THE DAY FRANCE FELL, I was cycling back from T. Wells, possessed by a deep anger. As I came near Crowborough, the whole earth seemed spread out at the foot of the hill, bathed in clear warm sun, green and gold as far as one could see. The scent of clover was strong from the quiet fields, and the distances were tranquil blue. England, spread out fair before the desperate new peril, infused even my cowardly, flinching heart so that then and now I still feel I could actually, without hesitation, take part gladly in slaughter and violence against anyone setting foot on these shores.
—Joan Russ, letter to Barney Russ, August 30, 1941
Four rocky years passed before Patrick’s zeal for India led to a breakthrough novel. In the meantime, life intervened in its own mysterious way. The worldwide depression caused varying degrees of desperation in the Russ family. Mike and Barney tried and failed at tobacco farming in northeast Australia. Barney moved into a shack by himself on the banks of the Barron River, where he attempted to raise corn. One day in 1934 a cyclone struck. Violent rains followed, and the river flooded. Clinging to his horse and praying, Barney nearly drowned while crossing through a torrent of logs and bloated animal carcasses to safety. A search party of neighbors found him asleep on the opposite bank, where he had collapsed after the struggle.
In 1933, prospects for European peace had abruptly deteriorated. Hitler became chancellor of Germany, and Hermann Goring, an air squadron commander who had won highest honors in World War I, was made head of Germany’s Air Ministry. Germany immediately quit both the League of Nations and the Disarmament Conference. England turned a wary eye toward the Continent. Meanwhile, Charles Russ, who had developed a knack for being out of step with the world, worked on improving the teakettle. In January 1934, he submitted to the patent office seven pages of descriptions and diagrams of his improved pot. Instead of whistling to indicate boiling water, the pot’s top rattled.
That Patrick had already grown skeptical of his father’s inventions is doubtful, and that he thought them humorous is unlikely. But later he certainly came to understand the sad but laughable irony in the fact that his intelligent, creative, and determined father continued to pour his efforts into a series of useless inventions and impractical medical treatments, supported by a series of books, instead of into finding a practical method of providing for the well-being of his family. Arcane books, nonfunctional machines, and ridiculous inventions would litter the Aubrey-Maturin series. Maturin himself is the author of Tar-Water Reconsidered. In one novel, Aubrey finds himself in command of an unnavigable experimental ship having two bows and no stern. In another, a Papin’s Digester, a pressure cooker designed to soften bones for stock, explodes, sounding “like the firing of a twelve-pounder” and blasting pudding all over the cook and his mates.
With his royalty advance for Beasts Royal, Patrick bought himself and Joan tickets to a benefit concert at the Royal Albert Hall. Sir Henry Wood conducted the Royal Amateur Orchestral Society, and Eva Turner, Conchita Supervia, and Richard Tauber sang. The famous Austrian tenor, who, as one story has it, missed his debut at the large hall out of sheer panic at the sight of it, did not disappoint on this night. King George V, Queen Mary, and Princess Mary were also there to enjoy Tauber’s selection of Wagner, Puccini, and songs from the Viennese musical comedies of Franz Lehar. Wood capped the evening with his rousing “Fantasia of British Sea Songs.” For the moment, despite their inescapable poverty, the two young Russes basked in England’s greater glory.
His writing success not being lucrative enough, Patrick searched for a sustainable way to earn a living. With the economy in shambles and the new national focus on preparing for the German threat, it is not surprising that he set his sights on military service. Although he later admitted to having been rejected by the navy, he would never talk about his brief and unsuccessful stint in the Royal Air Force. What he did disclose was that despite his health woes, he had long hoped to attend Dartmouth, the Royal Naval College, on the coast of Devon. He applied but was rejected, as he later told the Financial Times, because “I had not enough teeth, an inferior heart, rotten spine and brain not much cop.”
In 1934, the Royal Air Force (RAF) had nothing like the prestige of the long venerated Royal Navy. The RAF had been created in 1918, when the army’s Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Force combined, and the recently formed Air Ministry took control of the new branch of service. But this was to be a watershed year for the fledgling air force. It was now clear that Germany, with the help of Russia, was surreptitiously building a formidable air force. On July 19, Britain announced plans to expand the RAF by forty-one squadrons to meet this growing threat. ,
New planes required new pilots. Patrick applied to become a pilot officer. He was accepted, and on September 14, he entered the Royal Air Force, mustering with the other trainees at Uxbridge RAF depot, where they were issued uniforms with smart four-button, four-pocket jackets, belted at the waist, and flat-brimmed hats with the crown-over-eagle RAF insignia. The trainees were told what their table manners would be and whom to salute.
After two weeks, Acting Pilot Officer Russ was sent to Sealand, an RAF base northwest of Chester on the estuary of the River Dee, where the weeding out began. Of the thirty-two officers and ten airmen in the twenty-seventh course at No. 5 Flying Training School (FTS), twenty-seven of the former and nine of the latter completed it. Patrick was not one of them, which the literary world can be thankful for. A third of those who did graduate were killed in World War II.
With its red brick buildings, grass landing strips, rows of biplanes, and windowed, sliding steel-door World War I hangars, Sealand made an impressive boot camp. Officers ate in the Virginia creeper-covered mess hall six nights a week, one night in full mess dress, including a short, RAF-blue monkey jacket, tight trousers, and leather Wellington boots, and another in dinner jacket and black tie. Officers had their own rooms, and every three shared a batman, a civilian servant who made their beds, brought them tea in the morning, polished their shoes, and did their laundry. Adding to the romance of Sealand, flights took off over wild marshes and mudflats, giving way to a view of the coast of north Wales and the five distant peaks of Snowdonia, whose ragged beauty later inspired Patrick to try living there.
