Life Without Armour

by Alan Sillitoe

  Time went by in seemingly inconsequential talk which I suppose – looking back on it – some would call an interrogation. I was tired after several sleepless nights, and also hungry, but lost neither patience nor sense of humour, playing the ordinary tourist who was fascinated by all to do with the inexhaustibly interesting country of Spain. To a certain extent this was true, but my typewriter, which they opened and looked at closely, as well as my fluency in the language, would have made me suspect in any totalitarian country. Nor could my Colony of Gibraltar passport have endeared me to them, and acquiring it merely for the sake of Noreen’s car now seemed an act of rashness. Even so, I implicitly believed that ‘The Governor of the Colony of Gibraltar requires, in the name of Her Majesty, all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance etc’ would keep me safe.

  Lights came on when it grew dark outside, and there had been silence between me and my questioner for some time. I imagined that a wireless operator in a far-off room near the top of the building (aerials had been noted on glancing up at the entrance) had been told to tap out a telegram to Madrid for confirmation that my visa wasn’t forged. Eventually, the reply must have arrived, for one of the men who had detained me came in with my passport and said I was free to go.

  There was a slight shade of disappointment in his otherwise neutral politeness, and when I asked for my French carte de séjour he denied all knowledge of it. I persisted for a while, as did he with his lie, but then it seemed best to forget the matter. It was unlikely that I would live in France during the next few years, and the loss of a bit of cardboard was a small price to pay for my liberty, though I had liked the idea of having a French identity card.

  Next day at the station Ruth came with the news that my story ‘The Match’ had been taken by Carrefour. Ilse Steinhoff had met her at the Gare du Nord and given her twelve pounds to bring me, which more than paid for the two days we spent in Barcelona.

  Chapter Thirty

  At twenty-six, after five years of unremitting dedication, there was little to show for my writing. Quantity was not lacking, but quality was slow in coming. Stories and parts of novels suggested that recognition should have been closer than it was, but the perfection of whatever talent existed would only evolve at its own rate.

  Nothing could speed the process, and no one could help with the problems that needed solving. Even if anyone could, the role of respectful acolyte or adoring tyro was not part of my temperament. Reading great writers imparted much, but the more enjoyable their works the harder they were to learn from, because the sheer hedonism of reading blinded me to the peculiar analysis which would point to faults in my own work. If success took long in coming at least their company acted as encouragement, and gave consolation. Trusting no one but myself, I went on writing, lack of qualification for any other work contributing to such persistence, as well as the absolute faith that I could have no vocation but that of writer. Success would come if I went on long enough.

  In my otherwise optimistic and easy-going way – I had an income, however small – I was beginning to realize that telling a story was not good enough unless written with such conviction that the language and content indicated I had something to say as well as a tale to unfold. The best writing was when the movement of my pen coincided neatly with the tone of my thoughts, leading to the knowledge that every writer has his or her own unique voice, or style, and that though some might find such a voice more quickly than others, the longer it took to do so the more likely was it to be your own and not somebody else’s. As a trial and error system it could only be called learning the hard way, and for most of the time the business of living, and being involved in the actual writing, was a sufficiently powerful anodyne to keep such nagging thoughts in their place. The only allies against the problems which beset me were energy and faith.

  The sea during our crossing to Palma was almost as rough as the English Channel two years before, though this time my stomach did not dance to its tune. Noreen Harbord drove us from the ship in ‘my’ Ford Popular, over the mountains to her hotel at the Playa of Soller, where we were generously provided with free board and lodging for a fortnight.

