Life Without Armour

by Sillitoe, Alan;

  Brought up as a Roman Catholic – one of his sisters was a nun – he was militantly anti-religion, which occasionally made his talk tedious. Later in Spain he took some interest in church affairs even if only, from his insider’s knowledge, to say more outrageous things about it. While still in France, he seemed much bemused by the fact that I was re-reading the Jewish Scriptures – from a Bible given to me at school.

  Dorothy, a dark-haired bird-like woman ten years younger than John, had written a novel, yet bitterly resented his extravagance in spending the enormous sum of sixty pounds to have his library sent from London. Apart from John’s pension, extra income came from letting out rooms of their house in Kensington.

  My allowance was sometimes late coming through, and the food intake had to be reduced. Ruth would send, illegally, an emergency pound note rolled in a New Statesman, or I would get food on credit from a small shop on the main road, rather surprised that they trusted me. By the middle of December I had no stationery, and used the backs of bookjackets to write a story called ‘Canning Circus’, later to become part of a chapter in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.

  John and Dorothy, who lived in a rented flat, were friendly with a Russian-born man called Nick Nicholas, and his English wife Muriel. They took in boarders, and I had Christmas dinner there, paying the same nominal fee as the residents, enjoying my first glasses of vodka. Muriel had written a novel about her pre-war college life in England, which had a vaguely lesbian theme. Nick was in his fifties, a naturalized Englishman, of medium height and with steely blue eyes, who had spent twenty years as an officer in the Merchant Navy. He made violins as a hobby in a workshop behind the house, and drove a large black Jaguar.

  He gave me his memoirs to read (everyone seemed to be writing or to have written a book) and in the chapters about life in Odessa before the Revolution I found certain passages questionable because they implied that the Jews of that time had left Russia voluntarily and not as a result of pogroms, and that the pogroms had in any case been greatly exaggerated. This I knew to be different, and John to his credit thought the same, though in saying so our remarks were brushed aside with a sly kind of humour.

  Meanwhile in my solitude at Le Nid I read George Eliot’s novels, and went slowly through the single volume edition of Frazer’s Golden Bough, while François Mauriac’s Thérèse left me depressed. In almost every letter to Ruth I tried to persuade her to come back and live with me, but already in December I was thinking of going to Majorca, the Tarrs having left for Barcelona on their way there.

  Ilse Steinhoff wrote to say that Carrefour wanted stories dealing with football, so I sent ‘The Match’, saved from the flames before leaving England. Around this time I wrote ‘The Criminals’, about a woman in Nottingham taking a hot bath and drinking gin in order to get an abortion.

  By January 1953 seven stories, six poems and a novel were going the rounds, efforts which filled me with sufficient expectation to go on writing. Three stories were to become part of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning some years later, and these, I knew, had a surer touch of style than much of the other writing, as well as possessing that ‘slice of life’ which my Uncle Frederick had said my work must have before editors would show any interest. The themes were close to the people I had lived among, but about whom I felt as if looking across a deep chasm, at an existence which Fate had steered me away from. The rest of my writing, necessarily persisted in, was a cul de sac, but one in which accumulated a mass of material as humus out of which my true voice would eventually emerge, though I was not to know that at the time.

  The last four months in Menton were a rollercoaster of misery and elation. On dank late autumn and winter evenings I sat in my warm and shuttered living room, well fed after supper, smoking contentedly, and reading, or writing at something or other. When the wind was still, silence was complete, sooner or later disturbed by the purr of the cat on her jumping to my knees, the scratch of my pen, the turn to a new page, or an involuntary cough from myself, otherwise a room void of sound – until the newly rising wind was strong enough to shake the trees in the olive grove. For a year I heard no music, a malnutrition of the soul unrealized at the time, but in all respects it was ever true, as Robert Burton wrote in his incomparable The Anatomy of Melancholy, that ‘fishes pine away for love and wax lean,’ and ‘love tyrannizeth in dumb creatures’.

