Life Without Armour (30 page)

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.