BY HOLDING CLOSELY TO the truth, the British propaganda effort did more to sustain British influence in Europe than any other single factor. For five years it brought to the occupied countries of Europe the only news from the outside world. It kept alive the spark of hope in victory and was the backbone of the resistance movement in every country.
—Robert Bruce Lockhart, Comes the Reckoning, 1947
Between wartime austerity and secret service work, which demanded long, sometimes tense hours of concentration, Patrick and Mary lived a quiet, simple life, maintaining a small circle of friends. Together the two weathered the storms of their personal lives. In the course of three years, Patrick had lost a child and a brother and had abandoned his marriage. The Tolstoys’ divorce became official in November 1942. According to one Wicksteed family member, Dimitry offered Mary generous financial terms and custody of the children if she would leave Patrick. But she would not, and Dimitry turned almost obsessively spiteful. Ultimately, not only did he keep custody of the children, but he blocked Mary from even seeing them. This abysmal cloud followed her for the next thirteen years, until Nikolai came of age and visited her in France. In the meantime, he and Natasha were sent off to boarding schools, where even Mary’s letters were sometimes intercepted and not delivered. While Patrick at least had access to his son, Mary faced almost inhumane treatment on that score. The children often spent their holidays with Mary’s parents at Appledore or in London under the condition that they not come into contact with her.
Six months after the Tolstoy divorce was settled, Elizabeth Russ filed for divorce from Patrick. She, too, was extremely bitter. Still, though she reviled Patrick in front of their son, she did not seek money because she knew he had precious little to spare but also, she told Richard, “for the sake of his art.” But Patrick was certainly financially better off living with Mary than he had been, and this Richard could see if not fully understand.
Patrick tried to maintain a relationship with his son. Sometimes he picked him up at the apartment on King’s Road and took him for a walk around the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens or took him to the house where he and Mary lived. To Richard, Upper Cheyne Row, though not far from his mother’s small, dreary apartment, was a different world, one of splendor, polish, and intriguing objects. He was fascinated by Patrick’s gleaming Panther 250 motorbike, kept in the hallway under a sheet, his collection of Japanese swords, and by the air-raid shelter, made of angle iron and steel plate, in the cellar.
At the Cottage, Richard met Mary’s parents, Howard and Frieda Wicksteed, who were visiting; both were very upright and proper. In the cellar, Mary’s father, a classics scholar, and a retired captain in the Devonshire Regiment, mixed coal dust with straw and cement in flowerpots to create fuel for the fireplace. Wicksteed was a man of moral rectitude, who made a deep impression. He had been badly wounded in World War I and was invalided out of the army in 1917. But he refused to accept a pension on the grounds that he was a volunteer and had not served for money and therefore would not accept it now. A similar trait would be a hallmark of Patrick’s fictional character Stephen Maturin.
It was an odd domestic scene, as the Wicksteeds, very upset by the collapse of Mary’s marriage, blamed her for her separation from her children, no matter what the circumstances. But Richard remembers seeing his father on the floor humbly mashing potatoes in a china pot with a big wooden spoon, and hearing the Wicksteeds comment, “Oh, Patrick seems to be a very pleasant young man.”
With their friends, Patrick and Mary still displayed their youthful resilience. By and large, Londoners were intent on their jobs and on winning the war. When they socialized, because of the need for wartime secrecy, they kept their working lives to themselves. Among those whom the couple saw regularly was Walter Greenway, a major in the Royal Artillery, who had attended Cambridge with Dimitry and who had lived with the Tolstoys as a paying guest before the war.
Greenway had been appalled at Tolstoy’s treatment of Mary and remained loyal to her. He and his wife, Susan, lived in nearby Markham Square, and he worked in the Ministry of Supply, where he approved military equipment changes due to failure in action. A graduate in mathematics, Greenway was a man of technical skills and knowledge, which Patrick admired, while Greenway, in turn, was attracted to Patrick’s erudition and his passions. Patrick constantly engaged in a sort of intellectual sparring. Greenway was a good sport and countered with his practical knowledge; he knew more than Patrick about how weights and pulleys functioned, which gave him the edge in one of their favorite pastimes: shopping for and tinkering with clocks.
Patrick, at least in part inspired by a reading of the Irish novelist Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1760), desired to turn his longcase clock (which had no case) from one that needed frequent winding to one that, like Shandy’s, needed winding only once a month. To do this, the two friends devised a plan to attach a series of pulleys and a much heavier weight to the clock. They melted lead in a saucepan over the fire to make the hefty weight (on the order of fifty pounds), and they mounted the clock at the top of the stairs, so that the weight could hang down the stairwell. But no matter how they tinkered with the system, they never succeeded because the friction of the rope through the pulleys overrode their improvements to the clock.
