In our talk one evening Ulla said that if I wrote a script for her to act in she would get me an advance of a thousand marks from Germany, even if the film company never made it, so anxious were they to keep her under contract. I did not know the technique of writing a script, but she said it could be done as a short novel, so in a few weeks I gave her The Bandstand.
The germ of the story, rescued from The Palisade, which had been put away as unsaleable, was about a young Swedish woman who falls in love with a consumptive Englishman living with his wife on the Côte d’Azur. The bandstand of the town, where they first meet, becomes a symbol of their (necessarily doomed) association, various events leading to a dramatic and bloody climax on the festival of the Fifteenth of August. Ulla, to my surprise, saw it as a satisfactory blueprint for her talent, and the film company wrote to me after a while to say they would shortly be making an offer.
In May we left the hillside and went back to Maria Mayol’s house in the town, taking a flat on the third floor, the rear terrace still giving the panoramic expanse of mountain that we had come to expect. I worked much of that year on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, stitching the narrative together by ploughing in a dozen Nottingham stories which seemed to concern the main character, or to amplify the background before which he performed, some of the stories and sketches having been written as long as five years ago.
This creative process, if it can be defined as such, was recalled on seeing Benvenuto Cellini at Covent Garden a few years later, though I’m not sure the incident so brilliantly highlighted by Berlioz is in the famous Autobiography, which was my favourite reading for a time. My thoughts about the book might echo those of William Beckford who, on seeing the Perseus statue in Florence, wrote that ‘Cellini has ever occupied a distinguished place in my kalender of genius.’
In the opera the all-powerful Pope is waiting impatiently for the statue of ‘Perseus and the Gorgon’s Head’ which he has long since paid for. Visiting the atelier, he threatens the sculptor with hanging if he doesn’t produce the work immediately. Cellini finds that he doesn’t have enough metal to finish, and to get out of the impasse rushes around the studio snatching up smaller pieces already done and feeding them into the furnace. Thus the ‘Perseus’ appears, welcomed by Pope, workmen, and the artist himself of course, with great enthusiasm, a dazzling climax to the opera. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was constructed after much the same fashion, the Pope in my case being the spectre of poverty should my pension come to an end.
Perhaps it was this technique which gave the work a somewhat episodic effect, but ‘Once in a Weekend’ began the novel, ‘A Bad ’Un’ fleshed out Aunt Ada in chapter 5, into which was also ploughed ‘Situation Vacant’. ‘The Criminals’ ended chapter 8, ‘The Two Big Soldiers’ chapter 11, ‘Blackcurrant’ gave some point to chapter 14, and a poem called ‘Fish’ swam into the final pages. Thus these stories, as well as a few bits and pieces not worth mentioning, were melted into the novel to propel the narrative and enrich the book.
Most of one handwritten draft was done on the reverse pages of the bound copy of The Deserters, and at the end I uncharacteristically signed my name, for some reason adding: ‘Ten minutes to one in the middle of Sunday morning, and now to wash the dishes.’
During the many revisions I was so deeply back in Nottingham that the whole of my life up to the age of eighteen was called in for use, though little of the book was autobiographical. The factory worker, Arthur Seaton, was unlike anyone I knew, though perhaps my brother Brian in one of his many manifestations had suggested him, for it was he who in a letter told me of a young man in a pub falling down the stairs one Saturday night after drinking eleven pints of beer and seven gins.
In a notebook of the time I wrote:
The continuous tradition of inspired writing passed on from writer to writer seems to have been discontinued since Lawrence died. He had Hardy and Meredith. What have we? We have to forge new links and fasten somehow to the old chain so that people will again think writers have something to say … Creative genius springs from the same wells as folk art, the difference being that while folk art remains unrefined the art has to be shaped and polished by technique and form, though not enough to hide those origins which the writer should be careful to keep well in evidence.
The only novels I had read, dealing more or less with the kind of life I wrote about, were Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago and the abridged version of Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, neither of which I had seen since Malaya. Writing from my centre, and with most influences by now flushed out by continual failures, I was setting a story against a realistic background which nevertheless demanded the use of the imagination. So deeply was I engrossed in the writing that I was in no mood to hurry the book, continuing work on it till the middle of the following year.
I spent more time at the radio after Nasser of Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal in July 1956. Great Britain moved reinforcements to Cyprus, and when the matter went to the United Nations it looked like being lost in the bogs of feeble internecine discussion. By the end of October, Israel, no longer able to put up with the attacks on its frontiers, sent armoured columns against the Egyptian Army in the Sinai Desert. The only maps on which to follow these military operations were those in my old Baedeker of Palestine and Syria, which I had asked my mother to post on to me.
Britain and France demanded that the combatants in the desert cease fighting within twelve hours. Israel seemed willing, but Egypt was not in the mood to comply. This British and French reading of the Riot Act being ignored, RAF bombers attacked Egyptian airfields in the Nile Delta. The object of the Allies was to occupy the Suez Canal so that the waterway would not be damaged in the fighting, though the Israelis had already routed the Egyptians by the time the Allied landings took place.
The air waves had never been so busy and, going back happily to my old trade of wireless operator (the perfect diversion from work on Saturday Night and Sunday Morning), I intercepted the following advice sent out in Morse code by the Admiralty in London:
1630 HOURS GMT TODAY QUOTE IN VIEW OF THE SITUATION BETWEEN ISRAEL AND EGYPT MERCHANT SHIPPING IS ADVISED FOR THE TIME BEING AND UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE TO KEEP CLEAR OF THE SUEZ CANAL AND ISRAEL AND EGYPTIAN TERRITORIAL WATERS UNQUOTE AND DESPITE OUR RADIO 26TH OCTOBER GIVE YOU COMPLETE DISCRETION TO CLEAR CANAL IN EITHER DIRECTION IF CIRCUMSTANCES MAKE THIS FEASIBLE STOP IF ABLE TO CLEAR YOU SHOULD PROCEED TO VICINITY 23N 3745E PLEASE ACKNOWLEDGE AND ADVISE WHAT YOU ARE DOING.
News agency messages also in Morse were picked up:
… QUOTE DEEP CONCERN UNQUOTE AT BRITISH ATTACK ON EGYPT AND IS QUOTE FERVENTLY ASKING FOR PEACEFUL METHOD NOT YET INVOLVING TROOP MOVEMENTS UNQUOTE WOULD BE FOUND FOR SETTLING THE SITUATION STOP AMBASSADOR SAID THAT BRITISH WERE ACTING AGAINST A VICTIM OF AGGRESSION STOP IT IS UNDERSTOOD COMMUNICATION IN SIMILAR TERMS HAS BEEN MADE TO BRITISH AMBASSADOR IN LIBYA STOP SECURITY COUNCIL COULD NOT TAKE ANY PRACTICAL STEPS TO HALT HOSTILITIES AND ENSURE PASSAGE OF VESSELS THROUGH SUEZ CANAL END ITEM LONDON CRICKET SCORES BETWEEN AUSTRALIA AND …