Chapter Two

Max Fuller, my fifth form English teacher, again changed the direction my life. I'd shown some promise as a young actor in a couple of school plays he had produced, and he decided I would benefit from going on a two week, residential youth drama course.

My mother was opposed to the idea, as she had been opposed to my going to a Scout camp some years before, but this was not surprising as she was opposed to most things - and most people - on principle. However, my father took my side. He adored the theatre, and had been taking me to the cheap rate Monday night performances at our local repertory, the Connaught Theatre, for years.

His interest in the stage - in all its manifestations - dated back to the First World War. As a private in the Royal Sussex Regiment he had served in India on the North West Frontier. There, perched high up in some escarpment, his job had been to snipe passing tribesmen. He had soon become a snipee rather than a sniper and been shot in the foot.

He'd been taken to a field hospital and treated, and then in the magic way that the army has of doing unexpected things, he'd been posted to an army concert party as a sort of general factotum. He had spent the rest of the war travelling around India with this little troupe. His life must have been very much like that depicted in the 1960s sitcom, "It' Ain't 'Alf Hot, Mum" which was all about an army concert party in Burma in the Second World War.

My father confided to me many years later, when his life with my mother - and working as an insurance salesmen - seemed more than usually unbearable, that he wished he'd stayed in India. Now, in the middle 1940s, and his late 40s, his consolation was the weekly rep and occasional visits to the Brighton Hippodrome for variety shows. Apart from his racing and football papers, every week he bought The Stage - the trade magazine of the theatrical profession - and he knew who was 'top of the bill' at all the variety theatres in the country, who was acting in what play, who was 'resting', and all the gossip of the theatre of the time.

He had read J. B. Priestley's novel, The Good Companions, which he believed to be one of the greatest novels ever written. His favourite comedian was Max Miller, the Cheekie Chappie, who was banned forever from the BBC - and whose career was destroyed as a result - when he finished his act during an appearance on the radio show Workers' Playtime with the rhyme, 'When roses are red, they're ready to pluck. When girls are eighteen they're ready to...... Goodnight, ladies and gentlemen.' He didn't even say the dreaded four letter word. He just implied it. Poor Max Miller! It doesn't pay to be ahead of one's time. Lenny Bruce, Billy Connolly and the whole army of sexually explicit comedians of today were still thirty years away.

Not only was language and content strictly censored on the radio, great care also had to be exercised on material for the stage. Every play had to be submitted to and approved by the Lord Chamberlain's Office. Somerset Maugham's "Mrs Warren's Profession" was considered extremely daring for even hinting at what her profession actually was. And yet in spite of the blandness of the fare, the theatre thrived. Television had not arrived, and neither had colour in the movies.

The Worthing Rep had a resident company of about eight - four men and four women - and a permanent director. They performed a new play every week, six evening performances and two matinees. While they were performing one play they were rehearsing another, and reading a third. They did this for forty eight weeks a year. In the other four weeks they performed in pantomime. The work load. of most actors today is a fraction of this. Every play has at least a three week season, often much longer, and it would be most unusual for the actors to be rehearsing another play concurrently.

It was at the Worthing Repertory Theatre that I first encountered Priestly, Maugham, Rattigan, Pinero, Galsworthy, Shaw and the other popular playwrights of the time and developed an interest in dramatic writing.

The drama course was held at Lodge Hill, a convention and training centre located in a pine forest just outside Pulborough in West Sussex. The course turned out to be the greatest experience of my life up to that time.

I have always been something of an exhibitionist, and the drama fortnight provided me with almost unlimited opportunities for showing off and being made to feel loved and wanted - two very important needs in my life.

My father, though an affectionate man, spent most of his free time in the saloon bar of The Downview Hotel, and my mother seemed to have decided that affection was bad for a child. She was not a cruel woman: she was just inhibited and frigid. Accordingly, I sought love and adulation elsewhere - and usually got it from girls.

I used to think I got it because I was artistic. Now I think I got it because I was reasonably good-looking, very tall, often funny, and actually liked the company of girls and listened to them. I didn't need to be a writer to impress them. But I didn't know this at the time. I didn't discover it until forty years later by which time I had written several million words.

From the time I entered the sixth form to the present day, I have been lost to the world of words, a slave to reading and writing. It rapidly became a greater addiction than smoking which I was eventually able to give up. Even now if I do not write something for a few days, I suffer withdrawal symptoms. I have to put words down - at one time on paper, now on to the screen of my laptop. Fortunately I always have three or four 'writing projects' on the go:one commissioned, the others speculative.

