Life Without Armour (23 page)

Neither gas nor electricity in the house, I wrote by the light of an oil lamp in one of the bedrooms, left as much to myself as I cared to be, though sometimes going for a walk or a drink with one of my cousins. They were helping to repair and paint old woodwork in the village church, which they still attended on Sunday, having been in the choir as children – a strange life to someone who had grown up even below the religion line.

I met the vicar on my way to the post office one day, a handsome angular-bodied man of about fifty who wore spectacles. During a recent sojourn in hospital his dog had died, and he had since written its life story in verse so as to remember their friendship. ‘I used one long and two shorts for the rhythm.'

I put on a suitably erudite expression, yet wondered if he was testing me. ‘Oh yes, dactylic hexameter, if there were six feet to one line.'

‘That was it,' he smiled, ‘but whose metre was that?'

‘Homer's?' I suggested. He queried whether the village of Nonnington had inspired any poems, at which I supposed my cousins had said something about me. ‘Not so far, but it may one day,' I said.

I saw the films
Samson and Delilah
and
Pygmalion
in Canterbury, and from the public library in Dover took out books by James Joyce, Stephen Spender and Karel Capek, as well as Walter Raleigh's
Style
and
A Treatise on the Novel
by Robert Liddell. Poems went to
Outposts
, but with no luck. The countryside was in the full cool flush of spring, and I walked in fields and woods that were coloured with anemones and celandines, violets and primroses, wood sorrel and forget-me-nots.

One of my cousins worked at a farm, and I helped him – not very successfully – to milk the cows. The family's brute of a bull terrier called Major had to be exercised, and I got into trouble when it grabbed someone's pet mongrel and half killed it. Another day it charged salivating across a field after a cluster of sheep and nearly got shot by the justifiably irate farmer.

A group of poems, and ‘The General's Dilemma', came back from
World Review
. To console myself I ploughed stolidly through
USA
by John dos Passos, read David Gascoyne's
Short History of Surrealism
, and C. Day Lewis's work. I wrote more poems, and a couple of stories, sending poems to
The Listener
, and ‘The General's Dilemma' to
Orpheus
. The Song of Solomon seemed good to read while in our letters Ruth and I were planning to meet in Folkestone.

Macbeth
, and extracts from Dostoevsky's
Diary of a Writer
were read on the Third Programme, my aunt's wireless powered by an accumulator. I despatched a story to
Chambers's Journal
, and received ‘The General's Dilemma' back from John Lehmann, who turned out to be the editor of
Orpheus
, saying that he liked the story but unfortunately the magazine was closing for lack of money.

On 14th May I started
The Deserters
, a novel which had nothing of the macabre straight-from-the-head fantasy of
By What Road
, though there were similarities in that a slightly older man than John Landor, now called Brian Selby, comes back from the war and gets entangled in the local bohemian society, my artist-uncle and his girlfriend again being prominent. Other characters, however, were more believable, and there was less pseudo-philosophical verbiage.

In our letters Ruth and I discussed leaving England, south seeming the only direction. On 19th May
By What Road
was rejected, and I realize now that no editorial reader could have gone beyond the first page, there being so few promising features that anyone would have been justified in thinking that whoever had written such embarrassing rubbish would never succeed as a writer. Even if I had worked over a dozen more drafts in as many years the result could only have been an undistinguished first novel from someone who was unlikely to produce anything further. Knowing this at the time, I had the sense not to send it out again. In any case I had done 120 first-draft pages of
The Deserters
, and by the end of May the novel had grown to 55,000 words.

Ruth and I made our tryst in Folkestone, and stayed a few days at Mrs Tryon's boarding house. It was a time of Whitsun heatwave, and we walked seven miles along the clifftops to Dover, reading Matthew Arnold on the celebrated beach. Afterwards we explored the Stalingrad-like ruins still left from the war, and in the afternoon enjoyed the film version of Rattigan's
Separate Tables
.

