The Penguin Book of the British Short Story

by Philip Hensher

  ‘For goodness’ sake, girl, I don’t have your passport! What would I want with your passport? It’s probably in a drawer in the kitchen somewhere. Is that my job now, too, to look for your things?’

  Fatou was left alone. She packed her things into the decoy shopping bags she usually took to the swimming pool. While she was doing this, someone pushed her passport under her door. An hour later she carried her bags downstairs and went directly to the phone in the hall. Faizul walked by and lifted his hand for a high-five. Fatou ignored him and dialled Andrew’s number. From her friend’s voice she knew that she had woken him, but he was not even the slightest bit angry. He listened to all she had to say and seemed to understand, too, without her having to say so, that at this moment she could not speak freely. After she had said her part, he asked a few quick technical questions and then explained clearly and carefully what was to happen.

  ‘It will all be OK. They need cleaners in my offices – I will ask for you. In the meantime, you come here. We’ll sleep in shifts. You can trust me. I respect you, Fatou.’

  But she did not have her Oyster Card; it was in the kitchen, on the fridge under a magnet of Florida, and she would rather die than go in there. Fine: he could meet her at six p.m. at Brondesbury Overground station. Fatou looked at the grandfather clock in front of her: she had four hours to kill.

  ‘Six o’clock,’ she repeated. She put the phone down, took the rest of the guest passes from the drawer of the faux-Louis XVI console and left the house.

  ‘Weighed down a bit today,’ the girl at the desk of the health club said, nodding at Fatou’s collection of plastic bags. Fatou held out a guest pass for a stamp and did not smile. ‘See you next time,’ this same girl said, an hour and a half later, as Fatou strode past, still weighed down and still unwilling to be grateful for past favours. Gratitude was just another kind of servitude. Better to make your own arrangements.

  Walking out into the cold grey, Fatou felt a sense of brightness, of being washed clean, that neither the weather nor her new circumstances could dim. Still, her limbs were weary and her hair was wet; she would probably catch a cold, waiting out here. It was only four thirty. She put her bags on the pavement and sat down next to them, just by the bus stop opposite the Embassy of Cambodia. Buses came and went, slowing down for her and then jerking forward when they realized that she had no interest in getting up and on. Many of us walked past her that afternoon, or spotted her as we rode the bus, or through the windscreens of our cars, or from our balconies. Naturally, we wondered what this girl was doing, sitting on the damp pavement in the middle of the day. We worried for her. We tend to assume the worst, here in Willesden. We watched her watching the shuttlecock. Pock, smash. Pock, smash. As if one player could imagine only a violent conclusion and the other only a hopeful return.

  Author Biographies

  P. G. WODEHOUSE (1881–1975) was one of the most prolific, popular and original English novelists of the twentieth century. The child of old English gentry, he spent most of his childhood in boarding schools. He was unable to go to Oxford because of a fall in the value of the Indian rupee. A brief and unsuccessful period working for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank was followed by writing columns, stories for boys, and novels. A trip to New York left a lasting mark and encouraged him to develop his writing in the direction of musical comedies. In 1914, Wodehouse married a daunting woman named Ethel, and from the end of the Great War onwards, amassed colossal popularity and an immense fortune. They lived in France until captured by invading German forces, who interned him in concentration camps before releasing him and persuading him to make comic radio talks from Berlin. There were calls for him to be hanged as a traitor from wartime Britain, to which he never returned. He was given an honorary doctorate by Oxford University and, in 1975, shortly before his death, a knighthood.

  ‘MALACHI’ (MARJORIE) WHITAKER (1895–1976) was the daughter of a Bradford bookbinder. She wrote energetically from an early age, though most of her early work is lost; an early novel fell overboard from a channel steamer. She married Leonard Whitaker, a businessman, and adopted two children, saying later that ‘the only physical result of our union was that I was left with the itch’. She began to write under her pen name in 1926, and subsequently published four collections of short stories and an extraordinary autobiography, And So Did I, in 1939. After this, she announced her retirement from writing and published nothing else new for her remaining thirty-seven years.

