Rebel Writers of the East Midlands Books That Made Britain

MUSIC: Rebel Rebel by David Bowie.

Hello, and welcome to Books That Made Britain -

books that capture the essence of the places where we live.

I am here in the glorious DH Lawrence country

and my home county, Nottinghamshire.

I have chosen three excellent books.

Each of these authors could be described as a working-class rebel.

Furthermore, as a master storyteller.

Here's what is coming up...

A book that caused a sensation...

"Don't let the BLEEP get you down."

..and put the backstreets of Nottingham on the map.

A funny, subversive, teenage diary tapped out on an old

typewriter.

Neither Sue nor I thought it might be big but it just exploded.

It became an international multi-million bestseller.

And a revolutionary story of life in the pits...

It depicts that industrial close-knit community.

..now rated as one of the best novels of

all time.

Before the end of the show I have the impossible task of having

to pick a favourite from those three.

We begin here in Nottingham with a novel that caused quite a

stir when it was first published in 1958.

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe.

"I am me and nobody else.

Whatever people think I am or say I am, that is what I am not

because they don't know a bloody thing about me."

It's the story of rebellious factory worker Arthur Seaton.

A drinker, a fighter and a lover determined to win at whatever cost.

Here, fighting the corner for Saturday Night And Sunday Morning,

is local writer Nicky Monaghan.

When I opened that book and read it for the first

time when I was about 15, it was the first time I saw

something in a book that I really recognised.

It was a bit of a revolutionary moment

because I thought, I can be a writer.

I think Arthur Seaton's refusal to be defined.

He is rebellious but if you ever called

him a rebel, he would say, no, you do not know who I am.

That is typical of a Nottingham mentality.

Like Arthur, Alan Sillitoe his creator, never liked being labelled.

# Magic moments...

He would say, I am no Arthur Seaton but he

certainly knew plenty of him.

Raised in Radford, a close-knit working-class community

in Nottingham, he simply called himself an observer.

"It was my home ground that surrounded me with an

intensity and integrity that no other place has been able to gice."

On leaving school, he began working at

Raleigh Bikes.

"It was with a sense of wonder and adventure that I went to

work in a factory at 14.

I didn't want to go but I was resigned to it."

The shop floor spoke and the young Alan listened.

I should say repetition work without good mates around

you could be very, very boring.

Roll on 4.30.

One time I used to get satisfaction out of it but it becomes

a matter of routine now.

Best part of the week?

Friday, mostly.

The idea of going to work in the factory

held no fears for me.

Being given my own place to work at 17 was

a big step up.

On the playground and now in the factory I daydreamed

and fixed the faces, habits and histories

of the people around me in

my mind.

Almost without realising it.

Certainly not knowing the use I would one day put it to.

It would lead to the creation of a book that

caused a sensation and a character called Arthur Seaton.

"Factories sweat you to death, labour exchanges

talk you to death.

Insurance and income tax officers milk money from

your wage packets and rob you to death.

If you are still left with a

tiny bit of life in your guts after, the army calls you up

and you get shot to death."

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was revolutionary.

The stories of everyday people and their lives

had never been told before with such gritty realism.

He wrote very honestly.

It wasn't confected, it was from the heart.

I think when we look back over 20, 30, 40,50 years

this is one of the peaks.

This is one of the great British novels that,

I think, obviously came at exactly the right time.

It connected with people deeply and made difference.

Much of the city David's father new and captured on the

page has disappeared.

But the memories of factory workers who knew David's father and

lived in the real world of Saturday night and Sunday morning

remain as fresh as ever.

Work was hard and it was dull and it was boring and it was

repetitive and it was...

It was a means.

It was a means to the Friday night.

You used to just have fun.

Rock 'n' roll music in the street.

If somebody was playing it, you stood there and jived.

You did not care who was watching.

If you spoke from anybody from Radford at my age,

they would all say they

the same thing.

The story was exactly as we lived it, or wanted to live it.

# Good golly, Miss Molly.

You live for the weekend.

You live for Friday and Saturday.

You blew everything.

"The rowdy gang of singers who sat at the scattered tables, saw

Arthur walk unsteadily to the head of the stairs.

I know they must have known he was dead drunk and seen the

danger he would soon be in.

No one attempted to talk to him and lead

him back to his seat."

He drank to excess.

He absolutely drank to excess.

"With 11 pints of beer and seven small gins

playing hide and seek inside his stomach, he fell

from the topmost stair to the bottom."

# Good golly, Miss Molly.

If they weren't at the pub, they were in the bookies.

There were lots of Arthur Seatons.

