“A frank novel of today’s most controversial subject.” The tag line on the cover of the New English Library edition of George Moor’s novel The Pole and Whistle is accompanied by a photo of two men having a chat in the pub over a pint and a fag. It may have been the publisher’s way of achieving some plausible deniability, given that the Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalized homosexual acts between consenting adults, had yet to be passed. The subject could just as well be alcoholism, perhaps.
The contrast between the tentative tone of the book’s cover and the candor of George Moor’s writing, however, is striking. In fact, Moor’s ability to create a situation which is simultaneously utterly mundane and life-destroyingly risky is part of what makes The Pole and Whistle a fascinating work for its time.
John Anselm, in his mid-twenties, is working for his uncle in a chick hatchery in a large city in Lancashire (Moor was raised in Liverpool). His work is hard, tedious, and full of long days. One evening, dreading the long walk back to his apartment, he stops at the Pole and Whistle, a run-down pub just off the main square. There, as he quietly sips a pint, and then another and another, standing in the narrow “parlour,” he notices the young men in tight blue jeans going in and out through the door marked, “Singing Room.” The carefree spirit of the teenagers, the blare of the jukebox, and another pint or two releases John’s inhibitions. “Like a chameleon I changed my emotional colour with each succeeding song. I yearned for ‘Johnny’ and I flamed for ‘Norman.'”
Then, after a visit to the gents’, he encounters a sharp-dressed man in his late twenties who offers him a pint. “You were on ‘D’ landing in Stafford, weren’t you?” he asks. Frank Jeffers, just out of prison, is full of cock and confidence and not the least bit reserved about his interest in John. The two wander out and into a park, where Frank pushes John up against a tree and kisses him. “I’ll do you tomorrow night,” he tells John. “I’ll wait for you in the Pole and Whistle.”
“I had spent most of my twenty-five years as in a railway carriage where no one spoke and everyone kept his reserve,” John tells us. He has accustomed himself to loneliness as a way of avoiding the reality of his sexual orientation. “I could never be liberated from an inner watchfulness. To myself I disclosed only a slumbering awareness of what I was.” To be honest about his desire would ruin everything in his life: his job, the love of his parents, the acceptance of his community, the right to live freely outside prison.
But Frank wipes that all away with the openness of his physical and emotional attraction to John. Soon their nights all start in the Pole and Whistle and end in John’s bed, although this still requires some subterfuge to avoid the patroling bobby and suspicions of John’s landlady. Frank is even so comfortable with their relationship that he takes John home to meet his mum, almost to show off that he can make friends with someone of a better class.
For as genuine as Frank and John’s love for each other is, the fact that they are nightly committing an illegal act is not their only problem. Frank is a criminal, a petty burglar. He can never hold onto an honest job for more than a week or two and he is constantly trying to devise another easy theft. One night, Frank goes missing and stays missing for weeks. When he finally shows up at John’s flat, he confesses that he’d tried to pull a job in a nearby town, been caught, and spent some time in jail. Before long, he attempts another robbery, which also fails, and lands him in prison with a five year sentence.
If John is hoping for a discreet and (relatively) safe long-term relationship, Frank is the last man he should be involved with. Well, next to last, perhaps, after Beggy, one of Frank’s thuggish friends, who takes advantage of the absence of John’s protector to organize a session where John is gang-raped and tortured.
Feeling his world near collapse, John retains enough of a self-preservation instinct to grab a thin, implausible thread and save himself by taking a job in Japan. In a rare moment alone with his mother, he comes out to her. “I knew,” she tells him. “Only, you had so much control I thought it would be for ever.” “It is better to be dead than live without love,” he responds, adding, “The love of a man” to be clear. Their conversation ends in the most British way imaginable: “‘I accept you as you are,’ said my mother. ‘I’ll make some tea'” John replies.
Although The Pole and Whistle was a potentially controversial book when it was published (the New English Library lacked the visibility or marketing clout to attract any serious attention), it’s actually a quite ordinary and calmly-told story about inappropriate loves and learning to accept them. John loves Frank and knows they can never be together. John’s sister is involved with a married man and she and her parents accept this as a long-term relationship. John’s mother may regret the consequences of her son’s sexuality but accepts it as a fact. No one gets everything he wants and still life goes on.
The Pole and Whistle was only ever published as a paperback original and copies are extremely scarce today. But it is recognized as one of the few and one of the best English novels to deal openly with homosexual love published before the passage of the Sexual Offences Act. Dewey Wayne Gunn included it in his Gay Novels of Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth, 1881-1981.
It’s likely that the book had some autobiographical elements. After attending Cambridge, where he won several awards for his poetry, George Moor returned north, teaching in Lancashire and Wales before he moved to Japan in the early 1960s. There, he worked as an English teacher and translator. He later taught in Papua New Guinea and Iran, returning to England after the fall of the Shah. He won an award for his novella Fox Gold not long after that. This was collected with his stories “Nightingale Island” and “Bowl of Roses” and published by John Calder in 1978. He also had two novellas published in New Writing and Writers in the 1970s. Moor was a frequent entrant in New Statesman parody and satire competitions in the 1980s. He died in Burnley in 1992.