Growing up in the South of England, Sillitoe’s Saturday Night, Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner shaped my views of English life further north. ‘The Fishing-boat Picture’ is more sentimental than my usual taste, with a sweet, pure sadness runs through it, but we have reached a point in this anthology where the reader might like a break from dark, cynical stories. It describes one ordinary life within huge historical events, one of my favourite things.
“[M]aybe they were the best times we ever had together in our lives. They certainly helped us through the long monotonous dead evenings of the war.”
The narrator is a postman, Harry, who is conscious of narrating: “If I started using long and complicated words that I’d searched for in the dictionary I’d use them too many times […] so I’d rather not make what I’m going to write look foolish by using dictionary words.” He recalls the previous twenty-eight years (from the 1920s to the 1950s), in which he married Kathy, she left him, she came back to visit years later, in a sorry state, and eventually she died.
“I looked up and caught her staring at the picture of a fishing boat on the wall: brown and rusty with sails half spread in a bleak sunrise, not far from the beach along which a woman walked bearing a basket of fish on her shoulder.”
This picture passed between Harry and Kathy over the years, a symbol of their relationship in a clear but never overstated way. They remained always fond of each other, but Harry was too unadventurous, Kathy too reckless, and neither managed to learn balance from the other.
Collected in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, WH Allen & Co, 1959. A video of a reading by Garry Cooper is available here
A Personal Anthology 