I had obviously been in danger of an addiction since the days of Richmal Crompton's "William" books but the fix that did the real damage was a book called "English Prose Today", edited by A. C. Ward. This was one of the textbooks we had to study in the lower sixth. It consisted of extracts from about 30 important books of the century. At the end there was a bibliography of the works of the writers the extracts were taken from. I read every book listed. I couldn't stop. I was in thrall to the written word.

And to the spoken word. My experiences at Lodge Hill had made me want to become an actor and a playwright. I even considered applying to RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) instead of to a university. I had become part of a group of young people, all a little older me, who were stage struck. We called ourselves the Oberon Players, competed in drama festivals throughout the county, and even put on plays in village halls to unsuspecting audiences who, when they read the posters, assumed we were a professional company. Even before the curtain went up they were usually disillusioned. We were never less than half an hour late starting. We had, after all, had to travel to the village by bus with our costumes and props. No one had a car in those days, not even most of out fathers.

There were never more than 12 - 15 Oberons. We were all under eighteen and managed the little theatre company without any adult supervision or help. Using our minimal carpentry, sewing and electrical skills, we turned a derelict hall that we rented in the centre of Worthing into a small theatre, complete with stage and proper lighting. The money we needed for all this we raised from our shows. We supplied our own costumes and grease paints for make-up.

I'm afraid that if a group of young people today attempted to do what we did, they would be thwarted at every turn. They would have to apply to the City Council for a licence to put on performances in a building not zoned as a theatre, and a licence would certainly be refused, if only on the grounds that there were an inadequate number of toilets to meet the needs of a full house. They would have to apply to the Fire Service for an appropriate certificate, which would also be refused on the grounds that the entire building needed re-wiring and did not have adequate fire exits. They would have to apply to the Taxation Office for a tax number of some kind so that the appropriate tax could be deducted from their box office receipts.

The only applications we made were to Samuel French, the play publisher, for permission to put on performances of plays in copyright. We happily paid the few guineas required even though no one would have known if we hadn't.

My two years with The Oberons were two of the richest and most rewarding of my life. In retrospect I think they did me far more good than studying for my HSC would have done. It was assumed by my teachers that I would pass my exams and be offered at least a County scholarship to a university, perhaps even a State scholarship, the aim of every swot. As it was, I spent all the hours out of school either reading, rehearsing or performing in plays. Among other roles, I played the lead in Chekhov's "The Bear" against a delightful half Japanese girl, Edna Eguchi, whose brother, Ian, had the finest collection of classical music on record - 78s, of course - that I had seen outside of a music shop. My friendship with Edna was a major contribution to my musical education, begun by Kenneth Best.

Among the playwrights I read were Shaw, including the Prefaces, Ibsen, Strindberg and Chekhov. How much of them, at seventeen, I understood, I don't know. I don't think it mattered. I have read a great deal in my life that I have not fully understood. I like to think that my subconscious worries away at it all until meaning and understanding have been extracted.

All this play-reading and acting, of course, was enormously beneficial to my development as a writer. I am sure there can be no better grounding for a playwright than a stint as an actor - Harold Pinter and John Osborne, two of my contemporaries, would, I am sure, agree - and even for a novelist an ability to 'speak' dialogue, if only to one's inner ear, has to be an advantage.

The problem with so much current fiction, both literary and popular, is that the dialogue is so stilted. Or every character speaks in the same way as every other character. The problem is not that it is unrealistic - though it is. Realism is not what one should try to achieve in dialogue: it is the illusion of realism that the great playwrights achieve. The problem is that so many writers do not seem to have an ear for the rhythms of speech, or for the speech idiosyncrasies of race, class, age, occupation and so on.

To succeed , an actor must have a good ear - be a good mimic, even. I am sure that even a few years performing fine plays, if only badly, has to be of value to any writer of fiction, and especially for the stage and screen. My years with the Oberons, therefore, were probably crucial to my development as a writer, and did me far more good than the same amount of time would have done spent with my head in books such as "A Textbook of Geomorphology", "The Rise and Fall of Napoleon III "and "Principles of Economics" - useful though I later found a passing knowledge of economics. Every writer needs to understand the Laws of Decreasing and Marginal Returns!