The training program lasted two semesters over the course of a year, with a junior (first semester) class and a senior (second semester) class. Discipline was strict. The junior trainees, known as Sprogs, rose at 7 A.M. to prepare for flight training, followed by classroom training in the afternoon, with the schedule reversing on alternate days. During the first three months, Sprogs flew two-seater Avro Tutor biplanes. These light twenty-six-foot-long planes, with open cockpits, stood nine and a half feet off the ground and had wingspans of thirty-four feet. They could reach a top speed of 122 miles per hour. At first a Sprog sat in the fore cockpit, while an instructor sergeant, in the rear, took off and gave orders to the trainee through a gosport. This setup was not foolproof, and minor mishaps were not uncommon. When one trainee got lost with his instructor, they tried to navigate home via the railway lines but failed. Finally, they stopped in a field and asked directions.
After ten hours of flying time, achieved in the first few weeks of the course, Sprogs received their wings, allowing them to fly without an instructor. This increased the opportunity for folly. One advanced trainee, preparing for the Empire Air Day show, practiced a maneuver whereby he was supposed to skip his Avro on the runway and leapfrog another Avro, but he did not quite make it. Instead, he bowled over another trainee and an instructor who were leaning against the stationary plane. The two airmen, stunned though not seriously hurt, dusted themselves off and continued their conversation. Trainees also competed in blind flying, in which a hood was placed over their windshields, and they had to navigate a triangular course by instruments alone.
None of these maneuvers, however, was as daring as the stunt that classmates expected of one another. This foolhardy exhibition required two men to change seats while in flight. To do this, they left their cockpits simultaneously, stepped out onto opposite wings, and climbed into the other’s seat. Meanwhile, the control column (known as “the stick”) was held with an outstretched hand, and the rudder bar control, in the bottom of the cockpit, was briefly left unmanned.
Instructors trained Sprogs in the use of Lewis machine guns (a rear gunner’s weapon), Lee Enfield .303 rifles, and Browning automatic pistols, which might have been the genesis of Patrick’s love of shooting. As in all branches of the service, a certain amount of bravado and aggression was tolerated, even smiled upon. The school held boxing and rugby matches in which the airmen proved their grit. These were undoubtedly tough on Patrick, who was among the smallest in his class and physically weak, but at least boxing and rugby had rules. The harshest roughhousing took place after hours. Trainees such as Paddy Cole, a popular Irishman from a good family in Sligo, a jokester and a storyteller, had no problems. But a quiet or loner Sprog such as Patrick had to be constantly on his guard. At least one unpopular classmate had his room blasted with fire extinguishers. However, no one was immune from the inter-class brawls. In the middle of the night, the seniors often raided the juniors’ quarters for wrestling and fist-fighting, which sometimes got out of hand. One trainee walloped another with a golf club, sending the victim to the hospital.
After a total of sixty air hours and the performance of certain prescribed manuevers in the Avro, a trainee passed on to the next phase of flight training in the bigger, faster Armstrong Atlas bomber and Bristol Bulldog fighter planes, where the stakes and risks rose considerably. On October 26, a chilling accident occurred among the senior class at No. 5 FTS. Acting Pilot Officer Eric Hall took off alone in an Armstrong Atlas plane on a training flight from Sealand. Attempting to land on an official airstrip about four miles away in Hawarden, Flintshire, he crashed and was killed.
Somehow during his first semester at FTS, either Patrick did not make the grade, or he discovered that he simply was not cut out for the air force. The injured and the sick who could not finish the course for that reason were usually simply moved back a class, losing seniority but continuing on. The most likely reason for being bounced from RAF pilot training was for failing the flying course, most often the result of insufficient hand-eye coordination. This seems probable in Patrick’s case since Barney Russ later wrote in a letter that he thought Patrick had left the air force after “he had smashed a couple of aeroplanes in the course of his training.” Whatever the reason, Acting Pilot Officer Patrick Russ’s commission was terminated on the first of December.*
In late 1934, twenty-year-old Welsh poet Dylan Thomas moved to London. While quaffing beer in pubs, he filled exercise books with poetry, and when there was an audience, he practiced his wit and mimicry by the tap. Neither a university man from a wealthy family nor a radical as it was fashionable to be among his contemporary poets, Thomas liked to read detective stories, play a pub game called shove-ha’penny, and chase women. He loathed academicians and avoided discussions of art and literature. Still, he caught the attention of the literary establishment, including Herbert Read, Edith Sitwell, Stephen Spender, and Lawrence Durrell.
Thomas was a unique literary force operating on his own deep-seated principles. He was an outsider who mixed with the establishment, although often reluctantly and while drinking self-destructively. Patrick, back in London after his failed RAF stint, was an outsider who did not mix. Although he was intellectual and well-read, he did not have old-boy connections, literary clout, or Thomas’s magnetism. However, their paths did cross. Many years later Patrick recalled a conversation with Thomas about the creative process. Thomas had described it as a waking dream, a metaphor that never suited Patrick, though he was hard-pressed to find one that did. He also made the acquaintance of one of Thomas’s court of admiring women. Her name was Elizabeth Jones, and she was an independent young Welsh girl with a resume of personal hardship that surpassed even Patrick’s.
Elizabeth was an orphan from the village of Penycae Rhosllaner-chrugog in northeast Wales. Her mother had been killed, probably by influenza, in 1914, when Elizabeth was just three. Her father—a clay miner—died four years later. The girl and her three brothers were taken in by their aunts and uncles. Though she spoke little English, Elizabeth, while still a teenager, decided to attempt to escape the never-ending cycle of poverty in northeast Wales. She made her way down to London, where she found work as a domestic in the home of an American inventor named Converse.
She soon found the fast set in Chelsea, where Thomas was drinking himself green in hangouts like Finches and the Goat in Boots. It was a lively, loose atmosphere, and although Elizabeth was not well educated, her vivacity and charm in addition to her fresh good looks made her popular.
