Life Without Armour

by Alan Sillitoe

  The content and manner of telling fitted my condition, and had some influence, in that science matched to the mystical was in tune with my own forest experience and the theoretical side of radio. The account of the birth, life and death of the tree included reflections on the turmoil and pain of Man’s existence, which provided me with a kind of perspective when it was necessary that I should have one. I could only agree, for instance, with ‘Memory is activity’s retreating shadow,’ and ‘The play of external events upon our destiny seem as inexplicable as the inherited influences which direct us from within.’ Nor could I deny that ‘In the dark is the beginning of nearly all creative processes,’ or ‘every beginning is an end, and everything ends only to begin again.’ In the back of my engineers’ diary was copied something which seemed even more relevant: ‘If sickness might be called premature age, age might be called a slow sickness.’

  Having sufficient back-pay I devised a plan to spend part of my forthcoming leave in a guest house near Exmoor with my girlfriend. Lorna Doone had been going around, and we talked, when not more pleasurably occupied, of visiting places connected to that romantic novel. Unfortunately, on going home for a few days, she mentioned the scheme to her mother, who disapproved so strongly that she convinced her daughter I was dangerous to know, and should be given up. On her return she got herself transferred to another ward, though I think our friendship was lapsing in any case, and she had either fallen in love with someone else, or saw problems too difficult to contend with now that I was back on my feet.

  Six weeks’ leave at the end of July provided adequate recompense for my chagrin and disappointment. I certainly felt a new man, standing on the platform for the London train, to the one I had been on arriving at the same station nine months before.

  The novelty of civilian clothes was pleasant, and during those summery weeks in Nottingham I visited sentimentally memorable spots trawled over with my girlfriends of another age. On a borrowed bicycle, wearing my shorts from Malaya, I explored the old sights of Misk Hill, the Hemlock Stone, and various places up the Trent Valley. My brother Michael, now aged ten, came with me for company to Clifton Grove, a local beauty spot featured in poems by Henry Kirk White, who died at twenty-one from the disease that had been defeated in me because I had the luck to be born a hundred years later.

  My notebook was filling with poems, mostly of the rhyming and scanning sort. I bought The Principles of English Metre by Egerton Smith, the definitive textbook of the time on prosody, and experimented, somewhat rigidly, with all forms of poetics. By using the public library, or culling from Frank Wore’s shop, and by buying paperbacks, I read Aeschylus, both parts of Goethe’s Faust, and Dante’s trilogy of the afterlife (which didn’t convince me that there was such a state to look forward to), two novels by Dostoevsky, A Month in the Country and Poems in Prose by Turgenev, as well as the usual padding of Dumas, Wells, Aldous Huxley and others – rich pickings chosen from a list of Penguin Classics and a catalogue at the end of an Everyman’s Library volume. There was no need for anyone to point out what should be read, or tell me what I ought to think about each book. The feeding of such appetite was easy and cheap, an inborn taste guiding me to the best at a time when only the best was good enough. I never read a book that was not enjoyable and, enjoying everything because it was good, learned more than if I had been told to read or from a sense of duty.

  For most of my leave I was carrying on a love affair with a young woman who lived up the street. I’ll call her Joyce, since her real name would only be relevant if she were now known for her work on the stage or in the media, or from gossip in the newspapers, or both. As she is alive and married still, I prefer to pull the curtain of mourning over something wonderful but so long dead.

  At the end of September I returned to the demobilization centre and claimed a navy-blue pin-striped utility-style yet adequately stylish three-piece suit, as well as a mackintosh, and a trilby hat that was never worn. In my new guise, meeting George French for lunch in Manchester, we recalled the shin up Kedah Peak like two old sweats, which big event already seemed to have happened a century ago. The train back to Nottingham took a route through the most beautiful landscape of Derbyshire, on a track which no longer exists, seen between glimpses from Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham.

