When I wrote the first Poldark it was suggested to me – though not by my publishers – that I might have it put out under another name. I rejected this, preferring to take all the blame – or all the praise – without the shelter of a pseudonym. Also, for such a purpose, I have never written quickly enough. I have a very long list of publications, but this is because I started young and have been writing for a very long time. At the height of my production I came to write a novel about every eighteen months. Now it is about two years. Three novels have each taken three years to write. (I have been fortunate in that, once I began to earn a living from writing, I always earned enough to be able to take my time. In my earlier years I would have eagerly accepted some other literary activity to help augment my pitiful income, but it was not offered. When it was offered I was able to turn it down, so I have virtually never done any peripheral literary work in my life.)
From the earliest years I have always felt that it was up to the public to buy me by name rather than style or subject. This arrogant view has only partly been vindicated. Had I kept to one style I know I should have become a richer man. But so what?
Distributors, booksellers, and, alas, the public (who are the final arbiters) all like to be sure of what they are buying. Why should a shop that has developed a substantial clientele with a taste for Wilkins’ marmalade be expected to try to sell them the same firm’s strawberry jam instead? The remark made by Wilfred Lock, about my fifth novel being ten years ahead of the others but that commercially he could shake me, has been confirmed and reconfirmed through the years.
Collins were delighted when I returned to Poldark after a lapse of twenty years. The Black Moon was launched with great acclaim. I remember meeting their chief London rep a few days after publication and, along with his continuing – if a little forced – enthusiasm, his dropping into the conversation the fact that the book was piling up unsold at Hatchard’s and Harrod’s.
There has been a lot of stimulus and relaxation in moving from one style to the other. Ideally, perhaps, one should have used the styles alternately – and this happened for a time in the early Fifties – but one can’t discipline one’s impulses – or I don’t. The sparse, fairly taut story-telling of a suspense novel, with its stronger frame of events and its sharp conclusive ending, is just as much fun to write as the longer, more leisurely, more exploratory style of the historical novel. Why should I have given up either? Or why crouch in one’s study endlessly writing too many books when there is so much else to be found in life?
The ‘so much else’ has been largely hedonistic. Until well past forty I played tennis to distraction. With no natural talent for the game whatever, and no coaching, I became fairly good out of sheer application. I never played for Cornwall, though twice invited to do so – the deterrent being to drive to somewhere like Criccieth in North Wales, to spend each day playing competitive tennis for one’s county and each evening dancing until the small hours: a normal young man’s dream of delight, but not mine; I never had the stamina.
But I came to play with a number of county players from other counties which were much stronger than Cornwall, and not a few of the near-top English players, people who got usually to the second or third round at Wimbledon though never beyond. Of course I could not have lived with them at singles, not even the women. At doubles I was good enough not to spoil their game.
Perranporth at that time attracted a wonderful collection of good tennis players – the knowledge that some were coming would attract others – over a period of about eight weeks a year, beginning mid- July. Three hard sets of men’s doubles on a sunny summer morning, with kindred souls, is one of the rare pleasures that I would ask for again if I ever get to heaven.
In the earlier Who’s Whos to which I contributed I used to list one of my hobbies as ‘ beachcombing’. My love of the sea, especially the Cornish sea, has already been made plain. It seems to run in the family. My brother had no greater ambition than to sit in the sun on some Cornish strand. My son once said that if windsurfing had been invented when he was a boy he might have chosen not to be an academic but to be a ‘beachcomber’ instead. I don’t know how serious he was.
On the north coast swimming is rarely possible; surfing is all. Before the Malibu, body surfing was the universal occupation. In Poldark’s Cornwall I have described some of the peculiar joys of surfing. I will only repeat briefly some few moments of the wonderful summer before my son went to Charterhouse in the September.
