Having sufficient back-pay I devised a plan to spend part of my forthcoming leave in a guest house near Exmoor with my girlfriend. Lorna Doone had been going around, and we talked, when not more pleasurably occupied, of visiting places connected to that romantic novel. Unfortunately, on going home for a few days, she mentioned the scheme to her mother, who disapproved so strongly that she convinced her daughter I was dangerous to know, and should be given up. On her return she got herself transferred to another ward, though I think our friendship was lapsing in any case, and she had either fallen in love with someone else, or saw problems too difficult to contend with now that I was back on my feet.
Six weeks’ leave at the end of July provided adequate recompense for my chagrin and disappointment. I certainly felt a new man, standing on the platform for the London train, to the one I had been on arriving at the same station nine months before.
The novelty of civilian clothes was pleasant, and during those summery weeks in Nottingham I visited sentimentally memorable spots trawled over with my girlfriends of another age. On a borrowed bicycle, wearing my shorts from Malaya, I explored the old sights of Misk Hill, the Hemlock Stone, and various places up the Trent Valley. My brother Michael, now aged ten, came with me for company to Clifton Grove, a local beauty spot featured in poems by Henry Kirk White, who died at twenty-one from the disease that had been defeated in me because I had the luck to be born a hundred years later.
My notebook was filling with poems, mostly of the rhyming and scanning sort. I bought The Principles of English Metre by Egerton Smith, the definitive textbook of the time on prosody, and experimented, somewhat rigidly, with all forms of poetics. By using the public library, or culling from Frank Wore’s shop, and by buying paperbacks, I read Aeschylus, both parts of Goethe’s Faust, and Dante’s trilogy of the afterlife (which didn’t convince me that there was such a state to look forward to), two novels by Dostoevsky, A Month in the Country and Poems in Prose by Turgenev, as well as the usual padding of Dumas, Wells, Aldous Huxley and others — rich pickings chosen from a list of Penguin Classics and a catalogue at the end of an Everyman’s Library volume. There was no need for anyone to point out what should be read, or tell me what I ought to think about each book. The feeding of such appetite was easy and cheap, an inborn taste guiding me to the best at a time when only the best was good enough. I never read a book that was not enjoyable and, enjoying everything because it was good, learned more than if I had been told to read or from a sense of duty.
For most of my leave I was carrying on a love affair with a young woman who lived up the street. I’ll call her Joyce, since her real name would only be relevant if she were now known for her work on the stage or in the media, or from gossip in the newspapers, or both. As she is alive and married still, I prefer to pull the curtain of mourning over something wonderful but so long dead.
At the end of September I returned to the demobilization centre and claimed a navy-blue pin-striped utility-style yet adequately stylish three-piece suit, as well as a mackintosh, and a trilby hat that was never worn. In my new guise, meeting George French for lunch in Manchester, we recalled the shin up Kedah Peak like two old sweats, which big event already seemed to have happened a century ago. The train back to Nottingham took a route through the most beautiful landscape of Derbyshire, on a track which no longer exists, seen between glimpses from Cakes and Ale by Somerset Maugham.
The final goodbye-date of service life, marked in my paybook, was the end of December, and before consigning the tattered booklet to oblivion the question had to be asked: What had I learned in the last four years? Morse, of course, and the facility for reading the music and secrets of the spheres for the rest of my life. In the matter of basic electricity, Ohms Law could never be forgotten, which in its absolute relevance said: ‘The current in a conductor is directly proportional to the applied voltage.’
Drill had been taken on board my body for ever, the ability to stand on my feet for hours and not fall down, which prepared me well for London cocktail parties at some unforeseeable time. I was able to live for the day and not fear unduly for the future, knowing by now what tricks it could play. To exist parsimoniously and by habit had never been a problem, and such basic attributes were to serve me well.
After seven years I was to be eased out of the world of aviation, on ‘ceasing to fulfil Royal Air Force physical requirements although fit for employment in civil life’ — as my discharge certificate said. The air force, through the Ministry of Pensions, would look after me for another decade, and the amusing circumstances of being ‘pensioned off at twenty-one did not allow me to feel in any way physically impaired.
As a reminder to remove myself as soon as was practicable from the country I obtained a passport, which gave my profession as ‘none’, pleasing me by its implication that I might be thought of as someone with a private income. Physical details stated that I had blue eyes, brown hair, and was five feet eight inches in height.
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.