An excerpt from Through the Woods.

It’s a treat being a long-distance runner, out in the world by yourself with not a soul to make you bad-tempered or tell you what to do.—Alan Sillitoe

by a friend: “I was sitting in a sort of parlor there one day, writing. And suddenly I saw someone run past the window, along the lane outside. With shorts on, white shirt and so on. And it seemed to me such an unusual image that I wrote down at the top of a sheet of paper, “The loneliness of the long-distance runner.’ I didn’t know where he had come from. I didn’t know where he was going. He was simply a sort of vision, floating by the window. And I put the line

\ lan Sillitoe described once having been offered a cottage in Harsfordshire

away. I thought I was going to write a poem with this sort of line in it. It seemed rather a nice line.”

Instead of writing a poem, Sillitoe wrote a short story with the nice line as title. The line also served as title of a book collecting that and nine other short stories, published in 1958. Along with a novel titled Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, this launched his career as one of the decade’s “Angry Young Men,” a radical who championed the working class. In many respects, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner is less about running and more about the pervasive effects of poverty.

Several years later, Sillitoe wrote the screenplay made into a film starring Tom Courtenay as Colin Smith, a robber turned runner. Courtenay several years later would play the part of the rebel leader Pasha Antipov in the 1965 film Dr. Zhivago, for which he was nominated (but did not win) an Academy Award as best supporting actor. The director of Loneliness was Tony Richardson, who in 1964 would win two Oscars (best picture and best director) for Tom Jones. Sir Thomas Courtenay later was knighted for his work on the London stage.

Loneliness was black and white, a “foreign” film whose characters spoke in working-class accents not easy on American ears. Given the film’s half-century age, few runners today have seen it, and certainly, even fewer have read the short story from which it sprang. Ask anyone about Loneliness, and most often they

refer to it as a “book,” which it is not. They know the title but misunderstand the meaning of that title. Was the long-distance runner portrayed by Sillitoe really “lonely” with all the negative connotations associated with that word?

Consider definitions of “lonely” found in The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: (1) affected with, characterized by, or causing a depressing feeling of being alone, lonesome; (2) destitute of sympathetic or friendly companionship, intercourse, support; (3) lone, solitary, without company, companionless; (4) remote from places of human habitation, desolate, unfrequented, bleak: a lonely road.

If such is the plight of the long-distance runner, why would anyone want to do what Smith did each morning: awaken in a darkened dormitory; rise stiffly from his bed; don his kit of shirt, shorts and shoes; rub his arms to create some warmth; then set out along a cold and, yes, lonely road? Why run?

To ask that question is to misinterpret Sillitoe’s story and to suggest that Smith, its protagonist, was unhappy at being forced by the governor of the Borstal (or home for delinquent boys) into flagellating his body during solo runs through the woods. Sillitoe, apparently not a runner himself, understood runners. He knew us; he knew how we thought. Perhaps he interviewed several long-distance runners while researching his work. Maybe he attended different cross-country races to observe the sport, specifically its effects on participants and spectators. If not, Sillitoe had a remarkable imagination, because his descriptions of runners and his ability to look inside the mind of at least one are spot on.

Alan Sillitoe realized that his fictional character and many of us were “lonely” as in being free, in being able to commune with nature, in being able to achieve a state of total absorption in our own thoughts, and damn anybody who gets in the way and interrupts this reverie, our so-called runner’s high. It was during the single hour each day when the governor at the Borstal allowed the long-distance runner to get lonely, to leave the grounds unsupervised, that Smith was free at last.

Might not Smith, a burglar, a man of low character, use this opportunity to escape? What was there to hold him back? There were no bars, no fences. Sillitoe addressed this question in the second paragraph of his story, allowing Smith (serving as a first-person narrator) to address the reader: “I’m not so daft as I would look if I tried to make a break for it on my long-distance running, because to abscond and then get caught is nothing but a mug’s game, and I’m not falling for it.”

In being allowed to run, Smith was set free for the first time in his squalid life! He had no place to escape to other than the Nottingham slum where he had grown up, and nothing there held any appeal to him. Only while trotting through the woods was Smith happy.

