Jean Williamson’s father had been in the navy all his life. He had been a gunnery officer on board the Royal Oak at the Battle of Jutland, and among his other medals was that of the Order of St John, awarded by the Russians; though this must have been given him for some earlier adventure. Gunfire damaged his eardrums, and when I first met him he was already deaf.
At the end of the First World War he was sent as a gunnery expert to superintend the dismantling and blowing up of all the explosives at Nobel’s Dynamite Works, which had been situated on the Cornish cliffs about two miles outside the tiny village of Perranporth. Thinking his task might run for a couple of years at least, he bought a pleasant, largeish square-built house on the hill above the village and brought his wife and two children from Devonport to live there. But after six months he was transferred to Portland. As his next appointment was also likely to be temporary, his wife and family remained at Perranporth, and that is where his children grew up.
It must have been an unspoiled Cornish village then – some years before even we arrived. Jean remembered the mine opening on the cliffs a quarter of a mile out of the village, and the difficulty they had in hauling the huge cylinder for the engine up the steep hill, with eight horses straining at the traces and the wheels of the wagon inches deep in sticky mud. They failed to get it up the cliff road and so had to go up St George’s Hill – almost as bad – and round the corner into Tywarnhayle Road and then to the cliff and the mine.
Unknown to any of the happy Williamson family at this time, the Geddes Axe was pending, whereby the navy was savagely truncated in a post-war retrenchment, and Commander Williamson, at the age of just fifty, found himself redundant. The navy had been his life from the age of eighteen, and without it he had no life at all. He lived another twenty-one years, and took on a variety of paid and unpaid jobs, but fundamentally – although he could be jolly enough on occasion – he remained a moody and an embittered man. I remember when the Second World War broke out he immediately packed his bag, waiting to be called up, although by then he was sixty-eight.
Among Samuel Williamson’s earliest friends in the navy was a sturdy, cheerful, devil-may-care young man called Charles Alexander. Charles was a good bit the older, had run away to sea when a boy, had served before the mast in the clipper ship Thermopylae, sister to the Cutty Sark, and had finally joined the navy as an AB in 1873. When he married Emma Mitchell, a Cornish girl living in Plymouth, he sailed away to the Antipodes almost immediately after and did not see his eldest daughter until she was three and a half years old. The navy had little regard for the family life of its sailors in those days.
In the fullness of time Charles brought his friend Sam back to his home in Devonport, and Sam, now thirty-nine, proposed to Charles’s eldest daughter, who was twenty-six. Two children came of this marriage, Reginald, who eventually went into the banking world, and Jean, who married me.
When Charles Alexander eventually retired, first from the navy and then from the dockyard, they moved to Camelford and lived there for the rest of their lives. My wife, though born in Devonport, had a lot of Cornish cousins and was herself a quarter of Cornish blood. (The other quarters being London, Derbyshire and Scottish.) When her father was prematurely axed they were still living in Perranporth, and her mother, called to subsist on the miserly pension of a commander in the Royal Navy, had begun to ‘take guests’ at their home in the village, so my future wife was not without some experience in her new profession. But ours was of course an altogether bigger venture.
It was agreed – I’m not now quite sure why, possibly on the reasoning that married life and a new and exacting occupation shouldn’t be attempted at the same time – that she should run Trebarran herself – with such suitable help as she could muster – during the summer of 1939, and that we should be married in the October. And so she took on the new enterprise. Let down by the abysmal professional types whom she first engaged, she quickly reverted to friends of her own class and one or two good working types in the village, and somehow made an outstanding success of her first summer. I continued to live at home and go up daily, chiefly to supervise the ordering and to do the accounts, paying bills and making them out, at all of which, following my mercantile ancestry, I was good. Having been spoon-fed all my life, I knew nothing of the rolled-up-sleeves side of the enterprise. And to do my beloved wife justice, she never expected it of me.
Jean and I had come to look on this new venture as a challenge: exciting, exacting but of limited duration each year. To be together, married, owners of a handsome house within sight of the sea, independent, one hoped; for the first time able to look on my personal earnings as a supplement to what came in, instead of the only source of income. (I remembered wryly Wilfred Lock’s remark when I first met him, that one should regard the writing of novels as a financial stick, never as a crutch.) We could be a team: it was no novelty even then for both husband and wife to work to maintain the household.
Privately I sometimes ground my teeth just the same. I was a published novelist, for God’s sake, with a collection of handsome volumes on my shelf, with my name on every one, and admirably favourable notices on the back covers. I was an established novelist, whose books were reviewed in the Observer, The Times, the Financial Times, and in places as far away as Otago and Kuala Lumpur. When I wrote I needed to have no qualms about whether the next book would be published: it was taken for granted.
Looking back on those days I realize now that what I grossly omitted to read were enough biographies and autobiographies of famous and best-selling authors who had written maybe six or even a dozen unsuccessful books, being forced to support themselves by other work – often uncongenial work – until one day they struck oil.
Anyway, there it was at that time, my new wife was wonderfully gifted, and such a dynamo of energy that the project was bound to be a success.
