The Slaves of Solitude (3 page)

He was already a heavy drinker before his accident. By the time he began writing
The Slaves of Solitude
he had become an alcoholic, drinking three bottles of whisky a day. Drink slowed
his work and he made most progress on this book during periods of relative abstemiousness, writing in bed all day before going out to drink in the evenings. He was living partly in London, where he
had an apartment at the Albany near Piccadilly Circus, and in Henley, where he set his novel, ‘a mere village right off the map’ which he named Thames Lockdon.

He offers us an ironic self-portrait in
The Slaves of Solitude
as the mysterious Mr. Prest, ‘the black sheep of the boarding-house’, who with his beery voice and face of an
ex-pugilist, floats through each day with ‘an air of having been battered silly by life, of submissiveness to events, of gentleness, of willingness to please, of dog-like gloom and
absent-mindedness’. Though looked down on by the other members of the boarding-house as being almost an alien (‘funny’, ‘strange’, ‘odd’,
‘queer’), he regards all of them with ‘the supreme, leisured, and assured contempt of a cultivated man for Philistines . . . indeed, as a sort of zoo, containing easily recognized
types of freak animals, into which an ironical fate had brought him.’

The exception is Miss Roach, the shy, modest, decent, over-sensitive, thirty-nine-year-old spinster and daughter of a dentist from whose viewpoint the story is mostly told. She, who had been
nicknamed ‘Old Cockroach’, has an affinity with the man whose name is so nearly ‘pest’. But, within the stupefying atmosphere of the boarding-house, she does not recognize
this and ‘often wondered what exact motive Mr. Prest had in being alive – if, and by what means, this seemingly empty, utterly idle and silent man justified his existence.’

But Mr. Prest, like Patrick Hamilton himself, divides his life between Thames Lockdon and London, where he can be found at various bars, ‘sipping at his beer and hoping for the
best’. On unfortunate days he stands alone, embarrassed, self-conscious, obsessed by the fear of being ‘out of it’ and ‘not wanted’. But then come lucky days when he
joins the crowd and, ‘in his old element, now completely elated rather than dejected by his own yesterdays’, talks on an equal footing with famous men of the theatre. For Mr. Prest has
a secret. As ‘Archie Prest’, he has once topped the bills in pantomimes. Near the end of the novel, when, due to the wartime shortage of actors, he is starring in a production at
Wimbledon of
Babes in the Wood
, he is miraculously transformed from ‘a forlorn, silent man in the corner . . . that idler and hanger-about in bars’ into ‘a wicked but
absurd uncle . . . preposterously dressed in green’. In this wonderfully comic and surreal scene, partly a fantastical rewriting of a sad late performance he had witnessed by the great old
musical comedian George Robey, Patrick Hamilton gives us the opposite of that deadly transformation experienced by George Harvey Bone in
Hangover Square.
This is the ecstatic transformation
his characters search for in pubs; which Patrick Hamilton, changing his name to Henderson, had looked for when he briefly went on the stage himself in what he called his ‘nerve-wracking,
ill-adjusted, wretched early youth’; and which, in muted form, he finally achieved in his best novels. Seeing Mr. Prest’s elderly pugilistic face, so madly painted, as he stands
bombarded by the frantic yells of delight from the children, Miss Roach observes ‘an extraordinary look of purification about the man – a suggestion of reciprocal purification –
as if he had just at that moment with his humour purified the excited children, and they, all as one, had purified him.’

This too, in its fashion, is the achievement of Patrick Hamilton in
The Slaves of Solitude.
Mr. Prest and Miss Roach are the only characters in the novel to escape from
the horror and despondence of the Rosamund Tea Rooms at Thames Lockdon and find the possibilities of a fuller life in London. To do this, like characters in Wagner’s
Ring
, they must go
through the circle of fire laid down by the blitz, the flying bombs and enemy rockets. They must confront the ‘crouching monster’ that is London, with its polluted breath that exudes
across the first page of the novel. For Thames Lockdon, its name blacked out ‘for reasons of security’, where the cemetery ‘spoke greenly and gracefully of death and antiquity,
the Park spoke leaflessly and hideously of life-in-death, or death-in-life, amidst immature municipal surroundings’, was Patrick Hamilton’s purgatory: ‘a place to pass
through’ with its ‘semi-tottering parade of death in life’.

