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That is the thought of ten-year-old Colin as he accompanies his cousin Bert to the Goose Fair, a traveling carnival. "If it's on'y a penny a ride then we've got two goes each," he calculates. But he also is plagued by guilt, because if he instead used the fourpence to buy ten Woodbine cigarettes and gave them to his father, then his father would not brood and abuse his mother that night. But Bert prevails on Colin to contribute the fourpence as their stake for an evening of fun. Then, by stealing, begging, cheating, and sneaking onto rides, they manage to extend their stay at Goose Fair for hours, until the merry-go-round operator sets a trap and pitches Colin from the spinning roundabout.

That's one of the nine stories of working class life in the 1930's in northern England, much of which is based on Alan Sillitoe's boyhood in Nottingham, England. But for the lowest class of English society, the precise location is irrelevant: "[E]very city's the same when you come to weigh it up: the same hostels full of thieves all out to snatch your last bob if you give them half the chance; the same factories full of work, if you're lucky; the same mildewed backyards and houses full of silverfish and black-clocks when you suddenly switch on the light at night."

It's a bleak and bitter existence. Still, many of the characters have a sense of honor and dignity -- only it's not the honor of the upper classes of England, or as one of them calls the nation, "the poxetten land of hope and glory". World War II is approaching, but the "war" Sillitoe's folks are more preoccupied with is the class war between the haves and the have nots, or the "In-law blokes" versus the "Out-law blokes". As for that World War, this is what Colin and Bert sing on their way home in the dark from the Goose Fair:
"We don't want to fight in a Tory war
Die like the lads before
Drown in the mud and gore
We want to go to work."

THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE RUNNER is a powerful collection of stories. The title story is the best known, owing largely to the 1962 film of the same name, directed by Tony Richardson and starring Tom Courtenay and Michael Redgrave. While it's a very good story, I liked four other stories even more, one of them being "Noah's Ark", the story of Colin and Bert at Goose Fair. If the collection were limited to those five stories, my Amazon assessment would be a solid five stars. But the remaining four stories are less worthy, although I thought only one of them to be less than ordinary (one in which Sillitoe is far too heavy-handed in his indictment of conventional authority). Still, along with Sillitoe's novel "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning", LONG-DISTANCE RUNNER deserves a lasting place in English literature of the working and lower classes.

Alan Sillitoe was one of a number of young writers who emerged in the late fifties and sixties and who have become known as the "kitchen sink" school. (Other members of the group included the novelists Stan Barstow, John Braine, David Storey and Barry Hines and playwrights such as John Osborne and Shelagh Delaney). Their work was distinguished by a social-realist concentration of working-class life, often with a provincial setting.

This collection of short stories was published in 1959, a year after "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning", Sillitoe's first novel. All the stories are set, or partly set, in the author's home town of Nottingham. The title story is both the best-known in the collection and the longest. It takes the form of a first-person monologue by Smith (we never learn his first name), a teenager from a working-class Nottingham home who is sent to Borstal after being convicted of robbing a bakery. (A "Borstal", named after the Kentish village in which the first such institution was situated, was at this period a special prison for young offenders).

While in Borstal, Smith discovers a talent for long-distance running, and this brings him to the notice of the Governor, who takes a keen interest in sport as a means of rehabilitating young offenders, and he is entered in a cross-country race against other Borstals. (The Governor believes that for one of his inmates to win the race would bring prestige to his institution). Smith has a real talent for the sport and could easily have won the race, but quite deliberately chooses to lose it, stopping running just short of the finishing line to allow another runner to pass him. He does so as a deliberate gesture of contempt for the Governor and for the whole of the Establishment which he despises.

