Life Without Armour

by Alan Sillitoe

  I asked Pauline to leave her husband and come away with me, and though she spent a few days considering the matter, she was finally more flattered than attracted by the proposal. In my heart I couldn’t blame her, though the disappointment did nothing to daunt my love, for I must have known it was inconceivable for her to run away with someone who had no more than an RAF pension to live on.

  At the end of September she and her husband left to spend the winter in Malaga. Mike Edmonds was already there, and had written suggesting we take a flat together and share the rent. All in all, this seemed to fit in well with my hopes and intentions.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Since my birthday early in the year, celebrated for the first time with champagne, I was consciously glad of being twenty-five, as if some vital watershed in life had been crossed. Expanding confidence suggested that a more adventurous maturity could not be far off and, no longer (as I wrote in a letter to Ruth) the unblemished blue-eyed young man who had embarked for Menton nearly two years ago, I set out by the overnight boat and arrived in Valencia on 9th October. My luggage in the taxi to the Estacion del Norte was much less bulky: I had sold some of my belongings, given various things away, sent a few items to Ruth, parked the cat with an acquaintance, and left odds and ends for Elizabeth Trocchi to look after until my return to the island, whenever that might be.

  The correos train took seventeen hours to travel the 500 kilometres to Granada, and went through such scenery as occasionally kept me from a pocket edition of Cellini’s Autobiography. The pension chosen in Granada stank worse than a brothel, so after one night I moved to a clean place used by students. There were prominent exhortations over the walls of the town for Franco to live for ever, but I spent a few days peacefully roaming the Generalife and Alhambra, guided by plans and text in my Baedeker, while at the same time trying to fight down a heavy cold.

  Mike rented a ground-floor flat on the Carreteria, adequate for the two of us, except that a few days after I got there the place was burgled. Mine was the only room from which things were taken, since it was on the street, and though there were bars at the window some clever rat had fished objects out with a long stick while I slept. Apart from three pounds in cash (a real loss, however) I was deprived of my demob mackintosh, smart jacket, trousers, pyjamas, underwear, woollen waistcoat and, worst of all, my pen. There were so many people at the police station notifying similar thefts that I walked out, convinced that Malaga was a city of thieves.

  With foresight I had arranged to collect my quarter’s pension in Gibraltar, and one of Mike’s Australian friends drove me through whitewashed picturesque villages joined by the ribbon of an execrable road. The blackmarket exchange rate was several pesetas to the pound more than at a Spanish bank and, undeterred by the prospect of smuggling money over the frontier, I made enough extra cash to buy English tobacco, a pipe, a couple of paperbacks and a new pen.

  A better appointed and safer flat on the Calle Mariblanca, for a pound a week each, had five rooms, kitchen and bathroom, the only disadvantage being that with so much street noise it wasn’t always easy to sleep.

  During dinner with Pauline and her husband, at their somewhat posher place in the centre of town, I sensed that he knew of our liaison, or at least was justifiably suspicious, so decided that we had to be careful in seeing each other. Pauline agreed, and Mike helpfully vacated the flat whenever a visit from her was possible, which arrangement worked well until her departure.

  I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man sent by Ruth, and From Here to Eternity which Mike lent me. Rose Macaulay in Fabled Shore wrote that Richard Ford, author of the famous Hand Book of Spain for the John Murray guide series, had given his opinion that Malaga merited only one day of the traveller’s time, which she herself found to be true. The all-pervading poverty reminded me too forcefully of former days, with so many derelicts and beggars on the streets that I began to feel more threatened than sympathetic. Maybe this was because of my own precarious financial situation, in which it was hard to see far ahead with any sense of security. At times the impulse to go back to England had some appeal, having been away nearly two years, until I realized that there could be no kind of life in a place where one would be expected to have a job.

