. was slowly, cleverly, month by month, week by week, day by day, emptying the shelves of the shops – sneaking cigarettes from the tobacconists, sweets from the confectioners, paper, pens and envelopes from the stationers, fittings from the hardware stores . . . beer from the public houses, and so on endlessly – while at the same time gradually removing crockery from the refreshment bars, railings from familiar places, means of transport from the streets, accommodation from the hotels, and sitting or even standing room from the trains.’

I am reminded of a woman who re-read her war-time diaries years later and found she had never mentioned great events like Stalingrad or the Siege of Leningrad. She had written about the black-out, about queuing for a bit of off-ration meat, or a few sweets.

The general gloom is livened by an American soldier, Lieutenant Pike, born to illustrate the old gibe, ‘Over-paid, over-sexed, and over here.’ Among these English people wearied by the war, he is large, florid, generous, careless, good humoured and always out for a good time. His emotional excesses include a compulsion to ask every girl he meets to marry him, one of them Miss Roach, who though thirty-eight had ‘given up hope’ – to use the old phrase – years ago. Oddly enough, though ‘hopeless’ she had recently received an offer of marriage from ‘An impossible man who had somehow perceived her possibilities.’ The pensive resigned sadness while rejecting him, was because she was contemplating ‘the joy which would have been hers had she now been receiving, or had ever in her life received, an offer which she could reasonably accept.’

Is it surprising that ‘hopeless’ Miss Roach warmed to the careless attentions of the Lootenant whose slap-happy liberality in everything enlivened the spirits of this whole community of tired people?

Two of Patrick Hamilton’s nastiest characters are in this novel. One is Mr. Thwaites, a bully whose favourite victim was Miss Roach, and a German girl, Vicki, who secretly loves the Nazis, scheming, greedy, and spiteful. There is no possible defence to be made for either, unless it is that they are too stupid to know how vile they are. Between them their persecutions drive the mild Miss Roach into violence, and at the end of the story she is in bed in a good London hotel, driven from the Rosamumd Tea Rooms, and tomorrow she will start the search for a place to live in this overcrowded city. She knows nothing about the ‘February blitz shortly to descend on London’, flying bombs, rockets, the atom bombs that will at last end the war. ‘After long fearful musings, she at last composed her mind to sleep.’

‘God help us, God help all of us, every one, all of us,’ ends this sorrowful novel. It could do as an epitaph for all of Patrick Hamilton’s novels.

Is it permissible to wonder what awful persecutions he suffered himself to enable him to write so well about these victims, Miss Roach, George Harvey Bone, others struggling to survive when so much is stacked against them?

His London has gone, but never decent honourable sensitive people being driven crazy by cold cupidity, by the crooks, the bullies, the stupid.

So thoroughly has it gone that we may wonder if his novels could be called historical. But there are people who remember well the grimy war-depleted, grim meanness of the Tottenham Court Road area, of the Ten Thousand Streets Under the Sky, now so smart and full of commerce, of the shabby awfulness of Netting Hill Gate, now the last word in fashion, the meagreness of certain boarding houses and cheap hotels.

INTRODUCTION TO THE 1999 EDITION
BY MICHAEL HOLROYD

Patrick Hamilton wrote The Slaves of Solitude between 1943 and 1946. He was then in his early forties and already had behind him a brilliant career as novelist and playwright, with plenty of money earned from films of his work, but a dramatically shattered life.

His apparently conventional, upper-middle-class family background in the south of England seethed with tragicomic extravagance. Bernard Hamilton, his untrustworthy and vainglorious father, was himself a novelist, a truly awful novelist, who pursued an astonishing variety of additional roles: as an occasional soldier, part-time theosophist and bewigged though non-practising barrister; also an impressionable traveller, amateur actor, fascist (he was an ardent admirer of Mussolini), and dogged religious controversialist (‘What a low comedian you would have made!’ exclaimed Henry Irving after one of his monologues on religion). At the age of twenty-one he had inherited a fortune and then married a prostitute who threw herself in front of a train at Wimbledon Station. His second wife, the sexually frigid daughter of a fashionable London dentist, filled her time copying oil paintings, singing music-hall songs and writing romantic fiction. She found compensation for a loveless marriage in the possessive love of her three children, of whom Patrick was the youngest.

Patrick Hamilton’s first novel, Monday Morning, described by his brother Bruce as ‘a joyous miscellany of scraps of autobiography shaped to the needs of a novel’, was published when he was twenty-one. It was followed a year later, in 1926, by Craven House, which made his reputation as a realistic novelist. He was seen as being in a line of descent from Dickens, and compared in Britain to George Gissing and in the United States to Sinclair Lewis. Both books were largely autobiographical. Monday Morning chronicles the awkwardness of an early unconsummated love affair and provides it with a charmingly unconvincing fairytale ending. The novel presents, his biographer Nigel Jones suggests, ‘a self-portrait of a young author newly liberated from the smothering possessiveness of his mother and the tyranny of his father’.

Craven House, which was written in a guest house at Kew where his mother had protectively taken him, is a precursor to The Slaves of Solitude. Both novels chart with meticulous, almost plodding, care the banality of lodging-house life in England during wartime, the dullness and horror of which Patrick Hamilton’s macabre imagination converts into something between an asylum and a torture chamber. In Craven House we glimpse the beginnings of a break-up in English social life that took place after the First World War. This change was to be bewilderingly accelerated in the Second World War by the ‘twanging, banging invasion’ of United States soldiers – embodied in The Slaves of Solitude by the broad uniformed figure of ‘Lootenant’ Pike, whose wide American grin, gorgeous American teeth and insurmountable American talk dazzle and bemuse the other characters. But whereas Craven House is endearingly sentimental in its optimism, The Slaves of Solitude is a black comedy of manners that reaches its climax with a great cry from the soul echoing through the empty universe: ‘God help us, God help all of us, every one, all of us.’

Patrick Hamilton’s lodging houses, with their meagre gas-fires, their dim light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and the oppressive silences of their exhausted tenants, have something of the same nightmare atmosphere as Dickens’s boarding schools.