Nottingham seemed dead when I returned at the beginning of June, existence pointless without Ruth, even the convivial evenings at the Hendersons' a desolation in her absence. I sometimes called to see Paul, and we would talk with knowledgeable Noel Dilks, a dwarfish fifty-year-old with long grey hair who sold secondhand sheet music and musical instruments in a shop just up the road. He had been writing a play for years, perhaps decades, with only Anglo-Saxon-based words, a rigidity which bemused me, for it was like using only a small part of a wonderfully flexible tool. Excerpts read one night at the Hendersons' sounded fluent and pure, but I couldn't get much sense as to what it was about, only recalling that one of the characters went by the name of Philadamus. Noel lived alone in a council house on the edge of town, and when he died a few years later his theatrical masterpiece was thrown on to the rubbish dump – as were nearly all my Uncle Frederick's paintings after his girlfriend died.

Ruth and I arranged to meet for the day in Hastings and, though both of us arrived at the set time, we failed to see each other, as if Fate had taken a hand against us. Circling the clock tower, calling again at bus and train station, endlessly reconnoitring the stony beach, and rechecking the letter to make sure of the time and place, we must have stalked each other's shadow in the sun just too far behind – or in front – to make the longed-for contact.

Bewildered and cursing, I went back to Nottingham, for a week of solitary walks to burn my anger off. I sat on the bank of the sluggish Trent and wrote a poem called ‘Exfiltration', about electrical powerlines criss-crossing the fields, that hadn't existed when traipsed over with Peggy and our siblings a dozen years before.

On 25th August my rather contrived story ‘Two Ways of Thunder' was published in the
Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian
. A few-hundred-words description of ‘Mountain Jungle' was printed in the
Scribe
, the magazine of the Nottingham Writers' Club. My first poem was taken by the Royal Air Force's Association annual magazine (for which half a guinea was paid) concerning the somewhat mystical thoughts of a man in radio contact with an aeroplane going on a long journey over the sea, signed not in my name but as ‘wireless operator'.

In September my Aunt Edith's sons, Ernie and Arthur, called on me wanting to borrow a map so that they could plan a route around the Eastwood area to go ‘tatting' in their fifteen-hundredweight lorry. They asked me to come along, the idea being to walk the streets of various mining towns pushing leaflets through doors asking for scrap iron, and explaining that we would call later to see if any was forthcoming. We thought it hilarious when, after knocking on a door and asking a grizzle-haired shirtless collier – looking much like Morel in
Sons and Lovers
– if he had any old rubbish, he answered fiercely: ‘Ah! Tek me!' – and slammed the door in our faces before we could take him at his word.

Ruth and I met now and again, otherwise exchanging letters, which often included stories and poems. I was reading Ibsen, Chaucer and Aristophanes, Ovid, Thucydides and Lucretius, and for lighter matter the novels of Richard Aldington. I wrote such stories as ‘The Fall of the Cliff', ‘The Major', and ‘Mr Sing', which did not survive, but also ‘Blackcurrant' and ‘A Bad 'Un', later ploughed into
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
. A poem was accepted by a magazine called
Prospect
, and then came the news that my pension would continue until late in 1953. I unsuccessfully applied for the job of editing a magazine put out by the Raleigh Bicycle Company, called
The Raleighgram
.

Soon to leave Nottingham, it would be necessary to travel light, so I sold most of my books. I grew a moustache, which somehow made me look younger, and in October hitch-hiked around Cornwall, with
The Way of All Flesh
in my pocket, and a piece of old map from Langar for navigation. The idea was to find a cheap chalet or cottage in which Ruth and I might live for the winter, but either nothing was suitable, or I couldn't make up my mind on the few houses shown.

Later in the year a yarn called ‘Christmas Treaty' went to the
Observer
short story competition, based on an incident at my grandparents' cottage before the war. The influence of D. H. Lawrence, both in subject and style, was overwhelming, and the prize was rightly awarded to Muriel Spark.

At the end of October Ruth saw an advertisement in
The Lady
for an unfurnished house to let at forty-eight pounds a year near Menton in the Alpes Maritimes. The estate on which it stood was owned by an Italian called Corbetta, who had an English wife, and when we went to their house in Kensington to be vetted we not only persuaded them of our married state but lied that we had enough income to take on the place for a year.

