Life Without Armour

by Alan Sillitoe

  I would clear off for as many hours as possible, one day coming home to catch Peggy by the bed praying to God for peace in the house, hot and bitter tears falling on to her frock as she turned to me half ashamed and said: ‘It’s the only thing to do, our Alan. You should do it, as well, then perhaps he won’t hit her any more.’ Supposing God to exist somewhere – a titanic figure misty at the edges, remote and pitiless, but no less God for that – it was nevertheless hard to believe that such prayers could be in any way answerable. So I ran from her, screwing back my tears at knowing she didn’t even have the Burtons’ cottage for a refuge.

  Packed off on a summer’s morning with a bottle of tea and some sandwiches, our feet gave salvation in taking us, under a perfect sky, on a round trip of five or six miles to the Trent. After infancy, none of us was ever ill, as if living in the middle of an emotional battlefield held off infection.

  Peggy at twelve was in charge of me at ten, Pearl at eight, and Brian at five who travelled part of the way on my shoulders. Our only instructions were not to talk to any dirty old men and, happy to be out of the house and free, we found a ruined dredger moored by the riverbank, and chased each other around its rusting machinery for hours.

  The way out was easy, but the road back a somewhat slower march, not altogether because we were tired – though we were – but due to anxiety as to what we would find on getting home. As often as not the pessimism was unwarranted, and our parents would be in a good mood, since they had managed to get some food on the table, or had spent the time in bed. But the more one went into despair at the state of things the more difficult was it to come up on the corresponding swing of the see-saw and think that times were not really as bad as they seemed.

  The nadir was reached in the spring of 1937, when my father went to work at the Furse Electrical Company, the only job since his few weeks at the tannery around the time of my birth. For the first month he earned nine pounds nine shillings, and then walked out because such payment was only ten shillings a week more than he would have received on the dole. This was an ill-advised decision, for many families supported themselves on that amount, and the regularity of such an income would have improved our lives.

  Perhaps he clocked himself off because it was found that he could not read or write, and the humiliation was too great to be borne. The shame at having to admit this to my mother would have been more biting still, for in the land of universal education the illiterate is a pariah.

  Having given up the job, unemployment money was not paid for the ensuing months, and the family existed ‘on relief’, applying to the parish for tickets which could only be exchanged for food, rent, some coal, and clothes from absolute necessity. There was no actual cash, and my mother was outraged at what he had done, accusing him during even more terrible rows of having given up work not so much due to the low wage as because he was, and always had been, ‘bone idle’, a taunt Peggy and I began to see was true. He had, my mother shouted under his blows, made the family destitute – a new word whose significance was soon apparent.

  My mother took to going out in the evenings with her sister Edith, dressing as well as possible and putting on powder and rouge to make her look and feel younger, and packing screwed up newspaper into her handbag so that it would not seem empty. They stood at the bar of some pub downtown till spoken to by a man, who would treat them to a drink or two, and give them a few shillings when they came back from wherever they went.

  My father’s fist was paralysed when the truth came home, and though his vocabulary was limited he certainly knew the word prostitute. So did we, for it was bellowed many times, my mother’s perfect answer to his justified accusation being that with such as him to keep there was nothing else she could do.

  She walked out, screaming that she would never come back, after throwing all the money from her handbag into his face. He hardly moved from the fireplace for a week, the house run, if that was the word, by Peggy, who picked up the coins and went out for food, bought some cigarettes, shook the rugs into the yard, and made sure we got up each day for school.

  The man she had gone to live with brought her back after a while. Or maybe she persuaded him to do so, and my father agreed to take her in. Peggy and I were sitting at the table showing Pearl how to do a jigsaw puzzle, and Brian underneath stopped hammering a piece of wood, to look up at the man and say: ‘No nose’, for he had been disfigured by a shellburst in the Great War. Thereafter, my father, when he wanted to pain and insult her, would shout that she could go back to old No-nose if she didn’t like it where she was.

  Being of a brooding disposition, even more so due to his disabilities, my mother’s faithlessness led him to wonder who of her children had come from him. Such speculations must have tormented him for the rest of his life, though with diminishing force, for I believe that in happier moods he was certain enough that we were all his.

  And yet the episode seemed to have broken his spirit, in that he tried harder to get work. The fights at home did not decrease, however, because there was never enough money for cigarettes, and my mother still went out now and again with her sister.

  In the first ten years my father was employed for a total of just over six months. The fact was, he didn’t like going to work, was uneasy with spade or hammer, or sweeping brush. Being solitary, melancholic and illiterate, he felt at a disadvantage to everyone else, and obviously was. On the other hand his father had taught him the basics of upholstery; he could paint doors and put up wallpaper, cobble shoes, mend a wireless, do carpentry and frame pictures, and was never happier than when at home occupied with such tasks, or even in somebody else’s house, because he could be cheerful and obliging when out of his own.

