Life Without Armour by Alan; Sillitoe Read Free Book Online Page B

previous attempt I’d had no coaching, but at least knew what to expect. A hard try was not enough, however, and my second failure indicated that I was not a fit subject for formal education. Success would in any case have led to all kinds of complications, not least that of leaving my friends and entering a world I was not prepared for. I could not know it then, but I wanted to go in by the ceiling, not enter by the cellar.
    I knew that to continue schooling until the advanced age of seventeen was impossible in a family which needed any money that could be earned as soon as the legal age to work full time had been reached. It would be emotionally out of the question for me to endure the justifiable resentment of someone like my father, who at least had the power to make me feel guilty at having money in my pocket to buy books when there was little enough to eat on the table. It was the only moral problem I was to inherit.
    Disappointment was not despair, there being worse things in the world than failure, and once the illusory hurdle of further education was out of the way my life could take the course it was obviously fitted for, and allow me to do the best that was possible in no other terms but my own.

Chapter Nine
    Sometime in 1939 I stood in line at school to receive a gasmask. At last we mattered to the government, which was arranging for us not to be choked to death during an air raid. In my already long life there had been talk of war: in China, in Abyssinia and Spain. The Germans (of whom I had often heard that the only good ones were dead), after electing the Nazis to run their country, had retaken the Rhineland in 1936, and had now gone into the Sudeten part of Czechoslovakia. Hitler ranted like a dog with the colic, and people in the rest of Europe were afraid because they did not want war.
    As well as being poor, we could shortly expect to be bombed. The only good thing was that for most of the time we were too poor to be worried, and you could only worry about one thing at a time. Nevertheless, listening to people discussing the horrors of the previous conflict, which had ended only twenty years ago, and hearing of bombing atrocities in Spain, the prospect was frightening. The gasmask was a precious piece of equipment that had been given to us, but its significance could hardly promise a peaceful future.
    At Radford Boulevard Senior Boys’ School I was, with a few friends, always near the top of the ‘A’ stream. The diminutive Percy Rowe, another reputed terror of a teacher, had been a victim of shellshock, which to our silent amusement seemed a positive advantage as, with shaking hands, he drew a map of the western coast of Scotland or the fjords of Norway on the blackboard. On seeing me looking at a Michelin map from Wore’s bookshop he said he had used them driving lorries to and from the trenches during the Great War. He also taught English, and responded keenly to whoever wrote good ‘compositions’.
    Many of the usual boys’ books were borrowed by me from the nearby public library, which included every ‘William’ title by Richmal Crompton, as much as could be found by Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle and Jules Verne (who replaced G.A. Henty and Herbert Strang) as well as other novels by Alexandre Dumas (especially the d’Artagnan series), and Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Toilers of the Sea . Thirty or forty books were kept in the bedroom cupboard, mostly novels but also history, geography, and French grammars. An ex-Guardsman living nearby let me have his one-inch Ordnance Survey sheet of the Aldershot Training Area, which greatly increased my knowledge of map-reading. Old Mr Smith, who was dying in a house at the yard-end, sent me his paper railway map of England.
    A scene which impressed me, in a film on the life of the Victorian prime minister Benjamin Disraeli – though I suppose it could have been put in by the scriptwriters – was when