Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was the first in a series of your novels about various members of the Seaton family, which you’ve described as a kind of Nottingham comedie humaine. But in 2001 you published Birthday, a sequel to Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. What drew you back to Arthur? Had you always planned to write a sequel?
Yes, I had always wanted to do it. I’d even made an attempt only a few years after Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. But at the time I didn’t really feel it was quite right. I started one and eventually it became The Death of William Posters, which was quite different. He was someone like Arthur, out of Nottingham, but I concocted this story that turned into a trilogy. But the idea hung around. I really wanted to settle it once and for all, but of course decades go by and if you are a writer you just think you are going to live forever. And suddenly, after forty years, I had an idea to hang the story on, which was this woman’s birthday. So I started with that, and then it all fell into place. It was ready, and I never really do anything until it is ready.
Young people binge drinking at the weekend. For a book written nearly fifty years ago, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning feels remarkably contemporary in many ways, don’t you think?
I go back to Nottingham quite frequently to see my brothers, but I went back a few months ago and deliberately stayed in a hotel in the middle of town. It was a Friday night, and so I had a walk around after I’d had my dinner. It looked pretty much the same, everyone getting blindo, in quite a nice kind of way. It wasn’t dangerous, or perilous, in any way. I just walked around and watched people going from one pub to another, occasionally stopping off at the cash machine to get the wherewithal for more boozing. That’s the way it always has been. I remember, during the war and after the war, when people got their wages they went and had a damned good time. The idiom too stays the same: despite everything else, the local accent and language, a heavy strain of the old Nottingham lingo goes on. That’s what I like, and I am glad it doesn’t change.
Incidentally, are there any contemporary writers whom you admire?
John King. His three or four football novels are wonderful. I think he does what people have said that I do, which is giving people a voice who don’t normally have one — which is wonderful. No doubt there are ‘better’ novelists out there, but no one is really doing that kind of thing.
How do you regard Saturday Night and Sunday Morning now?
I suppose if I had the opportunity I’d tighten it up a little, but… having said that, I don’t know if I would actually. I think it stands. I won’t comment on the quality of the writing, I think it just came out and it’s good enough to stand. I have re-read it since and I don’t think I would want to do anything basically with it at all. I don’t normally read my books, or else I’d start rewriting them. I do pick up a book now and again and read a page and think, Oh well, I could do better now … But Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was my bridgehead. It still keeps earning me a bit of money! Obviously I’ve advanced far beyond but I still have a soft spot for it. It was my first published novel and, whether it had been successful or not, first novels are important because they are your launching pad.