Life Without Armour by Alan; Sillitoe Read Free Book Online

or hammer, or sweeping brush. Being solitary, melancholic and illiterate, he felt at a disadvantage to everyone else, and obviously was. On the other hand his father had taught him the basics of upholstery; he could paint doors and put up wallpaper, cobble shoes, mend a wireless, do carpentry and frame pictures, and was never happier than when at home occupied with such tasks, or even in somebody else’s house, because he could be cheerful and obliging when out of his own.
    Nottingham was a town of different industries, by no means an area of the highest unemployment. Work was available if you searched hard enough, but my father just didn’t look very far, though it could also be said that when he did no one saw him coming. Social conditions were not good, but they never had been, so you could not blame them. You were a plaything of Fate, and hope was the only solace, and it was hope which gave me the energy to believe that I would one day get away from such a life, and never go back. I could hardly know that to do so I would have to become a different person, and was even then in the grip of a process that must have begun at birth – if not before.

Chapter Eight
    Early in 1938 we moved to a terrace by the side of the Raleigh Bicycle Factory, a house with a parlour and two proper bedrooms, a small plot of garden back and front, and our own water closet across the yard. My parents made their bedroom in the parlour so that Pearl and Peggy could have the back room upstairs, and Brian and myself the other. Later that year my father got a job with Thomas Bow the builders lasting ten weeks, and then another in November with the British Sugar Corporation that ended after eight days.
    Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérable , also done as a serial on the wireless, had as lasting an effect on me as the one by Dumas. A neighbour, Monty Graham, a fearsome little Scot who had fought his way through the Great War in France, lent me his musty-smelling and abridged Readers Library edition. Pages tended to fall out, and the first fifty were missing, but I read what remained, though later saved penny by penny to buy my own copy.
    Set in France, Les Misérables nevertheless seemed relevant to life roundabout and, apart from Beatrice by Rider Haggard, it was to be the only adult book read before the age of nineteen. The story (though who doesn’t know it by now?) tells of Jean Valjean, hounded by the sinister police agent Javert even after he had been nineteen years in the galleys for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his sister and her starving children; the painfully hard existence of Fantine who became a prostitute so as to pay for the upbringing of her illegitimate daughter Cosette; the ingenious street urchin Gavroche whose secret den was in the foot of the statue of an elephant, and who reminded me of my cousin Jack; then the 1830 Revolution in which Jean Valjean rescues Cosette’s wounded lover (who is thereby going to rob him of the only person he ever loved) by carrying him through the sewers of Paris on his shoulders. Such grand themes blended into an exciting narrative which couldn’t be seen by me as anything but real.
    It was fortunate that Les Misérables and The Count of Monte Cristo were known to me so early on, and had such a deep effect, for between them they lit up my darkness with visions of hope and promise of escape. Dumas’ story was one of revenge, and Hugo’s of justice, both books powerhouses buried in the heart which they helped to survive.
    Concurrent with my reading, a phase of acquiring lead soldiers lasted till well after it should. Matchsticks set in cracks between the floorboards, and a wall of joined Woodbine packets, did for fortifications, a few neat grenadiers deployed on one side, and a half section of khaki Great War soldiers on the other. Such arms expenditure was financed by pennies cadged or donated at the Burtons’, spoiling my economy with regard to books but