WE HAD NOT BEEN A very close family, emotionally, perhaps because of my mother’s early death and the subsequent preponderance of housekeepers coupled with my father’s active mind but failing physical health, which necessitated cutting short some of our schooling.
—Barney Russ, Lady Day Prodigal, 1989
A truly good book is something as wildly natural and primitive, mysterious and marvelous, ambrosial and fertile, as a fungus or a lichen. Suppose the muskrat or beaver were to turn his views to literature, what fresh views of nature would be present! The fault of our books and other deeds is that they are too humane. I want something speaking in some measure to the condition of muskrats and skunk-cabbage as well as of men,—not merely to a pining and complaining coterie of philanthropists.
—Henry David Thoreau, journal, November 16, 1850
Patrick Russ’s stepmother was beautiful and unpretentiously stylish. Her perkiness contrasted markedly with Jessie’s wistful demeanor. In one early portrait, Zoe looks fetching in a dark feather boa over a simple white dress and a round-brimmed hat decorated with full roses. In the Russ household, her presence was a source of both joy and resentment, with emotions running more or less along gender lines.
To the boys, she was loyal, steadfast, and passionately kind. Barney, in a poem written upon Zoe’s death in 1964, remembered her as eternally optimistic that “goodness must prevail.” He also wrote that “Zoe certainly had the knack of making everyone feel better.” She was especially fond of Patrick, who was young and impressionable enough when she arrived to be essentially hers. She took him to see her sister, who gave the bright boy a copy of the Reverend J. G. Wood’s Natural History, a hefty mid-nineteenth-century tome filled with information on birds and beasts. The readable prose and vivid engravings of wildlife in their habitats fed his interest in the animal kingdom, an interest already sparked in part by his brother Michael’s enthusiasm for birds. Zoe might also have funded Patrick’s early education by sending him for a time to prep school (generally for ages six to thirteen in England) in Torbay, where he came to know the coast of Devon. “The Atlantic Fleet used to gather and King George would come down to review them,” Patrick later recollected for the London newspaper Independent. “The destroyers would tear along. Four funnels they had, with black smoke streaming from them.”
Patrick returned Zoe’s affection, and perhaps their bond created some jealousy among his siblings. Joan, who came back to the Russ household after Zoe and Charles married, later harbored an astonishing degree of animosity toward Zoe. Joan was something of a ragamuffin, so skinny that she was nicknamed “Bone,” and she was always going about with knickknacks stuffed in her pockets. She was perhaps not the sort of girl who would appeal to a fastidious and coquettish mother like Zoe. But Joan lived at home until she was twenty-two, when the war gave her a reason to move out and to establish her independence, and she seemed happy enough during those years. In a wartime letter to Barney, she spoke very affectionately of Charles and Zoe, expressing particular concern for their health. However, later, when she was no longer a dependent of her father and stepmother, she claimed Zoe had been cruel to her when she was a child, locking her in closets and leaving her unclean.
Nora and Connie shared Joan’s dislike for Zoe. They complained that she showered attention on the boys while ignoring the girls. They felt unwanted. Zoe was no doubt a target for the girls’ anger over their mother’s death. They naturally balked at the idea that Jessie could be replaced, and Zoe may have used heavy-handed tactics to affirm her position as the children’s mother, ultimately harming the fragile family.
Zoe’s insecurity in her new role was probably increased by Olive’s decision to live with her aunt and uncle, Bertha and Frank Welch, rather than with her father and new stepmother. Indeed, it appears that Zoe was hurt by this arrangement and may have colored young Joan’s memories of her time spent with the Welches. A subsequent letter from Barney to Joan reveals that Zoe suggested that she had saved Joan from an unhappy situation: “I well remember hearing of your being rescued by dear Stepmother from Auntie Bertha and Frank Welch, Margaret and Christine, where you [were] being kept in the servants’ quarters or at least were having your meals with the skivvies and I still feel indignant about it, because the rescue by our Stepmother was timely and effective.” This portrayal does not seem to be accurate, however. In fact, far from considering Joan an outsider, the Welches had offered to adopt her.