And it surely was a success – so far as it lasted, it could not have been more successful. But as we had all expected, Hitler was not to be satisfied with Austria and the Sudetenland. One August day I heard on the BBC that he had concluded a non-aggression pact with his lowering, suspicious neighbour to the east. A thunderstorm broke over the village that day, and in the middle of it I rushed down to Treberran and found Jean making her wedding cake in the company of Barbara Bryan-Haynes, her contemporary and friend who was helping to cook for her that summer. I came on their glowing happy faces with a look as thunderous as the weather and told them that war could now only be a matter of weeks. The wedding was fixed for the 18th of October, by which time the house would be blissfully empty. It has to be brought forward, I insisted. With a house booked to be full of people until mid-September, Jean said there was no way in which she could abandon her new commitment. We parted in mild dissension.
In the event, with war breaking out on September 3rd, I insisted on the wedding being not later than the 18th, so the paradox emerged that we, who had wanted to marry for several years, had in the event to be married by licence, with the sanction of the bishop. Coming back from Truro in my mother’s car, I picked up a young man I knew in Toc H called Joe Stephens and gave him a lift home. On the way I explained about having just been in for the licence and the haste of the wedding.
Before I could get any further he broke into an embarrassed laugh and said: ‘ Oh, I didn’t know you was in the same sort of trouble as me!’
After a rush to Plymouth to buy the wedding dress – the one ordered wouldn’t be ready in time – and the choice of a single bridesmaid instead of three (my cousin’s daughters heartbroken at not being able to get there) came the day, a Monday, sun and cloud with a fresh breeze; sixty guests, a wedding cake on which the icing had not sufficiently hardened, so that, towards the end of the breakfast, there was the risk that the lowest tier would not stand the strain (it was like the Leaning Tower of Pisa); an officiating vicar, Sir John Charles William Herschel, Bart. (great-grandson of the discoverer of Uranus), who either from the decrepitude of age or the stresses of the new war tried hard throughout the service to marry me to a girl called Christine; tea in Truro afterwards with my dearest friend, Fred Harris, and Jean’ssolitary bridesmaid Barbara, and then off to Mousehole for the beginning of our honeymoon.
Through the summer of 1939, on the fairly rare occasions when we had been able to get to the sea together, we had walked through the smaller surf, arms linked, planning a holiday in Scotland and singing or humming ‘Over the Sea to Skye’. This was now out of the question, with petrol rationing newly instituted, the blackout in force, evacuee children, air-raids expected. So we spent ten days at the Old Coastguard’s Hotel in Mousehole and the Godolphin Arms in Marazion.
I will not pretend that I greatly enjoyed our honeymoon. (It didn’t matter in the end, for we had so many marvellous ones later.) But at the time the war was too imminent (or do I mean immanent?). On our first morning we heard that the battleship the Royal Oak had been torpedoed and had sunk with few survivors. We took a fishing boat out to the Manacles, and the fisherman in charge of it congratulated us for being able to eat ham sandwiches in such a heaving sea. In the evening the blackout was so complete that going out of the hotel one could see nothing, only hear the hum of voices as people all round the horseshoe of the harbour came out of doors to talk neighbour to neighbour. One man, coming out of a pub, stumbled over a coil of rope and complained: ‘Tis dark as a bloody sack.’
That was more or less the outlook for us all. The evil war news of the over-running and destruction of Poland, the home news of the introduction of rationing, of the prospective call-up into the services of all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, the evacuation of millions of children, the endless decrees; these hardly made a favourable background for a peaceful, happy honeymoon. We also knew that the house we had left was not empty. Some people had stayed on because of the outbreak of war, others wanted to remain till Christmas; and there was the risk that such a large house would be commandeered either for troops or evacuees.
I saw a film a few years ago called Hope and Glory, which was set in London at the outbreak of war and during the Blitz. This showed men hurrying to recruiting stations as soon as war was declared and emerging a few weeks later khaki-clad and ready for the fray. Where this was dreamed up I don’t know; probably from memories of the First World War. It was not true of the Second. Notices were issued that men should not flock to recruiting stations but wait to be called up in an orderly fashion so that total chaos could be avoided. Towards the end of 1939 there was a cartoon in Punch depicting one man in civilian clothes talking to a man in khaki. The first man says: ‘ In the Army, I see? You must have influence!’
When it came time for me to register I chose what I thought the least uncivilized of the three services, which was the navy. I won’t catalogue all the ailments I had suffered in my teens and twenties; and when I was eventually called for a medical in the early summer of 1940 it obviously crossed my mind that I might be found partially unfit. However, on the day I sailed through everything and, but for one doctor, I would have passed A1. But the one doctor’s little tick meant that I was out of the navy altogether – they would take only the best – and I must be turned over to the army. This occurred, but another medical followed, and at it I was downgraded from B to C.
I am reminded of Bob Hope’s experience when, in the early days of the war, he was living in Hollywood and feeling that he should return to England and help in the war effort. Knowing that some of his friends had volunteered for the Canadian Air Force he asked one of them who had been accepted how he had got on.
‘ I suppose,’ he said, ‘you have to go through a strict physical test?’
The other man growled at him: ‘ They’ll take you if you’re warrm.’
Well, my downgrading meant that at least for the time being, I wasn’t warm enough. It didn’t matter that I had a fair skill with words, persuasive or abusive – or that in maths I was ahead of most people – or that I was bursting with a desire to do Hitler down. Because I wasn’t up to square bashing I was totally out.
