Perhaps it was this technique which gave the work a somewhat episodic effect, but ‘Once in a Weekend’ began the novel, ‘A Bad ’Un’ fleshed out Aunt Ada in chapter 5, into which was also ploughed ‘Situation Vacant’. ‘The Criminals’ ended chapter 8, ‘The Two Big Soldiers’ chapter 11, ‘Blackcurrant’ gave some point to chapter 14, and a poem called ‘Fish’ swam into the final pages. Thus these stories, as well as a few bits and pieces not worth mentioning, were melted into the novel to propel the narrative and enrich the book.
Most of one handwritten draft was done on the reverse pages of the bound copy of The Deserters, and at the end I uncharacteristically signed my name, for some reason adding: ‘Ten minutes to one in the middle of Sunday morning, and now to wash the dishes.’
During the many revisions I was so deeply back in Nottingham that the whole of my life up to the age of eighteen was called in for use, though little of the book was autobiographical. The factory worker, Arthur Seaton, was unlike anyone I knew, though perhaps my brother Brian in one of his many manifestations had suggested him, for it was he who in a letter told me of a young man in a pub falling down the stairs one Saturday night after drinking eleven pints of beer and seven gins.
In a notebook of the time I wrote:
The continuous tradition of inspired writing passed on from writer to writer seems to have been discontinued since Lawrence died. He had Hardy and Meredith. What have we? We have to forge new links and fasten somehow to the old chain so that people will again think writers have something to say … Creative genius springs from the same wells as folk art, the difference being that while folk art remains unrefined the art has to be shaped and polished by technique and form, though not enough to hide those origins which the writer should be careful to keep well in evidence.
The only novels I had read, dealing more or less with the kind of life I wrote about, were Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago and the abridged version of Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, neither of which I had seen since Malaya. Writing from my centre, and with most influences by now flushed out by continual failures, I was setting a story against a realistic background which nevertheless demanded the use of the imagination. So deeply was I engrossed in the writing that I was in no mood to hurry the book, continuing work on it till the middle of the following year.
I spent more time at the radio after Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal in July 1956. Great Britain moved reinforcements to Cyprus, and when the matter went to the United Nations it looked like being lost in the bogs of feeble internecine discussion. By the end of October, Israel, no longer able to put up with the attacks on its frontiers, sent armoured columns against the Egyptian Army in the Sinai Desert. The only maps on which to follow these military operations were those in my old Baedeker of Palestine and Syria, which I had asked my mother to post on to me.
Britain and France demanded that the combatants in the desert cease fighting within twelve hours. Israel seemed willing, but Egypt was not in the mood to comply. This British and French reading of the Riot Act being ignored, RAF bombers attacked Egyptian airfields in the Nile Delta. The object of the Allies was to occupy the Suez Canal so that the waterway would not be damaged in the fighting, though the Israelis had already routed the Egyptians by the time the Allied landings took place.
The air waves had never been so busy and, going back happily to my old trade of wireless operator (the perfect diversion from work on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), I intercepted the following advice sent out in Morse code by the Admiralty in London:
1630 HOURS GMT TODAY QUOTE IN VIEW OF THE SITUATION BETWEEN ISRAEL AND EGYPT MERCHANT SHIPPING IS ADVISED FOR THE TIME BEING AND UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE TO KEEP CLEAR OF THE SUEZ CANAL AND ISRAEL AND EGYPTIAN TERRITORIAL WATERS UNQUOTE AND DESPITE OUR RADIO 26TH OCTOBER GIVE YOU COMPLETE DISCRETION TO CLEAR CANAL IN EITHER DIRECTION IF CIRCUMSTANCES MAKE THIS FEASIBLE STOP IF ABLE TO CLEAR YOU SHOULD PROCEED TO VICINITY 23N 3745E PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE AND ADVISE WHAT YOU ARE DOING.
