Key to the Door (65 page)

I'll see mam and dad as well. Look, dad, I'm back, I'm out of jail, finished, free, paid-up, and ready for a hard job at the factory. Pauline, go and buy me a couple of pairs of overalls, an old jacket and a mashcan, a good pair of boots to keep the suds and steel-shavings out. What number bus do I need to get there spot on at half-past seven every morning? Don't try and tell me; I was born knowing it. Do you still work in the same shop, dad, carting steel rammel away on that barrow from them auto machines? Is that big bloke with a cauliflower nose still your shop-steward and does he bring the
Worker
in still every day? Tell him to put me down for the union as well. It'll be good to meet my old school pals again, back from their own jail sentences by now, I should think: Jim Skelton and Albert, Colin and Dave. Bert as well, when the loon gets finished with the further three years he had, after all, signed on for. He'd go sometime and see Ada and his uncle Doddoe, get a plate of stew and a slab of cake, and listen to Doddoe's nostalgic curses as he recounted his new adventures as a gaffer down the newly nationalized pit, or told of hair-raising escapades on his recently acquired high-powered motorbike.

I'll bump into other pals as I charge across to the canteen for my dinner. Or maybe I wain't bother with the canteen but will go home to mam's, round the corner and up the street, along the yards and clobbering into the back door. “Hey up, mam,” I'll shout from the lavatories: “'Ave yer mashed?” “Ay, Brian, my owd duck,” she'll shout: “I ev an' all.” And at night I'll get on the bus back to Pauline, out with the charging mass into fog or sleet (or maybe sunshine, if I'm lucky, though Malaya's spoilt me for life in that way), smelling the fresh warmth of our room a mile before I get to it, the smell of her powder and kisses as I put my arm around her by the door and pinch her in the right places, dodging out of her way before she tries to crack me one. Over my snap I'll maybe tell her about the paint and wallpaper I'm thinking of buying, because somebody's got to get the house fixed up now that Mullinder's a long time gone, and I'll be just the bloke for that. I remember the cistern in the bathroom was going rusty before I left and I'm sure nobody's done much to it, so I'll start on that first. After tea I'll be out in the dark rain-soaked streets, passing the beer-offs and fish-and-chip shops with a fag at the slope, smarmed up in my best and heading for the pub to play darts and sup pints with Johnny and Ernie and Arthur, Nan and the rest of them. I'll spend a night or two helping the union, you can bet, because somebody's got to do it, and I feel I'm just the bloke for a thing like that. I'll get to know what's what as well, pull a few more books into the house to see what makes the world tick, maybe read some of those I nicked years ago. I ain't let the bastards grind me down in the air force, and I wain't let them get a look in at grinding me down outside; in fact, if I 'ave owt to do with it, the boot'll be on the other foot.

His thought swung from this to a vivid and agreeable picture flashed back from the forgotten train journey when he was on his way into Nottingham for his embarkation leave. He stood in the corridor kneeing his pack and kitbag towards the door, and as the train rolled over the Trent, he saw below on its banks a youth and girl casually looking up at the bridge, his arm over her shoulder as if they had left off kissing to see the train over, and would kiss again as soon as it was out of sight.

While the train rattled him down through Malaya, he couldn't get to sleep so he thought mainly of Pauline and the long-since-gone aura of their courting days, which he hoped would come back to them a while when he got demobbed and home. A daylight yet dim picture of the Cherry Orchard (now covered in houses, she had written) came back to him, bringing with it a stronger feeling of Pauline than any other scene from Nottingham. He smelt the damp soil and grass blades at the end of a summer day when they had wandered there after meeting at the factory, remembered touching the ground before spreading his mac in one of the hollows for them to lie on when dusk came to hide them from anybody's view. He smelt her body as he opened her coat, as she lay beneath him, sometimes guiding his hand in the urgency of her desire, and the great feeling of loving completeness with which they went on embracing each other afterwards, and then the smell of smoke commingling from their cigarettes and mixing with the odours of soil and darkness. This vision was strong and weak, came to him like beautiful music pianoed from some distant broadcasting station thousands of miles across the empty and landless ocean, indistinct and varying in loudness, from booming to nothing, but with the thread forever kept whole in the mind that was attuned to it.

Turning through the jungle, the train sloughed off tunnels like a magic snake and sent its wood-sparks into the limitless air of the tiger-night. His pillow was heavy as lead from sweat, the sheets cold. There seemed to be no ventilation, and he felt as if he were being killed by a nightmare, a storm of past and present rolling loose, unhinged by the transition taking place. He told himself that Malaya was already left behind, that in the morning when it was light he would be off the peninsula and in the catch-net of Singapore. The long dream of sunshine was behind him; jungle mountains were fur-backed sleeping monsters taking their rightful place in the past. He had made his last foray into the jungle—the Malayan jungle, anyway—and sent his final rhythmical morse phrases into the last blood-flecked sunset over Pulau Timur. Yet there was a feeling of heartbreak about leaving it all.