"Piled up passions were exploded on Saturday night and the

affect of a week's graft graft in the factory was swilled

out of your system in a burst of goodwill."

If you were at it, so to speak.

You were found out, you could not say, that is it then, we are

separated now.

I am going to live somewhere else.

There was nowhere to go.

Particularly the lady of the house.

If she got caught, she had to live with the consequences.

There were quite a few fat lips, weren't there?

If you go back to the reviews and the response

of the critics at the time, they

were knocked out by the veracity and the authenticity of it.

A lot of the writing at that time was almost

semidetached from the environment and the social context.

Alan was true to his word.

I think that made it, not autobiographical, but

authentic.

That was its power.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, it actually give us an identity

because it went national.

It made us feel as though we were important

people to have lived around there.

That's how it made us feel.

The book remains powerful and resonated with

the next generation of readers.

There was a scene on the estate where my Grandma lived and all of

these places that I knew and I couldn't believe that someone had

written a book and put these places that I knew in a book.

It just changed my whole view of what literature was.

Arthur's really interesting because he is not a socialist.

He is anti-everything.

He is, whoever you are, you're after doing me down and

I'm not going to be defined by you.

He isn't into the union, but he hates the bosses.

"Me, all I am out for is a good time.

All the rest is propaganda."

Author Seaton is the kind of person that my grandma would

have said got the cheek of the devil.

Nikki met her hero and even got to know him a little before he

died in 2010.

She says he remained a defiant character.

He was a man of quiet rebellion.

I think it was definitely part of him.

"Once a rebel, always a rebel."

I was at school here when I first read our next book.

It made a real impression.

I was a little bit older than our hero, he was 13 3/4.

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole really struck a chord.

It was funny, smart and subversive.

"I've realised I've never seen a dead body.

Or a real female nipple.

This is what comes with living in a cul-de-sac."

A classic line there from Adrian Mole, which is set here

in Leicester.

I am on Atley Way just, outside the library about to

meet local writer Bali Rai.

It's a library Sue Townsend knew and loved.

Choosing to voice her opinions and her thoughts through the eyes of

Adrian, a narcissistic teenager, that was pretty clever.

It is wonderful because you can say stuff

that you want to say and touch on things that aren't quite your

viewpoints.

In a really, really easy and clever way.

Also, teenagers are so earnest about the world.

When I fell in love for the first time, no one had

been in love like that before.

Adrian does that with Pandora and everything else is very earnest

and real.

He feels it deeply.

Bali was aged around 10 3/4 when he first

read Secret Diary and it had a massive impact.

The book was huge.

It was the first time I ever considered that I could possibly

become an author.

I had also was wanted to be one and dreamt of it because

of the likes of Roald Dahl, CS Lewis and stuff.

They were untouchable.

Sue Townsend was a woman from my city whose kids had come

from my school and others.

They were people who were every day and she was

writing about the neighbours.

There were even Asian characters in the book.

Something quite extraordinary at that time.

"At the end of the tea, Mr Singh

made a speech about how great it was to be British.

Everyone cheered and sang Land of Hope and Glory.

But only Mr Singh knew all of the words."

Leicester is the most multi-racial city in the UK.

The idea that there was a Mr Singh character, especially

for me from a Sikh background, was a massive factor.

In the clip he is the only person in that room that

knows all the world to Land of Hope and Glory.

There was no other faces like Mr Singh.

He was a revelation.

It was like seeing a member of my own

family in the book.

Today, he is fulfilling a lifelong ambition.

He has come to the University of

Leicester library's special collections department.

Here they look after the entire Sue Townsend archive.

This is the original manuscript of the Secret Diary of

Adrian Mole.

This is...

It is stunning.

It is stunning to be able to see this.

For this book, there is

just one draft manuscript and this is it.

It is astonishing.

It is like our Magna Carta or Shakespeare's

first folio.

There are a couple of things that you might notice on that

front page.

He is called Nigel Mole and he is 14 and three quarters.

He is indeed.

It is hard to describe because when I was 11,

12, I used to

sit and reading the books and I used to wonder how Sue wrote them.

What did they look like?

What did they actually do?

I have just been

smiling since I saw it.

The name was changed on the advice of the BBC and

her publisher to avoid comparison with Nigel Molesworth, a fictional

schoolboy.

It is a real snapshot of a particular time

and this idea that you are

almost hovering over her shoulder and I can almost imagine her sitting

there doing it, maybe listening to the radio telling the kids to be

quiet or whatever.

It is an astonishing feeling.

If we go on through the manuscript, it starts to get a

little bit scrappy and this is very typical of how she wrote during this

part of her career.

These block capital letters, lots of crossing

out, revisions.

