Life Without Armour

  I must have disturbed her afternoon nap, and had to say my name before being invited in, motioned to step carefully by Mr Cutts who was dead asleep on the sofa. She apologized for the plate of stew being cold, but it was welcome after my long ride. The boy who had been evacuated with me had got into trouble for thieving, and they had sent him back to Nottingham. I sensed her horror at this experience, and a desire to change the subject. Asking about Laura, who had lived in a caravan on nearby wasteground, she said: ‘We used to have a little laugh at how sweet you were on her. She was your first love, we’d say. But they aren’t here any more. A pony towed the family to a site near Chesterfield two years ago. Laura’s a lovely young woman now.’ She had guessed the reason for my visit, and so it was me who switched the topic, by saying I had to go. Mr Cutts did not wake, and she sent me back to Nottingham with an apple and a sandwich in my saddlebag, which I ate by the gateway to Newstead Abbey, unable to decide whether or not my journey had been wasted.

  I was a fully integrated workman only insofar as there was little left to learn about the surrounding milieu, so it was time to get out by any means possible. In April 1945 I heard you could volunteer for aircrew with the Fleet Air Arm from the age of seventeen and a quarter, under something called the ‘Y’ Scheme.

  It may be worth quoting from the booklet put out at the time: ‘The Y scheme concerns candidates for the General Service branch, who come in as ordinary seamen in the first place, the pilot/observer candidates for the “A” branch (the Fleet Air Arm) who enter as naval airmen … Whichever the branch, the candidate has got to earn his commission in the same way as any other entrant, but to have been accepted by the Y scheme means that he is a marked man and that he will get every opportunity during his service training to prove himself worthy of a commission.’

  Getting the morning off work, the first one ever, I went to the recruiting office to enlist, to the regret of my employer and the intense disapproval of my parents. To pass the medical was no problem and, after my preference for the branch of service had been noted, instructions came from the Royal Navy a fortnight later to present myself before an aircrew selection board at 13–15 Nantwich Road, Crewe, the letter containing a railway warrant for May 2nd.

  A cadet friend, who had his School Certificate, and had passed all the tests which the ATC could devise, had come back from Crewe a few days before, having been considered the perfect candidate by Mr Pink and other officers. Cadets who succeeded in getting through an aircrew selection board, either for the Navy or the RAF, were entitled to wear the white flash of the Initial Training Wing in their caps, and in ATC squadrons those able to do so were a small and select band indeed.

  Everyone expected to see the aforementioned cadet come on parade sporting his white flash, but he had failed, and was too dashed to say why. Since my schooling had stopped at fourteen this seemed ominous for my prospects, and my usual over-confidence was replaced at times by utter pessimism. Being fit and capable did little to abate the anxiety of thinking that failure would finish me off. I had trained obsessively for two and a half years, had diligently taken in what was put before me, and would go to the selection board with high recommendations from those officers who had been my instructors. Hoping there was nothing after all to fear I quelled inner disturbance by a determination to do my best.

  I got up at six, even before my father, washed thoroughly at the kitchen sink, and put on my uniform. After a quick breakfast I took a bus to the railway station. Beyond Derby the train ran through the Potteries, whose grimy back-to-backs and smoking kilns made Nottingham seem like a garden-city.

  In Crewe it wasn’t far to the large Victorian house where the Navy had its aircrew testing facilities. After the medical came the eyesight test, a matter of picking out numbers made up of dots of a certain colour from a confusing multitude of dots of all colours, to prove I wasn’t colour-blind.

  At the selection board itself, standing to attention in front of four elderly (or so they seemed) and urbane naval officers, questions were shot at me such as: ‘If a triangle has an angle of fifty-six degrees, and another of sixty-four, what number would the third angle have?’ I was a little flustered at one point, but managed to give all the right answers. On being asked what sports I liked to play I feigned an enthusiasm never felt, having all my life regarded sport as a waste of time. ‘Cricket and football, as well as’ (which were liked because they could be done alone) ‘rowing and cycling.’