All through that splendid decade, if a summer’s day broke bright I would begin to write immediately after breakfast and go on until Jean let me know, about noon, that the picnic was ready. Then we would bundle the things – including the children if they were home – into the car and dash off to West Pentire or Treyarnon and spend the day sitting in the sun and surfing when the time and tide were right, returning home about seven, for me to do a little desultory work before a late supper.
That was quite a reasonable arrangement in most summers – I could seize the good days and work in the bad – but in that summer there was no let up. The fine weather set in on the 9th of July and went on until the end of September. Not merely did I neglect my work, but Jean got utterly sick of cutting sandwiches and packing picnics. But as summer did not relax, neither did we. The difficulty about our English summer, and more particularly about a Cornish summer, is that one can never, never take the next day for granted. So often one has been deceived by a halcyon two days and stayed in the second day, knowing exactly how to enjoy the third, and the third dawns with grey skies, a strong wind, and a 20-degree drop in temperature. We didn’t trust it that year, and the summer went on and on. So for virtually ten weeks we picnicked and sunbathed and surfed every day, gradually turning more and more boot-polish brown.
My son was due to be delivered to his new school on the 18th of September. The 17th was largely taken up with preparations and packing, but in the early evening he and I escaped onto Perranporth beach on an incoming tide. An almost breathless evening but the sea was monstrous. It was one of those seas when a surfer catches one wave, is borne along a dizzying way, then dropped upon another, and so upon another, and even sometimes on a fourth.
As we staggered together out of the sea joyfully exhausted after our fifteenth run, Andrew said to me: ‘Daddy, people who haven’t done this haven’t lived.’ He was about right. It is my second request from Paradise.
I have driven cars ever since I was eighteen. The number has not been great because I prefer to live with a car and get to know it. First was a Morris Minor, a small four-seater with a folding roof and an engine given much to piston wear (one always seemed to be discussing ‘rings’). It was the only car I know that, being delivered to us new, was used for six months before I noticed that the number plate on the front differed from the number plate on the back. It was also delivered with the footbrake only just working; the handbrake itself, operated only on the transmission shaft, being the only means of bringing the car to a stop. I decided to take my mother to the cinema in Newquay. On the way a herd of cows was crossing the road in leisurely fashion. I applied the brake and nothing happened, except that we drifted into a cow. Everyone was very courteous; the cow was not hurt, the car not damaged, the farmer was apologetic, and I more justifiably so. We continued on our way, saw the film and got in to drive home. By then it was night, and we found our headlamps to be squinting skywards at the stars.
The following day I slithered up and down the hills to Falmouth to get the brakes seen to. It was not a good beginning for a new driver. In those days, of course, there was no driving test to pass. ‘If in trouble put both feet down,’ directed presumably, and hopefully, to the brake and clutch. I had had an unlucky career as a cyclist, and my brother and sister-in-law came to the conclusion, which they gladly imparted to my mother, that Winston ‘ would be no good with a car’.
The second was a Wolseley Hornet, that triumph of British engineering which had a very small six-cylinder engine noted for its excessive cylinder wear and no compensating increase in quietness. It also had a ‘twin top’ gear specially suitable, they said, for overtaking. Unfortunately the two top gear ratios were so close that, going up Cornish hills, one was often forced to drop into second and grind up at a funeral pace.
Third was a Standard Flying Twenty, a handsome car for those days: probably it would be rated as a three-litre now. I bought it secondhand from Ronnie Neame, who directed my first film and who had had it from a naval lieutenant who had kept it unused during the war, so that the engine and all moving parts were in very good condition. But the bodywork was poor, so I arranged to have it overhauled and resprayed. I remember picking it up in London: it was transformed, beautiful and black and shiny. But the engine was missing badly. I drove it to Piccadilly, where I had arranged to meet my film agent and Anthony Kimmins, the film director, who had a project to put to me. I parked outside – one could in those days – but my attention to his proposition was a little absent-minded, as I wondered how I was going to be able to drive this shiny black beast back to Cornwall on the morrow if the engine was going to run as if fifteen out of the twenty horses had glanders.