Lots of notes and revisions.

This man, Sue Townsend's husband, was actually in the kitchen

trying to read that manuscript and prepare

it for the publisher.

She couldn't type.

I had to type it.

I can't type either, but I can type with one hand.

It was done on a really old type-writer, not a computer,

and when you made a mistake you had to Tipp-Ex it out.

That was a slow process, wasn't it?

I read it for the first time as a whole book as I was typing it.

Neither Sue nor I thought it would be big, but the publisher

was quite happy with it.

And it just exploded.

It became a huge bestseller, all over the world, translated

into 30 different languages.

The book also spawned a radio show, a TV series and even,

most recently, a musical.

# Everyone will know the tap, it'll put me on the map.

# What a piece of poetry.

The vanity and self obsession of Adrian was a gift

for illustrator Caroline Holden.

One of the things I thought of initially was to have a mirror

where the writing was done in the steam, so I think I stood

in the flat where I was living, steaming up the window

and writing on it.

I never wanted to draw Adrian.

Cos I had him in my head and I know with books, when you're reading

them, and it's a character that's quite strong,

I don't necessarily want to have that person drawn.

My skin's dead good.

I think it must be a combination of being in love and...Lucozade.

It was a dream job to have, really.

It was just so full of fun, laughter, but also very serious,

serious issues as well.

It was a lovely job to have.

Sue Townsend once said, "No amount of balsamic vinegar

or Prada handbags will make me forget what it was like to be poor"

and while the Secret Diary of Adrian Mole is achingly funny,

it's also intensely political.

MUSIC: Two Tribes by Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

People sat on the fence, waiting to see which way this battle

is going to go.

It's very political.

Sue was a socialist.

And she makes that point loads of times.

Didn't like Margaret Thatcher.

None of us did.

I'm not sure how I'll vote.

Sometimes, I think Mrs Thatcher is a nice, kind sort of woman.

Then, the next day, I see her on television

and she frightens me rigid.

She's got eyes like a psychotic killer, but a voice

like a gentle person.

It is a bit confusing.

She was able to make very, very sharp commentary

and observations about British society under Thatcher,

during the 1980s, but in a warm-hearted and humorous way

and I think the readership really connected to that.

Start fighting and let's all get together.

When she passed away, I think a lot of the coverage

and certainly a lot of the articles about her kind of glossed over

the fact that she was a rebel.

And I loved that about her.

# My name up in lights, what an intellectual man.

# I'll be.

It will endure forever.

Absolutely.

I can't imagine it not.

Yours faithfully, Adrian Albert Mole.

It's a classic, isn't it?

It a modern classic.

I think that's the way people see it.

What is the book you'd recommend?

Share your suggestion using the hashtag #LoveToRead

and see what other books people have been talking about.

Set here in North Nottinghamshire, our final book, Sons And Lovers,

takes us back 100 years but it's still as fresh and vibrant

and relevant today.

It's a true literary classic.

Sons And Lovers was written by DH Lawrence, the son of a miner born

in a back-to-back terrace house just over there in Eastwood.

Said to be his most autobiographical work, it describes life in the pits,

a mother's love for her son and a quest to rise

above working-class roots.

"On Sunday mornings, he would get up and prepare breakfast.

The fire was never let to go out.

He toasted his bacon on a fork, and caught the drops of fat

on his bread.

Then he put the rasher on a thick slice of bread and cut off

chunks with a clasp knife, poured tea into his

saucer and was happy."

Sons and Lovers is that rare thing.

It's a working-class novel written by somebody

who grew up working class.

It's full of authentic detail about the way

of life in this community.

It reproduces speech patterns, habits and routines of life,

so it's very authentic in that sense.

There were seven in the Lawrence family and David Herbert Lawrence

was born in the back streets of Eastwood in a miner's

cottage, now a museum.

The kitchen is a very kind of small place.

It's a place where the family gathered, because it was the warmest

place in the house, it always had the fire going.

And often there's a feeling of claustrophobia in the way that

Lawrence uses the kitchen.

A lot of the things that happen in Sons And Lovers happen

in the kitchen.

Particularly the arguments in the kitchen,

the blazing rows.

A fine mess.

Dos't think I'm goin' to sit wi' my arms danglin',

cos tha's got a parson for tea wi' thee?

SHOUTING.

Whinnying!

Just like in Sons And Lovers, the Lawrence home was cramped,

noisy and lacked privacy.

We think that they shared those facilities with three

or four families who lived along the same row.

There's no garden.

It is just a shared yard which was probably beaten earth

and there'd be children out there playing, it

would be smelly, dirty, very busy, no privacy whatsoever.

