiography of Arthur Koestler I was reading, is the remark that ‘D. H. Lawrence only possessed real genius between the ages of twenty-five and thirty. Before twenty-five he was an adolescent, and after thirty he was a crank.’

A high state of morbid romanticism fitted in well with my inflated sense of purpose, the pink blossom of a peach tree sending a different shade of sunlight through the window of my room. All I wanted to do, after writing, was get drunk now and again, and go to bed with a woman. Life was better than for a long time, perhaps than at any other time. After a cakes and champagne breakfast on the terrace I would enjoy a swim beyond the harbour, or go with fishermen along the coast, where the sea was often exhilaratingly rough under the cliffs. I took a boat out rowing when I could, and the Greek painter Varda, who lived at the port, tried teaching me to sail. The moustache grown before leaving for France was shaved off, as if to give my face an appearance in keeping with a much altered state of mind. Letters to Ruth were shorter, often typed instead of handwritten.

Elizabeth Trocchi came from Paris with her two children and took a flat in the town. Some issues of Merlin, edited by her husband Alex, contained interesting work by Christopher Logue, Samuel Beckett and others, so I sent him some revised and much improved Nottingham stories. When they were turned down I posted them to New Story, Botteghe Oscure, Nimbus and the BBC, but they had no luck at those places either.

I was generally reluctant to show my work, even to friends, but did from time to time, perhaps out of vanity, though the unwillingness must have been bound up with the hope that if I waited long enough I would be able to show it to them in print or, better still, they would see the stories or poems themselves without any prompting from me.

The exception to this was when, on hearing that Robert Graves lived in Deya, just along the coast, I wrote to him and enclosed some of my work, to which he replied: ‘Thank you for showing me these poems. There is something basically good about them but (department of brutal frankness) you have not worked hard enough to get them to the point of simplicity which they demand. Carthage comes closest.’ He ended the letter by asking me to call one Sunday for tea.

Hiring a bicycle for a few pesetas, I pedalled along the mountain road — pushed my way up much of it — and after the col, with its view of the Balearic Sea from nearly a thousand feet, freewheeled the remaining distance to Deya. The house was easy to find, a plain grey structure by an elbow of the road just before the village. A curtain of fine steel mesh to keep out insects overhung the open back door, green shoots already showing on the grapevine, and several broken toys strewn around the porch.

On my calling out, the scrape of a chair sounded from inside, and the curtain parted to show Graves, wearing sandals, blue jeans, and a brown open-necked shirt, scissors in one hand and a large glass jug in the other. He looked as if he might have seen me somewhere and forgotten in whose house, while I stepped back to make the difference in our heights less obvious. Informed of my name, he invited me to follow him into the garden to pick lemons for lemonade.

He was a big, well-built man in his late fifties, with grizzled hair, full lips, and a nose that looked as if it had been much knocked about in boxing — which he later confirmed. Talking about my poems, he said some were good, in that at least I ended them well, whereas so many poets got off to a fair start but fizzled out halfway through. I was to recall in later years, when young writers began coming to see me, how generous Robert had always been in his appraisals of beginners, never discouraging anyone, on the sound principle that no matter how inept they might be at the moment it was always possible they would become better in the future and write something of value.

He poured two glasses of lemonade, and sat at a large oak table to continue signing a limited edition of his poems, setting out the sheets to dry as questions and answers passed between us at the relaxed rate of a Sunday afternoon. ‘When you have a large family,’ he said, ‘you’ve no option but to work hard.’ He was writing The Greek Myths for Penguin, of 1,100 pages, as well as an even longer book called The Nazarene Gospel Restored.

I found his remarks about my poems encouraging, but told him that so far only two had been published, to which he replied that it didn’t matter, as long as one kept on writing. We discussed the various ways in which Ulysses and his son Telemachus were said to have died, the theme of one of my poems.

Outside again, he asked where I had been brought up. ‘I’ve never been there,’ he responded, ‘but when we were poor, just after the Great War, a Nottingham factory owner sent me a cheque for a hundred pounds. It was just before Christmas, and I tipped the postman with my last shilling for the letter. Another time, my travel warrant was made out to Nottingham by mistake when I was to go before a reassessment board for my pension, and I was so ill by the time I reached my real destination that the pension was kept on. So I have a soft spot for the place. I’m sure it’s an interesting town, if ever you write a novel.’

Walking along the road, he wanted confirmation of the ‘Nottingham good-night’ of courting couples, then queried what university I had been to. On telling him I left school early he said: ‘So did I, to go to the War.’ He wondered how I managed to live as a poet, and mention of my RAF pension led him to talk about T.E. Lawrence, recalling that in the 1920s Lawrence had generously given him a first edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which he had been able to sell for three hundred pounds, on which it was possible to live for a year in those days.

His wife Beryl came back from the beach with the children, and the table was cleared for tea. Graves riffled through a heap of papers on the window sill, then held out an engraving and asked her who in the room the face resembled. The upshot was that it looked like me, being a portrait of Ludowicke Muggleton, an eighteenth-century journeyman-preacher, son of a farrier from London, and author of The Divine Looking Glass.

‘I knew you reminded me of someone, as soon as I saw you.’ Graves was pleased at having solved the puzzle, and after tea we chatted over a few glasses of Spanish brandy, which helped as I took the hairpin bends back to Soller with more speed than wisdom.

By the end of May, wanting to get off the island and see other parts of Spain, I played with the notion of settling in Malaga. Apart from being more southerly, and unknown territory, it was close to Gibraltar, where I’d heard that the air force or the navy occasionally employed ex-service civilians in work to do with wireless operating. The pull of trying for a job, however, with all its attractions though possible uncertainties as well, weakened as the lackadaisical days and weeks went by. I was in any case diverted by the plan of writing a travel book about Majorca based on various articles and essays, which meant prolonging my stay to obtain further material.

In June I left the Villa Catalina for a house on the outskirts of the town, in which I could live rent free. A Dutch woman, Jup van Dreil, was looking after the place for a man from Holland who had bought it for his wife but, because she didn’t much like it, they rarely came to the valley. A generous and gregarious woman, Jup had lived in the Dutch East Indies with her husband during the ’30s, and in the war had been imprisoned by the Germans.

The house was called Casa Jolana, and my room being just below the eaves was more than hot at times, but I continued working on the final draft of The Deserters, which had now grown to over 400 pages.

A nineteen-year-old painter, Jim Donovan, was also staying in the house, and at the beginning of August, after stopping overnight in Palma to see a bullfight, we went by train to Inca, a town in the middle of the island. Few words said, we set out to walk the twenty kilometres north through rain-soaked woods to the monastery of Lluch, 3,000 feet above sea level. Guardias Civiles sat on the tops of passing buses with loaded rifles, as if in bandit country, and gave the hard stare at our suspicious plodding along the winding road. In the monastery we shared a large communal cell for the night with women and children, for the cost of about sixpence. Next day we walked thirty kilometres back to Soller, the only way in those days to see the wildest scenery of the island.

The height of summer was carefree, probably more so than I admitted to Ruth. Requests in my letters for us to resume life together were little more than a manifestation of the mercurial side of my temperament, but no less sincere for all that. The rate of such despatches, from the frontline of my endeavours to become a published writer had, however, diminished since the time in France. During eight months in Majorca nearly seventy detailed much, but not all, of my day-to-day existence, and though many came in return we had for a while gone our separate ways.

Mike Edmonds, an itinerant Australian, sometimes stayed at the Casa Jolana. A writer and journalist, he had travelled the Continent for years, at one time owning a restaurant in Paris, and making the acquaintance of such celebrities as Rita Hayworth, Hemingway and Picasso. A passionate aficionado of the bullring and all things Spanish, he took me around the brothels of Palma where, for not too many pesetas, one could spend a short time with an attractive girl. His tall dark aspect, and rapid Andaluz accent, enabled him to pass himself off as Spanish, at least in Majorca.

The final copy of The Deserters was bound into a large foolscap volume at the local stationer’s, and my hopes for it were not only based on its physical weight. A cursory rereading led me to believe in the possibility of making my fortune at last, or at least a hundred pounds, the magical upper limit of money beyond which it was hard to let my imagination go free.

At the same time as sending the book to Heinemann, never a believer in penny packets, I posted ‘Big John and the Stars’ to the BBC. This was a children’s story set in a prosperous kingdom of the Valley of Gold, a sort of Utopia much like Soller, which lacked only stars in the sky to make it perfect. The king promises his daughter in marriage to any man who can remedy this, while those who try but fail will be put to death. A blacksmith known as Big John accepts the challenge and, after many tribulations, succeeds.

A copy of the story ‘Saturday Night’, sent to my brother Brian, now a corporal on National Service with the army, came back with the comment that in his opinion ‘When you have the waiter fetch an order of eight pints, three glasses, two gins and oranges, one rum, a whisky, and three packets of Woodbines from the bar, it is wrong, because he wouldn’t be able to get all that on one tray’ — as indeed he wouldn’t.

Jim Donovan went back to London, and Mike Edmonds departed for Malaga, leaving all twelve rooms of the house for myself and Jup. My weight was down again, but more from debauchery than misery, which seemed much improvement. Having begun an affair, and wanting more privacy, I rented a room in a furnished house belonging to the friendly Nadal brothers. Every day Maria and Catalina, the folklore dancers who worked as waitresses at the Bar Nadal, came to make the large double bed, which had the graven image of a crucified man on the wall behind.

Working at a small table under the window, with a view of neighbouring house tops, I began writing about my childhood, contrasting the anguish and shortages of home life in the 1930s with the haven of the Burtons’ cottage, and recalling the idiosyncrasies of my blacksmith grandfather, about whom I hadn’t thought since his death in 1946. With the name of Brian Seaton for the main character, I tried to give the narrative an aspect of fiction, my imagination creating the life of his mother and father from the time before their marriage.

The story was satisfying to write, material seeming to come as much from my subconscious as from what was actually known about such people. In 50,000 words I took Brian to the age of thirteen, when the cottage, called The Nook, was bulldozed for redevelopment. After the handwritten draft was typed and put away I sat down to a steady rewriting of The Green Hills of Malaya, turning that also, as much as I was able, into fiction. I would break off from my work to eat a lunch of bread and salami, then open a bottle of wine and wait for the afternoon visit of my mistress, if she had been able to get away from her husband.

Her name was Pauline, and we had fallen in love on meeting at a table outside a café in the plaza one morning after she had done her shopping. For a while she was reluctant to come to bed, though eventually gave in, and our intense affair began. She was in her thirties, as handsome and beautiful as a Russian princess, and her husband had brought his family to Europe for a year so that he could write the Great American Novel undisturbed. They lived in a rented villa on the outskirts of the town, and I was friendly enough to read ‘Big John and the Stars’ to their seven-year-old daughter. Pauline would leave her playing in the garden, or the husband might have taken her by tram to the beach, and find some reason to come into town and be with me.

Bartolomeu Ferra, the postmaster, wrote articles for Ecos de Soller, the weekly newspaper of the town run off in a back room at the stationer’s. We met in the Bar Palacio one afternoon so that he could interview me, the piece appearing shortly before my departure for Malaga in late September. My name, in half-inch black letters, was spread across the page, part of a series called THOSE WHO VISIT us, in which I was said to be ‘un propogandista de Mallorca’ — after explaining my reasons for living on the island, and telling him that my journalism had always given a good impression of Soller.

Bartolomeu went on to describe me as a young bohemian with the soul of a child, but a person also who was full of experience and candour. I had no university degree, he wrote, only my pen and my talent, as well as an extensive knowledge gained from living in many countries of the Far East where I had worked as a wireless telegraphist. He also said that I occasionally made notes in an exercise book with my left hand, and stuffed black tobacco into a large curved pipe with the other. As a journalist and writer of fiction I had contributed to numerous magazines, as well as being such a friend of the Muses that success was sure to come in the hard fight to establish a position in the world of letters.

It wasn’t a matter of my believing or not. In one way I would have been happy to know that all he said was perfectly true, but the greater part of me discounted such eulogisms. The only person to know whether or not I was any good as a writer was myself, and a permanently underlying optimism allowed me to think so at times of rejection, such as when someone at Heinemann’s informed me that they were unable to make an offer for The Deserters, though would like to see Man Without a Home, which had been mentioned in a covering note. I posted a letter immediately to Ilse Steinhoff in Paris, asking her to send it from there.

My life had reached a balance between work and pleasure which was hardly to be achieved again. The affair with Pauline was in full and delectable spate and, as if to give even more time for it, my typewriter broke down and had to be left a week in Palma for repair.

I packed a picnic basket and walked ten kilometres to Deya with Elizabeth Trocchi, who wanted to meet Robert Graves. He was his usual gracious self and, inviting us to go for a swim, lent me a pair of — necessarily baggy — trunks. We descended the winding track 600 feet down between the olive trees to the beach, and after tea at the house later, walked the same way back to Soller.

Whenever I called at Elizabeth’s flat her four-year-old daughter Margo would run up and put her arms around my neck crying: ‘Daddy!’, so I was glad when Alex came at the end of September to see his family. He also wanted to have an issue of Merlin printed in Palma, since it was cheaper there than in Paris. Tall, thin and untidy, he had eyes which could change quickly from fanatical to vulnerable, or from dead to flashing a kind of uncertain fire. He spent one evening trying to contact people who might supply him with hash, but it seemed not to exist in a small town like Soller.

Over brandy in the plaza one night he told me he had earned 75,000 francs writing a pornographic novel for the Olympia Press series. By the end of our session he was merry enough to start advising me how to write, at which, being equally drunk, I could only reply that he didn’t know what he was talking about. We went on with our carouse until, about midnight, he got up and tottered across the square intending to tear down a poster of General Franco. Not wanting him given over to any rough treatment from the Guardias Civiles, I diverted him from this, and made sure he went home safe to bed. On leaving for Paris a few weeks later he neglected to pay the 7,000 pesetas printing bill for Merlin, and whether he ever did settle it, I don’t know.

When the two novels came back from Heinemann they were sent out again straight away. Hope, like energy, rose and fell, then lifted once more, much as we were taught at Radio School that the electromotive force of an alternating current goes through the positive and negative phases of an oscillatory circuit — in other words, something like my spirit, up and down in its various swings, whenever I sent work out and it was returned as unsuitable. Flipping the Holy Scriptures in my room one day while waiting for Pauline, my finger pressed on a verse from chapter nine of the First Book of Samuel, much like my mother’s old system, if system it could be called, though I was sure she still used it, an image which flashed to mind and stayed there strongly for a moment, as when she closed her eyes and, holding a pin, pricked the page of a racing paper to choose a horse on which to place sixpence or a shilling at the local bookie’s: ‘And they cut off his head, and stripped off his armour, and sent it into the land of the Philistines round about, to publish it in the house of their idols, and among the people.’

I asked Pauline to leave her husband and come away with me, and though she spent a few days considering the matter, she was finally more flattered than attracted by the proposal. In my heart I couldn’t blame her, though the disappointment did nothing to daunt my love, for I must have known it was inconceivable for her to run away with someone who had no more than an RAF pension to live on.

At the end of September she and her husband left to spend the winter in Malaga. Mike Edmonds was already there, and had written suggesting we take a flat together and share the rent. All in all, this seemed to fit in well with my hopes and intentions.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Since my birthday early in the year, celebrated for the first time with champagne, I was consciously glad of being twenty-five, as if some vital watershed in life had been crossed. Expanding confidence suggested that a more adventurous maturity could not be far off and, no longer (as I wrote in a letter to Ruth) the unblemished blue-eyed young man who had embarked for Menton nearly two years ago, I set out by the overnight boat and arrived in Valencia on 9th October. My luggage in the taxi to the Estacion del Norte was much less bulky: I had sold some of my belongings, given various things away, sent a few items to Ruth, parked the cat with an acquaintance, and left odds and ends for Elizabeth Trocchi to look after until my return to the island, whenever that might be.

The correos train took seventeen hours to travel the 500 kilometres to Granada, and went through such scenery as occasionally kept me from a pocket edition of Cellini’s Autobiography. The pension chosen in Granada stank worse than a brothel, so after one night I moved to a clean place used by students. There were prominent exhortations over the walls of the town for Franco to live for ever, but I spent a few days peacefully roaming the Generalife and Alhambra, guided by plans and text in my Baedeker, while at the same time trying to fight down a heavy cold.

Mike rented a ground-floor flat on the Carreteria, adequate for the two of us, except that a few days after I got there the place was burgled. Mine was the only room from which things were taken, since it was on the street, and though there were bars at the window some clever rat had fished objects out with a long stick while I slept. Apart from three pounds in cash (a real loss, however) I was deprived of my demob mackintosh, smart jacket, trousers, pyjamas, underwear, woollen waistcoat and, worst of all, my pen. There were so many people at the police station notifying similar thefts that I walked out, convinced that Malaga was a city of thieves.

With foresight I had arranged to collect my quarter’s pension in Gibraltar, and one of Mike’s Australian friends drove me through whitewashed picturesque villages joined by the ribbon of an execrable road. The blackmarket exchange rate was several pesetas to the pound more than at a Spanish bank and, undeterred by the prospect of smuggling money over the frontier, I made enough extra cash to buy English tobacco, a pipe, a couple of paperbacks and a new pen.

A better appointed and safer flat on the Calle Mariblanca, for a pound a week each, had five rooms, kitchen and bathroom, the only disadvantage being that with so much street noise it wasn’t always easy to sleep.

During dinner with Pauline and her husband, at their somewhat posher place in the centre of town, I sensed that he knew of our liaison, or at least was justifiably suspicious, so decided that we had to be careful in seeing each other. Pauline agreed, and Mike helpfully vacated the flat whenever a visit from her was possible, which arrangement worked well until her departure.