I should, no doubt, have had a better sense of proportion, for nothing came of the meeting, and when I returned to the car it refused to start at all. I got the bonnet up and discovered that during the respray three out of the six plugs had had their operative ends playfully – or accidentally – hammered down so that there was no gap left for the plug to spark. I was eventually able to buy a new set and, when installed, drove the car back to my club where I took a late dinner and bed. The car had been parked at a busy part of the north side of Piccadilly for five hours.
The Standard served us well and it was years before I sold it and bought a three-litre drophead Alvis. This was also a four-seater, but two-door and not so roomy.
The Alvis became the pride of our lives. Its suspension was very hard, but its roadholding and acceleration were superb. Without any attempt at all to go faster, I knocked an hour and a half off trips between London and Cornwall. It was in this car that I took my family on an annual holiday from Cornwall.
It was seven years before I could bring myself to change the Alvis, which I eventually did for a 3.4 Jaguar Saloon.
It was extraordinary to find a return of my travelling time between places to something like that of the old Standard. The new Jaguar, however good-looking it was and however silent and reliable the engine, however comfortable to ride in at modest speeds, was to me like a coffin on wheels. Coming from a car that glued itself to the road, I had a number of narrow escapes, not of hitting another car but of going off the road at a corner. The suspension was woefully soggy, the roadholding, in a fast car, really dangerous. But provided you didn’t actually drive it into a ditch, it was very trouble-free, and we kept the car for quite a while, along with a secondary car of assorted kinds: various Minis, a Riley (new style, alas), an Austin Healey Sprite.
When I sold the Jaguar I bought an Aston Martin DB6. This was the fastest thing I have ever driven. Its road-holding was still not as good as the Alvis but it was infinitely faster. At over 90 m.p.h. the Alvis began to smell of engine oil. The fastest I ever drove was in the first Aston: 140 mph on the Turin autostrada.
The engine was beautiful – none of that nonsense spread by envious rivals that after one crossing of London it needed a retune. You could drive it very fast indeed on the Continental motorways, yet the next day would be in the choked traffic of Monte Carlo, and it would crawl along the Riviera without a vestige of snatch. But the clutch was a brute.
After eighteen months I took the car back and ordered an automatic. In the jargon of the fashionable motor world, this new car would, they said, be built specially for me, my name on it, so to speak, from the beginning. But the automatic Aston was not a great car. It was as powerful as its predecessor, and at speed seemed to settle its back down securely on the road, but it was too low geared. At 120 m.p.h., which it would reach quickly and effortlessly, the rev-counter would be showing 6,000, in the red zone. It was also too low slung and grated on awkward dips (such as crossing King Harry Ferry). And it burnt out exhaust systems at a great rate. The new Avon tyres with which it was fitted lasted 9,000 miles, then I had seven punctures in five weeks. (The Pirelli tyres with which I replaced them not only improved the roadholding, they lasted almost for ever.)
About this time I started buying Alfa Romeos as a second car. I went to look for a Lancia in a showroom on the Bayswater Road, and saw a drophead Alfa Spyder in the window. I never got any further. The salesman, seeing my interest, said: ‘ It’s a fun car, sir.’ I thought this a piece of conventional salesmanship, but in fact it proved to be the truth. Insofar as driving a car is ever anything more than a means of getting from place to place nowadays, the Alfa provided it. Though, of course, a much smaller and lighter car, it had almost all the qualities of the Alvis, with a more comfortable ride and fewer foibles. It is the car by which I now judge all others for suspension and roadholding. In the course of the years I had three of them: white, pagoda yellow, and dove grey.
When I sold the second Aston I fell for the new Jaguar XJS twelvecylinder model, and kept it for nine years before buying a second. The early XJSs had a very bad reputation for unreliability, but apart from one recurring fault, which took a time to sort out, it did me extremely well, and the second was even better. It is wonderfully quiet, with none of that throttle roar of the Aston (which some people love), very powerful, very easy to drive, and very fast. I have done 125 in the last one, and there still seemed a little more in it. It still does not corner as well as the Alvis and the Alfa, but I have no other complaint.