  Cold weather made it difficult to sit in the unheated flat, but in November, after work on a long poem which Trocchi had asked for but later rejected, I began turning ‘The General’s Dilemma’ into a novel. Man Without a Home and The Deserters, returned to me from London, were tried with another firm, which was also to send them back. An English novelist, Charles Chapman-Mortimer, lived in the same building. He was forty-six years old, and had recently won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his book Father Goose, published in 1951. After looking through some of my writings he thought them sufficiently promising to put me in touch with his agent Rosica Colin, which favour was to be particularly helpful.

  One night Chapman-Mortimer, Mike and myself went to the gypsy caves outside the town. Frederick Thon, an American playwright, and his wife Harriet also came with us. They had been in Majorca with their two children, and were taking in Malaga as part of a European tour.

  Street lights no longer visible, our party stumbled over holes and gullies of a plateau, the black shape of Malaga’s unfinished cathedral looming behind. Coming to a low escarpment Mike shouted someone’s name, a nick of light showed at the cliff face, and we were led to one of many openings.

  One compartment housed a white donkey, another a row of sleeping children. The floor was tiled and the walls whitewashed, flame from a lit wick waving in a shallow bowl of oil. The only furniture was a couple of quilt-covered boxes for us to sit on. Dark faces returned our greetings, and uncorked wine soon set everyone singing and dancing – men and women, and even children who came out of their sleeping places at the noise. A humpbacked girl of about fifteen, with large breasts and arms folded on them, leaned against the wall as if she would capsize on moving away. Jokes were made about when an old woman addressed as grandmother was going to die, but she gave back a toothless smile as if to say she would outlive the lot of us.

  The wooden door was closed but, with so many people smoking the American cigarettes we had handed out, the chief of the group had to let in some air. Rain drummed down, but we were well protected and dry. In the Civil War both fascists and communists had massacred many gypsies, though now they danced, as did we after a while, stamping and clapping to a guitar, their faces reminding me, in the dim and changing light, of Tamils in Malaya.

  In December I finished the 200 pages of The General’s Dilemma, then let it lie while working at various essays for a future book on Spain. I eventually sent the new novel to Ilse Steinhoff in Paris, but that too was turned down. Rereading the Book of Nehemiah I for some reason pencilled a mark against the verse: ‘And I arose in the night, I and some few men with me; neither told I any man what my God had put in my heart to do at Jerusalem: neither was there any beast with me, save the beast that I rode upon.’

  Lottery booths erected in the streets at Christmas raised funds for charity, prizes ranging from a motor car to a few bars of soap. Many stalls sold ximbombas, a percussion instrument shaped like a plant pot, with skin stretched tight across the top, and a hollow cane thrust through, so that moistening the palm to rub up and down produced a loud unearthly grunting. They were also common in Majorca at fiesta time, varying in size from full blown to tiny ones for an infant.

  Illuminated cafés were crowded on Christmas Eve, stalls along the pavements overflowing with fruits, cigarettes and bread rolls, while the blind wailed among the throng trying to sell lottery tickets. Taxis and horsedrawn carriages could hardly get through the mob, the crack of whips not quite overwhelmed by people working glassy-eyed at ximbombas with wine-soaked hands. When thousands of drunks played them in the streets the effect was haunting and ghostly. Chapman-Mortimer, Mike and myself pushed our way from bar to bar, getting back to the flat at six in the morning for a breakfast of bacon a
nd eggs.

  Mike was occasionally visited at the flat by beautiful, well educated, and totally déclassé Maricarmen. Cut off by her family, she had been, or perhaps still was in her life of rather free love, the mistress of a writer and journalist called Pedro who had served in Russia with the Blue Division during the war. He had written about his experiences in such a negative way, however, that a militant fascist one day came into his office and put a hand-grenade with the pin out on his desk. Pedro had time to take cover, and was only slightly injured. He had the sense of humour you would expect from a man with a thin and drawn face: it was not always funny. Maricarmen told us he could never go to bed unless a bag of eatables hung from the rail by his head, for if he chanced to wake in the night he had to put something into his mouth, otherwise the horrors of starvation in Russia came back.

