Alan Sillitoe

I met Alan Sillitoe a long time ago at an adult education college in North Wales. He and two other famous authors were there to give us would-be writers advice and to read us some of their stories (it was a weekend devoted to short story writing). The two others were Ian McEwan and Alan Richards.
I remember a few things from that weekend: I was given the keys to the bar and put in charge of it in the evenings which meant I had to spend a great deal of time serving the others on the course; I had breakfast sitting opposite Iam McEwan one morning and remember him talking about his Polish royalties - he was unable to bring them here to Britain so he went there instead to spend them; when Alan Richards was asked "where are the markets for short stories? he replied "there aren't any"; and having a short conversation with Alan Sillitoe, a charming guy, who said he would not return to his roots ever again.
This surprised me. I had the idea from his early novels like "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning" and "The Lonliness of the Long Distance Runner" that he was "pure Northern" and therefore loved the place. He didn't. Not one little bit. In fact I felt that he hated it.
I used to quote someone - don't know who, probably a psychiatrist - to writers on courses where I was a tutor, the following: "If you have a problem, tell it in the form of a story". So, with Sillitoe, I wondered if this is what he had done. He had not one problem but quite a few. There was his drunken, violent father, there was working in the bicycle factory, there was pneumonia which he had for a year and there was "The North" which he depicted with savage, bitter scorn. Maybe he wrote about it all to get it out of his system, like the psychiatrist had said; and once it was out of his sytem, he left and went south to London and the continent and never went back.
The trouble is he never surpassed the work he did when he was there "Oop North".
I have a signed copy of his later novel "The Death of William Posters" which I have not been able to read past the first twenty or so pages.