Life Without Armour

by Alan Sillitoe

  Soon to leave Nottingham, it would be necessary to travel light, so I sold most of my books. I grew a moustache, which somehow made me look younger, and in October hitch-hiked around Cornwall, with The Way of All Flesh in my pocket, and a piece of old map from Langar for navigation. The idea was to find a cheap chalet or cottage in which Ruth and I might live for the winter, but either nothing was suitable, or I couldn’t make up my mind on the few houses shown.

  Later in the year a yarn called ‘Christmas Treaty’ went to the Observer short story competition, based on an incident at my grandparents’ cottage before the war. The influence of D. H. Lawrence, both in subject and style, was overwhelming, and the prize was rightly awarded to Muriel Spark.

  At the end of October Ruth saw an advertisement in The Lady for an unfurnished house to let at forty-eight pounds a year near Menton in the Alpes Maritimes. The estate on which it stood was owned by an Italian called Corbetta, who had an English wife, and when we went to their house in Kensington to be vetted we not only persuaded them of our married state but lied that we had enough income to take on the place for a year.

  I had saved some money, though not much, and had to borrow here and there to make up the first quarter’s rent, our train fares down, and something to live on. Corbetta said he would be going at the same time, and provide us with a few sticks of furniture from the attics of the main villa, which would save us having to sleep on the floor. The travel allowance of fifty pounds per person per year was hardly sufficient for any stretch of time, but we couldn’t imagine lasting for more than six months anyway on our resources, and decided that when the money ran out we would skip the rest of the year’s lease and come back to England.

  I burned stories, articles, poems, as well as a couple of notebooks and many first drafts – hard to say why, for they could have been left safely enough at home. Perhaps in a primitive way I wanted to signal the importance of the break about to take place. Or maybe to sacrifice something rough yet precious to the gods for the promise of a safe journey and eventual return which, I could hardly have known, would not be for six years.

  Stories not put into the conflagration were ‘The Fishing Boat Picture’, about a postman whose estranged wife keeps coming back to his house and borrowing the picture so that she can pawn it and get money for booze. I also kept ‘Uncle Ernest’, based on my Uncle Eddie (the Tramp) and his disastrous friendship with two young girls, as well as ‘The Match’, my one and only football story.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Ruth and I had acquired a kitten known as Nell and, not wanting to leave her behind, mocked up a passport, made her a travelling box into which we threw a raw herring, and took her with us to France. After the steamer trunk was booked through to Menton, and the rest of our suitcases – plus the cat box – was wheelbarrowed on board by a porter at Newhaven, we went into the saloon for a three-course lunch, thus missing the standard ‘Last of England’ vision, painted and written about so many times, as the boat chopped its way out of the harbour.

  It was 10 January 1952, and The Flying Enterprise was foundering in the North Atlantic, heaving waves doing their storm-force best to stuff Great Britain up the Skagerrak. Such unfriendly turbulence made me sick the whole five hours across, the first time any sea had done so, a spectacular throwing-up to Dieppe being my no doubt colourful version of ‘The Last of England’, which after all came out in spite of myself, except for the part of it I cared to hang on to by the time the coast of France was visible through the lashing rain, which didn’t seem to be much.

  It was the kind of day when minutes were only of value after they had gone by, sensibility fairly void till the train steamed into Paris. We saw our trunk through the customs, then followed a porter with the rest of our luggage to a bus for the Gare d’Austerlitz.

  France was strangely familiar, and in the third-class carriage we got what sleep was possible sitting upright. Dazed and in love, imagining she was mine at last and I was hers, we leaned against each other, fair hair and dark, blue eyes and brown, on one level too exhausted to care about what we were undertaking, but on another every impression was sharp and welcome. One lives for the moment at such an age, as if each is an encapsulated raindrop having to change its shape – and in the nature of things it always did – before drying up.

