Many famous authors have connections with Nottinghamshire, but three stand out in particular. There's Byron, of course, whose life and work I've followed with interest in recent years. I like Byron, but only in small doses. Then there's D.H. Lawrence. I read a number of his novels in my youth, as they were part of the canon of English literature I felt I ought to be familiar with. I didn't like them much (although it would be interesting to see how the older me would respond). And finally, there's Alan Sillitoe (1928-2010), the Nottingham-born author whose work I knew not at all.

As we've been based in Nottinghamshire for the last few months, I felt it behoved me to investigate. (Actually I'm writing this in Lincolnshire, but that's another story for another place.)

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, first published in 1958, has been a great first taste.

Sillitoe has a fascinating life-story. He left school at 14 with no qualifications, and worked in several local factories, including the bicycle works featured in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. His father was illiterate, and struggled to hold down a job. Consequently, the family was poor, and constantly on the move. During World War II he joined the air training corps, using a fake ID. He qualified just before the end of the conflict, but spent two years in Malaya as the Emergency was getting under way. On his return to the UK, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. It was during his period in an RAF sanatorium in Wiltshire that he discovered books, and determined to be a writer.


The University of Nottingham awarded an honorary DLitt to Sillitoe in 1994



Sillitoe paints a vivid picture of his home city.

True, the urban landscape is not attractive. The bicycle factory, just metres away from Arthur's family's house, is described like this: "Generators whined all night, and during the day giant milling-machines working away on cranks and pedals in the turnery gave to the terrace a sensation of living within breathing distance of some monstrous being that suffered from a disease of the stomach. Disinfectant-suds, grease, and newly-cut steel permeated the air over the suburb of four-roomed houses built around the factory, streets and terraces hanging on to its belly and flanks like calves sucking the udders of some great mother."

But there are plenty of bucolic canal-side scenes, too, where Arthur Seaton, our early-twenties anti-hero, fishes and romances.

The history is as vibrant as the geography, and the book should really be required reading for anyone pining for the past -- or at least the past as represented by working-class communities in the Nottingham of the 1950s.

This was a world where small, terraced houses were stuffed to the gunwales with occupants; where lifelong repetitive factory labour was pretty much all you could look forward to as a means of earning your living; where the possibility of imminent nuclear war seemed very real; where the hospitality shown to a black man comes riddled with microaggressions; where male violence was everywhere, and domestic violence so commonplace as to barely attract comment; where retroactive birth control consisted in a pint of gin and a scalding hot bath; and where the primary role of women was to mash tea, prepare food, and be sexually obliging.

I know a lot of those factors are still the reality for obscene numbers of people in the industrialized countries. We're far from having transcended sexism and racism; and much labour is essentially drudgery. But it seems to me as though we're in a somewhat better position these days, in terms of legislative frameworks, societal expectations, and available opportunities, if not necessarily in terms of a more fundamental basis of equality. (It would be interesting to see an empirical analysis of this, however, as my perceptions could be quite wrong.)

Nor do I want to give the impression that Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is a bleak book. It depicts a lot of stuff that's fun. Arthur earns enough (as a lathe-operator) to buy himself sharp clothing, which he dons with pride on going-out nights. He enjoys quiet afternoons fishing. There's the Goose Fair to look forward to. There's a very cheerful description of a Christmas that's crowded but homely and merry. There has been plenty of deprivation in the past, and the war was pretty terrible for the people in the book, but they would mostly say things were going in the right direction. Post-war, workers were in a pretty good position, Sillitoe suggests. Wages were reasonable ("fourteen quid, it's a fortune"), and job availability gave them the opportunity to up sticks and find work elsewhere if the bosses became too unreasonable.


"They ... finally elbowed through the squash of people packing the Trip to Jerusalem, a limpet of lights and noise fastened on to the carcass of the Castle Rock."



Arthur is not a particularly likeable character. He's too much an unreconstructed man of his time for that. When we first meet him, he's blind drunk, and totally anti-social -- the kind of guy you really wouldn't take to if you encountered him off the page. He's an unabashed philanderer, ducking out the front door just as the husband he's cuckolding rolls up at the back; he's totally unconvinced by the charms of marriage (admittedly understandable when they're expounded by said husband); and he has zero respect for women. He is a blatant liar; he's supremely out for himself; and he is capable of being "a real bastard", as his cousin acknowledges.

