Life Without Armour (34 page)

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.