It was a confusing time for the family, which was beginning to disintegrate. Aloof and self-centered, Charles had little talent or will to unite his family. What little he did have he appears to have focused on the two oldest boys, Godfrey, who was mechanically minded and his particular favorite, and Victor, both of whom remained close to him throughout his life. The others repudiated their father in clear ways. Olive stayed with the Welches, never moving back home. Nora took the vows of a Catholic nun, and Joan married into the working class and adopted Catholicism, despite (or perhaps because of) Charles and Zoe’s disapproval. Among the boys, Mike would abandon the family name, and he and Barney would move to Australia to escape the dreary conditions at home. But none would fall farther from the tree than Patrick, who would not only change his surname but eventually concoct an entire new persona.
Despite the friction with the girls, Zoe for a time brought a degree of normalcy to the family. One can picture a brief happy interlude before financial and personality troubles beset the family and created more strife, disappointment, and hardship. Christmas of 1923, a year after Charles and Zoe’s wedding and two weeks after Pat’s ninth birthday, was a special occasion for the Russes. They spent the holiday, the first in which the family was all together in its new form, in the village of Kempsey, four miles south of Worcester in central England. They stayed at Melbury Lodge, a rambling Napoleonic wars-era house in the Regency Gothic style that belonged to Zoe.
One family story has it that when Zoe married Charles, she thought there were just three children. If so, she was soon disabused of the notion as the other six found their way to Melbury for Christmas. Godfrey and Victor, then ages twenty and eighteen respectively, rode their bikes all the way from London to Kempsey for the occasion. Mike, then fourteen, and Barney, eleven, caught the train up from Shebbear College, and their new stepmother, whom they had never met, picked them up at the station in Worcester. When they arrived at Melbury Lodge, six-year-old Joan opened the door to greet her brothers. Mike and Barney, who had been left in North Devon for the past several Christmas and summer holidays, had seen their little sister only once—very briefly at the Welches’ home in Pinner—since their mother died five years earlier.
Seventeen-year-old Olive and the thirteen-year-old twins, Connie and Nora, were all there. Between the excitement of the reunion and the anticipation of Christmas, the clamor in the great house must have been terrific.
With its thatch-roofed houses, ancient church, and distant views of the snow-covered Malvern Hills, Kempsey could not have been more idyllic. Together at last, the family, which had suffered so much, enjoyed the wintery weather and traditions of the season: Christmas carolers, the music of the village band, and mince pies from the local bakery. The six-bedroom Melbury Lodge, so named by the previous owner after his childhood home, Melbury Osmond in Dorset, was a delightful hodgepodge of quirky rooms and additions, including glassed-in summer house pavilions on either side of a glassed-in front terrace. Originally called Gothic Villa, the house had south-facing living rooms with pointed stained-glass windows. Each day the boys spent an hour hand-pumping well water up to the hundred-gallon tank on the roof, which also collected rainwater from the gutters. The hard well water, tasting slightly of limestone and salt, made an excellent cup of tea.
The ever-active doctor, perhaps as part of a continuous effort to limit his boys’ mischief making, decided that the stagnant pond at Melbury Lodge’s greenhouse needed draining. Instead of handing out the water bucket by bucket, Charles thought it an opportunity to demonstrate the interesting physics involved in siphoning. This, however, was a slow process, and as the boys were charged with returning every so often to carry off the full bucket and replace it with an empty one, they grew impatient. When their father was not around, they emptied the pond in the traditional manner, scooping the water up with buckets and unceremoniously dumping it on the ground. This greatly displeased Charles, who was not able to complete his lesson.