Both Thomas and Patrick might have briefly flirted with Marxism, the young intellect’s credo of the day. But Thomas was a hedonist at heart, preferring worldly pleasures to polemics. Patrick, who would later tell one journalist that if he “hadn’t been Catholic, [he] would surely have been a Communist in the thirties, believing the world could be changed,” changed his own world, instead, by falling in love with Jones, a five-foot-tall brunette, who was devoted to him. While Patrick might not have been Catholic at the time, he did have a fertile imagination.
In 1935 Patrick, whose byline now read “R. P. Russ,” published stories in both of Strang’s annuals. To the Oxford Annual for Scouts, he delivered “The Snow Leopard,” a spare hunting vignette set in the Himalayas of Nepal, in which the son of a shikari (a professional big game hunter) proves himself by killing a leopard with his knife, saving the life of a Gurkha officer, an Englishman who comes to the Himalayas each year to hunt with the boy’s father. In this story, Patrick displayed two writing characteristics that would serve him well throughout his career. As he would later do so effectively in his Aubrey-Maturin novels, he peppered the story with undefined arcane lingo: “shikar” (hunting), “kukri” (a curved knife used by Gurkhas), “spoor” (a track or droppings). He trusted the power and the poetry of words. Standing alone, they accomplished more, even if only partially understood, than they would with prosaic definitions.
He also revealed for the first time his facility for creating a bond between two human characters. Just before the climax, in which the boy, Dhorgoshi, saves the Gurkha officer (Major Chetwynd), Chetwynd shows his respect for the boy, who like most boys is struggling with his sense of self-worth. As the party scales a sheer rock face in pursuit of a trophy ibex, Dhorgoshi, finding no foothold, verges on panic and slips. Chetwynd reaches up and guides his foot to a ledge. Afterward Chetwynd tells the boy’s father that he almost had to turn back himself. Patrick wrote, “Dhorgoshi loved him for not mentioning that missing foothold, and for acknowledging that it was a stiff climb. He tried to look unconcerned, but he felt his heart still hammering.” Patrick then coolly delivered the story’s climax so that it resonated profoundly but avoided melodrama.
In “Cheetah,” which ran in the Oxford Annual for Boys, Patrick wrote another episode about Hussein and continued to examine the mysteries and nuances of Indian storytelling, or at least the British version of it. For the first time, he wrote of opium addiction, a subject that would long fascinate him. Patrick suffused the tale, in which he portrays an India where one survives by one’s wits and accepts what cannot be controlled, with a subtle, dry humor.
“Cheetah” is a more complex story than “The Snow Leopard.” Hired to care for Shaitan, one of the hunting cheetahs of a raja, a task for which he has no training and no lineage, Hussein is ostracized by the other trainers. However, the resourceful mahout learns that an elderly trainer named Yussuf has a weakness for opium and that one of his wives denies him the means to buy it. Hussein supplies Yussuf with opium in exchange for the secrets of cheetah handling. Patrick took pains not to moralize, passing no overt judgments on this relationship or on Yussuf’s opium use. “The Prophet never forbade its use,” reasons the old man, who, like Hussein, is a Muhammadan in the midst of Hindus, “he only referred to intoxicating liquors.”
In the second part of the story, Hussein handles Shaitan in a staged hunt for gazelles in front of the raja. Suddenly a wild leopard appears and begins killing the trained cheetahs who are stalking the gazelles. In the resulting melee, the leopard knocks Yussuf down. Hussein falls on the beast and tries to choke him. Finally, the raja shoots and kills the leopard and is greatly pleased with himself. Yussuf makes Hussein his blood brother for coming to his rescue, and the raja rewards him for his bravery by tossing him a gold and ruby ring and ordering the treasurer to fill his mouth with gold coins. In a final twist, when Hussein discovers that the treasurer has substituted copper coins for gold, he humbly and wisely remains silent, satisfied in a small victory: one gold mohur is hiding among the copper.
In 1936, Patrick published a watershed story in the twenty-ninth edition of the Oxford Annual for Boys. In the past, he had written about animals, about men and animals, and about men on unequal terms, such as the young Hussein and the elder Yussuf. For the first time, in “Noughts and Crosses,” he introduced two characters on relatively even footing. Sullivan, a tall, thoughtful Irishman, and Ross, a tough, red-bearded Scot, are, despite their personality differences, bound by friendship, though at first it is not apparent.
In the smoking room of a men’s club, Sullivan, in Marlowesque fashion, narrates a sea tale of the Great Barrier Reef, in which Ross’s contrariness leads to the sinking of their boat and the death of their crew. Following a fierce storm, the duo’s whaler is besieged by sharks, which are agitated by the smell of a zinc tank on board that has been used to extract oil from sharks’ livers. The sharks ram the whaler and batter it with their powerful tails. Despite the pleas of his mates, Ross insists on continuing to fish. The sharks sink the whaler and eat the mates. Sullivan and Ross escape by climbing into the foul tank. Adrift, they play tic-tac-toe (“noughts and crosses”) as they await rescue or death.
The tale seems fairly straightforward, but Patrick again threw in a clever plot twist. After Sullivan finishes his tale and gets up to leave, Ross—who unbeknownst to the others has been sitting with them in the smoking room all along—reveals himself and confirms the story’s truth.
The reader is compelled to reconsider the two men and their relationship in light of the fact that the tale was told in front of Ross, not in his absence. The implications are entirely different, and the story becomes ingeniously resonant. Four decades later, Patrick told a reporter, “The essence of my books is about human relationships and how people treat one another.” The same was true of his stories written long before.
Patrick enjoyed writing the story, and it showed. He found both comfort and creative power in his new characters Sullivan and Ross, so much so that, in 1954, then writing as Patrick O’Brian, he published a novel recounting an elaborate Eastern adventure involving the two, along with a third character, an orphaned boy. It would be Patrick’s only obvious crossover writing, where O’Brian continued Russ’s work.