Most of the Oberon's were very attractive, rather 'fast' girls in their late teens - fast that is, for the late 1940s. By today's standards they were stationery. They were all in their last year at school or working. 1 became mildly romantically involved with many of them in turn. Unfortunately, because of the amount time I spent with the Oberons, - and the girls - I did no school work and failed my Higher School Certificate in every subject. There was now no possibility of my going to university. My headmaster was so disgusted with me that he refused to even consider my repeating the year. and told me never to set foot in the school again.

I was not dismayed, however. A university education was such a rarity for people of my class, that I had not given it much thought. Anyway, I was too interested in becoming a writer. For several months I had been writing a Youth Column every week for the Worthing Gazette. I had noticed that youth activities were rarely reported and thought this was a pity. I had called at the Gazette office and asked to speak to the editor. A little to my surprise he had agreed to see me, and I'd been taken up to his office. I had told him my idea. He had thought it was a good one and offered me a pound a week to write a round-up of what the various youth organisations had been up to. His only advice was 'mention as many names as you can, it increases circulation.'

This was my first experience of noticing a gap and offering to fill it, and I was lucky that my approach to the editor was so sympathetically received. Had it not been, my writing career could have been very different from what it has been, for I would probably have been hesitant to make such an approach to an editor in the future.

As it is, much of my writing has resulted from looking for gaps and then filling them. This is a rather different approach from that of most people who want to writer. They seem to prefer the 'me, too' method. They notice that a particular kind of book or story or article is popular and decide that they, too, will write something like it.

They adopt conventional market research techniques. And perhaps they are right to do so, for so much publishing nowadays seems to be of the 'me, too' kind, as a walk around the Frankfurt Book Fair will confirm.

The number of publishers who seem to be publishing not just the same kind of book, but virtually the same book, is astounding. But I prefer to use market research to find out what isn't available, and then check out whether this is because no one wants it or because no one has realized that there is a gap to be filled.

It may seem amazing that a sixteen year old school boy was able to spot a gap that an experienced newspaper editor had overlooked. And I would agree, if repeatedly throughout my writing life I had not encountered editors and publishers who had not seen a gap even though it was a yawning hole in front of them.

Writing About the 3rd Worthing Scout Troop was not the kind of writing I aspired to but it was writing, and writing moreover for which 1 was going to be paid. I did not then, and have never since, turned down paid work because it was not 'the kind of writing I really want to do'.

The column was as successful as anything can be in a small local paper, so I tried to get a job on The Gazette as a cub staff reporter. I had come to the conclusion that I was far too tall and skeletally thin to get even walk-on parts as an actor, and that 'journalism was my only hope of earning a living while I developed as a writer.

In fact, I had not been very worried about the likelihood of my failing my HSC, as I had decided to become a journalist and assumed that The Gazette or a similar paper would take me on. Unfortunately, because my National Service was just a few months away, no editor was interested in me.

I left school, therefore, not only without my HSC but with no decent job to go to.

I took the only job I could get. I cleaned the lavatories and swept the floor of a church hall that was hired out to various organisations.

One of my father's saloon bar friends was the detective story writer John Hunter who made a good living from his novels. He agreed to read some of my work and give me his opinion of it. I gave him a satirical short story about a boy who became a great music critic because he was able to judge a piece of music by the intensity of the shivers it sent down his spine. John Hunter thought it was very promising and he encouraged me to keep writing, while warning me it was hard to make a living from it. I owe a lot to John Hunter.

Kenneth Best. Max Fuller. John Hunter. The list is growing and will continue to grow. I was soon to meet a man who steered me in a direction that made possible everything that followed. I do hope he didn't go to prison.

I was still reading avidly, especially magazines such as Argosy and Penguin New Writing. My ambition was to have short stories published in either of these magazines - preferably both .

At this time my best friend, Jimmy Gilbert, introduced me to Ray Bradbury and Olaf Stapleton, two highly regarded writers of science fiction. Bradbury wrote mainly short stories for magazines. They were later collected in titles such as "The Martian Chronicles", "The Silver Locusts", and "The Illustrated Man".

His novel, "Fahrenheit 451" was later made into a film. Bradbury in the USA and John Wyndham in the UK were a major force in giving SF a degree of respectability. Wyndham, who wrote "The Day of the Triffids" and "The Kraken Wakes" was even able to persuade his publisher not to categorise his novels as science fiction, although this is undoubtedly what they are.

