The best storytellers explore the dynamics of individual and collective power. They feed and stimulate our historical memory and in so doing we are indebted to them for sustaining our moral integrity. Alan Silitoe falls easily into this category of writer. There are nine stories in this collection, first published in 1959, and the title one is the longest. “As a mirror of working class life,” the blurb editor informs us, these yarns are “worth several works of sociology”. Having been born and bred in a northern council estate during the immediate post war years I have no problem endorsing that opinion. These real life anecdotes reek of nostalgia for me. They open up windows of memory that have long since become shuttered.

Sillitoe was born in Nottingham eleven years before the war broke out and so a couple of the tales reference the abysmal quality of life experienced by children before the umbrella of the welfare state came into existence. One of these, mock heroically entitled The Decline And Fall Of Frankie Buller, is about a backward young man whose sole purpose in life appears to be to round up all the street urchins in his neighbourhood on pain of torture and take them into fantasy battles against a fantasy enemy named Sodom, the inhabitants of a new estate built to rehouse slum clearance families. It is therefore about the curious insanity of same class jealousy and tribalism. Like all Silitoe’s stories it is narrated with a gritty realism that fuses tragedy with comedy, authentic dialect voices with hauntingly squalid imagery; that never sentimentalises or indulges in high falutin literary semantics, that left me angry and indignant at how many young lives were crippled and blighted by a lack of educational opportunity and impoverishment.

This book stands as a rogue’s gallery of the disgraced, the marginalised, the oppressed, the psychotic, the embittered and the rebellious – with all of whom Sillitoe clearly identifies. Forget the nice refined psychologically complex characters of conventional middle class fiction. Here is the truth about the underclass on whose backs the hated Tories and the managerial classes have erected their monuments of affluence, their fallacies of trickle down economics and other myths of civilisation. You survive by whatever means you can or you get incarcerated and go under. Petty theft, serial misogyny, boozing and football are omnipresent characteristics of these abject creatures. It is a brutal and brutalising patriarchal world. Above all else these are chronically lonely people, adrift and alienated even from themselves in a dog eat dog environment that Silitoe often refers to as a jungle. We have, for instance, the appallingly sad yarn of a solitary old man who tries to be kind to a couple of manipulative young girls and gets mistakenly assumed to be a paedophile. Then another about a youth who decides to escape from the clutches of his suffocatingly over-possessive mother by marrying a well-bred middle class girl, only to find himself cruelly ditched once she discovers the full extent of his irredeemable working class vulgarity.

In these sagas marriage always dissolves quickly into a purgatory of mutual recrimination and antipathy. In The Fishing Boat Picture Kathy leaves her husband Harry for another man but when that relationship fails too she wheedles her way back into Harry’s home, knocking at his door once every week, pleading poverty and tapping him for cash. This routine endures for years throughout the war. He is glad to indulge her not just for reasons of sentiment, of course, but because she alleviates his solitude. Then after her death in a road accident Harry finds out she had a third husband on the go all the time and says, “I began to believe there was no point in my life – became even too far gone to turn religious or go on the booze. Why had I lived, I wondered?……I was born dead, I keep telling myself. Everybody’s dead, I answer. So they are, I maintain but then most of them never know it like I’m beginning to do.” As a study of the impotence, misery and alienation of a whole generation of working class people I found it unbearably poignant. I too might have lived that life had I not escaped to university.

Simultaneously while reading this collection I was dipping into a biography of John Lennon by Philip Norman. Lennon too came to feel guilty about escaping from his roots. “As soon as you’re born they make you feel small,” goes the lyric of his song Working Class Hero, “Til the pain is so big you feel nothing at all. They hurt you at home and they hit you at school, Til you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules.” In the final analysis Silitoe writes about people who are stark staring fucking crazy in much of their behaviour. Whether you deem that behaviour excusable or not will depend on your own social origins and how far you have ascended the greasy pole, I suppose. One of the abiding ironies here is that reading and writing are very much middle and upper class preoccupations so even though these stories may have worked brilliantly for their author as expiatory therapy, they would never have been experienced by the semi-literate victims who people them.

FIVE STARS