Alan Sillitoe begins his tale in stream-of-consciousness form. Smith (and in 47 pages we fail to learn his first name) narrates his own story: “As soon as I got

to Borstal they made me a long-distance cross-country runner. I suppose they thought I was just the build for it because I was long and skinny for my age (and still am) and in any case I didn’t mind it much, to tell you the truth, because running had always been made much of in our family, especially running away from the police. I’ve always been a good runner, quick and with a big stride as well, the only trouble being that no matter how fast I run, and I did a very fair lick even though I do say so myself, it didn’t stop me getting caught by the cops after that bakery job.”

“That bakery job” does not get described until a flashback a dozen pages into the story. More important to Sillitoe the short-story writer is Smith’s life in and around the Borstal, his running through the woods. It would prove equally important several years later to Sillitoe the filmwriter, and presumably director Tony Richardson. Yet 47 pages of running through the woods translated into two hours on film would not hold the attention of the moviegoing audience. The film offers more back story and additional characters. In print and on screen, Smith and a friend named Mike are petty thieves who, while walking down the street, spot an open second-story window and boost themselves onto a wall to enter a bakery, where they find money in a cash box. Fearful that police might suspect them of the burglary, the pair stuff the money—seventy-eight pounds, fifteen and fourpence—into a rainspout beside Smith’s front door.

The police do come to that door and search the house where Smith lives with his mother and her boyfriend. Smith’s father is dead, and Smith does not like the boyfriend. One policeman returns several times, hoping to trick Smith into a confession with no luck. Then during one visit, it begins to rain, causing the hidden cash to tumble out of the drain and onto the pavement. Foolishly, Smith tries to hide the money by standing on it floating in a puddle, but he has been caught. He tells us: “My pal Mike got let off with probation because it was his first job—anyway the first they ever knew about—and because they said he would never have done it if it hadn’t been for me talking him into it. They said I was a menace to honest lads like Mike.”

Smith gets sent to the home for delinquent boys in Essex. “It’s supposed to be a good Borstal, at least that’s what the governor said to me when I got here from Nottingham. ‘We want to trust you while you are in this establishment,’ he said, smoothing out his newspaper with lily-white workless hands.” The governor further tells Smith, “We want hard honest work and we want good athletics.”

Good athletics: The theme has been established. Set free with several dozen others to run in the surrounding woods, Smith immediately exhibits a talent for running, beating the previous fastest runner. This impresses the governor, who has an eye on winning the “Borstal Blue Ribbon Prize Cup for Long Distance Cross Country Running (All English)” in a match with a prestigious public school, Gunthorpe. In England, “public” schools are what Americans would call “private”

schools. You pay for the privilege of obtaining a superior education. The governor soon frees Smith to train on his own, allowing him the opportunity of rising an hour before the other lads to trot through the woods. It is in these descriptions of Smith’s running that Sillitoe shows the reader that to be lonely (Random House Dictionary notwithstanding) is far from being depressive.

Here, Sillitoe’s prose soars: “Sometimes I think that I’ve never been so free as during that couple of hours when I’m trotting up the path out of the gates and turning by that bare-faced, big-bellied oak tree at the lane end. Everything’s dead, but good, because it’s dead before coming alive, not dead after being alive. That’s how I look at it. Mind you, I often feel frozen stiff at first. I can’t feel my hands or feet or flesh at all, like I’m a ghost who wouldn’t know the earth was under him if he didn’t see it now and again through the mist. But even though some people would call this frost-pain suffering, if they wrote about it to their mams in a letter, I don’t, because I know that in half an hour I’m going to be warm, that by the time I get to the main road and am turning on to the wheatfield footpath by the bus stop I’m going to feel as hot as a potbellied stove and as happy as a dog with a tin tail.”

Is there a runner alive who has risen sleepy faced from bed early on a dark morning with the winds blowing from the north who cannot identify with that

feeling? Or who cannot identify wholly with Sillitoe’s word visualization of Smith running through the woods: “Trot-trot-trot. Puff-puff-puff. Slap-slap-slap go my feet on the hard soil. Swish-swish-swish as my arms and side catch the bare branches of a bush. . . .

Sillitoe trusts the reader to convert words into pictures. In the film, Tony Richardson does the work for moviegoers in what ranks as perhaps the best scene of a runner running ever filmed:

Smith is awakened in the dark before dawn. He stirs. He sits up, feet on the floor. Still seated, he dresses. He dons shoes. He rubs his shoulders for warmth. He stands up and moves toward the door, starting to hop as he reaches it.