In addition to my own car I have rented many in different parts of the world, the United States, North and South Africa, Australia and most countries of Western Europe. On my first visit to Hollywood I hired a car to drive down the coast as far as La Jolla and San Diego, requesting a ‘ compact’ car, as they call them. The car was late arriving and they apologized for this and for the fact that they didn’t have a compact. They awarded me a Chevrolet Bel Air, which measured 17 feet 9 inches. It was the first automatic car I had ever driven. They didn’t even bother to turn the engine off: I signed the papers, they bundled our luggage into the enormous boot and edged me into the driving seat. Then they leaned in at the open window and said: ‘ That’s OK, Mr Graham, just don’t use your left foot.’
Driving on the opposite side of the road has seldom troubled me. (I remember once leaving Compiègne and taking the wrong way round a roundabout. In England this would have resulted in a barrage of flashing lights and blaring horns. The French just ignored me until I came to my senses.) But being launched out into the Los Angeles traffic and trying to ignore one’s left foot was another matter. At the first lights we jerked to a violent halt. Both our heads tried to go through the windscreen. We proceeded in a volley of jolts and jerks – and here again the American drivers, though I was driving an American car, seemed to sense that I was a Limey and merited their forbearance, for I never heard an impatient horn.
Presently we spotted a sign pointing to the required highway and we were really off. Even this did not imbue any sense of confidence or ease, for we found ourselves part of a convoy of enormous automobiles all proceeding together down a four-lane highway at sixty miles an hour. There was no way of getting out of it. We could not accelerate without breaking the law. We almost came to be on nodding terms with our fellow travellers to right and left. At long last the congestion began to thin out.
I said to Jean: ‘What’s that noise?’
‘ The radio,’ she said.
‘ Who switched it on?’
‘ They must have. It was on when we left.’
I hadn’t heard it. Imminence of death concentrates the mind wonderfully.
When The Walking Stick was published in America, Double-day invited me to go over to publicize the book. When issuing the invitation Ken McCormick, the most distinguished editor Doubleday have ever had, said to me: ‘Mind, we shall expect you to work hard.’ I said OK, and despite this Jean, who had just had her premonitory stroke, chose to come with me.
It was an interesting experience. I gave a talk (lecture) and four interviews in Washington, six interviews – two on television, two on radio and two to the press – in New York, a similar number in Chicago and rather more in Detroit and San Francisco. It isn’t an experience I want to repeat, but I saw it as a challenge.
In Washington the lecture was to the English-Speaking Union, and I had taken a good deal of trouble to prepare what I was going to say, which was to be fairly wide-ranging and including speculation as to the future of the novel both in America and in England. Five minutes before I went on the platform the editor from Doubleday said to me: ‘Make it nice and folksy. And don’t forget to talk about your new novel.’
Swallowing my script, I began by saying that I had originally intended to talk about the novel in general but it had been suggested to begin that I talk first about one novel in particular, etc. etc.
It was a full house, and there was one tall middle-aged lady in the front row who fixed me with an eye and shook her head disapprovingly. After going on a couple of minutes more I hastened to add that nevertheless I wanted to make this lecture fairly wideranging, and shortly I would be broadening my approach. I glanced down and saw the lady shake her head disapprovingly at me again. I made a fairly good joke, to which most of the audience responded, but she still didn’t like me at all.
I went on, trying to avoid her gaze and consoling myself that there were about 299 people in the room who didn’t necessarily feel as she felt. Nevertheless it was disconcerting. It took me about another five minutes to realize that disapproval was not the expression on her face, and that she suffered from a nervous tic, causing her head to jerk negatively from side to side at irregular intervals.
One thinks of the Maugham story in which there is a woman who jerks her head backwards in such a way that she seems to be inviting every man she meets to come with her into her bedroom.
