Life Without Armour (38 page)

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

A Biography of Alan Sillitoe by Ruth Fainlight

Not many of the “Angry Young Men” (a label Alan Sillitoe vigorously rejected but which nonetheless clung to him until the end of his life), could boast of having failed the eleven plus exam not only once, but twice. From early childhood Alan yearned for every sort of knowledge about the world: history, geography, cosmology, biology, topography, and mathematics; to read the best novels and poetry; and learn all the languages, from Classical Greek and Latin to every tongue of modern Europe. But his violent father was illiterate, his mother barely able to read the popular press and when necessary write a simple letter, and he was so cut off from any sort of cultivated environment that, at about the age of ten, trying to teach himself French (unaware books existed that might have helped him), the only method he could devise was to look up each word of a French sentence in a small pocket dictionary. It did not take long for him to realize that something was wrong with his system, but there was no one to ask what he should do instead.

So, like all his schoolmates, he left school at fourteen and went to work in a local factory. Alan never presented himself as a misunderstood sensitive being, and always insisted that he had a wonderful time chasing girls and going with workmates to the lively Nottingham pubs. He also joined the Air Training Corps (ATC) where he absorbed information so quickly that by the age of seventeen he was working as an air traffic controller at a nearby airfield. World War II was still being fought, and his ambition was to become a pilot and go to the Far East, but before that could be realized it was VE Day. As soon as possible he volunteered for the Royal Air Force. It was too late to become a pilot or a navigator, but he got as far as Malaya, where as a radio operator he spent long nights in a hut at the edge of the jungle.