I FOUND MY MOTHER to be suffering from the after-effects of influenza and also the frailty to be expected of her age. Once she had recovered her energy and spirits, it became clear that she felt like a change of scene. It was arranged that she should go to stay with Welsh relatives in Carmarthen.
By chance the move fitted in with my plans. I had gone recently for a medical check-up where the doctor informed me that I was suffering from the peacetime aftermath of the constant and sometimes frenetic activity of the war years, and advised me most emphatically to adopt a more active and demanding life-style. I was to keep moving, revert as far as possible to the health-giving occupations the army had provided, be on the alert—ready to spring into action both by day and night. ‘But it’s not necessary any longer. I don’t need it,’ I objected. ‘Your body and your brain do,’ he said. ‘Do you enjoy sport?’ he asked and I shook my head. ‘How about horse-riding, tennis, squash?’ I couldn’t work up an enthusiasm, I told him. ‘You like the countryside, you tell me. You could go for long hikes.’ Knowing myself, I told him, I would never keep it up. A final suggestion was rock-climbing, which had some appeal for me. At least the scenery might be good. He was delighted. ‘As it happens it’s one of my principal interests,’ he said. He usually climbed in the Grampians where the climate imposed a valuable test with the added stimulus of risk. I was no masochist, I told him, and he recommended Pembrokeshire, where he had also climbed, ‘and you get your kicks the easy way’.
The area particularly recommended was only thirty miles from Carmarthen, where my mother intended to stay for the rest of the year, so I set out to find a suitable cottage somewhere along the Pembrokeshire coast. I was all in favour of Pembrokeshire, where the people lived on boiled mutton and bacon you had to wash the salt out of before cooking it.
To my amazement, on consulting a Carmarthen house agent I was told that he had nothing of the kind I was looking for on his books. What he could offer was a castle and he read out a few of the overwhelming details. It possessed four turrets, each containing three bedrooms, a banqueting hall flanked by six spacious living-rooms, ample servants quarters below stairs, an exceptionally large kitchen, wine cellars, and the usual offices. It was furnished, he had been informed, but not in a lavish style. The rent was £6 per week. This struck me as low for what was on offer, and he said that the demand for castles was limited, to some extent due to the impossibility of finding staff in these days. Castles could be awkward to live in, he thought, and the people who occasionally took them, sometimes organised themselves so as not to occupy more than a minimum of space. The castle in this case had not been occupied for the past five years.
I pressed for further details and it turned out not to be a castle at all, but St Catherine’s Fort in Tenby, situated on top of a rock about thirty yards offshore in the bay. It had been bought as a speculation by a local solicitor who had attempted to change the name by painting Tenby Castle in huge black letters on a fairly small rock surface facing the town. There was no legal way of stopping this piece of impudence, although Tenby Post Office refused to accept letters carrying this address. The solicitor meanwhile ignored letters addressed to St Catherine’s Fort.
Going to Tenby to view the property, I found it roughly as described. Among minor additions to the agent’s description was the inexplicable presence in the banqueting hall and rooms of the corpses of many small birds, some of which had been so long dead that they had virtually turned to powder. Letting myself in through the fake baronial doors, the first thing that met my eye was a gigantic bearskin rug, the head gazing up at the visitor with penetrating yellow eyes. The flat roof was home to innumerable nesting seabirds among the deep stench of guano deposits accumulated over a half-century.
When I took the place the agent seemed surprised, and it was only at this second meeting, and with my signature already on the document, that other disadvantages of life at the fort came out. I learned that there were no deliveries by any tradesmen, due to the difficulty in hauling goods up the steep and slippery steps cut in the rock. Likewise mail had still to be collected from the post office. He could find me a housekeeper, he said, mentioning that she was a missionary of one of the many obscure religious sects of the area, who would bring with her a daughter who was understudying her. Inconveniences might arise when she asked for days off to preach at chapels, where sermons were not only preached on Sundays but on weekdays. At some time during this conversation he mentioned a general belief that the fort was haunted by more than one ghost, and I told him that I imagined that that could well be the case. There was a special warning, ‘Watch out for the tides,’ he said. The rock was cut off by the tide for six hours at a time. This meant that you were frequently imprisoned at times when you had hoped to ‘go ashore’. It was important to remember that if you failed to beat the tide closing in when you decided to return, the shore visit would be prolonged for six hours longer than intended.
Life at St Catherine’s, as I had suspected, turned out to be a game of chance, offering mixtures of mystery, frustration and adventure. There were times when I felt halfway on the road back to early man with none of the tools he had been able to make for himself to tackle the problems of his day. I was unable at first to discover how the gas system operated and caused an explosion. This left me deaf for a few seconds, after which I gave up and fetched an expert who came grudgingly from the town to demonstrate the working of the battery of gas cylinders and their related equipment kept at the bottom of a dark cellar.
