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. His wife, the poet Madge Hales, whose book Pine Silence had just been published by the Fortune Press, was already a member. The club assembled monthly, and at the first gathering I took note of how a typescript for a publisher should be laid out, an advantage when in June 1950 I sent The Green Hills of Malaya to Edward Arnold Ltd in London.
I made contact about this time with Frederick, my father’s brother, the lace designer who in the early 1920s had taken his pantechnicon of unpaid-for furniture to London. In 1936 he had given up wife, children, and a good living as a designer of embroidery to return to Nottingham and become the artist he had always felt himself to be. Now going by the name of Silliter, as a precaution against any creditor who might still remember him, he occupied two small rooms as studio and living accommodation at the top of a rundown building in the middle of town.
An entirely self-made man, he had at one time been a Christadelphian (and a conscientious objector in the Great War) but he was now unfettered or unsupported by any creed. Full of enthralling reminiscences, he nevertheless guarded his time, and would not see me often. On one occasion he dismissed me with instructions to take from the library and read Savage Messiah (about the sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska) and Age Cannot Wither, the story of the affair between Eleonora Duse and Gabriele d’Annunzio; as well as translations of Verlaine and Baudelaire.
In a relaxed mood he would talk for hours on the lives of great artists and their techniques, and about his own work and ideas, which he illustrated by taking from a shelf those large art tomes of the Phaidon series with their many reproductions. One of his favourite painters was John Constable, and a series of Silliter’s landscapes, now hanging on my wall, showed some influence.
As a young man he had studied Hebrew, and his familiarity with the Bible was remarkable. The skullcap perched on the back of his bald head suggested he might still be a student of the Holy Language. His collection of texts, concordances and commentaries on the two religions filled a bookcase, and he mentioned theologians I had never heard of, it being impossible for me to show interest in people from what then seemed a fusty and bygone age. Nevertheless, I was lucky to find such a man in the family, and maybe he was surprised and in some way gratified at meeting me.
His reiterated advice, as he leaned back in his chair, pushed the cheap spectacles up the bridge of his nose, and gave a leer which in him denoted knowingness and intelligence, amounted to this: ‘If you want to make money as a writer, which is the only indication of success, you’ve got to remember that what editors want is a good short story, but it must be “a slice of life”.’ This was hard for me to understand, since it seemed that every story must by its own definition be ‘a slice of life’, though I later saw more clearly what he meant.
He also told me, without spelling it out, that whoever wanted to know about the soul of a rebel had to study the Old Testament. Perhaps he only said this so as to stir my interest, because I hadn’t up to then informed him how much of it was already familiar to me.
A frail yet compact man of sixty-five, he had a girlfriend who was referred to as ‘my model’. She was thirty years younger, and called Sybil Cotton, a beautiful red-haired woman whose devotion lasted up to his death twenty years later.
Sometime in 1950 I called on Ronald Schlachter, and he took me around London for the day, and then home for a meal and to meet his father, a sympathetic and civilized person of German descent. Being told of my ambition as a writer, he encouraged me by saying it was a hard road to travel, but that I would no doubt succeed if I went on long enough, which at such a time was all I wanted to hear.
I had sufficient energy for cycling, walking, and rowing on the Trent, determined at whatever cost never to act the sick man or the convalescent. The study of books on trees and flowers enabled me to name whatever I looked at, and there was nothing I liked better than roaming the woods and fields, often with my brother Michael. My knowledge and love of music, for which I seemed to have a good ear, increased all the time, and I went to many concerts at the local Albert Hall where first-class orchestras performed, sometimes talking my way by the doorman into rehearsals.
Feeling the need for more varied company, I called now and again on my cousin Jack, who had been a friend almost since birth, and he was still the one sure thread with childhood. He did not see me perhaps as having changed too much, because he had always felt there was some difference between us. To vary my intense pursuit of culture I allowed him to talk me into joining the local yeomanry regiment, the South Nottinghamshire Hussars, and during my two months as a territorial soldier I put in one session at the rifle range, firing a few dozen rounds of my old favourite the Short Lee Enfield. On receiving notification from the barracks, addressed to Gunner A. Sillitoe, that I must take a medical examination before being formally accepted into the ranks, I assumed that the lack of a fully activated left lung could hardly allow an A1 classification, so let my membership drop. In any case, I had come to the conclusion that my joining days were over.
Without apparent occupation, and with no intention of looking for one, having a pension made it seem like being on paid leave for ever. On my walks through the town I would pick up a Times Literary Supplement from a shop by the Mechanics Institute, and take delight in the number of reviews there seemed to be on books with classical themes.
One morning I saw ‘Eddie the Tramp’, my uncle, coming out of the Empire Café opposite the newspaper offices carrying his bag of upholsterer’s tools. He wore the same mildewed cap and shabby raincoat, as if he had been born in them, but gave a welcoming smile at my greeting. The family saw him from time to time, and I had recently heard the story about him being warned off two young girls he had befriended. We talked for a while, and on asking if he needed any money he said no, because he was off to do a job and would get a quid or two there.
Every ten or fourteen days I went to a chest clinic — a name I hated — to get the upper part of me pumped full of air so that the lung could, like its owner, continue the life of idleness to which both were now fairly accustomed. Home from an excursion one day my mother told me that a health visitor had been to the house, to check that I was living in suitable conditions. This social worker intrusion into my privacy so enraged me that I sent a blistering letter to say that one had better not call again, which had its effect because none did.
In July a short story competition was held by the Nottingham Writers’ Club, and I entered one recently written called ‘The General’s Dilemma’, after shortening it to the stipulated length of two and a half thousand words. The judge was Ernest Ashley, a crime novelist who earned his living by writing. He gave it first prize, telling me it was so well written and original that nothing further need be done, and that I should try to get it published.