At some point, a toy bow and arrow surfaced, probably a Christmas present for Pat. His brothers promptly tied him up to one of the big trees on the property and launched arrows at him. This was a humiliating turn of events, but Barney later recalled that Pat proved his mettle by taking his punishment with no tears and without tattling. When at last it fell his turn, Pat had only one reasonable choice for sibling target practice, his sister Joan. As luck would have it, a well-aimed shot hit her near the eye, cutting her. Pat pleaded with his bleeding sister to tell their father that she had tripped and fallen down. She did. But Charles studied the evidence and knew better, and again poor Patrick suffered from this child’s play. His father gave him a sound thrashing.
The Russes stayed on in Kempsey briefly, presumably for its restorative qualities, namely the clean air and medicinal waters for which the area was famous. (Children with respiratory problems from heavily polluted Birmingham were sent to the area to convalesce.) Wheezy Patrick probably benefited from the climate. This might be where he, on bad days, was examined and dosed by medical men, as he later recalled, and lay in bed reading the Gentleman’s Magazine, for it was most likely here that he discovered in the basement a chest full of copies of the eighteenth-century publication once edited by Samuel Johnson and considered the first magazine in the modern sense of the word, offering a variety of articles and subjects. The magazine brought the manners and wit, the tales and news stories of Johnson’s era vividly to life for the curious boy.
On good days, though, Pat could roam around the grounds beneath the large sycamore, wellingtonia, black mulberry, and cedar trees spotting birds and other wildlife. An easy five minutes’ walk took him to the ferry crossing of the forty-foot-wide Severn River, where old barges known as trows were tied to the bank. There is no doubt that Melbury Lodge left an impression on him. He later borrowed the name for the “neat gentleman’s residence” that Jack Aubrey leases in the novel Post Captain.
After the all-too-brief hiatus at Kempsey, the coming year brought more disruption. Charles published another treatise, Drink Versus Prohibition and applied for another patent for “instruments set in motion by the human eye,” extending research that had already produced a patent in 1918. Although he hoped the eye study would pay off, his practice was failing. He abandoned his office at 25 Beaumont Street, his only consistent address over the previous decade, and set up at 63 Wimpole Street. To save money during school holidays, the boys cleaned the office and washed the glass vessels and the instruments that Charles used in his bacteriological practice. But within a year, he closed this office as well. In June 1924, Zoe sold Melbury Lodge, which became a rooming house. Charles borrowed money.
Despite their worsening financial straits, Charles, conditioned to having what he wanted in his youth, found it impossible to alter his lifestyle. He continued to dine out and attend the theater with Zoe, pleasures they could not afford. In May 1925, with liabilities of more than £4,000 and assets of only about £150, Charles was forced to declare bankruptcy. To make matters worse, he continued to work on his doomed treatment, publishing Gonorrhoea Treated by Electrolysis: Results in 1,000 Cases in 1930. His eye-related invention, to which he also dedicated much time and energy, was equally ill-fated. Although he would publish an article, “Magnetic Spectacles for Ptosis,” in the British Medical Journal in 1936, nothing ever came of it.
Charles toiled in a dark cloud of insolvency for more than a decade, and this had a profound impact on his family. Following the summer term in 1924, he had been forced to pull his older children out of boarding school. Pat would never attend Shebbear, and Joan would never attend Edgehill. Mike and Barney, who had been at Shebbear spring, summer, and fall since January 1921, left at the end of July. Mike and Olive were both distinguished students. He had passed the senior entrance exam for Cambridge with honors and an exemption in mathematics, while Olive, who excelled at art and biology, had passed the junior exam, qualifying her to take the senior exam the next year. Instead, she went to a London secretarial school.
Pat enrolled at Marylebone Grammar School, where Barney, who also attended Marylebone, gave him a hand with his English homework, something Barney would laugh about later in life given his brother’s mounting literary achievement. Jerome K. Jerome, the author of Three Men in a Boat and other humorous works, was an alumnus (or “old boy,” as the English say) of Marylebone. Barney and Pat heard him speak and became fans of his whimsical writing. They shared their enthusiasm with Joan, and the three found a bond in the pleasure of this playful reading.
