The Flame of Life (41 page)

The house was placed near the brow of a hill, its lights glowing for miles around. Local people who'd known him for over twenty years saw that the Handleys were back after an absence which now seemed like no time at all. The local tradesmen sent vans up the muddy green-arched track laden with food and drink. Except for absent faces it was like old times, and Handley, upright as ever, smoking his long Schimmelpenninck, led his guests from room to room showing off his house as if it were a new car. Finished canvasses, awaiting transport to London, decorated every wall.

‘It amazes me where you get your energy,' Teddy said, sipping his champagne – and then putting it down on a box. It was so dry it scorched his tonsils.

Handley tapped himself on the groin. ‘I store it here!'

‘Oh you don't,' said Daphne Ritmeester. ‘I can't believe it!'

‘A dynamo,' Handley said. ‘I haven't had a woman for three months. The last was a girl of eighteen from some art college. Got the shock of her life to find me living on a construction site. She thought I was the foreman and asked where Albert Handley was. I didn't let on straight away. Said I thought he'd gone to Boston and would come back tomorrow – from his hotel to see how the house was progressing. I got on with her all right, even though she did think I was the foreman. After she'd slept two nights with me in my hut I sprang it on her gently. Then she stayed another two nights and left. A lovely young girl. We managed fine with my old dynamo.'

‘You don't change,' Daphne said. ‘That's why I never lose faith in you.'

‘I'll be sleeping in the hut tonight,' he said, ‘because friends and family have taken over the bedrooms.'

‘I shall love to see it,' Daphne said, holding his hand. ‘Does it smell of creosote?'

‘I gave it a new coat,' he told her softly, ‘specially for you.'

He led a hermit-like existence – except for the dog, and occasional visitors – though Daphne came now and again to see him. He thought of Enid, and remembered the coffee she made in the early Lincolnshire mornings. He hadn't had such a cup since she'd gone. He hadn't noticed it was so spectacularly good at the time. Yet it was, and he knew it now that she was no longer here to make it and share it with him.

It wasn't much to remember her by, yet everything else came with it. He had only to breathe the pure Lincolnshire air in the early morning to be reminded of her – and smell his own rotten coffee-brew coming through the window. We never value what we've got, he thought. If only man didn't always want something better – which turned out to be no good when he got it.

He heard from Cuthbert and Maricarmen, that they had set themselves up as sculptors in a village in the Pyrenees, but used their house as a sort of transit camp for Spaniards who had to cross the border illegally out of Spain. Those who came through in the perilous snows of winter were glad to find some haven that would help them on their way. Handley sent money, to finance the work of which his brother John would have approved. He knew also that Cuthbert would help people to get into England if ever it were necessary.

Cuthbert told how he had gone with Maricarmen to Algeria and, after a ten-day search, found Shelley's grave in a desert village between Aflou and Laghouat, guided there by directions which Dawley had written down for them. The people remembered when the group of guerrillas came, and how one of them who was sick had died that same afternoon. They led Maricarmen to his grave by the wall of their own small cemetery, still marked by the pyramid of stones that Dawley had built. Cuthbert observed her. She smiled, as if it were one desolation over and done with. Whatever was left in her would be for him, and it was more than enough. It had to be, though he felt it was more than he deserved. Life grew out of death. He saw it happening already. They paid a mason to build a permanent stone for Shelley. After photographing it, they got into their car and drove back to Oran.

Eric Bloodaxe, in the ripe fullness of age, its dream-world forever intact, guarded him day and night. The torment of losing Enid, which he put down more and more to callous neglect of her, stayed a while, and then the hardest bit of it eased after the new house was built on the ruins of the old. He worked hard at his painting, and though his reputation in the art world waned for a while, it then revived. He enjoyed his freedom for the first year in Lincolnshire, but was glad to send for his three children who, back in their old territory, made him feel more like himself again. It turned his agony on to remembering Enid, yet even that did not last. Unnecessary pain soon wears away.

Five years later a letter came from a town on the south coast, relayed from Myra's address, and he recognised her writing crossed out on the envelope. After a long time wandering between the Mediterranean and India she and Dean had made enough money on smuggling (she didn't say what, but he could guess) to buy a small hotel, where they had settled with their two children. He was welcome to have a free holiday any time he was down that way, she said.

He dropped the letter on to the fire, and went into the frost to cool off. He wouldn't spend any more effort on her than that. He was happy that she was happy with Dean, but what was happiness? He didn't know, and never would, though they were all entitled to it. Only the oblivion of work gave an illusion of it. He heard from her again, that her happiness palled and she couldn't get rid of Dean. He wouldn't leave her, she said – maybe wanting Handley to go down and sort things out, and perhaps ask her back to Lincolnshire.

But he didn't want to return to all that piggery, though it did occur to him from time to time that one day he might get married again. After all, he didn't want to live on Vinegar Hill for the rest of his life.

CHAPTER FIFTY

Dawley and Myra got married at St Pancras Town Hall, accompanied by the two children already born to them, and Handley who acted as best man. Nancy had divorced Frank for desertion, and she had used her freedom in the same way – as an end to independence.

Myra's house seemed empty. Maria and Catalina had gone back to Spain. The caravans were vacant, and so was the flat over the garage. When Handley took his children Myra and Dawley were left with Mark, and Saul the new baby. The community had died.

Frank's book was published, and went through three hardcover reprints in a year, and then into a paperback edition. It was not popular with the reviewers, but became well-known nevertheless, especially among young people and students, for it not only covered the adventurous times in Algeria, but contained his observations on street-fighting and guerrilla warfare, so that it became a technical handbook on the subject. Though it was weak on the political side, many organisations invited him to give talks and lectures, and out of these he got ideas for future essays.

