Slow, slow, fresh fount,
Ben Jonson wrote,
Keep time with my salt tears,
Yet slower yet, O faintly, gentle springs.
List to the heavy part the music bears.
Woe weeps out her division when she sings.
Droop, herbs and flowers,
Fall, grief, in show’rs;
Our beauties are not ours.
O that I could still
Like melting snow upon some craggy hill, drop.
Drop, drop, drop.
Since nature’s pride is now a withered daffodil.’
In 1983 my wife began to lose a lot of weight she could ill spare, and her voice became hoarse and croaky. Emphysema was diagnosed, but she refused to believe she had this. She became in the next few years quite tiny and bent: it was strange for me to see her when I remembered her straight back, her sturdiness and her great vitality.
It cannot have gone unnoticed that I think my marriage was an extraordinarily lucky one, because it was such a happy one. The best of marriages have their ups and downs, but in half a century I recall only one serious quarrel, which lasted about half an hour, and in the course of which my wife threw part of our dinner service out of the window onto the lawn, but, when anger cooled, compelled herself to go out and pick up the pieces before the maids arrived in the morning.
For the most part I remember it as an association full of passion and laughter, constant amicable companionship and enduring love.
She died in December 1992, to the last issuing strict instructions as to how her Christmas pudding was to be cooked.
After the loss of a woman with whom one has lived in the greatest amity for much the larger part of one’s life, one is not a little bereft. When towards the end she would once or twice become a mite depressed, I would say to her: ‘ Don’t be so selfish. You can’t go and die on me. Think of me. I can’t go on without you.’ And, although light-heartedly expressed, I meant it – and totally believed it. But I have.
Sometimes if you wear a cheerful face to deceive, the deception begins to stick, and you end up by deceiving yourself. I was of course greatly helped by my family, though necessarily after a few weeks most were far distant. And a few very good friends, the Chapmans, Christopher Biggins, Angharad Rees, and some of Jean’s bridge friends such as Molly Burton. But the largest contribution came from a young woman called Gwen Hartfield. My wife had taken her on when Gwen was living nearby with a husband and a daughter of seven. She came to help in the house, but then, as Jean’s health deteriorated, she took over ever more of the housekeeping, and when Jean died she became my housekeeper, while continuing to see to her own husband and child, and this has continued ever since. Efficient, humorous,cheerful, witty and eccentric, she offered me friendly yet challenging companionship which I so much needed at that time, and which has never wavered. She has recently celebrated twenty years with us.
A year or two before Jean died we also took on a second helper (replacing one who left) called Tina Creelman, and a new young gardener, Robin Brown. These three formed a young and jolly triumvirate and have continued so ever since, making the big empty house more pleasant to live in and more tolerable to return to after one of my visits to London or my travels abroad.
I dedicated my novel Tremor to them, and they were my guests at the Savile Club for a birthday party that was given to me there a few years ago.
So a routine has set in, different and inferior to the one I lost, but becoming more to be enjoyed for its own sake as the years passed. I have usually been able to get abroad about three times a year and to stay at my club two or three nights every fortnight, and this has made for a very pleasant way of life.
Another recent dedicatee is Ann Hoffmann, who, working for me on a freelance basis for upwards of thirty-five years, has been an enormous help both as researcher and typist. Recently that help has become even more invaluable. Very early in my creative life I found it impossible to type correctly and at the same time to concentrate on the exact meaning and perception of what I was putting down. Some subtle communication was lost. (Jean was a great consultant, but no typist.)
I have therefore had a variety of typists of varying quality (or lack of it). Coming to live in Sussex meant losing whatever help I had had before, so I was extremely lucky to meet Ann by chance at a book launch at Elise Santoro’s bookshop in Crowborough, and a friendship blossomed. Although primarily a researcher, and a writer herself, she agreed to type for me if required. Thus a very friendly yet half-business association has grown up. I have never met anyone else who can copy a manuscript so error-free. This has been indispensable in view of the untidy nature of my later manuscripts, made ever worse by the cramped and spidery nature of my handwriting, which is showing the wear and tear of the years. Among other publications, Ann is the author of the definitive research manual, Research for Writers, which has recently gone into its seventh edition.