News agency messages also in Morse were picked up:
… QUOTE DEEP CONCERN UNQUOTE AT BRITISH ATTACK ON EGYPT AND IS QUOTE FERVENTLY ASKING FOR PEACEFUL METHOD NOT YET INVOLVING TROOP MOVEMENTS UNQUOTE WOULD BE FOUND FOR SETTLING THE SITUATION STOP AMBASSADOR SAID THAT BRITISH WERE ACTING AGAINST A VICTIM OF AGGRESSION STOP IT IS UNDERSTOOD COMMUNICATION IN SIMILAR TERMS HAS BEEN MADE TO BRITISH AMBASSADOR IN LIBYA STOP SECURITY COUNCIL COULD NOT TAKE ANY PRACTICAL STEPS TO HALT HOSTILITIES AND ENSURE PASSAGE OF VESSELS THROUGH SUEZ CANAL END ITEM LONDON CRICKET SCORES BETWEEN AUSTRALIA AND …
Spanish newspapers were so biased against Britain and France (not to mention Israel) and so heavily censored, and supplied only with official handouts, as to be completely unreliable. Before the Allies landed in Egypt they quoted Arab sources in Beirut as saying that British troops had disembarked in Haifa to join Israeli forces on the Suez Canal. For me to believe in collusion between the Allies and Israel would have been wishful thinking, though the hope was there, since such co-operation would have made cultural and geopolitical sense.
My pencil ran across the pages to get down another radio news message beginning: ‘ITEM LONDON TWENTY PEOPLE FINED BETWEEN TEN SHILLINGS AND THIRTY SHILLINGS FOR OFFENCES AGAINST …’ telling about riots in Whitehall against the landing, as well as opposition from the Labour Party, and suggesting, which I found hard to believe, that most people in England disagreed with what was happening.
About the same time the Hungarian people rebelled against the communist rulers of their country, and were fighting the tanks of the Red Army. When I tuned in to a wireless telegraph station communicating with insurgent garrisons in Budapest the Russians were so adept at jamming that it was hardly possible to receive more than a word or two at a time. Diverting my faculties even further from the exploits of Arthur Seaton I wrote an 800-word ‘Plan for the Liberation of Hungary’, a strategical design delineating the armed forces necessary, their training and armaments, the places suitable for landing on the Baltic coast, and the main lines of advance towards the Carpathians. Those nations were listed which might be amenable to the scheme, with an analysis of political attitudes necessary to inveigle them into it if they were not. It was a highly satisfactory game of ‘Foreign Office’, but the wish was there, all the same, that such fantasy could become reality so as to help the Hungarians.
My opinions are from notebooks of the time (as are the Morse transcripts) though other people in Majorca, especially Americans, thought them foolish, or at least misguided when I expressed them. Israel was compelled by the United States to withdraw its forces from the Sinai, the British and French to pull out of the Canal Zone, which disasters were to leave the Russians with the illusion of having been victorious in both places.
Enough pieces had now been written on Majorca to make a book and, arranging them into the four seasons of the year, I typed the final draft into A Stay of Some Time, the title taken from Baedeker’s Spain and Portugal, in which it is stated that ‘Soller is suitable for a stay of some time’, which I knew to be true enough. The book, together with The Bandstand, went off to loyal and long-suffering Rosica in the autumn.
The supply of books had almost dried up, so we joined the British Council library in Barcelona, and were sent a form on which was to be specified the authors or subjects of interest to us. The books were then packed into a large carton and sent monthly on the boat, to be collected by us in Palma.
It’s hard to remember why I asked for books on criminology, but a score or so of titles came, dealing with prisons, borstals and their recidivist inmates, some analysing and commenting on the penalties handed out to anti-social elements of the British population, books written from every point of view except that of the criminal. The human and certainly intelligent authors, all of whom I read with interest, looked on the lawbreaker as little more than a statistic, giving only cursory attention to individual psychology and social conditions.
Towards the end of 1956, Letter
s from Malaya failed once more to find a publisher. I had worked on it to the utmost, and felt so discouraged that I decided not to have it sent out again. A Stay of Some Time, written with equal care and attention, also came back, together with The Bandstand. Short stories such as ‘The Fishing Boat Picture’, ‘Uncle Ernest’, ‘The Match’ and ‘Mr Raynor, the Schoolteacher’ were turned down regularly by magazine editors.