In 1935 Patrick turned twenty-one. Although he wrote for youth magazines, he was no longer a youth himself. There is little documentary evidence of events during this part of his life. It is impossible to verify his claims to have continued his quirky education at Oxford and the Sorbonne, concentrating on the natural sciences, the classics, and philosophy. Neither school has any record of his attendance. Lending further doubt is the fact that his older siblings, after Godfrey, had been unable to afford a higher education.
Patrick later said that he researched at the British Museum and other London libraries, at the Bodleian in Oxford, the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and the Vatican in Rome. He clearly acquired valuable research skills; very likely he did come by them sitting in Karl Marx’s chair beneath the great dome in the British Library and combing the stacks in Paris. He apparently pursued an interest in St. Isidore of Seville (d. 636) and the Western bestiary, which makes sense given his abiding interest in the animal kingdom. Patrick certainly had a thirst for knowledge. Although it is hard to say how he might have afforded to work on such an unprofitable project in these hard times, he did reveal a considerable familiarity with bestiaries to his friend Walter Greenway during the war.
The lovably pale boy with a large vocabulary was now a slim, handsome man with the last vestiges of a cherubic face. In Chelsea, his love for Elizabeth Jones continued to blossom. Though poorly educated herself, she recognized brilliance in Patrick’s demanding conversation. He was serious, resolute. Though physically gentle, he could be petulant. He was an underdog, but so was she. She found herself believing in his determination, and she knew she had found someone who needed to be cared for. He reciprocated, writing her affectionate letters—and sometimes poetry—when he left town to visit Charles and Zoe.
One thing led to another, and Patrick and Elizabeth moved in together at flat no. 2A on tree-lined Oakley Street, running between the King’s Road and Albert Bridge in Chelsea, three doors down from where Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott had lived. Perhaps part of what united the two was the discovery that they had in common traumatic childhoods. For Patrick, there was also the appeal of an older woman. Elizabeth was four years more experienced, and they were young enough for that to mean something. With friends José Birt and Edward H. Taaffe witnessing, the two tied the knot on February 27, 1936, at the Chelsea register office.
The marriage could not have pleased Patrick’s class-conscious, financially struggling parents. They would certainly be withering in their disapproval of Joan’s marriage to a Birmingham mechanic during the war. Two months after Patrick’s marriage, Nora stunned the family as well, entering the Roman Catholic convent Franciscan Sisters of Mill Hill. After a trial period, on November 29, 1936, she was admitted as a novice.
Patrick and Elizabeth’s marriage would be anything but conventional. Patrick was still too immature for the serious commitment of marriage, let alone children. The two soon moved into another Chelsea flat, at 24 Gertrude Street, and Elizabeth, whom Patrick often called “Cariad,” which is Welsh for darling, became pregnant. On February 2, 1937, at St. Mary Abbots Hospital in Kensington, she gave birth to a baby boy. They named him Richard Francis Tudor; Richard after his father, Francis for the couple’s good friend Francis Cox, a Chelsea painter, and, because of Elizabeth’s pride in her Welsh heritage, Tudor for the royal house of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, which was Welsh in origin. His mother called him “Ricky.”
With a family to support, Patrick took a job with the left-leaning Workers Travel Association, a vacation packager with a youth focus, that required him to spend the summer at a small hotel in Locarno, a lakeside tourist resort in Italian-speaking south-central Switzerland. He greeted the groups of British tourists at the train station, escorted them to the Hotel Quisisana, where he also stayed, arranging day trips and handling complaints and emergencies, until he saw them off again at the end of their stay and greeted the next group.
It was a strange situation for a recently married man with a baby at home to place himself in, a situation rife with potential. And this was especially true for Patrick, a handsome and charming romantic. He soon found himself infatuated with a pair of sisters.
While other girls, almost always escorted by their mothers, stepped off the overnight train with their noses freshly powdered and a new coat of lipstick glistening, Beryl and Joan Ainsworth, twenty-one and eighteen years old respectively, dismounted with sleep still in their eyes.* Patrick, not cut from the usual mold himself, recognized kindred spirits—who happened not to be chaperoned.
The hotel was small. Patrick’s room was just several doors down from the sisters’, and the three saw each other frequently. Beryl, a London secretary, was pretty but pining over a boyfriend who was driving his parents around Europe that summer. Patrick paid special attention to Joan, a perky graduate of an arty private school, who was fond of the theater and had a job selling theater tickets in London. She was fair-skinned, shapely, and had dark curly hair.
Patrick made for a bright and convincing tour guide, taking the group to see the Milan Cathedral and the Madonna del Sasso, a spectacular hilltop church in nearby Orta, among other places. Sometimes they traveled by bus and other times they puttered across Lake Maggiore by steamboat. On one hot outing he provided the Ainsworths with wine from a wineskin he carried with him. “Do you like it?” he asked.
“No,” they replied, wincing at the sour-tasting local red.
“Well, I only paid fourpence for it,” he laughed, shrugging.
Although he was supposed to be tending to the entire group, wherever they went he inevitably gravitated to the sisters and they to him. He told them that he was Irish, and, according to Beryl, that he had been an RAF pilot until an accident with a propeller had sent him to the hospital, where, he said, the doctors had put a steel plate in his head.† He also told them that he was an artist and that he had written a book of stories called Beasts Royal. He raved about James Joyce, and when Joan confessed that she had not read him, he playfully chastised her, saying that in that case she had not been educated at all.
He won them over with his animated, unreserved conversation and his occasional irreverence. He had something of a superior air, they thought, but, unlike the public school boys they were used to, he was offbeat and inflamed with ideas. As he got to know them better, he took notice of their looks and teased them with arch comments. “You know, Beryl, you would look good in black,” he suddenly observed one day, “but not until you are thirty.” Another time he asked her if he could make a mask of her face and seemed annoyed when she told him no.
