Macbeth, and extracts from Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer were read on the Third Programme, my aunt’s wireless powered by an accumulator. I despatched a story to Chambers’s Journal, and received ‘The General’s Dilemma’ back from John Lehmann, who turned out to be the editor of Orpheus, saying that he liked the story but unfortunately the magazine was closing for lack of money.
On 14th May I started The Deserters, a novel which had nothing of the macabre straight-from-the-head fantasy of By What Road, though there were similarities in that a slightly older man than John Landor, now called Brian Selby, comes back from the war and gets entangled in the local bohemian society, my artist-uncle and his girlfriend again being prominent. Other characters, however, were more believable, and there was less pseudo-philosophical verbiage.
In our letters Ruth and I discussed leaving England, south seeming the only direction. On 19th May By What Road was rejected, and I realize now that no editorial reader could have gone beyond the first page, there being so few promising features that anyone would have been justified in thinking that whoever had written such embarrassing rubbish would never succeed as a writer. Even if I had worked over a dozen more drafts in as many years the result could only have been an undistinguished first novel from someone who was unlikely to produce anything further. Knowing this at the time, I had the sense not to send it out again. In any case I had done 120 first-draft pages of The Deserters, and by the end of May the novel had grown to 55,000 words.
Ruth and I made our tryst in Folkestone, and stayed a few days at Mrs Tryon’s boarding house. It was a time of Whitsun heatwave, and we walked seven miles along the clifftops to Dover, reading Matthew Arnold on the celebrated beach. Afterwards we explored the Stalingrad-like ruins still left from the war, and in the afternoon enjoyed the film version of Rattigan’s Separate Tables.
Nottingham seemed dead when I returned at the beginning of June, existence pointless without Ruth, even the convivial evenings at the Hendersons’ a desolation in her absence. I sometimes called to see Paul, and we would talk with knowledgeable Noel Dilks, a dwarfish fifty-year-old with long grey hair who sold secondhand sheet music and musical instruments in a shop just up the road. He had been writing a play for years, perhaps decades, with only Anglo-Saxon-based words, a rigidity which bemused me, for it was like using only a small part of a wonderfully flexible tool. Excerpts read one night at the Hendersons’ sounded fluent and pure, but I couldn’t get much sense as to what it was about, only recalling that one of the characters went by the name of Philadamus. Noel lived alone in a council house on the edge of town, and when he died a few years later his theatrical masterpiece was thrown on to the rubbish dump — as were nearly all my Uncle Frederick’s paintings after his girlfriend died.
Ruth and I arranged to meet for the day in Hastings and, though both of us arrived at the set time, we failed to see each other, as if Fate had taken a hand against us. Circling the clock tower, calling again at bus and train station, endlessly reconnoitring the stony beach, and rechecking the letter to make sure of the time and place, we must have stalked each other’s shadow in the sun just too far behind — or in front — to make the longed-for contact.
Bewildered and cursing, I went back to Nottingham, for a week of solitary walks to burn my anger off. I sat on the bank of the sluggish Trent and wrote a poem called ‘Exfiltration’, about electrical powerlines criss-crossing the fields, that hadn’t existed when traipsed over with Peggy and our siblings a dozen years before.
On 25th August my rather contrived story ‘Two Ways of Thunder’ was published in the Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian. A few-hundred-words description of ‘Mountain Jungle’ was printed in the Scribe, the magazine of the Nottingham Writers’ Club. My first poem was taken by the Royal Air Force’s Association annual magazine (for which half a guinea was paid) concerning the somewhat mystical thoughts of a man in radio contact with an aeroplane going on a long journey over the sea, signed not in my name but as ‘wireless operator’.
In September my Aunt Edith’s sons, Ernie and Arthur, called on me wanting to borrow a map so that they could plan a route around the Eastwood area to go ‘tatting’ in their fifteen-hundredweight lorry. They asked me to come along, the idea being to walk the streets of various mining towns pushing leaflets through doors asking for scrap iron, and explaining that we would call later to see if any was forthcoming. We thought it hilarious when, after knocking on a door and asking a grizzle-haired shirtless collier — looking much like Morel in Sons and Lovers — if he had any old rubbish, he answered fiercely: ‘Ah! Tek me!’ — and slammed the door in our faces before we could take him at his word.
Ruth and I met now and again, otherwise exchanging letters, which often included stories and poems. I was reading Ibsen, Chaucer and Aristophanes, Ovid, Thucydides and Lucretius, and for lighter matter the novels of Richard Aldington. I wrote such stories as ‘The Fall of the Cliff’, ‘The Major’, and ‘Mr Sing’, which did not survive, but also ‘Blackcurrant’ and ‘A Bad ’Un’, later ploughed into Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. A poem was accepted by a magazine called Prospect, and then came the news that my pension would continue until late in 1953. I unsuccessfully applied for the job of editing a magazine put out by the Raleigh Bicycle Company, called The Raleighgram.
Soon to leave Nottingham, it would be necessary to travel light, so I sold most of my books. I grew a moustache, which somehow made me look younger, and in October hitch-hiked around Cornwall, with The Way of All Flesh in my pocket, and a piece of old map from Langar for navigation. The idea was to find a cheap chalet or cottage in which Ruth and I might live for the winter, but either nothing was suitable, or I couldn’t make up my mind on the few houses shown.
Later in the year a yarn called ‘Christmas Treaty’ went to the Observer short story competition, based on an incident at my grandparents’ cottage before the war. The influence of D. H. Lawrence, both in subject and style, was overwhelming, and the prize was rightly awarded to Muriel Spark.
At the end of October Ruth saw an advertisement in The Lady for an unfurnished house to let at forty-eight pounds a year near Menton in the Alpes Maritimes. The estate on which it stood was owned by an Italian called Corbetta, who had an English wife, and when we went to their house in Kensington to be vetted we not only persuaded them of our married state but lied that we had enough income to take on the place for a year.
I had saved some money, though not much, and had to borrow here and there to make up the first quarter’s rent, our train fares down, and something to live on. Corbetta said he would be going at the same time, and provide us with a few sticks of furniture from the attics of the main villa, which would save us having to sleep on the floor. The travel allowance of fifty pounds per person per year was hardly sufficient for any stretch of time, but we couldn’t imagine lasting for more than six months anyway on our resources, and decided that when the money ran out we would skip the rest of the year’s lease and come back to England.