I had saved some money, though not much, and had to borrow here and there to make up the first quarter's rent, our train fares down, and something to live on. Corbetta said he would be going at the same time, and provide us with a few sticks of furniture from the attics of the main villa, which would save us having to sleep on the floor. The travel allowance of fifty pounds per person per year was hardly sufficient for any stretch of time, but we couldn't imagine lasting for more than six months anyway on our resources, and decided that when the money ran out we would skip the rest of the year's lease and come back to England.

I burned stories, articles, poems, as well as a couple of notebooks and many first drafts – hard to say why, for they could have been left safely enough at home. Perhaps in a primitive way I wanted to signal the importance of the break about to take place. Or maybe to sacrifice something rough yet precious to the gods for the promise of a safe journey and eventual return which, I could hardly have known, would not be for six years.

Stories not put into the conflagration were ‘The Fishing Boat Picture', about a postman whose estranged wife keeps coming back to his house and borrowing the picture so that she can pawn it and get money for booze. I also kept ‘Uncle Ernest', based on my Uncle Eddie (the Tramp) and his disastrous friendship with two young girls, as well as ‘The Match', my one and only football story.

Chapter Twenty-seven

Ruth and I had acquired a kitten known as Nell and, not wanting to leave her behind, mocked up a passport, made her a travelling box into which we threw a raw herring, and took her with us to France. After the steamer trunk was booked through to Menton, and the rest of our suitcases – plus the cat box – was wheelbarrowed on board by a porter at Newhaven, we went into the saloon for a three-course lunch, thus missing the standard ‘Last of England' vision, painted and written about so many times, as the boat chopped its way out of the harbour.

It was 10 January 1952, and
The Flying Enterprise
was foundering in the North Atlantic, heaving waves doing their storm-force best to stuff Great Britain up the Skagerrak. Such unfriendly turbulence made me sick the whole five hours across, the first time any sea had done so, a spectacular throwing-up to Dieppe being my no doubt colourful version of ‘The Last of England', which after all came out in spite of myself, except for the part of it I cared to hang on to by the time the coast of France was visible through the lashing rain, which didn't seem to be much.

It was the kind of day when minutes were only of value after they had gone by, sensibility fairly void till the train steamed into Paris. We saw our trunk through the customs, then followed a porter with the rest of our luggage to a bus for the Gare d'Austerlitz.

France was strangely familiar, and in the third-class carriage we got what sleep was possible sitting upright. Dazed and in love, imagining she was mine at last and I was hers, we leaned against each other, fair hair and dark, blue eyes and brown, on one level too exhausted to care about what we were undertaking, but on another every impression was sharp and welcome. One lives for the moment at such an age, as if each is an encapsulated raindrop having to change its shape – and in the nature of things it always did – before drying up.

In the morning there was a dining-car breakfast of brioche and croissant, butter and toast, and good coffee after the wartime acorn dust of England. The sky was blue above sharply drawn and ashy-coloured mountains, and the sea didn't stop till reaching Africa: a transition total and sublime. Lemon and orange trees were in full fruit, and there were clouds of deep yellow mimosa, tricolour fields of carnations close to the railway, neat stations and exotic towns noted on the map in my out of date Blue Guide. The awakening was almost as different as that on the troopship five years before on steaming through the Suez Canal, except that now I was not alone.

Luggage remained at the station so that we could shop for bread, milk and sugar, then walk the short way out of Menton to the gate of the Corbetta estate on the Avenue Cernuschi. The concierge gave us the key to the house, and advised us to cut off the hairpin bends of the cart track by ascending flights of narrow steps with a low stone wall to either side, taking us up the hundred-metre height through eucalyptus, pine, red-berried arbutus bushes, and flowered mimosa trees with their overpowering scent.

The stone-built house, called ‘Le Nid', was in an olive grove, and had five small rooms, with a grape vine over the door which was to give luscious fruit in late summer. We went out to gather wood, and in a short time stood before a fire drinking tea. The cat lapped at bread and milk, then went to explore its new surroundings. Later in the day I borrowed a handcart from the concierge, and manoeuvred our cases and trunk up the hairpin bends, back to our nest that was cold indeed when sunlight faded from the trees.