When their phalanx quickened pace towards the control-post and customs-sheds, they all turned silent, as if expecting some final trouble to come from this grim concrete building. But a policeman at the door waved them on to the open quay and went back to a card-game with his friends. Benjamin walked across to a tourist kiosk where a uniformed and good-looking woman distributed travel literature to holidaymakers who had come to see the great and renovated nation of New Nihilon. With a rather wan smile she gave him a bundle of pamphlets, which he thought might contain information useful to the guidebook.
No one looked at their ticket as they moved up the gangway. After securing their cabins they came on deck and stood by the rail to enjoy a last glimpse of Shelp, having gathered that the ship was to sail in half an hour. Further across the bay Edgar saw boatwomen rowing sturdily from other ships back to the shore, transferring passengers’ luggage to the customs-shed. He looked through his binoculars in case any of them resembled Mella, and the memory of her great love for him brought an ache to his heart.
Such sadness however was offset by the fact that this great white ship of the Nihilon Line had a full array of lifeboats along either flank. It was something he had hoped for but not expected, and it was good because it promised him a relaxing journey, which he felt he had earned after his tribulations with Mella, whom he dreaded to see at any moment come in all her fury to get him back, perched high on her mighty throne that would be hauled by a thousand followers between the customs-sheds. So he was not really sad, except for the sake of being sad, and because the rowing boatwomen in the distance did make a rather gentle picture.
Another person stood close to their group, so that to anyone not of it he seemed to belong to it, an unobtrusive preoccupied gentleman of medium height who wore dark glasses of such size that they might almost have been a mask to hide his face. Richard took him for a common tourist, with a camera hanging on his chest, and what appeared to be a transistor-radio in his hand, with the silver rod of the aerial extended. He fiddled with prominent metal knobs under the dial, his anxious mouth working as he looked across at the shore, as if to receive speech or music from that direction.
The town was gleaming and prosperous in the sun. Fortune seemed to have smiled on it, with so many blocks of flats, factories, buses, cars, and well-dressed people. Along the quay were oil-tanks, gasometers, warehouses, ships, and cranes, a sight that filled their heads with memories. Adam remembered the girl at the hotel in Fludd, and was saddened at the thought that she had been swept away in the great disaster. Further back in time was his entrance into Nihilon when he had innocently held the soldier’s rifle and fired it towards Cronacia, thus bringing the retaliation that appeared to have set the whole insurrection in motion.
Who had fired that fatal shot? He had never felt guilty of it, and could only ascribe it to an accident, or an impulse travelling through heart to finger, just strong enough to move it on the trigger. But none of them was innocent, being heaven-bent for the end of the world, and never set for a beginning. It was too late to wonder where it all began, yet that seemed the only hope, if hope were wanted, and to a poet it was. A beginning might be mysterious, but it was always feasible.
Benjamin, as he smoked his cigar, dwelt on the magnificent charge of the two hundred Zaps which he had let loose at the soulless space-base of Tungsten. But his perilous journeyings in nether Nihilon were over, and he prided himself on having left the country a better place than he had found it, all in all. He wondered what he would do with the rest of his life, whether in the large world there wasn’t another Nihilon waiting to be surreptitously exploded and brought back to sanity, or whether he wouldn’t have to come back to this one and start all over again on familiar ground.
Lazy and content at having accomplished her mission, Jaquiline waited for the gangway to be hoisted to the side of the white ship. She thought of her strange encounter with the bookseller chief-of-police friend at the frontier, whom she almost expected to see on the ship but didn’t, and of the exquisite experience of swirling through orgiastic space with her husband Adam. There were things about Nihilon that she would never be able to forget, and that alone had made her sojourn worthwhile.
Everyone who was to travel seemed now to be on board. Refugees from the honesty of New Nihilon were soberly dressed and quietly happy to be leaving, while those travellers who had spent time in the country since its change of system were glazed at the eyes, and belligerent after their continual battering of straightforward nihilistic honesty.
Though Richard anticipated a smooth trip from the Bay of Shelp and across the sea to Cronacia, he was inwardly uneasy, but without knowing why – a not uncommon state in recent times. The days of peril seemed truly over, yet he felt unprotected and exposed standing by the rail of the ship, and wanted to go down and sleep in his cabin, from which no black force in any form would be able to pull him back to nightmare Nihilon. But he didn’t want to appear unsociable by leaving the others.
Sailors were fixing block and tackle to hoist the gangway, a few minutes before departure time, when a curious thing happened. The woman in the tourist-office hurriedly picked up a large handbag, ran across the quay, walked up the gangplank, and came aboard just as preparations were made to get the ship away. She stood a few yards from Jaquiline, gazing at the shoreline in a mood of bitter regret.
‘I think I know you,’ Jaquiline said, with an unpleasant pang of recognition.
‘Please, let’s not talk,’ said Cola quickly. ‘When I left you I was sent to Mount Bathos for a month, to be rehabilitated. It was really very successful.’
‘Then why are you leaving New Nihilon in such a hurry?’
‘You’ll see,’ Cola said, a tone of sad hysteria that prompted Jaquiline to hold her hands in a generous effort to calm her.
As the ship steamed between the arms of the inner breakwater, dragons of fire and smoke suddenly ate up part of the waterfront. The explosion was so mighty that a low wave came eddying towards the ship, at which they ran into the main saloon and closed the door. Débris rained down over the harbour, and a few scattered pieces fell on to the ship like dead and dying birds.
But, while still outside before the explosion took place, Benjamin had seen the unobtrusive tourist press one of the buttons on what they had thought to be a transistor-radio, and as the first flash broke on the skyline he had noticed how ex-President Nil’s mouth lost its twisted anxiety, and smiled.
Bells were ringing, and sirens moaning along the shore. Cola stood with her head resting on the edge of a window, in tears at another wrecking of beautiful Nihilon, the new model she had been taught to love in the brain-laboratories of Mount Bathos, and which she had spent a week describing to people who would never understand it. It was like a volcano erupting, a spectacle which showed Benjamin – though only for a moment – that Nihilon was a country for which nothing could be done, a part of the world that could no more be adequately covered by a guidebook than a jungle could. But he saw plainly that such a wayward reflection was only the false fire of nihilism continuing to blaze in his heart – when he knew all the time that men in general, and he in particular, had the power to extinguish it forever.
Before the tourist with the radio device could press the second of his series of buttons Benjamin furtively drew the revolver from inside his jacket and, taking careful aim, fired one shot and killed him. The machine fell from his hands and splashed into the sea. He ran up to the body, and heaved it on to the rail. With a further effort he sent it spinning after the radio-detonator.
He then returned the gun to its holster, and went into the saloon to comfort his friends, as the ship steamed out of the Bay of Shelp, and away from Nihilon.
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 ye
arned 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.
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 © 1971 by Alan Sillitoe
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3367-1
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Travels in Nihilon Page 29