Jon Silkin - Early Life

Early Life

Jon Silkin was born in London, in a Jewish immigrant family and named after Jon Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga, and attended Wycliffe College and Dulwich College During the Second World War he was one of the children evacuated from London (in his case, to Wales); he remembered that he "roamed the countryside incessantly" while in Wales, collecting "fool's gold" and exploring old Roman mines. For a period of about six years in the 1950s, after National Service, he supported himself by manual labour and other menial jobs. By 1956 he rented the top-floor flat at 10, Compayne Gardens, Hampstead, the house of Bernice Rubens, who later won the Booker Prize, and her husband Rudolph Nassauer, also a published novelist, later. Silkin, in turn, sublet rooms to, among others, David Mercer, later a prolific TV and West End dramatist, and Malcolm Ross-Macdonald, then a diploma student at the Slade and later a novelist; his first novel, The Big Waves (Cape, 1962) is a roman à clef of life in that flat, in which Silkin features as Somes Arenstein. All three men lived by teaching English as a Foreign Language at the St Giles School of English in Oxford Street.

Read more about this topic:  Jon Silkin

Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:

    Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.
    Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)

    In place of a world, there is a city, a point, in which the whole life of broad regions is collecting while the rest dries up. In place of a type-true people, born of and grown on the soil, there is a new sort of nomad, cohering unstably in fluid masses, the parasitical city dweller, traditionless, utterly matter-of-fact, religionless, clever, unfruitful, deeply contemptuous of the countryman and especially that highest form of countryman, the country gentleman.
    Oswald Spengler (1880–1936)