Greenway bought his own longcase clock around this time, and Patrick added several interesting clocks to his collection. One, from the eighteenth century, had been converted from verge escapement to pendulum. Another was fourteen inches square, with a set of homemade pulleys; it kept very precise time—as long as the temperature did not vary greatly—and was known as the “Wonderfully Accurate Clock,” though that still meant losing a minute or so a week.
Patrick also gave Greenway the bug for naval history. Together, they combed the used bookstores in Charing Cross Road. Patrick later told a story about participating in a book auction one day, when a bomb fell near enough to call off the bidding. The last bid before the blast had been his, and he was delighted to claim his book at an especially favorable price.
The two friends reenacted Lord Howe’s famous 1794 naval victory over the French, known as the Glorious First of June, with matchsticks on the rug in front of the Cottage’s fireplace. To feed their discussions, they pored over the six-volume naval histories of eighteenth-century historian Robert Beatson and nineteenth-century historian William James. James’s Naval History of Great Britain from the Declaration of War by France in 1793 to the Accession of George IV (1822) remained the definitive account of naval actions during the Napoleonic wars. Another book, Edward Brenton’s Naval History of Great Britain from 1783 to 1822, provided the two matchstick commodores with the perspective of a naval post captain. These troves of information supplied the details to be hashed out and marveled over at tea or while Patrick puffed his straight-apple pipe.
Though their conversations ranged from the mechanics of clocks to the principles of war, there were things they did not speak about, namely, their war occupations. As Britain’s internal propaganda emphasized, “Careless Talk Costs Lives.” When Patrick spoke about his war work with Greenway, it was only in innocuous anecdotes. For several days, he railed against a lanky Harvard-educated American working at Bush House, perhaps a representative of the Office of War Information (OWI), who in a conversation corrected Patrick’s misquotation of some Shakespeare lines. But even when incensed, Patrick remained properly discreet. Though the audacious Yank was forever cursed, he also remained nameless.*
During this period an overwhelming sense of secrecy began to settle on Patrick, who was an effective agent and promoted within his department. He later told a reporter that after being warned during the war not to be photographed, he never again felt comfortable in front of a camera. Following the war, he eventually clamped down tightly on the information in his book-jacket biographies and disdained probing questions. In his Aubrey-Maturin novels and in his personal life, Patrick repeatedly showed that he valued few virtues more than discretion, a quality that is personified in Maturin, who guards his shipmates’ secrets even when he knows they threaten the authority of his best friend, Captain Aubrey, and the well-being of the ship.
Within the first forty pages of his first Aubrey-Maturin novel, Master and Commander, Patrick would poise Aubrey on the brink of an indiscretion in his curiosity about Maturin’s impressive knowledge of the Catalan language. “‘How …?’” begins Aubrey. “But finding that he was on the edge of questioning a guest he filled up the space with a cough and rang the bell for the waiter” (p. 36). In the fifteenth book in the series, The Truelove, the character Clarissa Oakes remarks to Maturin, “‘How pleasant it is to be sitting … next to a man who does not ply one with questions’” (pp. 162–63), just before she candidly unburdens her painful story to him. Perhaps the best-known passage in all of Patrick’s writing is also found in that novel, when Maturin says, “‘Question and answer is not a civilized form of conversation. … It is extremely ill bred, extremely usual, and extremely difficult to turn aside gracefully or indeed without offence.’” Patrick continued: “Stephen spoke with more than common feeling, for since he was an intelligence-agent even quite idle questions, either answered or evaded, might start a mortal train of suspicion” (p. 80).
In early 1943, Patrick and Mary’s new colleague at the PWE, Armand Goëau-Brissonnière, a specialist in ancient Greek in addition to being a renowned lawyer in peacetime, became an adviser to Dr. Beck. Goëau-Brissonnière helped maintain the group’s dialogue with the advisers of General de Gaulle, preventing potential conflicts between the leader of the Free French Forces and the PWE, whose propaganda had to be to a certain extent coordinated with the often contentious leader in exile.
Goëau-Brissonnière also wrote policy and intelligence reports for Beck’s unit and assessed works by other intelligence branches. Among the works that he either wrote or analyzed was a plan for demoralizing German submarine crews. Suggested goals consisted of thwarting the German sailor’s ability to rest and enjoy himself in port; weakening his trust in his family’s security in Germany; and undermining his faith in German war progress and the Nazi Party. Most of the techniques involved the spreading of propaganda, often through clandestine and BBC radio broadcasts, or directing such groups as Catholic priests, Communists and Socialists, Gaullists, or ship mechanics to perform certain acts, often violent.