  In the morning there was a dining-car breakfast of brioche and croissant, butter and toast, and good coffee after the wartime acorn dust of England. The sky was blue above sharply drawn and ashy-coloured mountains, and the sea didn’t stop till reaching Africa: a transition total and sublime. Lemon and orange trees were in full fruit, and there were clouds of deep yellow mimosa, tricolour fields of carnations close to the railway, neat stations and exotic towns noted on the map in my out of date Blue Guide. The awakening was almost as different as that on the troopship five years before on steaming through the Suez Canal, except that now I was not alone.

  Luggage remained at the station so that we could shop for bread, milk and sugar, then walk the short way out of Menton to the gate of the Corbetta estate on the Avenue Cernuschi. The concierge gave us the key to the house, and advised us to cut off the hairpin bends of the cart track by ascending flights of narrow steps with a low stone wall to either side, taking us up the hundred-metre height through eucalyptus, pine, red-berried arbutus bushes, and flowered mimosa trees with their overpowering scent.

  The stone-built house, called ‘Le Nid’, was in an olive grove, and had five small rooms, with a grape vine over the door which was to give luscious fruit in late summer. We went out to gather wood, and in a short time stood before a fire drinking tea. The cat lapped at bread and milk, then went to explore its new surroundings. Later in the day I borrowed a handcart from the concierge, and manoeuvred our cases and trunk up the hairpin bends, back to our nest that was cold indeed when sunlight faded from the trees.

  Corbetta hadn’t arrived as planned, for his wife had been taken ill on the motor trip down, so in our empty kitchen-living room we pushed trunk and cases together, spread sheets and blankets on top, as well as a hammock which wouldn’t be possible to use till the weather became warmer, and managed to get some sleep. On the third morning we woke from our uneven platform to see a few centimetres of snow over the grass.

  An outside staircase led to the upper rooms, and in bad weather one needed a raincoat to go to bed. There was electric light, as well as a fireplace for heat and cooking in the living room. To keep the blaze going I chopped mimosa boughs from a nearby thicket, and we stripped bark from eucalyptus trunks for kindling, filling the living room with smoky fragrance. Water for all purposes came from a pump a couple of hundred yards away, opposite the main villa, and on drawing the first bucket in the morning tiny green frogs fell from the iron spout and hopped across the gravel to nearby bushes, returning to their favourite damp ground after we had gone.

  When Corbetta arrived he provided some furniture, but the weather continued damp and cold, downpours as heavy as in the monsoons I had known. One night twenty people were killed on a neighbouring hill, their houses carried away by landslides. It was a fight for survival, anticipated in the kind of goods we had brought with us, yet not quite imagined in the reality, as little ever can be. A telegram came from Ruth’s mother enquiring after our safety.

  Not able to afford meat – and I couldn’t stand the thought of horse flesh, though it was quite cheap – we lived mostly on fruit and vegetables, with the occasional egg or herring mixed into a dish of rice. Women selling produce on the pavement outside the market hall by the Old Town gave us good weight, and sometimes put extra vegetables into our basket if we arrived at the end of the morning. We stood in line for stale bread at the baker’s, on days when it was sold at half price.

  Someone told us that if we went to Ventimiglia, ten miles inside Italy, people at the station would ask us to change lire into francs, which only foreigners could do on their passports at the bank. In return we were given enough commission to cover our fares, as well as buy pas
ta, Parmesan cheese, tomato paste and tins of jam. This was a great help to our eating, but after a few weeks the law was changed so that it could no longer be done. On the day we discovered this the young Italian through whom the transactions had taken place told us that if we purchased a ladies’ watch, from a friend of his, we would be able to sell it for twice as much in France.

  With the elegant little timepiece in my pocket we walked the fourteen kilometres home, through the finest scenery on the Riviera. The weather was warm, and every flower in bloom, with oranges and lemons on the trees. The route, by the Hanbury Gardens, was the old Roman road between France and Italy, formerly traversed by such notables as Catherine of Siena, Machiavelli and Napoleon Bonaparte. On another day’s ramble we reached the mountain village of St Agnes, where the café proprietor would not let us pay for our glasses of wine.