I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man sent by Ruth, and From Here to Eternity which Mike lent me. Rose Macaulay in Fabled Shore wrote that Richard Ford, author of the famous Hand Book of Spain for the John Murray guide series, had given his opinion that Malaga merited only one day of the traveller’s time, which she herself found to be true. The all-pervading poverty reminded me too forcefully of former days, with so many derelicts and beggars on the streets that I began to feel more threatened than sympathetic. Maybe this was because of my own precarious financial situation, in which it was hard to see far ahead with any sense of security. At times the impulse to go back to England had some appeal, having been away nearly two years, until I realized that there could be no kind of life in a place where one would be expected to have a job.

Cold weather made it difficult to sit in the unheated flat, but in November, after work on a long poem which Trocchi had asked for but later rejected, I began turning ‘The General’s Dilemma’ into a novel. Man Without a Home and The Deserters, returned to me from London, were tried with another firm, which was also to send them back. An English novelist, Charles Chapman-Mortimer, lived in the same building. He was forty-six years old, and had recently won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his book Father Goose, published in 1951. After looking through some of my writings he thought them sufficiently promising to put me in touch with his agent Rosica Colin, which favour was to be particularly helpful.

One night Chapman-Mortimer, Mike and myself went to the gypsy caves outside the town. Frederick Thon, an American playwright, and his wife Harriet also came with us. They had been in Majorca with their two children, and were taking in Malaga as part of a European tour.

Street lights no longer visible, our party stumbled over holes and gullies of a plateau, the black shape of Malaga’s unfinished cathedral looming behind. Coming to a low escarpment Mike shouted someone’s name, a nick of light showed at the cliff face, and we were led to one of many openings.

One compartment housed a white donkey, another a row of sleeping children. The floor was tiled and the walls whitewashed, flame from a lit wick waving in a shallow bowl of oil. The only furniture was a couple of quilt-covered boxes for us to sit on. Dark faces returned our greetings, and uncorked wine soon set everyone singing and dancing — men and women, and even children who came out of their sleeping places at the noise. A humpbacked girl of about fifteen, with large breasts and arms folded on them, leaned against the wall as if she would capsize on moving away. Jokes were made about when an old woman addressed as grandmother was going to die, but she gave back a toothless smile as if to say she would outlive the lot of us.

The wooden door was closed but, with so many people smoking the American cigarettes we had handed out, the chief of the group had to let in some air. Rain drummed down, but we were well protected and dry. In the Civil War both fascists and communists had massacred many gypsies, though now they danced, as did we after a while, stamping and clapping to a guitar, their faces reminding me, in the dim and changing light, of Tamils in Malaya.

In December I finished the 200 pages of The General’s Dilemma, then let it lie while working at various essays for a future book on Spain. I eventually sent the new novel to Ilse Steinhoff in Paris, but that too was turned down. Rereading the Book of Nehemiah I for some reason pencilled a mark against the verse: ‘And I arose in the night, I and some few men with me; neither told I any man what my God had put in my heart to do at Jerusalem: neither was there any beast with me, save the beast that I rode upon.’

Lottery booths erected in the streets at Christmas raised funds for charity, prizes ranging from a motor car to a few bars of soap. Many stalls sold ximbombas, a percussion instrument shaped like a plant pot, with skin stretched tight across the top, and a hollow cane thrust through, so that moistening the palm to rub up and down produced a loud unearthly grunting. They were also common in Majorca at fiesta time, varying in size from full blown to tiny ones for an infant.

Illuminated cafés were crowded on Christmas Eve, stalls along the pavements overflowing with fruits, cigarettes and bread rolls, while the blind wailed among the throng trying to sell lottery tickets. Taxis and horsedrawn carriages could hardly get through the mob, the crack of whips not quite overwhelmed by people working glassy-eyed at ximbombas with wine-soaked hands. When thousands of drunks played them in the streets the effect was haunting and ghostly. Chapman-Mortimer, Mike and myself pushed our way from bar to bar, getting back to the flat at six in the morning for a breakfast of bacon and eggs.

Mike was occasionally visited at the flat by beautiful, well educated, and totally déclassé Maricarmen. Cut off by her family, she had been, or perhaps still was in her life of rather free love, the mistress of a writer and journalist called Pedro who had served in Russia with the Blue Division during the war. He had written about his experiences in such a negative way, however, that a militant fascist one day came into his office and put a hand-grenade with the pin out on his desk. Pedro had time to take cover, and was only slightly injured. He had the sense of humour you would expect from a man with a thin and drawn face: it was not always funny. Maricarmen told us he could never go to bed unless a bag of eatables hung from the rail by his head, for if he chanced to wake in the night he had to put something into his mouth, otherwise the horrors of starvation in Russia came back.

For some reason Pedro assumed that Maricarmen was calling at the flat to see me, and I was told at Thomas Cook’s office, on collecting my mail, that he was looking for me with a knife, intending to cut my throat. I sought one of his friends and, knowing that the message would be relayed, informed him that I had no designs on Maricarmen, that she only came to the flat to practise her English. I also said that being a British ex-serviceman who had spent two years fighting communist bandits in the Malayan jungle had made me more than capable of looking after myself. This seemed to calm the situation, and we even became reasonably friendly.

As soon as Maricarmen entered our flat the first thing she did was go into the bathroom and clean Mike’s razor, which seemed strange, considering her libertarian beliefs. She told me that a Spanish countrywoman who wanted to entice a young man into bed would sprinkle a few drops of her menstrual blood on to his food, which sometimes worked so well that it could send him into a sexual frenzy and take some time to wear off. She also informed us that the common contraceptive for women in Spain was a small ball of cotton wool soaked in Vaseline and inserted into the neck of the womb. A more scarifying piece of intelligence was that any woman who went into hospital as the result of a botched abortion was operated on without anaesthetic.

After my farewell to Pauline in December there seemed little reason to stay in that part of Spain, except to finish various pieces of work. Feeling no liking for Malaga, thus hardly expecting Malaga to like me, my intention was to go back to Majorca at the end of February in the hope that Ruth would come down from England and live with me again, for my letters continued to inveigle, persuade and encourage her to that end. To help me through the winter she sent a parcel of clothes and two packets of books. Meanwhile I wrote an account of my visit to the gypsy caves, printed in Scribe magazine the following year.

One day a coating of snow lay on the streets, though it did not surprise me, having long since learned to distrust Mediterranean winters. This made it impossible to work in the flat, so Mike and I would go to the bars in the morning and drink rough coñac at a penny a shot, and in the afternoon call at a brothel, with sweets or a bottle of wine to offer. One of the girls suggested I marry her, an unacceptable proposal, though my knowledge of Spanish became much more colloquial.

In the middle of February 1954 I was ordered to Gibraltar for a medical board, which meant X-rays, blood and sputum tests at the Military Hospital. On my way there I opened, and then sealed again, the letter from my Spanish doctor, to learn that ‘Señor Sillitoe has ulcerated tuberculosis which is not yet cured’. This stark summary gave something of a shock, though perhaps he exaggerated my condition in order to do me a favour after I had mentioned the advantage of a pension to an indigent writer.

Noreen Harbord, a hotel keeper from Soller, came with me, wanting to buy a Ford Popular car and take it back to the hotel she owned in Majorca. Being resident in Spain, and unable therefore to get it over the frontier without paying a heavy tax, she proposed purchasing it in my name, and obtaining notarized permission from me to use it. I was glad to do this, even though it meant pursuing the complicated formalities of somewhat fraudulently establishing my residence in the Colony, going from one bureaucratic den to another, to obtain a Rock Ape passport. This travel document was to last me well into the 1960s, until it ran out and I was, luckily I suppose, able to become fully British again.

It took almost a week while living at the Winter Garden Hotel to go through these procedures and get the papers for the car, as well as a Spanish visa for my new passport. During the intervening weekend we stayed in Ronda and visited the famous bridge. The bus ride back to Algeciras, on an unpaved pot-holed and winding descent that went under the name of a road, left hardly any bones that were not sore, but resulted in a bump by bump addition to my collection of travel pieces on Spain — none of which was ever published.

Prior to the Queen’s planned visit to Gibraltar I stumbled into a mob one night that was throwing stones at the British Consulate in Malaga. When a couple of young men asked my opinion on the matter I told them that if they wanted the place back for Spain all they had to do was march a hundred kilometres along the coast and take it, though I had to admit to myself that the existence of Gibraltar under British sovereignty was as if France or Germany had a permanent duty-free military base at Land’s End. Fortunately they had a sense of humour, and told me, when we went to a bar for a drink, that Franco only urged people to protest about the Colony when things were bad inside the country.

We also discussed Lorca, for I had been reading his poems and plays in the original. Until then it had only been possible to find editions printed in the Argentine, but his books were now coming back into shops in Spain, which country at last seemed to be loosening up from the tight fascism of previous years, albeit very slowly. An item in the newspaper said that a synagogue had been opened in Madrid, the first for worship since the Jews were expelled in 1492. Part of the United States Mediterranean Fleet was anchored in the harbour, bearing much appreciated gifts for the poor, and when Mike talked to a couple of marines in a bar they arranged for us to join a conducted tour on their aircraft-carrier.

In February a friend asked me to pick up some money from a bank in Tangier and carry it back into Spain without declaring it, there being a strict limit on the amount of pesetas that could be brought in from abroad. I stayed a couple of days, and was glad to be speaking French at my hotel in the Zocco Chico, in spite of the landlady replying: ‘Oui, mon enfant!’ whenever I asked a question.

In a restaurant Mike and I went to for lunch a buxom pale-faced waitress, with thin lips and a mass of black ringlets going down her back, demanded very belligerently in Spanish to know — a delicious tear on her cheek — why I had delayed so long before coming back? She as good as threw my plate of pasta on the table, and the more I denied having seen her before the angrier she became. Finally Mike talked to her at the bar, and found that she took me for her Swedish boyfriend, and even by the end of the meal she thought I still might be him.

In February I wrote ‘Once in a Weekend’, the story of a young Nottingham factory worker enjoying himself in a pub on Saturday night, and waking up on Sunday morning in bed with his absent workmate’s wife. The beginning went: ‘With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins inside him Arthur fell from the top of the stairs to the bottom.’ To save paper I used the reverse pages of the bound copy of The Deserters, which novel had been out three times already and rejected, and was now put aside as unpublishable. The story of Arthur’s weekend was sent to magazines in the next few months, but always came back without comment, so it was later used as the first chapter of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

I felt some affection for Malaga on my last day, but was glad all the same to be leaving, having a date with Ruth in Barcelona. I arrived there early, after changing trains in Madrid, on 17th February. Unshaven and tired, having deposited my cases at the left luggage, I walked along the Paseo de Colon, turned right up the tree lined Rambla, feeling almost home again, since I had been there before, and in a narrow street of the Old Town enquired at the reception desk of a cheap hotel if they had a room.

The clerk looked wary, as if a leper stood before him. Two men in trilby hats and raincoats came up from behind and told me to come with them. On asking what they wanted one of them flashed an embossed Technicolor badge and said I was under arrest.

They walked me through the streets, then by a sentry into a grey-stoned fortress-like police station, and led me into a room to be questioned. My passport and French identity card were looked at and taken away, and an elderly man, who invited me to sit down, asked what I was doing in Spain. I told him I was a writer, and in any case was there for my health, which was candid enough, for it was plain I had done nothing they could hold me for, though at the same time I speculated on what soft of an article could be made out of the experience, or whether it would be of any use in a novel.

The only possible reason for my detention was that in the crowded night train from Madrid I had said, or perhaps only agreed with, uncomplimentary remarks about General Franco. Some coppers’ nark must have reported me as soon as the train arrived at the station, and I had been followed to the hotel. No other explanation made sense, and I cursed myself for not keeping my mouth shut, having now to face the worry of being deported to the French frontier a hundred miles away.

Arrangements to meet Ruth had been going on for some weeks, both of us scraping up money to live on once we were together, though I already knew that my pension would be paid at its full rate for another year or so. She was on her way, and would expect me to meet her at the station the following day. What would happen if I wasn’t there? She was coming on a single ticket, and I wasn’t sure whether the money she had would cover a night in a hotel and the return fare to England.

Time went by in seemingly inconsequential talk which I suppose — looking back on it — some would call an interrogation. I was tired after several sleepless nights, and also hungry, but lost neither patience nor sense of humour, playing the ordinary tourist who was fascinated by all to do with the inexhaustibly interesting country of Spain. To a certain extent this was true, but my typewriter, which they opened and looked at closely, as well as my fluency in the language, would have made me suspect in any totalitarian country. Nor could my Colony of Gibraltar passport have endeared me to them, and acquiring it merely for the sake of Noreen’s car now seemed an act of rashness. Even so, I implicitly believed that ‘The Governor of the Colony of Gibraltar requires, in the name of Her Majesty, all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance etc’ would keep me safe.

Lights came on when it grew dark outside, and there had been silence between me and my questioner for some time. I imagined that a wireless operator in a far-off room near the top of the building (aerials had been noted on glancing up at the entrance) had been told to tap out a telegram to Madrid for confirmation that my visa wasn’t forged. Eventually, the reply must have arrived, for one of the men who had detained me came in with my passport and said I was free to go.

There was a slight shade of disappointment in his otherwise neutral politeness, and when I asked for my French carte de séjour he denied all knowledge of it. I persisted for a while, as did he with his lie, but then it seemed best to forget the matter. It was unlikely that I would live in France during the next few years, and the loss of a bit of cardboard was a small price to pay for my liberty, though I had liked the idea of having a French identity card.

Next day at the station Ruth came with the news that my story ‘The Match’ had been taken by Carrefour. Ilse Steinhoff had met her at the Gare du Nord and given her twelve pounds to bring me, which more than paid for the two days we spent in Barcelona.

Chapter Thirty

At twenty-six, after five years of unremitting dedication, there was little to show for my writing. Quantity was not lacking, but quality was slow in coming. Stories and parts of novels suggested that recognition should have been closer than it was, but the perfection of whatever talent existed would only evolve at its own rate.

Nothing could speed the process, and no one could help with the problems that needed solving. Even if anyone could, the role of respectful acolyte or adoring tyro was not part of my temperament. Reading great writers imparted much, but the more enjoyable their works the harder they were to learn from, because the sheer hedonism of reading blinded me to the peculiar analysis which would point to faults in my own work. If success took long in coming at least their company acted as encouragement, and gave consolation. Trusting no one but myself, I went on writing, lack of qualification for any other work contributing to such persistence, as well as the absolute faith that I could have no vocation but that of writer. Success would come if I went on long enough.

In my otherwise optimistic and easy-going way — I had an income, however small — I was beginning to realize that telling a story was not good enough unless written with such conviction that the language and content indicated I had something to say as well as a tale to unfold. The best writing was when the movement of my pen coincided neatly with the tone of my thoughts, leading to the knowledge that every writer has his or her own unique voice, or style, and that though some might find such a voice more quickly than others, the longer it took to do so the more likely was it to be your own and not somebody else’s. As a trial and error system it could only be called learning the hard way, and for most of the time the business of living, and being involved in the actual writing, was a sufficiently powerful anodyne to keep such nagging thoughts in their place. The only allies against the problems which beset me were energy and faith.

The sea during our crossing to Palma was almost as rough as the English Channel two years before, though this time my stomach did not dance to its tune. Noreen Harbord drove us from the ship in ‘my’ Ford Popular, over the mountains to her hotel at the Playa of Soller, where we were generously provided with free board and lodging for a fortnight.

We rented a furnished ground-floor apartment of a tall narrow house on the Calle Jose Antonio in the town for 500 pesetas a month — about a pound a week. Our landlady was Doña Maria Mayol, a retiring person who spoke little. Short and stout, she seemed older than she was, and had been a Republican deputy before the Civil War. When Barcelona fell to the fascist forces in 1939 she walked the hundred miles to France as a refugee, but was afterwards allowed to return unmolested to her properties in Majorca. In her younger days she had been known as a poet, and I later persuaded her to let me translate some of her verses from Mallorquin. I suspected there had been more than one tragedy in her life, and that she had witnessed others, though she never said anything to confirm this. Humour gleamed through her eyes occasionally, but it was as if wisdom and experience did not allow her to laugh, and even barely to smile. She was, however, superstitious, because when the Greek painter Varda and his wife nailed a bunch of garlic above one of their doors she called on Ruth to come and take it down after they had left.

Majorca was a kind of homecoming, after the precarious (so it seemed) life on the mainland, a civilization in which I knew the peculiar language and was familiar with people who were honest and tolerant. Because they resented rule from Madrid there was less evidence of Franco-worship, the Majorcans being pragmatic enough to get on as quietly and industriously as possible with their business.

The winter, never very equable, as George Sand and Chopin discovered during their sojourn at Valdemosa in 1838–39, still had some weeks to run. Our main provision against the climate was a small stove in the living room which we could afford to light only in the evening. Otherwise there was a pan of burning charcoal and its ash — called a brasero — placed in a fixture under a small round table, with a blanket-like cloth circling it to the floor for holding in the heat. You put your legs and feet through slits in the cloth, thus keeping at least part of your body warm. The disadvantage was that the charcoal fumes had a soporific not to say poisonous effect, making it necessary to get away from it every half hour, and hence become cold again. In past centuries, when the crops failed, the standard method for a Majorcan family to do away with itself had been to gather in an air-tight room and let charcoal fumes do the rest.

So little happened during my stay on the island that it is difficult to divide one year from another. Most dates are known only because of the particular book I happened to be working on, though these can’t always be pinpointed either, such margins of error signifying peace, and that gift of unlimited time and security which is a godsend to any writer.