To this point, there has been no sound. The silence is almost audible. Then a

trumpet sounds a theme in the background. As Smith moves outdoors and begins to run, the trumpet gets louder and will continue to play as Smith’s run continues.

We see Smith in silhouette running on the horizon, except the horizon is at the bottom of the screen, occupying no more than 10 percent of the screen. All above, the other 90 percent as framed by Richardson, is gray sky, the fog of morning. The sun has begun to rise, but we barely see the sun’s outline through the haze. This is how every long-distance runner sees the world this early in the morning. Is there a runner born who cannot identify with this image?

Smith runs slowly, somewhat awkwardly. Tom Courtenay certainly must have trained for this role, or he may previously have been a long-distance runner to get it. But he would never be mistaken for a Kenyan, not even in silhouette.

Smith moves through the woods. Trees occupy the forefront of the screen, Smith running out of focus behind them. He runs past a lake, his image reflected in the water.

Richardson shifts scenes, showing Smith and his mate Mike in a bar with two girls picked up on the street his short story. Smith and Mike have money from their burglary. Smith’s girl is named Audrey. The lads invite the tarts to accompany them on a beach holiday. Richardson’s wide shots of a beach rippled by waves and the waves themselves provide an image as poetic as Smith running through the woods.

In the corridor of a hotel, a woman renting the couples two rooms asks: “You’re

“a couple of tarts,”—as Sillitoe refers to them in

married, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” says Mike. “People get married young nowadays.”

Before going into their respective rooms, Mike tells Smith, “Sleep well.”

This was the 1960s. In the more liberal decades that followed, there would have been five more explicit minutes of what went on in those rooms. Richardson spares us that. He shows the couples the next morning, back on the beach, Smith and Audrey running through the dunes topped with dune grass. “Try to catch me!” he calls. She does. They drop to the sand, Smith rolling over on top of her as, clothes on, they begin to make love.

Except now, we are back in the woods with Smith running through a marshy area with patches of water, both dodging the patches and leaping over them. Richardson leaves us to wonder, did the incident at the beach with “a pair of tarts” happen, or was it all in Smith’s imagination as he ran? In the Sillitoe short story, the only reference to the girls is Smith’s someday hoping he and his mate might encounter “a pair of tarts.” The moviegoer is allowed to decide what happens with those tarts.

In the short story, the governor tells Smith that he hopes the runner can win the Borstal Blue-Ribbon Prize. Smith swears under his breath: “Like boggery I will.” He thinks, “What does his barmy hope mean? I ask myself. Trot-trot-trot, slap-slap-slap, over the stream and into the woods where it’s almost dark and frostydew twigs sting my legs. It don’t mean a bloody thing to me, only to him.”

The Gunthorpe cross-country team arrives at the Borstal by bus, eager faced, everybody dressed identically in dark blazers. These lads come from wealthy families but try not to act condescending to their rivals. In the film, Smith and the top Gunthorpe runner politely shake hands. They go to the line. In the short story, Smith narrates: “The Gunthorpe boy twitched before the signal was given; somebody cheered too soon; Medway bent forward; then the gun went, and I was away.”

Alan Sillitoe hits his stride as a writer as Smith hits his stride as a runner: “We went once around the field and then along a half-mile drive of elms, being cheered all the way, and I seemed to feel I was in the lead as we went out by the gate and into the lane, though I wasn’t interested enough to find out. The fivemile course was marked by splashes of whitewash gleaming on gateposts and trunks and stiles and stones, and a boy with a waterbottle and bandage-box stood every half-mile waiting for those that dropped out or fainted. Over the first stile, without trying, I was nearly in the lead but one; and if any of you want tips about running, never be in a hurry, and never let any of the other runners know you are in a hurry even if you are. You can always overtake on long-distance running without letting the others smell the hurry in you; and when you’ve used your craft like this to reach the two or three up front then you can do a big dash later that puts everybody else’s hurry in the shade because you’ve not had to make haste-up until then. I ran to a steady jog-trot rhythm, and soon it was so smooth that I forgot I was running, and I was hardly able to know that my legs were lifting and falling and my arms going in and out, and my lungs didn’t seem to be working at all, and my heart stopped that wicked thumping I always get at the beginning of a run. Because you see I never race at all; I just run, and somehow I know that if I forget I’m racing and only jog-trot along until I don’t know I’m running I always win the race.”

But does he? Read the short story or see the film and find out for your- MV self.