Patrick, who later wrote that recurrent illness interfered with his education and made his adolescence introspective and frequently lonely, found refuge in books. At times he read almost incessantly, continuing the day’s reading at night in bed by flashlight. As can be seen in his early literary efforts, he was moved by Rudyard Kipling’s animal stories and his novel Kim, set in colonial India, as well as by Ernest Bramah’s Kai Lung stories. Zoe’s collection of books from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries made its impact too. Patrick absorbed the Reverend Walter’s account of Admiral Anson’s celebrated, if costly, voyage to the South Pacific. More than half the crew perished, but the survivors got to parade the riches of a captured Spanish galleon through the streets of England. Like his Uncle Morse’s adventure tales, the chaplain’s account touched the boy’s imagination. The seed of the writer was taking root in him. During the next decade, he devoured the works of Tobias Smollett, Jonathan Swift, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon, and Richard Hakluyt.
In May 1926, the General Strike, organized by the Trades Union Congress in support of mineworkers, paralyzed England for nine days. Troops and teams of volunteers prevented the strike from creating even greater havoc. Godfrey Russ, who was training as an electrical engineer, drove shunting train locomotives. Michael, who worked in a surveyor’s office, substituted as a longshoreman and was chased by a mob of armed union men while moving meat from a refrigerated storage area.
Around this time, Charles moved what was left of the family to Lewes in Sussex, a town that must have stoked Patrick’s awareness of history. The family lived at 10 Priory Crescent, an arc of adjoining townhouses beside the Parish Church of St. John the Baptist, formerly a Norman hospital and the burial site of a knight of William the Conqueror. A basking shark weather vane topped the church’s Georgian tower.
One end of the path behind Priory Crescent opened onto Southover High Street near a sixteenth-century timber-framed house once owned by Anne of Cleves. In the other direction the path led to the ruins of Lewes Priory, founded in 1077 and destroyed by Thomas Cromwell in 1538. A little farther down the path came the Mount, an Elizabethan prospect mound, and the Dripping Pan, a medieval salt pan now used as a municipal gathering spot. In his novel The Yellow Admiral, Patrick would borrow this geographic feature, place it in Dorset, and stage a bare-knuckle fist-fight there.
Lewes was staunchly Protestant, and on Guy Fawkes Day, a raucous parade with marching bands converged on the Dripping Pan before the townspeople tossed an effigy, not of Fawkes, as was customary in most towns, but of a pope, from the bridge into the River Ouse. Lewes relished the occasion, and Joan, Pat, and Barney never forgot the excitement of the day. Nor, according to Barney, did they forget David Lloyd George, perhaps the greatest orator of his day, “shaking his silver locks” as he spoke to a throng in the Dripping Pan. Unfortunately for the Russes, it was only a visual memory because they were perched too far away to actually hear the former prime minister.
Barney and Pat attended Old Grammar School, which stood next to a Norman castle and traced its roots back to a thirteenth-century school connected to Lewes Priory. Each morning the two brothers walked up a steep cobblestone road to the High Street to reach the school, where it paid to show up on time, for it was well known that the headmaster, the Reverend Griffith, who doubled as the vicar of Glynde, was unsparing in his use of the cane. Barney, who was fond of writing verse, later commemorated the headmaster with these lines:
I am the Vicar of Glynde
For a change, it is pleasant, I find,
In my school, full of noise,
To chastise the boys
By dusting them well behind.
The Russes did not last long in Lewes. They soon moved back to London. But while in the south, Charles seems to have focused on his inventions. On December 12, 1927, he applied for a patent for an electric heater that prevented the water in car radiators from freezing, a device that Barney helped him demonstrate at an exhibition of inventions and that he apparently sold to an automaker, which unfortunately ended up shelving it. In the fall of 1928, Charles would apply for a patent for winding and constructing electrical heating elements, the description of which filled three pages. Three months after that, he patented an “improved protector for venereal discharges.” On each of these, his address is listed as 50 George Street, indicating that, even while residing in Lewes, he managed to keep an office in London.
