After so long in the south, the little individual houses on the outskirts of Paris, with their neat gardens in north European rows, gave something of a shock, as if I had only ever seen them before in another life. On board the Calais — Dover boat Ruth, being a foreigner, queued by the cubby hole where passport stamping went on, a green sea sliding up and down the windows. She was questioned by the immigration official, who supposed she lacked the necessary wealth to get into his glum country. Eventually (though not, one assumed, out of the goodness of his heart) he put in a stamp allowing her to stay sixty days, thus condemning us to the inconvenience of visiting the Aliens Office, for the flat in Soller had been let for three months.
A good tea was served on the London train, rain at the windows cutting visibility to nil. We stayed a while at the house of Ima Bayliss in Dulwich, whom we had met in Majorca. Though I believed in myself as a writer, it was sometimes difficult to assume that other people, on little enough evidence, should look on me in that guise as well. Ima was one of them, as was her husband, the Australian painter Clifford Bayliss, who earned a living by designing stage scenery at Covent Garden.
We called on our families (I hadn’t seen mine for well over five years) then came back to London and took a furnished room in West Kensington, close to Rosica Colin’s office in Baron’s Court. Invited to lunch, we discussed my prospects as a writer. She was a handsome and lively black-haired woman of middle age, a Rumanian by birth, who had been stranded in England at the beginning of the war after her husband was killed in a car crash. Left with a young child, she’d had a struggle, but being a person of quality and courage, had managed to establish a successful literary agency.
She had done her enthusiastic best for the last three years to get my work published, but the four novels and a travel book had been rejected again and again, and it was hard to know what to do next. Encouraged by the few chapters of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, however, she had made an appointment for me to deliver them personally to Tom Maschler at MacGibbon and Kee, whose firm was said to be looking for original new novels. She also found me some work reading a novel by Pio Baroja in Spanish, and writing a report for a publisher, who might then commission me to do the translation. The editor of a children’s anthology was interested in ‘Big John and the Stars’, and she would send A Stay of Some Time out again.
London was depressing, and at times I wondered why I had wasted time and money to be there. Having no settled place to live did not suit me, though there was the illusion of useful contacts being made. My picture of a return had been coloured by Balzac’s description of Rastignac at the end of Père Goriot, who looks down on Paris from the high ground and knows that when he descends it will be to certain success. Clearly, I had not reached that stage, and if ever I did the murky weather would be sure to put a damper on such a romantic notion.
Howard Sergeant and his wife Jean welcomed us for an evening in Dulwich, and the poems Ruth and I showed for the new Outposts series of booklets were immediately taken. The arrangement was that Howard would, out of 300 copies printed, keep fifty for himself and the reviewers, while we were to get back the thirty pounds cost of printing and binding by selling the rest at half a crown each, which Howard assured us we were bound to do.
The system seemed only half a step up from that of a vanity press, and I didn’t much relish being a huckster for my own work, but the poems would be printed and possibly noticed. Howard Sergeant deserves high praise for his unpaid work in disseminating poetry to a wider audience, for he went on to do hundreds more booklets in the same format. Ruth’s title and mine are now collectors’ items, and the price of one copy would have paid the bill for the whole transaction.
The poems chosen were from what I thought of as my recent best, put together and called Without Beer or Bread, publication being set for sometime in the autumn. On the subscription form, printed right away and to be handed out to any likely customer, the brief biographical information stated that I had just finished a novel called Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, being ‘the adventurous account of two years from the life of a Nottingham teddy-boy’. Then comes the declaration that the author of the present booklet
considers the Welfare State to be the poet’s deadliest enemy. By pandering so much to the people it destroys all ancestral connection between them and the poet. He advocates that poets begin to fight back. They should, he feels, abandon the precarious guerilla positions they now hold and spread comprehensible poems among people who would most certainly read them if awakened to the fact that they existed.
It’s hard to imagine my mood in dashing off those views, but at least there was only myself to blame should copies prove difficult to sell which, in the event, they did not.
We stayed a few days in Hove with Ruth’s parents who, although we were not married (and had no prospect yet of being so), treated me like a son-in-law. As a birthday gift Mrs Fainlight booked seats for a performance of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Brighton Theatre Royal. The audience did not seem especially impressed, but to me it was a revelation to see people like Jimmy Porter shown on the stage at last.
On the Brighton Belle next morning we talked to an urbane fifty-year-old professional man who had also enjoyed the play. We told him we were writers who lived in Majorca, and were visiting England to see friends. Perhaps he was intrigued at my mention of going from the station to rehearse a talk at the BBC, because he had a car waiting at Victoria with a chauffeur, and offered to take us to that part of town, his office being in the same area. Maybe he doubted my story, and wanted to see whether I would in fact go through those big revolving doors.
My stand-offish dislike of England came from having been so long away as to feel almost a foreigner. This would have been depressing had not sufficient novelty remained, to fascinate me in spite of myself. So strong had been the influence of Spain, and so decisive the struggle to consolidate my persona as a writer, that England had been very much rubbed away, and its people and the lives they led almost forgotten about during those five years. I didn’t want to stay, and could only face doing so by living from day to day, since the reality of being there seemed to have no relationship to hopes and expectations.
After delivering the half dozen chapters of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning to Tom Maschler, my talk was broadcast on the wireless at nine o’clock on 10th April. The Radio Times said: ‘The Mountain stands surrounded by dense jungle, and rises steeply to four thousand feet. Tigers still roam its forests, and so we were all armed. Mr Sillitoe describes the ascent and exploration of a mountain in North Malaya by a party of six members of an RAF jungle rescue team.’
The talk was preceded by the Promenade Players, and followed by a song recital. Not one word of the script I had sent in was altered, proof enough that my prose had for some years possessed the necessary quality of self-assurance to be read on the BBC, which organization had formed no small part in my pursuance of education and enlightenment. Apart from all that, the eighteen-guinea payment was a useful addition to our resources.