  After a meal in the mess I went into a classroom with half a dozen others for aptitude tests, reminiscent of those set for the scholarship exam at the age of eleven, but which by now had lost their mystery. A short time later I was called into an office where a man sat casually filling out a naval identity card. When he handed it to me I assumed he had made a mistake, and then could hardly believe my luck in knowing that I had passed.

  Everything had seemed so informal, but perhaps that, I thought, was the Navy’s way of doing things. He gave me three shillings for my first day’s service pay, and said all I had to do now was go home and wait to be called up for flying training on HMS Daedalus at Lee-on-the-Solent near Southampton. I felt as if I was floating instead of walking to the station, and must have opened my wallet half a dozen times to stare at the small red piece of folded card bearing my name, and the number FX643714.

  Looking back, that first success of my life was a low hurdle to have crossed, yet it proved to me that I was as good as anybody else, and maybe even better than most. I had wanted to be a navigator (or Air Observer, as it was called in the Fleet Air Arm) but being accepted to train as a pilot, who also had to know about navigation, was no disappointment. A photograph of the time shows me staring into space, eyes glassy as if half blind, my expression suggesting that full sight could be regained should an effort be made to see what exactly is before me.

  Almost across the road from the station in Nottingham was a service stores, and even before leaving the counter I had fixed the distinguishing white flash into my cap, to show off on parade that evening, not feeling similarly pleased until my first novel was published thirteen years later.

  The war seemed far from over, and I had, as it were, ‘taken the King’s shilling’. The Red Army was fighting in Berlin, and Hitler had, as my mother said when I walked into the house from the factory, ‘Snuffed it.’ Cousin Jack, having put a year on his age so as to volunteer and get into the war before it finished, battled with the infantry against an SS Cadet Training Battalion in the Teutoburger Wald. Another of his brothers was in West Africa, and a cousin who had deserted earlier in the war was riding on a tank towards Hamburg. Peggy had left the Women’s Land Army to join the NAAFI, and put her name down for overseas.

  At teatime I opened the Daily Mirror and saw a double-page illustration of the horrors of Belsen. My mother looked over my shoulder: ‘That’s what the Germans have done to people.’ Pamphlets detailing atrocities in Russia, with photographs, had been sold outside the Raleigh factory earlier in the war, but few had imagined inhumanity on such a scale as was now revealed. We were to learn that the Germans and their all too willing helpers had deliberately murdered six million men, women and children simply because they were Jewish. Poles, Russians and gypsies, also considered less than people, had been starved and butchered at will, telling everyone on the Allied side, if they hadn’t already known, that the war could not have been fought in any better cause.

  Chapter Sixteen

  May 8th was a day of flags, bonfires, tea-parties and unbridled boozing. If Delacroix had painted his ‘Liberty’ on that day in Radford, she would have been a big blowsy bespectacled woman of forty-odd in the White Horse pub doing a can-can on one of the tables, showing Union Jack bloomers with each high kick of her shapely legs, to cheers from the drinkers, among whom were me and my girlfriend. My father vomited all the way home, too senseless to realize till the following morning that he had lost his false teeth, by which time they had gone for ever. The nine pound-notes in my Bible were gladly donated,
so that instead of living on slops for a month he was fitted the following day with another set.

  On Wednesday 9th May a sore head didn’t stop me going flat-out at my lathe. War production went on because Japan had yet to be defeated. People were uneasy at the prospect of peace because the pre-war days of unemployment might come back, not everyone able to find work on reconstruction. Even my aircrew ambition would come to nothing unless the war in the Far East lasted another two or three years, by which time I would be flying from aircraft-carriers, and the possibility of being killed was a barrier against picturing a future.

  During the General Election Bert Firman didn’t think it funny when we stuck a Labour poster above his bench, but after the results came through it was a shock that Churchill was no longer the figurehead of the country, and that the days of inspiring perorations on the wireless were over, though of course there were plenty of people who said it was good that he had been thrown out.