  We rented a furnished ground-floor apartment of a tall narrow house on the Calle Jose Antonio in the town for 500 pesetas a month – about a pound a week. Our landlady was Doña Maria Mayol, a retiring person who spoke little. Short and stout, she seemed older than she was, and had been a Republican deputy before the Civil War. When Barcelona fell to the fascist forces in 1939 she walked the hundred miles to France as a refugee, but was afterwards allowed to return unmolested to her properties in Majorca. In her younger days she had been known as a poet, and I later persuaded her to let me translate some of her verses from Mallorquin. I suspected there had been more than one tragedy in her life, and that she had witnessed others, though she never said anything to confirm this. Humour gleamed through her eyes occasionally, but it was as if wisdom and experience did not allow her to laugh, and even barely to smile. She was, however, superstitious, because when the Greek painter Varda and his wife nailed a bunch of garlic above one of their doors she called on Ruth to come and take it down after they had left.

  Majorca was a kind of homecoming, after the precarious (so it seemed) life on the mainland, a civilization in which I knew the peculiar language and was familiar with people who were honest and tolerant. Because they resented rule from Madrid there was less evidence of Franco-worship, the Majorcans being pragmatic enough to get on as quietly and industriously as possible with their business.

  The winter, never very equable, as George Sand and Chopin discovered during their sojourn at Valdemosa in 1838–39, still had some weeks to run. Our main provision against the climate was a small stove in the living room which we could afford to light only in the evening. Otherwise there was a pan of burning charcoal and its ash – called a brasero – placed in a fixture under a small round table, with a blanket-like cloth circling it to the floor for holding in the heat. You put your legs and feet through slits in the cloth, thus keeping at least part of your body warm. The disadvantage was that the charcoal fumes had a soporific not to say poisonous effect, making it necessary to get away from it every half hour, and hence become cold again. In past centuries, when the crops failed, the standard method for a Majorcan family to do away with itself had been to gather in an air-tight room and let charcoal fumes do the rest.

  So little happened during my stay on the island that it is difficult to divide one year from another. Most dates are known only because of the particular book I happened to be working on, though these can’t always be pinpointed either, such margins of error signifying peace, and that gift of unlimited time and security which is a godsend to any writer.

  As far as the future existed it was only in the hope that our standard of living would change with the publication of a work that might bring in as much as a hundred pounds. On the other hand our income of four pounds seven shillings and sixpence a week was, in the Spain of that time, the salary of a rather senior clerk with a family to keep, so we always had a fully furnished five-roomed flat or house, wine on the table, tobacco to smoke, enough cash for postage, and a girl to come in now and again to do the laundry and clean the place.

  At the beginning of April Rosica Colin wrote to say she was pleased I wanted her to be my agent, and that she had already sent The General’s Dilemma to a publisher. Ruth and I, by constant application to our work, had some justification for hope. Shortly after getting back to Majorca I wrote the fourth draft of Letters from Malaya, based on that old manuscript The Green Hills of Malaya, turning it more into a novel by introducing Mimi, a Chinese girl who earns her living as a dance hostess and becomes the friend of Brian Seaton. More was made out of the Malayan Emergency, and the book ends by Brian killing a communist bandit when his jungle rescue group is ambushed during the search for a crashed aircraft.

  While doing this I assembled a number of Nottingham stories into one folder, wi
th the idea that they might one day be published as a book. By June Letters from Malaya had gone through a further draft, and in July went off to Rosica with a note explaining that the 70,000 word novel was about the beginning of the Malayan Emergency, that a part was already accepted as a talk by the BBC, and that another extract had been published in the Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian as a story some years before.

  The painter Eddie Allen came to live in the valley with his Austrian wife. Eddie and I had been brought up in the same area of Nottingham but, he being a few years older, we met for the first time in Soller. Another coincidence was that he had been a wireless operator in the RAF, which gave us something to talk about except painting and writing. Ruth and I sometimes walked the round trip of twenty kilometres to call on the Graves in Deya. We were also friendly with the Tarrs, though they left after a while to run a language school in Valencia, a venture which flourished due to John’s excellent teaching methods.

  Tony Buttita, a theatre press agent, who was also writing a novel, came frequently from the United States to see Elizabeth Trocchi. He had known Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood during the ’30s, and was later to write a book about him. Tony usually arrived with boxes of literary magazines from New York and San Francisco, as well as novels by Mailer, Salinger, Styron, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and others. Their books were like gold at a time when equally vigorous writing in England seemed not to exist, except for recently published first novels by Kingsley Amis and John Wain, which we hadn’t yet been able to read.

