The year I was to be fourteen, after I had been seriously ill with pneumonia, my mother had double pneumonia and also nearly died. I remember being sent to the cinema one night when she was gravely ill. When I got back, having separated from my friend Ernest Emery at the gate, I looked up and saw the front bedroom bay windows in darkness. This was where my mother was. I crept up the path and peered in at the drawing-room window where there was a light, and saw my crippled father sitting in conversation with the nurse and the doctor. Their faces were all grave, and I thought all was lost. If my mother was dead it was the end of the world for me. All mothers at the age I was then are no doubt dearly precious, but my own mother, in her love for me, had kept me so close that I could see no future for myself without her. I have long thought that psychologically her attitude was a terrible blunder; but if one assesses the outcome I suppose it cannot be criticized too drastically. (What is it that makes an author?)
Anyway, that night I was afraid to go in to the house, so fell on my knees, the doormat scratching them, to pray to a God I had never properly been introduced to that she was still alive – that somehow she was still alive. When eventually I summoned the courage to go in I discovered that my mother was dozing and the doctor and the nurse had turned the gas down and come downstairs to discuss the situation with my father. I should have learned from that that the imagination – my imagination – can always put two and two together and make six. It has been doing so ever since.
All this made my parents ready for a move. My mother with catarrh all the year and bronchitis every winter because of the ‘dampness’ of Victoria Park; my father a restive, frustrated cripple still only in his mid-fifties but forcibly retired by ill-health; and now my near-death and hers – there was nothing any longer to keep us in Manchester. The idea was to move to Southport, or perhaps to St Anne’s, which is the better, residential end of Blackpool, and which they knew suited my mother’s health. Together they could find a pleasant bungalow and face a long retirement. But behold my brother, frustrated beyond measure in his dead-end job, desperately wanting to marry, and now, suddenly, totally besotted in his desire to live in Cornwall. He didn’t mind what he did, however menial, so long as it was in Cornwall.
So in September 1925 we all took a holiday in Perranporth – Cecil’s fiancée Elsie with us – and stayed at the Tywarnhayle Hotel for two weeks, in the little undeveloped village with its fantastic cliff formations – mostly man-made, by miners seeking tin – and its three miles of golden sands and its apparently balmy climate. The whole family saw the light and was converted. Cecil and Elsie desperately sought opinions of the possibility of work in the district or some opening that they might jointly or individually seize on. There was nothing. Simply nothing. As many have found before them, and since.
But eventually it became evident that opening a shop catering for the villagers in one form or another might provide an opportunity. It was an acknowledged fact that almost all the people in the village went to Truro on Wednesdays for market day and did all their real shopping there. In Perranporth there was a big grocer’s called The Red House which, although badly run, was surely going to prosper in due time. There was a corner shop opposite run by a man called Samuel Harvey Mitchell, which in its small way sold everything from paraffin to Cornish cream; one or two other small village shops, old-fashioned in habit and long-established, and a group of wooden huts on the way to the promenade in which you could buy newspapers, toys, sweets and some primitive beach equipment. But in the newly developing part of the village, overlooking the recently opened Boscawen Park and boating lake, a chemist called Polgreen had recently built a fine-looking house and shop, next to which was a solitary plot of land as yet unsold and undeveloped. There would be no more shops built beyond.
It still startles me to think what happened in two weeks. In that time a builder called Healey, owner of the plot and of the Red House, and the father of Donald Healey, the only man in the last fifty years to give his name to a British-designed and built motor car, had been approached, a sketch plan produced by his architect, Pitkeathley, and discussed and amended and agreed, and the deal done, for the building of a similar shop and premises to the Polgreens’. So far nobody had any firm idea as to what sort of shop it was going to be, but opinion in the village was earnestly canvassed, and a decision was precipitately taken, that what was most lacking in Perranporth was a go-ahead ladies’ and gentlemen’s outfitters. Elsie was clever with her needle but knew nothing more of the business than that, having worked in an insurance office. Cecil was good at figures but knew nothing more of the retail business either. Within the last three days of our stay my parents found a furnished bungalow on rising ground 300 yards from the proposed shop, and took it for twelve months from the 1st of November.
Thereupon everyone returned in triumph to Manchester where, burdened with a sick husband and still as delicate as ever herself, my mother set about leaving all her friends, selling up all our furniture and effects and moving 300 miles to a new life in the depths of an unknown Celtic county by the sea.