As it happened, I almost felt I was receiving such an invitation at the dinner of the Association of American Publishers the following night. I was put next to a really beautiful girl whose father ran a bookstore in North Carolina.
As soon as I sat down she said: ‘Oh, Mr Graham, I’m real glad to be setten’ next to you. I took you to bed with me last night, but I was feeling sleepy so we didn’t get very far.’
I was about to reply on what I thought was the same plane, telling her that it would give me the greatest pleasure to help her to try again, when I gazed into her liquid brown eyes and saw not a spark of humour in them. Not for the first time I remarked to myself on the dangers of a common language. No French girl would have said that, but I would have understood the signals better.
In Detroit my fellow guest on a television programme was Muhammad Ali, or Cassius Clay: that is, we were joint guests. He was then at the height of his powers as one of the greatest of heavyweights, and in the height of his youth and good looks. Quizzed closely by the host about his attitude to patriotism, colour bars, conscription, etc., he was, I thought, very reasonable and very well behaved. None of the bragging, macho attitude one had come to associate with his name in the media.
We shared a taxi back to the hotel and shared a lift to our rooms. The lift attendant was a pretty young black girl. Ali gave his floor number as 5, I gave mine as 12. As he got out of the lift he gave the lift girl a smile. We then went up to floor 22.
I said: ‘No, I wanted twelve.’
‘ Oh, sorry, suh,’ she said, ‘I was goin’ wa-ay up to heaven.’
In Chicago I did my usual round, including the famous Kup’s talk show, to which about a dozen personalities were invited and over a period of three hours were casually questioned on this and that, and one was given a cup by the host Kupcinet and told one might have it filled with the liquid of one’s choice. Unknown to us in the cloistered circle of the TV lights, a violent storm broke over Chicago while we were there, decimating a carnival procession, organized by the Puerto Ricans to commemorate some anniversary, and flooding the streets. My wife, who had come with me to the studio, had a grandstand view of it all, saw the dancing girls drenched and the long display floats stripped of their hangings. When at last I came out we had great difficulty in getting back to our hotel, and when we reached it the kitchens were six feet deep in water and the lifts had failed. (By a crowning mercy one service lift still operated.) It seems that in their eagerness to cover the whole area of the lakeside city in concrete, the planners had not allowed for drainage to cope with emergencies.
While I was in Chicago I was invited by a journalist I knew to attend the seventieth birthday party of ‘ one of the last gangsters’, a man called Paddy Bauler. He had been a bootlegger and was said to have personally shot and killed a policeman years ago, but nothing could be proved. I have his invitation before me now. It has a Hong Kong postmark and carries a rather splendid frontispiece with a Chinese painting of cloud-covered mountains. Inside it states in large letters:
Neither
DEATH, TAXES or ELECTIONS
Can Stop
PADDY BAULER’S ANNUAL ART FAIR PARTY
You are commanded to be present at the
49th WARD CULTURE CENTER
403 WEST NORTH AVENUE
on Sunday 11th June beginning at 4 p.m.
The committee was twelve-strong, and included such interesting names as the Illinois Assistant Attorney General Joe Rubinelli and jazz club owner Earl Pionke. Heading the list was Governor Otto Kerner and Mayor Richard Daley. Third was the newspaperman Herman Kogan, who arranged my invitation, so I was in influential hands.
It was a brownstone house in an unexceptional street – except that it had been swept and scoured of all litter, and blue-washed, sidewalk, street and all, and was guarded by armed and uniformed policemen sitting astride motorbikes. You went in through a small hall into a much larger one, with two other rooms beyond and then a backyard, also blue-washed and guarded. We were given chicken legs and hamburgers, and beer to drink. A German band played music and an operatic soprano sang items from the shows of the time, accompanied by a zither. Many influential people were there, including a Catholic bishop, several judges and aldermen, a district attorney or two, and Adlai Stevenson junior.
