Life Without Armour (31 page)

I was requested to attend the military hospital in Gibraltar for another medical board, and arrived there on 29th February. During a haircut and shave in Algeciras the barber assumed I was native to the Balearic Islands, my Spanish accent sounding merely provincial, no longer English or entirely foreign.

My time in the hospital ward seemed much longer than three days, taking me vividly back to the RAF time. To National Service soldiers in the ward I was the older man, and they assumed I was able to answer all their questions. On admitting I was a writer one of the swaddies in his dressing-gown came to my bed with some verses he had written. Unfortunately they were no good, but I told him to keep on writing. I did some shopping while on the Rock, and returned to Soller with kippers, bacon and English tobacco. News came a few weeks later that my pension would continue until further notice.

A friend sent us
A Treasury of Yiddish Stories
, and I began the 600 page anthology at random by reading a tale of Israel Joshua Singer's called ‘Sand', set in the Jewish village of Podgurna on the banks of the Vistula in nineteenth-century Russia. Aaron, a travelling ritual slaughterer recently widowed, is invited to lodge at the Rabbi's house, in which he seduces the daughter who becomes pregnant. When the fact can no longer be concealed, the pair are married, though not before the whole community has come together in uproar to make sure the matter is put right. A further strand of the story takes us through four seasons, and tells of how the settlement acquires its own burial ground, no longer having to use the one in the next village which is slightly more prosperous, and whose charges the people of Podgurna can barely afford.

Strange as it may seem I felt some connection between the poor of these Yiddish stories and those I had grown up with, as if I had half known such people before. The style of writing was in some way responsible, but I also learned that in a story much can be told between the A of the beginning and the Z of the conclusion, the kind of detail which, though not apparently relevant, becomes so in the completed work, and is all the richer for being written in an unhurried, meandering and therefore more human way. This is one method by which the author of ‘Sand' gives reality to the lives of those who lead such hard and uncertain lives. Though the people in Nottingham were not Jewish, and did not therefore have the same passionate belief in their religion and its ethics (nor, of course, the ever present peril from physical persecution), their sense of humour, ability to endure and, flexible attitudes to the minutiae of life, showed some similarity. It was impossible to be unmoved on reading Isaac Bashevis Singer: ‘The Jew never looked askance at the deserter who crept into a cellar or attic while armies clashed in the streets outside,' something with which my mother would certainly have agreed.

The anthology also contained such masterpieces of the short story as ‘Kola Street', ‘Repentance', ‘White Chalah' and ‘Competitors'. Poor people have vivid lives and suffer much (though not, once they can afford to eat, more than other people) and one has to write about their tribulations and follies as if one loves them. Every person is a unique individual, and no writer should generalize, or classify people into any kind of political or sociological group, something doubly confirmed by those classics of Yiddish literary art.

Early in 1956 we met the Swedish film actress Ulla Jacobsson, famous for her recent performance in
Smiles of a Summer Night
. She was a quiet, tense and beautiful young woman who, when in the Soller valley, was probably as much at ease as she ever could be. Her husband was the Dutch artist Frank Lodeizen and, with Nancy, the five of us were to become good friends, though I contested Frank's assertion when we got on to political topics that the Royal Air Force during the war had never really tried to bomb the Krupp works at Essen because too many British capitalists had shares in the firm.

During our half drunken and hilarious sessions we devised a religion based on the worship of Globoes, enormous coloured tissue-paper lighter-than-air balloons acquired at the local stationers'. Some, shaped like pigs or other animals, were popular for sending aloft at fiestas or birthdays. Before launching, the Globo had to be opened as far as possible by hand, so that a wad of cotton wool soaked in alcohol could be tied to the wire frame of the opening and lit.

The shape slowly filled with hot air and, when it was released, began to ascend and drift majestically across the valley at a height of several hundred feet. Ruth and I wrote ‘The Globo Anthem', and a one-act ritualistic play to be performed on the Globo Sabbath before each series of balloons was released, the Globo Sabbath being any day the five of us felt like getting together over a bottle or two of champagne.

In our talk one evening Ulla said that if I wrote a script for her to act in she would get me an advance of a thousand marks from Germany, even if the film company never made it, so anxious were they to keep her under contract. I did not know the technique of writing a script, but she said it could be done as a short novel, so in a few weeks I gave her
The Bandstand
.

The germ of the story, rescued from
The Palisade
, which had been put away as unsaleable, was about a young Swedish woman who falls in love with a consumptive Englishman living with his wife on the Côte d'Azur. The bandstand of the town, where they first meet, becomes a symbol of their (necessarily doomed) association, various events leading to a dramatic and bloody climax on the festival of the Fifteenth of August. Ulla, to my surprise, saw it as a satisfactory blueprint for her talent, and the film company wrote to me after a while to say they would shortly be making an offer.

In May we left the hillside and went back to Maria Mayol's house in the town, taking a flat on the third floor, the rear terrace still giving the panoramic expanse of mountain that we had come to expect. I worked much of that year on
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
, stitching the narrative together by ploughing in a dozen Nottingham stories which seemed to concern the main character, or to amplify the background before which he performed, some of the stories and sketches having been written as long as five years ago.

This creative process, if it can be defined as such, was recalled on seeing
Benvenuto Cellini
at Covent Garden a few years later, though I'm not sure the incident so brilliantly highlighted by Berlioz is in the famous
Autobiography
, which was my favourite reading for a time. My thoughts about the book might echo those of William Beckford who, on seeing the Perseus statue in Florence, wrote that ‘Cellini has ever occupied a distinguished place in my kalender of genius.'

In the opera the all-powerful Pope is waiting impatiently for the statue of ‘Perseus and the Gorgon's Head' which he has long since paid for. Visiting the
atelier
, he threatens the sculptor with hanging if he doesn't produce the work immediately. Cellini finds that he doesn't have enough metal to finish, and to get out of the impasse rushes around the studio snatching up smaller pieces already done and feeding them into the furnace. Thus the ‘Perseus' appears, welcomed by Pope, workmen, and the artist himself of course, with great enthusiasm, a dazzling climax to the opera.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
was constructed after much the same fashion, the Pope in my case being the spectre of poverty should my pension come to an end.

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.