As far as the future existed it was only in the hope that our standard of living would change with the publication of a work that might bring in as much as a hundred pounds. On the other hand our income of four pounds seven shillings and sixpence a week was, in the Spain of that time, the salary of a rather senior clerk with a family to keep, so we always had a fully furnished five-roomed flat or house, wine on the table, tobacco to smoke, enough cash for postage, and a girl to come in now and again to do the laundry and clean the place.

At the beginning of April Rosica Colin wrote to say she was pleased I wanted her to be my agent, and that she had already sent The General’s Dilemma to a publisher. Ruth and I, by constant application to our work, had some justification for hope. Shortly after getting back to Majorca I wrote the fourth draft of Letters from Malaya, based on that old manuscript The Green Hills of Malaya, turning it more into a novel by introducing Mimi, a Chinese girl who earns her living as a dance hostess and becomes the friend of Brian Seaton. More was made out of the Malayan Emergency, and the book ends by Brian killing a communist bandit when his jungle rescue group is ambushed during the search for a crashed aircraft.

While doing this I assembled a number of Nottingham stories into one folder, with the idea that they might one day be published as a book. By June Letters from Malaya had gone through a further draft, and in July went off to Rosica with a note explaining that the 70,000 word novel was about the beginning of the Malayan Emergency, that a part was already accepted as a talk by the BBC, and that another extract had been published in the Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian as a story some years before.

The painter Eddie Allen came to live in the valley with his Austrian wife. Eddie and I had been brought up in the same area of Nottingham but, he being a few years older, we met for the first time in Soller. Another coincidence was that he had been a wireless operator in the RAF, which gave us something to talk about except painting and writing. Ruth and I sometimes walked the round trip of twenty kilometres to call on the Graves in Deya. We were also friendly with the Tarrs, though they left after a while to run a language school in Valencia, a venture which flourished due to John’s excellent teaching methods.

Tony Buttita, a theatre press agent, who was also writing a novel, came frequently from the United States to see Elizabeth Trocchi. He had known Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood during the ’30s, and was later to write a book about him. Tony usually arrived with boxes of literary magazines from New York and San Francisco, as well as novels by Mailer, Salinger, Styron, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and others. Their books were like gold at a time when equally vigorous writing in England seemed not to exist, except for recently published first novels by Kingsley Amis and John Wain, which we hadn’t yet been able to read.

England had vanished beyond the northern rim of the world, for I had now been away longer than the time spent in Malaya. Her Majesty the Queen — God bless her! — or her representatives, continued to provide what by now had become my private remittance-man income, enabling Ruth and myself to stay out of the way and go on with our writing.

In September we rented a large old farmhouse in the orchard area between the town and the sea, drawing our water from a well under fig and olive trees in the garden. Don Jose, the man of the neighbouring family, had been in prison during the Civil War for expressing socialist sympathies, and had caught tuberculosis. A pig they kept was fed on figs and peaches from their garden, and we were invited to the feast when it was killed, its dreadful squealing taking me back to the time when my grandfather’s pig had been slaughtered by the back door of the cottage at Old Engine Houses. Jose and his family later emigrated to Canada where, due to a better standard of life, he recovered his health.

Rosica Colin was trying to get my children’s story ‘Big John and the Stars’ published, but meanwhile The General’s Dilemma and Letters from Malaya had been turned down by half a dozen firms. Editors, she said, were afraid to take on something like Letters from Malaya because of the ‘strong language’, certain expressions not being permitted at a time when there was a drive against ‘obscene’ books. I told her that the notion of being obscene had never occurred to me, and though I didn’t like the idea of cutting anything out of my novel I would excise the occasional swear word (of which there weren’t many) if it meant getting the book published, and me receiving money for it. Rosica asked me not to be discouraged by such criticism, and to continue writing.

In the autumn we moved to the lower half of an isolated house on a hillside, whose wide terrace above groves of lemon and orange trees gave an unimpeded view over the town and across to the escarpment of Puig Mayor. Four stray cats attached themselves to the paved area around our back door, and were fed when there was anything to spare.

A poem ‘Left as One Dead’ was published in Outposts by Howard Sergeant, and in October ‘The Match’ was finally printed in Carre-four in Paris, though a copy never reached me. Some of Ruth’s poems appeared in the Hudson Review. I started a novel at the beginning of November called Mr Allen’s Island, and finished the first draft of 60,000 words in seven weeks. The story was about the reported sighting of an island near the sensitively strategic Bering Straits, an area notorious for mist and fog. The whole thing was a hoax, perpetrated by Mr Allen, an eccentric millionaire and practical joker, who was only too successful in convincing the world of the island’s reality. In the last chapter the Soviet and United States navies are heading for the non-existent island to claim sovereignty, and become embroiled in a battle for possession which marks the outbreak of the Third World War.

The novel came from my fascination with geography, world politics and warfare, and the extent of my enjoyment in writing it can best be gauged by the slapdash verve of its style and narration. On showing the final typed copy to Robert Graves his response was: ‘Why don’t you write something set in Nottingham? That’s the place you know best.’

Chapter Thirty-one

Mr Allen’s Island went to Rosica Colin on 4 February 1955, and was promptly turned down by an editor, though he (or she) had still to give a decision on The General’s Dilemma. Hope was raised later in the month when a publisher who liked Letters from Malaya thought that even more story would improve it, so I added sixty pages to increase still further the presence of Mimi the Chinese girl. The sixth and what was to be the final version was posted to London in April.

I then began writing The Palisade, a novel which used my RAF hospital experience, about a young man who, though seriously ill, decides to leave the hospital without further treatment. He is the son of a prosperous Lincolnshire farmer, and the nurse who deserts the Service to go with him comes from an ordinary family in Birmingham. They eventually marry, and leave England to live in a place much like Menton. By the end the man is close to a death brought on by the woman’s callous infidelities, and a suicidal carelessness on his part with regard to his illness. The typescript was 300 pages long and, in the earlier hospital chapters at least, I thought the quality of the writing was as good as any I had done so far.

Harry Fainlight, Ruth’s brother, and some Israeli friends from Cambridge came to visit us during the Easter vacation, and we decided to celebrate the homely ritual of Passover. The problem, however, was how to obtain the unleavened bread said to have been hurriedly eaten by the Israelites before fleeing from under the noses of their Egyptian overseers, but it was more or less solved when concocted on a griddle over our charcoal fire.

Every fortnight Ruth and I took the train to Palma so that I could have my pneumothorax refill at the tuberculosis clinic. We had lunch for eleven pesetas at the counter of a small eating place on the main avenue, grandiosely named ‘The Yatté Ritz’, and in the afternoon called on Robert and Beryl Graves at their weekday flat in the northern suburbs, where we talked, had tea, and often came away with borrowed books.

Robert was asked by a printer, publisher and writer in Palma, Luis Ripoll, to translate a book needed for the growing tourist readership, called Chopin’s Winter in Majorca. Robert, being too busy, recommended me as someone who would produce a fluent version. Though doubting that my Spanish was good enough, I agreed to do the job so as to earn the twenty-five pound fee. The 15,000-word book was wanted in a hurry and, with much assistance from a dictionary, I did 2,000 words a day, which left sufficient time before the deadline for revision, and translating the captions of the illustrations.

My Spanish identity card, issued by the General Security Headquarters in Palma, authorized me to live in Majorca for as long as I liked. In the application form my occupation was given as novelist, and beside the photograph, and of almost equal size, was the only fingerprint I have (so far) been asked for. This it was obligatory to provide, otherwise I would have had to relinquish my favoured expatriate life style.

My brother Brian came for three weeks in August, and his contribution to household expenses was helpful. We met Robin Marris, a Cambridge economics don, and his wife, who were on the island for their honeymoon, and the five of us went in Robin’s hired car to a bullfight. At Robert’s sixtieth birthday celebrations in Deya, scores of people, both local and foreign, assembled in the house and garden, where meat roasted on fires and there was champagne to help it down. Robert teased Brian about the antics he was undoubtedly getting up to in Nottingham — that sink of iniquity. Home-style entertainments included the old army game ‘O’Grady Says’, conducted by Robert, who later appeared in toga and laurel leaves to delight us with a simpering ‘Claudius’ act, prior to the concluding fireworks show.

Brian left me a suit before going back to Nottingham, which was rather in the ‘teddy boy’ style of the time, but looked smart enough after some minor tailoring. In return I gave him the handwritten draft of By What Road, both of us hoping it might one day be of some value.

The postman left our mail with the woman of a house on the main road, and one or both of us would goat-foot twice a day to the bottom of the hill to see if any was waiting for us. Most often there would be nothing, but letters from Rosica were always eagerly opened. In one I was informed that Mr Allen’s Island had been turned down. She had, however, sent it somewhere else, though she still thought Letters from Malaya would be the easiest to place. When it was rejected yet again she despatched it, with The General’s Dilemma, to another firm.

Jim Donovan, Elizabeth Trocchi, Ruth and myself set out at midnight with a basket of food, to walk to the monastery at Lluch. A fully risen moon lighted our way along the dusty lane out of Soller and through the silent village of Biniaraix. Up the winding and wooded ravine of Es Barranch the steps were just too far apart for easy progress, being made for donkeys rather than people.

From the zone of glistening olive trees we passed into pines and firs, stopping to drink and smoke by the descending water of an irrigation channel. Dully ringing bells sounded from scattering sheep as the path became something of a spiral staircase, but beyond the shuttered hunting lodge of L’Ofre, free of the ravine at last, we ascended zig-zag over loose stones.

Unfamiliar with the way to the monastery from the Soller direction, my rudimentary map brought us to the 900-metre contour line as first dawn was beginning to light the tableland of the Pla de Cuber. Gathering a few twigs and some grass we made a fire, and drank tea in the chill air with our breakfast of bread and spicy sausage.

The wide valley was as empty as if no human had ever been there, the main peak of the island rising behind the sheer flank of the Sierra de Cuber to our left. A lone figure coming towards us during the next hour of our walk turned out to be a woman well into her seventies, who introduced herself as Lady Shepherd. ‘And who might you be?’ she asked with endearing hauteur. We gave our names, and on hearing mine she exclaimed: ‘Oh! And are you one of the Edinburgh Sillitoes?’ The answer was no, and on we went, passing the untenanted farmhouse of Cuber, then in the increasing oven-heat of the morning resting our feet in the cold blue water of the Gorch Blau.

After the ten-hour walk we were glad of the one cell allotted to our group, there being no nonsense about asking for marriage lines, of which there wasn’t one between us. Ruth and Elizabeth went back next morning to Soller by bus and train, while Jim and I took the same route home through the mountains, walking sixty kilometres in two days.

Our flat was the lower part of a house, and the science-fiction writer Mack Reynolds lived in the upper section with his wife Jeanette and their large Dalmatian dog Story — so named because he had been bought from the proceeds of one. The only fault of this otherwise amiable canine was his petomanic ability occasionally to convert the air around him — with a haughty expression of achievement on his dignified features — into a gas so foul that even he had to move away.

Disciplined and industrious, Mack made a living from his yarns and articles, one of the latter, ‘How to Get Swacked on Fifty Cents’, being published in a down-market travel magazine. A big overweight man with a voice to match, every tread and chuckle was registered on our ceiling, but he was good company, full of jokes and anecdotes, telling us that when he was in the navy and first thought of becoming a writer he went into the public library and took out a book on how to make a career in that medium. The opening words of the book were: ‘If you are reading these words without moving your lips you too can become a writer.’ From then on, Mack said, all he had to do was read, and work.

The way to the house was by a curving footpath up the hillside and, Mack and his friends being heavy drinkers, we would often see delivery men sweating up the contours with crates of liquor on their shoulders. A visitor to the Reynolds during July was Anthony Brett-James, whose book Report My Signals had been based on his wartime experiences with the Fourteenth Army in Burma. He was a director of Chatto and Windus, and when he showed interest in seeing my work I asked Rosica to send The Palisade. He didn’t like it, however, commenting that no service nurse would abscond with a seriously ill patient. Such an incident had in fact taken place during my stay at Wroughton. Nor did his firm want The General’s Dilemma or Mr Allen’s Island, though Brett-James thought both should be persevered with.

Back at square one of the ludo game, I hardly knew what to do next, though Rosica’s encouragement never flagged, and she continued sending things out. On re-reading The General’s Dilemma and Mr Allen’s Island, after another publisher had rejected them, the truth was faced that they had not yet been sufficiently worked on, and I called them in. Sitting with pen and notebook one morning against an orange tree on the terrace below the house, I began to write a novel provisionally called The Adventures of Arthur Seaton.

People went away in the autumn, and tourism almost ceased. Another winter was coming, with the expense of buying firewood to keep the main room heated. We had no newspapers or magazines, and at this time no radio nor, of course, television. Among the films we saw in the town was Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, which had been so cut about by the censor as to be almost unintelligible. On long evenings after closing the shutters against the wind and the rain, and when supper was finished, Ruth and I sat by the fire and read. One could only write for so many hours out of the twenty-four, and books were our only solace.

I told Rosica, in a letter dated October 21st:

I may revise ‘The General’s Dilemma’ and ‘Mr Allen’s Island’ some time, perhaps when I have finished the second draft of a novel I am working on at the moment, which will be called ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’. The weather is variable and autumnal here, but we are already eating oranges off the trees. There are pomegranates and apples too, all of which make good fruit salads. But man doth not live by fruit alone, and I feel the need of an English library.

We rarely went short of something to read, however. Major Pring-Mill, who had lost an arm in the Great War, and had served all through the Second, was generous in lending books from his collection of English novels, among which were the complete works of Trollope. Interested also in military history, I borrowed the three volumes of J.F.C. Fuller’s Decisive Battles of the Western World.

The way to the Pring-Mills’ house was across the valley and along a dismal muddy lane, and on arrival the Major and his wife Nellie would offer sherry. We indicated small ones, but he put out tumblers and leaned over stiffly to fill them, sending us tottering home in the dark, careful not to drop his precious books.

In our rented flat we found a copy of The Far Side of the Moon, published by Faber and Faber in 1947, with a preface by T.S. Eliot. The anonymous author described the brutal deportations of innocent Polish people from that part of Poland occupied by the Russians in 1939. Another revealing book, probably borrowed from the Pring-Mills, was Alex Weissberg’s Conspiracy of Silence, telling the story of his arrest and giving an account of the Moscow show trials in the 1930s. He was an Austrian national, and also Jewish, and after the Soviet — Nazi Pact in 1939 the Russians handed him over to the Germans. Fortunately he survived to write his testimony.

To pass the long evenings we read aloud to each other. Ruth entertained me with various Gothic novels, such as Rasselas, The Castle of Otranto and Beckford’s Vathek, and I responded with a performance through several weeks of The Confessions of an English Opium Eater by De Quincey. This extended recitation reinforced the belief that ‘good English is clear English’, and gave a feeling for the language not so vividly received from eye contact or by listening. The cadences of style became apparent enough to help improve my prose, a revelation which could no doubt have come sooner with a nineteenth-century education in the Latin and Greek classics.

Reading my work aloud was a way of ensuring that it had the fluidity and clarity of good English. Care had always been taken, but more ruthlessness was now shown in picking out the number of repetitions on a page, at spotting unnecessary words, scratching out tautologies, getting rid of clichés, eliminating what was implied rather than plainly stated, and striving to achieve simplicity even in the descriptions of complicated thought processes — in using the techniques of poetry perhaps to write prose.

Clear English could be enriched by idiomatic or personal quirks as long as they fitted in with the narrative and echoed my inner voice, the way things sounded to me even before I had a pen in my hand. These observations are elementary, and had been half consciously noted already, such a standard of writing sometimes coming by inspiration, as was evident in many of my stories. Much in my novels was careless and slipshod, however, and the only remedy was constant ice-cold application.

During this long winter it became obvious that I had not been working hard enough on style: every word, every phrase, every sentence — in every story and on every page of a novel — had to be broken up and then knitted together again so that no loopholes in the prose remained.

Chapter Thirty-two

The only luxury allowed, which did for both of us, was a large domestic wireless set, with glowing valves and a good spread of short-wave. The cost of a pound a month melted into the total expenditure of seventeen pounds ten shillings on which we had to live, possible because a check was kept on every peseta that came in, and on every centimo spent. Account books show that the monthly outlay on food was about nine pounds, while two went on tobacco and drink, and a little more than that on postage. Putting aside a pound for rent, the rest was spread across general household expenses.

We economized on everything, and wasted nothing. Magazines or newspapers no longer needed were exchanged weight for weight for charcoal to heat water for coffee in the morning and cook the evening meal. Firemaking was my job, and I could bring a kettle to the boil with charcoal as quickly as a gas stove could have done it. Bleach and wood ash were used for cleaning, and esparto grass as a brush for washing up, always in cold water. A geyser system gave heat for showers, however, so comfort was by no means absent.

It was remarkable how clothes could last if you slopped around all summer in shorts and a shirt, or even with nothing on above the waist. Ruth’s aunt in America sent a dark suit for me which needed little work from a local tailor to make it fit, and was formal enough to wear at a film première some years later.

During the Christmas season, and into 1956, a young American writer, Nancy Warshaw (later Bogen) would take refuge with us on days when her house on the outer confines of the valley became almost uninhabitable in the damp and gloomy weather. She cheered our lives with New York humour, and laughter at what she called my ‘jungle stories’, later saying she had seen me in those days as being a potentially violent character — the only point of dispute between us.

In February nearly a foot of snow covered the island, and from the terrace below we picked huge navel oranges thinly coated with ice, delicious to eat but even more so for their cold sweet juice. The landlord let us take as many as we liked, since they would rot anyway when they fell, so that however bad the winter, there was plenty of vitamin C.

