Free Life Goes On by Alan Sillitoe Page B

Do you have an appointment with fear?’
    â€˜I’ve got problems,’ I admitted.
    His eyes glowed. Sidney Blood wasn’t in it. ‘What are they?’
    â€˜If I knew I wouldn’t have them, would I?’
    After a two-minute silence he said: ‘Michael, we’ve all got problems, but a writer, like a soldier, goes through life with his problems unresolved. I’ve been both.’
    I was fed up with his penny packets of wisdom. ‘You disgusting old bastard,’ I spat back. ‘I don’t need you to tell me that everybody goes through life with their problems unresolved.’
    He stared, maybe thinking there was something to the slum brat after all. He didn’t like it. There was certainly no point in hoping for a bit of human kindness from a writer. He rubbed his head as if wanting it to come, then rubbed his eyes as if he wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of what did. ‘I had a bad night last night. I spent it with Margery Doldrum, and didn’t get anywhere. So leave me alone. I’ve got work to do. The heart of darkness is within. It used to be outside in jungle or desert where we could handle it, but now it’s back on home ground. It crept in to roost, with most of us unaware of its movement, but in reality it never left – not all of it, anyway.’
    I hoped to cheer him up. ‘You should write that down. It’s not bad.’
    â€˜You think so?’
    â€˜I would, except that I’m not a writer, like you.’
    He found a pencil and scribbled on the back of an envelope. There was an unopened pile of mail on the low-slung Swedish-type table. ‘I’m going to give a talk on the modern English novel, so it’ll come in handy. Sometimes even a son like you can be useful.’
    â€˜How is the novel going?’ As his son, I thought I should at least show an interest in his work. But I only thrust him back into despair. You can’t win.
    â€˜It isn’t a novel, it’s the Dead March from Saul , a chain-and-ball half-page a day, sometimes down to a comma a day, up a narrow valley with no blue horizon visible to cheer me on. I’m one of the poor bloody infantry lost in the moonscape south of Caen but soldiering on in the knowledge, but mostly the vain hope, that I’ll get there soon and still have my feet left at least. But the joy of endeavour and solitude comes in now and again, Michael, sufficient to keep me going on this first draft route report. Fortunately, doing Moggerhanger’s biography – or ghosting his autobiography, I’m not sure which yet – will bring in a few thousand, so I’ll at least have enough hard cash to keep your extravagant mother at arm’s length. I wish you’d stop turning pale when I mention Moggerhanger, by the way. It unnerves me. It’s not that I don’t love your mother, but I can’t even write commas when she’s around. So I’ll deliver fifty pages of Moggerhanger’s trash now and again to line my pockets. If there’s one thing he knows nothing about, though he thinks he knows everything there is to know about everything else, it’s writing. I can put one over on him there.’
    â€˜I don’t suppose he knows what he’s let himself in for.’ I looked glumly at the netsuke to cheer myself up. ‘It must be good being a writer, and able to make people so unhappy.’
    â€˜Wonderful,’ he said, ‘but do you think it’s easy? If anybody comes to me and says they want to be a writer I tell them to get lost before I cut off their hands, blind them, and burst their eardrums. In any case, it’s going to be impossible for a writer to flourish in the future. The manuscript of every book will have to go to the Arabian Censorship Office before it’s published. So will all radio, and especially television scripts. The Foreign Office don’t want us to offend anybody whose hands are on the