Life Without Armour

by Alan Sillitoe

  These thoughts came to me when, at five o’clock next morning, we were awakened by clanking trams and such a great clatter of bells that they must also have shaken people out of their beds in Madrid. Our rooms bordered the terminus square, where trams turned to repeat their journeys through the town. An hour later a printing firm on the ground floor directly below ours began its work, and the din of industry went on all day. The place was untenable, but we had paid rent in advance.

  I earned twelve pounds for translating a booklet by Luis Ripoll in Palma, about the pianos Chopin had used while on the island. I also worked on another draft of Mr Allen’s Island, but with little energy and without much hope for it. I was still unsettled, and perhaps bemused by the continued rejection of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, unable to believe that nothing would come of it.

  After a fortnight in the flat neither Ruth nor I could stand the noise, and decided to make an excursion around Andalusia. At six in the morning we walked through the cold streets to the station with a suitcase each, the sky a startling turquoise lighting every house and wall as if they had just been washed and rubbed dry. Any place can look beautiful when you’re leaving it, but we settled into the third-class carriage with relief at getting away for what we hoped would be a real holiday.

  In Granada our four-shilling a night room at the casa de huespedes was dank and icy, the cold tap at the sink never ceasing its forceful running over the floor. From a more comfortable place during the next few days we went out to enjoy the sights. In Ronda, our next stop, the weather was raw and bitter, and we were exhausted from upset stomachs, a new experience for Spanish travel hands like us.

  Back in my own country, the Colony of Gibraltar, I collected some arrears of pension, changing pounds into pesetas with a man everyone called Pop, who ran a toy shop known as ‘The Hole in the Wall’, which in fact it was. He was a character of the Rock for many years, and always tried to sell me a doll or a fire-engine, for which at that time I had no use.

  We stayed a night with Mack and Jeanette Reynolds in Torremolinos, and recovered from our upsets in their warmth and friendship. The narrow road along the southern coast beyond Malaga went perilously close to unguarded cliffs. Beggars surrounded the bus whenever it stopped, jabbing fingers at their mouths to indicate hunger. The dusty and volcanic landscape, practically desert, seemed devoid of life, not even a church among the collection of hovels, most of which were without doors or windows, roofs covered by ashy rubble.

  At Almeria, after the all-day ride, we walked half a mile to a hotel, and had only the strength to boil a packet of soup on our alcohol stove. We were jaded, and ready even to get back to the flat in Alicante. The next day we wanted to travel a little more comfortably, so bought first-class seats on the bus, but they weren’t in fact the best. The even higher grade of extraordinarios, meaning three seats just behind the driver, were already taken. After a brief stop in the palm-tree city of Elche we trundled back into Alicante – or Callyante, as the Martin children called it.

  The flat was impossible to live in, mostly due to the noise. I loathed Alicante, in any case, after the settled and productive peace of Soller. The atmosphere was all wrong. Either it was far more expensive even than Palma, or we were cheated every time over the smallest transaction. Any attempt to pay reasonable prices, which we knew existed, ended in acrimony and failure. The idea of staying there and perhaps earning something by giving English lessons seemed less and less possible. It was a more depressed and therefore depressing town than Malaga, and we were there only to be robbed. Other foreigners were also dismayed by the place. A Frenchman who owned a bar even talked disconsolately of moving his business back to Algeria. I can only hope he didn’t.

  We had to shift, yet it seemed impossible to go back to Majorca, though we couldn’t say why, since it was an easy twelve hours away, and it wouldn’t have been difficult getting installed. Neither did we wish to go to any other place in Spain. The dream was over, and England the only destination. Having, with the Malayan adventure, spent eight years of my life out of the country, it was indeed time to go there, at least for a while, though I dreaded facing the so-called real world knowing that my pension could not go on for ever, and that I had no qualifications for any kind of work.

