“It does get dangerous out here at times, though, and I’ve had a few close shaves, but I love it. Not that I ask you to worry about me, because I know I’ll get out of it in one piece if ever the balloon goes up. There’s a bloke much like me training the wallahs on the other side, and if my lot comes to grief he’ll see me right. Likewise, if his lads go down the chute and he’s in peril I’ll look after him. We met for a chat recently, under a white flag, and worked it all out. He used to be in the Buffs.
“Must go now, and get Fred Karno’s army back on parade. In my few idle moments I often wonder how the kids and young men out here will get on when military instructors like me aren’t available to set them at each other’s throats. We’ll have to confetti them with french letters or contraceptive pills from Jumbo jets so’s they’ll stop breeding so fast. All the same, in this swampy heat who can blame them for having their bit of fun with the girls?
“Give my love to Dismal, and whoever else you’ve got stashed away at Upper Mayhem. I hope there’s still plenty left from your nest egg. Your old pal, Bill.”
The world has a place for everyone, I reflected, even me, but still I very much looked forward to Bill’s return, not doubting that I’d see him again, because if there was a born survivor, it was surely him.
When I decided that the house was back to its former state, only more so, I gave a dinner party. I felt financially safe for the foreseeable future, knowing that the fifty thousand would last some time because most was still on deposit. I would use as little as possible. Paying no rent, and living in the country, it would last at least until some other source turned up.
Blaskin motored in with Mabel for the celebration, and Clegg collected Frances and Sophie, who took the train to Cambridge. What they talked about on the way I did not want to know about.
I shopped for the best brandy, wine of a good year, Finlandia vodka, and Havana cigars. Clegg and I arranged a relatively cordon bleu repast of vegetable soup (puréed); fillets of smoked mackerel with anchovies, cucumber and hard boiled eggs as garnish; then a main course of roast lamb and assorted vegetables; ending with fruit salad for dessert, and sundry French cheeses.
Queenly Mabel wore a long navy blue skirt, and a blouse of vertical blue and white stripes ending at a little white collar at the throat with its scrap of purple tie. Her severe aspect led me to hope she wouldn’t torment Blaskin too much during the meal, as she walked downstairs after changing into something which now made her look halfway between a headmistress and a Victorian prison wardress, which I felt sure was how Blaskin wanted her to appear. He sported his wine-dark waistcoat and a jaunty cravat.
I was never any good at placing people around a table, and we ended up with Blaskin facing Mabel, while I was opposite Frances who could therefore keep Gilbert diagonally in view, with Sophie and Clegg to look at, when he wasn’t getting up to bring in plates and platters.
“Wish me luck, Michael,” Blaskin said, swilling back a shot of ice cold vodka straight from the freezer, and forking up a piece of smoked fish. “After finishing the Moggerhanger novel for you I’ll write my autobiography.”
I scented malice in his task. “If you deal with my mother in it she’ll scratch your eyes out.”
He was too easygoing at the moment to be offended. “On that score both of you are safe. It’ll only be about me. But autobiography is such a long word I thought fifteen letters was a little too much for you to take in.”
“Thirteen,” I said.
He soured at Sophie laughing at my riposte, which I regretted making in case he was tempted into something worse. Frances closed her eyes at the way things might go—and they undoubtedly would, I knew—and showed further disapproval at him saying: “When an author’s stuck for a book the first people to go to the wall are his family.”
I ignored his truism, and lifted my glass to drink to the reconstruction of the house. “When I’ve finished the Moggerhanger saga I’ll put the typescript in a briefcase and bring it to your flat.”
He hooked a thumb in the armhole of his waistcoat. “Never put it in one of those. Too many masterpieces have been lost, stolen, or carelessly forgotten. A nondescript plastic bag is best, even a cardboard box if you travel up by car.”
Frances emerged from her trance of boredom. “What if you have a prang, and it catches fire?”
“In that case Michael would do well to go up in the conflagration as well, and get sent to the devil for such lack of foresight. I would only hope I’m not in Hell to meet him.” His domed forehead angled back for a laugh. “My publisher said my books weren’t selling so well these days. He said I needed a juicy scandal to make people curious about my work when the story was splashed over the tabloids. Thinking to do something about it, I picked up a couple of prostitutes in Shepherds Market and paraded with them drunk and laughing on my arms. Nobody looked at us. A policeman leaned out of his patrol car on Curzon Street and greeted me heartily: ‘Evening, Mr Blaskin. Written any good books lately?’ They shot on their way without waiting for a reply. So the story of Moggerhanger’s doings which you’re cobbling together should bring me back into the limelight.”