German submarine crews tended to frequent private prostitutes or brothels specifically intended for Germans, making the brothels easy targets. The report suggested using “threats and the execution of threats” against the prostitutes, which would not be difficult to carry out because the idea of French women servicing German men was repugnant to the French.
On August 3, a Dr. P. Russ, presumably Patrick, who had reached the position of section head (though why the “Dr.” is unclear), wrote a letter politely asking Goëau-Brissonnière to write a series of five-hundred-word articles on the people and countryside of the regions of France for handbooks the group was preparing on Rouen, Rennes, Lille, Laon, and Lyons. In November, Goëau-Brissonnière critiqued a handbook on France for British officers and wrote a synopsis to help the officers to better use the book and to understand the current psychology of France.
In the spring of 1944, Goëau-Brissonnière was badly wounded in a bombing attack on London. Patrick wrote his colleague an eloquent note in the hospital. With a touch of dry humor, he noted that everyone in the office was sure the Frenchman lay near death until the return of Dr. Beck from a visit dispelled this rumor, and then everyone decided he was ready to waltz out of the hospital. The truth lay somewhere in between. Patrick offered to bring him some books to make his stay less tedious.
Shortly after he was released from the hospital in June, the unlucky Goëau-Brissonnière happened to be riding on a bus during one of the first VI bomb scares. Trying to maneuver through the panicky crowd on his crutches, he fell to the floor of the bus, reinjuring himself. He returned to the hospital, and Patrick and Mary were again very solicitous. Mary invited him to stay with them at the Cottage when he was released from the hospital, noting that their maid could look after him during the day. She also tried to visit him one day at lunchtime but got lost on the Underground, and by the time she got her bearings, she had to return to work. Patrick and Mary’s notes to their “dear colleague” never explicitly mentioned the momentous Allied invasion of France; instead, Mary provided him with a book containing some things she “hoped would amuse him.”*
In the summer of 1944, Joan Russ married an RAF mechanic from a working-class Birmingham family. Charles and Zoe did not approve and refused to attend the Roman Catholic ceremony. That fall, a month after German forces in Paris surrendered, setting off a week of celebrations, Patrick’s cousin Charles Russ, one of Sidney and Mary’s two sons serving in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, was killed in Ceylon.
In February 1945, Allied forces crossed the German border. Barney Russ, now a lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Medical Corps, found himself in a slit trench near Kleve, Germany, where German artillery hit an ammunition dump behind the Allied trenches, setting off a stupendous explosion that killed a number of men and detonated munitions throughout the night. The unit’s chaplain had moved up the line, so the next day, Barney was ordered to perform burials. With an icy wind blowing and German shells raining down, the soldiers wrapped their dead in army blankets and dropped them into graves. They huddled around, as Barney later recalled, while he read the unrehearsed service. But when he reached Psalm 23, the wind blew the loose page into a grave. Opting not to disturb the corpse, Barney carried on from vague memory, which necessitated splicing in lines from Pilgrim’s Progress and Paradise Lost to reach a reasonable length.
Barney, whose war experience, unlike Patrick’s, provided him with an arsenal of good—and sometimes far-fetched—stories to tell back home, continued serving with the occupying troops in Germany. One rainy day as he drove back to base, his jeep suddenly spun out of control and hit a tree. His head and right foot were severely injured. Unconscious, Barney was airlifted back to Bramshot, England, where he spent almost a year recuperating. Later he learned that his jeep had been sabotaged by young Germans who made a practice of cutting various control mechanisms in Allied vehicles and adding sugar to the fuel tanks of Allied aircraft.
That spring, despite the fact that war was still being waged in the Far East, life in London started its slow transition back to normal. The last manned air attack on Britain occurred in early March. At the end of the month, the last V1s and V2s hit the city. On May 8, Churchill made his eagerly awaited announcement: the war in Europe was over.
