A Haunted Life

I am a great admirer of the novels of David Storey, one of the wave of post-war northern writers characterized by a desire to give voices to working-class men and women. His fifth novel, Saville, was the Booker Prize winner in 1976. But I hadn’t realized, until I read his own memoir, A Stinging Delight, published in 2021, how closely the life of Colin Saville, the eponymous hero, paralleled David Storey’s own.

Growing up poor in a mining village near Wakefield was clearly the engine that drove Storey’s creativity all his life. To a modern eye, his prose is almost nineteenth-century in its simplicity and directness. But the writing – fierce, urgent, fluid – is uniquely suited to carry the weight of Colin Saville’s story and recreate a brutal 1930s landscape. Even now, entering that world, even in fiction, has the power to chasten and appal the reader. Saville’s father is a miner at the local colliery. The landscape in which they live has been plundered and blackened by the Industrial Revolution. The very air is filthy and their local river, the Calder, is known as the dirtiest river in England. This landscape demands hard physical labour. For the men, their labour earns subsistence wages for dangerous work. For the women, it’s an endless fight against dirt, brutality and more children than money. ‘Life was about work,’ Storey observes of that time, ‘Anything else was showing off.’ But two factors set Colin Saville apart, as they had done his creator. He is clever, and he’s tall and strong. He passes his 11-plus and gains a place at Wakefield Grammar School. But his family can’t afford to feed him during the long school summer holiday. So from the age of 12 he’s doing a man’s job at a neighbouring farm, giving his wages to his mother. The farmer strides ahead, scything the corn. Colin’s job is to stook it, full of nettles and brambles, and simply keep going for an eight-hour day in scorching heat. The following summer he gets a job with Andrassy, a marquee hire company, where he’s roundly hated by the other workers for sounding educated. But they back off when they discover he’s more than able to defend himself and can wield the sixteen-pound hammer needed to drive in the wooden supports for the marquees. Colin’s story takes us from childhood, through grammar school and college to a teaching job. Ostensibly he’s a success in that he’s avoided going down the pit. In reality he is angry and dissatisfied, out of tune with his family and his upbringing. The book ends with him taking a train to London for a life he can’t yet envisage. I’ve read and enjoyed Saville many times. But what I learned from David Storey’s memoir is that though the novel is a piercingly accurate account of his own upbringing, it omitted an underwater iceberg of distress and mental illness, both of which Storey inherited along with his prodigious gifts. Andrew O’Hagan, reviewing A Stinging Delight, observes that Storey, of all those so-called kitchen-sink writers, ‘most fully demonstrates the price of that journey from home and culture to become the person he wanted to be’. It was Storey’s misfortune to have left home ‘with the scars still raw and the family illness undisclosed’. This family trauma is only hinted at towards the very end of Saville. Colin knows he is the third of four sons, the eldest, Andrew, having died very suddenly of pneumonia aged 6. Colin’s mother was three months pregnant with Colin at the time. Now, as an adult, he asks his father: ‘How did Andrew’s death affect my mother?’ ‘Well,’ says his father, ‘I think that’s been half the trouble.’ The father says no more but suddenly the causes of Colin’s mother’s bizarre and often vindictive behaviour towards her son are illuminated. All this was reflected with painful exactitude in David Storey’s own life. His memoir is addressed throughout to Neville, his real-life eldest brother, who died suddenly aged 6.

Our mother was three months gone with me when you died. From the age of three or four I woke up each morning with the unmistakable impression someone had died; the sensation that life, in the most frightening way possible, was coming to an end. I believe your death had a traumatic effect not only on our mother but on the foetus she carried. A speculation that was carried into conviction, when I discovered that, in the twelfth week of foetal life . . . the central nervous system taps into and is vulnerable to outside influences. Not a day goes by when you’re not present to me in some form or other.

The death of Neville, Storey believed, left him traumatized from birth and with a permanent sense of loss. The effect on his mother was still more destructive. Clearly in the grip of a nervous breakdown, she decided the best way she could be a good mother to the newly born David was to never pick him up, or kiss or cuddle him. Ever. This way, she reasoned, she could make him a man. The fact that Storey delineated Colin’s mother with great compassion in Saville says everything about his generosity of spirit. But the damage was done: he grew up never daring to speak of these crippling daily terrors for fear of being thought a coward, not a ‘man’. Instead he ferociously embraced his creative life, ‘working like a pit pony’ as Andrew O’Hagan vividly puts it, as the only effective means to hold that pain at bay. It was never a cure, only a relief. When he couldn’t write, serious depression and breakdown were lying in wait. Storey’s first ambition was to be an artist and he won a place in London at the Slade School of Art. Unbelievably, he financed those years by commuting home weekly to play halfback for the Leeds Rugby League Club A team. He returned to London on Sunday night, bruised and shaking, to continue his Fine Arts degree on Monday morning. But the experience provided the background for his second novel, This Sporting Life (1960). It was subsequently made into an acclaimed film and was described by the veteran sports journalist Frank Keating as the best novel ever written about sport. When you love a book you find yourself speculating about what happens after the narrative ends. Will Saville find more congenial worlds and will they bring him any more peace of mind? At home he’s been involved with Margaret, an older, married woman, separated from her husband. They have endless acrimonious conversations as to whether they should both leave and go south. Colin is fired up by the idea while Margaret has discovered, to her own surprise, that she doesn’t want to move away from everything that’s familiar. She reminds him that many great artists, including Rembrandt, stayed put. ‘It’s an illusion to think you’ve got to break the mould. Sometimes,’ she adds presciently, ‘the mould may be the most precious thing you have.’ In other words, you risk breaking it at considerable cost. It can leave you, like David Storey, eternally looking over your shoulder with pain and longing at a culture and a landscape which no longer even exist. This ambivalence is beautifully illustrated by the later years of David Storey’s own life. He was a kind father and grandfather, fond of taking his young grandchildren out for walks. They lived in North London yet one of their favourite walks seems to have been the long tramp down to Kings Cross Station. The purpose of the walk would be revealed when Storey would stand, staring into the station’s immense dark tunnel which had first brought him from Wakefield to the soft south. The longing to connect to both seemingly never left him.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 86 © Frances Donnelly 2025