In the morning, he thought, as he fell off at last towards sleep, the boat will roll from Singapore, and I suppose there'll be a Highland band playing bagpipes as we draw away. Looking back, and looking forward, he somehow felt he had the key to the door, especially when next year's birthday seemed already near enough for his hand to reach. (If you lived to be twenty, twenty-one, or twenty-two—or a year older than you were at the moment, till your next birthday, in fact—then you were immortal and indestructible.) And with the key to the door all you need do now, he smiled with an irony that made his heart constrict, was flex your labouring muscles to open it; though I wouldn't be surprised if that doesn't take more than half as long again.

A Biography of Alan Sillitoe by Ruth Fainlight

Not many of the “Angry Young Men” (a label Alan Sillitoe vigorously rejected but which nonetheless clung to him until the end of his life), could boast of having failed the eleven plus exam not only once, but twice. From early childhood Alan yearned for every sort of knowledge about the world: history, geography, cosmology, biology, topography, and mathematics; to read the best novels and poetry; and learn all the languages, from Classical Greek and Latin to every tongue of modern Europe. But his violent father was illiterate, his mother barely able to read the popular press and when necessary write a simple letter, and he was so cut off from any sort of cultivated environment that, at about the age of ten, trying to teach himself French (unaware books existed that might have helped him), the only method he could devise was to look up each word of a French sentence in a small pocket dictionary. It did not take long for him to realize that something was wrong with his system, but there was no one to ask what he should do instead.

So, like all his schoolmates, he left school at fourteen and went to work in a local factory. Alan never presented himself as a misunderstood sensitive being, and always insisted that he had a wonderful time chasing girls and going with workmates to the lively Nottingham pubs. He also joined the Air Training Corps (ATC) where he absorbed information so quickly that by the age of seventeen he was working as an air traffic controller at a nearby airfield. World War II was still being fought, and his ambition was to become a pilot and go to the Far East, but before that could be realized it was VE Day. As soon as possible he volunteered for the Royal Air Force. It was too late to become a pilot or a navigator, but he got as far as Malaya, where as a radio operator he spent long nights in a hut at the edge of the jungle.

The Morse code he learned during this time stayed with Alan all his life; he loved listening to transmissions from liners and cargo ships (although he never transmitted himself), and whenever invited to speak, he always took his Morse key along. Before beginning his talk, he would make a grand performance of setting it up on the table in front of him and then announce that if anyone in the audience could decipher the message he was about to transmit, he would give that person a signed copy of one of his books. As far as I remember, this never happened.

In Malaya, Alan caught tuberculosis—only discovered during the final physical examination before demobilization. He spent the next eighteen months in a military sanatorium, and was awarded a 100 percent disability pension. By then Alan was twenty-three years old, and it was not long until we met. We fell in love and soon decided to leave the country, going first to France and then to Mallorca, and stayed away from England for more than six years. That pension was our only reliable income until, after several rejections, the manuscript of
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
was accepted for publication. Afterward, Alan would say that during those apprentice years he had been kept by a very kind woman: the Queen of England.

It is said that an artist must choose between life and art; sometimes Alan would tell whomever questioned him that after his first book was published and he became a recognized writer, he stopped living—there was not enough time to do both. I hope that was not entirely true. But writing was his main activity: He would spend ten to twelve hours a day at his desk, reading or answering letters when he needed a break from working on his current novel. And there were poems, essays, reviews—and scripts for the films of his first two books,
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
and
The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner
, and later others. He was extremely productive. But certainly he also enjoyed social life with our friends and going to concerts or the theatre. This was the heyday of the young British dramatists at the Royal Court Theatre.

Now, in the 1960s, there was enough money for what we enjoyed most: travel, and although in the first few years our son was still a baby, we would spend up to six months of the year away from England. Alan's books were translated into many languages, which meant that he was invited to many other countries, frequently to literary festivals, or sometimes offered the use of a villa or grand apartment for generous periods of time. I remember a stay at a castle in then-Czechoslovakia, where we were awoken every morning by a scream from our son, who had managed to get his head or hand caught in some part of the rickety crib that had been put in our room for him. We also spent months in Mallorca, in a house generously lent by Robert Graves. During our four years on the island we had become good friends with him and the Graves family.

Time passed … the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties.… Every year or two a new book, a trip to another part of the world. Japan, India, the United States, Mexico, and Latin America: the range extended. I usually went with him, and as by then I also was having work published, sometimes the invitation was to me, and he would assume the role of consort.

Looking back, I realize what a wonderful life we had then. But a year or two before his eightieth birthday, Alan told me he was not feeling well. It was always hard to persuade him to see the doctor; this time he suggested it himself. There were many hospital appointments for investigations and tests—the National Health Service was as excellent and thorough as ever—and a few weeks later the diagnosis came: There was a cancer at the base of his tongue. His suspicions were confirmed. Although he had continued to smoke his pipe (and the occasional cigar), now he stopped at once. The tragic program of treatments started, and the inevitable oscillations between hope and despair. Twice it seemed that he was cured; then it all began again. In April 2010, not long after his eighty-second birthday, Alan died. We had hoped he could die at home, but he needed the facilities of a good hospital. Months later, on a cupboard shelf in his study, I found the manuscript of
Moggerhanger
.

Sillitoe in Butterworth, Malaya, during his time in the RAF.