Although recently having stepped down as an alderman, Paddy was still powerful in the Democratic Party; also he had a rake-off from most of the one-armed bandits in clubs and arcades in the city, so he was very rich. In his later and more respectable years he had developed a passion for things Chinese, hence the appearance of the invitation card. All the names of the committee had their Chinese equivalent in gold leaf beside their own on the card. There were Chinese lanterns in the rooms, and numerous bonsai on pedestals. Fireworks occurred later in the yard.
Paddy was known to give not unvaluable silk kimonos to those who took his fancy at such parties, and he was wearing one himself on the night, with Chinese silk trousers. He was a very small man, and he sat on a high chair surrounded by his henchmen. His face was lined, his head shrunk between his shoulders, his eyes small and a faded blue. Herman introduced me. ‘This is Winston Graham, the celebrated British novelist, who is over in our city on a brief visit.’
Paddy took a shrivelled-looking cheroot from between his lips and stared at me belligerently.
Presently he said: ‘ You look like an egghead.’
I smiled apologetically and said: ‘ Oh, I don’t know about that. Just a writer, I suppose.’
He continued to stare and then snarled: ‘ Your country starts all the wor-rs.’
This was the end of the interview. I didn’t receive a kimono.
San Francisco was chock-a-block with some convention, and my publishers had had to get us accommodation in one of the older hotels instead of at the Fairmont where we had previously stayed. Breakfast in our room proved an almost insurmountable obstacle. Telephone calls were to no avail. Hours seemed to pass. I was due for a radio interview at eleven, and only just made it.
The hotel where we were staying was the one where Fatty Arbuckle, one of the most famous of the earlier film stars of the silent screen, had many years before committed suicide in mysterious circumstances. Arriving at the restaurant (it was to be an interview in a restaurant) feeling frustrated and very angry, I was about to say that I had at last solved the mystery of Fatty Arbuckle’s suicide. He had shot himself, at the hotel where I was at present staying, in frustration waiting for his breakfast.
But as the interview began I happened to glance down and see a printed notice on the table saying something to the effect that ‘interviewees’ were ‘personally and legally responsible for any action for libel or slander brought by any person or persons as a result of this interview’.
I have never seen this notice before or since. Perhaps it is everywhere – if so I haven’t spotted it. But perhaps it is as well I took heed. Knowing something of the speed of the American law processes, I think if I had spoken out, I might just still have been over there fighting my corner.
Between Charterhouse and university Andrew took a year off and worked for my American publisher in New York, before travelling widely round the States by Greyhound bus. He had done well at school, though was not perhaps ‘facile princips’, as the headmaster of the Cathedral School, Truro, presciently described him. He coasted along pleasantly at St Edmund Hall for a couple of years, but in the third year began to make big strides. It was a time when the National Economic Development Council (NEDDY) was in its infancy, and an official came round seeking likely recruits. His tutor recommended Andrew, who was invited for an interview and offered an appointment before he sat his Finals.
So to the tall new building on the banks of the Thames; but within a few months George Brown created the Department of Economic Affairs and invited Sir Donald MacDougall to lead it and to bring with him from NEDDY a half-dozen of the brighter young economists. Andrew was one of them.
He came home one weekend and told us there was a vacancy in the Cabinet Office, and it had been suggested to him that he might apply. He did so apply, and was appointed; but found when he arrived that he was not to be in the Cabinet Office but in 10 Downing Street itself, where he was to be the junior in an office of five under the then Sir Thomas Balogh.
In a fairly short time one after the other of his seniors in the office left to take up other posts and were not replaced, and he found himself Balogh’s personal assistant. Then Balogh accepted a peerage and came to spend most of his time in the House of Lords, and Andrew was left on his own with two secretaries and five telephones at his disposal.
