. . the elderly comedian . . . was pulling it off tremendously in spite of his age and long retirement, astonishing everyone, even himself . . . And, observing the purification of Mr. Prest, Miss Roach herself felt purified.

This too, in its fashion, is the achievement of Patrick Hamilton in The Slaves of Solitude. Mr. Prest and Miss Roach are the only characters in the novel to escape from the horror and despondence of the Rosamund Tea Rooms at Thames Lockdon and find the possibilities of a fuller life in London. To do this, like characters in Wagner’s Ring, they must go through the circle of fire laid down by the blitz, the flying bombs and enemy rockets. They must confront the ‘crouching monster’ that is London, with its polluted breath that exudes across the first page of the novel. For Thames Lockdon, its name blacked out ‘for reasons of security’, where the cemetery ‘spoke greenly and gracefully of death and antiquity, the Park spoke leaflessly and hideously of life-in-death, or death-in-life, amidst immature municipal surroundings’, was Patrick Hamilton’s purgatory: ‘a place to pass through’ with its ‘semi-tottering parade of death in life’.

Heaven appears to lie in the country beyond, where Miss Roach sometimes walks at weekends. It is a place that dominates and submerges ‘all things appertaining to men and towns’ and brings her spirit moments of consolation and refreshment. But in the paradox of war these fields and hills have become a mirage, irrelevant to life, while Thames Lockdon itself, which people believed had been ‘heaven’ before the war, was now the very pit of hell.

Patrick Hamilton makes the Rosamund Tea Rooms a palace in this hell (‘this dead-and-alive house, of this dead-and-alive street, of this dead-and-alive little town’). I myself lived not far away from Henley during the war and afterwards, and I recognize the authenticity of this guest house, its torpor and apathy. But Patrick Hamilton makes it hideously and hilariously surreal. Like London, it is a monster, giving out its repertoire of ‘silent noises’, its uncanny gurgling and throbbing sounds from unlocated water-pipes, its shrieks, and bumps and expectorations. It is full of the rage and prejudice and unhappiness that existed in himself. It contains everything he had acquired from his parents. We see aspects of his father in the loquacious and malevolent Mr. Thwaites, that archaic ‘trampler through the emotions of others’, who carries a mental age of twelve into ‘the bloom of his carefree and powerful dotage’; and also in Lieutenant Pike, the Lucifer who brings a light that blinds rather than illuminates, and whose inconsequence and unpredictability heighten Miss Roach’s anxieties. And we see the influence of his mother in the false friend, Vicki Kugelmann, so sinister and ambiguous, who promises to ‘lighten things up’ but adds to the awfulness of the place.

From these Furies Miss Roach finally escapes to her publishing life in London, as Patrick Hamilton himself escaped into his writing. The Slaves of Solitude is a powerfully redemptive novel. We are spared nothing: and nothing is sentimentalized. The condition of England is subtly blended with the author’s own condition, and we are led from this black hole of boredom, with its thunderous atmosphere of recrimination and insecurity, by a humour that is not merely defensive, not merely a sudden glory at the ridiculousness of our enemies, life’s enemies, but which in its magical fusion of fact and fantasy becomes an illumination of reality.

CHAPTER ONE

1

LONDON, the crouching monster, like every other monster has to breathe, and breathe it does in its own obscure, malignant way. Its vital oxygen is composed of suburban working men and women of all kinds, who every morning are sucked up through an infinitely complicated respiratory apparatus of trains and termini into the mighty congested lungs, held there for a number of hours, and then, in the evening, exhaled violently through the same channels.

The men and women imagine they are going into London and coming out again more or less of their own free will, but the crouching monster sees all and knows better.

The area affected by this filthy inhalation actually extends beyond what we ordinarily think of as the suburbs – to towns, villages, and districts as far as, or further than, twenty-five miles from the capital. Amongst these was Thames Lockdon, which lay on the river some miles beyond Maidenhead on the Maidenhead line.

The conditions were those of intense war, intense winter, and intensest black-out in the month of December. The engine carrying the 6.3 from Paddington steamed into Thames Lockdon station at about a quarter past seven. It arrived up against buffers, for Thames Lockdon was a terminus, and it hissed furiously.