  At the Air Training Corps a shortage of officers led to me occasionally teaching navigation and signals to younger cadets. From Syerston I flew to Harwell and back in a Lancaster, my station the rear turret behind four .303 Browning machine-guns fortunately not ammoed up, otherwise I might have been tempted to let go out of sheer joie de vivre. Playing in inter-flight football matches was a pleasant enough activity on the odd Saturday afternoon. Exhausted but doing my utmost, I scored a goal towards the end of one game, then heard a cry from the sports officer in the stands: ‘Run, Sillitoe, run! Don’t hang about!’

  What the fuck did he think I had been doing all this time? My rage abated in a few seconds, but I made only a pretence of playing in the few minutes left. Energy was free, and I was lavish with it, but would not be a spectacle for those who, shouting encouragement or denigration, would drop dead if they had to run fifty paces.

  Going to annual camp at Syerston, I fainted on arrival, and did not wake up for a week. Those days were utterly lost, impossible to know where they went. Perhaps I had been too much with my girlfriend, as if to make up beforehand for our separation, or working over-assiduously at my lathe in an effort to keep up the wage of six pounds a week which was almost as high as my father’s. Or maybe there was some kind of ’flu going around.

  I was aware of nothing, no dreams or fevers, no fits or miseries, no discomfort, only the obliteration of time and consciousness – my consciousness at any rate – and perhaps beneath it all, in some dimension inconceivable, schemes were concocted, snares laid, life shaped, and me unaware of such goings on until whatever they were overtook me.

  Opening my eyes on the strange bright cleanness of the station sick-bay, the quart bottle of milk noted on the locker was swigged off in a few moments, its rich cool liquid feeding me back to life. The medical officer told me I hadn’t moved, or needed any attention, so they had left me to sleep myself out. I thanked him, and asked if it was all right to get up and go. ‘As soon as you like,’ he said, ‘but take it slowly for a while.’ After a meal in the mess I caught the bus home, and on Monday morning cycled as usual to work, chagrined at having wasted a week in hospital instead of getting more flying hours in.

  In the factory we talked about how politics were interesting to us now that Labour had won. There was a feeling that government had come just that bit nearer to ordinary people. Parliamentary reports in the Daily Herald were longer than in my mother’s Daily Mirror, and on reading of an egalitarian society coming about I did not quite understand what was meant, never having felt anything except equal, at least. To be told that I was equal was as impertinent as being informed that I was not.

  As soon as Monday morning began in the factory the cut-off of Friday night was longed for. Between the two points of time lay an eternity spent in high-speed work, the muscle power of my arms in full play. Such heavy duty was nevertheless taken lightly, complaints made only if they could be plaited into a picturesque curse, or bottled into a joke. The emptiness induced by repetition, however, became less and less filled by what thoughts could be trawled through my mind. Such mental vacuity aggravated me, and boredom began to take over.

  At midday I cycled to a nearby British Restaurant to get a satisfactory hot meal for a shilling, then pedalled to Frank Wore’s shop in town to see what books were scattered over the table which seemed to breed them. For sixpence I bought the first English edition of Baedeker’s Palestine and Syria, 1876, which was taken on visits to Israel thirty years later.

  When an announcement was made at ATC headquarters that men were required to take up temporary posts as air-traffic control assistants with the Ministry of Aircraft Production, I lost no time in applying for the job. Bert Firman was getting fewer orders from Rolls-Royce, and it was likely he would soon go back to making gambling machines, as he had before the war, and I didn’t care to be involved with such work.

  Jaded in my room after too much theory of aviation, too much work in the factory, perhaps even too much time with my girlfriend, an arm that could only have been mine but which acted without thought reached to the shelf for Les Misérables. So little was lost of its former hold that I was soon deep into it, the difference being that the love story now moved me as much as the pitiful struggles of Jean Valjean.