  Nottingham was a town of different industries, by no means an area of the highest unemployment. Work was available if you searched hard enough, but my father just didn’t look very far, though it could also be said that when he did no one saw him coming. Social conditions were not good, but they never had been, so you could not blame them. You were a plaything of Fate, and hope was the only solace, and it was hope which gave me the energy to believe that I would one day get away from such a life, and never go back. I could hardly know that to do so I would have to become a different person, and was even then in the grip of a process that must have begun at birth – if not before.

  Chapter Eight

  Early in 1938 we moved to a terrace by the side of the Raleigh Bicycle Factory, a house with a parlour and two proper bedrooms, a small plot of garden back and front, and our own water closet across the yard. My parents made their bedroom in the parlour so that Pearl and Peggy could have the back room upstairs, and Brian and myself the other. Later that year my father got a job with Thomas Bow the builders lasting ten weeks, and then another in November with the British Sugar Corporation that ended after eight days.

  Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérable, also done as a serial on the wireless, had as lasting an effect on me as the one by Dumas. A neighbour, Monty Graham, a fearsome little Scot who had fought his way through the Great War in France, lent me his musty-smelling and abridged Readers Library edition. Pages tended to fall out, and the first fifty were missing, but I read what remained, though later saved penny by penny to buy my own copy.

  Set in France, Les Misérables nevertheless seemed relevant to life roundabout and, apart from Beatrice by Rider Haggard, it was to be the only adult book read before the age of nineteen. The story (though who doesn’t know it by now?) tells of Jean Valjean, hounded by the sinister police agent Javert even after he had been nineteen years in the galleys for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister and her starving children; the painfully hard existence of Fantine who became a prostitute so as to pay for the upbringing of her illegitimate daughter Cosette; the ingenious street urchin Gavroche whose secret den was in the foot of the statue of an elephant, and who reminded me of my cousin Jack; then the 1830 Revolution in which Jean Valjean rescues Cosette’s wounded lover (who is thereby going to rob him of the
only person he ever loved) by carrying him through the sewers of Paris on his shoulders. Such grand themes blended into an exciting narrative which couldn’t be seen by me as anything but real.

  It was fortunate that Les Misérables and The Count of Monte Cristo were known to me so early on, and had such a deep effect, for between them they lit up my darkness with visions of hope and promise of escape. Dumas’ story was one of revenge, and Hugo’s of justice, both books powerhouses buried in the heart which they helped to survive.

  Concurrent with my reading, a phase of acquiring lead soldiers lasted till well after it should. Matchsticks set in cracks between the floorboards, and a wall of joined Woodbine packets, did for fortifications, a few neat grenadiers deployed on one side, and a half section of khaki Great War soldiers on the other. Such arms expenditure was financed by pennies cadged or donated at the Burtons’, spoiling my economy with regard to books but giving hours of brainless diversion.

  When I was coming up to eleven my grandmother thought I should take a Free Scholarship examination which, with sufficiently high marks, would get me to a school until the age of seventeen, instead of starting work at fourteen. One’s age began to assume importance: a change in life at eleven would decide how the next six years were spent.

  Grandmother Burton had taken in my preoccupation with the school prizes in her parlour, and habitually gave me old laundry or penny cash books with pages still clear at the back to write on. My grandfather must have considered buying the house, because he let me have two cadastral plans of that part of Lord Middleton’s property on which it stood. These were drawn to a scale of 1:2,500, and I learned that one inch on the paper equalled 2,500 inches on the ground.

  Unfolding the thin sheets, it was possible to make out the land, on which I daily rambled, in such detail that by going a hundred paces I had moved over an inch on the paper. With pencil and rubber I arranged the companies and platoons of an imaginary battalion into defensive positions around groups of cottages, on a bridge, by the edge of a wood, and along the railway embankment. Machine-guns were set out for crossfire, and barbed wire laid, the maps used this way until they were worn out. The idea of joining the army as soon as I became of age appealed to me as a way of leaving home.

  My grandmother said that on my passing ‘the scholarship’ she would pay for uniform and books by arranging a loan from the Cooperative Society, of which she had long been a member. What attracted me to the scheme was that at a secondary school one would be taught French, a necessary road through education being paved with a knowledge of that language. Jack Newton’s brother taught him to count up to ten in French, and these magic syllables were passed on to me. I bought a dictionary and tried to translate sentences into French, though not knowing how to conjugate verbs was a fullstop to getting anywhere in my studies.

  In the basement of Frank Wore’s secondhand bookshop downtown was an enormous table on which many treasures could be found for threepence, and some for slightly more on the shelves above which occasionally came out under my coat. A Pitman’s French grammar showed my errors of translation, and provided a rough but effective phonetic guide to pronunciation. One such primer contained a plan of Paris, making me familiar with the buildings and street names of that place much sooner than with those of London.