The decision was made to sell everything, even to pots and pans and pictures and beds and brooms and baking tins – retaining only the piano, a bookcase full of books and our silver and china, personal clothing and effects.
I don’t remember much of that time except the wrench of selling many things we had grown attached to. We were leaving other things behind, apart from friends. After his stroke, my father had a ragingly high blood pressure, and in those days there were no pills to control it. In a desperate clutch at anything, anything to make him better, he had taken first to Christian Science, in which his gentle brother-inlaw Dan had long been a believer, and then to spiritualism. Seances were held at our house at which a young medium while under the ‘control’ of one of her spirits would massage my father’s arm and leg, trying to bring back the muscle strength. One has to record that she was the first person to make him walk across the room without a stick, and in the nine months under her care he never had a fit. Later it was whispered that she had been exposed as a fraud. I can only speak of the improvement she brought in him and the fact that she refused any payment for her visits.
We must have seemed a strange crew arriving in that Cornish village where most people were still Cornish and new blood from up-country was then mercifully rare – I and my parents in the October, my brother and sister-in-law, newly married, the following April. We were semi-genteel, middle-middle-class, rather modest and retiring but with an underlying sense of position. This was particularly so in my mother’s case, who never forgot that she had been Miss Anne Mawdsley. It scarcely existed in my brother, who was the most un-class-conscious person I have ever met. I was not far behind – at that time – being almost totally unaware that there were people either superior or inferior to myself.
I remember saying to a woman called Dorothy Hunt, whose bungalow we eventually bought: ‘ It’s a bit difficult among all these new faces. I can’t remember who I’m supposed to know and who I’m not supposed to know.’ She said stiffly: ‘ I think the Cornish are just as good as we are, so there’s no reason to pick and choose one’s friends.’ I stared at her in total astonishment. I suppose I could have phrased it better, making it clear that I was talking solely about recognition, since in a city one would have looked a damned fool saying good afternoon to everyone one passed. But the idea that ‘ supposed to know’ implied some sort of social discrimination was utterly foreign to me.
Maybe at that time I was a bit of a literary snob – though snob is the wrong word. I had virtually nothing whatever to contribute to ordinary gossipy family chat, but if books were mentioned I came awake. So far as the company I kept was concerned, it might be said that although I had no great opinion of my own literary abilities, I had less of theirs.
From the very earliest days I had wanted to write. At the age of five I dictated a story to my mother which began: “Oh, look,” said Tom to his mother, “There is a dead man on the doorstep!” That was as far as the story went. I can’t remember whether it was inspiration that dried up first or my mother’s patience. I won a special essay prize, open to a number of schools, the subject being ‘The Horrors of War’. It was my first meeting, aged ten, with the high master of the Manchester Grammar School, Mr Paton, who had helped to judge and who presented the prize. He made the now-expected joke about my Christian name, since by then my namesake had become famous. There was an occasion when our doctor came to see me and, being in a rarely jovial mood, stuck his stethoscope on the end of my nose and said: ‘I hope you’re not capable of a terminological inexactitude.’ It was shortly after Winston Churchill in the Commons had declared that some statement of the Opposition was ‘A lie!’ and had been told by the Speaker that this was not parliamentary language; so he had amended it.
Actually I was better at maths than literature, disgustingly inept at foreign languages – which would have been so useful in later life – and good at most other things. When it was finally decided I was not strong enough to face the rigours of the journey to and from Manchester Grammar School, my father went to see the headmaster of the Long-sight Grammar School and asked him what he thought I might be likely to do well at. The head replied, ‘He’ll succeed at anything he sets his mind to.’
I don’t know how true that was, but certainly my mother must have had an inordinate belief in the abilities of her ewe lamb. Of course it suited her to have me living at home; and probably she felt if the worst came to the worst she could buy me a bookshop somewhere where I could marry and live out my life comfortably enough. And of course it suited me just as marvellously to live at home and not to be dependent on my earnings for the bare essentials.
In the liverish eye of my relatives I was something of a drip. Since school, when I had appeared so ‘clever’, I had seemed to go to seed. I sharpened up to play tennis or go on the beach or tramp the cliffs or go to the cinema or in pursuit of a girl, but I did not seem interested in any gainful occupation. I got up very late in the mornings and stayed up very late at night. (Kinder to reverse the description of this routine, one being the outcome of the other.) Since, in the house my parents bought in Cornwall, we had no electricity, this meant reading or studying by ‘Aladdin’ lamps, or by one candle only in the bedroom, and not infrequently I would read till 3 a. m. My eyes did not have so much demanded of them again until the war, when as a coastguard I would illegally read – usually poetry – by the light of a torch.