In their spare time, the threesome often went to the Lido, a manmade sand beach with umbrellas and chairs. While Beryl composed forlorn love letters to her boyfriend, Patrick and Joan lazed on the beach together, smoking cigarettes, and both being strong swimmers, raced each other out to the raft on the lake, where they lay side by side chatting and gazing at the distant snow-capped mountains. Patrick coyly told Joan, who had never been in love before, that her decadent appearance when she stepped off the train had captured him immediately. Joan was receptive to her dark-browed, urbane new friend, even when he confided in her the shocking news that he had a wife at home. According to Joan, he said he had been tricked into marrying when Elizabeth falsely claimed to be pregnant.
Beryl, who was supposed to be looking after her younger sister, did not realize just how intense the relationship had grown, and Joan was careful to keep it that way. At night after Beryl went to sleep, she crept out of her twin bed and down the hall to Patrick’s room.
After two passionate weeks, Joan had to return to London. Patrick had warned her that their relationship must the on the vine. But they had fallen in love, and neither was happy to end the affair. They carried on by mail, Patrick exercising his biting humor when he told her that “a fresh batch of erect apes” had arrived, and his tenderness when he sent her a sonnet devoted to her eyebrows. Joan’s illicit telephone calls courtesy of her employer kept the flame lit the rest of the summer.
But when Patrick returned to England and his family in the fall, they saw each other just two more times, once to see the Irish playwright Denis Johnston’s The Moon in the Yellow River, and another time for dinner at The Bag of Nails, a Chelsea pub, where they said farewell forever.
During this time Patrick continued to write stories and work on a novel set in India, which Kaberry, his Oxford University Press editor, had encouraged him to write on the basis of his Hussein stories. This work was highly disconnected from the life he was leading, demonstrating again just how thoroughly he could escape reality. In “Two’s Company,” which ran in the 1937 Oxford Annual for Boys, Patrick once again wrote a boy’s story with greater depth than first meets the eye. This tale stranded Ross, the ‘wide-jawed Lowland Scot, and Sullivan, the garrulous Irishman, in a northern seas lighthouse so remote that even their wireless is useless. During their first three-month tour of duty in the tower above a dangerous reef, the carcass of an immense whale lodges against the lighthouse in a storm. With no hope of removing the mass of rotting blubber, they find themselves at the epicenter of a seabird and shark feeding frenzy, not to mention an atrocious stench.
Finally, they beg some explosives off the destroyer delivering them supplies, and they blow up the carcass. They sign up for another three months in the lighthouse, but now they find the isolation has seriously strained their friendship. As they try to ignore each other, Sullivan turns to his violin and pet sea eagle, while Ross plays a bagpipe and chats with his pet skua. The two train their tamed birds of prey to hunt from their arms, but when the birds attack each other over a herring, the men are destined to come to blows. That evening bitter words at supper lead to a fight. Fists fly until Ross is knocked senseless. No scene of reconciliation takes place. But none is necessary. The violence clears the air like a summer storm.
In “Two’s Company,” while the setting and action satisfy the reader on a visceral level, another story—the personal relationship—plays out on a deeper plane. One feeds off the other, but ultimately the latter adds profundity to an otherwise innocent yarn. Patrick used this method again and again, as in his 1938 odyssey, “One Arctic Summer,” also published in the Oxford Annual for Boys. Later, in the Aubrey-Maturin novels, he would enchant the reader with sailing adventures, secret service intrigues, and naval battles, all the while carefully exploring and commenting on the nature of human relationships.
In “One Arctic Summer,” an unnamed narrator, a surgeon, searches the Arctic for his plane-wrecked friend, Wetherill. The search stalls at the border between Christian-controlled Lapland and the land of the savage, pagan nomads to the north when the hired Lapps refuse to travel farther. But the surgeon is aided by the timely arrival of Father Sergei, a missionary priest of the Holy Russian Church. An expert linguist with stature among the Christian Lapps, Sergei stands out in the entire Patrick Russ/O’Brian oeuvre as most nearly resembling a perfect man. This is all the more remarkable because in his early writing Patrick rarely attributed positive qualities to a priest of any sort.
In describing Sergei, the narrator says:
It sounds most unpleasant, but he was easily the best man I have ever known, and I have met archbishops and cardinals: there was nothing obviously religious about him, he never asked any one whether he was saved, or anything remotely resembling it, and he had been known to knock the heads of two impudent Lapps together and kick them each nearly four feet out of his tent, but he also has a way of doing very decent things, and expecting no thanks for them. … I think he must have been the nearest approach to the more robust kind of medieval saint that one could find. (P. 92)
Sergei volunteers to accompany the narrator, and his knowledge of the dialects allows them to gather clues. After many days of wearisome marches, they join a group of Eskimo shamans wearing fox skulls and animal bones, who, unbeknownst to the narrator, are traveling north to determine the fate of his injured, captive friend, Wetherill.
At the meeting place, the shamans and their tribesmen, dancing and howling wickedly, surround the search party. While the surgeon fingers his gun, Sergei begins to laugh raucously. The more the shamans dance, the louder he laughs, holding his sides, spilling tears. Exasperated, the three chief shamans attack, snapping their teeth like wild animals. The priest cocks his fist, and with three swift punches lays them out. He then barks out orders to the shamans with such authority that they obey him immediately.
United with Wetherill, the surgeon amputates his friend’s arm to save his life. Afterward, they head south together. Sergei remains with the shamans to teach them Christianity. The story could not make plainer the author’s notions of the highest qualities a man can have: chief among them, intelligence, civility, quiet piety, loyalty, competence, and courage, virtues likewise extolled in the Aubrey-Maturin novels.
In addition to writing these stories, Patrick wove his Indian tales into a meandering novel called Hussein: An Entertainment. One review later claimed that he had been tutored by “Arabian” storytellers. Perhaps the reviewer was referring to Uncle Emil, who had worked as a tailor in India until he won the Calcutta Sweep in 1920. He pocketed £15,800 and hied it back to England, where he liked to swim in the sea and hold court in the pubs. He was also known to spin a yarn or two. Emil lost his fortune almost as quickly as he made it. According to Major H. Hobbs, who wrote The Romance of the Calcutta Sweep: “In 1927 the news was broadcasted through the British Empire, possibly right around the world that he, a prize winner in the Derby Sweep, had made his appearance in the Canterbury Bankruptcy Court, where it was stated that he had been living at the rate of £2,000 a year.”
