Life Without Armour

by Alan Sillitoe

  The wide valley was as empty as if no human had ever been there, the main peak of the island rising behind the sheer flank of the Sierra de Cuber to our left. A lone figure coming towards us during the next hour of our walk turned out to be a woman well into her seventies, who introduced herself as Lady Shepherd. ‘And who might you be?’ she asked with endearing hauteur. We gave our names, and on hearing mine she exclaimed: ‘Oh! And are you one of the Edinburgh Sillitoes?’ The answer was no, and on we went, passing the untenanted farmhouse of Cuber, then in the increasing oven-heat of the morning resting our feet in the cold blue water of the Gorch Blau.

  After the ten-hour walk we were glad of the one cell allotted to our group, there being no nonsense about asking for marriage lines, of which there wasn’t one between us. Ruth and Elizabeth went back next morning to Soller by bus and train, while Jim and I took the same route home through the mountains, walking sixty kilometres in two days.

  Our flat was the lower part of a house, and the science-fiction writer Mack Reynolds lived in the upper section with his wife Jeanette and their large Dalmatian dog Story – so named because he had been bought from the proceeds of one. The only fault of this otherwise amiable canine was his petomanic ability occasionally to convert the air around him – with a haughty expression of achievement on his dignified features – into a gas so foul that even he had to move away.

  Disciplined and industrious, Mack made a living from his yarns and articles, one of the latter, ‘How to Get Swacked on Fifty Cents’, being published in a down-market travel magazine. A big overweight man with a voice to match, every tread and chuckle was registered on our ceiling, but he was good company, full of jokes and anecdotes, telling us that when he was in the navy and first thought of becoming a writer he went into the public library and took out a book on how to make a career in that medium. The opening words of the book were: ‘If you are reading these words without moving your lips you too can become a writer.’ From then on, Mack said, all he had to do was read, and work.

  The way to the house was by a curving footpath up the hillside and, Mack and his friends being heavy drinkers, we would often see delivery men sweating up the contours with crates of liquor on their shoulders. A visitor to the Reynolds during July was Anthony Brett-James, whose book Report My Signals had been based on his wartime experiences with the Fourteenth Army in Burma. He was a director of Chatto and Windus, and when he showed interest in seeing my work I asked Rosica to send The Palisade. He didn’t like it, however, commenting that no service nurse would abscond with a seriously ill patient. Such an incident had in fact taken place during my stay at Wroughton. Nor did his firm want The General’s Dilemma or Mr Allen’s Island, though Brett-James thought both should be persevered with.

  Back at square one of the ludo game, I hardly knew what to do next, though Rosica’s encouragement never flagged, and she continued sending things out. On re-reading The General’s Dilemma and Mr Allen’s Island, after another publisher had rejected them, the truth was faced that they had not yet been sufficiently worked on, and I called them in. Sitting with pen and notebook one morning against an orange tree on the terrace below the house, I began to write a novel provisionally called The Adventures of Arthur Seaton.

  People went away in the autumn, and tourism almost ceased. Another winter was coming, with the expense of buying firewood to keep the main room heated. We had no newspapers or magazines, and at this time no radio nor, of course, television. Among the films we saw in the town was Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux, which had been so cut about by the censor as to be almost unintelligible. On long evenings after closing the shutters against the wind and the rain, and when supper was finished, Ruth and I sat by the fire and read. One could only write for so many hours out of the twenty-four, and books were our only solace.

  I told Rosica, in a letter dated October 21st:

  I may revise ‘The General’s Dilemma’ and ‘Mr Allen’s Island’ some time, perhaps when I have finished the second draft of a novel I am working on at the moment, which will be called ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’. The weather is variable and autumnal here, but we are already eating oranges off the trees. There are pomegranates and apples too, all of which make good fruit salads. But man doth not live by fruit alone, and I feel the need of an English library.