I can understand how very irritating it must have been to my father – an intensely practical man who, though with musical leanings, was wholly wedded to the business ethic – to have this tall, thin, frequently jolly, but frail, drooping, sometimes ungracious son, who had no real ambition – no ambition at least that was realizable – and spent most of the day with his nose in a book. And who, through indifferent health and his mother’s pampering, was such a disappointment.
Many snide remarks came my way from outside, and my sisterin-law never missed an opportunity to point out to my mother, after my father died, what a useless member of society I was becoming.
In his first two years in Cornwall my father recovered sufficiently to be able to take long walks, to play bridge, to write with his left hand and to do a little gardening. On his last birthday he wrote to his mother: ‘My dear Mother, Sixty! I can hardly believe it!’ I had had no real idea how old he was, but it so happened that he left the letter open on the writing table, and, going for an envelope, I inadvertently saw it. I had supposed him somewhere in his midfifties, and sixty – to an eighteen-year-old – seemed immensely aged.
That same year, on a November afternoon, six years almost to the day after his first stroke, a lady at the door roused me from sleep – I had nodded off to sleep with my head on the page of the novel I was trying to write – to say that my father was ill in the garden. I hurried out, hoping it was just another fit, but it soon became clear that this was a second stroke – this time it had affected the whole of his left side. We got him to bed somehow. He could not speak or move at all, only his weakened right hand endlessly flexed and unflexed, as he had got into the habit of doing to try to strengthen it; that, and a fluttering of one eye.
‘Can you hear me, Father?’ I would say, and he would wink. It was the only communication left. He died a week later, survived by his eighty-five-year-old mother in Blackburn. Life is not kind – nor is it in any way even-handed. At sixty I was at the peak of my career, though already burdened with a wife crippled in just the same way as my father had been. Happily ‘burden’ simply does not apply to her; but living with a handicap and living under threat is not conducive to high spirits. She was a miracle. Always optimistic, even when first paralysed, always cheerful, always loving.
At that time, the time of my father’s death, and for a long while before and after it, I was appallingly shy of telling anyone I wanted to be a writer, fearing total ridicule – which such a statement would probably have received. The year before he died I had bitterly offended him because he suddenly said to me one day: ‘ When’s your novel going to be finished?’ It was the first time he had ever mentioned the subject. I replied: ‘Oh, this year, next year, sometime, never.’ It was a rude and unworthy reply, but I was only just turned eighteen and he spoke with what the French call pudeur, as if he were lifting the corner on some distinctly disreputable occupation. I curled up inside instantly, like a prodded snail, and those were the only words I could think to say.
The idea that I should ever make a living out of such scribblings seemed derisory. And it probably was. I lived a quiet, unadventurous, retired life when, if I really meant to succeed at this strange profession, I should have been plunging into all aspects of living with the gusto and the enterprise of an explorer. Once when Somerset Maugham was asked by an anxious American mother how she could best help her son, who wanted to be a writer, he replied: ‘Give him five thousand dollars and tell him to go to the devil.’ This advice no doubt would have been appropriate for me.
I did not know a single author, however insignificant, or publisher, however small-time, and I don’t think I knew that people called agents existed.
My first full novel, after a long and arduous struggle with an earlier book, got itself written when I was twenty-one. It took me ten weeks – then I retired to bed with complete exhaustion and a stomach complaint. Later I typed the book and sent it to a publisher, who returned it within two weeks with a rejection slip. I then fired it at another, who kept it a month. Then I sent it to Hodder & Stoughton, who kept it five months before sending it back saying the book had distinct promise but wasn’t quite strong enough for their list, but if I wrote a second they would like to consider it. Heartened and encouraged, I shoved the first novel away in a drawer and began my second. When this was finally finished I sent it away in great hope, whereupon Hodder & Stoughton returned it with a conventional rejection slip.
I had now been writing for five years and had virtually nothing to show for it. Surely mine was a pipe dream, as everyone else thought and knew and had been trying to tell me for ages? Why didn’t I wake up and stir myself and get some regular decent honest work? I was untrained for any profession, but I could surely turn my hand to something practical and realizable.