When a publisher sent back The Palisade — after much consideration, it was said — Rosica posted it somewhere else, and intended trying another firm should it come back from there. As long as I kept working there would be typescripts to send out, and as long as things were being sent out I couldn’t lose hope, and as long as there was hope my optimism enabled me to continue working.

The wireless kept us informed on what was happening in the world, though it didn’t seem to be much, for I was as adept as I should have been at slinging an aerial to get all kinds of foreign stations. At eight thirty one evening a melancholy tune played across the aether, and on listening to the news in English which followed I learned that it was the Ha-Tikva — the national anthem of Israel, coming from Kol Zion Lagola in Jerusalem.

Tuning in to the same station from then on, I learned something of what modern life was like in the Holy Land. Every day there were murderous raids across its borders from Arab countries, who were determined to destroy it. Israel was in the same situation as Great Britain in 1940, except that for Israel the threat seemed to be permanent. The announcer of Kol Zion invited listeners to send reports of their transmitter’s strength, and on posting a detailed wireless operator’s assessment I received a monthly magazine of news and comment.

I was requested to attend the military hospital in Gibraltar for another medical board, and arrived there on 29th February. During a haircut and shave in Algeciras the barber assumed I was native to the Balearic Islands, my Spanish accent sounding merely provincial, no longer English or entirely foreign.

My time in the hospital ward seemed much longer than three days, taking me vividly back to the RAF time. To National Service soldiers in the ward I was the older man, and they assumed I was able to answer all their questions. On admitting I was a writer one of the swaddies in his dressing-gown came to my bed with some verses he had written. Unfortunately they were no good, but I told him to keep on writing. I did some shopping while on the Rock, and returned to Soller with kippers, bacon and English tobacco. News came a few weeks later that my pension would continue until further notice.

A friend sent us A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, and I began the 600 page anthology at random by reading a tale of Israel Joshua Singer’s called ‘Sand’, set in the Jewish village of Podgurna on the banks of the Vistula in nineteenth-century Russia. Aaron, a travelling ritual slaughterer recently widowed, is invited to lodge at the Rabbi’s house, in which he seduces the daughter who becomes pregnant. When the fact can no longer be concealed, the pair are married, though not before the whole community has come together in uproar to make sure the matter is put right. A further strand of the story takes us through four seasons, and tells of how the settlement acquires its own burial ground, no longer having to use the one in the next village which is slightly more prosperous, and whose charges the people of Podgurna can barely afford.

Strange as it may seem I felt some connection between the poor of these Yiddish stories and those I had grown up with, as if I had half known such people before. The style of writing was in some way responsible, but I also learned that in a story much can be told between the A of the beginning and the Z of the conclusion, the kind of detail which, though not apparently relevant, becomes so in the completed work, and is all the richer for being written in an unhurried, meandering and therefore more human way. This is one method by which the author of ‘Sand’ gives reality to the lives of those who lead such hard and uncertain lives. Though the people in Nottingham were not Jewish, and did not therefore have the same passionate belief in their religion and its ethics (nor, of course, the ever present peril from physical persecution), their sense of humour, ability to endure and, flexible attitudes to the minutiae of life, showed some similarity. It was impossible to be unmoved on reading Isaac Bashevis Singer: ‘The Jew never looked askance at the deserter who crept into a cellar or attic while armies clashed in the streets outside,’ something with which my mother would certainly have agreed.

The anthology also contained such masterpieces of the short story as ‘Kola Street’, ‘Repentance’, ‘White Chalah’ and ‘Competitors’. Poor people have vivid lives and suffer much (though not, once they can afford to eat, more than other people) and one has to write about their tribulations and follies as if one loves them. Every person is a unique individual, and no writer should generalize, or classify people into any kind of political or sociological group, something doubly confirmed by those classics of Yiddish literary art.

Early in 1956 we met the Swedish film actress Ulla Jacobsson, famous for her recent performance in Smiles of a Summer Night. She was a quiet, tense and beautiful young woman who, when in the Soller valley, was probably as much at ease as she ever could be. Her husband was the Dutch artist Frank Lodeizen and, with Nancy, the five of us were to become good friends, though I contested Frank’s assertion when we got on to political topics that the Royal Air Force during the war had never really tried to bomb the Krupp works at Essen because too many British capitalists had shares in the firm.

During our half drunken and hilarious sessions we devised a religion based on the worship of Globoes, enormous coloured tissue-paper lighter-than-air balloons acquired at the local stationers’. Some, shaped like pigs or other animals, were popular for sending aloft at fiestas or birthdays. Before launching, the Globo had to be opened as far as possible by hand, so that a wad of cotton wool soaked in alcohol could be tied to the wire frame of the opening and lit.

The shape slowly filled with hot air and, when it was released, began to ascend and drift majestically across the valley at a height of several hundred feet. Ruth and I wrote ‘The Globo Anthem’, and a one-act ritualistic play to be performed on the Globo Sabbath before each series of balloons was released, the Globo Sabbath being any day the five of us felt like getting together over a bottle or two of champagne.

In our talk one evening Ulla said that if I wrote a script for her to act in she would get me an advance of a thousand marks from Germany, even if the film company never made it, so anxious were they to keep her under contract. I did not know the technique of writing a script, but she said it could be done as a short novel, so in a few weeks I gave her The Bandstand.

The germ of the story, rescued from The Palisade, which had been put away as unsaleable, was about a young Swedish woman who falls in love with a consumptive Englishman living with his wife on the Côte d’Azur. The bandstand of the town, where they first meet, becomes a symbol of their (necessarily doomed) association, various events leading to a dramatic and bloody climax on the festival of the Fifteenth of August. Ulla, to my surprise, saw it as a satisfactory blueprint for her talent, and the film company wrote to me after a while to say they would shortly be making an offer.

In May we left the hillside and went back to Maria Mayol’s house in the town, taking a flat on the third floor, the rear terrace still giving the panoramic expanse of mountain that we had come to expect. I worked much of that year on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, stitching the narrative together by ploughing in a dozen Nottingham stories which seemed to concern the main character, or to amplify the background before which he performed, some of the stories and sketches having been written as long as five years ago.

This creative process, if it can be defined as such, was recalled on seeing Benvenuto Cellini at Covent Garden a few years later, though I’m not sure the incident so brilliantly highlighted by Berlioz is in the famous Autobiography, which was my favourite reading for a time. My thoughts about the book might echo those of William Beckford who, on seeing the Perseus statue in Florence, wrote that ‘Cellini has ever occupied a distinguished place in my kalender of genius.’

In the opera the all-powerful Pope is waiting impatiently for the statue of ‘Perseus and the Gorgon’s Head’ which he has long since paid for. Visiting the atelier, he threatens the sculptor with hanging if he doesn’t produce the work immediately. Cellini finds that he doesn’t have enough metal to finish, and to get out of the impasse rushes around the studio snatching up smaller pieces already done and feeding them into the furnace. Thus the ‘Perseus’ appears, welcomed by Pope, workmen, and the artist himself of course, with great enthusiasm, a dazzling climax to the opera. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was constructed after much the same fashion, the Pope in my case being the spectre of poverty should my pension come to an end.

Perhaps it was this technique which gave the work a somewhat episodic effect, but ‘Once in a Weekend’ began the novel, ‘A Bad ’Un’ fleshed out Aunt Ada in chapter 5, into which was also ploughed ‘Situation Vacant’. ‘The Criminals’ ended chapter 8, ‘The Two Big Soldiers’ chapter 11, ‘Blackcurrant’ gave some point to chapter 14, and a poem called ‘Fish’ swam into the final pages. Thus these stories, as well as a few bits and pieces not worth mentioning, were melted into the novel to propel the narrative and enrich the book.

Most of one handwritten draft was done on the reverse pages of the bound copy of The Deserters, and at the end I uncharacteristically signed my name, for some reason adding: ‘Ten minutes to one in the middle of Sunday morning, and now to wash the dishes.’

During the many revisions I was so deeply back in Nottingham that the whole of my life up to the age of eighteen was called in for use, though little of the book was autobiographical. The factory worker, Arthur Seaton, was unlike anyone I knew, though perhaps my brother Brian in one of his many manifestations had suggested him, for it was he who in a letter told me of a young man in a pub falling down the stairs one Saturday night after drinking eleven pints of beer and seven gins.

In a notebook of the time I wrote:

The continuous tradition of inspired writing passed on from writer to writer seems to have been discontinued since Lawrence died. He had Hardy and Meredith. What have we? We have to forge new links and fasten somehow to the old chain so that people will again think writers have something to say … Creative genius springs from the same wells as folk art, the difference being that while folk art remains unrefined the art has to be shaped and polished by technique and form, though not enough to hide those origins which the writer should be careful to keep well in evidence.

The only novels I had read, dealing more or less with the kind of life I wrote about, were Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago and the abridged version of Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, neither of which I had seen since Malaya. Writing from my centre, and with most influences by now flushed out by continual failures, I was setting a story against a realistic background which nevertheless demanded the use of the imagination. So deeply was I engrossed in the writing that I was in no mood to hurry the book, continuing work on it till the middle of the following year.

I spent more time at the radio after Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal in July 1956. Great Britain moved reinforcements to Cyprus, and when the matter went to the United Nations it looked like being lost in the bogs of feeble internecine discussion. By the end of October, Israel, no longer able to put up with the attacks on its frontiers, sent armoured columns against the Egyptian Army in the Sinai Desert. The only maps on which to follow these military operations were those in my old Baedeker of Palestine and Syria, which I had asked my mother to post on to me.

Britain and France demanded that the combatants in the desert cease fighting within twelve hours. Israel seemed willing, but Egypt was not in the mood to comply. This British and French reading of the Riot Act being ignored, RAF bombers attacked Egyptian airfields in the Nile Delta. The object of the Allies was to occupy the Suez Canal so that the waterway would not be damaged in the fighting, though the Israelis had already routed the Egyptians by the time the Allied landings took place.

The air waves had never been so busy and, going back happily to my old trade of wireless operator (the perfect diversion from work on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), I intercepted the following advice sent out in Morse code by the Admiralty in London:

1630 HOURS GMT TODAY QUOTE IN VIEW OF THE SITUATION BETWEEN ISRAEL AND EGYPT MERCHANT SHIPPING IS ADVISED FOR THE TIME BEING AND UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE TO KEEP CLEAR OF THE SUEZ CANAL AND ISRAEL AND EGYPTIAN TERRITORIAL WATERS UNQUOTE AND DESPITE OUR RADIO 26TH OCTOBER GIVE YOU COMPLETE DISCRETION TO CLEAR CANAL IN EITHER DIRECTION IF CIRCUMSTANCES MAKE THIS FEASIBLE STOP IF ABLE TO CLEAR YOU SHOULD PROCEED TO VICINITY 23N 3745E PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE AND ADVISE WHAT YOU ARE DOING.

News agency messages also in Morse were picked up:

… QUOTE DEEP CONCERN UNQUOTE AT BRITISH ATTACK ON EGYPT AND IS QUOTE FERVENTLY ASKING FOR PEACEFUL METHOD NOT YET INVOLVING TROOP MOVEMENTS UNQUOTE WOULD BE FOUND FOR SETTLING THE SITUATION STOP AMBASSADOR SAID THAT BRITISH WERE ACTING AGAINST A VICTIM OF AGGRESSION STOP IT IS UNDERSTOOD COMMUNICATION IN SIMILAR TERMS HAS BEEN MADE TO BRITISH AMBASSADOR IN LIBYA STOP SECURITY COUNCIL COULD NOT TAKE ANY PRACTICAL STEPS TO HALT HOSTILITIES AND ENSURE PASSAGE OF VESSELS THROUGH SUEZ CANAL END ITEM LONDON CRICKET SCORES BETWEEN AUSTRALIA AND …

Spanish newspapers were so biased against Britain and France (not to mention Israel) and so heavily censored, and supplied only with official handouts, as to be completely unreliable. Before the Allies landed in Egypt they quoted Arab sources in Beirut as saying that British troops had disembarked in Haifa to join Israeli forces on the Suez Canal. For me to believe in collusion between the Allies and Israel would have been wishful thinking, though the hope was there, since such co-operation would have made cultural and geopolitical sense.

My pencil ran across the pages to get down another radio news message beginning: ‘ITEM LONDON TWENTY PEOPLE FINED BETWEEN TEN SHILLINGS AND THIRTY SHILLINGS FOR OFFENCES AGAINST …’ telling about riots in Whitehall against the landing, as well as opposition from the Labour Party, and suggesting, which I found hard to believe, that most people in England disagreed with what was happening.

About the same time the Hungarian people rebelled against the communist rulers of their country, and were fighting the tanks of the Red Army. When I tuned in to a wireless telegraph station communicating with insurgent garrisons in Budapest the Russians were so adept at jamming that it was hardly possible to receive more than a word or two at a time. Diverting my faculties even further from the exploits of Arthur Seaton I wrote an 800-word ‘Plan for the Liberation of Hungary’, a strategical design delineating the armed forces necessary, their training and armaments, the places suitable for landing on the Baltic coast, and the main lines of advance towards the Carpathians. Those nations were listed which might be amenable to the scheme, with an analysis of political attitudes necessary to inveigle them into it if they were not. It was a highly satisfactory game of ‘Foreign Office’, but the wish was there, all the same, that such fantasy could become reality so as to help the Hungarians.

My opinions are from notebooks of the time (as are the Morse transcripts) though other people in Majorca, especially Americans, thought them foolish, or at least misguided when I expressed them. Israel was compelled by the United States to withdraw its forces from the Sinai, the British and French to pull out of the Canal Zone, which disasters were to leave the Russians with the illusion of having been victorious in both places.

Enough pieces had now been written on Majorca to make a book and, arranging them into the four seasons of the year, I typed the final draft into A Stay of Some Time, the title taken from Baedeker’s Spain and Portugal, in which it is stated that ‘Soller is suitable for a stay of some time’, which I knew to be true enough. The book, together with The Bandstand, went off to loyal and long-suffering Rosica in the autumn.

The supply of books had almost dried up, so we joined the British Council library in Barcelona, and were sent a form on which was to be specified the authors or subjects of interest to us. The books were then packed into a large carton and sent monthly on the boat, to be collected by us in Palma.

It’s hard to remember why I asked for books on criminology, but a score or so of titles came, dealing with prisons, borstals and their recidivist inmates, some analysing and commenting on the penalties handed out to anti-social elements of the British population, books written from every point of view except that of the criminal. The human and certainly intelligent authors, all of whom I read with interest, looked on the lawbreaker as little more than a statistic, giving only cursory attention to individual psychology and social conditions.

Towards the end of 1956, Letters from Malaya failed once more to find a publisher. I had worked on it to the utmost, and felt so discouraged that I decided not to have it sent out again. A Stay of Some Time, written with equal care and attention, also came back, together with The Bandstand. Short stories such as ‘The Fishing Boat Picture’, ‘Uncle Ernest’, ‘The Match’ and ‘Mr Raynor, the Schoolteacher’ were turned down regularly by magazine editors.

Though I had been writing for eight years, and had lived out of England for nearly five, it seemed as if I might have to go on for some time yet. Doom and gloom occasionally had me in their grip, though rarely for long, because I was rewriting Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and decided to stake everything on that. A small sign of encouragement came in a copy of Outposts, which contained a poem showing something of my state of mind during those years of exile and rejection. Under the title of ‘Anthem’ it goes:

Ruth and I joked about a time in the future when we would have to erect barbed wire around the grand house we lived in so as to keep biographers at bay. We were also amused to recall Joseph Grand in The Plague by Albert Camus, who had spent years writing and rewriting the first sentence of what he hoped would be a great novel. In the middle of plague-stricken Oran he says to his friend Doctor Rieux: ‘What I really want, doctor, is this. On the day when the manuscript of my novel reaches the publisher, I want him to stand up — after he’s read it through, of course — and say to his staff: “Gentlemen, hats off!”’

The year ended on a hopeful and not ungenerous note, for I received nearly two hundred pounds from Constantine Films of Stuttgart, as advance payment on The Bandstand. The covering letter declared that I was to turn the book into a script if and when the company decided to continue with the project as a film in which Ulla Jacobsson would play the main part. Nothing further was to come of it, and the typescript may well be mouldering away in some company archive. I only hope it stays there.

Chapter Thirty-three

The new year of 1957, helped by the cash from Germany, brought a little ease with regard to money. For one exhilarating month there was adequate to buy a primitive small house in a nearby village, but we didn’t give such a sensible idea much consideration, perhaps because further money couldn’t be guaranteed to furnish it to the standard of a rented place. Instead we decided to go to London and find out whether or not we could get something published by making ourselves known. I would be able to read ‘Kedah Peak’ on the BBC which had been accepted three years ago, and show someone the first six chapters of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The rest of the novel, needing more work, would stay in Majorca, for I was in no hurry, and not in the mood for taking chances.

The least commercially-minded people, we were told it was possible to sublet the flat, and ask a rent that would seem more than reasonable to a family from England, yet give us a small profit. At the end of January Beryl and Robert Graves took us and our luggage in the family Landrover to Palma, treated us to a meal at a restaurant near the waterfront, and wished us luck before waving us off on the boat to Barcelona. In France a bottle of our Spanish brandy smashed on the floor of the compartment, which reeked so strongly up and down the corridor that no one else came in, leaving space for us to stretch out and sleep.

After so long in the south, the little individual houses on the outskirts of Paris, with their neat gardens in north European rows, gave something of a shock, as if I had only ever seen them before in another life. On board the Calais — Dover boat Ruth, being a foreigner, queued by the cubby hole where passport stamping went on, a green sea sliding up and down the windows. She was questioned by the immigration official, who supposed she lacked the necessary wealth to get into his glum country. Eventually (though not, one assumed, out of the goodness of his heart) he put in a stamp allowing her to stay sixty days, thus condemning us to the inconvenience of visiting the Aliens Office, for the flat in Soller had been let for three months.

