After existing in Birmingham for a week on just a loaf of bread, he left for London, where his first job was as an errand-boy in a greengrocer's shop, and later in an educational bookshop connected with the University Tutorial College, where one of his literary heroes, H. G. Wells, was once a tutor.
He later claimed that his universities were, as he termed them, 'the penny dumps on the secondhand book-barrows' in Farringdon Road and around the British Museum, and that his finishing school was Speakers' Corner at Marble Arch in Hyde Park.
A conscientious objector during the First World War, Britton was imprisoned for a year, and, according to some autobiographical notes by his friend Erik Warman, 'he was a difficult prisoner and refused to do any work or take any exercise'.
It is a huge digressive book about the intellectual life and grinding poverty of a teenage bookshop assistant; Bertrand Russell was so impressed with the novel that he wrote a five-page Introduction to it.
He stayed there at the expense of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, but the visit was a great disappointment for him: he hated the queues, what he considered to be the ignorance of the Russian people, and the fact that they would not answer his questions or allow him to walk around freely.
There, Britton worked at Netherwood, a large, run-down property bought by the actor and playwright E. C. Vernon Symonds to convert into a left-wing haven for meetings, trade union conferences, or simply as a guest house.