About this time, having written two unpublishable novels, I found myself involved in amateur theatricals in the village Women’s Institute. I acted in one or two small pieces, and at once it struck me how perfectly frightful the dialogue was, and how equally awful the contrived events and denouements. So, while keeping the titles and the general storylines, I began to rewrite the pieces and found the audience most happily responding. The authors got their minute royalties, and we got the laughs.
Just then there was a popular movement to raise money for the unemployed, and someone, interested in what I’d done, said why didn’t I write a three-act play and it could be put on at the local cinema for this good cause. So I sat down and wrote a play in six weeks, called it Seven Suspected, and this was eventually produced and played to a full and appreciative house for three nights. It was never printed, but copies circulated in typescript, and it was produced in Truro, Camborne, Hayle, Bury, Hendon and elsewhere, always with great success. Looking back, one particular feature strikes me – hardly a line had to be altered from the first draft. When one thinks of authors writing and rewriting scenes endlessly until the moment of first production, this seems preposterous. Of course it was only played by amateurs, who probably didn’t know any better, but every line was speakable, and when actors found their lines producing laughs they didn’t want to change them.
Coincident with this, there appeared on the horizon a Captain and Mrs Craddock, who had taken a house for six months in St Agnes. She was actually a real, live authoress and had published novels – many novels – under her maiden name of Elizabeth Carfrae. A great and important person indeed! She was taken up and lionized by what passed in the district for society, and she heard of my play and helped with its production and was generally very kind and generous to me. When she knew I had written a novel she asked to see it and sent it up with a note to her agent, J. B. Pinker, who had it read and sent it back, saying he did not think he could place it.
At the end of the six months the Craddocks abruptly departed, leaving unpaid bills everywhere, and were never heard of again. It is a characteristic of some authors which I have always determined to avoid. She was published by Mills & Boon, and nowadays we all know about them: ‘ not lit., my dear, but Romance with a capital R!’ I shouldn’t have minded. Indeed I should have been delighted to be published by anyone.
I have always valued her kindness in trying to help me.
In all this my mother took little part. She enjoyed her bridge and my company and my chauffeuring her around. She virtually took no sides in the opinion war. I do not know, and now I shall never know, how much she believed in my ability. (Oh, she believed tremendously in my ability – was I not her son? – but I mean my ability to make a living out of writing.) She was a great one for taking the easy way, for postponing the awkward encounter, for letting things be. She had a son at home – she could just afford to keep him and herself in a pleasant degree of comfort: why should she thrust me out to make a sort of living in some uncongenial job or – even more to be deplored – push me off to live among the viceridden streets of London, to sink or swim, as many better men had done?
But although she was unkind enough to pass on the occasional sneer, she never personally interfered nor enquired in a way which would cause embarrassment to me. I was my own man. It was a comfortable life for us both – a million miles too comfortable for me.
I am happy she lived just long enough to see the first explosions of success.
My father’s younger sister, Mollie, was unmarried, deeply romantic and intense about everything. She was enraptured to learn that one of her nephews wanted to be a writer. She and my parents must have discussed me at length on many occasions, but I never knew the substance of the talks. Anyway, her approach to me was much more tactful than her brother’s, and although I must have been as tight as a crab so far as my own writing was concerned we did have endless talks about literature and about writing in general. She was an aspirant and failed writer of children’s stories herself. Whether she believed any more than my father in an ultimate commercial success for me I know not, but she encouraged me in every way she could. In the end I let her read my first novel. I cannot remember whether she said she liked the book when she read it – she was always fiercely candid – but she declared passionately that it was quite wrong to keep it stuffed in a drawer and that it must be tried on other publishers. She persuaded me to retype a few pages that were dog-eared and then lovingly bound it into two volumes, with stitched sheets and cardboard sides so that it opened easily and looked like a book. I sent it off to Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co. Ltd.
Until now I had submitted the typescript to those publishers who published the sort of books I liked to read. This was particularly so of Hodder, who published John Buchan and A. E. W. Mason and Eric Ambler and ‘Sapper’ and Philip Oppenheim and Dornford Yates, etc., etc. It cannot be said honestly that I liked Ward, Lock books. They were a grade lower down the scale, and, looking them over in a bookshop once, I thought, ‘Surely my book is better than some of these!’ What I didn’t know at the time was that Ward, Lock had started off many famous writers and then, through editorial inadequacy or failure of their publicity department or the meanness of their directors, had allowed them to slip away to more fashionable publishers who proceeded to cash in.