  JACK COMMON (1903–68) was the son of a Newcastle engine driver. From intermittent casual employment, he acquired a reputation as a powerful debater in socialist causes. He was encouraged by John Middleton Murry at The Adelphi, of which he ultimately became the editor. Primarily an essayist and polemicist, he retained a strong interest in working-class voices. After the war, he worked as a screenplay writer, but never made a living. He had to work at a mushroom nursery in the 1950s, despite publishing two impressive and much-praised autobiographies. By the end of his life, his views of class conflict were so out of fashion as to make him unpublishable.

  ELIZABETH BOWEN (1899–1973) was born of an old Anglo-Irish family, in Ireland, but grew up in Hythe. In 1923, she married Alan Cameron, an educational administrator. Their marriage was unconsummated. She started to publish fiction in 1923. In 1933, she embarked on an affair with the Oxford don Humphry House. That and subsequent affairs, with Sean O’Faolain and May Sarton, fed into her novels and fiction of emotional trauma and rejection. In 1952, she and Alan moved to her ancestral home, Bowen’s Court, where he died. Afterwards, Bowen had a stretch of success as a literary hostess before having to sell the house to a local farmer, who demolished it.

  EVELYN WAUGH (1903–66) was the son of a Hampstead publisher. His elder brother, Alec, was also a novelist. A legendarily disgraceful undergraduate career led to a period teaching boys in an awful boarding school, interspersed with Bright Young Things debauchery in London. His first novels, brilliant farces, were written during a brief marriage to a woman also called Evelyn. Subsequent novels darkened and showed the influence of a profound Roman Catholic faith. With his second wife, Laura, he had six children. He was a celebrated wit and practical joker who was generally found grossly offensive in person. In later years, he lived as an English country gentleman in a form so exaggerated many people concluded it was meant as a joke; he required tailors to make suits from cloth previously reserved for flat caps. He had an appalling war, having to be removed from frontline service in case one of his men took the opportunity to shoot him in the back. Drug-fuelled delirium provided him with the theme of a great late novella, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. He died at home in the lavatory on Easter Sunday, shortly after having received Communion in the old rite. The reforms of the Second Vatican Council had partly estranged him from his chosen church.

  JAMES HANLEY (1901–85) was born in Dublin but moved with his family to Liverpool at the age of seven. At twelve he left school and joined the merchant navy, enlisting in the army and working as a docker and on the railway or on the racecourse from the late 1920s. His novels began to be published in 1930. His second novel, Boy, was the subject of prosecution for obscenity and defended by E. M. Forster. He was prolific, and his work was so bleak that it never found popularity among readers, although he was regarded with considerable respect by his peers.

  T. H. WHITE (1906–64) was born in Bombay, and had a traumatic childhood. His alcoholic father and the furious beatings laid on at his public school made their mark on his adult personality. He became a schoolmaster at the newly founded Stowe School before retreating to ‘a feral state’ in a rural cottage. His adult novels were succeeded by the first in a Malory-influenced tetralogy, The Sword in the Stone. He moved to Ireland during the war, and, to avoid taxation, to Alderney afterwards. Financial success because of the Broadway musical Camelot and the animated Disney film The Sword in the Stone brought White misery, and he died alone on board ship in Piraeus. His friends concede that he was a sexual sadist, but furi
ously deny that he could have been homosexual.

  LESLIE HALWARD (1905–76) was of working-class origins, born in Birmingham. He left school at fifteen, and worked as a toolmaker, labourer and plasterer before starting to write stories for magazines and for the BBC, as well as radio plays. His autobiography, Let Me Tell You (1938), tells of a passion for music. It was written shortly after Halward married his wife Gwen, after a long engagement, and describes how they moved into a house called O Providence, after a novel by his best man, John Hampson, a fellow member of the Birmingham Group of writers.

  JULIAN MACLAREN-ROSS (1912–64), immortalized as ‘X Trapnel’ in his friend Anthony Powell’s sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, has come to be synonymous with the bohemian culture of Soho and Fitzrovia in the 1940s and 1950s. He was the son of a gentleman ‘of independent means’ and lived in France as a child. Having run through any inherited money, he worked as a vacuum-cleaner salesman. His stories and plays were accepted by the BBC and Cyril Connolly’s Horizon. Military service ended with imprisonment for absence without leave, and subsequent apotheosis as a Soho dandy in white suit and silver-topped cane. His Memoirs of the Forties, assembled after his early death by Alan Ross, offers an unparalleled view of the time and place.

