Life Without Armour (22 page)

Every ten or fourteen days I went to a chest clinic – a name I hated – to get the upper part of me pumped full of air so that the lung could, like its owner, continue the life of idleness to which both were now fairly accustomed. Home from an excursion one day my mother told me that a health visitor had been to the house, to check that I was living in suitable conditions. This social worker intrusion into my privacy so enraged me that I sent a blistering letter to say that one had better not call again, which had its effect because none did.

In July a short story competition was held by the Nottingham Writers' Club, and I entered one recently written called ‘The General's Dilemma', after shortening it to the stipulated length of two and a half thousand words. The judge was Ernest Ashley, a crime novelist who earned his living by writing. He gave it first prize, telling me it was so well written and original that nothing further need be done, and that I should try to get it published.

The story was about a symphony orchestra sent by train to play to the troops behind the front during a war based very much on a future interminable conflict between the West and Soviet Russia. The orchestra is captured in a surprise offensive by an Eastern (or ‘Gorshek') general, who has standing orders to kill all prisoners no matter what their status. He makes the mistake of demanding that the orchestra play for him, and afterwards can't make up his mind whether or not to have them executed, hesitation which leads to his downfall.

When
The Green Hills of Malaya
came back I sent it to another publisher. Shortly afterwards the
Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian
wrote to say that they had accepted ‘No Shot in the Dark'. The full-page story appeared on 26th August, and with the one-and-a-half guinea payment I bought a biscuit barrel as a wedding present for my sister Peggy.

Though happy to have a story printed so early, I could not regard it as much of a success, since the venue was only local. I wanted to be published by newspapers and magazines in London, unable to realize how many years were to go by before such became possible. Nor did I care for the embarrassment of being known as a writer by the people of the district I lived in, and not entirely because an old school friend teased me at seeing my photograph boxed in the middle of the story and captioned: ‘The Author'. I wanted to travel, and obtain that detachment from such an environment which I knew to be necessary.

I sent ‘The General's Dilemma' out several times, but with no success. Of many other stories nothing remains but their titles: ‘The Return of the Crave', ‘Lucky to be Alive', ‘The Queer Type', ‘Dark Stairway', and ‘The Last Compartment'. I tried my luck with a total of eighty items up to February 1951, after which I stopped taking note.

Writing for writing's sake, I had no set purpose beyond getting published, the only aim being to convince myself I was a writer, which was no great difficulty, since there was nothing else I
could
be, and to go on until readers thought the same. Small as my income was, I had no idea of earning a living by writing, though knew it would be pleasant to get money from it if I could. Having turned out a book-length manuscript about Malaya, I wanted to start on a novel, and saw nothing to deter me. World events of the time hardly impinged, though when the Korean War began on 25th June I was interested enough to follow the campaign on maps from the Madrolle guidebook
Chine du Nord
, picked up for a shilling at Frank Wore's.

My reading for 1950 took in the remainder of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev. I read Flaubert, Gogol, some of Zola, more Balzac, and made a start on Dickens. During the winter I took a course of WEA classes on the modern English novel, reading Graham Greene and E. M. Forster (including his
Aspects of the Novel
). D. H. Lawrence was also discussed, and I went on to read most of his novels and stories, as well as poems, letters and two biographies. His work was a revelation in showing that great fiction could be written with a local setting, and one that I knew so well.

I pursued my way through Lord Derby's translation of
The Iliad
, Pope's
Odyssey
, the Dialogues of Plato, and the plays of Euripides, as well as Apuleius and the Histories of Herodotus. The Everyman
Smaller Classical Dictionary
was culled from end to end for the construction of genealogical diagrams connecting the gods, goddesses and heroes of antiquity, until I was able to recite from memory their crimes, proclivities and misadventures. It was a pageant-like amalgam of geography, history, dramatic folklore and poetry, and philosophical conundrums made plain by reading, an old strange world coming so alive that it wasn't so much strange anymore as merely a separate recreation ground that the imagination could play in.