Heaven appears to lie in the country beyond, where Miss Roach sometimes walks at weekends. It is a place that dominates and submerges ‘all things appertaining to men and towns’ and
brings her spirit moments of consolation and refreshment. But in the paradox of war these fields and hills have become a mirage, irrelevant to life, while Thames Lockdon itself, which people
believed had been ‘heaven’ before the war, was now the very pit of hell.

Patrick Hamilton makes the Rosamund Tea Rooms a palace in this hell (‘this dead-and-alive house, of this dead-and-alive street, of this dead-and-alive little town’). I myself lived
not far away from Henley during the war and afterwards, and I recognize the authenticity of this guest house, its torpor and apathy. But Patrick Hamilton makes it hideously and hilariously surreal.
Like London, it is a monster, giving out its repertoire of ‘silent noises’, its uncanny gurgling and throbbing sounds from unlocated water-pipes, its shrieks, and bumps and
expectorations. It is full of the rage and prejudice and unhappiness that existed in himself. It contains everything he had acquired from his parents. We see aspects of his father in the loquacious
and malevolent Mr. Thwaites, that archaic ‘trampler through the emotions of others’, who carries a mental age of twelve into ‘the bloom of his carefree and powerful dotage’;
and also in Lieutenant Pike, the Lucifer who brings a light that blinds rather than illuminates, and whose inconsequence and unpredictability heighten Miss Roach’s anxieties. And we see the
influence of his mother in the false friend, Vicki Kugelmann, so sinister and ambiguous, who promises to ‘lighten things up’ but adds to the awfulness of the place.

From these Furies Miss Roach finally escapes to her publishing life in London, as Patrick Hamilton himself escaped into his writing.
The Slaves of Solitude
is a powerfully redemptive
novel. We are spared nothing: and nothing is sentimentalized. The condition of England is subtly blended with the author’s own condition, and we are led from this black hole of boredom, with
its thunderous atmosphere of recrimination and insecurity, by a humour that is not merely defensive, not merely a sudden glory at the ridiculousness of our enemies, life’s enemies, but which
in its magical fusion of fact and fantasy becomes an illumination of reality.

CHAPTER ONE

1

L
ONDON
, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure,
malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and
termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels.

The men and women imagine they are going into London and coming out again more or less of their own free will, but the crouching monster sees all and knows better.

The area affected by this filthy inhalation actually extends beyond what we ordinarily think of as the suburbs – to towns, villages, and districts as far as, or further than, twenty-five
miles from the capital. Amongst these was Thames Lockdon, which lay on the river some miles beyond Maidenhead on the Maidenhead line.

The conditions were those of intense war, intense winter, and intensest black-out in the month of December. The engine carrying the 6.3 from Paddington steamed into Thames Lockdon station at
about a quarter past seven. It arrived up against buffers, for Thames Lockdon was a terminus, and it hissed furiously. That hiss, in the blackness of the station, might have been the sound of the
crouching monster’s last, exhausted, people-expelling breath in this riverside outpost of its daily influence and domain. Or it might, tonight, merely have been the engine hissing through its
teeth against the cold.

One waiting at the barrier to meet a friend could see compartment doors being flung open rapidly everywhere (as though some sort of panic had occurred within the train), and the next moment a
small army of home-seekers, in full attack, came rushing towards the dim black-out light – like moonlight gone bad – above the ticket-collector. Those who were early enough got through
at once, but soon the rush of the crowd was caught in the bottle-neck, and there was formed a slow, shuffling queue of people, having green tickets snatched from them in the bad moonlight.

Once through the barrier the wayfarer thundered over the bare wooden floor past the booking-office out into the three-times-night. Here, waiting for the rich, or the overloaded with luggage, a
few cars and taxis could just be discerned, lurking silently, or with their self-starters throbbing, or moving cautiously away. Torches came flashing on and going out like fireflies. These
fireflies went away in all directions in an atmosphere which was one blended of release, of caution in the blackness, and of renewed painful awareness of the cold.