  ALUN LEWIS (1915–44) was the son of a Glamorgan schoolmaster. After university in Aberystwyth and Manchester, he became a schoolmaster himself before joining the army in 1940. He married in 1941 before being posted to India. There, he fell in love with a Freda Aykroyd. In March 1944, shortly before the start of his first patrol against the Japanese, he shot himself.

  ‘HENRY GREEN’ (HENRY YORKE) (1905–73) was a patrician novelist who created one of the most extraordinary and original prose styles in the English language. After school and Oxford, where he was reputed to have seen two different films every day for two years, he worked on the factory floor of the family engineering works, Pontifex and Sons, in Birmingham. He wrote his novels unobtrusively, during his lunch hour. His first novel, Blindness (1926), was written while still at school. The eight novels and volume of autobiography that followed establish him as an experimental modernist. He took up a post as a fireman during the London Blitz, and claimed once to have entered a burning house to discover a young woman ignoring the conflagration around in favour of sexual congress with an Alsatian. After Doting (1952), he wrote no more novels, instead concentrating on heavy drinking in and around his Belgravia house, where he was often mistaken for a derelict.

  SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER (1893–1978) was the daughter of a Harrow schoolmaster, and became a musicologist of high accomplishment. Friendship with David Garnett and T. F. Powys led to the publication of her first poems and a novel, Lolly Willowes. In 1930, she met and fell in love with the poet Valentine Ackland. The two women lived together in Dorset for the rest of their lives, where Valentine was often mistaken for a man by the slower inhabitants of the county. They were devoted to advanced causes, and travelled together to Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War to work for the Red Cross. Sylvia had a long association with the New Yorker, which published many of her short stories. The startling differences between the style, subject and effect of her eight novels has sometimes confused readers, during her life and subsequently.

  W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM (1875–1965) had a stammer in youth, and learned French (perfectly) and German (imperfectly, in Heidelberg, where he was first seduced by a man). He qualified as a doctor, but immediately published a modestly successful novel, and gave up medical practice. His first major success was a play, Lady Frederick. From then until 1933, he concentrated on the theatre, developing a parallel career as a successful novelist, often on imperial themes, from Of Human Bondage (1915) onwards. He amused his contemporaries greatly by marrying a woman, Syrie Wellcome (née Barnardo) in 1917. They divorced in 1929, after which Maugham settled down in the South of France with a succession of heavily drinking queens of doubtful temperament. Sometimes guests, observing handsome naked boys swimming in the pool at the Villa Mauresque, were surprised to be handed a note on a silver salver by the butler, reading in Maugham’s hand, ‘You may look, but you may not touch’. His latter days were darkened by an inadvertently hilarious memoir, in which he pretended to be heterosexual, and by the constant presence of his sponging nephew Robin Maugham, memorably described by Patrick White as resembling ‘a wizened cow’s twat’.

  ROALD DAHL (1916–90) was born in Glamorgan, the son of prosperous Norwegians. He was damaged by his father’s early death and by a brutal regime at his public school. An adventurous early life travelling to Newfoundland and Tanganyika culminated in a wartime career in the Royal Air Force in Africa. Dahl’s romantic accounts of RAF life, often inaccurate in detail, led to an unusual friendship with F. D. Roosevelt. His bizarre and often cruel stories were widely read. In 1953, Dahl married Patricia Neal, the film actress. Their family life had tragic aspects, including a son whose skull was smashed at four months (Dahl invented a life-saving medical pump) and a daughter who died at seven. In 1967, he turned to writing books for children, starting with James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, much disapproved of by the establishment of children’s literature. He also wrote the script for the best of all James Bond movies, You Only Live Twice. Stories of his deliberate offensiveness, experienced at first hand, abound.