Kipling’s “great, gray, formless India,” as seen in Kim, certainly influenced Patrick. But Hussein, being entirely Indian, allowed for even deeper immersion into the culture than did Kipling’s half-Irish Kim. Hussein falls in love with a beauty named Sashiya, murders his evil-spirited rival, and thus embroils himself in a vendetta with the dead man’s family. As a result, the handsome clean-cut youth with a high-bridged nose is destined to roam India, surviving by his wits.
Like Kim, Hussein is unsuspectingly drawn into what Kipling called “the Great Game that never ceases day and night throughout India” (Kim, p. 158). “There is an incidental Secret Service background, which Mr. Russ is too wise to labour in detail,” wrote Professor L. F. Rushbrook in his review of Hussein in the South Asian Review. “Perhaps he has learned wisdom from the single artistic fault in the construction of Kim. However this may be, Hussein really knows very little indeed of the inner meaning of what he is doing—which is exactly as it should be in real life!”
As Kipling wrote of colonial India in Kim, “This is a world of danger to honest men” (p. 130). Patrick’s India, too, is an ethical morass. The good Hussein will win at all costs. Even murder is justified if the murderee is villainous enough and the act is committed in Hussein’s pursuit of Sashiya, who represents his highest ideals. As Patrick cunningly wrote, “Hussein’s code was an elastic one, and it would stretch surprisingly on occasion; but he did not like making a cuckold of a man whose salt he had eaten, when he was not in love with the woman” (p. 228). Hussein is faithful to Sashiya, but as Patrick put it, “like most men, faithful in his own way” (p. 212).
Patrick had already arrived at a technique that would hallmark the Aubrey-Maturin novels, examining humanity through the friendship of two men. Such relationships provided some of his most humorous and touching passages. One scene in Hussein (originally in the story “Cheetah”) particularly stands out. In it, Hussein provides the old man Yussuf with opium pills in return for instruction on training cheetahs. Because of certain constraints and mutual suspicion, the transaction plays out in a wonderful dance. First Hussein deliberately spills opium pills from a brass box in front of Yussuf, making it appear as if it were an accident. Yussuf later tells Hussein he has a beautiful cheetah collar that he no longer needs, making as if he wishes to sell it to Hussein. Hussein confesses that he cannot afford it. Yussuf, praising his modesty, offers to give it to him, but then appraising it, changes his mind: although the collar has some “commercial value” (p. 214), he says, it is not a worthy gift for one so excellent as Hussein. Hussein insists, “Assuredly it would be a royal gift” (p. 214). But, Yussuf counters, it is still unworthy of Hussein. However, he has an idea. To prove the lack of value of the collar, he will trade it for the tacky brass box that Hussein earlier dropped. Hussein agrees, but first he extracts the pills.
Patrick stretched the tactical game to maximum effect. Eventually both characters get what they are after. This scene, where the two gain respect for one another in their witty duel, sets the stage for their friendship, which is later forged through an act of self-sacrifice.
The white cobra, first seen in Patrick’s earlier story “The White Cobra,” also found its way into the novel. Feroze Khan, Hussein’s master in the Great Game, tells a variation of the tale in which he steals the snake from a village by seducing the wife of the priest and lying to her about the direction in which he is headed. Patrick no doubt took pleasure in cuckolding the priest, who at the end of the short story mercilessly beats Hussein.
Patrick would say in his foreword to the 1999 reprint editions of Caesar and Hussein that he expanded the Hussein stories into a larger work while living in Dublin in a Leeson Street boardinghouse “kept by two very kind sisters from Tipperary and inhabited mostly by young men studying at the national university with a few from Trinity.” (Since he married Elizabeth in London in February 1936 and Richard was born there in February 1937 and the book was published in April 1938, it is difficult to fit this into the chronology, unless he spent some time there soon after leaving the air force and nearly three years passed between the time he wrote the book and its publication, which is unlikely.) Whether or not he finished the book on a bench in Stephen’s Green “with a mixture of triumph and regret,” he had, indeed, refined his craft in storytelling. He had experienced the exaltation of writing well, in a groove, where everything felt just right, and this sense of pleasure, unachievable by any other means, he never ceased to pursue.
In April 1938, two years after Kipling’s death, Oxford University Press published Hussein: An Entertainment, with a Welsh dedication reading “I fy ngwraig annwyl/a fy mab bychan,” “To my dear wife/and my small son.” At 2,965 copies, the print run was modest, but this was the first work of contemporary fiction ever published by the prestigious press, a coup that was not lost on the author. Fortunately for Patrick, the book’s reputation did not depend on the number of copies printed but on its critical reception. With the magic of a good storyteller around a campfire at night, he had achieved an almost hypnotic effect. Though reverential of Kim, Professor Rushbrook could not resist Patrick’s spell. “Such a story as this is full of traps for an author who does not know Indian life like the palm of his hand,” wrote the professor. “Mr. Russ is to be congratulated on escaping all the obvious mistakes and a good many of the more subtle ones. … [His] spelling of Indian names suggests that he has picked up his knowledge by ear unsupplemented by eye. But the quality is undeniable.”
The Times Literary Supplement called an episode in which wild dogs chase Hussein the “best adventure in the book” and noted that there was an underlying humor to the story that the “author scarcely sets himself to develop.” The review added that Hussein’s “methods of self-help would scarcely have commanded the approval of Mr. Samuel Smiles.” (Smiles, a Victorian, wrote moralizing books such as Self Help and Thrift.) As evidence, the review pointed out that Hussein “stole the faithful elephant, … had a rival for the hand of Sashiya done to death by the arts of a dreadful fakir, … [and] finally won through to fame and fortune by murdering the Rajah of Kapilavatthu and stealing the Rajah’s money and jewels.” The reviewer failed to qualify this by mentioning that, within the context, Hussein in most cases acted justly. The critique was most notable for the fact that this important literary newspaper noticed the book at all.
