Walking in the Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949 -1962

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, a classic of working-class life, had been published several times, first in 1914, but only in a truncated form. Fred Ball, who had been researching Tressell’s life for many years, managed to locate the original manuscript and bought it, with the help of friends, for seventy pounds. Some people doubted its authenticity, but it was genuine. It was difficult to get the full version published, because the abridged version was still in print and several publishers felt that the full text was too much of a socialist tract. Eventually Maurice Cornforth at Lawrence and Wishart, the communist publishers, were persuaded to publish. It was very successful. Jonathan Clowes, who was to become a well-known literary agent, was working as a painter and decorator then. He was a friend of Fred Ball, helped him with advice, and was able to place his biography of Tressell with Weidenfeld – a mainstream publisher, not a socialist one. Lawrence and Wishart did not want to publish the biography, because Fred Ball discovered that Tressell, probably the son of a well-off Irish RM, was not working class. This was about the same time as Joan Littlewood had a big success with a ‘working-class’ play about building workers called You Won’t Always Be on Top, by Henry Chapman, also Jonathan’s friend – described by the press as the Hastings bricklayer. Much to the disgust of the Communist Party cultural commissars, Henry also turned out to have impeccable middle-class origins.

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During this time, when almost all the people I met saw themselves as the vanguard of the working class, the only person I knew who was a genuine representative, unredeemed and unpolitical, was – classically – the woman who came to clean my flat once a week. What interested me most about her was that she was just like the Scottish farmers’ wives I had grown up with. She was Mrs Dougall, about sixty, thin, pale, unwell, never without a cigarette, but if Fate had taken her winging across the seas to Southern Rhodesia? Instead she was as downtrodden as anyone I’ve known, but a willing accomplice in her exploitation. She was on the books of a firm employing cleaning women, which charged us the maximum per hour, paid her half. It was no use telling her that if she set up for herself she would earn twice as much. ‘They’ve been good to me,’ she would sigh. She had an unsatisfactory husband, whom she often had to keep. She loved him. My little splinter of a story ‘He’ was suggested by her. When not talking lovingly of her husband and kindly of her employers, she brooded about 10 Rillington Place, just up the road, the scene of horrific murders.