Had I had influence in London something would of course have been fixed for me. (One reads in autobiographies of a dozen such instances.) As I had not, nothing was. Being newly married, very much in love, and with a hefty bank overdraft to sustain, it was not difficult to reconcile myself, at least for the time being, to the thought that a non-combatant’s lot was not an unhappy one. When volunteers were invited for the Coastguard Service I applied.
At the first interview for this service a selected but not select group of volunteers was examined by a crusty elderly naval lieutenant. We gave our names and such other details as were asked for, and then after a bit of discussion he looked crossly round the room and said:
‘Well, there are twenty or more of you here and we only want seven. How am I going to select you?’
There was a pause, then he said: ‘No suggestions? Maybe you’d like to fight it out between you.’
I looked at my neighbours, summed them up and said: ‘I’ll take my chance.’
‘Right,’ he said instantly, ‘ you’re in.’ And I was. Later he made me station officer.
Such acts of braggadocio, I may say, don’t occur frequently in my life.
The Auxiliary Coastguard Service, as it was properly called, was distinctly combatant, and under semi-naval discipline, but it was largely recruited from those too old or unfit to serve, and some of the patrols and the night watches were so local that one could sleep at home.
So I had a very, very ‘lucky’ war. (One of my friends who was called up at the same time as me went down in the Repulse.) Apart from occasional bombings at Penhale three miles away, and the drifting in of corpses or unexploded mines, our duties were boring rather than dangerous. The constant regular – or rather irregular – hours on watch and patrolling the cliffs and beaches in all weathers, from the crystalline sunshine of a June day to the blinding force-10 night gale, when one clutched at anything to stay on one’s feet, gave me the sort of health I had never had before. It was a prolonged sea voyage without often being afloat. And though I had little time to write I had immense areas of time to think, to meditate, and to dream, so that, when the war ended, ideas and scenes and stories came out, much matured from what they had been before. Also, more than ever previously, I came to watch and understand the sea and to love Cornwall in a new way. When I began to write Poldark I drew on this part of my life as in another dimension.
When the newly recruited coastguards assembled in July 1940 we were a motley crew of seven, under a regular officer from St Agnes, called Sparrock, and a senior commander from Plymouth, called Coombes. Coombes was a fatherly old chap, Sparrock a martinet. We had no uniform of any sort and our total defence equipment was one Ross rifle. These rifles were relics of the First World War and had been kept in store in Canada for twenty-odd years before being shipped across to supply the Home Guard and people like ourselves with the object of resisting the parachutists and landing craft of a professional German invasion army. I sometimes pictured myself taking it in turns with my compatriots to aim a single potshot at Nazi invaders equipped with automatic weapons and hand grenades. Fortunately for the survival of these reminiscences, it never happened.
Our watches were of six hours a day, plus a one-week-in-six of patrols. The day watches were always on one’s own. But in the hours of darkness one worked in pairs. I loved the solitariness, the isolation, but six hours sitting with another man who would perhaps talk for two hours nonstop and then snore for an hour – though he was not supposed to – could be boring to desperation. One of the men I double-banked with was a Protestant Irishman – one of the landed gentry whose house had been burned down during the ‘ Troubles’ and had fallen on, relatively, hard times. Early on, a cask of some liquid was washed ashore and appropriated by him (since he had found it). Our local chemist, confronted with a sample, pronounced it to be pure spirit. Waller, the Irishman, used it in his motor cycle with some success, but then discovered it was drinkable. He was scandalized that he should have wasted any of it on his motorcycle. Thereafter, until it was all drunk, he was an awkward customer to share six hours of darkness with. Every twenty minutes or so he would make an excuse and go out to see if his motor bicycle was safe and come back with breath that was ignitable. As time went on each night, he would become steadily more quarrelsome; so there were occasions when one was not far from a private war of one’s own.
Another man, Sampson, an old sailor, had the sort of blinkered, one-track mind which was interesting to study but indescribably boring to be with. He had a restricted number of views on a restricted number of subjects. One only had to mention the relevant word, and it was like putting a penny in a slot: the reaction was instant and utterly predictable. The dangers of having such a mind were sometimes fascinatingly demonstrated. Once at the beginning of a watch we were visited by Sparrock, and Sampson was sharply reprimanded. I heard the interchange. Sampson was so indignant that he talked about it without a stop for the whole six hours. At the beginning of that time his memory faithfully reproduced the interchange. But over the hours it gradually altered with each telling, so that by the end of the watch it was Sampson who was putting the officer in his place.
I used him as one of three models for Jud Paynter.
Laced with the deadly dull routine were the occasional emergencies: the mines drifting in on the beach, the corpses wedged among the rocks, the stray German raider, the bombed convoys, the Spitfire diving into the sea, the invasion scares; but in the main it was watching the horizon, an occasional practice with Sten guns – when they eventually came – and the telephoning of the passage of ships along the coast.
As always short of stamina, I used to find the six-mile walk to the end of the beach and back, usually over soft sand and carrying our one precious but very heavy Ross rifle, a physical trial, so I bought a Smith & Wesson .45 from an officer just back from France, and was given permission to carry that instead. When well out of earshot of the general public, with illimitable stretches of empty beach on all sides of me, I would take pot shots at pieces of flotsam brought up on the tide.