On the first night I slept in a bed in one of the town’s pubs, and next morning Eiluned Price and her eighteen-year-old daughter Rose of Sharon arrived at the fort. I heard an unidentified sound I first ascribed to the soughing of the wind through the immense keyhole of the baronial doors and went out to find my new housekeeper and her daughter in full flight of the well-known hymn Let Us With a Cheerful Mind (praise the Lord for he is kind), sung in this case in Welsh in robust contralto voices. This at an end, Mrs Price explained that the hymn was their standard preliminary to any job they took on. A kind of prophylactic, as she explained beamingly, against the power of evil which was everywhere to be encountered. Both ladies were dressed in brightly flowered dresses worn with short, religious capes in the style of the Salvation Army, but after the initial burst of religiosity the capes came off and the pair got down to work with such vigour that by the end of a hard-slogging day, most of the grime of five years had been expunged. Rose of Sharon, despatched to the town for essential provisions, returned with blood sausage and unleavened bread specially made by one of the bakers for the sect. Mrs Price hoped that it would be the first of many meals she prepared for me. I was relieved to learn that her sect, the Beth Miriams, followed biblical dietetic rules and the Welsh standby, over-salted bacon, was out.
Rock-climbing, the announced reason for my presence in Wales, was not to be avoided, but being a bad performer at sports of all kinds, I was convinced that no good would come of it, and this proved to be the case. Westward of Tenby, the road through Solva to St David’s frequently passes close to the edge of the cliffs, offering seascape views unchanged since pre-history. On my first exploratory day I tried an unambitious preliminary climb and found myself in an uncontrollable slide among shale which brought me within yards of a hundred-foot drop. From this dangerous amateurism I took refuge in long and hopefully invigorating walks and bird-watching. This, in an area devoid of the human presence, was extraordinary, with peregrines to be seen at their nesting-sites on cliff ledges, and on one occasion a parliament of ravens, as described in the bird books, with fifty of these excessively rare birds gathered to perform some mysterious social ritual in a farmer’s field.
In a way the fort was a good place to work in. Weather in Pembrokeshire was a little worse than in Southern England. The massive stone pile on its rock top seemed to draw on itself the full bluster and rage of storms, and for days on end the town, so close when the sun came out, disappeared behind sheets of rain. Bad weather freed me from the obligation to go ashore and take long, lonely, beneficial walks, and I would settle to work in the central redoubt of the banqueting hall. Here I escaped the worst of the gale’s shindy, although the living rooms reverberated and clanked endlessly and the wind whimpered through keyholes and round the edges of loose-fitting panes of glass. On these days of strict confinement, I plunged deeply into the books and documents I had brought back from Guatemala and planned the structure of my book on pre-Colombian culture although with every month that passed its completion date became more problematical and remote. Almost by way of light relief I began my first novel, based on my war-time experiences in Algeria. It was now nearly two years since peace had been declared, and I wanted to write about the war while it was still fresh in my memory.
In the meanwhile the loneliness and sense of isolation lying in wait in such a place was kept at bay by the presence of the two Prices, scrubbing woodwork, polishing windows or over-cooking off-the-ration scrag-end of neck to the accompaniment of resounding and triumphant songs of praise.
‘Mr Lewis, bach, please say if we are disturbing you with our singing.’
‘You never do that, Mrs Price. I enjoy it.’
‘Very kind of you to say that. Pity, but there was only kidney in the butcher’s shop today.’
‘Then we’ll have to make do with it, Mrs Price.’
‘With all the fish in the sea funny it is we can’t get fresh fish. Are you a fisherman, Mr Lewis, bach?’
‘I’m afraid I’m not, but I’ll have a go.’
‘Tomorrow I’ll bring a line and some bait and you shall try.’
‘I certainly will.’
She was going then stopped. ‘Hymns Ancient and Modern,’ she said. ‘We could sing them in English for your benefit. Better it would be if you understood the words.’
‘Not at all, Mrs Price. They sound splendid in Welsh. Quite like Latin.’
‘Well, that is a compliment indeed. Something we much appreciate. Mr Lewis, bach …’
‘Yes, Mrs Price.’
‘You heard the rumour that the last occupant but one hanged himself from the hook under which you are now sitting?’
‘I’ve heard it, but I’ve paid it no attention.’
‘I am sorry but I have reason to believe it is true.’
‘In that case I’ll get someone to take the hook down, Mrs Price.’
Next day Mrs Price arrived with a line and a can full of bait and I fished with it in turbulent seas but caught nothing.