I read more Shakespeare, enjoyed
Don Quixote
, and continued with the Bible, a rate of reading that went on for the next few years, though indeed it has never stopped. When little of importance remained unread I turned back to certain books a second or third time, as well as picking up the few that had been missed. It was self-evident that you could not become a writer unless you had read everything, and learned what you could in the process.

I made some remarks in a letter to a schoolteacher friend about Raskolnikov's Siberian dream in
Crime and Punishment
, suggesting that D. H. Lawrence had been influenced by it when he wrote
St Mawr
, in which there is a similar apocalyptic vision of the night. This letter led him to ask whether I had thought of going to university, because as an ex-serviceman it would not be difficult to get a grant. The notion seemed attractive, but the obligatory study of Latin for six months or so in order to pass the entrance examination decided me against it. I lacked the urge to go in that direction, another instinctive negative never to be regretted. Perhaps I declined out of laziness, though if I'd had Latin already I might have been willing to cut myself off from the world for three years.

My uncle suggested looking around a small and grubby secondhand bookshop as yet unknown to me. The proprietor, Paul Henderson, had in his younger days been a writer, and he told me with some pride that one short story had earned him what to me seemed the enormous sum of fifty pounds. On gloomy afternoons we sat in his back room talking about books and writers, drinking coffee, and warmed by a smelly paraffin stove.

Paul and his wife kept open house on Saturday night, and people came to talk about what they were reading (or writing), such authors as John dos Passos, Hemingway, Sartre and Camus. Or we listened to classical music, and were generously provided with coffee and sandwiches at a time when extra food was not easy to find.

During that hard winter fuel was also difficult to obtain, and I did my share at home by going to various depots for coal or coke. You were restricted to a quarter of a hundredweight at each place, and had to stand half frozen in a queue to get it. I also helped my uncle, for he hardly had the frame to carry much.

Taking my father's local election poll card from the shelf one day, I went up the street to vote in his place. Nottingham, like everywhere else at that time, was a depressing town. Food was rationed, though the war had ended five years ago, and people were complaining that even a Labour government was unjustified in keeping such scarcities going. Perhaps it was this that caused me to place a cross next to the name of the Conservative candidate, though I don't suppose he was elected. It may also have been done as a kind of joke against my father, but whatever the reason, my political views were, to say the least, in a state of uncertainty – if it could be said that I had any at all.

On a gloomy afternoon in late autumn I met Ruth Fainlight in the bookshop. After the introduction Paul closed up and drove us into town to have tea at a café. Ruth was a nineteen-year-old American poet, who I thought was Canadian, though I don't know why, for she had no accent. She had come to Nottingham with her husband, but we fell in love, and began to see each other as often as possible.

Chapter Twenty-six

Sitting in an unheated bedroom in November meant no hardship, since the theme of my novel was of a temperature to keep even a Hottentot warm. I could hardly have gone out of the house for seventeen days, which time it took for the first pen and ink draft of 100,000 words to be written. On 16 January 1951, less than three months from start to finish, which included typing, retyping, and a certain amount of revision, the 400-odd pages were squeezed into two new spring-backed folders and sent as a parcel, with return postage, to a publishing firm which had announced a competition for new novels.

After a quick re-reading of the handwritten version forty years later I can only hope the final typescript was some improvement. Paul Henderson saw it, as did Ruth, but their comments were not positive, and I see why. The story opens with John Landor, modelled perhaps on me, in so far as I was able at that time to know myself, coming home after three years in the army. During that period his mother's last letter had promised a further one that never arrived, which was to make dreadful revelations about his father, Ralph, who was some kind of businessman. On the first day home John visits Larry, a character who seemed to have been suggested by my friend John Moult, and they sit in a pub discussing the possible contents of the missing letter.

