Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958)
James Walker:
The first location on our virtual tour
through Alan Sillitoe’s Nottingham is Cecil Hewitt’s grandiose, Neo-Baroque
show-piece Council House and its attendant Old Market Square. This space is where
folk from Nottingham regularly meet up by either the left or the right lion. It
has also been the site of mass demonstrations over the centuries.
Our first commissioned writer is
Derrick Buttress, a contemporary of Alan Sillitoe, who will lead us through the
decades leading up to 1958 through five essays exploring: Processions and
parades; WWII and the arrival of G.I.s; VE Day; Childhood memories and the
local characters who have populated this civic space.
Derrick Buttress was born in New
Basford in 1932 and grew up learning about life on the terraced streets of
Radford, Hyson Green and Broxtowe Estate. He would recollect these tough but
enjoyable times in two memoirs, and three poetry collections published by
Shoestring Press and various plays broadcast on radio and television. At the
grand age of eighty he has just had his first short story collection published,
Sing to Me.
We feel Derrick Buttress is an
inspiration to all writers out there, not only in that he has been able to
carve out a career by drawing on his own personal circumstances, and therefore
validating the voice of his community, but in starting his writing career in
his forties. The Space is a new multimedia platform that promises to transform
the media and arts for the 21st century. What better way, then, to embrace
this philosophy, than ensuring an eighty year-old writer is there to usher in
this new and exciting digital era.
Don’t let the literati grind you down
Each location on our
trail has a particular theme inspired by Saturday
Night and Sunday Morning. Arthur Seaton, the defiant anti-hero at the heart
of the novel, is suspicious of all forms of authority and is determined to live
his life on his terms. He lives by the personal credo of ‘Don’t let the
bastards grind you down’. James Walker, who is editing together the Sillitoe
Space project, has adapted this theme to see how Alan Sillitoe and their
first commissioned writer, Derrick Buttress have challenged the literary
establishment through their representations of working class people. Indeed,
such was the shock at the success of Sillitoe’s debut novel that his former
classmates from a Radford elementary school were convinced it must have been
written by Alan’s wife, who, apparently, had been to a university…
Don’t
let the bastards grind you down
Our second commissioned writer for
this first event is Christy Fearn, a
local historical fiction writer and Byron expert. Christy is currently writing
a novel about the Stocking-knitters’ demonstration of 1811/2. Saturday night is
significant in her novel as this is when the demonstrators make banners to be
shown in Market Square the following Sunday Morning.
The most recent protesters to Market Square were
the Occupy Movement. Christy went out and spoke to them to see if she could
find a correlation between their cause, that of the Stocking-Knitters, and
Arthur Seaton’s mistrust of all forms of authority. We would like to continue
this debate with you via Facebook as well as sharing your Market Square
memories with us via Flickr. Selected content from this will be published at
the end of October in a physical book with a digital heart.
Sillitoe:
Then and Now
is part of a series of projects put together by the Alan Sillitoe Committee, a
voluntary organisation raising funds to have a statue of the writer
commemorated in his home city. Please support us by spreading the word however
you can and by joining us on The Space.
Editor: James
Walker
james@jameskwalker.co.uk
Technical
Editor:
Paul Fillingham
paul@thinkamigo.com
For contact details of commissioned
writers, please contact James.
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