Life Without Armour by Sillitoe Alan;

Author:Sillitoe, Alan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-five

Both brothers at school, and often out during the evening as well, the bedroom at home was mine all day to read and write in. I soon learned to disregard the hum and thump of industrial noise from the Raleigh factory at the end of the terrace, thirty-five yards away, or the squealing racket of kids under my window. I was fed for a pound a week, leaving ample from my three pounds eleven shillings to spend on books, postage, stationery and tobacco. The affair with Joyce went on for a while, though was soon to end because I had no intention of becoming engaged and then married.

Poems and stories came back from Argosy, Chambers’s Journal, the Poetry Review, Lilliput, The Listener, and London Opinion. Disappointed but undaunted, on the last day of 1949 I posted ‘No Shot in the Dark’ to the Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian, a story from Malaya about a pi-dog wandering around the wireless hut, which the operator intends to kill as a pest. When the animal is finally in the sights of his rifle he finds he can’t do it, though in the original incident the dog was shot. I worked hard on the story, and must have counted the 1,428 words as carefully as a radio operator totting up a rather long telegram.

Sometime in the autumn my cousins took me to a football match, on a Saturday afternoon when Notts County was playing Bristol City. Never having been to one before (or since), it was interesting as much for the observation of those standing around as for the misty tergiversations of the ball. A man close by could barely make out what was happening on the pitch, and seemed absolutely pole-axed when the local team lost, shuffling off at the final whistle in a dudgeon higher than Mount Everest, so that I hadn’t much hope for the peace of his family when he got home. A month or two afterwards I wrote a story called ‘Cock-eye’, later renamed ‘The Match’, in which the man beats his wife up so severely in his ire that she leaves him.

Books read included some by Arnold Bennett, and more Somerset Maugham, but also Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Insulted and the Injured, as well as the stories of Maupassant. In the classical mode I read Xenophon, Tacitus, Sophocles, Virgil and Lucian, punctuated by books of verse, Russian stories from Pushkin to Gorki, and Balzac’s Père Goriot, making a start at last on the continent of the great and the good, as much to populate the wilderness of my understanding as because the books were such a pleasure to consume.

Assuming that my experiences in Malaya might be interesting to others, I began a chronological account, dividing the series of ordinary events into chapters. I used sheets of lined foolscap for the first handwritten draft, then typed the material to a length of about 50,000 words.

Talking with Hales, in the office of his small hosiery wholesale firm, he suggested my joining the Nottingham Writers’ Club.

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