In the United States, Hussein made a much bigger splash. On May 8, both the New York Times Book Review and New York Herald Tribune extolled the novel. Both reviewers seemed swept away by the author’s control of the beguiling genre, his effortless storytelling, his ability to transfix the reader in this mysterious Eastern adventure. In the Times, Percy Hutchison wrote:
If one has no feeling for Kipling’s animal stories, and does not enjoy the bloody and sugared picaresque Arabian tales we devoured so avidly in our childhood Hussein is to be passed by. But if a better elephant story has been written between “My Lord the Elephant” and Hussein we have had the misfortune to miss it. Moreover, Patrick Russ, who studied his craft with Arabian story-tellers, has mastered the art of spinning an Oriental yarn in that Oriental manner so different from the Occidental that few have mastered it. Hussein is gorgeous entertainment not only in the story which it unfolds but also in the manner of the telling.
In his review in the New York Herald Tribune, Thomas Sugrue, not to be outdone, was moved to eloquence:
Young Patrick Russ, the author of Hussein, has said to himself, “Let’s make an Arabian Nights story, keep the plot structure and sequence, but rewrite it as a modern, realistic novel.” He probably didn’t quite know what was going to happen when he began. He was like an alchemist, mixing things on chance: Indian politics, fakirs, the lovely maiden in the tower, the elephant who loves and understands, the curse that kills, the bag of gold, the misfortunes sowed by fates, the rescue of the lovely maiden from the tower, and all the minor ingredients that go to make up the old and the new in the East. The result, when he saw it, must have been something of a surprise, for the experiment turned out as fortunately as Ben Franklin’s attempt to catch lightning in a jar. The story of Hussein is a swift-moving, well written account of events so fantastic that moonshine was certainly their mother. As the pages move by things become slightly plausible, then credible, then entirely believable. Finally they are living, factual events, and Hussein, in quest of his Sashiya, is a hero as alive and as human as Tom Jones seeking his Sophia.
In the July 9 Saturday Review of Literature, a somewhat more ambivalent reviewer nonetheless added to the chorus of American praise for Hussein: “This medley of Eastern folk-tales, assembled in the form of a novel … resembles the entertainment provided by those professional tellers of tales who have, since before the time of Homer, perpetuated the legends of their people for the price of their daily bread. The adventures are set in that pristine world of fiction where magic joins with realism … excellent entertainment for a thousand and second Arabian Night.”
Perhaps Hussein’s subdued reception in England owed more to the political climate than to the book’s lack of merit or the nation’s penchant for understatement. The stench of genocide was already wafting from the Continent, as is apparent in Wilfrid Gibson’s April 22 Manchester Guardian review: “It is a good yarn, rather in the nature of a boys’ story, but with more of a love interest than the puerile are apt to find palatable. It is sufficiently diverting, and I found it a pleasantly relaxing distraction from the stress of contemplating the menace of impending catastrophe which threatens to involve all us poor helpless men of goodwill.” The same edition of the Guardian reported the increasing persecution of Jews in Danzig and the Gestapo’s robbery and deportation of Jews in Austria.
Hitler’s army had occupied Austria in March. While Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain practiced appeasement, Britain prepared for war.
In the spring of 1938, Elizabeth Russ became pregnant again. But if the birth of Richard had brought the joy every new parent feels, then the birth of this child would bring the weight of the world crashing down on the young couple. On February 8, 1939, again at St. Mary Abbots Hospital, Elizabeth bore a daughter, whom the couple named Jane Elizabeth Campaspe Tudor. The unusual name “Campaspe” came from a Theban captive of Alexander the Great, whom Alexander loved for her beauty and freed, but then lost to the painter Apelles, with whom she fell in love while sitting for a portrait. Her story—recorded in the first century by Pliny in Natural History (XXXV, 36) and retold in John Lyly’s play Alexander and Campaspe in 1584—delighted Patrick, who almost certainly experimented as a visual artist.
Sadly, the daughter named for a famous love story was born with spina bifida, a disease for which there was no effective treatment at the time. Jane, as she was called, would live only three years.
Although the stress of caring for a hopelessly ill child would strain their relationship to the breaking point, something appears already to have been amiss between the Russes, for by the time the birth was registered, just five weeks later, Elizabeth, Richard, and Jane had left Gertrude Street and moved to 301 Ring’s Road, while Patrick remained behind. The two had been rash in choosing each other as partners, the way the young and lonely often are. Whereas Patrick’s life centered on literature, writing, and love of language, Elizabeth, though she had plenty of common sense, was nearly illiterate. Her education had been minimal and in Welsh.
Their marriage officially lasted another five years. Following Jane’s birth, the entire family moved to the flat countryside of Suffolk, in east-central England. They lived in a terrace house called Gadds Cottage, which shared a chimney with a vacant attached house. Gadds Cottage was remote enough to provide solitude for Patrick’s writing and to allow him to hunt for bird and game with a small-bore shotgun. A duck pond on the property was another source of food for the family. The ducks roosted in the backyard beside a tumbledown garden shed, which, following Russ tradition, Patrick named Lazar-house (a hospital for diseased people, especially lepers), for the general squalor and all the feathers shed there.
A loving mother and a capable provider, Elizabeth spoke tenderly in Welsh to her children and her animals (the ducks and a goat kept for milk). She managed the daily tasks of the household, and it was she who tended and disciplined Richard. When he threw the kitchen utensils into the pond or crushed one of the duck eggs they culled for food, she scolded him mildly. But she focused most of her attention on Jane in a vain attempt to prevent the onset of infection, which in those days ultimately killed most children with spina bifida.