  For some reason Pedro assumed that Maricarmen was calling at the flat to see me, and I was told at Thomas Cook’s office, on collecting my mail, that he was looking for me with a knife, intending to cut my throat. I sought one of his friends and, knowing that the message would be relayed, informed him that I had no designs on Maricarmen, that she only came to the flat to practise her English. I also said that being a British ex-serviceman who had spent two years fighting communist bandits in the Malayan jungle had made me more than capable of looking after myself. This seemed to calm the situation, and we even became reasonably friendly.

  As soon as Maricarmen entered our flat the first thing she did was go into the bathroom and clean Mike’s razor, which seemed strange, considering her libertarian beliefs. She told me that a Spanish countrywoman who wanted to entice a young man into bed would sprinkle a few drops of her menstrual blood on to his food, which sometimes worked so well that it could send him into a sexual frenzy and take some time to wear off. She also informed us that the common contraceptive for women in Spain was a small ball of cotton wool soaked in Vaseline and inserted into the neck of the womb. A more scarifying piece of intelligence was that any woman who went into hospital as the result of a botched abortion was operated on without anaesthetic.

  After my farewell to Pauline in December there seemed little reason to stay in that part of Spain, except to finish various pieces of work. Feeling no liking for Malaga, thus hardly expecting Malaga to like me, my intention was to go back to Majorca at the end of February in the hope that Ruth would come down from England and live with me again, for my letters continued to inveigle, persuade and encourage her to that end. To help me through the winter she sent a parcel of clothes and two packets of books. Meanwhile I wrote an account of my visit to the gypsy caves, printed in Scribe magazine the following year.

  One day a coating of snow lay on the streets, though it did not surprise me, having long since learned to distrust Mediterranean winters. This made it impossible to work in the flat, so Mike and I would go to the bars in the morning and drink rough coñac at a penny a shot, and in the afternoon call at a brothel, with sweets or a bottle of wine to offer. One of the girls suggested I marry her, an unacceptable proposal, though my knowledge of Spanish became much more colloquial.

  In the middle of February 1954 I was ordered to Gibraltar for a medical board, which meant X-rays, blood and sputum tests at the Military Hospital. On my way there I opened, and then sealed again, the letter from my Spanish doctor, to learn that ‘Señor Sillitoe has ulcerated tuberculosis which is not yet cured’. This stark summary gave something of a shock, though perhaps he exaggerated my condition in order to do me a favour after I had mentioned the advantage of a pension to an indigent writer.

  Noreen Harbord, a hotel keeper from Soller, came with me, wanting to buy a Ford Popular car and take it back to the hotel she owned in Majorca. Being resident in Spain, and unable therefore to get it over the frontier without paying a heavy tax, she proposed purchasing it in my name, and obtaining notarized permission from me to use it. I was glad to do this, even though it meant pursuing the complicated formalities of somewhat fraudulently establishing my residence in the Colony, going from one bureaucratic den to another, to obtain a Rock Ape passport. This travel document was to last me well into the 1960s, until it ran out and I was, luckily I suppose, able to become fully British again.

  It took almost a week while living at the Winter Garden Hotel to go through these procedures and get the papers for the car, as well as a Spanish visa for my new passport. During the intervening weekend we stayed in Ronda and visited the famous bridge. The bus ride back to Algeciras, on an unpaved pot-holed and winding descent that went under the name of a road, left hardly any bones that were not sore, but resulted in a bump by bump addition to my collection of travel pieces on Spain – none of which was ever published.

  Prior to the Queen’s planned visit to Gibraltar I stumbled into a mob one night that was throwing stones at the British Consulate in Malaga. When a couple of young men asked my opinion on the matter I told them that if they wanted the place back for Spain all they had to do was march a hundred kilometres along the coast and take it, though I had to admit to myself that the existence of Gibraltar under British sovereignty was as if France or Germany had a permanent duty-free military base at Land’s End. Fortunately they had a sense of humour, and told me, when we went to a bar for a drink, that Franco only urged people to protest about the Colony when things were bad inside the country.

