CLANCY SIGAL
131
way of Sheffield, South Yorkshire.
A hungry writer with his back against the ropes will lash out with
everything he has. I was lucky enough to meet a coal-face collier named
Len Doherty, also a writer, who understood my hunger because he too
was famished for escape. We collaborated on my first book,
Weekend in
Diniock ,
although only my name appeared on it. I wrote it but he
opened his village, his pit and himself to me. When I showed him my fi–
nal manuscript, he shoved it back across the pub table and said, "It'll
make thy reputation, lad. But it won't solve thy problems. God Al–
maghty couldn't help the likes of us."
"Us" was a Chicago corner boy and a Yorkshire handgetter in tem–
porary alliance against "Them" - not only the English upper class which
was our formal enemy but also a whole world of cosmopolitan sophisti–
cates centered in London , who drove us mad with their double signals of
praise and patronization. Angry , trapped (we felt) in a kind of claustro–
phobic clumsiness, steeped in the different prides of our respective work–
ing classes - he Geordie, me Russian-Jewish - we often took it out on
each other. We had one or two terrible fist fights in the dark lanes of
Thurcroft after pub closing. Finally, almost laughing with exhaustion, he
collapsed against me one night in the Miners Club. "What do tha want
of us, man? If tha stay much longer, one or both of us'll end up in hos–
pital. Go home, Yank."
But I didn't, or couldn't, go "home.'
"You Red worms sure been crawling out of the woodwork ever
since that damn Negro crooner fooled the judges he wasn't a Commie.
Here's your new passport - and you can go to hell with it," angrily spat
a Second Secretary at the U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square as he almost
threw the prized document at me . The Supreme Court had just ruled
that the singer-actor Paul Robeson could not be denied a valid passport
simply because of his radical opinions. The court's decison suddenly re–
leased me from a curiously clandestine life I'd led since coming to Britain
as a passportless, blacklisted "McCarthy refugee." Finally, I was free to
go home - but where was that?
Somehow, while dodging Home Office snoops, sleeping in open
fields and in railway guards' vans if I didn't have money for a ticket,
brazenly knocking on strangers' doors in places that tickled my fancy,
stopping a night with a friendly newspaper editor or (yes) policeman
willing to give me a hot cuppa on a freezing night, I'd become less
American. Not British or English. More Yanklish .
And as its gray soot rubbed off on me, a Londoner.
I tried going back to the States. But so much had happened there,
so few of my gloomy predictions were proving true, that I slunk back
to England with a relieved sense that here, thank God, things stayed the