A good tea was served on the London train, rain at the windows cutting visibility to nil. We stayed a while at the house of Ima Bayliss in Dulwich, whom we had met in Majorca. Though I believed in myself as a writer, it was sometimes difficult to assume that other people, on little enough evidence, should look on me in that guise as well. Ima was one of them, as was her husband, the Australian painter Clifford Bayliss, who earned a living by designing stage scenery at Covent Garden.

We called on our families (I hadn’t seen mine for well over five years) then came back to London and took a furnished room in West Kensington, close to Rosica Colin’s office in Baron’s Court. Invited to lunch, we discussed my prospects as a writer. She was a handsome and lively black-haired woman of middle age, a Rumanian by birth, who had been stranded in England at the beginning of the war after her husband was killed in a car crash. Left with a young child, she’d had a struggle, but being a person of quality and courage, had managed to establish a successful literary agency.

She had done her enthusiastic best for the last three years to get my work published, but the four novels and a travel book had been rejected again and again, and it was hard to know what to do next. Encouraged by the few chapters of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, however, she had made an appointment for me to deliver them personally to Tom Maschler at MacGibbon and Kee, whose firm was said to be looking for original new novels. She also found me some work reading a novel by Pio Baroja in Spanish, and writing a report for a publisher, who might then commission me to do the translation. The editor of a children’s anthology was interested in ‘Big John and the Stars’, and she would send A Stay of Some Time out again.

London was depressing, and at times I wondered why I had wasted time and money to be there. Having no settled place to live did not suit me, though there was the illusion of useful contacts being made. My picture of a return had been coloured by Balzac’s description of Rastignac at the end of Père Goriot, who looks down on Paris from the high ground and knows that when he descends it will be to certain success. Clearly, I had not reached that stage, and if ever I did the murky weather would be sure to put a damper on such a romantic notion.

Howard Sergeant and his wife Jean welcomed us for an evening in Dulwich, and the poems Ruth and I showed for the new Outposts series of booklets were immediately taken. The arrangement was that Howard would, out of 300 copies printed, keep fifty for himself and the reviewers, while we were to get back the thirty pounds cost of printing and binding by selling the rest at half a crown each, which Howard assured us we were bound to do.

The system seemed only half a step up from that of a vanity press, and I didn’t much relish being a huckster for my own work, but the poems would be printed and possibly noticed. Howard Sergeant deserves high praise for his unpaid work in disseminating poetry to a wider audience, for he went on to do hundreds more booklets in the same format. Ruth’s title and mine are now collectors’ items, and the price of one copy would have paid the bill for the whole transaction.

The poems chosen were from what I thought of as my recent best, put together and called Without Beer or Bread, publication being set for sometime in the autumn. On the subscription form, printed right away and to be handed out to any likely customer, the brief biographical information stated that I had just finished a novel called Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, being ‘the adventurous account of two years from the life of a Nottingham teddy-boy’. Then comes the declaration that the author of the present booklet

considers the Welfare State to be the poet’s deadliest enemy. By pandering so much to the people it destroys all ancestral connection between them and the poet. He advocates that poets begin to fight back. They should, he feels, abandon the precarious guerilla positions they now hold and spread comprehensible poems among people who would most certainly read them if awakened to the fact that they existed.

It’s hard to imagine my mood in dashing off those views, but at least there was only myself to blame should copies prove difficult to sell which, in the event, they did not.

We stayed a few days in Hove with Ruth’s parents who, although we were not married (and had no prospect yet of being so), treated me like a son-in-law. As a birthday gift Mrs Fainlight booked seats for a performance of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Brighton Theatre Royal. The audience did not seem especially impressed, but to me it was a revelation to see people like Jimmy Porter shown on the stage at last.

On the Brighton Belle next morning we talked to an urbane fifty-year-old professional man who had also enjoyed the play. We told him we were writers who lived in Majorca, and were visiting England to see friends. Perhaps he was intrigued at my mention of going from the station to rehearse a talk at the BBC, because he had a car waiting at Victoria with a chauffeur, and offered to take us to that part of town, his office being in the same area. Maybe he doubted my story, and wanted to see whether I would in fact go through those big revolving doors.

My stand-offish dislike of England came from having been so long away as to feel almost a foreigner. This would have been depressing had not sufficient novelty remained, to fascinate me in spite of myself. So strong had been the influence of Spain, and so decisive the struggle to consolidate my persona as a writer, that England had been very much rubbed away, and its people and the lives they led almost forgotten about during those five years. I didn’t want to stay, and could only face doing so by living from day to day, since the reality of being there seemed to have no relationship to hopes and expectations.

After delivering the half dozen chapters of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to Tom Maschler, my talk was broadcast on the wireless at nine o’clock on 10th April. The Radio Times said: ‘The Mountain stands surrounded by dense jungle, and rises steeply to four thousand feet. Tigers still roam its forests, and so we were all armed. Mr Sillitoe describes the ascent and exploration of a mountain in North Malaya by a party of six members of an RAF jungle rescue team.’

The talk was preceded by the Promenade Players, and followed by a song recital. Not one word of the script I had sent in was altered, proof enough that my prose had for some years possessed the necessary quality of self-assurance to be read on the BBC, which organization had formed no small part in my pursuance of education and enlightenment. Apart from all that, the eighteen-guinea payment was a useful addition to our resources.

The last month was a pleasing counterpoint to the early weeks, for Ima Bayliss let us stay in the thatch-roofed Primrose Cottage which she had the use of, at Manuden near Bishop’s Stortford. The countryside roundabout was a dream-England, fine spring weather recalling those first forays out of the hospital in Wiltshire eight years before. I sat in the front room facing the lane to begin writing again. Two months doing none had made life fairly insupportable, and for a few weeks I had as satisfying an existence as a writer could wish for.

Immersed in the works of Albert Camus, I was especially impressed by L’Homme Révolté, and the Gallic complexities of logic that went into the definition of the rebel’s state of mind. A novel to be called The Rats, in which I would clarify my reflections on life in England with the fresh eye of a returning exile, turned instead into a book-length poem, and developed into an attack on the mindless conformity and complacency of England in the 1950s. At my writing one day (or not writing, because at times I could do no more than look vacantly out of the window before me) I saw a youth in vest and shorts trotting by along the lane. On a clean sheet of paper I scribbled what seemed the beginning of a poem: ‘The loneliness of the long distance runner …’ No second line came, so the paper was put away, and more work done on The Rats.

Chapter Thirty-four

Back in Soller at the beginning of May, we unpacked books posted to ourselves from Manuden, and in spite of the dream-time in that village, it was like being home again, for there was no place I had lived in longer except Nottingham. I set to work revising Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, improving the style as well as shortening the book by some 50,000 words.

A Swiss woman explorer who lived in the valley, Colette Martin, had written about her travels in the Sahara with a St Bernard dog, and I translated sixty pages from French and sent them with her unique photographs of Bedouin women and desert scenery to a publisher in London. We agreed to go half and half on any cash from the project, having already received a few guineas from her article ‘Nomad Women in the Sahara’ which I placed in the Geographical Magazine. The package came back in double-quick time, and nothing further was done with it.

‘The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller’ was returned by the Hudson Review, and ‘The Fishing Boat Picture’ came back from another magazine. After the visit to England, which had not after all been so unsuccessful, I wanted to remain in my agreeable state of exile for as long as we could afford to do so. Majorca was where we lived, and it was impossible not to be content in such a place. Ruth was earning money by making hotel and villa bookings for a travel agency, and I gave English lessons which were suddenly in demand, for a couple of hours a day. The exchange rate had improved in the pound’s favour, while the cost of living remained the same, so that our income was almost half as much again, though a cool watch was still kept on expenditure.

Tom Maschler wrote a long letter in which he outlined what he thought ought to be done about making Saturday Night and Sunday Morning into a successful book, to which I could only reply: ‘I may be able to let you have the manuscript by the date you mention.’ In a letter of 4th June Rosica said: ‘What Tom wants is the old mss of “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” so that he can compare that with the revised one, but you have not left that with me.’ Exactly. The reason was that in a letter of 6th May Maschler had written: ‘I confirm that you will let me have the completed manuscript by the end of July at the very latest, and I can then make suggestions on the rewriting as a whole.’

While completing the final version of the book I lived as if the England which I loved but did not especially like had little to offer. A miasma of falsity was spread by those who assumed that their opinions were the same as everyone else’s — and therefore the only ones that mattered — such hypocrisy stifling every aspect of life. These purveyors of conformism did not know about the great majority of the people, and did not care to consider them as worthy of notice. When they did not fear or hate them, they wanted them to be in perpetual thrall to values which the complacent upper few per cent had decided, because they were their own, were the only ones worth living by. This included those socialists and left-wing commentators who also thought they knew how people ought to live, but would never live like it themselves. The country was dead from the neck up, and the body was buried in sand, waiting for someone to illuminate those views and values which they were being told in a thousand ways were something to be ashamed of and ought never to be expressed.

Tom Maschler came to Majorca on holiday, and called on me in Soller to talk about what he had seen of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. I listened, but was unable to show any enthusiasm, wanting a publisher to say ‘Hats off!’ about my novel, or not touch it at all. Maschler may have looked on the book as something worth influencing, but if so it was difficult for me to feel in any way flattered by such interest. I had not been working unrewarded for eight years, and learning to write the hard way, to be told by any editor how to revise my novel.

My recent visit to England, and the reading of that score of books on criminology the year before, led me to believe that my writing should unite the opinions and observations, settled in my mind up to the age of eighteen, to those of the voice which had emerged during the past few years, and which exile had clarified. I knew by now that you do not write what society or editors expect, but only that which is illuminated by the truth of your own experience. A certain amount of iron must have been in my soul before I was born, reinforcing the attitude that the writer must listen to no one but himself, as a magnet attracts iron filings because it is a piece of more solid metal. He has to know, of course, what his true self is to be sure he is not mistaking it for someone else’s or for what other people say it ought to be.

A writer may well feel the need of approval from those around him, but he has a choice of courting the acceptance of those who run the country — at the time I was calling them ‘the rats’ — or of those who are the governed. The only valid way is to disregard both, to write for yourself alone, out of an ineradicable respect for the unique voice, but a voice all the same about which you must have no illusions. I had lived too many lives to listen willingly to others, and if my writing continued even now to be unpublishable, then so be it.

Having been lifted by Fate out of the zone of popular culture for most of the ’50s could be compared to a situation in which you didn’t have to listen to an adversary’s point of view, nor care about not being able to, since whatever it was could have no relationship to your own. In the age of mass media, cultural variations, called fashion, come and go, but the eternal values override them and remain, and it is the same today as it was then.

When Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was finished at the end of July I gave it to dark-haired and willowy Felicity Meshoulam, who was in Majorca on her honeymoon, to carry to England. This method saved on the postage, would be more secure than in the mail (though I had not yet lost anything) and might possibly bring me luck.

In August I set out, with the Dutch journalist Constant Wallach, to climb the 1,400 metres of Puig Major. After an all-night bout of mixed drinking we were hardly in condition for such exercise and, coming out of the wooded area of small oaks and stunted pines on to the stony slopes above the valley, the heat became intense. By midday we were at 1,000 metres, and in early afternoon had reached a point not far short of the summit. We hadn’t a hat or any water between us, and I at least should have known better but, as occasionally happens, Fate takes a stronger hand than common sense, something only realized when it is too late.

In such a season we turned back, and reached the valley in a state close to sunstroke. The summit of the island defeated me as surely as had Gunong Jerai in Malaya nine years before. The heights of both mountains were roughly the same, equally tempting and visible, but I ought to have realized that, small as they were, such pimples of the earth were not meant to be climbed by me. Other heights, though less solid under foot, deserved more attention.

I had always seen myself as a physical being, when I clearly was not to that extent, but the indication that such heights were beyond me was proved wrong when, on a tour across the United States in 1985, I set out alone at five o’clock one morning, to go down into the Grand Canyon. Three hours later I had crossed the Colorado River 5,000 feet below and nine miles from my starting point. To get back to the hotel before nightfall, and avoid the rattlesnakes, meant ascending a mountain in reverse, higher than any I had attempted to climb before, and I got back with nothing worse than sore feet and aching thighs.

I wrote a story during that last summer in Majorca called ‘On Saturday Afternoon’, about a boy watching a man trying to hang himself, suggested by a scene from the French film of Dostoevsky’s ‘The Eternal Husband’. Another tale from that year was ‘The Insider’, describing the collapse of the offices of a leading London literary magazine, and the death of the editor who is buried under the rubble. This was published by Michael Horovitz in New Departures five years later.

Poems came back from The Listener, Time and Tide, the London Magazine, and Partisan Review — to name a few, but Howard Sergeant printed ‘Guide to the Tiflis Railway’ in Outposts, to coincide with the publication of the booklet Without Beer or Bread.

A letter from Rosica at the end of August said that Saturday Night and Sunday Morning had been rejected by Tom Maschler at MacGibbon and Kee, but that she was sending it immediately to another firm. I had earlier told her that I had taken note of some of Maschler’s oral suggestions during his Soller visit, but this was little more than a white lie, to prevent her becoming discouraged in trying to get my work published.

Before the end of the year two more publishers were to reject the novel. I said in a letter to Rosica in December that I thought it would be a success if someone were to take it on, adding that in my opinion it was being rejected because it didn’t fit into the preconceived romantic notions that people had about the so-called working class. The book was too realistic, and didn’t support their theories, ‘but I have broken new ground,’ I went on, ‘and can only hope that some publisher will see this sooner or later.’

It’s no use saying I was not discouraged. One publisher thought, or so I was to hear, that I should alter the ending, though I would not have enquired in what way. Another gave it as his opinion that I did not know much about working people if I chose to describe their lives in such a way, which made it difficult to believe that a rather nasty form of what has come to be known as ‘political correctness’ was not being followed, or that some publishers’ readers were half conscious Marxist sympathizers who could not take to my book. I had always suspected that such leftward-inclining people looked on socialism as little more than a confidence trick to keep the Arthur Seatons of the world in their place. However it was, these rejections confirmed my eternal antipathy to anyone who tries to meddle in the work of a novelist. Such people are no doubt amiable, hard-working, and perhaps creative (with other people’s work) and eager to give that help which some writers timorously seek and are grateful for.

Publishers, and you may say why not, want novels which they think have a chance of selling, and are reluctant to print work without an editor having smoothed it into the style and content of what they imagine their readers expect, or what they decide, according to their own prejudices, readers ought to get, in which case there is little chance of a deviation from the dull norm, or of any interesting whiff of experimentation, or even of any flaws which can make an author’s work memorable. What one editor will think acceptable another will deem inept, so that only the writer’s version can be the right one. A writer should not surrender to the sail-trimming of editorial readers who want to guide him or her towards middle-brow best-sellers or, as in these days, the kind of book they think likely to win a literary prize.

Art only ever came out of a single creative mind, and good writing that aspires to art can only be achieved through trial and error. If it were not the case that the writer always knows best nothing interesting in fiction would ever be published. Writing is an activity where the individual is supreme, and an author has no chance of achieving anything unless his talent is protected by his own integrity.

The occupation of a novelist is a lonely one: labouring like the coalminer far underground, and away from all populist influences, or intellectual preconceptions, he has only the light from his helmet to illuminate the unique ore he has discovered, at which he must work undisturbed.

Chapter Thirty-five

I revised The General’s Dilemma, shortened the title to The General, and sent it to Rosica, being the version which was to be published, with few alterations, in 1960.

We had become friendly with the painters Philip Martin and Helen Marshal, who with their two children had come to live in Soller. How it came about I shall never know, because I had certainly not imagined leaving Majorca in the way we did. Perhaps we had been there too long, and acted out of a false sense of boredom with the place. Maybe Fate again had a hand in my life, but the fact was that we and the Martins assumed it would be jolly good fun, or something like that, to take off for Alicante on the mainland, share a flat, and set up life in a communal sort of way. An adventure of this type was so uncharacteristic of me that I still cannot decide how it happened.

Philip, tall and thin, and with a long black beard, looked something like a walking ikon. He stammered now and again to the point of incoherence, but had a fine sense of humour. Helen was about twenty years older, short and stout and loquacious, and wore shapeless smocks and skirts to the ground. The two of them together appeared, to say the least, ‘bohemian’, telling anyone from a distance that they were ‘artists’, though they assumed such flamboyance because that was how they wanted to be, and thought that the world could go and fuck itself if it saw anything unusual or funny about it.

Ruth and I were fairly indistinguishable from the normal run of people, so it’s possible that the Martins seemed by contrast more outlandish when we were all together than when they were on their own. They were also taken by various types of Indian mysticism at that time, reading such people as Krishnamurti and Shri Aurobindo, which didn’t interest me at all.

Our party assembled early in the morning at the Soller railway station and, as well as Philip and Helen, there was Philip’s mother, the widow of a Suffolk bank manager who no doubt felt the same sense of unbelonging as I did. She had come down for a week or so to be with her son and the two children, Steven and Serafina.

We stood beside a mountain of suitcases, steamer trunks, rolls of canvas, huge boxes of painters’ materials, bundles, easels, baskets and bedrolls, as if a tribe of gypsies was on the move. My little reconditioned Remington typewriter in its hard black case was somewhere in the middle.

At the docks in Palma so much money was demanded by rapacious stevedores to get the luggage on board that Philip and I took off our jackets and, to the jeers of bystanders, manhandled every last piece into the hold. We were obliged to perform the same operation on docking at Alicante next morning. An amused policeman on the quay recommended a dilapidated fonda on the waterfront for our accommodation and, on arrival there, the two taxi drivers demanded brigands’ prices.