Ward, Lock kept the book seven months, then accepted it. I remember it was the 10th of May and I was in bed with a filthy sore throat. Within two hours of receiving the letter the sore throat had disappeared. I showed the letter to my mother, who looked pleased and startled and ultimately delighted.
The letter from Ward, Lock just said they were sorry for such a long delay but after due consideration they had decided to publish my novel ‘on a 10% basis’, provided I would agree to toning down one or two scenes in the book, which they said was so exciting that they felt it was not necessary to ‘out-Herod Herod in the details’. The letter was signed S. E. Sarcoe. It goes without saying that I agreed to the small amendments. This was the only editing of the typescript that they ever suggested; otherwise it came out exactly as it was put in.
Incidentally, the contract, when it came for me to sign, was only a page and a half in length, and, apart from the fact that it offered me no advance on account of royalties and no increase on the 10% of the published price with increased sales, it was a model of simplicity and generosity. All rights, except for a few small ones, were expressly reserved to the author. No modern publisher would offer such an unworldly contract.
When the news got around in the village it was a sensation. A few still wouldn’t quite believe it until they saw the published book – and one relative was frankly doubting that it would ever come out at all. But most people thought my fortune was made. Our local dentist – an educated Londoner – made calculations of the sales the book must have if merely every branch of Boots’ Library took one. (He was clearly ignorant that the practice of Boots’ Library – like that of most libraries – was to buy a couple of dozen copies and send them around where there was a request for them; so you put your name down and waited until one came free.) It was a bad time for new novelists – I have never known it not – but perhaps it was specially bad with Hitler beginning his long tramp to menace the peace of the world.
The book, The House with the Stained-Glass Windows, was accepted in May and published in October. In between I went up to London and met my new publishers in their substantial building in Salisbury Square, EC4. Ward, Lock was an old-established firm, well known for publishing cook books – including Mrs Beeton – and a vast selection of excellent guides. These were the bread and butter. Fiction was a sideline but a substantial one. They also published the Windsor Magazine which, after the Strand, was the most important monthly magazine of the day. I met my correspondent, Mr S. E. Sarcoe, who was the editor-in-chief, a cheerful, fast-talking, fastmoving, middle-aged man, whose lips seemed to get in the way of his words, a down-to-earth, no-nonsense, friendly man who knew a very great deal about commercial publishing but whose literary tastes didn’t exactly reach the stratosphere. He was delighted to know I had ‘almost finished’ a second novel (a heart-warming reaction for me) but he startled me by saying that they wanted two novels a year from me. There was ‘not much money’ in writing, but what there was could chiefly be earned by regular and constant output. They would like the second book by November, ready for next April, and preferably one the following May.
After that I met Wilfred Lock, the chairman of the company and virtually the dictator. He was a strange small man who was never away from the office and had his eye on everything. He had a very disconcerting habit when you met him of falling completely silent and then, when you volunteered something, immediately interrupting with a remark of his own. I have never met anyone else with this strange off-putting gift. Was it deliberate, I wondered sometimes? How else could he always have something ready to say within two seconds of your beginning to speak?
He greeted me with agreeable detachment and was pleased to learn that for the moment I did not have to depend on my earnings for every crust. Financially speaking, he said more than once, he always looked on novel-writing as a stick to walk with but never a crutch.
Naturally, from the moment that Ward, Lock decided to publish me, my view of their output drastically changed, and I found out all sorts of new virtues in their list. I felt myself lucky to be taken up by such a substantial and old-established firm. And, by God, I was! They were London-based, had a fair number of reps (commercial travellers in those days), a high standard of book production, an office in Melbourne and agents in all the ‘Colonial’ territories. When my book was published it came out with handsome advertisements in the heavy Sunday papers and the best dailies, and it received a fair amount of notice from reviewers.
Even now I’m not sure if I appreciate how extraordinarily fortunate I was – for I now regard this first novel as amateurish, derivative (how could it be anything else?) and sloppily written. The one thing it did have, I suppose, was immense story-telling drive, and if you could believe the story it would grip you to the last page. Had I been a publisher I would certainly have rejected it.
