Birthday

by Alan Sillitoe

  ‘Wait till I tell you. Every story has an ending. The firm went bankrupt six months later, and Stan was out on his arse. He got no golden handshake, either. Firms were closing down all over the place in Thatcher’s time. I got another job, and so did a lot of the others, but Stan was known as a firebrand, and one of the blokes. I met on the street told me he’d seen him drawing the dole. Stan didn’t know where to put his face. He was counting his money as he walked to where he’d parked his car.

  ‘He wasn’t on the dole for long, though. I was in town one day and saw him coming down the steps of the council house with a briefcase under his arm, dressed even smarter than when he’d worked in the factory office. I waved to him, and he waved back, but he didn’t stop to talk. I haven’t seen him since. He’ll probably be Lord Mayor one day, as long as he’s not Labour. Come on, sup up. I get thirsty talking so much.’ No second telling, since no jar had far to go, and he stood up to go for their refills.

  ‘He doesn’t seem too bad now,’ Eileen said.

  Derek passed the cigars. ‘He’s getting over it, but there’s still a fair way to go.’

  ‘You wouldn’t know, though.’ Brian puffed on his cigar. ‘None of us would show what was going on inside.’

  ‘That’s the best way.’

  ‘I’m not sure about that,’ Eileen said.

  Derek smoothed the froth from his moustache. ‘That’s Arthur’s way, and it’s working. They don’t need to send him a social worker for counselling.’

  ‘Not unless she’s got good tits and nice legs,’ Brian said, creating sufficient laughter for Arthur to think what a merry lot they were as he laid the jars down: ‘I bought four packets of pork scratchings, so get stuck in. I saw ’em behind the bar, and remembered how mam used to love ’em, but I can’t eat ’em in case they break my teeth.’

  Brian put one in his mouth, and softened it with a gulp of beer. ‘I haven’t tasted them for donkey’s years.’

  ‘My dad took ’em down the pit in his lunch box,’ Eileen said. ‘He said they made him work better.’

  ‘They used to be spread out on a big tray,’ Brian recalled, ‘at La Roche’s the pork butchers on Ilkeston Road. Mam often sent me to get some, and told me not to eat any on the way back, but I could never resist a pick.’

  Arthur lifted his jar. ‘Let’s drink to her.’ Glasses were emptied and taken by Derek for another filling.

  ‘I remember when I went with her in the ambulance, after she had that last heart attack,’ Arthur said, when Derek came back. ‘I was sitting holding her hand because she was frightened. Well, who wouldn’t be? But the ambulance bloke told me to get away from her, and sit on the other side, because it was against regulations. My fucking blood went up. He was a big bloke and thought he could put one over on me, but I told him to shut his trap or I’d punch his head in. I stayed where I was. He could see I was doing her some good, but he wanted to show his authority.

  ‘After I’d seen mam tucked up in bed I went outside looking for that ambulance man. I was going to give him a right fucking pasting, but luckily for him I couldn’t find him. He’d probably gone on another trip to try barking at somebody who’d cringe and do what he said. I’d been going to smash him in the ambulance, but didn’t want to upset mam. If I had knocked him about a bit they’d have needed an ambulance for him.’

  ‘The world’s full of ’em,’ Derek said. ‘Somebody’s got to keep ’em in their place, or the scabby Hitlers would be all over us.’

  Eileen turned to Brian. ‘How long are you up for this time?’

  ‘Until Sunday morning. Then I’ll slide back to London.’ He would bypass the Smoke and head for France on the Shuttle, go travelling for as long as he could stand being by himself. Or maybe he’d put it off till Arthur was right again. They’d go together, and what a trip that would be! ‘I’ll see you and Derek before I go. Tomorrow I’m taking Arthur to Matlock. It’s our favourite run.’

  ‘And on the way back,’ Arthur said, ‘we’ll call and see how Jenny is.’

  The waiter came in and laid platters of food on each table, legs of chicken, small sandwiches, meat balls, bits of kebab. ‘What’s all this?’ Derek wanted to know.