The thing I disliked most to discover – after decomposed corpses – was a mine. We were forbidden, of course, to tamper with them, so it meant trudging back to the village, telephoning Plymouth and then, when the bomb disposal man arrived two hours later, walking back to where the mine had been seen and watching the operation from a safe distance.
On one occasion rather more than halfway along the beach I found a crate. It was undamaged, had open slats, and through the openings you could see an eighteen-inch-long, four-inch-wide object wrapped in waterproof sacking, and suspended, to protect it from damage or jolting within the three-foot-square crate, by steel springs tautly secured to the bars of the crate. I approached it with caution, but there were only numbers on the crate and no indication whether it was British or German. I debated what to do. The enormous trek back, with the long wait and the trek out and back again? It looked like no bomb I’d ever seen – nor in fact like anything else I had ever seen. Clearly it was of value, and was either explosive or, more probably, delicate and must not be jolted for that reason. I found one or two stones on that enormously unstony beach and threw them at the crate, but they only shook it slightly. The sensible thing was to shoot at it and make sure it was safe, but I did not like to destroy what might be some valuable item of equipment.
I went up to it again and saw that the springs were simply hooked by tension to the sides of the crate and so could be unhooked. With a good deal of care I gently unlatched it until only one hook remained. This was more difficult but it eventually yielded and I slid the object out of the crate and began my trek home, the thing dangling from my hand like a spring-heeled puppet.
When, having wended my way through the sparse holiday-makers and climbed the steep hill, I reached the coastguard look-out I found myself the most unpopular man in Great Britain. Compared to me, Hitler was a friend. Although I hung the object on a wire fence some twenty feet from the little station, every one of my fellow coastguards joined in condemning my foolish and dangerous action, an action which not only endangered my life but, more importantly, their own. I rang Coombes in Plymouth, and spoke to him and then to a bomb disposal officer and answered a number of questions. The officer didn’t think it was explosive, so Coombes, who was coming for one of his inspections the following day, said he would look at it when he came.
For these inspections all seven of us had to be present, and they all stood around with the greatest alarm and annoyance while he examined my find. The top of the waterproof covering was secured by a metal ring. As he removed it he suddenly shouted: ‘ Ph-izz!’ Six of the coastguards jumped a foot in the air. Coombes had a great sense of humour.
My curiosity as to the identity of my find was never entirely satisfied. I was told it was a newly introduced type of radio valve, but accepted that with a pinch of salt.
On another occasion, in mid-June, when I was double banking, an alarm came through that two soldiers from Penhale Camp – three miles along the beach – had been cut off by the tide and were on the cliffs and in danger of drowning. Lifesaving apparatus was sent for from St Agnes and a group of us, headed by the irascible Mr Sparrock, made for the cliffs beyond Flat Rocks. In mid-June in fine weather there is no real darkness in Cornwall. At two in the morning the sun has long sunk but the sky over the sea is a luminous cobalt already promising a dawn two hours off. It was such a night when we set out to rescue the soldiers, windless, more gloaming than dark, the tide coming to the full, hissing over the sand; rock pools and shadowed cliffs, faint stars in the distant sky, shaded lanterns, splashing feet. It was wonderful to be alive on such a night.
The upshot of our rescue operation was that we climbed the cliffs and after a while located the soldiers. But, by the time we got the rope ladders in place and clambered down over the precipice, the soldiers, helped by the tide which had now begun to ebb, had fled. In spite of strenuous enquiries, they were never identified. They had been breaking camp and somehow got back undiscovered.
The fury of the rescue team knew no bounds. ‘If I got near them,’ fumed Sparrock, ‘I’d help them up the frigging cliffs with the toe of me frigging boot.’ He was particularly mad because on the way to the rescue he had stumbled and fallen flat on his face in a footdeep sandy pool. For me that was the high spot of a thoroughly delightful night.
The next day, bleary from lack of sleep, I had to attend the funeral of an old friend at St Agnes, a fine Belgian violinist called Dupont who at one time had been leader of King Edward VII’s private orchestra. In the warm, glittering midday, scented with the roses flowering in the churchyard, my stomach kept giving convulsive jerks. If anyone saw it I hope they thought I was weeping. In fact I was trying helplessly to control the laughter brought on by memories of the night.
In the meantime my personal life was not without vicissitudes. With the constant risk of evacuees being billeted on us, the house could not be allowed to remain empty except for our small family; so, as a protection from worse things, paying guests – of whom there were a few around – must be taken all winter and through the next summer and the winter after that, etc., etc., etc. It meant no rest for my young wife, and, beset by staff problems, rationing, blackout precautions in a house with an excessive number of windows, and every other sort of wartime restriction, it was not the sort of early married life we had pictured.
But we were together a lot, which was far more than I had ever dreamed possible, once war had broken out. And so far as one could see, unless some better use were found for my unimaginable talents in London, or the war casualties became so high that the barrel had to be scraped clean, I was likely to remain in Cornwall.