The rooms were cheap, fundamentally furnished, but of elegant proportions, though the far-away toilets were an odorous hole in the ground over which one had to squat, such being nothing strange in the Spain of that time. There was no dining room, so we often used an alcohol stove and ate convivially in one room or the other. Coming back after a walk one day Ruth and I found that the ceiling of our room had fallen in, the bed splattered by lath and plaster, suitcases dusty but luckily undamaged. The landlady moved us to another part of the building, but soon afterwards someone stole a thousand pesetas from the Martins’ room while they were out, and we decided to move as soon as possible.

Large flats were scarce, and expensive compared to Soller, but we found one for 2,000 pesetas a month, and took it one Sunday without too much thought, installing ourselves the same evening. The more people involved in a decision the more likely things are to go wrong. Groups act hurriedly and less circumspectly simply to get things done without too much bother, being basically impatient with each other. Even with only two people this is often the case, the ideal number perhaps being no more than one, at least among artists.

These thoughts came to me when, at five o’clock next morning, we were awakened by clanking trams and such a great clatter of bells that they must also have shaken people out of their beds in Madrid. Our rooms bordered the terminus square, where trams turned to repeat their journeys through the town. An hour later a printing firm on the ground floor directly below ours began its work, and the din of industry went on all day. The place was untenable, but we had paid rent in advance.

I earned twelve pounds for translating a booklet by Luis Ripoll in Palma, about the pianos Chopin had used while on the island. I also worked on another draft of Mr Allen’s Island, but with little energy and without much hope for it. I was still unsettled, and perhaps bemused by the continued rejection of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, unable to believe that nothing would come of it.

After a fortnight in the flat neither Ruth nor I could stand the noise, and decided to make an excursion around Andalusia. At six in the morning we walked through the cold streets to the station with a suitcase each, the sky a startling turquoise lighting every house and wall as if they had just been washed and rubbed dry. Any place can look beautiful when you’re leaving it, but we settled into the third-class carriage with relief at getting away for what we hoped would be a real holiday.

In Granada our four-shilling a night room at the casa de huespedes was dank and icy, the cold tap at the sink never ceasing its forceful running over the floor. From a more comfortable place during the next few days we went out to enjoy the sights. In Ronda, our next stop, the weather was raw and bitter, and we were exhausted from upset stomachs, a new experience for Spanish travel hands like us.

Back in my own country, the Colony of Gibraltar, I collected some arrears of pension, changing pounds into pesetas with a man everyone called Pop, who ran a toy shop known as ‘The Hole in the Wall’, which in fact it was. He was a character of the Rock for many years, and always tried to sell me a doll or a fire-engine, for which at that time I had no use.

We stayed a night with Mack and Jeanette Reynolds in Torremolinos, and recovered from our upsets in their warmth and friendship. The narrow road along the southern coast beyond Malaga went perilously close to unguarded cliffs. Beggars surrounded the bus whenever it stopped, jabbing fingers at their mouths to indicate hunger. The dusty and volcanic landscape, practically desert, seemed devoid of life, not even a church among the collection of hovels, most of which were without doors or windows, roofs covered by ashy rubble.

At Almeria, after the all-day ride, we walked half a mile to a hotel, and had only the strength to boil a packet of soup on our alcohol stove. We were jaded, and ready even to get back to the flat in Alicante. The next day we wanted to travel a little more comfortably, so bought first-class seats on the bus, but they weren’t in fact the best. The even higher grade of extraordinarios, meaning three seats just behind the driver, were already taken. After a brief stop in the palm-tree city of Elche we trundled back into Alicante — or Callyante, as the Martin children called it.

The flat was impossible to live in, mostly due to the noise. I loathed Alicante, in any case, after the settled and productive peace of Soller. The atmosphere was all wrong. Either it was far more expensive even than Palma, or we were cheated every time over the smallest transaction. Any attempt to pay reasonable prices, which we knew existed, ended in acrimony and failure. The idea of staying there and perhaps earning something by giving English lessons seemed less and less possible. It was a more depressed and therefore depressing town than Malaga, and we were there only to be robbed. Other foreigners were also dismayed by the place. A Frenchman who owned a bar even talked disconsolately of moving his business back to Algeria. I can only hope he didn’t.

We had to shift, yet it seemed impossible to go back to Majorca, though we couldn’t say why, since it was an easy twelve hours away, and it wouldn’t have been difficult getting installed. Neither did we wish to go to any other place in Spain. The dream was over, and England the only destination. Having, with the Malayan adventure, spent eight years of my life out of the country, it was indeed time to go there, at least for a while, though I dreaded facing the so-called real world knowing that my pension could not go on for ever, and that I had no qualifications for any kind of work.

We packed our trunks and cases in a sombre and fatalistic mood, sorry to be parting from the Martins but gripped by a feeling that there was no alternative except to go. Discarding heaps of paper to lessen the cost of excess baggage, I found a sheet with ‘The loneliness of the long distance runner’ written across the top. I spoke the words several times aloud, as if recalling them from a half-forgotten dream, and then in a kind of waking dream of the present I unscrewed my pen, pulled more clean paper towards me, and began to write several thousand words of the story which that line suggested.

I sat in a field of energy, the rhythmical narration of a runner coming from hardly to be guessed where — except possibly from the beats of the printing presses below — writing out of my impacted thirty years of existence, all that I had lived and learned going in, as if composing a long poem rather than a story. The rhythm of a man running pulled my pen along for line after line and page after page, trams and playing children as far from my consciousness as if I had been alone on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I was writing almost to the minute of our luggage going into the taxi, and carried the halting point of the story in my head until such time as I could get to the pages again.

The second-class compartment was empty on the night train to Madrid, and we lay one to either side, our sleepy faces in the morning seeing a white-blue dawn over the seemingly endless plain of Castile. A short stay in Madrid was devoted mainly to the Prado, the asterisked masterpieces of Goya, El Greco and Velazquez wearing me out by the end of the day, as if the witnessing of such wonders drained all energy from the ordinary mortal body.

We were almost out of money after paying the fares via Hendaye, Dieppe and Newhaven, and several hundred pesetas on excess luggage. Ruth’s parents welcomed us in Hove on Saturday night of 22nd March, and it was a relief to know that we could stay with them before deciding what to do. I spent some days in the living room, finishing the story about the long distance runner in Borstal.

Ruth’s Outposts booklet A Forecast, a Fable was published, and she was busy despatching subscribers’ copies. Rosica telephoned me with the news that Saturday Night and Sunday Morning had been sent back to her again, and that trying to place it was beginning to seem hopeless. She also informed me that The General had been rejected, that A Stay of Some Time had now been turned down by a total of six publishers, The Palisade by seven, and The Bandstand by two. She added, however, that she had posted Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, as a kind of forlorn hope, to W. H. Allen. If it came back, perhaps I ought to put it away and get on with something else — a reasonable suggestion in view of all she had done.

Towards the end of the month I went to Nottingham for a few days, then came back to Hove, where I wrote ‘Picture of Loot’, a poem later included by Philip Larkin in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. My pension wasn’t enough to live on, and resources were dwindling, in spite of the Fainlight tolerance and generosity. Some humorous articles, written to try and earn money, came back from Lilliput and Punch, as did a batch of work from Poetry Chicago.

The novels Rosica hadn’t been able to do anything with arrived in one big parcel, as if I were Fate’s dustbin for my own work. The notion of teaching English to foreign students was as far as it went, though maybe various language schools were written to because several addresses and telephone numbers had been copied into a notebook. Dramatizing some of my stories for a play competition announced by Granada Television was a possibility, but nothing was done about that, either. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, after being finally polished (though it had needed very little) and sent to a magazine, was rejected almost by return of post.

Ebullient rather than depressed, I enjoyed rummaging in secondhand bookshops, where you could find something good for as little as sixpence. Walking along the Brighton front with Ruth, the sea air induced an unjustifiable euphoria, and there were interesting foreign films to see at the Classic Cinema in Kemptown, as well as numerous cafés where we could sit and talk. The future seemed to rear up in front like a concrete wall, and so didn’t figure much in our conversation.

A letter from Rosica said that ‘as luck would have it, Jeffrey Simmons of W. H. Allen is very impressed with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. He does not want to make any promises or to give false encouragement, but would like to talk to you about it.’ She went on to say that if I gave him an option on my next two novels, and let him arrange a sale of the book in the United States, he would do his best with other directors of the firm to get the book taken. If this happened, she said, I would have ‘terrific promotion and publicity’.

She made an appointment for me to see Simmons at the W. H. Allen offices on Tuesday 15th April. Such a letter meant only one thing, yet it was impossible to feel any happiness, in case I was wrong, though it hardly seemed they would want to see me without intending to publish the book. On asking Ruth if she would like to come with me, she suggested I go on my own. I was calm, almost nonchalant, on getting the midday train from Brighton, and watching the delightful Sussex landscape go by.

There seemed to be a fine grit in the air, as if from a mist just lifted, while walking up Essex Street from the Temple tube station. The house was a Dickensian kind of rookery, and at the top of some steep narrow stairs I was greeted by Jeffrey Simmons, a tall somewhat saturnine man, and son of the managing director. Jeffrey told me that one of his readers, Otto Strawson, had read the book and was enthusiastic. He too liked it, and as we sat in his office he asked what else I had written. They didn’t want to take one book, was the implication, and then find that nothing more would be forthcoming. After telling him briefly about Key to the Door, which was written but still in a formless state, I took a typescript of The General from a briefcase lent by Ruth’s father. ‘You can look at this for my second novel, although it might need a little more revision.’

Jeffrey introduced me to Mark Goulden, the head of the house, a compact and dynamic man. ‘They tell me you’ve written a masterpiece,’ he said, which I found an amusing conceit, while liking his sense of humour. ‘We’ll see what we can do with it. If you put yourself in my hands, I’ll make a lot of money for you. I’ll talk to Rosica about the advance.’

In his autobiography Mark was to recall my stammered thanks, and my apparent incredulity at his claim, but appreciation is certainly owed for much that he did. In the 1930s he had been the first publisher to print Dylan Thomas, and also, as editor of the Sunday Referee (which I occasionally saw at my grandparents’) he had, before any other British newspaper, taken on the whole gang of Nazi thugs who governed Germany. As a publisher of books after the war he wouldn’t have anything to do with that country, on the grounds of its insufficient and as yet unacknowledged guilt, an attitude he maintained to the end of his life.

Walking along the Strand, steeped in a compound of gloom and optimism, it was hard to understand what I had let myself in for but, whatever it was, I had been working towards it for ten years, perhaps for the whole of my life, certainly for what had seemed at times like a century. I probably appeared mindless to those passing by, if they noticed me at all, but thoughts crowded in of those absent people who were nevertheless with me, including Ruth who had known me much of that decade; her parents who were helping us so selflessly; her Aunt Ann in America who had sent food, clothes and often money; my own family who had contributed food parcels from time to time; Robert and Beryl Graves; and last but not least Rosica Colin who had persisted with my work for so long. I wanted to talk to them and explain my feelings, even perhaps to boast a little and show my joy.

Laughing inwardly (and a smile may have been on my face by now) the much desired seemed to have occurred. My book would be printed, and perhaps earn as much as two hundred pounds, which would allow Ruth and myself to live, modestly still, in Majorca while we went on writing. The future didn’t delineate itself beyond that basic hope, for I was taken up with the moment, walking as light as air and unwilling to speculate further on what had happened because it already had, and I had learned to waste nothing.

For a moment I recalled the day thirteen years before, also in April, when I had passed the aircrew selection board to be trained as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm. That incident too, insignificant as may be, had set me apart from people in a way I wanted to be, which was a strange aim perhaps in someone who would write as if he belonged to them more than they did themselves. I had not removed myself half as effectively in 1945 as by the present achievement, but the desire to escape the crowd didn’t mean that I despised it. Though part of it from every point of view, I could only write about the individuals that make up the crowd by living apart from them, because solitude enhances the power of judgement and reflection.

I was nothing except glad, in spite of all that, on entering a Lyons Café to have tea, before taking the train back to Brighton and telling them the news.

Chapter Thirty-six

Towards the end of April, staying again at Ima Bayliss’s place in Dulwich, I cashed a money order from the Ministry of Pensions for thirty-seven pounds, and a cheque for ninety pounds came from Rosica as an advance on my novel. In the London of that time it might have been possible to live on ten pounds a week, but such resources as the above would not carry us as far as the middle of October, when the next ninety pounds was due on publication. We moved to a room-and-kitchen on the top floor of a house in Camden Square for two pounds seven and six a week, and Ruth worked as an interviewer with the British Market Research Bureau, thus becoming our mainstay until the end of the year. In this period she had two more poems taken by the Hudson Review.

With the bed pushed against a wall, a table for us to write and eat at, and a small kitchen across the landing, such living space was rather a decline after the flats and houses in Spain. We managed because we could afford nothing better, but it was important for us to believe that we lived in such a way from choice, and could always go back to the more ample life in Majorca.

For want of something to do in my unsettled state I continued the story of Colin Smith, the long distance runner, telling what happened to him after he came out of Borstal. The work grew to nearly a hundred pages, but, the quality being indifferent, it was put aside. I revised eight of my best Nottingham stories and, with The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner in the lead, typed them into a book-length manuscript and posted it in July to Rosica with the suggestion that it be shown to Jeffrey Simmons as a possible second book after Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. This would give time for the final revisions to be made on The General, which I would present as my third book.

Poems were returned from the Times Literary Supplement, The Listener, and the BBC, though the story ‘Big John and the Stars’ appeared in a children’s anthology, for a fee of five pounds. I sent The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner story to the London Magazine, though being rather long I didn’t believe it had much of a chance, and in any case it came speedily back with a plain rejection slip. I was anxious to have it published, anywhere, since it seemed based on such a rare idea that I was afraid someone else would write as similar a story as made little difference, and get it into print before mine. I occasionally woke in a paranoid sweat after reading exactly the same story in my dreams, with the name of a writer impossible to decipher on the title page, an anxiety which persisted, though with diminishing force, until it was published the following year.

At the end of June the proofs of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning were ready at Essex Street, and I couldn’t resist fetching them myself. I took the large envelope back to the bed-sitting room and spread out the long sheets to see a book of mine in print for the first time. No editing, at my request, had been done (though none had been suggested) so there were only a few errors to correct. Mulling over such paper fresh from the printer gave me the impression that my novel was better than I had thought. Print endowed it with a glow that typescript could not. The pleasure of seeing my writing at this stage has never left me, and with every fresh work I recall the bemused hours going through the proofs of my first novel.

Clifford Bayliss provided tickets for a performance of The Trojans at Covent Garden, the five-hour operatic spectacular by Berlioz, which I don’t think has been done since at that length. I was beginning to enjoy London, and during this strange period of waiting worked on ‘The Rats and Other Poems’, also sketching out the shape of what was to become my third published novel Key to the Door.

August was spent at the cottage of a schoolmistress friend, Jo Wheeler, in the village of Whitwell, Hertfordshire. The long evenings were warm and mellow, and we passed them listening to Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A on a small wind-up gramophone, as the gloaming slowly deepened over the fields outside the small windows of the living room.

‘The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller’ was refused by the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, but advertisements were beginning to appear for my novel, and I was interviewed for Books and Bookmen by the editor Bill Smith, who had been a librarian. In September, six complimentary copies of the novel came in the post, one being sent immediately to Ruth’s parents, and most of the rest to Nottingham. An appointment was made for me to be interviewed by David Holloway for the News Chronicle.

The Books and Bookmen article, out at the end of September, was headlined ‘Working Class Novelist’, a rather crass label, because I had always strongly objected to any sort of categorization. The irritation was tempered however by the hope that the piece might help in making the book known, and on the whole Bill Smith had written fairly. Mention was made of a television interview, and such general interest in the air led me to suppose that even if the novel wasn’t a commercial success it could not help but be noticed. As a beginner I assumed that this was a normal atmosphere on the publication of a book, though people at W. H. Allen may have wondered at my phlegmatic attitude.

We spent Saturday night being royally entertained by Rosica at her flat, amusing her by our ‘hats off!’ clowning, and joking about the old notion of erecting barbed wire around the house to keep off biographers. On Sunday morning of 13th October, the day before publication, I walked down the square and crossed the street after breakfast to get the newspapers.

As well as advertisements for the book there was a second-place review by John Wain in the Observer, and a dozen lines in the Sunday Times. While not exactly splash coverage, though it was pleasing to get what there was, more substantial notices came out in the following couple of weeks, in the Daily Telegraph, the News Chronicle, Reynolds News by Brian Glanville, and the Daily Express by Robert Pitman, not to mention the Oxford Mail and, of course, the Nottingham newspapers, as well as many others from throughout the kingdom. Often they were short, and took second or third place in the ‘posh papers’, one writer in a communist journal blathering that Arthur Seaton and such like were ‘the scum of the earth’, which infelicitous designation caused me to observe that I myself would have been the scum of the earth had such a party hack seen Arthur in any better light.

The understanding of such people had never been expected, yet Victor Hugo surely showed great wisdom when he wrote:

Are the duties of the historians of hearts and souls inferior to those of the historians of external facts? Can we believe that Dante has less to say than Machiavelli? Is the lower part of civilization, because it is deeper and more gloomy, less important than the upper? Do we know the mountain thoroughly if we do not know the caverns?

An interesting but perhaps unconsidered remark came from a reviewer in a London evening tabloid called the Star: ‘No reader is going to be deceived into thinking that Arthur Seaton is in any way typical of factory workers.’ This writer may have been as experienced in the matter as I was, perhaps more so, because my hero (or anti-hero, as some called him) had been made as untypical as possible in order to show someone different to all the rest, bearing in mind that ‘typical’ is not what I wanted Arthur Seaton to appear, as much as an individual in some way recognizable by those who worked and lived in similar conditions. Maurice Richardson’s perspicacity in the New Statesman amused me most: ‘The style is effectively clear and blunt, as if it had been written with a carpenter’s pencil on wallpaper. This is all the more of a tour de force as Mr Sillitoe is plainly highly educated.’

