The rights were bought for four thousand five hundred pounds, of which two-thirds came to my bank, though the contract stated that I should also receive two per cent of the producer’s profits, a clause which eventually gave me several times that amount. The fee for writing the script was one thousand five hundred pounds and, though the combined sum was small indeed by Hollywood standards, there seemed no reason to complain at this unexpected addition to our riches.
On Friday 22nd April I was given the Authors’ Club Prize for the Best First Novel of 1958, which meant (after an interview for The Times) going to their imposing premises in Whitehall, wearing the dark suit sent by Ruth’s aunt from America some years before. My first after-dinner speech was a carefully written account as to how I had become a writer and produced the novel they had chosen to honour. I had hoped for Jeffrey Simmons to be present, and was somewhat annoyed that the committee of the Authors’ Club had unwittingly selected the one evening of the year when it was impossible for both religious and family reasons for him to do so.
For the next two years, as well as writing the film scripts, I was working on Key to the Door, an autobiographical novel which had been maturing for some time. The hundred-page account of the early married life of Brian Seaton’s parents, and of his childhood (the first draft done in Soller in 1953), was followed by chapters of Letters From Malaya, which were interspersed with sections on Brian’s youth and work in the factory, the narrative finally shifting entirely to Malaya. This shuffling of material, at one stage an uneven heap of nearly a thousand pages, needed stringent cutting and revision. By the time the final draft of 750 pages was typed in April 1961 it had been ‘in progress’ for thirteen years, since two chapters were based on that first handwritten version of the trip to Kedah Peak in the autumn of 1948.
A late change was to have Brian Seaton spare the life of the communist guerrilla at his mercy when the jungle rescue patrol is ambushed. In earlier versions he had killed him as having been responsible for the death of his friend Baker. In view of the nature of his upbringing such a change would, I hoped, be understandable. I saw Brian Seaton’s decision as a similar ‘cutting off the nose to spite the face’ to that of Colin Smith losing the Borstal governor’s race in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Morally right or wrong, the idea was to give more than insular point to the book, and though one or two critics were offended, it was hard to see why the possibly amoral action of a character implied a lack of morality in the author. At the end of April I sent a letter to the Home Secretary, pleading for the life of Ronald Henry Marwood, who had been sentenced to death for the murder of a policeman during a robbery. He was later hanged.
I talked to a doctor friend in London about whether there wasn’t some treatment which could be paid for and thus prolong my father’s life, but the verdict was that no better medical care existed than what he was already receiving in Nottingham. He died at the end of May, in his fifty-seventh year, the only mourners at his funeral being his long-suffering wife and their five children. Not long afterwards my mother married a lorry driver somewhat younger than herself and, after a more peaceful time than had ever been possible with my father, survived him by a few years.
The countryside around Whitwell was ideal for walking, but if you wandered off paved lanes you were likely to be warned away at the point of a gun by the landowner or one of his cap-touching minions, an experience unknown in my childhood, and certainly not in France or Spain. Work was, as always, the saviour, and in six weeks I produced a screen treatment, and then the first draft script, for the film of my novel. Disinterring the book after it had seemed dead and out of the way, and reading it several times to decide how to marshal the events into the sort of movie I would like to see, was a tedious process. However, having pocketed some of the money, the task had to be taken seriously, though my temperament was not suited for work which depended on a certain amount of consultation.
Karel Reisz, the director, read the script, and in his quiet and diplomatic manner said: ‘Well, yes, it is all right, but in my opinion there is just one small problem.’ If the film was made according to what I had written, he went on, the running time would be several hours too long. We were both novices with regard to feature films, but Karel had made documentaries, including ‘We are the Lambeth Boys’, and knew infinitely more about the business than I ever could. During the next few months the script was honed down to a ninety-minute maximum under his careful and talented scrutiny.
One of the main reasons for doing the script was to get as faithful a transition to the screen as possible, with no other writer muddying the adaptation according to his own personality or beliefs. Each version had, however, to be examined by the British Board of Film Censors, and some employee of that loathsome organization stipulated that though the issue of the abortion may be mentioned in the film, the attempt to procure one on the part of Brenda after she gets pregnant by Arthur must not be shown. Not even by as much as a stray word could it be indicated that the abortion had been ‘brought off’.
Then there was the matter of violence, which they might consider to be exaggerated, and as for strong language, well … Such a film in any case could only be released with an ‘X’ certificate, a category which it was hoped might restrict the size of its audience. My acceptance by the world — or some of it — had brought my nihilistic feelings even more to the fore, and my impulse was to tell the censorship goons to fuck off, but such nursery rules had to be followed if the film was to go on release at all, and in my view we ended with a much watered down version of the book.
The advance payment for The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner volume, of 100 pounds, was on the low side, but was considered adequate for a book of stories, which might not sell as well as a novel. Since we did not lack money this amount seemed reasonable, and in any case an ‘advance’ payment is not, and never was, a munificent handout for the privilege of printing one’s work, but a sum which must be earned by copies sold in the shops. The lower the advance the sooner would further money start to come in, whereas an extravagant advance which was not recouped in sales would do no good for an author’s reputation. Such was my view then, though the economics of writing and publishing today do not allow such principles to be followed too closely.
In May a letter asked me to report to a hospital in Luton for a final check-up with regard to my pension. An early bus from Whitwell took me to St Albans, and the train another twenty miles to Luton. The distance back to Whitwell was only six miles direct, so after the examination I set off with a map in my pocket along lanes and footpaths. Few cars were about, and no pedestrians, and I strolled along recalling half-forgotten names of trees and wild flowers, the clear warm day giving a couple of hours in which to be at peace in a way that had not been possible since leaving Majorca.
Karel Reisz wanted me to write the commentary to a documentary he was making on how Nottinghamshire coalminers spent their leisure. He decided that since we were going to investigate their pastimes we should also see the conditions they worked in, which meant spending a day down Clipstone pit. The two-mile trek to the coal face where men laboured in seams of less than thirty-six inches, 3,000 feet underground, convinced me of the wisdom of people who said they would never let their sons go down the pit unless they couldn’t get a job anywhere else. But the miners endured their work, since there was no other, and they certainly seemed to enjoy their leisure. I had never been present at a brass band rehearsal, or inside a Welfare Institute before, or watched with any interest people playing bowls, but half a dozen pages were duly produced, and used for a film I have no memory of seeing.