Around this time, Patrick’s respiratory ailment “returned with greater severity,” as he later wrote, and he was left with a lingering weakness. Photographs, however, show him looking fit and healthy, sitting in a hammock with Jane on his lap and Richard by his side, coyly posing like a film noir detective lighting a cigarette, or standing with his single-barrel shotgun before a hunt. That is not to say that he did not experience an occasional flare-up of the tuberculosis or some other problem. He also complained of a bad back. Elizabeth told her son that there were lumps on his father’s spine caused by a plane crash at flight school.
In March 1939, as Hitler terrorized eastern Europe and Mussolini invaded Albania, Chamberlain guaranteed British support to Poland, Greece, and Romania, pushing the country to the brink of war. Britain solemnly prepared, conscripting soldiers and erecting radar stations. By August, when Russia and Germany sliced up Poland, London had emptied its hospitals, laid in a supply of quicklime for mass burials, and stockpiled papier-mâché coffins in city swimming pools ostensibly closed for repairs.
On September 1 and 2, the government evacuated a million children and 200,000 women from London, and on Sunday morning, September 3, Chamberlain announced that the nation was at war. Although the RAF shot down two German bombers over the Firth of Forth in Scotland in October, Britain remained in a state of limbo, at war but not fighting, a period dubbed the Phony War, an uncomfortable time of teeth gnashing, rising prices, disappearing goods, and last hurrahs.
The winter of 1939–40 was bitterly cold, with a North Sea wind that ravaged the Suffolk countryside. The duck pond at Gadds Cottage froze solid, and one day Elizabeth badly burned her hand when she gripped the freezing handle of the outdoor water pump too long. Because of the war, coal and coke were rationed, but at least in the country Patrick could find brush and cut wood for fuel, and he could hunt for food. When snow covered the ground, he buckled on cross-country skis and went in search of hare and partridge.
By Easter 1940, gas rations were exhausted, and private cars essentially ceased to operate. In May, the German army swept into France and the Low Countries, ending the Phony War, and on June 21, France surrendered to Germany. In July, German reichsmarschall Hermann Goring’s Luftwaffe began its assault on England’s air force in the prelude to Operation Sea Lion, the planned invasion of Britain. Defending England, Spitfires and Hurricanes fought Messerschmitts, just to have a shot at the slower bombers—Heinkels, Dorniers, and Junkers—easier targets but still equipped with deadly machine guns. Growing used to the racket in the sky, the English carried on with life, playing golf and cricket, taking postprandial walks, gardening, and working in the fields.
Charles, Zoe, and Joan now lived in Crowborough, south of London. Joan described to Barney in a letter their first brush with the Battle of Britain, which would determine the fate of Britain and, indeed, of Europe:
It was about 5:30, a hot afternoon. We’d just finished tea. Mother and Pa were both down the garden. I was messing about in the scullery when a deep droning suddenly began. I went out of the back door, and looking up through the plum trees, saw the planes at a dizzy height looking like minute silver fish twining and swooping round each other. The noise was disproportionately loud, and every now and then a sharp whine would break out and a plane would come down in a low sweep, to climb up again with a roar back to the fight. Ma and Pa came galloping up the garden, and some passers by came in for shelter. The noise grew terrific, and Ma and I crept under the table! The zooming seemed like bombs, but actually none came down. It was the first of an endless series of dog-fights, which went on, as you know, all that summer.
Deep emotions and atavistic impulses were stirred now, not only by the news from the Continent but by the sight of the enemy overhead. It was a time when an Englishman could no longer take England for granted. It was a time when he had to consider what he would sacrifice for his country.
Whether Patrick walked out of Gadds Cottage after an argument or failed to return after a research trip to London is unknown. What exactly caused him to leave the family in that summer of 1940 is also unclear. An urge to be involved somehow in the war, not to be left out of history while helplessly caring for a doomed child, might have overwhelmed his sense of responsibility at home. He might have felt guilty about being the father of a crippled child, a stigma in that day since the malady was often attributed to the infirmities or wickedness of the parents. He might have been unable to stand the daily torment of watching and hearing his infant daughter suffer. Elizabeth was emotionally stretched to the limit. Although she was normally happy-go-lucky, her world had changed dramatically. Her focus now was the flaw in her baby’s back. The tension exaggerated the personality differences between husband and wife and provided many reasons for resenting their current existence. Patrick’s creative endeavors suffered.
Regardless of the reason or the method, in a moment of weakness, he left his helpless family, causing permanent bitterness, not only between him and Elizabeth and Richard, but among his disapproving siblings. When they learned what had happened, Patrick’s oldest brother, Godfrey, and Connie, his wife, who were living in Thorpe-next-Norwich, drove out to Gadds Cottage and picked up Elizabeth and the two children. Even Richard, just three at the time, sensed the ominous mood and the finality of that ride to Norwich. Connie had packed a bucket of pickled eggs to tide him over, and the sloshing sound they made remained with him as a permanent reminder of that miserable day.
Not long afterward, Gadds Cottage was plowed under, and its foundations were entombed in a sea of asphalt, an airstrip of a U.S. Air Force base. But the Russ familial wound would fester and cause heartache for the rest of their lives.
* The following entry appeared in the London Gazette on December 4, 1934: “Royal Air Force: The short service commissions of the undermentioned Acting Pilot Officers in probation are terminated on cessation of duty—29th November 1934: William Ocock Pridham, Douglas George Scott; 1st December 1934: Basil Stuart Francis, Richard Patrick Russ, Thomas Brisbane Yule.”
* I corresponded with Joan and interviewed both sisters in April 2000.
† While there is no evidence to support this claim, it seems that some accident did occur during Patrick’s RAF training (he would complain of a bad back), and readers of the Aubrey-Maturin novels will certainly wonder if it is just a coincidence that Stephen Maturin most ingratiates himself with his shipmates by his remarkable ability to save lives by trepanning the skull.