“I’m enjoying writing it,” I said. “I’ve always fancied myself as a writer, though I don’t suppose you’d like having one for a son. But what can I do when my money runs out?”
Frances confirmed by her looks that she disliked Blaskin. She always had, maybe sensing in him a direction my life might finally take. I had put her right on that fear several times, and tried to make sure she didn’t often meet him, though on doing so she coolly endured the experience for my sake.
“I’ll allow you to write a Sidney Blood for me now and again,” he said, hanging onto the tail of my thought, “which should help you along. Between one title and the next you can always do some typing for me.”
Before I could suggest whose fundament he could crawl into, Clegg brought the leg of lamb to the table, and to stop further disturbing talk from Blaskin I asked him to carve.
“We would rather you did it, Michael,” Mabel said. “The last time he made the attempt he cut his hand terribly.”
“I did,” Blaskin said. “She’d been sharpening the knife and greasing the handle all day, and her twisted smile at my life’s blood draining into the platter terrified me so much I thought my demise was close.”
Being away from the decor of Dumbell Mansions encouraged her not to be put down. “How can I forget? You said: ‘Forgive me, darling, for being so melodramatic, but I think I’m dying.’”
“It’s true, but my alarm lasted only a moment, because I thought: ‘If I’m dead, what will time mean to me then? You can’t take the love of your life with you.’” He looked too lasciviously at Sophie for my liking, though she seemed to be enjoying it. “Mabel nearly had an orgasm while staunching the blood and binding me up. The meat was delicious, though.”
Sophie came out of her wine haze. “Father, I love you, but you do go on a bit much.”
A muted ‘here-here’ from Frances brought a nod of agreement from me.
He pretended to weep, but Mabel was not discouraged. “He’s old fashioned in all his ways,” she said to us. “I’m still trying to get him to use a word processor, but he won’t countenance one. It would save him so much work.”
He filled his glass to the brim with vodka. “A writer at the Pencil Club the other day gave me a proselytising tirade on how practical they could be, but I replied that the road to Hell was paved with good inventions. I’ve done scores of books on my steam Remington, I told him, so why change?” He glanced at Mabel. “But how wonderful it would be, to live with a woman young enough to look on me as an anachronistic, sensitive, knowledgeable and endlessly fascinating character. Not knowing me, she wouldn’t have ten years of resentment to throw in my face, and I would be dead before I got to know her. Then she wouldn’t be too old to marry again, which would be a most amicable and civilis
ed end of the affair. Still, nothing can be perfect in this life, certainly not with my beautiful but eternally icy Mabel.”
“Has it never occurred to you, Gilbert, that I’m not icy at all? I’m not even cold. I know myself to be the warmest blooded and most complicated of women, far more so than any you can have known.”
He crushed out his cigar. “That’s why we’re still together. Even though I can read your mind better than any of my books I never know what you’re going to say next. However, I’m certainly aware that you’re in no way icy when you’re boiling with vindictive rage, as you are now.”
He was getting out of control, and so would she be. I didn’t like it, but I was the host. In any case I was used to his tantrums, and was prepared to let the wrath wash over me without effect.
Knowing him about to go on, Frances could take no more and said, as if to some poor broken down superannuated malingerer in her surgery: “If you don’t grow up, Gilbert, and soon,” she fingered her little watch and looked straight at him, “and live a more healthy existence, and stop being self-indulgent and boorish, you’ll lose your ability to write anything worthwhile, and your will to live will go. You have to become more sedate in your elderliness, more philosophical and calm. Your work will then become much better, even though the books might not sell as well. I’m telling you, as a doctor, that your puerile and unhealthy lifestyle has to change, and if it doesn’t I for one won’t want to see you again.”
“About this Moggerhanger novel,” I barged in, filling the silence, and to break the astonishment. “I look on it as something like the present meal. Both will have to be edged towards a friendly and sensible conclusion. I’m not very skilled at bringing such mechanisms together, so if you help to end the novel, Gilbert, I’ll endeavour to push the meal forward.”
Frances sat back as if not having said a word to him, but he was still pale from her cool harangue. “I’m happy to know you need my assistance,” he said to me. “You’re talking to a man of experience, in all matters, and from now on he will train himself to be considerate, contrite and compassionate. For better or worse he will learn to mend his ways.”
If my putative father had anything it was style, though it was hard to decide whether or not I wanted his complete reformation. He took up the carving knife and cut a choice slice on the platter, laying it with a sober yet loving expression on Mabel’s plate, then passed meat to the rest of us: “Don’t you think that was rather a good way to help things along?”
“Yes,” everyone agreed, as his hand reached for Mabel’s wrist. We’d never known her so happy, and our meal went on merrily to the end.
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 yearned 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.