The reviews on the whole were kind, perhaps too kind. Robert Lynd in the News Chronicle headed his solus review ‘Wicked Uncle’ and was mildly amusing at my expense; Torquemada in the Observernoticed it, the Mail and the Telegraph had nice things to say. The review I appreciated most was a thoughtful one in a newspaper called the Buxton Advertiser. I wonder if it still exists? It criticized all the things it should have criticized but managed to convey appreciation at the same time. Its last sentence read: ‘Nevertheless keep an eye on young Mr Graham, for he has come to stay.’
The reviewer, bless him whoever he was, could hardly have known how truly he was speaking.
The reception locally was flattering. I became known as the local author, and was generally made more of than I had been before. I remember at a bridge drive – a horror I then attended to oblige my mother – a Mr Arthur Mitchell, an elderly retired London chemist who had some pretensions to being the squire of the village, said to me that he had enjoyed my novel, and then, with a half attempt to take a rise out of me, asked, ‘When is your next one going to be published?’ It gave me exquisite pleasure to tell him and to see his surprise.
Because I had stockpiled by having two novels finished before the first was published, I was able to have a third ready for the following September; but thereafter I fell rapidly behind Ward, Lock’s urgings to produce two books a year. I am not by nature a fast writer, and, although flattered by their requests, I instinctively rejected the idea of becoming a writing machine. In those days I was far less ambitious than I later became. What I really wanted above all was to improve, to learn, to expand, to make each book better than the last, and I thought one whole novel a year was the absolute maximum.
Also I was reading a lot of dangerous books on the technique of writing: Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction, John Steeksma’s The Writing Way, Basil Hogarth’s The Technique of Novel Writing, and The Technique of the Novel by Carl Grabo. These were fascinating but they did me a lot of harm. They grafted self-consciousness on the story-telling stem, and, although they did not throttle it, they doubled the labour without adding much to the quality of the finished product. My fifth book, The Dangerous Pawn, was my first attempt at a straight novel. When Wilfred Lock read it he said it was ten years ahead of any of the previous books but ‘ commercially I could shake you’. How right he was. I was told that Hatchard’s had been taking a dozen of my books and occasionally reordering, but when they heard The Dangerous Pawn was not a thriller, they would not even look at it.
Not that any of these books had been a commercial success. They had not produced anything like enough for even a single person to live on. (Looking at the figures I am about to quote, I feel as if I am, financially, writing not of the Thirties but of the Middle Ages.) My mother had a more or less guaranteed income from her partnership in Mawdsleys of £360 a year. On this she was able to live in a degree of comfort, with a living-in maid, a small car, and to take at least one holiday at a hotel a year. My first novel earned me £29, my second £33, my third £41, my fourth £35. Occasionally a little extra trickled in from somewhere, but my earnings never exceeded £60 a year. A distinct depression began to settle on me. In the early books on writing I had read, people spoke of the poor returns that might be expected of a first or second novel; they had not alerted me to the fact that a third, a fourth and a fifth might earn no more, or even less. There was no build-up at all. A year’s hard work produced £50. To be able to live off my earnings I would have to write six novels a year. Some people did, I knew, using different names. During the Second World War a youngish middleaged novelist called Maisie Grieg came to live in Perranporth with her husband. She was pregnant for the first time, and this was an area reasonably free from bombs. She also wrote under the name of Jennifer Ames and some other pseudonyms. Her son was born in the July. At the Christmas I went to see her, and someone said, ‘How many novels have you written this year, Maisie?’ ‘Only five,’ she said, ‘but then I did have Robert.’
That sort of production was beyond me – fortunately, as it turned out. But all through this period Ward, Lock never seemed to hesitate for a moment about publishing each novel as it was finished. And they made no attempt to edit, to suggest, to criticize. Except for the request that I should tone down a few scenes in the first novel, everything was printed exactly as I submitted it to them – to the last comma. It was a very considerable act of faith on their part, and some years later when people told me I had outgrown their list I stayed on with them, feeling they deserved more profit from the association. Perhaps this treatment from my first publisher has bred in me an egotistical belief that when I have finished a book – about which I have never consulted anyone, except my wife – then what I have written is what I wanted to write, and it is said in the way I wanted to say it. Full stop.
After I married, my wife was the one confidante, willing to listen, to talk. Often she was just the listener, so that, in talking it over, I could work out my own problem; sometimes she contributed a vital thought. When writing the Poldarks I often went to her for information about country ways, and she drew on memories of her Cornish farmer cousins. Sometimes she seemed to have a sort of folk memory – of things she knew by instinct rather than experience.