  The final goodbye-date of service life, marked in my paybook, was the end of December, and before consigning the tattered booklet to oblivion the question had to be asked: What had I learned in the last four years? Morse, of course, and the facility for reading the music and secrets of the spheres for the rest of my life. In the matter of basic electricity, Ohms Law could never be forgotten, which in its absolute relevance said: ‘The current in a conductor is directly proportional to the applied voltage.’

  Drill had been taken on board my body for ever, the ability to stand on my feet for hours and not fall down, which prepared me well for London cocktail parties at some unforeseeable time. I was able to live for the day and not fear unduly for the future, knowing by now what tricks it could play. To exist parsimoniously and by habit had never been a problem, and such basic attributes were to serve me well.

  After seven years I was to be eased out of the world of aviation, on ‘ceasing to fulfil Royal Air Force physical requirements although fit for employment in civil life’ – as my discharge certificate said. The air force, through the Ministry of Pensions, would look after me for another decade, and the amusing circumstances of being ‘pensioned off at twenty-one did not allow me to feel in any way physically impaired.

  As a reminder to remove myself as soon as was practicable from the country I obtained a passport, which gave my profession as ‘none’, pleasing me by its implication that I might be thought of as someone with a private income. Physical details stated that I had blue eyes, brown hair, and was five feet eight inches in height.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Both brothers at school, and often out during the evening as well, the bedroom at home was mine all day to read and write in. I soon learned to disregard the hum and thump of industrial noise from the Raleigh factory at the end of the terrace, thirty-five yards away, or the squealing racket of kids under my window. I was fed for a pound a week, leaving ample from my three pounds eleven shillings to spend on books, postage, stationery and tobacco. The affair with Joyce went on for a while, though was soon to end because I had no intention of becoming engaged and then married.

  Poems and stories came back from Argosy, Chambers’s Journal, the Poetry Review, Lilliput, The Listener, and London Opinion. Disappointed but undaunted, on the last day of 1949 I posted ‘No Shot in the Dark’ to the Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian, a story from Malaya about a pi-dog wandering around the wireless hut, which the operator intends to kill as a pest. When the animal is finally in the sights of his rifle he finds he can’t do it, though in the original incident the dog was shot. I worked hard on the story, and must have counted the 1,428 words as carefully as a radio operator totting up a rather long telegram.

  Sometime in the autumn my cousins took me to a football match, on a Saturday afternoon when Notts County was playing Bristol City. Never having been to one before (or since), it was interesting as much for the observation of those standing around as for the misty tergiversations of the ball. A man close by could barely make out what was happening on the pitch, and seemed absolutely pole-axed when the local team lost, shuffling off at the final whistle in a dudgeon higher than Mount Everest, so that I hadn’t much hope for the peace of his family when he got home. A month or two afterwards I wrote a story called ‘Cock-eye’, later renamed ‘The Match’, in which the man beats his wife up so severely in his ire that she leaves him.

  Books read included some by Arnold Bennett, and more Somerset Maugham, but also Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Insulted and the Injured, as well as the stories of Maupassant. In the classical mode I read Xenophon, Tacitus, Sophocles, Virgil and Lucian, punctuated by books of verse, Russian stories from Pushkin to Gorki, and Ba
lzac’s Père Goriot, making a start at last on the continent of the great and the good, as much to populate the wilderness of my understanding as because the books were such a pleasure to consume.

  Assuming that my experiences in Malaya might be interesting to others, I began a chronological account, dividing the series of ordinary events into chapters. I used sheets of lined foolscap for the first handwritten draft, then typed the material to a length of about 50,000 words.

  Talking with Hales, in the office of his small hosiery wholesale firm, he suggested my joining the Nottingham Writers’ Club. His wife, the poet Madge Hales, whose book Pine Silence had just been published by the Fortune Press, was already a member. The club assembled monthly, and at the first gathering I took note of how a typescript for a publisher should be laid out, an advantage when in June 1950 I sent The Green Hills of Malaya to Edward Arnold Ltd in London.

