Such articles took up too much of my time, being far more difficult to produce than fiction. I was more at home with myself in writing ‘The Other John Peel’ for the Manchester Guardian’s summer issue, and in July there was the pleasure of seeing my poem ‘Picture of Loot’ published in The Listener, and ‘Carthage’, commented on by Robert Graves in 1953, in the New Statesman. Advance payments for the screen rights of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner were made at the end of August by Woodfall Films — the total payment being six thousand pounds — stipulating that work was to begin on the script in the following year.
In Manchester Ruth and I stayed a night at the house of Bill Webb, the literary editor of the Guardian, and it was good to settle down to a long evening of convivial talk with someone whose views were much like our own.
From there we took the train to Ambleside in the Lake District, where a friend of Terry Harjula’s had lent us High Hall Garth for a month. This was a low stone slate-roofed house beyond Little Langdale, with calor gas for lighting and cooking, an outside toilet which hung over a cliff (very windy for the vitals) and water to be scooped by bucket from a nearby stream.
Such conditions were more primitive than those we had known at Le Nid, but the place was better furnished, and the isolation priceless. It rained every day, but was the perfect place to work in, sitting under lamps at opposite ends of a large dining table. Ruth was writing a play on which an option was later taken by a producer in New York, while I was bodging along with Key to the Door. We walked daily downhill and across Slaters Bridge to the village for supplies, calling at Birk Howe Farm for a slab of newly churned butter that shot out droplets of water when a knife was run along it.
In October came the proofs of The Rats and Other Poems, with a dedication to Ruth Fainlight. Later that month the film of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was shown for the first time, at the Warner Theatre in Leicester Square. The sight of the title in huge lit-up letters across the outside of the cinema was somehow unbelievable, on recalling those months of parsimonious desolation in the house among the olive trees where the first tentative pieces of the novel had been written.
When the lights went down Ruth took my hand, emotion subdued at seeing Albert Finney as Arthur Seaton working in the Turnery Department of the Raleigh factory, as if he too had been there since he was fourteen. The spot was the same I had stood on at that age, in another world, at another time, and certainly as someone else.
Chapter Thirty-eight
After the show Karel, Ruth and I, with Albert Finney and Norman Rossington, went to a nearby steakhouse for supper, a short and gloomy affair in which we had little to talk about, none of us knowing whether or not the film would be received with any kind of understanding.
We need not have worried. Critics who didn’t like it were not able to ignore it, and the film ran to full houses all over the country. The Watch Committees of certain counties banned it, like Colonial District Commissioners who didn’t want the natives to be suborned by the idea that they had any value in the world. How anyone could object to such a film puzzled rather than annoyed me, but the publicity created by intolerance helped to fuel interest and speculation. In a short time the film recouped its relatively small budget, and Harry Saltzman received a great deal from its success, as he well deserved to do, which enabled him to buy the screen rights of all the Ian Fleming novels.
The gutter press was harassing me to know whether or not my mother would be getting a new fur coat now that I too was rich. Gutter language told them what they could do. Sick of the novel, and of everything concerning the film, we left by train and boat for Paris, to stay a week at the Martins’ place.
With Sally Belfrage and the beautiful Elaine Netboy (now the writer Kim Chernin), we set out one Sunday morning to have lunch with the script writer Mike Wilson, who had a villa near Pontoise. Elaine was bowling us along in her tiny Gogomobile, when a wheel came off. With great coolness she stopped the car, and I chased the weaving wheel along the wide and almost empty road, to bring it back and fix on so that we could continue our merry journey.
Paris was marvellous, but the itch was on to move, out of the lowering weather for another look at southern landscapes. Couchettes on the train took us to Madrid, and more inspections of the Prado. During a day’s trip to Toledo I made unflattering remarks about the stand of the fascist forces in the Alcazar fortress during the siege of the Civil War. In the train going back to town a couple of identikit plain-clothed coppers, who must have been told by the crutch-wielding guide what I had said, came on board to look at our passports. With everything in order there was no cause to bother us but, recalling my experience in Barcelona, we left next day for Tangier, arriving in the middle of November.
Mike Edmonds had written the only useful guidebook to the place, and helped us find an unfurnished flat in a modern block on the outskirts. We rented furniture from a Danish man, and set up house with a Spanish woman to clean for us.
Jane and Paul Bowles lived in the same building, and we met frequently for talk and meals. Jane’s aura of anxiety was redeemed by a mordant wit, and Paul’s nonchalant precision of speech matched it with an elegant sense of humour. Jane’s writing was interesting in a very different way to Paul’s (whose books we had read in Majorca), especially her novel Two Serious Ladies, written when she was twenty. She was half crippled after a stroke but, being relatively young, was able to get about with a walking stick and the aid of her Berber girlfriend. She and Paul kept separate establishments in the same block, but ate together every evening in Jane’s. Paul’s rooms, more orientally arranged, let out a subtle aroma of pot and parrot droppings.
While Ruth worked on poems I revised the penultimate draft of Key to the Door. Kenneth Allsop came to interview me for the Daily Mail, and I had sharp words with the photographer who wanted a picture of me riding a donkey through the Kasbah.
The Rats and Other Poems was published during my stay in Morocco, the reviews implying, or their paucity seeming to indicate, that I couldn’t expect to be thought of as a poet as well as a successful writer of fiction. Either that, or the diatribe of ‘The Rats’ struck too close to home and was considered crude and offensive, one critic idiotically describing me as ‘a working class Lord Byron’.
In December, going still further south, we toured Morocco with Mike Edmonds in his Peugeot motor car. He knew all the good hotels and restaurants and, after a gastronomic blow-out in Rabat, and lunch at a comfortable brasserie in Casablanca on Christmas Day, he drove us inland to the vast walled city of Fez.
With many different trade quarters it was like a place out of the Arabian Nights, but Muslim fanaticism forbade us to enter the celebrated El Karouine mosque. We were more welcome at a synagogue and yeshiva in the rapidly depopulating Mellah or Jewish Quarter. The Jews were treated badly at the time due to the Arab world’s inflexible attitude to the State of Israel. Having no future in the country, most wanted to leave, but it was difficult to get exit visas. A boat load of sixty Jews, trying to reach Spain ‘illegally’, sank in bad weather in the Straits of Gibraltar, and all on board perished.