I have been under considerable pressure to buy at least a laptop computer. I have always turned the suggestions down for the reason that I have never done creative work on a typewriter. There is to me a lack of empathy. I have been told of the many extra advantages of word-processing, and I acknowledge them. But, apart from other reasons, I find that a sentence, a page, a book, assumes a different nature when it is first in manuscript, second in typescript, and third in page proofs. There is a separate, a welcome change, and each time one is able to see it in a new light.
Ann, of course, has long since become computer-literate.
The friendships which Jean and I made during the shooting of Poldark have, happily, continued.
An eminent man, who has had a good deal to do with television, remarked the other day that he had never known so many friendships – and enduring friendships – to develop between the actors in a TV series and the author and his wife. It said something, he added, important of both sides.
Angharad has remained a specially dear friend. She has visited me in a variety of hospitals in which from time to time I have reluctantly found myself. Young, pretty, smiling, bringing flowers or fruit or delicacies to eat, sometimes all three on one visit, she has lightened the eyes of doctors and nurses and, when recently I was in an accident ward, that of other patients. Angharad has just not changed. She could still play Demelza – Ross’s young wife – as she did in the late Seventies, and one would not notice the difference. A few years ago I invited my eighteen-year-old grandson, who had a terrible crush on her, to have lunch with her at Buck’s Club; and when it was over, and we had separated from her, I said: ‘Well, has it helped?’ He gave a convulsive sigh, and replied, ‘No.’
My popularity at the Savile Club shows a remarkable leap when I invite her to lunch. Men I hardly know, or others who at most would content themselves with a wave of the hand, think up excuses to come over and speak to me.
Robin Ellis was voted the sexiest man of his generation. When he was acting at Stratford, which was between the first and second Poldark series, his dressing room would be invaded by groups of adoring girls. Wherever he went, he was followed and feted.
When Clark Gable was between marriages, and rather suddenly and unexpectedly remarried, one of the Hollywood newspapers came out with a banner headline, ‘GABLE’S GONE, GIRLS’. Well, Robin ‘went’ by marrying an elegant and charming American girl. They had a splendid wedding, which Jean and I went to, and he has now, it seems, retired from acting and lives a quiet life in France, north of the Pyrenees. His friends see him too seldom.
Ralph Bates (George Warleggan) died tragically young, and his wife runs a fashionable shop supplying dresses and costumes for the stage. Their daughter, Daisy Bates, is in the television world and recently played John Thaw’s daughter in Kavanagh QC.
Jill Townsend (Elizabeth), during and after the filming, had a long association with Alan Price, but more lately it has broken up and she has gone back to America, where I have lost touch with her. (I once played snooker with Alan Price in Luxulyan Church Hall, while a scene was being prepared in the graveyard. It was a strange experience.) I put him up for the Savile Club, of which he remained a member for many years.
Christopher Biggins remains a close friend. It has always disappointed me that he has not received his due as a straight actor. Because of his size, his joviality, his keen sense of humour, he is always much in demand for light comic roles. (He seems to have made a corner for himself as a Pantomime Dame, and for this he is rightly in great demand and rightly renowned.) But casting directors should look again at his acting as Nero in I, Claudius and as Whitworth in the second Poldark series to see the range of his more serious talents, particularly in a role with a touch of the sinister, and they should make use of them.
Jane Wymark (Morwenna) is also a good friend. Shortly after the end of the series she married a man in the diplomatic service, and they have two children. Since they returned to England she has appeared in a number of TV plays. She is Patrick Wymark’s daughter, and although in Poldark she was required to play a quiet, gentle girl, trapped in a hateful marriage, she has, I am sure, the capacity to play dynamic, aggressive parts. Such as a woman barrister?
Paul Curran (Jud Paynter), alas, died.
Mary Wimbush (Prudie) is fortunately still with us.
David Delve (Sam Carne) has been on the stage a lot since Poldark. He played an important part in The Phantom of the Opera at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Haymarket, and stayed in it for two years.
The last time I saw Kevin McNally (Drake Carne) on the stage was when he played opposite Dame Maggie Smith in The Lady in the Van. Kevin played Alan Bennett, who wrote the play, and his personification of the author was pinpoint perfect. Years ago, on the set of Poldark, Robin Ellis said to me that Kevin McNally was the best actor in the production.