  Despair that struck would be made plain in the current letter to Ruth, but the tone was generally softened by the end. Stuck in a box in the middle of nowhere, and hardly knowing why, I was more alive than I had ever been, because that was where I lived and where I had no alternative except to be. Ruth was my lifeline, and suffered an avalanche of nearly eighty letters spilling from a rite of passage which, like all Fate’s turns of the wheel, was known to be necessary, and certainly not wasted – as one sees afterwards that nothing ever is.

  Ruth did not know when she would be able to come back, so having money for my fare after weeks of frugality, I decided to go to Majorca. John and Dorothy Tarr, installed in a fully furnished villa for six pounds a month near the port of Soller, advised me to move there as well, since living was half the cost of France.

  Hard to say how it happened, but there wasn’t enough luggage to hold all my goods, so I borrowed tools from the concierge and made a large wooden chest, complete with locks and handles. It was a job I enjoyed, thinking I might at last have inherited something from my clever-handed father. Apart from this, I had a steamer trunk, a large pigskin suitcase bought in Malaya, my faithful Remington typewriter, and Nell in her box to be carried by hand. For some reason I was unable to leave her behind.

  Having secured a Spanish visa in Nice, I trundled my belongings downhill to the station in the same way that they had come up. I walked out of a clean house, and left Menton owing nothing, closing the door on memories I preferred to forget. A final visit to the doctor showed my weight to be 130lbs, even less than when I came out of the jungle.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  On the evening of Thursday 28 January 1953, at the age of twenty-four – such facts are important as the underpinnings of an otherwise slipping by of time – I left on the all-night express for Spain. In my raincoat pocket was Baedeker’s Mediterranean, 1911, sent by Ruth some weeks before. Having lived four months alone, and being again on the move, the feeling of adventure barely outdid the flutter of uncertainty as to what would be found on arrival. After the frontier the train went at a slower speed, but time passed in talk on all topics (including religion) with an amiable and bespectacled priest who knew some English, though we conversed mainly in French.

  A phthisical-looking man at the station in Barcelona transported my goods by handcart to the wharf, for which work I paid him well, since the taxi drivers considered my handmade chest too big and heavy for their dilapidated vehicles. Sixty-five pesetas at the shipping office secured a third-class berth on the Rey Jaime Primero. After wandering a while around the Old Town I sat down to a plate of paella and a bottle of wine at a workmen’s café, and talked the bartender into providing a saucer of bread and milk for Nell in her box. By nine o’clock I was asleep in my bunk, crossing the calm Balearic Sea to Palma. At half past six the dawn was chilly, and Majorca seemed to be sliding by the ship like some new geological world emerging from the womb of creation. The light of Dragonera winked on the western tip, and a blue tinge in the east made the summit-line of the mountains more and more distinct, the dark sea lightening into dull green, deep yellow, then orange, until a spread of sun above the horizon showed houses along the shore in sharper detail. A few soldiers who had spent the night on deck shivered in their drab khaki, and the ship’s engines were so quiet it might almost have been pushed along by the current alone. Such a palpable new day went deep into my spirit, and the endpapers of Ruth’s copy of The Knapsack were covered with notes.

  A taxi took me by the cathedral, and up the main avenue to the station for Soller, a town twenty miles north through the mountains. The ticket clerk,
a tall good-looking young man with fair hair and brown eyes, spoke some English, and proudly brought out the grammar he was studying, which had as its bookmark a postcard from a girl in England called Kitty. Helped by a packet of Chesterfields bought at the frontier, we talked for a while, until he registered my heavy baggage, charging only half price, and installed me with the rest into the waiting carriage.

  The train toy-trumpeted between acres of almond trees in white bloom, and soon the foothills drew us into a long tunnel under the island’s watershed. Elbowing down to Soller through cuttings and shorter tunnels, wide views revealed a large valley sheltered by mountains except for an opening to the sea on the north-west, the north-eastern side blocked by the main peak of Majorca rising to 4,739 feet. At lower levels fragrant air from lemon and orange trees came through open windows till the train hooted between the backs of houses and drew into the little station. Waiting for a tram to take me two miles to the port, a woman came out of the pork butcher’s with a household chair for me to sit on.