But as time went on he did not know how to reconcile his revolutionary principles and writings to his life as a normal family man. It bothered him most when he was happiest, because he was happiest when he was in the garden with his children, feeling he had no right to be happy with so much misery and devastation in the world. But he could not avoid loving Myra and the children and being happy. They talked about the problem, but he could find no answer. The main thing was that the question continued to gnaw at him.

He woke up at four one summer's morning, a slit of light at the blind. Lately he'd not been able to sleep much, and instead of tormenting himself with it he dressed in silence, and walked downstairs.

The sky was low and milky across the paddock, as if it would turn into a hot fine day. A snail lay on one of the steps, a slimy track behind, so he stepped aside to avoid crushing it. The gate squeaked on its hinges: he'd oil them later. The far hedge was tall and dark, blackberry creepers reaching out and putting new tentacles tenaciously among the grass, digging their roots in.

It seemed the end of life, this beginning of the day in which the birds were so loud from neighbouring fields and trees that it sounded as if they were getting ready to take over the earth – hoping that all men had gone from it during their brief sleep.

This end of life was the fire of life, in which the flame was often invisible, nonexistent. How could one live without this flame? You didn't have to see it to believe it was there. If it was in your heart you could see it spring up in all different places. As long as it stayed in your heart your revolutionary principles were not at variance with the way you lived.

He could wait, and warm himself at his own flame, and let others share it when they needed it. Waiting and guarding your own flame with the faith of your life was justification enough. Because when the call came, when he had waited until he knew what to do, when it was necessary to go out to a cause and do something, then he would do so – but always finally remembering, and being troubled by, the words of Handley's brother John. In the meantime the flame stayed plain, and as long as you loved those nearby you would know what to do when the time came.

And if it never did? he asked himself with the healthy bite of scepticism. While the flame of his heart stayed with him he did not need to answer that question. Life in any case was brief enough. If it never came he still had to live. Yet he knew beyond all doubt that it would come. The world that he knew was made that way.

Feeling good to be alive and up so early, he went back to the house to make breakfast for his family.

A Biography of Alan Sillitoe by Ruth Fainlight

Not many of the “Angry Young Men” (a label Alan Sillitoe vigorously rejected but which nonetheless clung to him until the end of his life), could boast of having failed the eleven plus exam not only once, but twice. From early childhood Alan yearned for every sort of knowledge about the world: history, geography, cosmology, biology, topography, and mathematics; to read the best novels and poetry; and learn all the languages, from Classical Greek and Latin to every tongue of modern Europe. But his violent father was illiterate, his mother barely able to read the popular press and when necessary write a simple letter, and he was so cut off from any sort of cultivated environment that, at about the age of ten, trying to teach himself French (unaware books existed that might have helped him), the only method he could devise was to look up each word of a French sentence in a small pocket dictionary. It did not take long for him to realize that something was wrong with his system, but there was no one to ask what he should do instead.

So, like all his schoolmates, he left school at fourteen and went to work in a local factory. Alan never presented himself as a misunderstood sensitive being, and always insisted that he had a wonderful time chasing girls and going with workmates to the lively Nottingham pubs. He also joined the Air Training Corps (ATC) where he absorbed information so quickly that by the age of seventeen he was working as an air traffic controller at a nearby airfield. World War II was still being fought, and his ambition was to become a pilot and go to the Far East, but before that could be realized it was VE Day. As soon as possible he volunteered for the Royal Air Force. It was too late to become a pilot or a navigator, but he got as far as Malaya, where as a radio operator he spent long nights in a hut at the edge of the jungle.

The Morse code he learned during this time stayed with Alan all his life; he loved listening to transmissions from liners and cargo ships (although he never transmitted himself), and whenever invited to speak, he always took his Morse key along. Before beginning his talk, he would make a grand performance of setting it up on the table in front of him and then announce that if anyone in the audience could decipher the message he was about to transmit, he would give that person a signed copy of one of his books. As far as I remember, this never happened.

In Malaya, Alan caught tuberculosis—only discovered during the final physical examination before demobilization. He spent the next eighteen months in a military sanatorium, and was awarded a 100 percent disability pension. By then Alan was twenty-three years old, and it was not long until we met. We fell in love and soon decided to leave the country, going first to France and then to Mallorca, and stayed away from England for more than six years. That pension was our only reliable income until, after several rejections, the manuscript of
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
was accepted for publication. Afterward, Alan would say that during those apprentice years he had been kept by a very kind woman: the Queen of England.

It is said that an artist must choose between life and art; sometimes Alan would tell whomever questioned him that after his first book was published and he became a recognized writer, he stopped living—there was not enough time to do both. I hope that was not entirely true. But writing was his main activity: He would spend ten to twelve hours a day at his desk, reading or answering letters when he needed a break from working on his current novel. And there were poems, essays, reviews—and scripts for the films of his first two books,
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
and
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
, and later others. He was extremely productive. But certainly he also enjoyed social life with our friends and going to concerts or the theatre. This was the heyday of the young British dramatists at the Royal Court Theatre.

Now, in the 1960s, there was enough money for what we enjoyed most: travel, and although in the first few years our son was still a baby, we would spend up to six months of the year away from England. Alan's books were translated into many languages, which meant that he was invited to many other countries, frequently to literary festivals, or sometimes offered the use of a villa or grand apartment for generous periods of time. I remember a stay at a castle in then-Czechoslovakia, where we were awoken every morning by a scream from our son, who had managed to get his head or hand caught in some part of the rickety crib that had been put in our room for him. We also spent months in Mallorca, in a house generously lent by Robert Graves. During our four years on the island we had become good friends with him and the Graves family.