The antipathy from those who did not like the book showed that the character created out of my imagination had genuine differences of attitude to the normal run of people depicted in novels of that time. Some of the wilder utterances of Arthur Seaton were based on my own views of earlier years, but sloganized from long entries in notebooks and blended with sentiments which would come naturally to him. Such views were genuine because I had heard them while working in a factory, and things had not changed in that respect during my conversion to another life. The objection of many was that such remarks had found their way into print, and in the form of a novel that might be in danger of becoming popular among the people it was written about. Rough hewn or not, style was married to narrative as neatly as I knew how, though some reviewers commented on the uneven story line, as well as on the form — whatever was meant by that. It was evident that, a kick having been aimed at the door, the whole structure was found to be rotten.

Perhaps it is unjustifiable to devote so much space to the genesis and appearance of a first novel, but the book is still in print after thirty-five years, and count has been lost as to how many million copies have been sold in all versions and languages. This phenomenon is still as much of a surprise to me as it no doubt is to others, though I hardly ever need tell myself that to sell many copies is not necessarily an indication of a book’s literary excellence. In my opinion much better work was to come, but the sales and film success of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning enabled me to live as a writer, and not have to earn money in ways which could only be regarded as a waste of time.

After publication I was for ever racing down three flights of stairs to answer the telephone in the entrance hall, one call being for a live television appearance in Birmingham. Brendan Behan was on the same programme, and in the lounge of the hotel, and in the studio later, he was surrounded by publishing and publicity people who wanted to see him sufficiently drunk to perform in the unorthodox way they had come to expect, yet not so blindoe that he would lapse into obscene humour, in which case the technicians would be compelled to cut him off and the show would be ruined. Behan responded to a certain extent, though was astute enough to know what was going on. We were introduced, and cordially greeted each other, but I stayed on the periphery of the circus. As it happened, the media people knew what they were about, and Behan’s interview turned out well.

We visited my brother Brian, who with his Shropshire wife lived in Dawley. Walking through woods along the banks of the Severn near Coalbrookdale we came across abandoned chimneys and forges, perfect relics of the Industrial Revolution in a better state of preservation than the ruins of many Roman cities, and possibly as interesting in the history of Man’s attempt to create a civilization.

From Dawley we went to Nottingham, where I gave interviews. My father, ill with cancer of the palate, was no longer at work. While I was in the house he picked up the copy of my novel, turned it round and round in his large analphabetic hands and said: ‘My God, our Alan, you’ve written a book! You’ll never have to work again!’ — a reaction difficult to forget.

In November another ninety pounds came from W. H. Allen, as well as a two hundred and fifty pound advance from Alfred Knopf publishers in the United States, who had accepted the book after fourteen other American firms had turned it down. Including Ruth’s earnings, and my pension, over seven hundred pounds had come into our coffers since leaving Spain, which gave enough money for entertainment. In one week we saw Endgame and Krapp’s Last Tape at the Royal Court, Gorki’s Childhood at the National Film Theatre, and Brendan Behan’s The Hostage put on by Joan Littlewood at Stratford East. A few songs in this last show were good, and much of it funny, but the squalid execution of a young soldier by the IRA at the end left a bitter taste.

My policy was to accept all interviews, since writing a book was one phase, and helping its sales was another. Whether a newspaper was left- or right-wing didn’t bother me, since any publicity, whether positive or negative, was good. I was interviewed by the News of the World, and photographed by Mark Gerson. Several literary agencies enquired about the possibility of representing me. Letters from various people said how much they had enjoyed my novel, and a corrected typescript went on show, with other material from local authors, at Nottingham Central Library, in whose reference section I had written the first chapters of The Deserters seven years before.

With one or two exceptions the backwash of rejection slips dried up, and editors were asking for work. At a cocktail party the managing director of a publishing firm regretted that the manuscript of my novel had not been sent to him, and some satisfaction was felt in replying that in fact it had, but his editors had rejected it.

In December we stayed a fortnight in Amsterdam, at the flat of Constant Wallach, our journalist friend from Majorcan days. The weather was wet and raw but, perusing a Baedeker, we spent hours at the Rijksmuseum and in the Rembrandt House.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was taken by Pan Books for a paperback edition, and was featured as one of the best novels of the year in the Observer. Shortly afterwards a contract was signed for the novel to be turned into a film, which deal made a happy end to an unusual year.

Chapter Thirty-seven

Early in 1959 we moved to a furnished cottage in Whitwell, twenty-six miles north of London, paying two hundred pounds in advance for the year’s tenancy. An extension built on to the back made it a large enough place, with a garden going down to the banks of the reedy and sinuous Mimram. On wet nights in late spring, new green frogs, as flat and small as buttons, would find a way under the kitchen door, and amuse us by hopping across the tiles as if in some kind of sack race, till I lifted each one on to a piece of newspaper and put it carefully back on the grass outside. Their activities reminded me of those which sported around the water pump near our first house in France.

Our literary earnings up to the end of the tax year in April were such that we now felt reasonably secure, though for another year or two — habits of parsimony taking a long time to relinquish — accounts were still kept of every item spent to the nearest halfpenny.

Harry Saltzman, who was to be the producer of the film, rented an opulent flat on Kensington Gore from which to conduct his operations. When I went to see him he told me that I should write the script, at the same time implying that the job would be easy, because all a director need do was turn the pages of the novel while making the movie. The book was so cinematic in the unrolling of its sequences that he wondered if it had been written with a film in mind. I told him that it had not, though perhaps it was natural that my work should give that impression, since I must have seen as many films as I had read books. Whether his assumption was a ploy to fob me off with a smaller fee is hard to say, but it was certainly hammered in, as all of us involved knew it had to be, that the film must be made as economically as possible.

The rights were bought for four thousand five hundred pounds, of which two-thirds came to my bank, though the contract stated that I should also receive two per cent of the producer’s profits, a clause which eventually gave me several times that amount. The fee for writing the script was one thousand five hundred pounds and, though the combined sum was small indeed by Hollywood standards, there seemed no reason to complain at this unexpected addition to our riches.

On Friday 22nd April I was given the Authors’ Club Prize for the Best First Novel of 1958, which meant (after an interview for The Times) going to their imposing premises in Whitehall, wearing the dark suit sent by Ruth’s aunt from America some years before. My first after-dinner speech was a carefully written account as to how I had become a writer and produced the novel they had chosen to honour. I had hoped for Jeffrey Simmons to be present, and was somewhat annoyed that the committee of the Authors’ Club had unwittingly selected the one evening of the year when it was impossible for both religious and family reasons for him to do so.

For the next two years, as well as writing the film scripts, I was working on Key to the Door, an autobiographical novel which had been maturing for some time. The hundred-page account of the early married life of Brian Seaton’s parents, and of his childhood (the first draft done in Soller in 1953), was followed by chapters of Letters From Malaya, which were interspersed with sections on Brian’s youth and work in the factory, the narrative finally shifting entirely to Malaya. This shuffling of material, at one stage an uneven heap of nearly a thousand pages, needed stringent cutting and revision. By the time the final draft of 750 pages was typed in April 1961 it had been ‘in progress’ for thirteen years, since two chapters were based on that first handwritten version of the trip to Kedah Peak in the autumn of 1948.

A late change was to have Brian Seaton spare the life of the communist guerrilla at his mercy when the jungle rescue patrol is ambushed. In earlier versions he had killed him as having been responsible for the death of his friend Baker. In view of the nature of his upbringing such a change would, I hoped, be understandable. I saw Brian Seaton’s decision as a similar ‘cutting off the nose to spite the face’ to that of Colin Smith losing the Borstal governor’s race in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Morally right or wrong, the idea was to give more than insular point to the book, and though one or two critics were offended, it was hard to see why the possibly amoral action of a character implied a lack of morality in the author. At the end of April I sent a letter to the Home Secretary, pleading for the life of Ronald Henry Marwood, who had been sentenced to death for the murder of a policeman during a robbery. He was later hanged.

I talked to a doctor friend in London about whether there wasn’t some treatment which could be paid for and thus prolong my father’s life, but the verdict was that no better medical care existed than what he was already receiving in Nottingham. He died at the end of May, in his fifty-seventh year, the only mourners at his funeral being his long-suffering wife and their five children. Not long afterwards my mother married a lorry driver somewhat younger than herself and, after a more peaceful time than had ever been possible with my father, survived him by a few years.

The countryside around Whitwell was ideal for walking, but if you wandered off paved lanes you were likely to be warned away at the point of a gun by the landowner or one of his cap-touching minions, an experience unknown in my childhood, and certainly not in France or Spain. Work was, as always, the saviour, and in six weeks I produced a screen treatment, and then the first draft script, for the film of my novel. Disinterring the book after it had seemed dead and out of the way, and reading it several times to decide how to marshal the events into the sort of movie I would like to see, was a tedious process. However, having pocketed some of the money, the task had to be taken seriously, though my temperament was not suited for work which depended on a certain amount of consultation.

Karel Reisz, the director, read the script, and in his quiet and diplomatic manner said: ‘Well, yes, it is all right, but in my opinion there is just one small problem.’ If the film was made according to what I had written, he went on, the running time would be several hours too long. We were both novices with regard to feature films, but Karel had made documentaries, including ‘We are the Lambeth Boys’, and knew infinitely more about the business than I ever could. During the next few months the script was honed down to a ninety-minute maximum under his careful and talented scrutiny.

One of the main reasons for doing the script was to get as faithful a transition to the screen as possible, with no other writer muddying the adaptation according to his own personality or beliefs. Each version had, however, to be examined by the British Board of Film Censors, and some employee of that loathsome organization stipulated that though the issue of the abortion may be mentioned in the film, the attempt to procure one on the part of Brenda after she gets pregnant by Arthur must not be shown. Not even by as much as a stray word could it be indicated that the abortion had been ‘brought off’.

Then there was the matter of violence, which they might consider to be exaggerated, and as for strong language, well … Such a film in any case could only be released with an ‘X’ certificate, a category which it was hoped might restrict the size of its audience. My acceptance by the world — or some of it — had brought my nihilistic feelings even more to the fore, and my impulse was to tell the censorship goons to fuck off, but such nursery rules had to be followed if the film was to go on release at all, and in my view we ended with a much watered down version of the book.

The advance payment for The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner volume, of 100 pounds, was on the low side, but was considered adequate for a book of stories, which might not sell as well as a novel. Since we did not lack money this amount seemed reasonable, and in any case an ‘advance’ payment is not, and never was, a munificent handout for the privilege of printing one’s work, but a sum which must be earned by copies sold in the shops. The lower the advance the sooner would further money start to come in, whereas an extravagant advance which was not recouped in sales would do no good for an author’s reputation. Such was my view then, though the economics of writing and publishing today do not allow such principles to be followed too closely.

In May a letter asked me to report to a hospital in Luton for a final check-up with regard to my pension. An early bus from Whitwell took me to St Albans, and the train another twenty miles to Luton. The distance back to Whitwell was only six miles direct, so after the examination I set off with a map in my pocket along lanes and footpaths. Few cars were about, and no pedestrians, and I strolled along recalling half-forgotten names of trees and wild flowers, the clear warm day giving a couple of hours in which to be at peace in a way that had not been possible since leaving Majorca.

Karel Reisz wanted me to write the commentary to a documentary he was making on how Nottinghamshire coalminers spent their leisure. He decided that since we were going to investigate their pastimes we should also see the conditions they worked in, which meant spending a day down Clipstone pit. The two-mile trek to the coal face where men laboured in seams of less than thirty-six inches, 3,000 feet underground, convinced me of the wisdom of people who said they would never let their sons go down the pit unless they couldn’t get a job anywhere else. But the miners endured their work, since there was no other, and they certainly seemed to enjoy their leisure. I had never been present at a brass band rehearsal, or inside a Welfare Institute before, or watched with any interest people playing bowls, but half a dozen pages were duly produced, and used for a film I have no memory of seeing.

Still in Nottingham, Karel mentioned that an actor who might be good as Arthur Seaton was playing Edgar in King Lear at Stratford. My opinion seemed to be wanted, so seats were booked. I hadn’t been to the place since riding in on the back of an army lorry from RAF Snitterfield to see Ann Hathaway’s cottage, and the Memorial Theatre from the outside. How are the lowly lifted! This time Ruth and I were trundled there in Karel’s Morris van.

Albert Finney flailed and muttered in half darkness as Edgar, and while not difficult to imagine him as Arthur Seaton, it was obviously impossible to find an actor who matched the appearance of the person so vividly pictured when writing the book. Karel, and Miriam Brickman the casting director, were convinced that Finney could do the job, and they turned out to be right.

In September The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner received a Recommendation from the Book Society, the more prestigious Choice being awarded to something about the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Tony Godwin, a peppery little media genius, printed a review in the journal of the Book Society by Penelope Mortimer, which had a drawing of me on the cover by Andrew Freeth. In the same issue he published my story ‘Uncle Ernest’. A telegram of congratulations from Rosica was followed by many favourable reviews, those stories being praised which had been sent back by so many magazines (except for one in France) during the last ten years, though I was too gratified by the reception of the book to be more than a little wry about that.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was published in the United States, and Pan Books was about to issue a paperback. A Swedish firm was first in line for translation rights, and enquiries were coming in from many other countries. The original hardback was in its fourth printing, sales in the first year close to six thousand.

In Whitwell we met Betty Allsop, who was helping Peter Benenson to stand for Labour at the coming General Election. We also agreed to do something, as did a few others in the village, including our neighbour, the painter Terry Harjula. My speech for Labour at Hitchin was an embarrassing peroration that went on far too long. The local atmosphere was hostile when we tried canvassing, and though our house was plastered with Labour posters my heart wasn’t in it because Labour used the Suez campaign as something with which to berate the Conservatives.

In November, a few days after reading ‘On Saturday Afternoon’ at the BBC, Ruth and I were married at Marylebone Town Hall. In neither of our diaries is the fact recorded, which may have been because our long engagement had been going on for ten years. With Harry Fainlight, Lillie Gore, and Karel Reisz, we went to Soho afterwards for a celebration lunch.

The main change from an expatriate life to that of living in England as someone who had become accustomed to the idea that every novel he wrote would be printed without let or hindrance, had gone smoothly enough. This was due both to luck and a certain amount of industry, as well as a backlog of material from the previous few years. Apart from poems and stories, and sections for insertion in Key to the Door, little was being written that was completely new, because I was working on the film script of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Having no more anxiety about money seemed the one sure confirmation of success. Another, perhaps, was being invited to tea by the fascinatingly fragile Blanche Knopf on a visit from the United States. When I was threatened with expulsion from the restaurant for not wearing a tie, and ready to walk out at such stupid intolerance, Blanche charmed (or perhaps bribed) the waiters into letting me stay.

Harry Saltzman was having difficulty raising the 95,000 pounds needed to make the film of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Without someone as hardworking, knowledgeable and dedicated the project would have been dead-stopped. Many of the financial people, on reading the screen treatment, said that cinema-goers wanted to see comedy, adventure and musicals, and not a story set in conditions with which they were too familiar, and from which if they had any sense they would only want to escape. Nevertheless, Harry obtained the money, and assembled a team which could not help but make a good film: Johnny Dankworth wrote the music, Freddie Francis was the photographer, Seth Holt the editor, and Karel Reisz the director. Miriam Brickman chose Albert Finney, Rachel Roberts, Shirley Ann Field, Norman Rossington, Hylda Baker and Bryan Pringle as the cast.

Filming began in the spring of 1960, and in Nottingham my brother Michael, a musician in his spare time, played the part of a pub drummer, while various members of the family walked up and down as extras. The old familiar backyards and streets were used on location, and my mother enjoyed making tea for the stars as they came and went.

In January we moved to Hampstead, into the top flat of Karel Reisz’s house once occupied by his father-in-law, A.E. Coppard, who had written such excellent short stories. Working in his study, I did four Sundays of novel reviewing for Reynolds News, but did not extend the stint, because it was hard to put in the time necessary to read every one of the half dozen books for each article.

We bought a lease on a flat near Notting Hill Gate, a part of London we have always lived in except for a brief and unsuccessful experiment in Clapham. When the Aldermaston March came into London the temptation to join it was irresistible, though my views on nuclear disarmament were far from unreserved, believing that the West should give up weapons only if Soviet Russia agreed to do the same. My opinion was also different from those who wore sackcloth and ashes over the use of the atomic bomb against Japan in August 1945. The raids had been an unfortunate occurrence but, war being war, the bombs probably caused less casualties than if an invasion and bitter fighting had taken place, though at the time I hadn’t been altogether happy because the war had ended before I could get into it. Japan and Germany would certainly have used such a bomb against the Allies if they had had it, and then the guilt would have been on their side, had they been capable of feeling it. All the same, it seemed senseless now to have such weapons in the world. On starting a book the question would nag at me as to whether the outbreak of a nuclear war would prevent me from completing it.