Sometimes I made unpatriotic use of the meagre allowance of petrol we were permitted, and drove around in search of food to feed our guests. There was a farm in Roseland, owned by the friend of a friend, where a few discreet eggs could be bought. Driving home we reached Truro. It was market day and busy, and just as I entered the town I touched my horn at a pedestrian and the damned thing stuck and would not stop. It is not a large town, but it seemed large that day. I drove right down the hill, through the crowded streets and up the other side with the horn relentlessly blaring. Everyone stood and stared. It was as well I was not picked up because in addition to a wife and baby son in the car I had eight dozen blackmarket eggs in the boot.
To complicate things a little more in our home life, my mother, always a difficult person to satisfy where maids were concerned, had by early 1940 run through a succession of them and been left frequently adrift and untended; so in the end we said she must come and live with us, at least for the duration of the war; though I think we all knew it meant for the duration of her life. We were able to give her a private sitting room, and the arrangement worked fairly well.
By 1943 the airfield at Trevellas, two miles away, was fully operational, and one day a flight lieutenant called and told us we must provide accommodation for six pilot officers. For this the Government would pay us 6d a night.
Of course we welcomed the young men – all younger than I was – and we made many warm friendships, none of which, alas, endured. Our young men were constantly changing; and not many survived the war. We lost two while they were staying with us – not from enemy action but from hideously ordinary flying accidents. They were the cream of youth: supremely fit, intelligent, high-spirited, zestful, courageous but fatalistic. There were some Poles among them too – equally splendid men. I have written about two of them in my novel Cameo.
A further complication in our lives, though a happy one, was the birth of our first child, a son, Andrew, in June 1942 – about the time of the Battle of Stalingrad. But while Jean was carrying him – clearly as a result of the tension and overwork of the last three years – she developed asthma, a complaint which was almost to kill her in the next half decade. She began to have savage monthly attacks, from which after two days in bed she would begin to crawl about, thin and wasted but with the tremendous stamina that she had, rapidly becoming her old self again. Then she would have about three weeks before the next attack. This, plus half a hotel to run, six young airmen to be seen to on occasion, a delicate mother-in-law who could do nothing in the house, and now a young baby to tend, was more than enough for one young woman.
Of course we got away from time to time, thanks to my motherin-law and one or two other people who could temporarily take the load; and these short holidays – in spite of everything much more high-spirited than our honeymoon, because now the dangers were out in the open and could be faced and some of them already defeated – quickly made up for anything lacklustre in the first. Several times we went to London and ignored the air-raids with theatre-and concert-going. Once at the ballet at Sadler’s Wells we saw a young girl dancing one of her first key roles. When we came out, the sky was ablaze with searchlights. We hoped they were out to welcome the arrival of Margot Fonteyn.
During my time as a coastguard I spent many long hours looking down at the remains of a wreck. Only the weed-grown timbers showed, a skeleton of a French ship called La Seine which had been driven ashore in a January gale in 1900. Waller, the Irishman, a vividly vigorous sixty-year-old, as soon as he saw it wanted to put the wreck to good use and, standing in water sometimes up to his shoulders, since wrecks always create pools around themselves, he rigged up a very long rope between the coastguard station and the wreck and erected an endless whip, whereby a thinner line with baited hooks upon it could be rotated out to sea at full tide and back again. It was a Heath Robinson contrivance, but after a few false starts it suddenly worked in abundance, and one night we found ourselves with two dozen mackerel and two huge skate. Food was so short that I telephoned my wife and, pregnant though she was, she walked the mile from our house and traversed the singlefile precipitous cliff path to the station. It was nine o’clock on a wild black winter’s night, and when I heard a rattle of stones I went out with the Ross rifle and challenged her.
A faint voice came through the windy darkness. ‘ It’s your wife!’
Unfortunately the large canvas bag she had brought wasn’t big enough to take the skate lying down, so to speak, and when she came to cut it up next morning rigor mortis had set in, and she was confronted with a huge crescent-shaped fish covered with sharp abrasive scales. We ate it in due time. But presently news of Waller’s enterprise reached headquarters and it was put a stop to.
After the war, when the little coastguard station was converted into a sophisticated, instrument-crammed building concerned to measure the height of waves (waves, it seems, diminish on their long journey from the Mexican Gulf, but they do not alter their relative size, one to another), the remains of the wreck were blown up so as not to disturb the pattern of the sea. But from 1940 onwards I stared at it and thought long about it: it seemed a wonderful relic of an age long past – although in fact it was then only forty years gone. Indeed one of the seven of us on watch, a man called Tom Mitchell – Farmer Tom, to distinguish him from all the other Mitchells in the village – had seen the vessel actually come in and the following day, as a boy of nine, had clambered over the ship. He was able to tell me all the details of the wreck, and I pondered over the lives of the people who had been drowned and those – the majority – who had been saved.
On one of my infrequent days off I took my wife to Falmouth and found a rather disreputable cafe–restaurant where the proprietor did not send round to take your orders but bargained fiercely with you as you came in as to which joint you should have some slices of, these being arrayed on the counter at his side. As sometimes happens with an author, two fairly disparate scenes come together to make a novel, and from these scenes – the shipwreck and the cafe – emerged The Forgotten Story.