  I made contact about this time with Frederick, my father’s brother, the lace designer who in the early 1920s had taken his pantechnicon of unpaid-for furniture to London. In 1936 he had given up wife, children, and a good living as a designer of embroidery to return to Nottingham and become the artist he had always felt himself to be. Now going by the name of Silliter, as a precaution against any creditor who might still remember him, he occupied two small rooms as studio and living accommodation at the top of a rundown building in the middle of town.

  An entirely self-made man, he had at one time been a Christadelphian (and a conscientious objector in the Great War) but he was now unfettered or unsupported by any creed. Full of enthralling reminiscences, he nevertheless guarded his time, and would not see me often. On one occasion he dismissed me with instructions to take from the library and read Savage Messiah (about the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska) and Age Cannot Wither, the story of the affair between Eleonora Duse and Gabriele d’Annunzio; as well as translations of Verlaine and Baudelaire.

  In a relaxed mood he would talk for hours on the lives of great artists and their techniques, and about his own work and ideas, which he illustrated by taking from a shelf those large art tomes of the Phaidon series with their many reproductions. One of his favourite painters was John Constable, and a series of Silliter’s landscapes, now hanging on my wall, showed some influence.

  As a young man he had studied Hebrew, and his familiarity with the Bible was remarkable. The skullcap perched on the back of his bald head suggested he might still be a student of the Holy Language. His collection of texts, concordances and commentaries on the two religions filled a bookcase, and he mentioned theologians I had never heard of, it being impossible for me to show interest in people from what then seemed a fusty and bygone age. Nevertheless, I was lucky to find such a man in the family, and maybe he was surprised and in some way gratified at meeting me.

  His reiterated advice, as he leaned back in his chair, pushed the cheap spectacles up the bridge of his nose, and gave a leer which in him denoted knowingness and intelligence, amounted to this: ‘If you want to make money as a writer, which is the only indication of success, you’ve got to remember that what editors want is a good short story, but it must be “a slice of life”.’ This was hard for me to understand, since it seemed that every story must by its own definition be ‘a slice of life’, though I later saw more clearly what he meant.

  He also told me, without spelling it out, that whoever wanted to know about the soul of a rebel had to study the Old Testament. Perhaps he only said this so as to stir my interest, because I hadn’t up to then informed him how much of it was already familiar to me.

  A frail yet compact man of sixty-five, he had a girlfriend who was referred to as ‘my model’. She was thirty years younger, and called Sybil Cotton, a beautiful red-haired woman whose devotion lasted up to his death twenty years later.

  Sometime in 1950 I called on Ronald Schlachter, and he took me around London for the day, and then home for a meal and to meet his father, a sympathetic and civilized person of German descent. Being told of my ambition as a writer, he encouraged me by saying it was a hard road to travel, but that I would no doubt succeed if I went on long enough, which at such a time was all I wanted to hear.

  I had sufficient energy for cycling, walking, and rowing on the Trent, determined at whatever cost never to act the sick man or the convalescent. The study of books on trees and flowers enabled me to name whatever I looked at, and there was nothing I liked better than roaming the woods and fields, often with my brother Michael. My knowledge and love of music, for which I seemed to have a good ear, increased all the time, and I went to many concerts at the local Albert Hall where first-class orchestras performed, sometimes talking my way by the doorman into rehearsals.

  Feeling the need for more varied company, I called now and again on my cousin Jack, who had been a friend almost since birth, and he was still the one sure thread with childhood. He did not see me perhaps as having changed too much, because he had always felt there was some difference between us. To vary my intense pursuit of culture I allowed him to talk me into joining the local yeomanry regiment, the South Nottinghamshire Hussars, and during my two months as a territorial soldier I put in one session at the rifle range, firing a few dozen rounds of my old favourite the Short Lee Enfield. On receiving notification from the barracks, addressed to Gunner A. Sillitoe, that I must take a medical examination before being formally accepted into the ranks, I assumed that the lack of a fully activated left lung could hardly allow an A1 classification, so let my membership drop. In any case, I had come to the conclusion that my joining days were over.

