Telling it Straight

‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive . . .’

Well, it would be hard to argue it was a revolution, I suppose – that ‘new wave’ of English novels of my youth. But it was definitely thrilling to be reading new fiction in the late 1950s and early ’60s; and to be a young man buying those novels as soon as the booksellers would sell you them (if I remember rightly, once you were, or looked, 14) came pretty close to literary heaven. It wasn’t just the sex, though the authors of this new wave of literature seemed keen to treat the subject in as matter-of-fact a way as possible. It was also the settings, which were northern, provincial and predominantly working-class and were depicted as frankly as were the characters’ love affairs. These new authors – David Storey, Keith Waterhouse, Stan Barstow, Alan Sillitoe – were from this background, Storey and Barstow from Wakefield, Waterhouse from Leeds, Sillitoe from Nottingham, and none of them had had a university education. They had left school at 14 or a few years later, when they’d finished gram mar school; after which, too young to see action, they either trained in one of the services during the war or did National Service after it. All of this applied in spades to the man who made the biggest literary breakthrough of them all in those years – John Braine – and the novel that made his name, Room at the Top (1957). Braine’s title was a deliberate play on words. The Top in the novel certainly means the top of the ladder, or the heap, in the material and social sense, but The Top or ‘T ’Top’, as it’s known to the locals, is also the highest topographical point of the fictional town of Warley where the novel’s action takes place. This physical ‘Top’ embodies the socio-economic one. Here is the narrator and main protagonist, Joe Lampton, just arrived in Warley, reflecting on his new lodgings, which are located on one of the roads leading to the top of the town:

I congratulated myself on my good fortune . . . my lodgings might easily have been one of those scruffy little houses by the station . . . Instead I was going to the Top, into a world that even from my first brief glimpses filled me with excitement: big houses with drives and orchards and manicured hedges, a preparatory school to which the boys would soon return from adventures in Brittany and Brazil and India or at the very least an old castle in Cornwall, expensive cars – Bentleys, Lagondas, Daimlers, Jaguars – parked everywhere in a kind of ostentatious litter as if the district had dropped them at random as evidences of its wealth; and, above all, the wind coming from the moors and the woods on the far horizon.

Joe Lampton is a young man on the rise. Born into a working- class family in the nearby town of Dufton, where his father was a labourer in one of its mills, Joe is an only child orphaned in his teens when a Luftwaffe bomb demolished the family home. His remaining war years were spent first as a lowly ‘sergeant-observer’ in the RAF and then as a POW in a camp in Bavaria. While there – as he says at one point, keen to highlight the contrast between his kind and the moustachioed and later bemedalled RAF officer-types – he made no attempt to escape but spent his time studying for the accountancy exams he would be taking on his return home. His mathematical skills ensured he passed those and, as the novel opens, Joe is arriving in Warley to take up a position in the Treasurer’s department at the Town Hall. In doing so, he is leaving both his geographical and his social origins behind. His job at the Town Hall will mean earning more than his labourer-father could ever have hoped to and, he believes, will give him at least the beginnings of status in the world he aspires to enter. Joe is sharply aware of class, but he has no chip on his shoulder nor any political axe to grind. His father had prided himself on his Labour loyalties – ‘If Ah’d joined t’Con Club, lad, Ah’d be riding to work in mi own car . . .’. Joe is more interested in owning a car than having the correct politics. The novel is set in the early postwar years, when many basic goods and foodstuffs were still strictly rationed and private cars were rare. Joe is all the more impressed by the luxurious lifestyle of those at the Top because it contrasts so starkly with the drab indigence of most people’s lives. Integral to Joe’s pursuit of social status and material success is the acquisition of a ‘trophy’ wife, as she would now be called. Tellingly, in what is a skilfully constructed story, his first glimpse of the type of girl he is aiming to conquer is through the window of a café; and what first attracts his attention is a car – a green Aston Martin tourer parked outside a solicitor’s office. The car is then joined by its owner – a young man whose appearance exudes wealth and good living – and a young girl with an ‘even suntan and her fair hair cut short in a style too simple to be anything else but expensive’. Joe is immediately consumed with envy. For a moment I hated him. I saw myself, compared with him, as the Town Hall clerk, the subordinate pen-pusher, half-way to being a zombie, and I tasted the sourness of envy. Then I rejected it. Not on moral grounds; but because I felt then, and still do, that envy’s a small and squalid vice . . . This didn’t abate the fierceness of my longing. I wanted an Aston Martin, I wanted a three-guinea linen shirt, I wanted a girl with a Riviera suntan – these were my rights, I felt, a signed and sealed legacy. Joe is as direct, calculating, arrogant and driven by ambition as this passage suggests. Not particularly likeable, you might think. But it is Joe who tells the story and while not ‘a thoroughly decent chap’, he has the virtue of honesty: he doesn’t pretend to be anything other, or better, than he is. His conduct towards the women in his life is far from admirable but he is not a cad and the lessons he is forced to learn over the course of the novel about the complications of sexual love and the depth of feeling it arouses are painful ones, for him and the reader. Room at the Top is as much the coming-of-age story of a young man, ‘an unmarried man of 25 with normal appetites’, as an account of how a version of Stendhal’s Julien Sorel, transplanted to an English industrial town, climbs his way to the top of local society. The dynamism and forcefulness of both this character, Joe Lampton, and the novel as a whole impressed critics of the time, one praising its ‘bounding vitality and talent’, another the ‘panoramic accuracy of the picture of English society’ Braine had provided. A third, the Listener magazine, went further, arguing that Room at the Top helped define the burning literary issue of the time, the ‘question of the Angry Young Man’. What the angry young writers – John Osborne, Kingsley Amis and now John Braine – had drawn attention to was ‘that there are still two nations in Britain, and they are still at war’. These two nations had now come face to face, ‘for the young men from the back streets have found voices: the first to do so and escape . . . gentility’. Braine, the Listener critic concluded, had an even stronger grasp than the other two of ‘the roots of the matter’. Though I read Room at the Top four or five years after it was first published this was still how it felt to me when I finally got hold of my Penguin edition – ‘Complete and Unabridged’ – in the early 1960s. I may have been middle- rather than working-class, and from the steel town of Sheffield rather than a wool town like Warley (based on Braine’s experience of Bradford) but the world of the postwar industrial north was my world. The landscapes of Warley, both geo graphical and social, were immediately recognizable, as were the language, the attitudes and the characters. And although Braine was often bracketed with the two leading Angry Young Men, for we northerners he belonged much more to that new wave of writers I mentioned at the beginning, who had taken to the novel as a means of recording their own direct experience of growing up in what the Listener called ‘a frontier-life between our horn-locked nations’. Rereading the novel now, I’m not sure this analysis is quite correct. Like Braine’s Joe Lampton, these writers were not consumed by the so-called class war. What they wanted was to ensure the social reality they knew and in which they had grown up received the interest and attention it deserved – not just the social reality but also the psycho logical truth of the working-class characters they created. And it was clear that they succeeded. Not only did their novels sell but they were rapidly turned into films, which met with a huge popular response. Room at the Top was no exception, being brought to the screen within two years of its first publication and becoming an immediate runaway success. The new British fiction had launched another ‘new wave’, of a young generation of film-directors who felt the same drive as the novelists to do justice to what they considered neglected areas of British life. Perhaps Room at the Top belonged to a kind of revolution after all.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 88 © Anthony Wells 2025