It was published in the spring of 1945 while the war was still at a crucial stage. It seemed to me at the time that it was written too hastily and too casually and had been scribbled down in the spare moments of a broken and traumatic few years. I have never written a novel I thought less well of at the time. The previous book, The Merciless Ladies, most of it written before the war, had come out in 1944 and was now beginning to sell. I was sufficiently clearsighted to be aware that this was largely due to the times: shortage of newsprint, shortage of new novels, and a public which, deprived of many other outlets, was reading more than ever before. All the same I thought well of this book and feared that the publication of what seemed to me to be a relatively trivial novel like The Forgotten Story would do my growing reputation no good at all. As publication date drew near I became more and more anxious and worried, so that at the end if someone had offered me £50 to withdraw the book I should have done so.
In the event The Forgotten Story, simple though it was, drew a new critical attention and soon began to sell on its own merits apart from any popularity born of a newsprint shortage. The Merciless Ladies, in my view now, was a rather pretentious, ‘literary’ novel, which, if I had ambitions to suppress anything, should have been the better target. In later years I rewrote it entirely and, I hope, ironed out some of the worst bugs. But there seems no doubt that, judging as objectively as possible, The Forgotten Story is far the better of the two. So can one totally deceive oneself at the time.
I remember walking up to the coastguard station one day just before the end of the war with the glowing – dizzying – knowledge in my heart that the recently published The Forgotten Story was earning me around £50 a week. Fifty pounds a week! Today’s equivalent is about £1,000. At this rate I would shortly be rich and independent.
After that a lot of things happened more or less together. Just before we were married I had told Jean one evening that I had an idea to write an historical novel about Cornwall. For a young woman who had a sublime faith in my abilities, she – for once – looked doubtful. I think it crossed her mind that I was really attempting too much.
I had in fact over the previous ten years been ‘taking in the air’ – the ambience – of the county in which I now lived. Like all my family, I had fallen in love with it, but unlike them, being more imaginative and of an impressionable age, I took in more – and eventually gave out more. Being quite unaware of the sublime superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, I got on well with the Celts, indeed found some affinity between them and my own North Country breed and upbringing.
I met them and liked them and laughed with them and talked to them, and listened, of course – to old miners and young rugby players, old fishermen, young laywers, middle-aged butcher boys, clerics and farmers, doctors and dentists and dustmen. And their wives and sisters and daughters. From many old men I heard about the mines and the county’s strange history. Romantic, of course, with its stories of smuggling and wrecking, but equally interesting in its political and social life, the gambles of mining, the forty-four Members of Parliament, returned mostly through ‘rotten boroughs’, the social life of Truro, the rich families and the poor. All this went along with my special appreciation of the tetchy, beautiful, unreliable weather, the great seas, the massive cliffs, the crying of the sea birds, the smell of heather and gorse, the tantrums of the wind.
I had read, of course, the ‘Cornish’ novelists, and found them on the whole a disappointing lot. Some of them wrote good novels, but these could just as easily have happened in Devon or in Norfolk. The writers used the county because it was romantic, but never even tried to understand it. From these strictures I naturally excepted the real Cornish writers like Baring-Gould, Quiller-Couch, and Crosbie Garstin.
There had been growing in my mind a story which was unoriginal in its inception but which fortunately broke the mould as it went along. Before the war I had sketched out a few characters, then while I was waiting for call-up I used to walk to my mother’s bungalow – furnished but empty since her coming to live with us – and there I began to write the first few chapters of Ross Poldark. It was a strange contrast for me between the formidable war news and the many complexities of modern life and the total isolation of an empty bungalow – a mile from my house – with a long lawn, a flowing stream and pastoral silences.
Sometimes late at night in bed I would read aloud a part of what I had written, while Jean’s blue-grey eyes would mist over with the sleepiness she indignantly denied.
Necessarily all this was broken; and I did not begin to rewrite what I had written or to continue the story until the war was near its end. But while on watch in the daylight – and during the long nights – I would think and dream and consider the characters and allow them to grow. So that when the war was near its end and when to everyone’s inexpressible joy it did end, the story was there for the writing.
I had no thought when I began Ross Poldark of a continuing series of books. It was just to be a story of eighteenth-century Cornwall, with a gloomy beginning and a happy ending, and that was that. In the course of it I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote, polishing and pruning, adding and subtracting, trying to get the perfect balance in each chapter between emotion and restraint. Some chapters I wrote nine times: each time I went to them they responded to something different in my own mood and had to be done again. In some ways I was very young – younger than my years – in spite of having been a professional writer so long; and I was too romantic. My approach to women was too romantic – it still is – but it was by then a part of my nature and was too inbred to be changed.
This novel, although preceded by a sort of ‘trailer’ in the form of The Forgotten Story, was in fact a big departure from anything else I had written, being slower moving, concerned with mood and scene rather than action – though there was plenty of that too – and it took some imaginative stress to build up the historical background behind the characters. When my publishers saw it they liked it very much but suggested I should cut 20,000 words from the first half. It was the first time they had ever suggested any amendment since my very first novel. It was, I am sure, a genuine criticism on their part, but also it was activated by the extreme shortage of paper and their knowledge that an economy of forty pages would be a handsome saving of their short supply. I just said no. I said I regretted I wasn’t willing to cut anything, so they took it as it was. Whether they were in any way justified I don’t know, but no one ever since has said that the beginning was drawn-out or slow.