But he's not entirely unlikeable either. He thinks about life, in his own, pessimistic-but-devil-may-care way: "Life went on like an assegai into the blue, with dim memories of the dole and school-days behind, and a dimmer feeling of death in front, a present life punctuated by meetings with Brenda on certain beautiful evenings when the streets were warm and noisy and the clouds did a moonlight-flit over the rooftops... And the assegai into the blue was only tipped with death when newspaper headlines rammed the word war with a nail-punch into the staring sockets of his eyes."

Politically, he's stubborn, cynical, and rebellious, displaying an astuteness that you can't help but admire: "I'll never let anybody grind me down because I'm worth as much as any other man in the world, though when it comes to the lousy vote they give me I often feel like telling 'em where to shove it, for all the good using it'll do me... They think they've settled our hashes with their insurance cards and television sets, but I'll be one of them to turn round on 'em and let them see how wrong they are. When I'm on my fifteen-days' training and I lay on my guts behind a sandbag shooting at a target board I know whose faces I've got in my sights every time the new rifle cracks off. Yes. The bastards that put the gun into my hands... Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can't help being one. You can't deny that. And it's best to be a rebel so as to show 'em it don't pay to try to do you down. Factories and labour exchanges and insurance offices keep us alive and kicking -- so they say -- but they're booby-traps and will such you under like sinking-sands if you aren't careful."


"From the hump of the railway bridge he turned around and saw the squat front-end of the castle still sneering at him. I hate that castle, he said to himself, more than I've ever hated owt in my life before..."



For all his self-centredness, though, he is not incapable of kindness. And by the end, he has started to move on. Is that a hopeful sign that he is growing up, or a tragic indication that he has given in? That's up to the reader to judge.

Arthur's evolution is underlined by the structure of the book. The first part is a whirlwind-paced catalogue of the scrapes this irrepressible and apparently incorrigible young man manages to embroil himself in. The pivot point is the drubbing he is given by the husband of one of his lovers. The second part presents the ambivalent change I have already alluded to. As Arthur stands on the brink of marriage and domesticity, the high-risk frenzy of Saturday night has given way to the quieter (duller?) atmosphere of Sunday morning.

The ambiguity of Arthur's change of direction is highlighted by two variants of an expression that recurs throughout the book.

On the one hand:

-- "It's a hard life if you don't weaken, if you don't stop that bastard government from grinding your face in the muck."

On the other hand:

-- "It's a fine world sometimes, if you don't weaken."
-- "It was a good, comfortable life if you didn't weaken, safe from the freezing world in a warm snug kitchen, watching the pink and prominent houses of the opposite terrace."

The exact nature of "weakening" is left to us to determine. Does weakening equate to (negatively) giving in, surrendering? Or to (more positively) accepting, coming to terms with the way things are?

As he puts it, "To live with his feet on the ground did not demand... that he go against his own strong grain of recklessness"; but nor did it preclude his acceptance of "some of the sweet and agreeable things of life... before Government destroyed him, or the good things turned sour on him."

Sitting fishing near the end of the book, he reflects: "For himself, his own catch had been made, and he would have to wrestle with it for the rest of his life... Everyone in the world was caught, somehow, one way or another, and those that weren't were always on the way to it... If you went through life refusing all the bait dangled before you, that would be no life at all. No changes would be made and you would have nothing to fight against... Even though bait meant trouble, you could not ignore it for ever." He and Doreen (his fiancee) would be all right together, Arthur decides.

He concludes: "Trouble for me it'll be, fighting every day until I die. Why do they make soldiers out of us when we're fighting up to the hilt as it is? Fighting with mothers and wives, landlords and gaffers, coppers, army, government... There's bound to be trouble in store for me every day of my life, because trouble it's always been and always will be... Well, it's a good life and a good world, all said and done, if you don't weaken."

As you do from any good book, you come away from this one with the renewed sense that it's jolly hard to be a human being. And anything that reignites such compassion for ourselves and others has got to have been worth the effort.