Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Author of sixty books, Alan Sillitoe thought of citizenship in terms of militarism, warfare, and service in the army. Too young to fight during the Second World War, Sillitoe was sent to Malaya as a Royal Air Force radio operator in 1947 and was discharged in 1949 after being diagnosed with tuberculosis. His ‘national service’, as he calls it—with reference to the National Service Act 1948, which required all British men to serve in the military for eighteen months and remain on the reserve list for four years—is surprising because he comes from a family of deserters and scofflaws. Drawing upon Sillitoe’s non-fiction essays and the government film, They Stand Ready (1955), this chapter focuses on militarism in the British state from the declaration of war in 1939 through the end of national service in 1963, with particular reference to Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner (1959), and All Citizens Are Soldiers (1963), a play by Lope de Vega that Sillitoe translated, in partnership with Ruth Fainlight. This chapter features a discussion of jungles, as a metaphor for statehood and as a historical marker of Sillitoe’s experiences in Malaya at the time of the Emergency.</jats:p>