Only twice have I had substantial advice from any other outside source, and both with books rewritten from earlier published novels. On Woman in the Mirror (formerly The Giant’s Chair) Carol Brandt’s advice was invaluable, and on Cameo (formerly My Turn Next) Marjory Chapman’s equally so.
But if these were years of frustration, there were also years of development, and there were many compensations, not least that of living in Cornwall. Could one choose a better place to be a relative failure? Perranporth has one of the finest beaches in the world – I call it Hendrawna in the Poldark novels, Hendrawna being the name of a small area of the hinterland adjacent to that beach.
It was visited frequently by Tennyson, accompanied by his friend Henry Sewell Stokes, in the 1850s, and five years after Tennyson’s death in 1892 a poem was published in the Echo, for the first time, I believe, and attributed to him. I don’t think it has been included in any collected edition of his poems, but Henry Sewell Stokes should have known.
Hast thou ever in a travel
Through the Cornish lands,
Heard the great Atlantic roaring
On the firm, wide tawny flooring
Of the Perran sands?Sea-rent gully where the billows
Come in great unrest;
Fugitives all white and reeking,
Flying from the vengeful Sea-king,
Striking from the west.Level broadway, ever ermined
By the ocean verge;
Girt by sandhill, swelling, shoaling,
Down to imitate the rolling
Of the lordly surge.Nine large files of troubled water
Turbulently come;
From the bosom of his mother,
Each one leaping on his brother,
Scatters lusty foam.In the sky a wondrous silence,
Cloud-surf, mute and weird;
In the distance, still uplifting,
Ghostly fountains vanish, drifting,
Like a Druid’s beard.Spreading out a cloth of silver,
Moan the broken waves;
Sheet of phosphorescent foaming,
Sweeping up to break the gloaming
Stillness of the caves.
I lived within a mile of this beach, and was free to walk on it whenever the fancy took me, or along the cliffs which rose up between Perranporth and St Agnes. This is Cornwall at its gauntest, at its most iron-bound. For centuries these granite cliffs have withstood mountains of water flung at them by tempestuous seas – literally millions of tons of seawater hurled at them in every gale – and they have lost none of their grandeur, scarcely anything of their shape or form through measurable centuries. The land bordering the cliffs is the habitat of rabbit and gull and errant seabird, mice and stoat and all small things – preying on each other but not yet preyed upon by man. It is rampant with heather and tiny flowers and wind-driven gorse, nothing much being allowed by the gales to grow above three feet in height; uncultivable, empty, wild.
Or should I tire of the sea, there were valleys to walk in – and every valley with a hasty stream. Marlowe’s ‘By shallow rivers to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals’ does not apply to the Cornish streams. Birds, yes, in plenty, but the streams are always in a hurry as if they remember their heyday as vital adjuncts for the nearest mine – to provide water for the washing floors and the tin stamps and vital fresh water for the pumping engines which would corrode quickly if the acid minerals in the water they pump up were to be used.
I have no fear of heights when heights are presented by flying in planes, or standing at the top of the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower and looking down. But I have a morbid fear of climbing, which I have expressed in scenes in several of my novels: Night without Stars and The Loving Cup, for example. This stems almost certainly from an early occasion in Cornwall. I used to climb all over the great cliffs, without much thought to the risk, and usually on my own, and one day I decided to explore Sobey’s Ladder, which is a narrow mineshaft not far from Wheal Prudence – driven from part way down the black cliffs to the sea below. (Sobey was a miner who used to keep a boat on a ledge down there and use it for fishing.) When I was part way down I slipped and fell about six feet. There I clung on, with jagged rocks licked by the sea a hundred feet below. Slightly concussed, bruised and cut on shoulder and leg, nothing worse, I crawled slowly back to the top, lay there on the sloping grass gasping, and in the confusion of my swimming head it felt as if the grassy floor I had reached was slowly tilting until I was in danger of sliding off over the edge into the sea. There was no one within a mile, and the sun had just set.
I don’t remember how long it took to get home, but it was the end of cliff-climbing for me. For years after I had a nightmare of picking my way along a narrow path with cliffs looming above me and the sea licking below, and the pathway gradually narrowing until it petered out.
In the Poldark novels Sobey’s Ladder has been attributed to a man called Kellow.