Down from the Hill by Alan Sillitoe

First published: 1984

Type of work: Psychological realism

Time of work: The summers of 1945 and 1983

Locale: Nottingham, England, and some dozen small towns in the surrounding West Midlands, such as Stafford, Lichfield, and Coventry

Principal Characters:

• Paul Morton, the protagonist, a seventeen-year-old factory worker in 1945 and a successful television scriptwriter in 1983
• Alice Sands, his girlfriend in 1945
• Gwen, Alice’s friend
• Uncle Fred, Paul’s favorite relative, who dies in a hospital-home for the mentally ill

The Novel

The action in Down from the Hill centers on Paul Morton’s two journeys through the beautiful West Midlands, first on a bicycle in the summer of 1945 at the age of seventeen, and then by car in the summer of 1983. As a young factory worker in the Cadets, about to become an air traffic control assistant, Paul starts on his bicycle trip with one thought in mind: to see Alice Sands, the girl he met in Stafford on a trip the year before and with whom he has maintained a correspondence. The novel begins with Paul’s sexual awakening, but any real intimacy between Alice and him is prevented by Alice’s friend Gwen, and Paul continues on his way with youthful optimism and a sense of freedom. The rest of his six-day cycling trip centers on the simple joys of touring the English countryside, meeting other cyclists, and finding lodgings and food.

Before leaving Stafford on the second day, Paul rides with Alice and Gwen to the ruins of Wishdale Abbey, where he climbs about the beams and feels “like a monkey over the abyss.” Though not given to romantic fantasizing, and as yet unaware of his artistic calling, Paul imagines himself a hero: “I pictured myself defending the Castle, then leading the attack from below, but didn’t know finally where I belonged.” When they all say goodbye, Alice promises to write Paul immediately. Paul, who thinks he loves Alice and is anxious to receive her letter, has to resist the urge to cut short his trip: “It had to go on, until it came back to where I was, in myself.” The sense of “something unfinished” compels him to “cover more ground, get further away, see other places.” It is apparent throughout these experiences that Paul is no ordinary youth; he is highly imaginative and sensitive to his surroundings and other people.

During the third, fourth, and part of the fifth day, Paul rides with a group of three young cyclists from Sheffield: Noah and Pete, who ride a tandem, and a boy he refers to as Sheffield, after their native town. Paul spends the fourth day helping them search for a friend, Jack Randall, whom they describe in exalted terms but who apparently does not exist. The joke is on Paul, but he concludes that what matters is not whether “the bloke lived or not” but the talk itself, “how you told the lie, or joke, or even the truth itself.”

On the sixth day, Paul is joined by Tom Clifford, an older man who imposes his company and raves about the Labour Party’s recent victory. “And now things are going to alter,” he says. “Especially for the working man.” Paul, skeptical and somewhat embarrassed by Tom for being so personal, finally makes his escape and returns home to Nottingham, taking the road down from Broughton Hill. When he arrives home, he finds no letter from Alice but gets a job as an air traffic controller; he will train with the Royal Air Force in Buckinghamshire, and for the first time, he will live away from his parents.

In part 2 of the novel, Paul Morton—now age fifty-five, recently left by his third wife for being unfaithful, and recovering from an injury to his side from absently falling out of a tree that he was pruning—remembers the summer of his cycle ride as a time without troubles and decides to make another tour of the Midlands, this time in his “large Volvo.” He regards his nostalgia as a result of his going through a change of life; while melancholy and cynical, however, he is not embittered or defeated but sustained by a vivid imagination and a sense of humor. On this shorter trip, he tries to retrace his route of thirty-eight years before. While driving, he imagines talking with Uncle Fred about Italian opera, and he has the idea that Fred was his real father. In Stafford, Paul searches for Alice Sands, but he hears from an old inhabitant that she married a Canadian lawyer and now lives in Canada.

On his way home, Paul picks up a hitchhiker who says he is going to London. When the hitchhiker gets out, however, he turns around and takes a ride going in the opposite direction. Similarly, Paul, who finds himself back on the summit of Broughton Hill, instead of completing the circle again by coming down from the hill, makes a three-point turn in the road and drives “towards London as fast as he can go.”