  We also discussed Lorca, for I had been reading his poems and plays in the original. Until then it had only been possible to find editions printed in the Argentine, but his books were now coming back into shops in Spain, which country at last seemed to be loosening up from the tight fascism of previous years, albeit very slowly. An item in the newspaper said that a synagogue had been opened in Madrid, the first for worship since the Jews were expelled in 1492. Part of the United States Mediterranean Fleet was anchored in the harbour, bearing much appreciated gifts for the poor, and when Mike talked to a couple of marines in a bar they arranged for us to join a conducted tour on their aircraft-carrier.

  In February a friend asked me to pick up some money from a bank in Tangier and carry it back into Spain without declaring it, there being a strict limit on the amount of pesetas that could be brought in from abroad. I stayed a couple of days, and was glad to be speaking French at my hotel in the Zocco Chico, in spite of the landlady replying: ‘Oui, mon enfant!’ whenever I asked a question.

  In a restaurant Mike and I went to for lunch a buxom pale-faced waitress, with thin lips and a mass of black ringlets going down her back, demanded very belligerently in Spanish to know – a delicious tear on her cheek – why I had delayed so long before coming back? She as good as threw my plate of pasta on the table, and the more I denied having seen her before the angrier she became. Finally Mike talked to her at the bar, and found that she took me for her Swedish boyfriend, and even by the end of the meal she thought I still might be him.

  In February I wrote ‘Once in a Weekend’, the story of a young Nottingham factory worker enjoying himself in a pub on Saturday night, and waking up on Sunday morning in bed with his absent workmate’s wife. The beginning went: ‘With eleven pints of beer and seven small gins inside him Arthur fell from the top of the stairs to the bottom.’ To save paper I used the reverse pages of the bound copy of The Deserters, which novel had been out three times already and rejected, and was now put aside as unpublishable. The story of Arthur’s weekend was sent to magazines in the next few months, but always came back without comment, so it was later used as the first chapter of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

  I felt some affection for Malaga on my last day, but was glad all the same to be leaving, having a date with Ruth in Barcelona. I arrived there early, after changing trains in Madrid, on 17th February. Unshaven and tired, having deposited my cases at the left luggage, I walked along the Paseo de Colon, turned right up the tree lined Rambla, feeling almost home again, since I had been there before, and in a narrow street of the Old Town enquired at the reception desk of a cheap hotel if they had a room.

&nb
sp; The clerk looked wary, as if a leper stood before him. Two men in trilby hats and raincoats came up from behind and told me to come with them. On asking what they wanted one of them flashed an embossed Technicolor badge and said I was under arrest.

  They walked me through the streets, then by a sentry into a grey-stoned fortress-like police station, and led me into a room to be questioned. My passport and French identity card were looked at and taken away, and an elderly man, who invited me to sit down, asked what I was doing in Spain. I told him I was a writer, and in any case was there for my health, which was candid enough, for it was plain I had done nothing they could hold me for, though at the same time I speculated on what soft of an article could be made out of the experience, or whether it would be of any use in a novel.

  The only possible reason for my detention was that in the crowded night train from Madrid I had said, or perhaps only agreed with, uncomplimentary remarks about General Franco. Some coppers’ nark must have reported me as soon as the train arrived at the station, and I had been followed to the hotel. No other explanation made sense, and I cursed myself for not keeping my mouth shut, having now to face the worry of being deported to the French frontier a hundred miles away.

  Arrangements to meet Ruth had been going on for some weeks, both of us scraping up money to live on once we were together, though I already knew that my pension would be paid at its full rate for another year or so. She was on her way, and would expect me to meet her at the station the following day. What would happen if I wasn’t there? She was coming on a single ticket, and I wasn’t sure whether the money she had would cover a night in a hotel and the return fare to England.