When the book came out it was a terrific success in Cornwall. W. H. Smith in Truro sold 700 copies in the month of December. It did not receive as many favourable reviews as The Forgotten Story, possibly because critics, a disillusioned race, don’t care for romance. But it continued to sell moderately well all through the succeeding year – and it has never stopped selling in all the years since.
Before this I was well on with the second Poldark novel, Demelza. Towards the end of Ross Poldark it became clear that I had far more to say and to tell than could be contained within a single book. There had to be another, and perhaps even one after that. Not only did Ross and Demelza grip my thoughts but all the lesser characters: the Martins, the Carters, Dwight Enys and Karen Smith, the Bodrugans, the Chynoweths, and of course the Warleggans. These people had come alive and clamoured for attention.
So Demelza came into being. All through the time I was in the Coastguard Service I had come particularly to appreciate being alone. I remembered the strange stimulating isolation of those few months in 1940 when, awaiting call-up, I had written the first chapters of Ross Poldark. In the final few weeks before being demobilized – since there was little now we could constructively do – I had shamelessly carried my books up to the coastguard station and spent the time writing. When the station was closed I looked for somewhere else. On the opposite side of the beach was a wooden bungalow, nearly always uninhabited except for a few weeks in high summer. It belonged to a Mr Harry Tremewan. I went to see him and hired it.
I have had a lot of happiness in my life, but those next few months rank high among the high spots. Each day about ten I left our house, with a few books under my arm and a haversack on my back containing perhaps potatoes, boiled ham, a tomato, lettuce, a few slices of bread and some butter, and walked through the village and out onto the sandy beach – sometimes with the tide miles out, sometimes with it thundering and hissing at my feet, sometimes having to wade through sputtering surf up to my knees – and at the other side climb the Flat Rocks and go into the bungalow where, collecting dust even from yesterday, would be the pile of reference books and old papers that had already accumulated. Sitting in my deckchair in the immense silences, I would pick up the book in which I had been writing yesterday and continue with the story.
It was a remarkable experience. Sometimes in moments of critical self-examination I had asked myself if I was really a novelist or just a craftsman with a story-telling ability. In writing Demelza I knew myself with conviction to be a novelist. What I was writing was not a planned thing, it was organic, with the characters working out their own destiny. Sitting there in the grey old empty bungalow, I felt like a man driving a coach and four, roughly knowing the direction in which the coach would travel, but being pulled along by forces only just under his control. It was physically and mentally both exhausting and exhilarating. Every now and then after a long passage the coach, as it were, would lurch to a stop with a halfdozen possible roads opening ahead and no signposts. A day or two of agonizing indecision; then the road would be chosen and we would be off again. Occasionally during the day I would go out and stroll around the bungalow and watch the gulls and the translucent tides, feel the wind on my face: it was a mile or so from the old coastguard station but with a different, gentler view. At about five I would pack the haversack, take up the written work, and begin the walk back in the glimmering twilight with the sea far out and the waves glinting like mirages on the wet sand. I was going back each evening to the real world, waiting to welcome me at home; but it is doubtful which to me just then was the more real. All I knew was that I was writing something out of my very guts, and that I was content.
New-found prosperity was also offering a new perspective. We had had fun and a deal of anxiety and responsibility in running our private hotel. It was good while it lasted, but we now had a family, and Jean had become asthmatic. Our first intention was to put it up as a going concern and move to some comfortable small house; but this was superseded by an even more agreeable prospect. We could shut the doors of Trebarran with a bang and then just go on living in it as a private residence. Before it was enlarged it had been one of the most attractive houses in the district; let it revert to its original purpose, and if we had far too many bedrooms we could shut them up or spread ourselves to occupy more of them. My wife was pregnant again, and in March 1946 we had a daughter, whom we called Rosamund.
In the years when we ran Treberran as a small hotel, only one – the summer of 1939 – had in any way been a normal one. After that it was always wartime. But through it we met many charming and delightful people, some of whom were to have a strong influence on my future.
In late 1940, a fellow writer called Max Murray, who had come to Cornwall to escape the Blitz with his wife Maisie Grieg – the enormously prolific author – who was having a baby, told me that his friend, Benno Moiseiwitsch, the famous pianist, needed a holiday away from the bombs; could I put him up? I was overwhelmed at the thought, for I had heard Moiseiwitsch a number of times giving recitals in London before the war, and I had a tremendous admiration for his playing. Except for two Dutchmen (bulb growers, very nice men, who had been crossing the Atlantic when Germany invaded Holland and found themselves stranded in England) our house was just then empty. If it had not been, I would have emptied it for Moiseiwitsch.
My mother had sold her piano when she came to live with us, but we had my mother-in-law’s upright Bechstein, which was a pretty good instrument. We had this put in his bedroom so that he could use it when he had the mind. So he arrived with his wife and his small son, Boris; and it was an enchanting three weeks. All of them, Benno, Annie and Boris, were unpretentious and delightful. God knows what we must have seemed like: certainly young and eager but so desperately short of food and fuel and staff. Their life in London was the height of sophistication (I was to sample it later) but they never complained or showed any dissatisfaction with anything in the house. Within a week we were friends, laughing together at the war’s deprivations.