  In the week before taking the scholarship examination I felt set apart from those in the class, though the proportion of pupils sitting for it was not small. My sister would tell her friends proudly on the street: ‘Our Alan’s going to do his scholarship next week.’ Needless to say, I did not pass, though two boys did, one whose father ran a hardware shop, and another whose mother owned a café. The unfamiliar puzzles and conundrums I was asked to solve might just as well have been Chinese ideograms, for I had expected to be tested on knowledge rather than intelligence.

  When the result came my disappointment was not acute. I had wanted to pass, and hoped I would, yet didn’t care too much that I hadn’t, telling myself that the test had been taken as much for the experience as for anything else. Perhaps it was thought by the teacher, however, that my marks had been close enough to justify another attempt, for I accepted the chance of a free scholarship exam the following term for Nottingham High School. Hard to remember what season it was, the day of the test being cold and wet, and my shoes letting in water, but the high spirits of Arthur Shelton and I declined somewhat on going through the gate and seeing masters wearing caps and gowns much like those at the school of Billy Bunter in the comics we laughed at.

  Since my experience of the previous attempt I’d had no coaching, but at least knew what to expect. A hard try was not enough, however, and my second failure indicated that I was not a fit subject for formal education. Success would in any case have led to all kinds of complications, not least that of leaving my friends and entering a world I was not prepared for. I could not know it then, but I wanted to go in by the ceiling, not enter by the cellar.

  I knew that to continue schooling until the advanced age of seventeen was impossible in a family which needed any money that could be earned as soon as the legal age to work full time had been reached. It would be emotionally out of the question for me to endure the justifiable resentment of someone like my father, who at least had the power to make me feel guilty at having money in my pocket to buy books when there was little enough to eat on the table. It was the only moral problem I was to inherit.

  Disappointment was not despair, there being worse things in the world than failure, and once the illusory hurdle of further education was out of the way my life could take the course it was obviously fitted for, and allow me to do the best that was possible in no other terms but my own.

  Chapter Nine

  Sometime in 1939 I stood in line at school to receive a gasmask. At last we mattered to the government, which was arranging for us not to be choked to death during an air raid. In my already long life there had been talk of war: in China, in Abyssinia and Spain. The Germans (of whom I had often heard that the only good ones were dead), after electing the Nazis to run their country, had retaken the Rhineland in 1936, and had now gone into the Sudeten part of Czechoslovakia. Hitler ranted like a dog with the colic, and people in the rest of Europe were afraid because they did not want war.

  As well as being poor, we could shortly expect to be bombed. The only good thing was that for most of the time we were too poor to be worried, and you could only worry about one thing at a time. Nevertheless, listening to people discussing the horrors of the previous conflict, which had ended only twenty years ago, and hearing of bombing atrocities in Spain, the prospect was frightening. The gasmask was a precious piece of equipment that had been given to us, but its significance could hardly promise a peaceful future.

  At Radford Boulevard Senior Boys’ School I was, with a few friends, always near the top of the ‘A’ stream. The diminutive Percy Rowe, another reputed terror of a teacher, had been a victim of shellshock, which to our silent amusement seemed a positive advantage as, with shaking hands, he drew a map of the western coast of Scotland or the fjords of Norway on the blackboard. On seeing me looking at a Michelin map from Wore’s bookshop he said he had used them driving lorries to and from the trenches during the Great War. He also taught English, and responded keenly to whoever wrote good ‘compositions’.

  Many of the usual boys’ books were borrowed by me from the nearby public library, which included every ‘William’ title by Richmal Crompton, as much as could be found by Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle and Jules Verne (who replaced G.A. Henty and Herbert Strang) as well as other novels by Alexandre Dumas (especially the d’Artagnan series), and Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Toilers of the Sea. Thirty or forty books were kept in the bedroom cupboard, mostly novels but also history, geography, and French grammars. An ex-Guardsman living nearby let me have his one-inch Ordnance Survey sheet of the Aldershot Training Area, which greatly increased my knowledge of map-reading. Old Mr Smith, who was dying in a house at the yard-end, sent me his paper ra
ilway map of England.

  A scene which impressed me, in a film on the life of the Victorian prime minister Benjamin Disraeli – though I suppose it could have been put in by the scriptwriters – was when in the House of Commons during some important debate he seemed to be asleep, not caring to be influenced by what the Leader of the Opposition had to say. Disraeli’s own speech was already prepared, and this gesture of integrity, and disregard of other points of view, must have impressed if not influenced me, since I remember it when most films from that period have been forgotten unless they contained set-pieces of violence and adventure. Such films, far more thrilling to see, were those of James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and Paul Muni. Never mind that such characters ended heroically dead, at least they’d had their time of glamorous power and glorious excess.

  Every day was an island, closed by sleep and sleep. The hour of a film came and went, leaving no firmer mark that school life could not rub out, or tread down to a layer where it was apparently forgotten. At the time of tests, because no homework was ever given, I often (though not too often) studied in the bedroom in order to steal a march on the others. Having little confidence in my ability to memorize what was imparted during lessons, it was the right thing to do, and proved I could learn more through lack of confidence, which was a secret kept to myself, than by boasting or carelessness.