  Visiting Monte Carlo to dispose of our ladies’ watch, we found that no shop would touch it without the required customs clearance certificate, and so we lost some of what had been gained on our money-changing trips, though the watch was good for a few years on Ruth’s wrist. I went into the casino to see the gaming tables, but only as an observer, Ruth having to stay outside because her passport showed she was not yet twenty-one.

  The Exchange Control Commission in England, on being informed that I was an ex-serviceman living abroad for reasons of health, allowed my pension to be sent to France as it fell due, thus giving no more worry about travel allowance restrictions. I also convinced the Ministry of Pensions that my move to Menton was for reasons of health, so they agreed to pay for my artificial pneumothorax injections through the British Consular Service.

  The local doctor who gave them put me in touch with the English wife of Doctor Schelbaum, who invited us to her Sunday teas, where we met some of the local residents. She also signed a card for us to use the English library in the town, and The Magic Mountain started me on a run through other novels by Thomas Mann. We had brought some Grey Walls Press publications from England, a few Penguin books and poetry anthologies, The Burnt Child (a newly published novel by the Swedish writer Stig Dagerman), Herbert Read’s Knapsack, a Shakespeare and, of course, my Bible.

  A chalet, in a more remote part of the estate, was rented by an English writer and painter, Robert Culff, who also lived on little, but we spent some agreeable evenings, talking over makeshift suppers and a glass or two of wine. In warmer weather a German painter, Gowa, rented the tower of the main villa, and his friend Ilse Steinhoff, a literary agent from Paris, stayed there as well for a while.

  Since arriving in France I had written Man Without a Home, a novel of 70,000 words, about a young English painter living on the Cote d’Azur who is drawn so deeply into the local expatriate community of elderly people that he is spiritually destroyed by it and has to flee back to the safe anonymity of his bedsitter in London. Ilse Steinhoff liked this, as well as my story ‘Uncle Ernest’, and took both to Paris to try and get them published.

  The Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian accepted two articles about expatriate life on the Riviera, which brought in a few guineas, and my poem ‘New World’ came out in the little magazine Prospect, as well as two short pieces about Menton in the Scribe, needle-pricks of publication sufficient to keep hope going. Ruth was also writing poems and stories: we had pens, paper and a typewriter, and managed to put money by for postage and international response coupons. I did more work on The Deserters, so that even the coolest look backwards suggests that when youth and industry are harmoniously functioning hope becomes a natural part of the equation.

  On summer evenings we cooked supper against a wall outside, and when it got dark sat in the house writing, or reading, or studying French grammar. We laughed a great deal, especially when I put on a D. H. Lawrence act, pillorying the worst of his turgid Plumed Serpent style, and talking to Ruth in a mock-Nottinghamshire accent. We called it ‘playing Bert and Frieda’, and also made fun of two over-artistic characters in a novel with the title No Peace Among the Olives.

  The only noise around the house, apart from the rusty-pump braying of donkeys going up the nearby track into the mountains, came from an Aristophelian chorus of bullfrogs which in no sense diminished our feeling of living, albeit frugally, in a kind of paradise. We washed our clothes in an abandoned laundering trough in a hidden dip of the estate, then took advantage of its cold fresh water to bathe ourselves when no one was about. Mosquitoes were a nuisance in the hot weather, but they did not bite me. Had they done so, we joked, they would have zig-zagged away coughing. For Ruth, who was more to their taste, we had brought an army mosquito net from England.

  A Nottingham tyre manufacturer, Mr Boak, who had heard of me from Hales, sent a note to the house asking me to call at the Royal Westminster Hotel in town, where he and his wife were staying on holiday. After a meal and a cigar he handed me, on leaving, a five pound note, which covered the cost of our food for nearly a fortnight. He and his wife Dolly later sent a sumptuous parcel of provisions, also containing a box of cigarettes. Ruth’s aunt despatched clothes and good things to eat from America, while my sisters Peggy and Pearl, as well as my mother, provided the occasional consignment of tea, powdered milk and tinned food.

  Autumn came with storms and chill rain, but I had no wish to go back to England for greater comfort, which did not necessarily exist for me there in any case. My feeling was to remain where I was, and manage as best I could, as if more adventures and revelations would come by staying on the Continent.