Although Jules Verne with "Journey to the Centre of the Earth" and other titles, and H.G.Wells with "The War of the Worlds", and "The Time Machine" had been 'respectable' writers, as a genre SF had been taken over in the thirties by the American comics with Superman, Spiderman, The Phantom and amazing characters of that ilk. As a result it was looked down upon by the literati.

Jimmy subscribed to Astounding Science Fiction, the leading serious SF American magazine at the time. It was edited by John W.Campbell Jr., a legend in the history of SF. Astounding published most of the writers who, in the 50s and 60s, were key figures in what Kingsley Amis described as The Golden Age of Science Fiction' in his book of this name.

Amis contributed greatly to the growing acceptance of SF as a literary genre, something which his recent critics have overlooked - or decided to ignore - in their self-serving denigration of him. A few years later I submitted a novella to John W. Campbell. He wrote on the rejection slip, ' Not quite, but nearly there. Keep on trying.' It was as good as an acceptance. Well, almost.

I looked forward to new issues of Astounding rather as I had done to new issues of Wizard and the other comics of that kind. At this time I also read the futuristic novels of George Orwell - "1984" - and Aldous Huxley - "Brave New World" - though neither of these were categorized as SF. My interest in SF was much later to be very beneficial to me as for about ten years I wrote extensively and regularly about the genre for a national newspaper and a science magazine.

Jimmy was an important friend, for we supported one another in our literary endeavors. He, too, wanted to be a writer, even though he was in the Science Sixth and hoped to take a degree in chemistry. We both wrote numerous short stories which, with total confidence, we submittedto Argosy and Penguin New Writing. None was published, but we did not despair. We did not really expect to be published yet. We sent out the stories 'on the off chance'. Although we wrote everything in long-hand, we had access to a typewriter, and made sure that our submissions were properly typed, double-spaced, with a carbon copy for ourselves. The two-finger typing of the stories took far longer than the writing of them.

One of my stories, "The Glass Ship", was about a young boy who sees a ship made of glass in the window of a secondhand shop. It takes on enormous significance in his life. I can't remember what or why. I do remember, though, how I felt about the story. I thought it was a masterpiece. It was this strong belief in my writing that kept me going. Without this kind of arrogance I think most writers - and artists of all kinds - find it difficult if not impossible to keep going. One has to believe in oneself, no matter how little evidence there is for such a belief!

Jimmy and I spent hours together talking about books and writing, and listening to classical music on the radio or on our record players. We also listened to a great deal of radio drama on the BBC, probably the single most important outlet for writers of all kinds in the country.

The finest writers of the day wrote for the BBC. Dylan Thomas made his name with his radio piece, "Under Milk Wood", which was commissioned by the BBC. Louis McNeice and other poets wrote a number of poetic dramas. The verse plays of Christopher Fry, "The Lady's Not for Burning" and "Venus Observed", were first heard on radio.

The BBC produced at least one radio play a day, as well as radio features, serials and short stories. There was nothing elitist about the broadcaster's dramatic output. There was plenty for everyone. There were the silly serials, which I loved, such as "Dick Barton, Special Agent" and "Journey into Space".

There were two family serials, "Mrs Dale's Diary" and "The Archers" which is still running seventy on. And there were the detective serials of Francis Durbridge, in particular the Paul Temple stories. For listeners who wanted something more meaty, there was the BBC's Third Program where one was as likely to hear a Greek play adapted for radio as the latest works of such writers as Auden and Isherwood.

There seemed to be almost unlimited opportunities for writers of fiction in the late 40s and 50s. Apart from the BBC's huge demand for the written word, there were dozens of magazines and newspapers, all of which published fiction. The best known of these were probably Everybody's, The Leader and John Bull, all of which published short fiction.

All of the women's' magazines published short stories and serials, and one of them, Woman's Journal, published the very best it could buy. H. E. Bates first made his name as a short story writer in Woman's Journal. Even newspapers often carried short fiction; the Evening News had a daily short story. And there were still the comics buying serials and short stories for children at a few pence a word. For the determined writer, with a modicum of ability and plenty of application, it was not hard to make a living.

I believe that H.E. Bates, one of my literary heroes of the time, was one of the finest short story writers Britain has ever produce. He managed to achieve high literary quality with popular appeal, a rare feat for any author, and not one that many writers achieve today.