  We rarely went short of something to read, however. Major Pring-Mill, who had lost an arm in the Great War, and had served all through the Second, was generous in lending books from his collection of English novels, among which were the complete works of Trollope. Interested also in military history, I borrowed the three volumes of J.F.C. Fuller’s Decisive Battles of the Western World.

  The way to the Pring-Mills’ house was across the valley and along a dismal muddy lane, and on arrival the Major and his wife Nellie would offer sherry. We indicated small ones, but he put out tumblers and leaned over stiffly to fill them, sending us tottering home in the dark, careful not to drop his precious books.

  In our rented flat we found a copy of The Far Side of the Moon, published by Faber and Faber in 1947, with a preface by T.S. Eliot. The anonymous author described the brutal deportations of innocent Polish people from that part of Poland occupied by the Russians in 1939. Another revealing book, probably borrowed from the Pring-Mills, was Alex Weissberg’s Conspiracy of Silence, telling the story of his arrest and giving an account of the Moscow show trials in the 1930s. He was an Austrian national, and also Jewish, and after the Soviet–Nazi Pact in 1939 the Russians handed him over to the Germans. Fortunately he survived to write his testimony.

  To pass the long evenings we read aloud to each other. Ruth entertained me with various Gothic novels, such as Rasselas, The Castle of Otranto and Beckford’s Vathek, and I responded with a performance through several weeks of The Confessions of an English Opium Eater by De Quincey. This extended recitation reinforced the belief that ‘good English is clear English’, and gave a feeling for the language not so vividly received from eye contact or by listening. The cadences of style became apparent enough to help improve my prose, a revelation which could no doubt have come sooner with a nineteenth-century education in the Latin and Greek classics.

  Reading my work aloud was a way of ensuring that it had the fluidity and clarity of good English. Care had always been taken, but more ruthlessness was now shown in picking out the number of repetitions on a page, at spotting unnecessary words, scratching out tautologies, getting rid of clichés, eliminating what was implied rather than plainly stated, and striving to achieve simplicity even in the descriptions of complicated thought processes – in using the techniques of poetry perhaps to write prose.

  Clear English could be enriched by idiomatic or personal quirks as long as they fitted in with the narrative and echoed my inner voice, the way things sounded to me even before I had a pen in my hand. These observations are elementary, and had been half consciously noted already, such a standard of writing sometimes coming by inspiration, as was evident in many of my stories. Much in my novels was careless and slipshod, however, and the only remedy was constant ice-cold application.

  During this long winter it became obvious that I had not been working hard enough on style: every word, every phrase, every sentence – in every story and on every page of a novel – had to be broken up and then knitted together again so that no loopholes in the prose remained.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  The only luxury allowed, which did for both of us, was a large domestic wireless set, with glowing valves and a good spread of short-wave. The cost of a pound a month melted into the total expenditure of seventeen pounds ten shillings on which we had to live, possible because a check was kept on every peseta that came in, and on every centimo spent. Account books show that the monthly outlay on food was about nine pounds, while two went on tobacco and drink, and a little more than that on postage. Putting aside a pound for rent, the rest was spread across general household expenses.

  We economized on everything, and wasted not
hing. Magazines or newspapers no longer needed were exchanged weight for weight for charcoal to heat water for coffee in the morning and cook the evening meal. Firemaking was my job, and I could bring a kettle to the boil with charcoal as quickly as a gas stove could have done it. Bleach and wood ash were used for cleaning, and esparto grass as a brush for washing up, always in cold water. A geyser system gave heat for showers, however, so comfort was by no means absent.

  It was remarkable how clothes could last if you slopped around all summer in shorts and a shirt, or even with nothing on above the waist. Ruth’s aunt in America sent a dark suit for me which needed little work from a local tailor to make it fit, and was formal enough to wear at a film première some years later.