  We packed our trunks and cases in a sombre and fatalistic mood, sorry to be parting from the Martins but gripped by a feeling that there was no alternative except to go. Discarding heaps of paper to lessen the cost of excess baggage, I found a sheet with ‘The loneliness of the long distance runner’ written across the top. I spoke the words several times aloud, as if recalling them from a half-forgotten dream, and then in a kind of waking dream of the present I unscrewed my pen, pulled more clean paper towards me, and began to write several thousand words of the story which that line suggested.

  I sat in a field of energy, the rhythmical narration of a runner coming from hardly to be guessed where – except possibly from the beats of the printing presses below – writing out of my impacted thirty years of existence, all that I had lived and learned going in, as if composing a long poem rather than a story. The rhythm of a man running pulled my pen along for line after line and page after page, trams and playing children as far from my consciousness as if I had been alone on an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I was writing almost to the minute of our luggage going into the taxi, and carried the halting point of the story in my head until such time as I could get to the pages again.

  The second-class compartment was empty on the night train to Madrid, and we lay one to either side, our sleepy faces in the morning seeing a white-blue dawn over the seemingly endless plain of Castile. A short stay in Madrid was devoted mainly to the Prado, the asterisked masterpieces of Goya, El Greco and Velazquez wearing me out by the end of the day, as if the witnessing of such wonders drained all energy from the ordinary mortal body.

  We were almost out of money after paying the fares via Hendaye, Dieppe and Newhaven, and several hundred pesetas on excess luggage. Ruth’s parents welcomed us in Hove on Saturday night of 22nd March, and it was a relief to know that we could stay with them before deciding what to do. I spent some days in the living room, finishing the story about the long distance runner in Borstal.

  Ruth’s Outposts booklet A Forecast, a Fable was published, and she was busy despatching subscribers’ copies. Rosica telephoned me with the news that Saturday Night and Sunday Morning had been sent back to her again, and that trying to place it was beginning to seem hopeless. She also informed me that The General had been rejected, that A Stay of Some Time had now been turned down by a total of six publishers, The Palisade by seven, and The Bandstand by two. She added, however, that she had posted Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, as a kind of forlorn hope, to W. H. Allen. If it came back, perhaps I ought to put it away and get on with something else – a reasonable suggestion in view of all she had done.

  Towards the end of the month I went to Nottingham for a few days, then came back to Hove, where I wrote ‘Picture of Loot’, a poem later included by Philip Larkin in The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. My pension wasn’t enough to live on, and resources were dwindling, in spite of the Fainlight tolerance and generosity. Some humorous articles, written to try and earn money, came back from Lilliput and Punch, as did a batch of work from Poetry Chicago.

  The novels Rosica hadn’t been able to do anything with arrived in one big parcel, as if I were Fate’s dustbin for my own work. The notion of teaching English to foreign students was as far as it went, though maybe various language schools were written to because several addresses and telephone numbers had been copied into a notebook. Dramatizing some of my stories for a play competition announced by Granada Television was a possibility, but nothing was done about that, either. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, after being finally polished (though it had needed very little) and sent to a magazine, was rejected almost by return of post.

  Ebullient rather than depressed, I enjoyed rummaging in sec
ondhand bookshops, where you could find something good for as little as sixpence. Walking along the Brighton front with Ruth, the sea air induced an unjustifiable euphoria, and there were interesting foreign films to see at the Classic Cinema in Kemptown, as well as numerous cafés where we could sit and talk. The future seemed to rear up in front like a concrete wall, and so didn’t figure much in our conversation.

  A letter from Rosica said that ‘as luck would have it, Jeffrey Simmons of W. H. Allen is very impressed with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. He does not want to make any promises or to give false encouragement, but would like to talk to you about it.’ She went on to say that if I gave him an option on my next two novels, and let him arrange a sale of the book in the United States, he would do his best with other directors of the firm to get the book taken. If this happened, she said, I would have ‘terrific promotion and publicity’.