Times were hard for the whole family, and the children received little assistance in moving on with their lives. In 1927, Barney had sat for and passed his Oxford junior exam, with first-class honors in eight subjects: English, history, geography, religious knowledge, Latin, French, arithmetic, and mathematics, and with “distinction” in history and French. He seemed destined to go to college, but Charles could not afford it. Instead, Barney moved to London, and, at fifteen, took a dreary job collecting rents in the East End’s slums. There could be no clearer example of Charles Russ’s failure to provide for his family.
Like Pat, Barney turned to books to escape this grim reality. He often passed his lunch hour at the Guildhall Library, immersed in Sidney Colvin’s John Keats, His Life and Poetry and Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. He discovered Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge in an Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch anthology. During subsequent travels he sought refuge in the anthology, long after it had grown “sweat-stained and ink-blotted, the pages loose and the binding almost all gone”(Lady Day Prodigal, p. 65).
Olive, who was still living with the Welches, made the most of her secretarial training. She joined Standard Telephones and Cables, Ltd., in its Aldwych, London, office and became the personal secretary of Sir Thomas Spencer, managing director. At Standard, she soon met and became engaged to Reginald Cole, an electronics engineer with a physics degree from Cambridge. When Olive took “Reg,” as he was called, to meet Charles and Zoe, her father heartily congratulated the couple on their impending nuptials but absolved himself from paying by quickly adding, “Oh, well, no doubt Frank Welch will organize the wedding.” Charles had little money to spare, and sometimes even less charm.
In preparing for the wedding, Olive decided to be baptized and confirmed in the Church of England. At the same time she anglicized to Elizabeth her middle name, Isobel—the name her brothers had found great mirth in teasing her about. Her decision to change her name incensed Charles. He refused to attend the wedding. Zoe might well have encouraged this break with Charles’s oldest daughter, who had performed in a motherly role for her younger siblings after Jessie’s death. Though there would be some reconciliation just before Charles’s death, decades later, this turn of events caused a permanent rift between father and daughter. Charles Russ had become hard and intolerant.
In April 1927, Michael, fed up with the family and the bleak outlook in London, enrolled in the Dreadnought Scheme, a program (financed by surplus World War I funds originally meant for building a Dreadnought battleship) that sent young men and women to Australia to assuage its manpower shortage. After arriving in Australia, men trained for three months at dairy and vegetable farming, blacksmithing and horse management, and construction, and women worked as nannies, maids, and cooks. In June, Michael boarded a steamer for New South Wales.
Over the next year and a half, he wrote letters home depicting Australia as wide-open, full of opportunity and new companions. He sent Patrick the pelt of an opossum and the sixteen-foot skin of a carpet snake (an Australian python), which had made the mistake of peering at Michael over some crops that he was harvesting. “He took its head off with a machete,” a beaming Patrick later recounted to the BBC, “skinned it and so sent it back.” In London, Patrick taped the snake skin to his bedroom wall. This was enough for Barney, who decided to join his brother Down Under. He secured a Dreadnought passage at the Australian embassy and landed in Sydney in November 1929, just days after the U.S. stock market crash shocked the world. It would take Barney three years to pay back his Dreadnought fare of £12.
On December 12, 1928, Patrick turned fourteen. Whether or not he had remained at the Old Grammar School for another year is unclear, but it seems he was now living with his parents in London.* He says he was unpopular with his brothers and sisters, perhaps for the pampering from Zoe or perhaps he simply had a low opinion of himself and assumed others did too. He definitely resembled his later fictional character Stephen Maturin, who was paying “serious attention to voles” by the age of seven and often “wandered alone … peering into the water-shrew’s domain … and making a rough inventory of birds” (The Yellow Admiral, p. 49). Patrick also kept an aquarium.