The foreign office, desperately short of staff, needed qualified personnel to fill embassy positions in liberated nations. It turned to the PWE, an organization that would be phased out, for candidates. Patrick was offered the post of a third secretary in the Paris embassy, an indication of the high regard in which he was held as a section leader in the PWE and the strong relationships he and Mary had forged with the likes of Goëau-Brissonnière. He turned down the post, probably due to a combination of factors: To take such a position required personal wealth; self-sufficiency was a requisite. Even with Mary’s help, Patrick did not have the money. Though it needed a bit of resuscitation, Patrick still possessed a passion for writing. And lastly, no matter how essential the cause, he had grown somewhat sickened by the service he had had to perform during the war. The secret services at times were necessarily ruthless in achieving their aims. In order to move on, Patrick needed time and self-reflection to reckon with this phase of his life.* England had sacrificed more than 300,000 military men and 34,000 merchant marines in the war against totalitarianism. German bombing had destroyed half a million houses. In London, returning military men could not find work. Squatters abounded, and others lived in barrackslike temporary housing. The city was physically devastated. Rationing remained in effect. Patrick and Mary decided to leave. But first they had business to finish.
In the Russ divorce case, the court had issued a decree nisi in December 1944; on June 25, 1945, Patrick and Elizabeth were officially divorced. Ten days later, Patrick and Mary married at the Chelsea Register Office, with two friends, Jane Dunn Byrne and May Whitely, as witnesses.* After all that Patrick and Mary had been through, the two still made a nod to decorum. On their marriage certificate, Patrick recorded his residence as “1 Upper Cheyne Row,” while Mary listed “The Cottage, Upper Cheyne Row,” though they were one and the same.
But the transformation was not complete. On July 20, Patrick signed the document to change his, Mary’s, and his son’s surname from Russ to O’Brian. So unceremonious was the event that he did not bother to call and inform eight-year-old Richard, who learned of his new name during recess at Southey Hall, his school, when the headmaster tapped him on the head and said, “Right, you’re now called O’Brian.” No fuss was made, and Patrick never spoke about the name change to his son.
On August 14, Patrick’s new literary agent, Spencer Curtis Brown, appeared before the commissioner of oaths to make it official. Brown, the Cambridge-educated son of Albert Curtis Brown, founder of the prestigious literary agency Curtis Brown, Ltd., had served in the Special Services branch of the Intelligence Corps from 1943 to 1945. In 1945, at the age of thirty-nine, he had become the agency’s chairman.
Of all people, he was acutely aware of the sacrifice Patrick was making to change his identity. With his third book, Patrick had established a foothold on a solid literary reputation, particularly in the United States. Nonetheless, he was determined to go through with it. To the commissioner of oaths, Brown swore:
I have for fifteen years and upwards personally known and been well acquainted with Richard Patrick O’Brian formerly known as Richard Patrick Russ the person who has executed the Deed now produced and shown to me and marked “A.”
The said Richard Patrick O’Brian who has executed the said Deed marked “A” and the person referred to as Richard Patrick Russ in the said Certificate of Birth are one and same person.*
The documents were enrolled in the Central Office of the Supreme Court of Judicature on August 20, 1945. It was official. Patrick Russ, now O’Brian, had forsaken his family name. It was an act that would in many ways haunt him for the rest of his life.
Easing back into the realm of literature, Patrick O’Brian decided to produce an anthology of early English travel writing. On December 3, 1945, Spencer Curtis Brown sold the book concept, titled A Book of Voyages, to the publisher Home and Van Thal.
But Patrick and Mary could not afford the literary life in London even if they wanted it. The Wicksteeds moved into the Cottage, where they lived for many years. To some degree they may have turned their backs on the couple. Perhaps they frowned on this marriage of passion and Patrick’s determination to write, which promised only poverty. They certainly lamented the fact that Mary could not raise her children.
Patrick and Mary had forged a bond under fire. She had sacrificed everything for him, and he would wholly commit himself to this marriage. They were now a steely, independent unit. Emerging from the war, they would create a new life together, different from anything that they had experienced before. They would live as one, work as one, move as one, and the world and their pasts could not interfere with that.
* Among the possibilities is the Yale-and Harvard-educated poet Archibald MacLeish. An official in the OWI, MacLeish was in London in 1942 to coordinate efforts for Operation Torch, a planned Anglo-American invasion of North Africa.
* Robert Bruce Lockhart’s Comes the Reckoning offers a riveting account of the tensions at Bush House before and after D-Day.
* Barley Alison, a friend of Patrick’s at the foreign office, from a wealthy Australian family, accepted the post. She went on to become a legendary editor at Weidenfeld and Nicolson and then at Seeker and Warburg, where she had her own imprint, Alison Press.
* At the war’s end, the register office was a busy, if not romantic, place. When Patrick’s future publisher Rupert Hart-Davis attended his sister’s marriage there, after a spell in the waiting room, his father piped up, “Since we seem to have plenty of time, we might as well make arrangements for my funeral” (Rupert Hart-Davis, Halfway to Heaven, p. 19).
* Deed poll 10/-1060.