  Ruth decided to leave, mainly to try and get a divorce from her husband, and I was in no fair state of mind to ask her not to go, especially since we both thought she would perhaps come back when the divorce business was finished. After seeing her off from the station in the morning I went back to the house, and gloomily empty it seemed now that I had it to myself. In the afternoon, ever the conscientious advocate of the tidy billet, if not exactly domesticated, I swept the floors, cleaned the windows, and washed the towels. In the evening I lit a fire to cook supper, then put in some work on The Deserters.

  When Robert Culff and the Corbettas went back to England, and Gowa departed for Germany, I had the estate more or less to myself. Between work I roamed around like a man of the woods, though kept my hair short by sufficient visits to the barber, and never went down to the town unless in good clothes and wearing a tie. As far as was possible I followed a routine, much as an old soldier might, and cooked a simple meal every evening.

  A concierge guarded the estate at the main gate down on the avenue, and a caretaker lived with his family in a small bungalow near the main villa. Madame Boeri, the housewife, was a dark little woman who had two pretty daughters, and I suppose she took pity on what was thought to be my lonesome state, for she would occasionally appear at the door with a steaming dish of something good in her hands, which saved me cooking for a day or two.

  A crop of succulent-seeming mushrooms grew in the meadow behind the house, and I plucked a dozen to cut up and fry in olive oil for supper. Quite soon after eating I was spectacularly sick, stricken throughout the night till nothing was left in my stomach, proof perhaps of an organism healthy enough to jettison whatever poison had been imbibed, though at certain moments it felt as if a Roman and lonely death might be on the cards. The experience made me realize that, after a Lucullan feast at the Borgias, those able to belch must have done so with smiles of more than ordinary relief.

  By now I had written 250 pages of The Deserters. Ilse Steinhoff asked for more Nottingham stories, so I posted ‘Saturday Night’, about a barman’s view of a Bacchanalian working men’s booze-up, and ‘Blackcurrant’, concerning a black West African soldier who spends Christmas with a rough Nottingham family, and at the end of his stay begins to wonder whether or not they can be considered civilized.

  In the same letter Ilse told me that someone in Paris, after reading ‘Man Without a Home’, had remarked that I was ‘a gifted writer’, causing me to hope that my luck was about to turn. In a further letter she
wrote that the editor of Carrefour, a magazine which printed work by leading French writers, had asked for ‘Uncle Ernest’ to be translated so that it could be brought out the following year. She was also trying to get ‘Man Without a Home’ published in France, Germany or England. No one ran down those hundred or so steps with more hope than me, to see if there was any mail in the little tin box bolted to the gate on the road.

  Long letters passed between me and Ruth, she also sending books, a little money now and again, newspapers and, on one occasion, two pair of shoes. English tobacco went into my pipe when it could be found, and I smoked an occasional cigar. Sometimes bored even with reading, elaborate red and black plans of imaginary cities were devised on the typewriter. I was learning how long twenty-four hours could be when living alone in an isolated place, but one day on the beach I made friends with Brenda Muldon, a fair and interesting young woman who worked at the Foreign Office. She was having a fortnight’s holiday with a French family, and after taking her to see the house where Katherine Mansfield had stayed in Garavan she came back to my place for tea.

  A poetry reading was advertised in the library, to be given by Stan Noyes, a young American later to publish a novel based on his experiences in rodeo. He drove a car, and lived with his wife and child in a furnished villa in Nice. Also in the audience were John and Dorothy Tarr, John being about sixty and recently retired from the Monotype Corporation. He had published many articles, and a book called Printing Today, as well as several manuals on how to write Chancery script. During the years I was to know him he was working, though so slowly that progress was almost invisible, on a project called The History of Printed Letters.

  As far as I know he had never been a member of the Communist Party, but vociferous left-wing views led him to refer to George Orwell as a traitor to the working class (whatever that’s supposed to be, I thought) for having written Animal Farm, though I told him the book made good enough sense to me. Later he would be infuriated when I teased him by saying that anyone who went on strike should be shot, which of course I didn’t believe.