J B Priestley's stories are a real pleasure

August 14 marks the 30th anniversary of the death in 1984 of Bradford-born writer J B Priestley, and the 120th anniversary of the great man’s birth in 1894.

I like to think the author of so many plays, novels, essays, articles, scripts and short stories, would have been grimly amused by the dilemma of whether to celebrate his birth or commemorate his death.

But I’m sure he would have been pleased that a new edition of his selected short stories has been published. And a tidy-looking volume it is too: seven tales printed in a clear and easy-to-read type, and on the front cover David Hockney’s 1970 line drawing of the old man reclining in an easy chair, pipe in hand, as though pondering a narrative.

Like his contemporary Somerset Maugham, Priestley was not interested in the histrionics of world-defining events.

In the title story, a seemingly dried-up old waiter in an equally dried-up London hotel, shuffles about serving tea and whiskey; but his shabby gentility conceals a past the old man would prefer to forget and unscrupulous others are keen to exploit.

In the story Going Up?, Priestley makes a brief appearance, entering a lift in a big London store – Borridge’s – just after Milly, the lift operator, and her young man Jimmy, an Underground ticket collector, have settled their differences.

“He was a humorous, fattish, shabby man, who pulled away at an ancient pipe. (Perhaps he was an author). He looked at her quizzically, jerked a thumb at the glass roof, shook his head, and said: ‘Going up? No, not yet’.”

In the Handel and the Racket, Tom Hebblethwaite, a down-to-earth Yorkshireman from Luddenstall, gets into an argument with a sleek American plutocrat about a piece of Handel’s music the latter whistles in the lift they are sharing.

Evidently this is London before the Second World War, before the advent of transatlantic air travel and not too distant from the First World War – where Hebblethwaite, a West Yorkshire Regiment volunteer, got a DCM on the Somme.

His combative soldierly skills save the day when gangsters try to shake down the American in his palatial green and gold hotel suite.

This is Priestley having a bit of fun. Adventures of this sort aren’t his style. Judging by the story titled Adventure, his view is that young men dissatisfied with themselves who hunger for adventure are likely to run into trouble – just like Priestley’s generation who went off to war in 1914 hoping that something “exciting, mysterious, romantic” would happen.

When 23-year-old Hubert Graham Esquire allows a total stranger to talk him into going to a seedy, backstreet London club, the excitement of doing something contrary to his nature quickly turns to alarm as he finds himself compromised and threatened.

Instead of ending up in the Thames he... Nay lad, that would be telling. The art of the short story is to lead the reader up the garden path and deliver a surprise at the end of it.

These stories don’t always do that but, like the book itself, they are a pocketable pleasure.