If my doctor told me I had only six months to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type faster.
Isaac Asimov
I was once asked by the Americans to write how, when I die, I want to be remembered.
After more than ninety-eight years of life, this was quite an undertaking because so many things have happened during those years.
I have been ecstatically happy, very miserable and deeply saddened, especially when I lost my father, Captain Bertram Cartland, in May of 1918, during World War I, then both my brothers at Dunkirk in 1940—Anthony on May 29, and Ronald on May 30—in World War II.
I have been shown great kindness. I have endured a certain amount of teasing and sometimes ridicule by the press. At the same time, they have helped and supported wholeheartedly my often very controversial crusades.
I would like to be remembered for my books, especially for my novels, through which I have tried to give morality, beauty and love to the world.
I have written at the moment 723 books all together and have sold approximately one billion. The Guinness Book of World Records says that I am the “Best Selling Author in the World,” and I hold the world’s record for writing and publishing twenty-three or more books a year for twenty-one years straight. And it delights me to think that I am now published in every country.
Journalists who come to interview me always start by saying:
“When did you start writing, Dame Barbara?”
“When I was five years old,” I reply, and they do not believe me.
I did, however, write a book for my mother when I was that age. I illustrated it and bound it with some pieces of wallpaper. My mother was delighted. I called it The Little Slide Maker.
My mother, Mary Hamilton Scobell, was heartbroken when my father was killed. She was left with me, aged seventeen, and my two brothers—Ronald and Anthony— who were still at school at Charterhouse, where my father had also been educated.
We had very little money, and my mother asked where I would like to live. I said: “London,” and we moved there. But my mother said we would have to go to the country on school holidays.
I was bored in the country, and once when my brother told me to be quiet because he had to write an essay, I replied: “Then I will write a book.”
Everyone said I would never finish it because I was out dancing all night. However, I did finish it, and I called it Jigsaw. This was my first novel, published in 1923. It was a huge success, going into six editions and being published in five languages.
After that, I began to write seriously to make money.
I was asked by a friend who had just come out of the Navy, who was working for a new newspaper called The Daily Express, if I would give him a paragraph for his newspaper in the morning after I had danced all night, and he would pay me five shillings.
This was the first time I had written for a newspaper, and I thought it would be rather fun.
After a few weeks, the owner of the newspaper, Lord Beaverbrook, sent for me. He said I wrote very well, but he wished to correct my contribution every night before it went to the newspaper. He taught me to write as a journalist, which has been a tremendous help to me all my life.
Lord Beaverbrook sent a car for me every week, and I went to his house for dinner where I met his friends.
They were Lord Birkenhead, who was a great judge at the time; Winston Churchill, who had just lost his seat in Parliament; Viscount Castlerosse, the greatest wit of the time; the Duke of Sutherland, whose ancestral home Dunrobin Castle in Scotland was like a fairy palace with its turrets and towers; and Sir James Dunn, who was very rich and a Canadian like Lord Beaverbrook.
Later, in 1935, my brother Ronald, who was working in the Conservative Central Office, told me that the Constituency of Kings Norton in Birmingham had come into the market, and he would love to stand. But, unfortunately, he could not afford it, as in those days a candidate had to pay the cost to run which came to about £1,000. The first time, I began to write 10,000 words a day. I paid Ronald’s expenses and helped him by speaking every night to win the seat of Kings Norton, Birmingham.
When World War II came in 1939, Ronald joined the Worchestershire Regiment and went out to France.
Sir Winston Churchill, then the Prime Minister, said that if he returned from Dunkirk, he intended to make him a Minister. He did not return, and after Ronald’s death, I wrote his biography; Sir Winston Churchill wrote the preface.
I am very thrilled by what I have achieved in my life, and I hope I have helped a great number of people to find love. What really matters, however, is that I do bring happiness to people, for the simple reason that my heroines are the sweet, loving, genuine women who were first portrayed by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet and whose example has been copied by all classical authors.
It is they who evoke in a man the real love that is both spiritual and physical, and it is the woman in a marriage who stands for Morality, Compassion, Sympathy and Love. I finish all my books with:
“They found Love. Real Love, which comes from God, is part of God, and is theirs for Eternity.”
Dame Barbara Cartland