It was around this time that he began to write. As he later described in his foreword to the reprint of his first book, Caesar, he began writing while spending “long sessions in the incubator room” (p. v) in his father’s laboratory, where Charles confined Patrick ostensibly to improve his health. Sitting at a metal table with a glass top, Patrick finished the tasks assigned to him by his tutor, and barred from bringing in a book to read, he began to write his own. At other times, he told the BBC, he wrote when he was confined to bed “rather fanciful things of a person of my own age making surprising voyages and so on … wish-fulfillment.”
From his great-grandfather and grandfather he had inherited a keen interest in wild animals; from his father, the curiosity and acuity of a scientist, as well as the fertile imagination of an inventor; and from his mother, a passion for botany and birds. For his first book, Patrick invented his own beast: the offspring of a male giant panda and a female snow leopard, which he called a panda leopard. He wrote in his bedroom, sometimes with a guilty conscience because he should have been doing his homework. He narrated the story from the point of view of the beast, named Caesar by his master. Much of the tale involves Caesar’s hunting. He grows to be a lithe, powerful animal, but each potential meal presents its own challenges and sometimes dangers. When he is not hunting, he is often fending off predators, from warrior ants with disproportionate jaws to starving wolves.
Not surprising, given Patrick’s childhood, Caesar’s coming-of-age story involves much early suffering. Shortly after his birth, he loses a sister to a black bear and a brother to a hyena. While he is still a youth and just learning to hunt, his mother and remaining brother are killed in a forest fire. The loss of his mother haunts him. After one brutal fight, Caesar dreams about the fire that took his mother: “I saw her quite plainly just before the pine killed her,” he reports, “and I felt very sad” (p. 17).
When Caesar is grown, his mother appears in phantom form to scare off a large python. “Then the thought that perhaps she had lived through the fire flashed through my mind,” Caesar relates, “and I started forward with a purr of delight to meet her, but to my horror and amazement there was nothing there” (pp. 61–62). Clearly, Patrick, who had experienced this kind of pain firsthand, had a gift for writing with detachment.
Left to fend for himself, Caesar at first searches for easy prey, which he finds in domestic livestock. This naturally leads to an encounter with humans. For a fourteen-year-old, Patrick wrote with striking sangfroid in describing the encounter: “With a shriek of fear he struck me with a stick, and missed. We fell together, but his skull was cracked like an egg-shell. It was ridiculously easy to kill him” (p. 10).
Always true to the voice of his carnivore hero, Patrick coolly—and without a hint of sentimentality—described another scene in which Caesar has caught a mountain goat kid and is attacked by its mother:
She charged with her long horns lowered. I darted to one side, and with my paw I got in a blow which ripped her open to the shoulder-bone. Then wonderfully quickly she turned and gored me in the side. I leaped dear, and we stood panting and looking at each other for a second. Then I charged, and leaping on to her back I broke her neck.
Then I took up the kid again, and set off home. (P. 15)
By now, the Russ family had moved again, to Sutherland Avenue in the Maida Vale section of London. Pat finished his book in March 1930, just four months after his fifteenth birthday. It was a more than respectable effort for a boy of his age, and Charles decided to seek a publisher.
Barney, who turned eighteen the same month, was about to become a farm laborer in Goolgowi, Australia, four hundred miles west of Sydney. He lived in a tin-roofed shack with a dirt floor, slept on a piece of canvas stretched on metal poles, and performed backbreaking labor all day. Despite Australia’s claim to egalitarianism, the family for whom Barney worked made him eat alone in the kitchen. He later expressed his outrage at this humiliation: “Now, I had come from a fairly good English home and my father was a professional man. I was totally unused to life among the lower classes. Yet here were these definitely inferior beings treating this son of a gentleman like a common peasant!” (Lady Day Prodigal, p. 37).
Though Pat and Barney were less than three years apart in age, how different their lives had become. Barney would remain in Australia for almost a decade, and though his situation eventually improved, he had not hit rock bottom yet. Pat would endure his own dose of demoralizing poverty; however, it came later, and more on his own terms.
* According to school officials, all early school records were destroyed in 1965.