Though I had been writing for eight years, and had lived out of England for nearly five, it seemed as if I might have to go on for some time yet. Doom and gloom occasionally had me in their grip, though rarely for long, because I was rewriting Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and decided to stake everything on that. A small sign of encouragement came in a copy of Outposts, which contained a poem showing something of my state of mind during those years of exile and rejection. Under the title of ‘Anthem’ it goes:
Retreat, dig in, retreat,
Withdraw your shadow from the crimson
Gutters that run riot down the street.
Retreat, dig in, arrange your coat
As a protective covering,
A clever camouflage of antidote.
Retreat still more, still more,
Remembering your images and words:
Perfect the principles of fang and claw.
The shadows of retreat are wide,
Town and desert equally
Bereft of honest hieroglyph or guide.
Release your territory and retreat,
Record, preserve, and memorise
The journey where no drums can rouse nor beat.
Defeat is not the question: withdraw
Into the hollows of the hills
Until this winter passes into thaw.
Dig in no more. Turn round and fight
Forget the wicked and regret the lame
And travel back the way you came,
In front the darkness and behind the light.
Ruth and I joked about a time in the future when we would have to erect barbed wire around the grand house we lived in so as to keep biographers at bay. We were also amused to recall Joseph Grand in The Plague by Albert Camus, who had spent years writing and rewriting the first sentence of what he hoped would be a great novel. In the middle of plague-stricken Oran he says to his friend Doctor Rieux: ‘What I really want, doctor, is this. On the day when the manuscript of my novel reaches the publisher, I want him to stand up – after he’s read it through, of course – and say to his staff: “Gentlemen, hats off!”’
The year ended on a hopeful and not ungenerous note, for I received nearly two hundred pounds from Constantine Films of Stuttgart, as advance payment on The Bandstand. The covering letter declared that I was to turn the book into a script if and when the company decided to continue with the project as a film in which Ulla Jacobsson would play the main part. Nothing further was to come of it, and the typescript may well be mouldering away in some company archive. I only hope it stays there.
Chapter Thirty-three
The new year of 1957, helped by the cash from Germany, brought a little ease with regard to money. For one exhilarating month there was adequate to buy a primitive small house in a nearby village, but we didn’t give such a sensible idea much consideration, perhaps because further money couldn’t be guaranteed to furnish it to the standard of a rented place. Instead we decided to go to London and find out whether or not we could get something published by making ourselves known. I would be able to read ‘Kedah Peak’ on the BBC which had been accepted three years ago, and show someone the first six chapters of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The rest of the novel, needing more work, would stay in Majorca, for I was in no hurry, and not in the mood for taking chances.
The least commercially-minded people, we were told it was possible to sublet the flat, and ask a rent that would seem more than reasonable to a family from England, yet give us a small profit. At the end of January Beryl and Robert Graves took us and our luggage in the family Landrover to Palma, treated us to a meal at a restaurant near the waterfront, and wished us luck before waving us off on the boat to Barcelona. In France a bottle of our Spanish brandy smashed on the floor of the compartment, which reeked so strongly up and down the corridor that no one else came in, leaving space for us to stretch out and sleep.
After so long in the south, the little individual houses on the outskirts of Paris, with their neat gardens in north European rows, gave something of a shock, as if I had only ever seen them before in another life. On board the Calais–Dover boat Ruth, being a foreigner, queued by the cubby hole where passport stamping went on, a green sea sliding up and down the windows. She was questioned by the immigration official, who supposed she lacked the necessary wealth to get into his glum country. Eventually (though not, one assumed, out of the goodness of his heart) he put in a stamp allowing her to stay sixty days, thus condemning us to the inconvenience of visiting the Aliens Office, for the flat in Soller had been let for three months.
