Life Without Armour (36 page)

My policy was to accept all interviews, since writing a book was one phase, and helping its sales was another. Whether a newspaper was left- or right-wing didn't bother me, since any publicity, whether positive or negative, was good. I was interviewed by the
News of the World
, and photographed by Mark Gerson. Several literary agencies enquired about the possibility of representing me. Letters from various people said how much they had enjoyed my novel, and a corrected typescript went on show, with other material from local authors, at Nottingham Central Library, in whose reference section I had written the first chapters of
The Deserters
seven years before.

With one or two exceptions the backwash of rejection slips dried up, and editors were asking for work. At a cocktail party the managing director of a publishing firm regretted that the manuscript of my novel had not been sent to him, and some satisfaction was felt in replying that in fact it had, but his editors had rejected it.

In December we stayed a fortnight in Amsterdam, at the flat of Constant Wallach, our journalist friend from Majorcan days. The weather was wet and raw but, perusing a Baedeker, we spent hours at the Rijksmuseum and in the Rembrandt House.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
was taken by Pan Books for a paperback edition, and was featured as one of the best novels of the year in the
Observer.
Shortly afterwards a contract was signed for the novel to be turned into a film, which deal made a happy end to an unusual year.

Chapter Thirty-seven

Early in 1959 we moved to a furnished cottage in Whitwell, twenty-six miles north of London, paying two hundred pounds in advance for the year's tenancy. An extension built on to the back made it a large enough place, with a garden going down to the banks of the reedy and sinuous Mimram. On wet nights in late spring, new green frogs, as flat and small as buttons, would find a way under the kitchen door, and amuse us by hopping across the tiles as if in some kind of sack race, till I lifted each one on to a piece of newspaper and put it carefully back on the grass outside. Their activities reminded me of those which sported around the water pump near our first house in France.

Our literary earnings up to the end of the tax year in April were such that we now felt reasonably secure, though for another year or two – habits of parsimony taking a long time to relinquish – accounts were still kept of every item spent to the nearest halfpenny.

Harry Saltzman, who was to be the producer of the film, rented an opulent flat on Kensington Gore from which to conduct his operations. When I went to see him he told me that I should write the script, at the same time implying that the job would be easy, because all a director need do was turn the pages of the novel while making the movie. The book was so cinematic in the unrolling of its sequences that he wondered if it had been written with a film in mind. I told him that it had not, though perhaps it was natural that my work should give that impression, since I must have seen as many films as I had read books. Whether his assumption was a ploy to fob me off with a smaller fee is hard to say, but it was certainly hammered in, as all of us involved knew it had to be, that the film must be made as economically as possible.

The rights were bought for four thousand five hundred pounds, of which two-thirds came to my bank, though the contract stated that I should also receive two per cent of the producer's profits, a clause which eventually gave me several times that amount. The fee for writing the script was one thousand five hundred pounds and, though the combined sum was small indeed by Hollywood standards, there seemed no reason to complain at this unexpected addition to our riches.

On Friday 22nd April I was given the Authors' Club Prize for the Best First Novel of 1958, which meant (after an interview for
The Times
) going to their imposing premises in Whitehall, wearing the dark suit sent by Ruth's aunt from America some years before. My first after-dinner speech was a carefully written account as to how I had become a writer and produced the novel they had chosen to honour. I had hoped for Jeffrey Simmons to be present, and was somewhat annoyed that the committee of the Authors' Club had unwittingly selected the one evening of the year when it was impossible for both religious and family reasons for him to do so.

For the next two years, as well as writing the film scripts, I was working on
Key to the Door
, an autobiographical novel which had been maturing for some time. The hundred-page account of the early married life of Brian Seaton's parents, and of his childhood (the first draft done in Soller in 1953), was followed by chapters of
Letters From Malaya
, which were interspersed with sections on Brian's youth and work in the factory, the narrative finally shifting entirely to Malaya. This shuffling of material, at one stage an uneven heap of nearly a thousand pages, needed stringent cutting and revision. By the time the final draft of 750 pages was typed in April 1961 it had been ‘in progress' for thirteen years, since two chapters were based on that first handwritten version of the trip to Kedah Peak in the autumn of 1948.

A late change was to have Brian Seaton spare the life of the communist guerrilla at his mercy when the jungle rescue patrol is ambushed. In earlier versions he had killed him as having been responsible for the death of his friend Baker. In view of the nature of his upbringing such a change would, I hoped, be understandable. I saw Brian Seaton's decision as a similar ‘cutting off the nose to spite the face' to that of Colin Smith losing the Borstal governor's race in
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
. Morally right or wrong, the idea was to give more than insular point to the book, and though one or two critics were offended, it was hard to see why the possibly amoral action of a character implied a lack of morality in the author. At the end of April I sent a letter to the Home Secretary, pleading for the life of Ronald Henry Marwood, who had been sentenced to death for the murder of a policeman during a robbery. He was later hanged.

I talked to a doctor friend in London about whether there wasn't some treatment which could be paid for and thus prolong my father's life, but the verdict was that no better medical care existed than what he was already receiving in Nottingham. He died at the end of May, in his fifty-seventh year, the only mourners at his funeral being his long-suffering wife and their five children. Not long afterwards my mother married a lorry driver somewhat younger than herself and, after a more peaceful time than had ever been possible with my father, survived
him
by a few years.