In the meantime Harold Wilson had taken a liking to him, and he became accustomed to accompany Wilson to Cabinet meetings and subcommittees and sit with Wilson’s secretary, taking notes. By this time Henry Kissinger was already emerging as senior adviser to the President. Wilson wanted to send him a résumé of Britain’s view of how the world economic situation had developed since the days of Bretton Woods, and he asked Andrew, then twenty-five, to write it. Andrew came home with about thirty pages he had written, and with an occasional notation from the Prime Minister made in bright green ink. In due course this was sent off.
The following year Andrew told me there was a vacancy for an economics fellowship at Balliol, and it had been suggested he might apply. What should he do? I said there was no harm in his applying so long as he didn’t expect to get it. So he applied, and got it. He was one of the youngest dons to be appointed to Balliol in half a century.
Later, the Labour Government fell; but they were not out of office for long, and when he came back Wilson immediately applied for Andrew to return as the economic adviser in his policy unit. This he then did for the next two years. New as he was to Balliol, it was a very exacting time for him, and he was not disappointed, I think, when Wilson’s resignation created a natural break.
But he expected to be recalled when the next Labour Government came to office – and would have been. He had become personal economic adviser to John Smith, and was a close personal friend, but when Smith unexpectedly died, the top echelons of the Labour Party underwent drastic change, and Andrew was marginalized.
It cannot really be looked upon as a consolation prize that he has now become Master of Balliol.
Rosamund, being nearly four years younger, thought naturally enough that when she left school she too would be entitled to travel as her brother had done. But she did not want to go to university. Going on from Truro High School to Westonbirt in Gloucestershire, her routine as a normal schoolgirl had been abruptly, if blissfully, interrupted by a summer on the Côte d’Azur. This too was a fairly natural reaction. Give any pretty blonde a summer in Cap Ferrat, where she spends hours sitting in the sun in a bikini, surrounded by admiring French boys, then returns after two months to the rigours of the English public school, wearing thick grey stockings, flat-heeled shoes and a plain school uniform, and academic life does not appeal. After a year at a finishing school, the Institut Alpin Montesano at Gstaad, she wanted to take another year in the States, working as Andrew had worked, travelling as Andrew had travelled.
At that time there happened to be a ban on the employment of British secretaries in New York, as the local girls were being deprived of their jobs. So by infinite contrivance I arranged a fictitious job in a publishing firm in Boston. (It did not occur to me at the time that I was arranging for her to spend most of the rest of her life at a distance from us of 8,000 miles, but that, as someone once said, is how the cookie crumbles.)
Rosamund met a tall, good-looking American, and it was love at first sight. Already divorced, Douglas was still in his twenties; and although I have not been able to monitor his life at close quarters, I get the strong impression that he has never looked seriously at another woman since he first met my daughter.
After two sojourns in England, where two of their three children were born, they finally settled in California, where Rosamund has been the linchpin of their family life. Maximilian, Dominic and Anthea are all tall and goodlooking. More important is that they are all jolly, cleanliving, affectionate and highly intelligent, the two boys already married. Max is in law, Dominic is in law-enforcement! Apart from bearing and raising the children, Rosamund has worked all through, first at a Californian university, and more lately she has become Director of Human Resources for the District of Tulare, responsible for the welfare – and the hiring and firing – of 750 personnel, of mixed races, many Hispanic.
Before she was married, she rejected the academic life. Now, having raised a family and all the time lived a life of endless and extraordinary activity, she has recently studied for, and been awarded, a BA.
Both children have now been long and happily married, my son to Peggotty, a remarkably pretty, but not noticeably studious, girl from Somerset. However, since she found they would have no family, she decided to follow a fully academic life of her own, is now an MSc and is at present Dean and Director of Social Sciences at the Open University.
As to the rest of the immediate family, my niece Barbara (my brother Cecil’s only child) lives at Haywards Heath, not far from Buxted, and – together with her late husband, Ronald – has provided much appreciated support and companionship. Recently widowed, but ever cheerful and competent, she has often stepped in to help at times of domestic crisis.
Jean’s niece, Jacqui, now married to Geoff Williams and living in Newport, Shropshire, I see far too rarely.