A good tea was served on the London train, rain at the windows cutting visibility to nil. We stayed a while at the house of Ima Bayliss in Dulwich, whom we had met in Majorca. Though I believed in myself as a writer, it was sometimes difficult to assume that other people, on little enough evidence, should look on me in that guise as well. Ima was one of them, as was her husband, the Australian painter Clifford Bayliss, who earned a living by designing stage scenery at Covent Garden.
We called on our families (I hadn’t seen mine for well over five years) then came back to London and took a furnished room in West Kensington, close to Rosica Colin’s office in Baron’s Court. Invited to lunch, we discussed my prospects as a writer. She was a handsome and lively black-haired woman of middle age, a Rumanian by birth, who had been stranded in England at the beginning of the war after her husband was killed in a car crash. Left with a young child, she’d had a struggle, but being a person of quality and courage, had managed to establish a successful literary agency.
She had done her enthusiastic best for the last three years to get my work published, but the four novels and a travel book had been rejected again and again, and it was hard to know what to do next. Encouraged by the few chapters of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, however, she had made an appointment for me to deliver them personally to Tom Maschler at MacGibbon and Kee, whose firm was said to be looking for original new novels. She also found me some work reading a novel by Pio Baroja in Spanish, and writing a report for a publisher, who might then commission me to do the translation. The editor of a children’s anthology was interested in ‘Big John and the Stars’, and she would send A Stay of Some Time out again.
London was depressing, and at times I wondered why I had wasted time and money to be there. Having no settled place to live did not suit me, though there was the illusion of useful contacts being made. My picture of a return had been coloured by Balzac’s description of Rastignac at the end of Père Goriot, who looks down on Paris from the high ground and knows that when he descends it will be to certain success. Clearly, I had not reached that stage, and if ever I did the murky weather would be sure to put a damper on such a romantic notion.
Howard Sergeant and his wife Jean welcomed us for an evening in Dulwich, and the poems Ruth and I showed for the new Outposts series of booklets were immediately taken. The arrangement was that Howard would, out of 300 copies printed, keep fifty for himself and the reviewers, while we were to get back the thirty pounds cost of printing and binding by selling the rest at half a crown each, which Howard assured us we were bound to do.
The system seemed only half a step up from that of a vanity press, and I didn’t much relish being a huckster for my own work, but the poems would be printed and possibly noticed. Howard Sergeant deserves high praise for his unpaid work in disseminating poetry to a wider audience, for he went on to do hundreds more booklets in the same format. Ruth’s title and mine are now collectors’ items, and the price of one copy would have paid the bill for the whole transaction.
The poems chosen were from what I thought of as my recent best, put together and called Without Beer or Bread, publication being set for sometime in the autumn. On the subscription form, printed right away and to be handed out to any likely customer, the brief biographical information stated that I had just finished a novel called Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, being ‘the adventurous account of two years from the life of a Nottingham teddy-boy’. Then comes the declaration that the author of the present booklet
considers the Welfare State to be the poet’s deadliest enemy. By pandering so much to the people it destroys all ancestral connection between them and the poet. He advocates that poets begin to fight back. They should, he feels, abandon the precarious guerilla positions they now hold and spread comprehensible poems among people who would most certainly read them if awakened to the fact that they existed.
It’s hard to imagine my mood in dashing off those views, but at least there was only myself to blame should copies prove difficult to sell which, in the event, they did not.
We stayed a few days in Hove with Ruth’s parents who, although we were not married (and had no prospect yet of being so), treated me like a son-in-law. As a birthday gift Mrs Fainlight booked seats for a performance of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Brighton Theatre Royal. The audience did not seem especially impressed, but to me it was a revelation to see people like Jimmy Porter shown on the stage at last.
On the Brighton Belle next morning we talked to an urbane fifty-year-old professional man who had also enjoyed the play. We told him we were writers who lived in Majorca, and were visiting England to see friends. Perhaps he was intrigued at my mention of going from the station to rehearse a talk at the BBC, because he had a car waiting at Victoria with a chauffeur, and offered to take us to that part of town, his office being in the same area. Maybe he doubted my story, and wanted to see whether I would in fact go through those big revolving doors.
Life Without Armour Page 24