‘You tried,’ Mrs Price said, ‘which is the best any of us can do, but Almighty God hasn’t given you the knack. I see you here working hard. You can’t be good at everything.’
They were to spend the afternoon at a funeral at which Mrs Price would officiate and spent much of the morning practising passionate laments. I listened to Mrs Price’s flow of the noble oratory of the funeral service.
‘Mr Lewis, bach, do you really believe that your redeemer liveth?’
‘It’s something many people would like to believe, Mrs Price.’
I missed them, but by way of compensation the sun came out while they were away. The herring gulls resumed their joyful hysteria overhead, and Tenby with its soft, rain-washed colours came layer by layer into focus through the sheaves of mist.
I watched the streets of the town through my binoculars. After the cold rectangles of Carmarthen, the featureless and identical terraced houses and the blunt facades of chapels, Tenby seemed frivolous. This was the capital of an English enclave that had been named Little England Beyond Wales. According to a body of opinion, the English had moved in and taken it over because they saw that it had the makings of the only pleasant seaside resort reasonably accessible to the coalfields and iron foundries of South Wales, where they dominated the scene. When I was in Carmarthen as a child the choice of the summer holiday lay between Llanstephan, which although exceedingly romantic in appearance was small and somewhat dreary, and Tenby, a real town and a metropolis of pleasure. There was nothing here of the Wales of the stubborn, silent whitewashed villages. To Tenby the English had brought colour and fantasy, with fanciful little buildings that could have been French or even pseudo-oriental stuck into odd corners to drive out the last of the Celtic monotony.
There was no money anywhere else in South-west Wales but the English spenders had brought money here, and walking in the streets you could pick them out not only by their well-cut clothes, but by their size. As the Western Mail had noted, the people of English stock who had come to live in Pembrokeshire were taller, on average, by 1½ inches than the Welsh natives of the country. Tenby had dress shops, pubs that admitted ladies to the saloon bars, a single prostitute lurking near the bus station on Saturday nights, and a public urinal with a fine cast-iron screen. It also had an antique shop and in this I was offered a cannon ball which inspired me to take a closer look at the history of St Catherine’s Fort, largely to be discovered from old newspaper cuttings. It was clearly a folly of the most expensive kind, built in the fifties of the last century when, improbably enough, the government of the day believed that they had reason to fear a sudden attack by the French and ordered the erection of this and three other such forts at vulnerable points along the Pembrokeshire coast. There could hardly have been any area in the south of the British Isles, even supposing the French had suddenly fallen victims to expansionist madness, where an invasion could have been more pointless. Nevertheless the project was carried out at huge cost, and the forts when complete were advertised as the culmination in defensive military architecture, with a sea-facing curtain wall sixteen feet thick through the embrasures of which twenty-five guns of the largest calibre to that date pointed in the direction of the enemy that never appeared. Shortly after completion a ship attempting to navigate between the rock and the shore carried away the bridge joining St Catherine’s to the land. This brought about long confinement of the garrison to the rock, inducing in the end a form of claustrophobia so acute that the fort’s batteries bombarded the town. There is no record of the outcome of this mutiny, unique in British history. At the time of my stay cannon balls were still being recovered from the gardens of houses fronting the sea.
A week or so later I went to collect my letters from the post-office, where I was received by a small Welsh lady, with an outburst of melodious astonishment. ‘The Fort is it? Quite a collection of them we have, some of them dating back for donkey’s years.’ The letters were those abandoned by the solicitor. There was one waiting for me from Singapore from a Chinese, Loke Wan Tho. I had met him in unusual circumstances outside a pub in Epping Forest where I had stopped to allow my Alfa Romeo racing car to cool down. The car had won a Le Mans race, and I had had the good fortune to acquire it for an absurdly low price in Italy. It attracted Loke’s attention and he pulled up alongside. He was driving a new Mercedes, of which only two had been made, and was accompanied by a beautiful young English girl whose main claim to distinction was her possession, as I later learned, of a hundred or possibly two hundred pairs of shoes. Loke took a fancy to the Alfa and I was dazzled by the Merc, which was the most astonishing car I had ever seen. We each took the other’s car for a short spin, and then, as though it was the most ordinary of propositions, Loke suggested a swap. ‘You mean here and now? On the spot?’ I asked, wondering if this could be some oriental form of joke. ‘Certainly,’ Loke said. ‘You can have my car, and I’ll take over yours. Our people can fix up all the legal details.’ If it had been possible to put a price on the Mercedes I would have put it at three times that of the somewhat battered Alfa. I had no way of knowing that what was proposed was to a very rich man no more than a trivial whim. For the first time I was encountering great wealth, which was so unfamiliar that it seemed almost incomprehensible. I explained to him that it was not a matter of relative values but that I had half committed myself to a project by which the Alfa was to be converted for racing at Brooklands. The explanation satisfied him. He was at that time an undergraduate at Cambridge and he gave me an address in the town in case I should change my mind.