The countryside around Whitwell was ideal for walking, but if you wandered off paved lanes you were likely to be warned away at the point of a gun by the landowner or one of his cap-touching minions, an experience unknown in my childhood, and certainly not in France or Spain. Work was, as always, the saviour, and in six weeks I produced a screen treatment, and then the first draft script, for the film of my novel. Disinterring the book after it had seemed dead and out of the way, and reading it several times to decide how to marshal the events into the sort of movie I would like to see, was a tedious process. However, having pocketed some of the money, the task had to be taken seriously, though my temperament was not suited for work which depended on a certain amount of consultation.

Karel Reisz, the director, read the script, and in his quiet and diplomatic manner said: ‘Well,
yes
, it is all right, but in my opinion there is just one small problem.' If the film was made according to what I had written, he went on, the running time would be several hours too long. We were both novices with regard to feature films, but Karel had made documentaries, including ‘We are the Lambeth Boys', and knew infinitely more about the business than I ever could. During the next few months the script was honed down to a ninety-minute maximum under his careful and talented scrutiny.

One of the main reasons for doing the script was to get as faithful a transition to the screen as possible, with no other writer muddying the adaptation according to his own personality or beliefs. Each version had, however, to be examined by the British Board of Film Censors, and some employee of that loathsome organization stipulated that though the issue of the abortion may be mentioned in the film, the attempt to procure one on the part of Brenda after she gets pregnant by Arthur must not be shown. Not even by as much as a stray word could it be indicated that the abortion had been ‘brought off'.

Then there was the matter of violence, which
they
might consider to be exaggerated, and as for strong language, well … Such a film in any case could only be released with an ‘X' certificate, a category which it was hoped might restrict the size of its audience. My acceptance by the world – or some of it – had brought my nihilistic feelings even more to the fore, and my impulse was to tell the censorship goons to fuck off, but such nursery rules had to be followed if the film was to go on release at all, and in my view we ended with a much watered down version of the book.

The advance payment for
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
volume, of 100 pounds, was on the low side, but was considered adequate for a book of stories, which might not sell as well as a novel. Since we did not lack money this amount seemed reasonable, and in any case an ‘advance' payment is not, and never was, a munificent handout for the privilege of printing one's work, but a sum which must be earned by copies sold in the shops. The lower the advance the sooner would further money start to come in, whereas an extravagant advance which was not recouped in sales would do no good for an author's reputation. Such was my view then, though the economics of writing and publishing today do not allow such principles to be followed too closely.

In May a letter asked me to report to a hospital in Luton for a final check-up with regard to my pension. An early bus from Whitwell took me to St Albans, and the train another twenty miles to Luton. The distance back to Whitwell was only six miles direct, so after the examination I set off with a map in my pocket along lanes and footpaths. Few cars were about, and no pedestrians, and I strolled along recalling half-forgotten names of trees and wild flowers, the clear warm day giving a couple of hours in which to be at peace in a way that had not been possible since leaving Majorca.

Karel Reisz wanted me to write the commentary to a documentary he was making on how Nottinghamshire coalminers spent their leisure. He decided that since we were going to investigate their pastimes we should also see the conditions they worked in, which meant spending a day down Clipstone pit. The two-mile trek to the coal face where men laboured in seams of less than thirty-six inches, 3,000 feet underground, convinced me of the wisdom of people who said they would never let their sons go down the pit unless they couldn't get a job anywhere else. But the miners endured their work, since there was no other, and they certainly seemed to enjoy their leisure. I had never been present at a brass band rehearsal, or inside a Welfare Institute before, or watched with any interest people playing bowls, but half a dozen pages were duly produced, and used for a film I have no memory of seeing.

Still in Nottingham, Karel mentioned that an actor who might be good as Arthur Seaton was playing Edgar in
King Lear
at Stratford. My opinion seemed to be wanted, so seats were booked. I hadn't been to the place since riding in on the back of an army lorry from RAF Snitterfield to see Ann Hathaway's cottage, and the Memorial Theatre from the outside. How are the lowly lifted! This time Ruth and I were trundled there in Karel's Morris van.

Albert Finney flailed and muttered in half darkness as Edgar, and while not difficult to imagine him as Arthur Seaton, it was obviously impossible to find an actor who matched the appearance of the person so vividly pictured when writing the book. Karel, and Miriam Brickman the casting director, were convinced that Finney could do the job, and they turned out to be right.

In September
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
received a Recommendation from the Book Society, the more prestigious Choice being awarded to something about the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Tony Godwin, a peppery little media genius, printed a review in the journal of the Book Society by Penelope Mortimer, which had a drawing of me on the cover by Andrew Freeth. In the same issue he published my story ‘Uncle Ernest'. A telegram of congratulations from Rosica was followed by many favourable reviews, those stories being praised which had been sent back by so many magazines (except for one in France) during the last ten years, though I was too gratified by the reception of the book to be more than a little wry about that.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
was published in the United States, and Pan Books was about to issue a paperback. A Swedish firm was first in line for translation rights, and enquiries were coming in from many other countries. The original hardback was in its fourth printing, sales in the first year close to six thousand.

In Whitwell we met Betty Allsop, who was helping Peter Benenson to stand for Labour at the coming General Election. We also agreed to do something, as did a few others in the village, including our neighbour, the painter Terry Harjula. My speech for Labour at Hitchin was an embarrassing peroration that went on far too long. The local atmosphere was hostile when we tried canvassing, and though our house was plastered with Labour posters my heart wasn't in it because Labour used the Suez campaign as something with which to berate the Conservatives.

In November, a few days after reading ‘On Saturday Afternoon' at the BBC, Ruth and I were married at Marylebone Town Hall. In neither of our diaries is the fact recorded, which may have been because our long engagement had been going on for ten years. With Harry Fainlight, Lillie Gore, and Karel Reisz, we went to Soho afterwards for a celebration lunch.