  She made an appointment for me to see Simmons at the W. H. Allen offices on Tuesday 15th April. Such a letter meant only one thing, yet it was impossible to feel any happiness, in case I was wrong, though it hardly seemed they would want to see me without intending to publish the book. On asking Ruth if she would like to come with me, she suggested I go on my own. I was calm, almost nonchalant, on getting the midday train from Brighton, and watching the delightful Sussex landscape go by.

  There seemed to be a fine grit in the air, as if from a mist just lifted, while walking up Essex Street from the Temple tube station. The house was a Dickensian kind of rookery, and at the top of some steep narrow stairs I was greeted by Jeffrey Simmons, a tall somewhat saturnine man, and son of the managing director. Jeffrey told me that one of his readers, Otto Strawson, had read the book and was enthusiastic. He too liked it, and as we sat in his office he asked what else I had written. They didn’t want to take one book, was the implication, and then find that nothing more would be forthcoming. After telling him briefly about Key to the Door, which was written but still in a formless state, I took a typescript of The General from a briefcase lent by Ruth’s father. ‘You can look at this for my second novel, although it might need a little more revision.’

  Jeffrey introduced me to Mark Goulden, the head of the house, a compact and dynamic man. ‘They tell me you’ve written a masterpiece,’ he said, which I found an amusing conceit, while liking his sense of humour. ‘We’ll see what we can do with it. If you put yourself in my hands, I’ll make a lot of money for you. I’ll talk to Rosica about the advance.’

  In his autobiography Mark was to recall my stammered thanks, and my apparent incredulity at his claim, but appreciation is certainly owed for much that he did. In the 1930s he had been the first publisher to print Dylan Thomas, and also, as editor of the Sunday Referee (which I occasionally saw at my grandparents’) he had, before any other British newspaper, taken on the whole gang of Nazi thugs who governed Germany. As a publisher of books after the war he wouldn’t have anything to do with that country, on the grounds of its insufficient and as yet unacknowledged guilt, an attitude he maintained to the end of his life.

  Walking along the Strand, steeped in a compound of gloom and optimism, it was hard to understand what I had let myself in for but, whatever it was, I had been working towards it for ten years, perhaps for the whole of my life, certainly for what had seemed at times like a century. I probably appeared mindless to those passing by, if they noticed me at all, but thoughts crowded in of those absent people who were nevertheless with me, including Ruth who had known me much of that decade; her parents who were helping us so selflessly; her Aunt Ann in America who had sent food, clothes and often money; my own family who had contributed food parcels from time to time; Robert and Beryl Graves; and last but not least Rosica Colin who had persisted with my work for so long. I wanted to talk to them and explain my feelings, even perhaps to boast a little and show my joy.

  Laughing inwardly (and a smile may have been on my face by now) the much desired seemed to have occurred. My book would be printed, and perhaps earn as much as two hundred pounds, which would allow Ruth and myself to live, modestly still, in Majorca while we went on writing. The future didn’t delineate itself beyond that basic hope, for I was taken up with the moment, walking as light as air and unwilling to speculate further on what had happened because it already had, and I had learned to waste nothing.

  For a moment I recalled the day thirteen years before, also in April, when I had passed the aircrew selection board to be trained as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm. That incident too, insignificant as may be, had set me apart from people in a way I wanted to be, which was a strange aim perhaps in someone who would write as if he belonged to them more than they did themselves. I had not removed myself half as effectively in 1945 as by the present achievement, but the desire to escape the crowd didn’t mean that I despised it. Though part of it from every point of view, I could only write about the individuals that make up the crowd by living apart from them, because solitude enhances the power of judgement and reflection.