But the deprivations at home where nothing compared

-- But the deprivations at home were nothing compared

to the brutal life underground.

Sons And Lovers was published in 1913 and for the first time,

middle-class readers discovered just how hard and back-breaking

the life of the miner was.

Mining and pit life is the framework of the whole novel because it

depicts that industrial, close-knit community.

Very hard living and that, you don't know where the next

penny is coming from.

Just like in the novel, Lawrence's father was a butty,

a sort of self-employed foreman.

I mean to have it out.

Catch me up.

What he does, he's a middleman between the coal

company and the men.

He actually employs teams of colliers to get the coal

out and he takes a cut.

What I've always loved about the novel is just how

graphically realistic, how intimate the portrayals

of working-class life, the mining community are in it.

That's the thing that strikes anybody who reads the novel.

It commemorates working-class life and it presents working class life

for a middle-class readership.

"The sun was going down.

Every open evening, the hills of Derbyshire were blazed

over with red sunset.

Mrs Morrell watched the sun sink from the glistening sky, leaving

a soft, flower blue overhead.

While the western space went red, several of the fire

had swung down there."

There's a real feeling, not only for the gritty reality

of working life but also of the beautiful surrounding

countryside around here.

Of the way that the agricultural world was so close to the industrial

world, of how one could escape from this world

into another world beyond.

The Lawrence family escaped by moving up the housing

ladder within Eastwood, something else reflected

in Sons And Lovers, with homes like this.

It's called The Bottoms in the opening to Sons and lovers.

It's an end terrace with a plot of garden to the side of it and it's

a sign that the Lawrence family was moving up in the world.

Lawrence of course would eventually leave Eastwood for good.

He travelled and lived all over the world and died in France.

For quite a whil, Eastwood resented the way their town had been depicted

in Sons And Lovers and Lawrence retaliated by saying

he hated the damn place.

But these days Eastwood relishes and even raises

a glass to DH Lawrence.

Yes, here you can get yourself a pint of Mellors named

after the lusty gamekeeper in Lady Chatterley's Lover.

But I'm not just here for a drink.

I'm also here to learn about the language of Lawrence.

Round here you'll hear lots of words from Lawrence's work.

But what about the more obscure phrases, like scraightin?

Did you know that meant to weep uncontrollably or slive, to creep up

behind someone stealthily, or perhaps my favourite, clat-fart.

Not what you think.

In fact, it just means gossip.

THEY READ FROM LAWRENCE.

Drama students at the town's Hall Park Academy have been

discovering their own personal connections with the

language of Lawrence.

Were there any specific words that you relate to, that you actually say

and you actually use in your own everyday language?

Owt.

What do you use owt for?

What does it mean?

Instead of anything.

If somebody offers you food, you'd say, I don't want owt.

Yes, brilliant and we say that all the time.

The language is so rich, it's very much how they speak now,

even if the students won't admit that.

They'll say, oh, no, I don't really understand,

don't really talk like that, but once they start actually reading

it and looking deeper into it, they realise that that is actually

how they speak, they use a lot of the language,

they use a lot of the words.

You have to pick up all the old phrases and it's very hard.

My mum grew up in Eastwood so she shortens words

a lot of the time.

And these students share something else with Lawrence

and Sons And Lovers - a burning desire to leave Eastwood.

When I'm older I want to act, so I want to get somewhere

where it's easier for me to pursue my dreams.

There's not a lot here to do, so maybe we'll move away and explore

the country or the world or go to university or

something like that.

I think Sons And Lovers recreates and reproduces a very

intimate, glimpse of a world that is now lost to us.

Now, this is the really tricky bit.

I need to decide which of the three brilliant books that we've featured

in the programme is my favourite.

My head is spinning.

Alice should pick Saturday Night And Sunday Morning because it

encapsulates almost a moment in British history.

I think Sons And Lovers should be picked because it's

just a wonderful story.

Alice should pick The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole because it

essentially was a revolution.

Plenty of advice there but in the end I have

to make the decision, so what is it going to be?

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning?

Arthur Seaton, I think we've all met one.

Sons And Lovers, perhaps.

It is still taught in schools today.

And let's not forget Adrian Mole.

Reading that again I realised how much I'd missed

the first time around.

But I can only pick one.

It's got to be Saturday Night And Sunday Morning.

In Arthur Seaton, Alan Sillitoe has created a character that still feels

completely relevant even today.

He is fighting against authority he's pushing against older

generations, he doesn't want to give up on that hedonistic

lifestyle and in 2016, that is definitely something

I recognise.

So this is my favourite but what is yours?

From me and Books That Made Britain, goodbye.