  The Tarrs invited me to stay at the Villa Catalina, paying my share of food and general expenses. The room John used for his library had a table I could write at, though my first days passed in walking the beach and exploring the byways of the valley.

  Two letters from Ruth were waiting, as well as one from the Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian requesting a couple of articles about Majorca. Notification also came from the BBC to say they would like me to go to London and read my talk ‘Kedah Peak’ on the wireless, for a fee of eighteen guineas. I had sent it to them as little more than a forlorn hope, and was encouraged by what seemed my first real acceptance. The promised payment was more than I had so far been offered, but because it would barely cover my return fare to London and a night or two in a hotel I asked for the piece to be held till I had other reasons to go there.

  I continued studying French, made a desultory attempt at Spanish, and started a notebook on the Majorcan dialect. John, with his quick and flexible mind, was endlessly zestful at unravelling the meanings and derivations of words in almost any language, causing a lot of discussion. Knowing that an understanding of Romance languages would enable my own to be more thoroughly comprehended, I tackled a novel by Simenon, and translated poems by Verlaine and Baudelaire. I also read, though as yet in English, Proust and Stendhal.

  At the British Consulate in Palma I obtained the name of a doctor, and arranged payment for the pneumothorax refills, which system made me a private patient with my own waiting room. The nurse, Francesca, was so attractive and charming that I in no way objected to being looked on as a gentleman-invalid sent out by doting parents from England to recover health and strength in a supposedly more benign climate.

  Despite my easygoing attitude to the tuberculosis that had undoubtedly been more positive than it was now, there was always the possibility that, if I didn’t take care, symptoms would reappear and, with insidious speed, reduce me to a state of real illness. For some weeks there had been snow on the surrounding mountains, and the valley of Soller was dull and cold from continual rain. Heating at the house came from a small woodstove in the living room, and I was plagued by one cold after another, each with an ominous cough that made my good lung also feel somewhat sluggish. Tests which the doctor gave showed that my blood sediment rate had gone up to twelve from almost nothing since leaving France. This was a bad sign, he said, but added with a smile that it was sure to go down once the good weather came, which it in fact did. Fortunately my instinct and self-indulgence coincided so neatly as to suppress all worry.

  My articles for the Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian described Majorca as being fifty years behind the times, a place where one could live on little because rents were cheap, decent wine was sixpence a pint, and tobacco twopence an ounce. The people were honest and hardworking, and there was little or no poverty, the island being blessed with much fertile land and a fairly short winter – most of which was true enough. A short piece printed in the Scribe later in the year, about a car trip over the hills to Palma, was my last publication for some time.

  At the Villa Catalina I worked desultorily on The Deserters, and talked with John about our writing an up-to-date guidebook for foreign visitors, a project which never got beyond the synopsis. The only available map of the island was a rudimentary one for tourists. Proper survey maps were unobtainable, which proved, if proof was needed, that Spain was an undemocratic country, since a refusal to sell large-scale topographical maps to ordinary people signified a fundamental lack of other human rights. During the worst of the weather I enlarged an existing map to a scale of 1:50,000, on four big sheets which were fitted together after John had scripted in the place names. Details were added from the map in Baedeker, and I also put in data from my own explorations.

  One afternoon, with not so much as a knock on the door, a stout priest in full canonicals entered the house, followed by several altar boys decked out in white surplices. To John’s anti-Catholic consternation they began intoning a hymn of blessing for the place, the priest swinging a heavily smoking censer which sent fumes into every room. All John could say when they left was thank you, but I think he was rather pleased about it, even while saying he was glad to have wasted their time.

