Ann replaced two half-bottles of rum that Edna hadn’t found. ‘I don’t want anything.’
She got up from the settee. The days were longer but the nights flashed by. She didn’t dream about Melanie and her mother anymore. Maybe Sailor had taken them away. She didn’t even dream about him, and found that strange. But he was present every moment of the day.
She’d had little booze since the funeral and, looking back on a month of nights, wouldn’t taste it again. Tears fell from her thinning face as she shook the thousand pieces of the jigsaw puzzle back onto the table. Call me Sailor, he had said, in a voice never to be forgotten. His smile during however much time was needed to put it together would show her what a villain he had been to leave her in such a state, but she was getting enough from the DHSS to manage. She didn’t know whether she would glue each piece firmly till it could be framed and hung as they had talked about, or scatter the completed picture broadside into the fire, hoping to see Sailor one last time among the flames.
Alan Sillitoe
was born in 1928, and left school at fourteen to work in various factories until becoming an air traffic control assistant with the Ministry of Aircraft Production in 1945.
He began writing after four years in the RAF, and lived for six years in France and Spain. His first stories were printed in the Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian. In 1958 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was published, and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which won the Hawthornden Prize for literature, came out the following year. Both these books were made into films.
Further works include Key to the Door, The Ragman’s Daughter and The General (both also filmed), The William Posters Trilogy, A Start in Life, Raw Material, The Widower’s Son, Her Victory, The Lost Flying Boat, Down from the Hill, Life Goes On, The Open Door, Last Loves, Leonard’s War, Snowstop, Collected Stories, Alligator Playground, and The Broken Chariot — as well as eight volumes of poetry, and Nottinghamshire, for which David Stillitoe took the photographs. He has also published his autobiography, Life Without Armour.
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By the Same Author
Fiction
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
The General
Key to the Door
The Ragman’s Daughter
The Death of William Posters
A Tree on Fire
Guzman, Go Home
A Start in Life
Travels in Nihilon
Raw Material
Men, Women and Children
The Flame of Life
The Widower’s Son
The Storyteller
The Second Chance and Other Stories
Her Victory
The Lost Flying Boat
Down From the Hill
Life Goes On
Out of the Whirlpool
The Open Door
Last Loves
Leonard’s War
Snowstop
Collected Stories
The Broken Chariot
Non-fiction
Life Without Armour (autobiography)
Poetry
The Rats and Other Poems
A Falling Out of Love and Other Poems
Love in the Environs of Voronezh and Other Poems
Storm and Other Poems
Snow on the North Side of Lucifer
Sun Before Departure
Tides and Stone Walls
Collected Poems
Plays
All Citizens are Soldiers (with Ruth Fainlight)
Three Plays
Essays
Mountains and Caverns
For Children
The City Adventures of Marmalade Jim
Big John and the Stars
The Incredible Fencing Fleas
Marmalade Jim on the Farm
Marmalade Jim and the Fox