  I was nothing except glad, in spite of all that, on entering a Lyons Café to have tea, before taking the train back to Brighton and telling them the news.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Towards the end of April, staying again at Ima Bayliss’s place in Dulwich, I cashed a money order from the Ministry of Pensions for thirty-seven pounds, and a cheque for ninety pounds came from Rosica as an advance on my novel. In the London of that time it might have been possible to live on ten pounds a week, but such resources as the above would not carry us as far as the middle of October, when the next ninety pounds was due on publication. We moved to a room-and-kitchen on the top floor of a house in Camden Square for two pounds seven and six a week, and Ruth worked as an interviewer with the British Market Research Bureau, thus becoming our mainstay until the end of the year. In this period she had two more poems taken by the Hudson Review.

  With the bed pushed against a wall, a table for us to write and eat at, and a small kitchen across the landing, such living space was rather a decline after the flats and houses in Spain. We managed because we could afford nothing better, but it was important for us to believe that we lived in such a way from choice, and could always go back to the more ample life in Majorca.

  For want of something to do in my unsettled state I continued the story of Colin Smith, the long distance runner, telling what happened to him after he came out of Borstal. The work grew to nearly a hundred pages, but, the quality being indifferent, it was put aside. I revised eight of my best Nottingham stories and, with The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner in the lead, typed them into a book-length manuscript and posted it in July to Rosica with the suggestion that it be shown to Jeffrey Simmons as a possible second book after Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. This would give time for the final revisions to be made on The General, which I would present as my third book.

  Poems were returned from the Times Literary Supplement, The Listener, and the BBC, though the story ‘Big John and the Stars’ appeared in a children’s anthology, for a fee of five pounds. I sent The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner story to the London Magazine, though being rather long I didn’t believe it had much of a chance, and in any case it came speedily back with a plain rejection slip. I was anxious to have it published, anywhere, since it seemed based on such a rare idea that I was afraid someone else would write as similar a story as made little difference, and get it into print before mine. I occasionally woke in a paranoid sweat after reading exactly the same story in my dreams, with the name of a writer impossible to decipher on the title page, an anxiety which persisted, though with diminishing force, until it was published the following year.

  At the end of June the proofs of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning were ready at Essex Street, and I couldn’t resist fetching them myself. I took the large envelope back to the bed-sitting room and spread out the long sheets to see a book of mine in print for the first time. No editing, at my request, had been done (though none had been suggested) so there were only a f
ew errors to correct. Mulling over such paper fresh from the printer gave me the impression that my novel was better than I had thought. Print endowed it with a glow that typescript could not. The pleasure of seeing my writing at this stage has never left me, and with every fresh work I recall the bemused hours going through the proofs of my first novel.

  Clifford Bayliss provided tickets for a performance of The Trojans at Covent Garden, the five-hour operatic spectacular by Berlioz, which I don’t think has been done since at that length. I was beginning to enjoy London, and during this strange period of waiting worked on ‘The Rats and Other Poems’, also sketching out the shape of what was to become my third published novel Key to the Door.

  August was spent at the cottage of a schoolmistress friend, Jo Wheeler, in the village of Whitwell, Hertfordshire. The long evenings were warm and mellow, and we passed them listening to Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A on a small wind-up gramophone, as the gloaming slowly deepened over the fields outside the small windows of the living room.

  ‘The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller’ was refused by the New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly, but advertisements were beginning to appear for my novel, and I was interviewed for Books and Bookmen by the editor Bill Smith, who had been a librarian. In September, six complimentary copies of the novel came in the post, one being sent immediately to Ruth’s parents, and most of the rest to Nottingham. An appointment was made for me to be interviewed by David Holloway for the News Chronicle.

  The Books and Bookmen article, out at the end of September, was headlined ‘Working Class Novelist’, a rather crass label, because I had always strongly objected to any sort of categorization. The irritation was tempered however by the hope that the piece might help in making the book known, and on the whole Bill Smith had written fairly. Mention was made of a television interview, and such general interest in the air led me to suppose that even if the novel wasn’t a commercial success it could not help but be noticed. As a beginner I assumed that this was a normal atmosphere on the publication of a book, though people at W. H. Allen may have wondered at my phlegmatic attitude.