Handley had, for reasons of family solidarity and to put on a show of love and understanding in front of Frank and Myra, been rehearsing a few lily-white phrases of a welcome-home speech, but now they flew back in his mouth and choked him purple. ‘Sit down,’ he commanded, standing up. ‘You’re the only one of all my brood who is worse than me. One day you’ll steal my turps and cut my bollocks off. You’re the sort who in the Middle Ages would have taken a quiverful of poisoned arrows to the top of a brand-new cathedral built to the glory of God and picked off his friends first and his enemies second. Still, welcome back, Cuthbert. I think no one will object to such a valuable sackbag of assets joining our community. There was never much of “hear all, see all, say nought” about our Cuthbert — was there, Cuthbert? So I’m sure his time with the trainee clergy has been an admirable exercise in self-restraint. And when he does open his mouth nobody can accuse him of having a concentrated epigrammatic idiosyncratic style either. So before we get down to a night of drinking, talking, knifing, remembering John, and cracking nuts, I’m going to have the last ceremonial word, as an artist always should. We’ll found this community as a memorial to my brother John, and to his life, such as you all know it was. There should be enough money to keep this project going, but if there isn’t then we’ll have to find ways of getting it. England’s a rich country still, so I don’t see why it shouldn’t support us while we’re trying to bring it crashing down. And if ever it does crash we’ll be able to fend for ourselves, because some of us will be running it. And if it’s beyond a state when it can be run at all, by anybody, then we’ll still keep alive, because chaos is very conducive when it comes to the likes of us living off the land.’
Cuthbert turned his eyes from one member of the family to another, and to those who were strangers to him. Frank saw him, and burned his look away. Introductions would come later, but there were no smiles between them.
‘We all have our pledges,’ Handley went on. ‘Mine is to keep painting, to open the furnace-ovens and pull out the steel, work till I go mad or drop dead, to keep my patience and courage even when I can’t do a stroke for weeks, to work cheap and sell to the highest bidder. My labour and long hours cost nothing, is so dirt-cheap that it’s free where art is concerned, and in the end I place no money-value on what I turn out. But I know what it is worth to others, and I also know that my heart is never willing to sell it. But it’s no use creeping into a corner to have a quiet cry when Teddy Greensleaves takes half a dozen canvases away on a tumbril cart to their doom in his gallery, though I know that when they go a few more gobbets of irreplaceable flesh have been snapped off my backbone. And so all I can do is have bad dreams, and carry on painting — as long as the rest of you work with me.’
Cuthbert stood up with tears on his cheeks, and a glass in his hand. ‘We’ll drink to that, Dad. We’ll drink to that. And to Uncle John. And to Mother, and all of you.’
Everyone gathered around, including Ralph. Handley looked at them all with obvious distrust, but concealed love, then smiled sardonically and put an arm around Cuthbert. Frank was bemused, saw many weeks, even years of invigorating chaos ahead, of great ideas, and great work, and to this only he lifted his glass.
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.