The story was about a symphony orchestra sent by train to play to the troops behind the front during a war based very much on a future interminable conflict between the West and Soviet Russia. The orchestra is captured in a surprise offensive by an Eastern (or ‘Gorshek’) general, who has standing orders to kill all prisoners no matter what their status. He makes the mistake of demanding that the orchestra play for him, and afterwards can’t make up his mind whether or not to have them executed, hesitation which leads to his downfall.
When The Green Hills of Malaya came back I sent it to another publisher. Shortly afterwards the Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian wrote to say that they had accepted ‘No Shot in the Dark’. The full-page story appeared on 26th August, and with the one-and-a-half guinea payment I bought a biscuit barrel as a wedding present for my sister Peggy.
Though happy to have a story printed so early, I could not regard it as much of a success, since the venue was only local. I wanted to be published by newspapers and magazines in London, unable to realize how many years were to go by before such became possible. Nor did I care for the embarrassment of being known as a writer by the people of the district I lived in, and not entirely because an old school friend teased me at seeing my photograph boxed in the middle of the story and captioned: ‘The Author’. I wanted to travel, and obtain that detachment from such an environment which I knew to be necessary.
I sent ‘The General’s Dilemma’ out several times, but with no success. Of many other stories nothing remains but their titles: ‘The Return of the Crave’, ‘Lucky to be Alive’, ‘The Queer Type’, ‘Dark Stairway’, and ‘The Last Compartment’. I tried my luck with a total of eighty items up to February 1951, after which I stopped taking note.
Writing for writing’s sake, I had no set purpose beyond getting published, the only aim being to convince myself I was a writer, which was no great difficulty, since there was nothing else I could be, and to go on until readers thought the same. Small as my income was, I had no idea of earning a living by writing, though knew it would be pleasant to get money from it if I could. Having turned out a book-length manuscript about Malaya, I wanted to start on a novel, and saw nothing to deter me. World events of the time hardly impinged, though when the Korean War began on 25th June I was interested enough to follow the campaign on maps from the Madrolle guidebook Chine du Nord, picked up for a shilling at Frank Wore’s.
My reading for 1950 took in the remainder of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Turgenev. I read Flaubert, Gogol, some of Zola, more Balzac, and made a start on Dickens. During the winter I took a course of WEA classes on the modern English novel, reading Graham Greene and E. M. Forster (including his Aspects of the Novel). D. H. Lawrence was also discussed, and I went on to read most of his novels and stories, as well as poems, letters and two biographies. His work was a revelation in showing that great fiction could be written with a local setting, and one that I knew so well.
I pursued my way through Lord Derby’s translation of The Iliad, Pope’s Odyssey, the Dialogues of Plato, and the plays of Euripides, as well as Apuleius and the Histories of Herodotus. The Everyman Smaller Classical Dictionary was culled from end to end for the construction of genealogical diagrams connecting the gods, goddesses and heroes of antiquity, until I was able to recite from memory their crimes, proclivities and misadventures. It was a pageant-like amalgam of geography, history, dramatic folklore and poetry, and philosophical conundrums made plain by reading, an old strange world coming so alive that it wasn’t so much strange anymore as merely a separate recreation ground that the imagination could play in.
I read more Shakespeare, enjoyed Don Quixote, and continued with the Bible, a rate of reading that went on for the next few years, though indeed it has never stopped. When little of importance remained unread I turned back to certain books a second or third time, as well as picking up the few that had been missed. It was self-evident that you could not become a writer unless you had read everything, and learned what you could in the process.
I made some remarks in a letter to a schoolteacher friend about Raskolnikov’s Siberian dream in Crime and Punishment, suggesting that D. H. Lawrence had been influenced by it when he wrote St Mawr, in which there is a similar apocalyptic vision of the night. This letter led him to ask whether I had thought of going to university, because as an ex-serviceman it would not be difficult to get a grant. The notion seemed attractive, but the obligatory study of Latin for six months or so in order to pass the entrance examination decided me against it. I lacked the urge to go in that direction, another instinctive negative never to be regretted. Perhaps I declined out of laziness, though if I’d had Latin already I might have been willing to cut myself off from the world for three years.
My uncle suggested looking around a small and grubby secondhand bookshop as yet unknown to me. The proprietor, Paul Henderson, had in his younger days been a writer, and he told me with some pride that one short story had earned him what to me seemed the enormous sum of fifty pounds. On gloomy afternoons we sat in his back room talking about books and writers, drinking coffee, and warmed by a smelly paraffin stove.
Paul and his wife kept open house on Saturday night, and people came to talk about what they were reading (or writing), such authors as John dos Passos, Hemingway, Sartre and Camus. Or we listened to classical music, and were generously provided with coffee and sandwiches at a time when extra food was not easy to find.
During that hard winter fuel was also difficult to obtain, and I did my share at home by going to various depots for coal or coke. You were restricted to a quarter of a hundredweight at each place, and had to stand half frozen in a queue to get it. I also helped my uncle, for he hardly had the frame to carry much.
Taking my father’s local election poll card from the shelf one day, I went up the street to vote in his place. Nottingham, like everywhere else at that time, was a depressing town. Food was rationed, though the war had ended five years ago, and people were complaining that even a Labour government was unjustified in keeping such scarcities going. Perhaps it was this that caused me to place a cross next to the name of the Conservative candidate, though I don’t suppose he was elected. It may also have been done as a kind of joke against my father, but whatever the reason, my political views were, to say the least, in a state of uncertainty — if it could be said that I had any at all.
On a gloomy afternoon in late autumn I met Ruth Fainlight in the bookshop. After the introduction Paul closed up and drove us into town to have tea at a café. Ruth was a nineteen-year-old American poet, who I thought was Canadian, though I don’t know why, for she had no accent. She had come to Nottingham with her husband, but we fell in love, and began to see each other as often as possible.
Chapter Twenty-six
Sitting in an unheated bedroom in November meant no hardship, since the theme of my novel was of a temperature to keep even a Hottentot warm. I could hardly have gone out of the house for seventeen days, which time it took for the first pen and ink draft of 100,000 words to be written. On 16 January 1951, less than three months from start to finish, which included typing, retyping, and a certain amount of revision, the 400-odd pages were squeezed into two new spring-backed folders and sent as a parcel, with return postage, to a publishing firm which had announced a competition for new novels.