  Without apparent occupation, and with no intention of looking for one, having a pension made it seem like being on paid leave for ever. On my walks through the town I would pick up a Times Literary Supplement from a shop by the Mechanics Institute, and take delight in the number of reviews there seemed to be on books with classical themes.

  One morning I saw ‘Eddie the Tramp’, my uncle, coming out of the Empire Café opposite the newspaper offices carrying his bag of upholsterer’s tools. He wore the same mildewed cap and shabby raincoat, as if he had been born in them, but gave a welcoming smile at my greeting. The family saw him from time to time, and I had recently heard the story about him being warned off two young girls he had befriended. We talked for a while, and on asking if he needed any money he said no, because he was off to do a job and would get a quid or two there.

  Every ten or fourteen days I went to a chest clinic – a name I hated – to get the upper part of me pumped full of air so that the lung could, like its owner, continue the life of idleness to which both were now fairly accustomed. Home from an excursion one day my mother told me that a health visitor had been to the house, to check that I was living in suitable conditions. This social worker intrusion into my privacy so enraged me that I sent a blistering letter to say that one had better not call again, which had its effect because none did.

  In July a short story competition was held by the Nottingham Writers’ Club, and I entered one recently written called ‘The General’s Dilemma’, after shortening it to the stipulated length of two and a half thousand words. The judge was Ernest Ashley, a crime novelist who earned his living by writing. He gave it first prize, telling me it was so well written and original that nothing further need be done, and that I should try to get it published.

  The story was about a symphony orchestra sent by train to play to the troops behind the front during a war based very much on a future interminable conflict between the West and Soviet Russia. The orchestra is captured in a surprise offensive by an Eastern (or ‘Gorshek’) general, who has standing orders to kill all prisoners no matter what their status. He makes the mistake of demanding that the orchestra play for him, and afterwards can’t make up his mind whether or not to have them executed, hesitation which leads to his downfall.

  When The Green Hills of Malaya came back I sent it to another publisher. Shortly afterwards the Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian wrote to say that they had accepted ‘No Shot in the Dark�
��. The full-page story appeared on 26th August, and with the one-and-a-half guinea payment I bought a biscuit barrel as a wedding present for my sister Peggy.

  Though happy to have a story printed so early, I could not regard it as much of a success, since the venue was only local. I wanted to be published by newspapers and magazines in London, unable to realize how many years were to go by before such became possible. Nor did I care for the embarrassment of being known as a writer by the people of the district I lived in, and not entirely because an old school friend teased me at seeing my photograph boxed in the middle of the story and captioned: ‘The Author’. I wanted to travel, and obtain that detachment from such an environment which I knew to be necessary.

  I sent ‘The General’s Dilemma’ out several times, but with no success. Of many other stories nothing remains but their titles: ‘The Return of the Crave’, ‘Lucky to be Alive’, ‘The Queer Type’, ‘Dark Stairway’, and ‘The Last Compartment’. I tried my luck with a total of eighty items up to February 1951, after which I stopped taking note.

  Writing for writing’s sake, I had no set purpose beyond getting published, the only aim being to convince myself I was a writer, which was no great difficulty, since there was nothing else I could be, and to go on until readers thought the same. Small as my income was, I had no idea of earning a living by writing, though knew it would be pleasant to get money from it if I could. Having turned out a book-length manuscript about Malaya, I wanted to start on a novel, and saw nothing to deter me. World events of the time hardly impinged, though when the Korean War began on 25th June I was interested enough to follow the campaign on maps from the Madrolle guidebook Chine du Nord, picked up for a shilling at Frank Wore’s.