Sillitoe never expressly passes judgement on Smith's attitude to life, and some have certainly seen him as an admirable character, a working-class hero standing up to the System. In my view, however, Sillitoe simply allows Smith to condemn himself out of his own mouth; certainly, the author is critical of the British class system, but it seems to me that one of his criticisms is that it encourages distorted attitudes like Smith's, whose anti-Establishment stance is essentially an ideological justification for his own selfishness and criminality. One of the most striking aspects of his lengthy diatribe is that he never considers anyone other than himself; he certainly does not spare a thought for the baker he has robbed or for his other victims. His only friend is Mike, another delinquent youth who helps him carry out the robbery; they can think of nothing to do with their loot except to travel to the nearest seaside resort and spend it on gambling machines and cheap tarts. The "loneliness" of the title may refer to Smith's self-centredness; it is perhaps symbolic that he excels at a purely individual sport rather than those like football or rugby which demand teamwork and co-operation.

Loneliness and alienation are the themes of a number of the other stories in this volume. In "Uncle Ernest" a solitary, ageing and embittered veteran of World War I befriends two young girls who briefly bring a sense of meaning into his life, before he is warned off by the police, who suspect his motives. (Hysteria about paedophilia is clearly nothing new). "On Saturday Afternoon" tells the story of a young boy who witnesses a quiet, reclusive neighbour attempting to kill himself. In "Mr Raynor the Schoolteacher" the title character seems unable to form relationships with women except at a distance; his main preoccupation, which distracts him from his classes, is gazing from afar at the girls who work in the shop across the road from his classroom.

Even when Sillitoe's characters are able to form relationships they are often doomed to failure, leaving those characters even lonelier than before. The title character of "The Disgrace of Jim Scarfedale" is caught between the demands of his domineering, over-protective mother and those of his equally demanding wife, a middle-class Socialist for whom her preconceived ideas about working-class life turn out to be more congenial than the reality; after the inevitable breakdown of his marriage he ends up being arrested for indecently exposing himself to young girls.

"The Match" contrasts two married couples, a happily-married pair of newlyweds and the couple next door, trapped in a loveless and violent relationship; the title refers to the fact that the husband comes home and physically abuses his wife after watching his football team lose a game. Yet we cannot help feeling that once Mr and Mrs Lennox may have been as much in love as their neighbours, and cannot help wondering what the future might hold for young Fred and Ruby. "The Fishing Boat Picture" tells the story of a long-estranged middle-aged couple who have a chance of reconciliation yet fail to take it. "Yes I cry, but neither of us did anything about it, and that's the trouble".

A number of the stories are told from the perspective of a child and are set during Sillitoe's own childhood in the 1930s and 1940s. This allows him to draw on memories of hardship during the war and the depression, although the child's viewpoint enables him to bring a lighter touch to these stories, such as "Noah's Ark" or "The Decline and Fall of Frankie Buller". Even in "One Saturday Afternoon", with its subject-matter of suicide, Sillitoe is able to derive a certain amount of grim humour.

In many ways these stories reminded me of those written by Sillitoe's exact contemporary Stan Barstow (both were born in 1928), another chronicler of working-class life although in his case from the neighbouring county of Yorkshire rather than Nottinghamshire. Yet even though they describe similar social milieus there is, I think, a difference between them which explains why Sillitoe, unlike Barstow, is often numbered among the fifties literary grouping known as the Angry Young Men. Barstow's characters, including his most famous Vic Brown, often react to hardship or misfortune with stoicism and resilience; Vic even has ambitions to better himself socially, something which the likes of Uncle Ernest or Jim Scarfedale would regard as incomprehensible and Smith would regard as a sell-out to the System. The tone of Sillitoe's stories is more often a bleak, if sometimes defiant, anger and bitterness, occasionally relived by sardonic humour. Yet it is this very bleakness which gives them much of their emotional power.

Alan Stilltoe was a fine writer who really exposed the grimness of life in postwar industrial England through characters who either endure lives of quiet desperation or inner rebellion. The title story in this collection is well known since it was made into a film in the 60s and it falls into the later category. The prime character is a youth living in a grim rainy gritty city in England who is caught after a robbery and sent to a Borstal where he discovers his talent for running. He then uses this to set up a rebellious tale that sets the individual against the establishment, a theme that is repeated in much of Stilltoe's work. The other stories are very good and as a collection this short book is excellent for the quality of the writing and consistency of theme.
Stilltoe's full length novel Saturday Night and Sunday morning is equally well done and worth exploring if you enjoy these stories.