  During the Christmas season, and into 1956, a young American writer, Nancy Warshaw (later Bogen) would take refuge with us on days when her house on the outer confines of the valley became almost uninhabitable in the damp and gloomy weather. She cheered our lives with New York humour, and laughter at what she called my ‘jungle stories’, later saying she had seen me in those days as being a potentially violent character – the only point of dispute between us.

  In February nearly a foot of snow covered the island, and from the terrace below we picked huge navel oranges thinly coated with ice, delicious to eat but even more so for their cold sweet juice. The landlord let us take as many as we liked, since they would rot anyway when they fell, so that however bad the winter, there was plenty of vitamin C.

  When a publisher sent back The Palisade – after much consideration, it was said – Rosica posted it somewhere else, and intended trying another firm should it come back from there. As long as I kept working there would be typescripts to send out, and as long as things were being sent out I couldn’t lose hope, and as long as there was hope my optimism enabled me to continue working.

  The wireless kept us informed on what was happening in the world, though it didn’t seem to be much, for I was as adept as I should have been at slinging an aerial to get all kinds of foreign stations. At eight thirty one evening a melancholy tune played across the aether, and on listening to the news in English which followed I learned that it was the Ha-Tikva – the national anthem of Israel, coming from Kol Zion Lagola in Jerusalem.

  Tuning in to the same station from then on, I learned something of what modern life was like in the Holy Land. Every day there were murderous raids across its borders from Arab countries, who were determined to destroy it. Israel was in the same situation as Great Britain in 1940, except that for Israel the threat seemed to be permanent. The announcer of Kol Zion invited listeners to send reports of their transmitter’s strength, and on posting a detailed wireless operator’s assessment I received a monthly magazine of news and comment.

  I was requested to attend the military hospital in Gibraltar for another medical board, and arrived there on 29th February. During a haircut and shave in Algeciras the barber assumed I was native to the Balearic Islands, my Spanish accent sounding merely provincial, no longer English or entirely foreign.

  My time in the hospital ward seemed much longer than three days, taking me vividly back to the RAF time. To National Service soldiers in the ward I was the older man, and they assumed I was able to answer all their questions. On admitting I was a writer one of the swaddies in his dressing-gown came to my bed with some verses he had written. Unfortunately they were no good, but I told him to keep on writing. I did some shopping while on the Rock, and returned to Soller with kippers, bacon and English tobacco. News came a few weeks later that my pension would continue until further notice.

  A friend sent us A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, and I began the 600 page anthology at random by reading a tale of Israel Joshua Singer’s called ‘Sand’, set in the Jewish village of Podgurna on the banks of the Vistula in nineteenth-century Russia. Aaron, a travelling ritual slaughterer recently widowed, is invited to lodge at the Rabbi’s house, in which he seduces the daughter who becomes pregnant. When the fact can no longer be concealed, the pair are married, though not before the whole community has come together in uproar to make sure the matter is put right. A further strand of the story takes us through four seasons, and tells of how the settlement acquires its own burial ground, no longer having to use the one in the next village which is slightly more prosperous, and whose charges the people of Podgurna can barely afford.

  Strange as it may seem I felt some connection between the poor of these Yiddish stories and those I had grown up with, as if I had half known such people before. The style of writing was in some way responsible, but I also learned that in a story much can be told between the A of the beginning and the Z of the conclusion, the kind of detail which, though not apparently relevant, becomes so in the completed work, and is all the richer for being written in an unhurried, meandering and therefore more human way. This is one method by which the author of ‘Sand’ gives reality to the lives of those who lead such hard and uncertain lives. Though the people in Nottingham were not Jewish, and did not therefore have the same passionate belief in their religion and its ethics (nor, of course, the ever present peril from physical persecution), their sense of humour, ability to endure and, flexible attitudes to the minutiae of life, showed some similarity. It was impossible to be unmoved on reading Isaac Bashevis Singer: ‘The Jew never looked askance at the deserter who crept into a cellar or attic while armies clashed in the streets outside,’ something with which my mother would certainly have agreed.