  A short chapter entitled ‘A Heart Under the Stone’ was a series of notes in a high romantic tone which Marius Pontmercy left for his sweetheart Cosette to find. They struck so deeply that I read them again and again before going on through the last third of the novel. The love-lorn philosophical reflections of Marius lacked the mechanical precision my mind had been trained to, but much of me obviously hungered for such apothegms as: ‘The future belongs even more to hearts than to minds. Loving is the only thing which can occupy and fill the immensity, for the infinite needs the inexhaustible. God can add nothing to the happiness of those who love, except giving them endless duration.’

  These few pages were the literary equivalent of Bizet’s L’Arlésienne Suite Number Two, whose haunting music of broken love in the Camargue I heard on the wireless one mellow summer’s evening while in the house alone. The effect of the music, and now these words of Hugo’s, was to convince me that there was another world somewhere, but an interior more than a horizontal world, and such devastating sadness enveloped me because for the moment I could only contain the tormenting seed of it within myself, not knowing what it meant, or how to deal with it, or relate it to anything else.

  In August I went on a fortnight’s advanced navigation course at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire, practising square-search and interception techniques on Dalton computers, and learning how to ‘box’ an aircraft’s compass. Halfway through the schooling a friend waved a newspaper telling in big headlines that a bomb dropped on Hiroshima had wiped out the whole city. It was hard to believe the war was over, until a second such projectile descended on Nagasaki, and Japan surrendered.

  We abandoned classes for the day and went to London, no one at railway or underground stations asking for the fares of those in uniform. King George waved to us in the crowd from the balcony of Buckingham Palace. Zipping from A to B on the underground to enjoy the novelty of being in the capital, I was surprised at how only a second or so seemed to pass between one station and the next, making it difficult to know whether the time was short because there was nothing in my mind, or whether it was due to the density of my reflections.

  The station warrant officer’s daughter at Halton was about my age, slim, lively and russet-haired, with a sharp pale face. We passed each other walking along an impeccably kept avenue between the barrack blocks, on an evening when a delicious scent wafted from the nearby wooded hillside. Both of us immediately turned to say hello and talk, as if we had known each other before. Perhaps she was as much my type as I was hers, and in colouring if little else she resembled Edith Shaw of Parknook who earlier that summer had walked me through the overgrown rose-smelling grounds of Ranton Abbey near an aerodrome in Staffordshire.

  I don’t remember the name of the girl at Halton, but recall that she
took me to meet her father, who was neutrally polite, and gave me a cup of tea in their comfortable married quarters home. Nor is it certain that we kissed, but a letter or two passed between us, before her father was posted to Wales and contact ended. A year later, in the air force, a man came with an oral message saying that she still thought of me.

  At that age love is as profound as it will ever be, but the objects of it are displaced by continually moving events. The tragedy of changing affection is also a factor; having only one life made it impossible to live through each piquant adolescent romance to a terminus of bliss or devastation. The enjoyable yet sad working out can only be done by memory, and mine was already a useless bundle of fused reflections as I took the train back to Nottingham knowing we would never meet again.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Exhausted from the factory, and smelling of disinfectant suds as I sat down to eat, my mother put a small buff envelope by my plate of conger eel, potatoes and peas, which contained notification of my appointment to the post of air-traffic control assistant. I was bemused at being referred to as a ‘temporary civil servant’, never having thought of myself as anybody’s servant, though feeling no regret at saying farewell to factory work for what I hoped would be for ever.

  Payment for the new job would be monthly by cheque, and not much more than half of what I had earned in wages, though there would be no hardship in managing. I was sent for a fortnight’s instruction at RAF Wing near Leighton Buzzard, a short course in the control tower, with airborne experience in Wellington and Stirling bombers.

  My posting was to Langar, in Nottinghamshire, and I was disappointed at not being billeted in the nearby village (birthplace of Samuel Butler, a fact not known until some years later) which was an option only for those who lived more than twenty miles away. The word ‘work’ hardly described what I had to do, and such an amalgamation of my enthusiasm of the last few years made it seem as if I were already halfway serving in the air force, since days were given to ‘duty’ rather than to the concept of hours ‘clocked on’.