  A poem I wrote called ‘Carthage’ was suggested by a few lines in my Baedeker, but more time was spent on a several-page sequence called ‘Toni Moreno’. He was a character in one of the Majorcan folk songs I had translated, and I turned him into a mixture of Adonis and Don Juan who was unable to draw back from his fate.

  On Saturday nights the Tarrs and myself went to a hotel at the port and watched the spectacle of the Soller folklore group Brot de Taronger (Branch of Oranges). Maria and Catalina, the star dancers, did a thrilling Maenadic version of the Jota Mallorquina, arms out full length as if in ecstasy, and long skirts swirling just high enough to show white stockings and give a glimpse of their cotton drawers.

  The tunes had some Moorish or perhaps Jewish influence, and I learned the words to their songs so as to translate them into English, terms I wasn’t sure about being explained in Spanish by Andreu or Gaspar Nadal, the directors of the group.

  John, a man of many parts, sat at a piano by the bar after the performance and hammered out tunes from Tosca or La Bohème, as well as traditional English songs. Instead of sand falling through a glass to keep account of time we had bottles of wine or brandy, which often saw us still there at two in the morning, though with only a few hundred yards between us and the house.

  We became friendly with an itinerant middle-aged scholar who came to Soller to work on a book about Nietzsche and ‘The Will to Power’. John, in a bullish mood, would drag him down in ferocious argument on the ethics of such a project, and of what he thought of Nietzsche in general, at which I sat on the sidelines till boredom drove me away.

  An amiable streak in both men let them forget their controversies on Shrove Tuesday Eve, and the four of us went by tram to see the fiesta-like goings-on in the town. We found seats in a crowded café, and I danced with one or two of the pretty local girls, atlotas in the island language, otherwise I sat at the table smoking and drinking, and writing a poem sent unrevised in a letter to Ruth the following day:

  Coloured lanterns hang like moments

  That will not fall in a lifetime,

  Rainbows in a pre-Lent room

  And full moons lighting up

  The split of a saxophone and a honkey-tonk

  Piano beating out the rudiments of doom.

  Nubility like low-power beacons

  Waiting to be danced out of the corners,

  And blue flames in cups

  Charmed upon the tables

  By the trumpets in a paradise flare:

  And confetti like a worn out smile

  Winks in a woman’s hair.

  Quasi-philosophical and literary discussions, of the sort heated by wine, took place between John, the Nietzsche scholar and myself. Their range was as wide as civilization seemed to be long, and cou
ld have gone on for ever without resolving anything. Occasionally losing them in the tentacles of convoluted speculation, I fell back behind the palisade of my own basic tenets, which convinced me that creativity and intellect need not go together, that talk was one thing and writing another, and that Art promised to be more effective when unencumbered by theoretical baggage.

  Parallel to the pursuit of a voice peculiar to myself, which blind faith told me must be sought, was the more compatible approach, and this suggested that the longer I went on, the more certain was an aesthetic system to show in my work, if it was necessary that one should be there at all. Continual striving and practice was the only way forwards, during which any originality of structure or content would build itself in more effectively than by conscious artifice.

  A string of fine days seemed to indicate that winter was over, and during an afternoon of balmy and inspiring breezes I wrote ‘Mr Raynor’, about a teacher at my old school who used to sit on his high stool and, rather than give attention to the rowdy uneducable twelve-year-olds before him, look out of the window and across the road at buxom young women serving in a draper’s shop. The story was set off by a line from Baudelaire’s poem ‘Les Métamorphoses du Vampire’, which kept going through my mind: ‘Timide et libertine, et fragile et robuste.’

  I thought it obvious that such so-called ‘Nottingham stories’ lacked nothing of the standard and interest for publication, and when ‘Mr Raynor’ was rejected I merely assumed it was a matter of the roulette dice not dropping into the right place to produce its modest jackpot. The engines of hope were fully churning, and it seemed that the future could not be anything but better than the present, of which in any case, even with the anxiety that came of living from hand to mouth, I had little to complain about.