  England had vanished beyond the northern rim of the world, for I had now been away longer than the time spent in Malaya. Her Majesty the Queen – God bless her! – or her representatives, continued to provide what by now had become my private remittance-man income, enabling Ruth and myself to stay out of the way and go on with our writing.

  In September we rented a large old farmhouse in the orchard area between the town and the sea, drawing our water from a well under fig and olive trees in the garden. Don Jose, the man of the neighbouring family, had been in prison during the Civil War for expressing socialist sympathies, and had caught tuberculosis. A pig they kept was fed on figs and peaches from their garden, and we were invited to the feast when it was killed, its dreadful squealing taking me back to the time when my grandfather’s pig had been slaughtered by the back door of the cottage at Old Engine Houses. Jose and his family later emigrated to Canada where, due to a better standard of life, he recovered his health.

  Rosica Colin was trying to get my children’s story ‘Big John and the Stars’ published, but meanwhile The General’s Dilemma and Letters from Malaya had been turned down by half a dozen firms. Editors, she said, were afraid to take on something like Letters from Malaya because of the ‘strong language’, certain expressions not being permitted at a time when there was a drive against ‘obscene’ books. I told her that the notion of being obscene had never occurred to me, and though I didn’t like the idea of cutting anything out of my novel I would excise the occasional swear word (of which there weren’t many) if it meant getting the book published, and me receiving money for it. Rosica asked me not to be discouraged by such criticism, and to continue writing.

  In the autumn we moved to the lower half of an isolated house on a hillside, whose wide terrace above groves of lemon and orange trees gave an unimpeded view over the town and across to the escarpment of Puig Mayor. Four stray cats attached themselves to the paved area around our back door, and were fed when there was anything to spare.

  A poem ‘Left as One Dead’ was published in Outposts by Howard Sergeant, and in October ‘The Match’ was finally printed in Carre-four in Paris, though a copy never reached me. Some of Ruth’s poems appeared in the Hudson Review. I started a novel at the beginning of November called Mr Allen’s Island, and finished the first draft of 60,000 words in seven weeks. The story was about the reported sighting of an island near the sensitively strategic Bering Straits, an area notorious for mist and fog. The whole thing was a hoax, perpetrated by Mr Allen, an eccentric millionaire and practical joker, who was only too successful in convincing the world of the island’s reality. In the last chapter the Soviet and United States navies are heading for the non-existent island to claim sovereignty, and become embroiled in a battle for possession which marks the outbreak of the Third World War.

  The novel came from my fascination with geography, world politics and warfare, and the extent of my enjoyment in writing it can best be gauged by the slapdash verve of its style and narration. On showing the final typed copy to Robert Graves his response was: ‘Why don’t you write something set in Nottingham? That’s the place you know best.’

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Mr Allen’s Island went to Rosica Colin on 4 February 1955, and was promptly turned down by an editor, though he (or she) had still to give a decision on The General’s Dilemma. Hope was raised later in the month when a publisher who liked Letters from Malaya thought that even more story would improve it, so I added sixty pages to increase still further the presence of Mimi the Chinese girl. The sixth and what was to be the final version was posted to London in April.

  I then began writing The Palisade, a novel which used my RAF hospital experience, about a young man who, though seriously ill, decides to leave the hospital without further treatment. He is the son of a prosperous Lincolnshire farmer, and the nurse who deserts the Service to go with him comes from an ordinary family in Birmingham. They eventually marry, and leave England to live in a place much like Menton. By the end the man is close to a death brought on by the woman’s callous infidelities, and a suicidal carelessness on his part with regard to his illness. The typescript was 300 pages long and, in the earlier hospital chapters at least, I thought the quality of the writing was as good as any I had done so far.