In order to reach the Rosamund Tea Rooms (which were not Tea Rooms any more, but a boarding-house) Miss Roach, who was thirty-nine and worked as secretary and in other capacities with a
publishing firm in London, could either turn to the left and walk through the shopping streets, or turn to the right and go by the houses along the river-front. There was nothing in it – it
was five to six minutes either way. She usually chose the way by the river, however, for the river, being open and flowing and made of water, without her knowing it gave her a sense of briefly
escaping, of getting a ‘breather’, as one would when walking along a front on a seaside holiday – and this in spite of the fact that she could not see the river, or anything at
all in the universe save the other fireflies and the patches of pavement coming within the radius of her torch-light.

She heard a couple of frozen people muttering and blundering behind her, and another couple muttering and blundering ahead of her. A solitary firefly-holder came blundering by her. The earth was
muffled from the stars; the river and the pretty eighteenth-century bridge were muffled from the people; the people were muffled from each other. This was war late in 1943.

In the glass door of the River Sun – perhaps Thames Lockdon’s most popular and fashionable public-house, which stood on a corner facing the river, and which she now passed on her
left – she could see the cheerful word ‘
OPEN
’ gleaming dimly through transparent violet inserted in the black-out material. But even this small token of light and
welcome, because of the way in which it had perforce to be made, gave again an impression of being muffled, bringing to the mind a picture of dark and surreptitious pleasures taking place within
– as if the River Sun were some sort of waterside brothel instead of a healthy public-house.

When she was level with the bridge she turned off to the left, and went past the church up Church Street. The Rosamund Tea Rooms were about half-way up on the left.

She could not see Church Street, yet imagined it more vividly because of the blackness – imagined it with the brightness of vision such as a blind man may have, or a sleepless man who,
having stared at his light, suddenly puts it out and forces his eyes shut. She saw it in the sunshine of summer – this broad and not very long shopping street, which was not the main shopping
street, the High Street, but one having a greater air of distinction than that because of its breadth and the Church at its end. She saw each shop and building – the garage, the public-house,
the Bank, the butcher, the tobacconist, the ironmonger, the various Lunch and Tea rooms, and all the other street-level commercial fronts inserted in the architectural farrago – the jostling
of the graceful and genuine and old by the demented fake and ye-olde – characteristic of the half-village, half-town which Thames Lockdon was – a place a stockbroker or book-maker,
passing through in his car in peacetime on the way back to his centrally-over-heated flat in a London block, would designate as ‘very pretty’ – a place to pass through, above
all.

2

As she let herself in by the front door she could in the same way see the Rosamund Tea Rooms – the somewhat narrow, three-storied, red-brick house, wedged in between
a half-hearted toy-shop on one side, and an antique-shop on the other. She saw its bow-window on the ground floor, jutting out obtrusively on to the pavement; and above this, beneath the
first-floor windows, the oblong black wooden board with faded gilt letters running its length – ‘The Rosamund Tea Rooms’. But now, since the war, it was the Rosamund Tea Rooms no
more – merely, if anything, ‘Mrs. Payne’s’. Mrs. Payne would have taken the sign down had not the golden letters been far too blistered and faded for anyone in his right
mind to imagine that if he entered he would be likely to get tea. All the same, a few stray people in summer, probably driven slightly mad by the heat, did still enter with that idea in mind, and
quietly had their error made clear to them.

What did ‘Rosamund’ mean? Why, in heaven’s name, ‘Rosamund’? A ye-olde Rosamund’s Tea Bower, or what? Mrs. Payne could not have told you, and no one else
knew. This active, grey-haired, spectacled, widowed woman had no interest in knowledge, only in gain. She had taken over the Rosamund Tea Rooms some four years before the war, run the place, as Tea
Rooms, with very little profit, until the outbreak of the war, and then, with the general evacuation from London, had seen its possibilities as a boarding-house and proceeded to furnish it for that
purpose. Her initiative had been more than justified, for when the first blitz came to London – with private cars still on the road and Thames Lockdon like a riverside Blackpool at the height
of its season – she could have crammed her rooms with exhausted people at whatever price she cared to charge. And since then – after the blitz had subsided practically into nothingness
– Mrs. Payne had never had a room empty.