The Characters

The only character of any real complexity in Down from the Hill is Paul himself; most of the other characters are foils who reflect Paul’s development. The novel is narrated from two consecutive points of view: the first-person in part 1 and the third-person-limited in part 2. Through his interior monologues, Paul provides an ironic commentary on socialism and the nascent welfare state of 1945, and on Margaret Thatcher’s Great Britain in 1983. The social criticism, however, focuses less on politics than on the replacement of the culture of friendly tea shops and bicycle journeys by a bleaker England of concrete and television.

Reliving the past even as a boy, Paul remembers visiting Uncle Fred in the hospital on the day of his bizarre death, the day Paul makes his uncle laugh so hard that he dies of a heart attack. Paul is deeply disturbed, while his father, who hates his brother Fred, is happy to see him gone. Paul’s relationship with his father, whom he suspects is responsible for the disappearance of Alice’s promised letter, among other things, is strained, like that between Paul Morel and his father in D. H. Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers (1913). Sheffield also has difficulty with his father, who unjustly accuses him of causing his mother’s death: “I’ll bloody kill him, though, if he don’t stop needling me.”

The only real conflict that Paul experiences on his journey, however, is the frustration of not being able to consummate his love for Alice. On his first night in Stafford, he wonders, although with a bad conscience, if he might not have been better off pursuing Gwen, even though she was the main obstacle in his quest for Alice. In Down from the Hill, as in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), most of the drama occurs in the protagonist’s mind, in the transformations of a consciousness growing in artistic sensibilities upon which nothing is lost.

The main opposition in the novel, then, is that between the two periods of Paul’s life. The impact of the second period, as a repetition of the first, is not only sentimental, the nostalgia for lost innocence, but also critical, revealing the discrepancy between expectation and fulfillment. Yet, when the “archetypal English feed” enjoyed by others in the British restaurant at Coventry is for him lacking in something, Paul realizes that “it wasn’t only the uncritical hunger of youth. Even at seventeen he would have known how unpretentiously rotten it was.” To compensate for whatever is lacking, Paul derives great satisfaction from making things up: “He had, after all, spent his life creating reality out of lies.” At the age of fifty-five, Paul is a professional writer for whom art and life are no longer unambiguously distinguished.

When the man from Stafford whom Paul asks for information about Alice Sands compares her to the television star Muriel Fletcher, Paul does not reveal that he wrote the scripts for two of her films. When the man criticizes the “playboy she got hitched to,” Paul does not reveal, for fear of being held “in some way responsible for her marital disaster,” that he is also one of those playboys and that his recent affair with Muriel Fletcher has led to his own marital disaster. As an inveterate scriptwriter, Paul imagines a situation in which the hitchhiker he takes toward London becomes a terrorist who wants him to drive to Liverpool, while Paul becomes a man determined to commit suicide by driving off a cliff into the sea, thus terrorizing the terrorist. His story is interrupted when the hitchhiker remarks that he used to sing in a choral society and was enjoying Paul’s tape of George Frederic Handel’s Israel in Egypt. Paul, reflecting on the modern-day conveniences of stereo systems and airplanes, wonders, “Does all this indicate that we have reached the Promised Land?”

Critical Context

Although labeled a “working-class novelist,” Alan Sillitoe has come to recognize that political systems lack the power to create an ideal society. Like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) and Key to the Door (1961), Down from the Hill involves the search for metaphysical order in the cultural entropy of the second half of the twentieth century. Unlike Arthur Seaton, the rebellious youth who in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning grows to maturity, Paul Morton ultimately looks backward from this state of maturity: “The mysteries of the past were more profound than those of the future.”

While by no means a masterpiece, Down from the Hill is a powerfully evocative novel, dramatizing in a fresh way the role of memory in the formation of a person’s character. This self-interacting power of memory is responsible for the metaphysical vision of unity that finally leads Paul to experience some degree of self-awareness, an order of truth that exceeds conventional maturity. Although his prose in Down from the Hill is at times florid (as in “Rolls of cloud looked like curlers in the hair of a woman who’d had nothing but worry all her life”), Sillitoe remains a master at absolute verisimilitude.

Bibliography

Atherton, Stanley S. Alan Sillitoe: A Critical Assessment, 1979.

Daleski, H. M. Unities: Studies in the English Novel, 1985.

London Review of Books. Review. VI (December, 1984), p. 19.

Niven, A. Review in British Book News. April, 1985, p. 137.

The Observer. Review. November 4, 1984, p. 26.

Quill and Quire. Review. LI (May, 1985), p. 33.