The Aldermaston March was in any case a convivial occasion. One met people like Christopher Logue, whose play The Lily-White Boys had been so successful at the Royal Court; Michael Hastings, the novelist and playwright; Clancy Segal, whose book about a Staffordshire coalminer, Weekend in Dinlock, I had written about for the Evening Standard; and Penelope Mortimer, who had so enthusiastically reviewed The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

Some Sunday afternoons we went to the Hampstead salon of Ella Winter and Donald Ogden Stewart, American members of the Hollywood Ten who had been persecuted in the United States during the McCarthy era. Don was witty, graceful and debonair, while Ella (who had been married to Lincoln Steffens: ‘I have seen the future, and it works!’) had eyes which gave an expression of vulnerability, of wanting to believe well of the world, and hoping it would repay such trust in kind. They were a hospitable couple, and at their magnificent old house we made contact with such writers as James Aldridge, Cedric Belfrage, Kenneth Tynan, Elaine Dundy and Sally Belfrage. One could also look at the rare collection of paintings by Paul Klee.

The General, started as a short story so long ago, was published in May. It has since gone through several hard and paperback editions, and been translated into half a dozen languages. The film rights were later bought for 30,000 dollars, and a movie made from the idea in Hollywood called Counterpoint, with Charlton Heston playing the lead.

Some reviewers of the novel suggested that I ‘get back to Nottingham’, in other words write only about what they had decided I knew best, or ought to know at all. This opinion was offensive, for I had always believed that a writer should show interest in people from any background, no matter what education they had had, or whatever profession or trade was followed. I had never intended to restrict my imagination by writing only about those who worked in factories or came from Nottingham. For reviewers and journalists to refer to me as ‘working class’ or ‘of the working class’ was as much a misconception as roping me into the ‘angry young man’ corral. It was even worse in the United States, where ex-Marxist subliterate reviewers used those dreadful words ‘prole’ and ‘proletarian’ in their articles.

I had never thought of myself as being of the so-called ‘working class’, or in any class at all. As a child the term would have been meaningless, since it was hard to imagine belonging even to my parents. In the factory I was judged by the amount of work I was expected to do, and looked on it as little more than a basic commercial transaction, and if any knowing lickspittle had in those days implied that I was a member of ‘the working class’ he would have been told in the harshest terms to find a quiet corner and indulge in sexual intercourse with himself. When I enlisted into the Royal Air Force it was to become a technician, with men from all kinds of background.

In France and Spain I had lived the life of a man with a private income, small as it was, so couldn’t have had anything to do with, or feeling for, the whole class issue, which seemed (and still does) to obsess the English, and to that extent at least I am a foreigner. When Tony Godwin said that someone like me must have strong opinions on ‘class’, he was told that I knew nothing about it, a mild response since he was likeable.

Nor did I feel any part of the ‘angry young man’ movement, if such there was, and I can’t think of any writers who did, for the label was used by journalists and others who wanted to classify those who wrote in ways they didn’t understand or care for — to define so as to defuse.

With some hesitation I allowed my name to be put on to the letter press of Arnold Wesker’s ‘Centre 42’. While respecting Wesker’s selfless efforts to educate ‘the workers’, it had always been obvious to me that anyone in England wanting to become knowledgeable or cultured, no matter what their income or status, could do so freely, and at little cost. They still can. Libraries are free, secondhand books almost given away, and a basic radio will provide familiarity with classical music.

In May news came that the weekly rate of my pension would be reduced to sixteen shillings, continuing until June 1962, when a terminal gratuity of seventy-five pounds would end it all — thirteen years after it had begun. I often wonder whether some unknown sympathizer at the Ministry of Pensions had divined my ambition, and secretly did his or her best to keep me going. However it was, such an extended period of cosseting merely for doing my duty turned into a much appreciated case of patronage.

Whether from shock at receiving news of being given the prestigious Hawthornden Prize for The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, or from the cumulative effect of too much eating in restaurants, I took to bed for the longest period since Wroughton. A lump in my stomach had the shape and consistency of a cannon-ball, which suggested in more sombre moments that the bells of hell were at last going ting-a-ling-ling for me and no longer only for others. The cannonball area was painful to touch, but Dr Green, instead of rushing me off to the Knackerstone Hospital as a terminally ill patient, suggested it might have to do with the state of my liver, and that three days would see me still among the living. Obviously, the diet in Majorca had been healthier. At the Hawthornden ceremony in St James’s Square, I met Lord David Cecil, and Victor Pritchett who presented me with a prize which Robert Graves had gained in 1934 for I, Claudius.

It’s hard to say why the first rough-cut film version of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning made me so embarrassed that I wanted to sink back into my seat and disappear. The accents seemed hopelessly out of shape, but that shouldn’t have mattered, and no doubt wouldn’t to those who had no idea where Nottingham was anyway. If the accents had been right nobody would have understood a word. Nor, in spite of the authenticity of the locations, could I think the film showed the reality imagined while writing the book. Wanting the film to be exactly the one set going in my mind’s eye during that process was clearly unreasonable.

I was also weirdly perturbed at having set off the whole complex mechanism of a movie in the first place, and though in the end my unease remains a mystery, such sensations were to come back with my next film, and return even more fully some years later when a story was dramatized for BBC television, reinforcing my belief that the novel is merely a blueprint, while the film made out of it is something different. Such reality was a peculiar form of art because it left little to the viewer’s imagination, giving nothing to do except supinely watch.

My feelings also reflected the fact that whereas I had total control of a novel, with a film there was, in spite of writing the script, not very much. I suppose that finally my embarrassment was little more than chagrin at not being all powerful, but there was some comfort in the fact that the book existed for whoever cared to read it, and in knowing that the reader of fiction becomes his or her own film-maker, setting their particular and idiosyncratic cameras moving after the first word of novel or story registers on the brain, thus completing the work of the writer. There is no substitute for that unbeatable combination.

My brother Michael was to appear before a tribunal in Manchester as a conscientious objector to military service, and I went there to help defend him. It was inconceivable to me to be a pacifist, yet I had always believed that conscription was not compatible with a free society, in so far as one could be said to exist, and that the armed forces should be manned by volunteers. In times of war this opinion might have to be modified, but even then there had to be an outlet for people who objected on the sincerest principles to being called up.

My brother didn’t have a leg to stand on, you might say, because he had served as a bandsman for two years in the Territorial Army. On the other hand he played the fact to his advantage, saying that because he had already had some experience of military life, he now knew for genuine pacifist reasons that he did not want to be called upon to serve full-time.

Fortunately, because what he and I said at the tribunal had little effect, a schoolmaster of Michael’s, who had been in a Guards regiment and won the Military Cross during the war, wrote such an eloquent endorsement of my brother’s beliefs that the appeal was successful. The only penance for Michael was that he must work out his time in the food distribution industry, which he did willingly enough as a Co-op warehouseman. Had he lost his case I might well have helped him leave the country.

The Times Literary Supplement published my essay ‘On Both Sides of the Street’, in which I wrote that while most of the population were as yet unable to recognize themselves in a novel, should they care to pick one up, this situation was changing, and writers were appearing who would counter and ultimately stifle the stereotypes issued by films, radio and television. I damned Soviet-style writing as well, for portraying working people as heroic automatons, and using them in as false a fashion as the jokey creations of popular entertainment in western countries.

Such articles took up too much of my time, being far more difficult to produce than fiction. I was more at home with myself in writing ‘The Other John Peel’ for the Manchester Guardian’s summer issue, and in July there was the pleasure of seeing my poem ‘Picture of Loot’ published in The Listener, and ‘Carthage’, commented on by Robert Graves in 1953, in the New Statesman. Advance payments for the screen rights of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner were made at the end of August by Woodfall Films — the total payment being six thousand pounds — stipulating that work was to begin on the script in the following year.

In Manchester Ruth and I stayed a night at the house of Bill Webb, the literary editor of the Guardian, and it was good to settle down to a long evening of convivial talk with someone whose views were much like our own.

From there we took the train to Ambleside in the Lake District, where a friend of Terry Harjula’s had lent us High Hall Garth for a month. This was a low stone slate-roofed house beyond Little Langdale, with calor gas for lighting and cooking, an outside toilet which hung over a cliff (very windy for the vitals) and water to be scooped by bucket from a nearby stream.

Such conditions were more primitive than those we had known at Le Nid, but the place was better furnished, and the isolation priceless. It rained every day, but was the perfect place to work in, sitting under lamps at opposite ends of a large dining table. Ruth was writing a play on which an option was later taken by a producer in New York, while I was bodging along with Key to the Door. We walked daily downhill and across Slaters Bridge to the village for supplies, calling at Birk Howe Farm for a slab of newly churned butter that shot out droplets of water when a knife was run along it.

In October came the proofs of The Rats and Other Poems, with a dedication to Ruth Fainlight. Later that month the film of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was shown for the first time, at the Warner Theatre in Leicester Square. The sight of the title in huge lit-up letters across the outside of the cinema was somehow unbelievable, on recalling those months of parsimonious desolation in the house among the olive trees where the first tentative pieces of the novel had been written.

When the lights went down Ruth took my hand, emotion subdued at seeing Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton working in the Turnery Department of the Raleigh factory, as if he too had been there since he was fourteen. The spot was the same I had stood on at that age, in another world, at another time, and certainly as someone else.

Chapter Thirty-eight

After the show Karel, Ruth and I, with Albert Finney and Norman Rossington, went to a nearby steakhouse for supper, a short and gloomy affair in which we had little to talk about, none of us knowing whether or not the film would be received with any kind of understanding.

We need not have worried. Critics who didn’t like it were not able to ignore it, and the film ran to full houses all over the country. The Watch Committees of certain counties banned it, like Colonial District Commissioners who didn’t want the natives to be suborned by the idea that they had any value in the world. How anyone could object to such a film puzzled rather than annoyed me, but the publicity created by intolerance helped to fuel interest and speculation. In a short time the film recouped its relatively small budget, and Harry Saltzman received a great deal from its success, as he well deserved to do, which enabled him to buy the screen rights of all the Ian Fleming novels.

The gutter press was harassing me to know whether or not my mother would be getting a new fur coat now that I too was rich. Gutter language told them what they could do. Sick of the novel, and of everything concerning the film, we left by train and boat for Paris, to stay a week at the Martins’ place.

With Sally Belfrage and the beautiful Elaine Netboy (now the writer Kim Chernin), we set out one Sunday morning to have lunch with the script writer Mike Wilson, who had a villa near Pontoise. Elaine was bowling us along in her tiny Gogomobile, when a wheel came off. With great coolness she stopped the car, and I chased the weaving wheel along the wide and almost empty road, to bring it back and fix on so that we could continue our merry journey.

Paris was marvellous, but the itch was on to move, out of the lowering weather for another look at southern landscapes. Couchettes on the train took us to Madrid, and more inspections of the Prado. During a day’s trip to Toledo I made unflattering remarks about the stand of the fascist forces in the Alcazar fortress during the siege of the Civil War. In the train going back to town a couple of identikit plain-clothed coppers, who must have been told by the crutch-wielding guide what I had said, came on board to look at our passports. With everything in order there was no cause to bother us but, recalling my experience in Barcelona, we left next day for Tangier, arriving in the middle of November.

Mike Edmonds had written the only useful guidebook to the place, and helped us find an unfurnished flat in a modern block on the outskirts. We rented furniture from a Danish man, and set up house with a Spanish woman to clean for us.

Jane and Paul Bowles lived in the same building, and we met frequently for talk and meals. Jane’s aura of anxiety was redeemed by a mordant wit, and Paul’s nonchalant precision of speech matched it with an elegant sense of humour. Jane’s writing was interesting in a very different way to Paul’s (whose books we had read in Majorca), especially her novel Two Serious Ladies, written when she was twenty. She was half crippled after a stroke but, being relatively young, was able to get about with a walking stick and the aid of her Berber girlfriend. She and Paul kept separate establishments in the same block, but ate together every evening in Jane’s. Paul’s rooms, more orientally arranged, let out a subtle aroma of pot and parrot droppings.

While Ruth worked on poems I revised the penultimate draft of Key to the Door. Kenneth Allsop came to interview me for the Daily Mail, and I had sharp words with the photographer who wanted a picture of me riding a donkey through the Kasbah.

The Rats and Other Poems was published during my stay in Morocco, the reviews implying, or their paucity seeming to indicate, that I couldn’t expect to be thought of as a poet as well as a successful writer of fiction. Either that, or the diatribe of ‘The Rats’ struck too close to home and was considered crude and offensive, one critic idiotically describing me as ‘a working class Lord Byron’.

In December, going still further south, we toured Morocco with Mike Edmonds in his Peugeot motor car. He knew all the good hotels and restaurants and, after a gastronomic blow-out in Rabat, and lunch at a comfortable brasserie in Casablanca on Christmas Day, he drove us inland to the vast walled city of Fez.

With many different trade quarters it was like a place out of the Arabian Nights, but Muslim fanaticism forbade us to enter the celebrated El Karouine mosque. We were more welcome at a synagogue and yeshiva in the rapidly depopulating Mellah or Jewish Quarter. The Jews were treated badly at the time due to the Arab world’s inflexible attitude to the State of Israel. Having no future in the country, most wanted to leave, but it was difficult to get exit visas. A boat load of sixty Jews, trying to reach Spain ‘illegally’, sank in bad weather in the Straits of Gibraltar, and all on board perished.

On leaving Tangier we drove with Mike to Paris, sharing the cost of petrol, calling on Mack Reynolds in Malaga, then going up and into France at Bayonne, with good eating and accommodation all the way. Ruth and I stayed a few days in Paris, then got back to a quieter life in London than we had left four months before.

Key to the Door was posted to W.H. Allen, and it was a good feeling to have the table cleared so that I could begin the film script of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Being a story and not a novel, the first draft was much too short, and new material had to be added to bring it to the usual length of ninety minutes.

The British Board of Film Censors was even more worried about the text than on the previous occasion, though Tony Richardson and I came off better because times were changing. In a two-page closely typed letter the censor complained of excess ‘language’. Such words as ‘bugger’, ‘sod’ and ‘Christ!’ were really not acceptable, he said, pointing out that ‘bleeding’ was used thirty-two times, and ‘bastard’ eleven times, leading me to wonder what demented apparatchik had gone through the 120 pages to count them. He suggested there should be some reduction of these words, and it was fruitless for me to argue that they were used merely to give colour and punctuation to the talk of those whose vocabularies were otherwise somewhat limited.

The censor also objected to an ‘obscene’ sign which one of the Borstal boys makes with his two fingers, and he also thought that ‘a bob in the eye is worth two in the crotch’ should be excised. One certainly ought not to show a screw kicking Stacey, he burbled on, when they bring him back to the institution after he has absconded, because parents with sons in Borstal might imagine that this was normal treatment. For the benefit of the young those ideas expressed in the story which were dangerous should also be toned down.

Early in 1961, at which point this account of a life without armour comes to an end (because the mere enumeration of a list of books produced would be too dull to write about), enquiries were made as to whether I would go to Hollywood and write a script for 50,000 dollars. A refusal to embark on such a career and become rich was not difficult. My publisher indicated that he would like me to continue writing ‘Nottingham books’, perhaps with such titles, I thought, as ‘Monday Night and Tuesday Morning’, ‘Wednesday Night and Thursday Morning’, or ‘Son of Arthur Seaton’, or ‘Arthur Seaton Goes West’, or even ‘And Quiet Flows the Trent’. I had no intention of competing with radio and television, which would soon have the new mood well in hand, or with other writers who came through the door which I had helped to blow off its hinges.

Such success as I had achieved was purely financial, because in three years, from the first advance payment for Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, enough had been earned from all sources to begin paying back with income tax what I had received as my pension. We were indeed rich compared to the days in France and Spain, and though it was still modest by worldly standards we were content in having sufficient to live on. By now it was not difficult to believe that such a state would continue for as long as I went on writing, my main reason for being alive. I was under no illusion that the success of my first book — or my second — need be put down to more than a socio-historical accident, and artistic success still had to be striven for, and never lost sight of.

My first luxury, apart from travel, was the huge hundredweight black box of an AR-88 RCA communications receiver, of the type I used in Malaya, with which one could eavesdrop on Morse code transmissions, never knowing when the idea for a novel or story would come into my earphones from the sacred aether. I also used it as a sort of therapy when for reasons known only unto God I was paralysed with despair halfway through a comma.

I bought a pair of Barr and Stroud binoculars, so as to see landscape clearly without having to walk over it. Thirdly, a mark of normality perhaps, and so as to get from A to B more quickly, I acquired a new Austin Countryman car and learned to drive, taking happily to motoring because I was still in thrall to machines. I was also able to buy books, and what maps took my fancy at Stanford’s.

There was something which did not allow me to enjoy my so-called fame to the extent I should have been capable of doing. Perhaps it was just as well. I persuaded myself that such an afflicted state was necessary in order to go on writing. The wheels of fame and artistic success did not lock into each other, and I distrusted any feeling which came from a whiff of either.

Lack of enjoyment could have been caused by something in me, or factors exterior, or a mixture of both. The only success which meant anything was that of doing good work, and my increasingly hypercritical faculties never allowed me to acknowledge that sort of achievement. I learned to regard good reviews with the same objective appraisal as bad ones, realizing that success which eluded me in one book could always be aimed for in the next.

An eternal refugee from such ambiguous feelings, I immersed myself in work that came out of the coal measures of my subconscious, and never allowed sufficient time to elapse between novels in which I could be intimidated by what the ‘normal’ world looked on as ‘success’. Nor was it possible for me to work and live, and though that decision was to be a mistake as far as my life was concerned, it was necessary because there was not enough energy in me to do both.

Facing such truth reinforces my inherited conviction that, having chosen what to do in life, you must go on with it to the utmost. Choices have to be paid for, and those half hidden ones that you allow to be made for you, or which Fate makes, cost even more.

Many aspects of life were too difficult for me to endure. They always had been. Why this was is hard to say, but I suppose a possible answer might be that dissatisfaction supplies the power for the mill of the imagination, out of which one endeavours to create works which leave the reader (and therefore the author) in favour of life by the end of the book rather than in a state of despair at all the vile things that go on in the world.

15 April 1993