  L. A. G. STRONG (1896–1958) was the son of a professional Devon family. He suffered from poor health, which interrupted his education. A career as a schoolmaster continued until the success of his first published novel. Thereafter, he was a successful and popular novelist and writer of short fiction of unusual subtlety. He also wrote biographies, literary criticism and a work on the speaking of English. The near-total decline of his reputation after his death is something of a puzzle, given his writing’s consistent quality and penetration.

  T. F. POWYS (1875–1953) was one of eleven children, including two other celebrated novelists, John Cowper Powys and Llewellyn Powys. His father and both grandfathers were clergymen. He became a farmer and biblical commentator. He wrote much fiction before achieving publication. He was very prolific, and much of his fiction, often taking the form of fables set in an allegorical and luminous version of Dorset, has never been published.

  GRAHAM GREENE (1904–91) was the son of a headmaster. He attempted suicide while still a schoolboy, and was sent for psychiatric treatment by his parents. He was converted to Catholicism by his first wife, and wrote his first novel, a historical romance, while a sub-editor at The Times. In 1932, he wrote a novel designed to be popular, Stamboul Train, by establishing a firm routine of 500 words a day. It worked. Thereafter, until the 1950s, Greene divided his books, rather misleadingly, into ‘novels’ and ‘entertainments’. During the Second World War, he was involved in intelligence and counter-espionage, where he worked with Kim Philby. An energetic traveller in every part of the world, he gave MI6 unofficial help for many years. Post-war statements of sympathy for the Soviet Union did not fool knowledgeable observers. His last years were spent in tax exile in France and Switzerland.

  G. F. GREEN (1911–77) was the child of a well-to-do family, but his observations of working-class life were so acute and sympathetic as to lead Alan Sillitoe to describe him as a ‘proletarian’ writer. In the Second World War, he was posted to Ceylon, but this ended in disaster when he was caught in flagrante with a Sinhalese rickshaw-puller. His talent was damaged by heavy drinking, but he stopped altogether in 1957. He was an austere and slow-working writer. His later years were spent restoring a handsome Georgian house in Somerset.

  ANGUS WILSON (1913–91) was born in Bexhill-on-Sea, and had a borderline respectable childhood, moving from hotel to hotel. He was left-wing, and theatrical in temperament. He worked at the British Library until called up to work at the code-breaking unit at Bletchley Park during the war. After a nervous breakdown, he was advised to write as therapy. His collections of short stories touched a fashionable nerve after the war, and during the 1950s his novels were also success
ful. He undertook a busy public life on committees and attending international conferences, although the quality of his novels declined. In 1970 he established an early, although not the first, MA in Creative Writing in Britain. He was knighted in 1980.

  RHYS DAVIES (1901–78) was the son of a grocer in a mining district of Wales. He left school at fourteen, and began working in his parents’ shop. After five years, he moved to Cardiff and subsequently, in 1924, to London. He published his first collection in 1927. His life was peripatetic and on the borders of success, much admired by many of his contemporaries but dogged by bad luck and the looming prospect of failure. He often wrote from a woman’s point of view, and despite setting the vast majority of his fiction in Wales, never lived there after the age of twenty-three. His best friend was the novelist Anna Kavan, whose legacy supported his last years.

  FRANCIS KING (1923–2011) was born in Switzerland, the son of an Indian official, and spent his childhood with a succession of relations in England. He was a prodigy of a novelist, and his first book was published while he was still an undergraduate. A career with the British Council was combined with a busy novelistic practice, and gave him useful insights into foreign cultures, especially that of Japan. His novels are often brilliant, but sometimes curiously foul-tempered in final effect. One of the best, A Domestic Animal, ran into trouble when a male Labour MP of King’s acquaintance, Tom Skeffington-Lodge, recognized himself thinly disguised as a ridiculous Dame Winifred Harcourt. He sued for libel, and King lost his house to legal costs. Ten years later, King portrayed Skeffington-Lodge in even more venomous, and recognizable, terms as another ridiculous woman in a novel, bringing another legal action for libel. When asked what on earth he was thinking of, he merely said ‘Oh, I thought he wouldn’t have the stomach to go through all that again.’