Another of my heroes was Arnold Bennett, at the time highly regarded, and in his heyday in the 20s, one of the most successful novelists and playwrights of the century. Now he is remembered, if at all, for his novels set in the Staffordshire potteries, in particular, "Anna of the Five Towns". I found his journals inspiring. Not only did they record the number of words he had written each day, they also recorded how much he had earned from them, down to the last farthing. Amold Bennet, like most of my writer heroes - Somerset Maugham, Sinclair Lewis, Gerald Kersh (now wholly forgotten) - was in the business of writing. Not only did he write to live, he lived to write. He was the kind of writer I wanted to be.

But for now 1 was cleaning toilets while I waited to begin my National Service.

Then, without any effort on my part, my situation improved. One of the Oberons, Ron Green, had a job in a bookshop. He had to leave it to go into the army and he asked me if I'd like to apply for his job. I had produced him as the king in King Lear for the school dramatic society - undoubtedly the worst Shakespeare production ever - and although we weren't close friends, there was a bond of failure between us.

The bookshop, Mason & Hodges, was a taste of heaven, even though for two months I was not allowed to do anything except spend five hours a day dusting the shelves. The rest of the day I spent unpacking the new books, checking them against the invoices, and either putting them on the special order shelves or on the shelves in the main part of the shop. For me, just handling all the new books, smelling them, looking at the dust jackets was being in paradise, especially as neither Mr Mason nor Mr Hodges had any problems with staff borrowing books provided they were returned quickly in mint condition.

I loved my first taste of book-selling, and before long I was allowed to serve customers. I knew the title, author, publisher, price and location of nearly every book in that shop. I experienced a real sense of satisfaction when a customer asked me if we had a book and I could instantly lead him or her to it.

Nowadays, in so many bookshops, the assistants haven't any idea what stock they have unless there is a computer to tell them. Neither do they care. They could be selling corn flakes for all the interest they have in their wares. But when I begin bookselling in the late 40s, bookshop assistants, even though they were as poorly paid as any other shop assistant, were amazingly knowledgeable, and prided themselves on this knowledge.

My wage as a junior assistant in the shop was two pounds ten shillings a week, a hundred and twenty-five pounds a year. A publisher's advance at that time on a first novel was usually about a hundred and fifty pounds, and the average novel cost about ten shillings and six pence in hard covers. A packet of cigarettes and a seat in a cinema both cost about two shillings each, give or take a few pence.

A junior assistant in a bookshop today would earn about six pounds fifty an hour say twelve thousand pounds a year. A publisher's advance on a first novel - which will almost certainly be published only in paperback at about ten pounds - will be, if the writer is really lucky, fifteen hundred pounds.

When I began to think about having a career as a writer, an advance on a novel was greater than a shop assistant's annual salary, today it is about a tenth of it. In the late 40s one could live simply but comfortably in a country cottage on writing a novel a year, a short story or two and a piece for the BBC.

Today it is impossible. The increase in the price of books, on which an author's earning are based, has fallen far behind the increase in salaries and wages of all kinds. I don't think that people who are not in the book trade, are aware of this. I don't know about the situation in America, but in Australia, New Zealand and, I suspect, Canada, the situation is even more disastrous.

Although many writers made a living at this time, very few became very rich. The era of the block-buster bestseller was still to come, though some books such as Eric Williams "The Wooden Horse" and the adventure novels of Hammond Innes and Alastair McClean sold very well.

Sales to libraries, both at home and overseas, accounted for a major part of every first printing, and it was common for large libraries to buy multiple copies so that their waiting lists did not become too long.

Authors rarely appeared in bookshops to sign copies of their books - so signed copies were actually worth something - or assisted their publishers in any way in the promotion of their books. This was considered to be the publisher's and booksellers job.

At Mason & Hodges, Mr Mason, a genial, elephant of a man, looked after the libraries while Mr Hodges, a benign disciplinarian with a tooth-brush moustache and glasses, was responsible for the shop. There were only two assistants, myself and an experienced spinster lady, who had been there for years. We worked non-stop except during the hour for lunch when I cycled home. We worked all day Saturday, but had Wednesday afternoon, early closing, off.

I began to think that perhaps my future lay in bookselling during the day and, until I could earn enough as a writer to live on, writing in my spare time. But first I had to go into the army, an experience that was to send me reeling in a completely different direction.

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