The Essential Colin Wilson by Colin Wilson Page A

lengthened, while I spent more time writing my novel and a play than looking for rooms. I was working at this time as a porter in a hospital in Fulham. Finally, I got sick of the portering job—which involved, mostly, wheeling live patients to the wards and dead ones to the mortuary—and went to Paris again. But the problem of working for a living was not solved until the following year, when I had returned to London. In a few months I went through a series of jobs rapidly—a laundry, two office jobs (both firms sacked me), a plastic factory and a Lyons Corner House. Then, one day, the idea came to me that I was earning far more money than I strictly needed to keep alive. I earned £5 or £6 a week. Of this, 30s. was spent in rent, £2 or so on food, and the rest was sent to my wife, or spent on books and bus fares. I reasoned that of these, food is the only absolute necessity. One can buy a tent for 30s., and provide a roof over one's head. And a bicycle can make bus fares unnecessary. The tent idea excited me. It seemed a perfect solution—for summer, at all events. So I gave up my rooms (or rather, my landlady threw me out after a disagreement) and bought a tent. I did not give up work immediately: I was making a great deal of money by working overtime in a plastic factory in Whetstone. But I saved rent by setting up my tent at nights on a golf links opposite the factory. After a while, I realized that to put up a tent and take it down every day was an unnecessary labour. A waterproof sleeping bag would serve as well. So I bought one, together with an eiderdown sleeping bag, an immense army frame rucksack for my belongings, and a bicycle with a carrier on the back. In a few weeks, I had saved enough money to leave work with a certainty of not having to return for a few months provided my expenditure did not exceed £2 a week. I moved my quarters from the golf links to Hampstead Heath, and cycled down to the British Museum every day, to work from nine till five. I was making a determined effort to reduce some of the immense manuscript of my Jack the Ripper novel to publishable form. Mr Angus Wilson, who at that time was an official in the Reading Room, noticed me writing furiously, and offered to read the manuscript when it was completed, and, if he liked it, to submit it to his publisher.
    But sleeping out was a nerve-racking business. I did not dare to go onto the Heath until after midnight; there were too many young lovers about. The police patrolled the Heath, but they stuck to the paths and only occasionally flashed a powerful torch around. I sometimes slept till ten (the Heath is a surprisingly quiet place on weekday mornings), and was often wakened by someone's dog sniffing at my face, or voices in the distance. Usually, I had breakfast at a busman's café at the bottom of Haverstock Hill: they did a remarkably cheap slice of bread and dripping and an enormous mug of tea for 2½d. The day in the Museum usually went by too quickly; but the evenings were the difficult time. After eight o'clock all the libraries were closed; there was nowhere where one could spend a few hours in warmth and quiet until midnight. A girl whom I had met in Leicester the previous Christmas was also in London at the time. She kept all my books for me, and sometimes entertained me in the evening; but it was too much to expect her to have to put up with me every evening. Her help and sympathy were invaluable; but all the same, I always felt exhausted and ill at ease as I cycled around London with my sleeping bags rolled up on the back; it was a strange sensation, having nowhere to go, nowhere to retire to at nights, nowhere to spend the evening reading. Besides, the girl's landladies objected if I turned up too often; they left her little notes telling her not to let me use the bathroom, and that I had to be out by ten o'clock.
    Occasionally during that summer I ran out of cash. Then I had to take a job for a few weeks: one in Lyons, one in