Life Without Armour (32 page)

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:

Retreat, dig in, retreat,

Withdraw your shadow from the crimson

Gutters that run riot down the street.

Retreat, dig in, arrange your coat

As a protective covering,

A clever camouflage of antidote.

Retreat still more, still more,

Remembering your images and words:

Perfect the principles of fang and claw.

The shadows of retreat are wide,

Town and desert equally

Bereft of honest hieroglyph or guide.

Release your territory and retreat,

Record, preserve, and memorise

The journey where no drums can rouse nor beat.

Defeat is not the question: withdraw

Into the hollows of the hills

Until this winter passes into thaw.

Dig in no more. Turn round and fight

Forget the wicked and regret the lame

And travel back the way you came,

In front the darkness and behind the light.

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.