He practised three to five hours a day. It was like a separate spirit in the house, singing, intoning, inhabiting every corner of one’s existence. He would take a light breakfast in his room and then practise for the rest of the morning, smoking incessantly. An hour of scales and wonderful arpeggios, then more complicated finger exercises written by one or other of the great teachers of the past. After lunch he would rest for a while and begin again about four, this time playing pieces that he would soon be giving at a concert. Particularly he played the more difficult parts – and they are infinitely difficult – of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor, which he was to perform shortly in Liverpool. And he learned, for the first time, Beethoven’s Concerto No. 3 in D Minor at our house; the whole thing from beginning to end. He had no objection to my sitting with him while he played, when I had time, sometimes giving running commentaries on the object of a particular passage or what he was trying to do with it. At six he would stop and very often walk down to the Perranporth Hotel for a drink with Max Murray and me. After dinner he would play bridge, usually with the two Dutchmen and my mother. He was an infinitely witty man, sometimes destructively so, but never to or about his friends. I may be prejudiced but I have always thought he played Rachmaninov better than the composer himself; without sentimentality but with more true emotion. (I have very recently discovered, to my surprise and pleasure, that this was also Rachmaninov’s view.)
One day when we were walking down to the Perranporth Hotel together we passed two friends of my mother’s, a Mrs Retallack and a Mrs Trevithick. They were both in their seventies, dressed in the height of bourgeois fashion, gloved, jewelled, austere, prim. After they had passed, Benno said to me: ‘Ah, I see the ladies of the town are back on their evening beat.’
He had a dog called Rach, named after his old friend Rachmaninov. Benno’s comment when I met the dog was: ‘ One word from me and he does exactly as he likes.’
At Christmas we went up to see the Murrays, and Maisie gave Benno a gift wrapped in expensive glittery paper. Before he opened it he said: ‘Oh, Maisie, thank you. It’s just what I’ve always wanted.’
Once, later on in the war, we saw that Moiseiwitsch was giving a concert in Plymouth. I was on duty but Jean contrived to take the time off and made the two-hour journey by train. When she got there all seats were sold. So she went round to the stage door and Benno immediately commanded that she be given a special seat by herself on the platform.
We remained friends until his death, and when Andrew was christened, Annie Moiseiwitsch was his godmother. Benno stayed with us twice more, as our true guest, and I stayed with him at his home in Berkhamsted and helped to time his playing of Chopin’s thirty-two preludes, which he was shortly to record. I went with him often as his guest to the Savage Club, where I met Mark Hamburg, James Agate, and others of that set and played an occasional game of bridge but never poker, which was Benno’s favourite. I remember on one occasion sitting behind him while he was at the poker table; he was on a winning streak and a club servant came to tell him that his taxi had arrived to take him to Paddington, where he was to catch the overnight train for Swansea for a concert on the morrow. He told the servant to cancel the taxi, he would catch a later train. I said to him: ‘But you’ve got a sleeper booked. If you catch a later train it will mean sitting up all night.’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, ‘I’m only playing the Rachmaninov No. 2.’
It was my misfortune to be with him on the morning that he received word from the surgeon that his beautiful forty-five-yearold second wife, Annie, had inoperable cancer.
A second meeting was even more formative for me, and again it was with a musician. I cannot remember at all how it came about that a Lieutenant Peter Latham, stationed at Penhale, wanted his wife and daughter to spend a few weeks in Perranporth so that he could see more of them. I suppose someone recommended us, and presently I met this tall, thin, gangling middle-aged man who had the utmost charm in the world.
He worked at the Royal Academy, teaching and examining, and was later to become Gresham Professor of Music. He had served in the First World War, and had been severely wounded, with the result that he shambled as he walked, and had a deformed shoulder. Being intensely patriotic, he had at once applied to rejoin his regiment when the Second World War broke out, and the War Office, with its usual perception, appointed him to be a gunnery instructor, a subject about which he knew virtually nothing. So he had been sent to Penhale Camp where morning gunnery practice took place, shooting at a target being towed at a (fairly) safe distance by a slowmoving biplane.
This was the beginning of another friendship, which lasted until Peter’s death, and then Angela’s death many years later. They became close friends – even closer than Benno and Annie. We again had the piano moved into the bedroom, and Peter, when off duty, would come along and play there. Though clearly he could not begin to match Moiseiwitsch’s brilliance, he was a fine pianist and an immense musicologist, with a fund of reminiscence and anecdote and funny stories and limericks, many of them scabrous – the jolliest and most lovable of men. His wife, a pretty, eccentric, intellectual, sparkling woman, was by profession a fresco artist, and when The Last Supper in Milan was showing uncheckable signs of deterioration she was invited by the Italian government to go to see it and advise on its preservation and restoration. After the war we saw them many times at their home in Hampstead, and they came, like Benno, to stay with us as our non-paying guests in Cornwall when Treberran had become a private house again.
Peter and Benno opened up to me a world that before I had only been groping to find – a world in which conversation was no longer chatter, in which anecdote was not gossip, in which wit and fun and intellectual debate were all.
But the strongest influence Peter Latham had on my life was to put me up for membership of the Savile Club – of which much more later.
I remember another guest at Treberran, a Dr Dancy – whose elder son later became headmaster of Marlborough – saying to me one day towards the end of the war: ‘ When this war is over it will be the beginning of a new life for you.’ He spoke even more truly than he knew.