  ‘It’s from a wedding party in the back room,’ the publican said. ‘There was too much food, and all this is the leftovers. They told us to spread it among the clients.’

  Hands went out, picking things to eat. ‘It looks good,’ Eileen said. ‘I wish I was hungry, that’s all.’

  ‘If you don’t eat it it’s going in the bin, and it’ll be a shame if it does.’

  ‘Who do we have to thank for it?’

  ‘It was the bridegroom’s idea. Here he is.’

  A slim six foot man in his early twenties, with short fair hair, grey eyes, and wearing a T-shirt and jeans, stood smiling at the door, to be thanked and shaken hands with by everyone in the room, congratulated, wished happiness and a long life.

  ‘It was time for me to get spliced,’ he said, ‘because she’s five months pregnant. So eat the grub up if you can. It was too much for us. If we sent it to Yugoslavia it’d be rancid before it got there. I’ll get back to my wife now though, because she’s a bit tired. It’s time to take her home and tuck her up.’

  ‘Which is where we ought to go.’ Eileen stood. ‘I’m starting to yawn.’

  ‘You aren’t five months pregnant, are you, duck?’

  She turned to Derek and kissed him. ‘I sometimes wish I could be, but I’ve got to drive you lot home, and it’s lucky I have, otherwise who knows where we’d end up?’

  Pot after pot of tea at Arthur’s kept them talking till the middle of the night, and Eileen knew that when they left Arthur would have no trouble falling asleep. If it meant that Brian wouldn’t get his wake-up mug of coffee at eight o’clock he would surely look on it as the best news of the day, as would the rest of them when they heard about it.

  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 anno
unce 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.

  Time passed … the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties.… Every year or two a new book, a trip to another part of the world. Japan, India, the United States, Mexico, and Latin America: the range extended. I usually went with him, and as by then I also was having work published, sometimes the invitation was to me, and he would assume the role of consort.

  Looking back, I realize what a wonderful life we had then. But a year or two before his eightieth birthday, Alan told me he was not feeling well. It was always hard to persuade him to see the doctor; this time he suggested it himself. There were many hospital appointments for investigations and tests—the National Health Service was as excellent and thorough as ever—and a few weeks later the diagnosis came: There was a cancer at the base of his tongue. His suspicions were confirmed. Although he had continued to smoke his pipe (and the occasional cigar), now he stopped at once. The tragic program of treatments started, and the inevitable oscillations between hope and despair. Twice it seemed that he was cured; then it all began again. In April 2010, not long after his eighty-second birthday, Alan died. We had hoped he could die at home, but he needed the facilities of a good hospital. Months later, on a cupboard shelf in his study, I found the manuscript of Moggerhanger.

  Sillitoe in Butterworth, Malaya, during his time in the RAF.

  Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight shared their first home together, “Le Nid”, while living in Menton, France, 1952.

  Sillitoe in Camden Town in 1958, soon after the publication of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

  Sillitoe at his desk in his country house in Wittersham, Kent, 1969.

  Sillitoe in Berlin while on a reading tour in 1976.

  Sillitoe sitting at his desk in his flat, located in Notting Hill Gate, London, 1978.

  Sillitoe writing at his desk in Wittersham in the 1970s or ’80s.

  Sillitoe and Ruth Fainlight at the PEN conference in Tokyo, Japan, 1984. They both gave readings at the conference, and Sillitoe was a keynote speaker, along with Joseph Heller.

  Sillitoe standing on the porch of his wife’s apartment in Nashville, Tennessee. He visited Ruth while she was a poet-in-residence at Vanderbilt University in January of 1985.

  Sillitoe (right) in Calais, France, with Jacques Darras (center), a French poet and essayist, August of 1991.

  Sillitoe in front of his and Fainlight’s Somerset cottage with his friends, American poet Shirley Kaufman and Israeli literary critic and academic H. M. “Bill” Daleski.

  Sillitoe on holiday in Penang, Malaya, in 2008. Sillitoe spent time in Malaya as a radio operator for the RAF in 1948.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2001 by Alan Sillitoe

  Cover design by Jason Gabbert

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-2084-8

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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