  Harry Fainlight, Ruth’s brother, and some Israeli friends from Cambridge came to visit us during the Easter vacation, and we decided to celebrate the homely ritual of Passover. The problem, however, was how to obtain the unleavened bread said to have been hurriedly eaten by the Israelites before fleeing from under the noses of their Egyptian overseers, but it was more or less solved when concocted on a griddle over our charcoal fire.

  Every fortnight Ruth and I took the train to Palma so that I could have my pneumothorax refill at the tuberculosis clinic. We had lunch for eleven pesetas at the counter of a small eating place on the main avenue, grandiosely named ‘The Yatté Ritz’, and in the afternoon called on Robert and Beryl Graves at their weekday flat in the northern suburbs, where we talked, had tea, and often came away with borrowed books.

  Robert was asked by a printer, publisher and writer in Palma, Luis Ripoll, to translate a book needed for the growing tourist readership, called Chopin’s Winter in Majorca. Robert, being too busy, recommended me as someone who would produce a fluent version. Though doubting that my Spanish was good enough, I agreed to do the job so as to earn the twenty-five pound fee. The 15,000-word book was wanted in a hurry and, with much assistance from a dictionary, I did 2,000 words a day, which left sufficient time before the deadline for revision, and translating the captions of the illustrations.

  My Spanish identity card, issued by the General Security Headquarters in Palma, authorized me to live in Majorca for as long as I liked. In the application form my occupation was given as novelist, and beside the photograph, and of almost equal size, was the only fingerprint I have (so far) been asked for. This it was obligatory to provide, otherwise I would have had to relinquish my favoured expatriate life style.

  My brother Brian came for three weeks in August, and his contribution to household expenses was helpful. We met Robin Marris, a Cambridge economics don, and his wife, who were on the island for their honeymoon, and the five of us went in Robin’s hired car to a bullfight. At Robert’s sixtieth birthday celebrations in Deya, scores of people, both local and foreign, assembled in the house and garden, where meat roasted on fires and there was champagne to help it down. Robert teased Brian about the antics
he was undoubtedly getting up to in Nottingham – that sink of iniquity. Home-style entertainments included the old army game ‘O’Grady Says’, conducted by Robert, who later appeared in toga and laurel leaves to delight us with a simpering ‘Claudius’ act, prior to the concluding fireworks show.

  Brian left me a suit before going back to Nottingham, which was rather in the ‘teddy boy’ style of the time, but looked smart enough after some minor tailoring. In return I gave him the handwritten draft of By What Road, both of us hoping it might one day be of some value.

  The postman left our mail with the woman of a house on the main road, and one or both of us would goat-foot twice a day to the bottom of the hill to see if any was waiting for us. Most often there would be nothing, but letters from Rosica were always eagerly opened. In one I was informed that Mr Allen’s Island had been turned down. She had, however, sent it somewhere else, though she still thought Letters from Malaya would be the easiest to place. When it was rejected yet again she despatched it, with The General’s Dilemma, to another firm.

  Jim Donovan, Elizabeth Trocchi, Ruth and myself set out at midnight with a basket of food, to walk to the monastery at Lluch. A fully risen moon lighted our way along the dusty lane out of Soller and through the silent village of Biniaraix. Up the winding and wooded ravine of Es Barranch the steps were just too far apart for easy progress, being made for donkeys rather than people.

  From the zone of glistening olive trees we passed into pines and firs, stopping to drink and smoke by the descending water of an irrigation channel. Dully ringing bells sounded from scattering sheep as the path became something of a spiral staircase, but beyond the shuttered hunting lodge of L’Ofre, free of the ravine at last, we ascended zig-zag over loose stones.

  Unfamiliar with the way to the monastery from the Soller direction, my rudimentary map brought us to the 900-metre contour line as first dawn was beginning to light the tableland of the Pla de Cuber. Gathering a few twigs and some grass we made a fire, and drank tea in the chill air with our breakfast of bread and spicy sausage.