The next chapter described John's visit to his Aunt Rhoda, who lives in the country (strong echoes of
The White Peacock
here) and who also intimates sinister behaviour on his father's part in connection with his mother's death. John's old girlfriend Helen is now an art student, and on meeting in the local gallery their conversation is full of callow intellectual chit-chat. Helen takes painting lessons from an opinionated artist called Tom Ransom, based as much on my Uncle Frederick as Helen is on Sybil his girlfriend, and in his studio they talk endlessly in a very
faux
-Aldous Huxley fashion:

‘In a way, though,' said John, ‘I like to believe in immortality, but mainly in that of the Greek religion. I like to think that when I die, someone will put a gold coin between my teeth, so that Charon can take my fare when he rows me across the Styx into Hades. I like the Greek religion altogether. As far as I'm concerned, Homer is my bible. The Iliad and Odyssey. The Greek religion is romantic, it is sheer poetry, not sombre like the Christian religion. When I think of God I like to imagine Zeus sitting laughing on Olympus, looking at the antics of the world with one eye, and keeping the other anxiously on Troy and Agamemnon.'

Then: ‘I believe too much in freedom to be sympathetic to communism, though maybe I could believe in it if I was the absolute boss.' And: ‘In order to eliminate wars we have to get rid of the surplus population by some means of perfect birth control, educate people into having only two children per family.' And, lastly: ‘People worship God out of pity for Him, not because they need love and guidance.' And much more of the same kind.

One evening John sees his father in town with a strange woman, suspects him of having pursued an affair with her throughout his mother's illness. On getting home – this part of the yarn turning very Dostoevsky – he finds his favourite kitten dead, and is convinced his father killed it in a fit of homicidal madness.

The plot begins to sicken, rather than thicken. An account of listening to Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony at a concert has overtones of E. M. Forster, though only in so far as to indicate that nothing has been learned from him. John also has an association with a girl called Ada who works in a hosiery factory. She shows understandable irritation at his self-indulgent talk, her character being the composite of my pre-service girlfriends.

The title
By What Road
, a phrase lifted from Sir Edwin Arnold's version of the
Bhagavad-Gita
, indicates the uncertain direction of the story, but the upshot is that John's father is given to having sexual intercourse with his wife's corpse in the graveyard. Moira, his girlfriend, has long been trying to cure him of the habit, but in the end Ralph kills her, and hangs himself. Such a vainglorious mish-mash of terminal horror leads me to wonder whether I read about a case of necrophilia at the time, or if it had been discussed at the Hendersons', and if so why was it used as the theme of my novel?

Such an avalanche of pages can only be put down to an unbridled Stakhanovite determination to concoct a novel at any price. The mechanism employed was, simply, to begin, and then let rip with whatever thoughts or people came to hand. One situation gave birth to another, with dire results, each character dragging in someone else in conditions of maximum anguish and forcing them also to participate in the progress of the juggernaut.

It must have been on a day off from the fabrication of
By What Road
that Ruth and I visited Alderman Willie Hopkin at Eastwood. Now nearly ninety, he had been a friend of the young D. H. Lawrence, and I was interested, even eager, to know anything about the great writer. Hopkin had responded kindly to our letter with an invitation to tea, and we sat on the top deck of a trolley bus through the twelve miles of a bleak November landscape of head-stocks and pit villages to get there.

For a couple of hours he answered our questions, and talked about ‘Bert' as if he still lived around the corner. We had read most of Lawrence's work, as well as some biographies, so kept the conversation going, while Hopkin added many details, and told anecdotes about the young writer and his friends. Some account of the meeting went into a notebook, which has since disappeared.

At the beginning of April 1951 I went to stay at my Aunt Amy's cottage near Aylesham in Kent. Her coalminer husband, Richard Richardson, known for some reason in the family as ‘Mimic', had been killed a few years before on his motorbike, she being injured in the same accident. Four of her eight children were still at home, though now grown up, and I was generously fed and looked after during my stay.