  The anthology also contained such masterpieces of the short story as ‘Kola Street’, ‘Repentance’, ‘White Chalah’ and ‘Competitors’. Poor people have vivid lives and suffer much (though not, once they can afford to eat, more than other people) and one has to write about their tribulations and follies as if one loves them. Every person is a unique individual, and no writer should generalize, or classify people into any kind of political or sociological group, something doubly confirmed by those classics of Yiddish literary art.

  Early in 1956 we met the Swedish film actress Ulla Jacobsson, famous for her recent performance in Smiles of a Summer Night. She was a quiet, tense and beautiful young woman who, when in the Soller valley, was probably as much at ease as she ever could be. Her husband was the Dutch artist Frank Lodeizen and, with Nancy, the five of us were to become good friends, though I contested Frank’s assertion when we got on to political topics that the Royal Air Force during the war had never really tried to bomb the Krupp works at Essen because too many British capitalists had shares in the firm.

  During our half drunken and hilarious sessions we devised a religion based on the worship of Globoes, enormous coloured tissue-paper lighter-than-air balloons acquired at the local stationers’. Some, shaped like pigs or other animals, were popular for sending aloft at fiestas or birthdays. Before launching, the Globo had to be opened as far as possible by hand, so that a wad of cotton wool soaked in alcohol could be tied to the wire frame of the opening and lit.

  The shape slowly filled with hot air and, when it was released, began to ascend and drift majestically across the valley at a height of several hundred feet. Ruth and I wrote ‘The Globo Anthem’, and a one-act ritualistic play to be performed on the Globo Sabbath before each series of balloons was released, the Globo Sabbath being any day the five of us felt like getting together over a bottle or two of champagne.

  In our talk one evening Ulla said that if I wrote a script for her to act in she would get me an advance of a thousand marks from Germany, even if the film company never made it, so anxious were they to keep her under contract. I did not know the technique of writing a script, but she said it could be done as a short novel, so in a few weeks I gave her The Bandstand.

  The germ of the story, rescued from The Palisade, which had been put away as unsaleable, was about a young Swedish woman who falls in love with a consumptive Englishman living with his wife on the Côte d’Azur. The bandstand of the town, where they first meet, becomes a symbol of their (necessarily doomed) association, various events
leading to a dramatic and bloody climax on the festival of the Fifteenth of August. Ulla, to my surprise, saw it as a satisfactory blueprint for her talent, and the film company wrote to me after a while to say they would shortly be making an offer.

  In May we left the hillside and went back to Maria Mayol’s house in the town, taking a flat on the third floor, the rear terrace still giving the panoramic expanse of mountain that we had come to expect. I worked much of that year on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, stitching the narrative together by ploughing in a dozen Nottingham stories which seemed to concern the main character, or to amplify the background before which he performed, some of the stories and sketches having been written as long as five years ago.

  This creative process, if it can be defined as such, was recalled on seeing Benvenuto Cellini at Covent Garden a few years later, though I’m not sure the incident so brilliantly highlighted by Berlioz is in the famous Autobiography, which was my favourite reading for a time. My thoughts about the book might echo those of William Beckford who, on seeing the Perseus statue in Florence, wrote that ‘Cellini has ever occupied a distinguished place in my kalender of genius.’

  In the opera the all-powerful Pope is waiting impatiently for the statue of ‘Perseus and the Gorgon’s Head’ which he has long since paid for. Visiting the atelier, he threatens the sculptor with hanging if he doesn’t produce the work immediately. Cellini finds that he doesn’t have enough metal to finish, and to get out of the impasse rushes around the studio snatching up smaller pieces already done and feeding them into the furnace. Thus the ‘Perseus’ appears, welcomed by Pope, workmen, and the artist himself of course, with great enthusiasm, a dazzling climax to the opera. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was constructed after much the same fashion, the Pope in my case being the spectre of poverty should my pension come to an end.