This I did, for the Alfa proved unsuitable for conversion, and a letter went off to Loke to enquire if he were still interested. Several months passed before a reply came. He had been away touring in Germany and a photograph enclosed with the letter showed the wreck of the admired car. It had been hit by a train at an unguarded crossing and the impact sliced away the rear wheels. Loke had taken me seriously, for the car was now under repair in Frankfurt. There it would naturally be completely repaired and he asked, ‘Any particular colour you prefer?’
Years were to pass before we were in contact again, for the Munich crisis was upon us, changing both our worlds. Loke, obliged to drop everything, was called back to Singapore. Escaping the Japanese invasion, he was on the New Moller when it was sunk in an air attack, and was rescued from the water with severe burns and temporary loss of sight. Now, for the first time, he was back in England, and was pleasurably astonished to learn that I was rock-climbing in Pembrokeshire, a famous venue for bird-watchers, of which he was one. He said he would like to come to see me, and I invited him down.
For all its zany charm and modest comforts, Tenby was not in fact bird-watching country. This was to be practised at its best some thirty or so miles along the coast, further to the west, and after a quick reconnaissance I found a tiny, semi-derelict cottage in the village of Little Haven which I rented for the period of Loke’s proposed stay. The cottage, which would have suited me quite well had I known of its existence in the first place, was primitive indeed, possessing neither electric light, running water nor sanitary arrangements of any kind.
Thirty yards back from the high tide mark lay the frontier of the twentieth century, but down by the shore it was Britain before the Romans waded ashore. Mysteriously, this was one of the Pembrokeshire ‘English’ villages with an inhabitant even in possession of a double-barrelled name. But whatever the real or assumed family trees Newhaven was a scruffy place, for waste of all kinds that the villagers were too lazy to bury was tipped along the shore in the certain knowledge that apart from tin cans it would be consumed by enormous and confident rats. The contents of latrines were disposed of more discreetly at night, being emptied into the sea at a reasonable distance from the beach when the tide had turned. Some illegal slaughtering went on in times of continuing food shortages and rationing, and small piles of tripes left after sundown on the shore were neatly removed by a pair of foxes tripping delicately over the rocks at dawn.
Loke arrived brimming with enthusiasm and, apart from areas of glistening pink skin round the eyes, little changed in his appearance. The Little Haven scene was one into which he plunged with relish after a brief flicker of surprise at the sight of the house-rat ascending the stepladder to the bedrooms. The fact that the villagers appeared not to notice the presence almost everywhere of the rats seemed to him evidence of a latent Buddhism in the Welsh character. The reverse of the primitive coin displayed summer life by the sea in its most brilliant guise: seals in every cove, a stream with an otter at the back of the hill, and a bluster of wax-white gulls always in the sky. None of the boats from Milford Haven bothered to come here to fish and such, in season, was the largesse of the sea that there were mornings when villagers who could put out of mind what the night tides carried away, brought buckets to the water’s edge to scoop up swirling masses of whitebait trapped in the shallows.
In this scene Loke was in his element. At the time of our first meeting, he had been on his way to photograph birds, and now bird photography had become the principal interest in Loke’s life. With all the ravens and peregrines, and even the rumour of a Montagu’s harrier breeding somewhere in the vicinity, it came as a surprise to find Loke occupied with his first love, the common wren, to be seen hunting its microscopic prey just out of reach of the spume. Ensconced in brambles and bracken he trained his twenty-inch telephoto lens on a one-and-a-half inch bird and there were soft exclamations of triumph when, perhaps once in an hour, he got the shot for which such weighty and sensitive apparatus had been brought huge distances to this spot.
Three island sub-species of troglodytes—the family of wrens—were to be found on St Kilda, the Hebrides and the Shetlands, he informed me, the differences arising largely from the variations in their song performed in the ends of sexual attraction against the never-ending thunder of the surf on such islands. His hope was to identify a fourth variation based on the island of Skomer, which lay only a few miles from Little Haven. This, despite some days of field work in which I assisted, he never did.
Most of the nearby islands showed traces of ancient settlements. On Skomer a sizeable farmhouse, now partially in ruins, had not been occupied for possibly a century, but shortly before our arrival Reuben Codd had taken it in hand and begun a partial restoration, and had recently been joined by his wife and child. Using stones collected from the old ruins, he had patched the holes in the farmhouse walls in such a way that it now stood up to any weather. He kept a cow and a calf, a few sheep, and chickens that were recovering ancestral powers of flight. Where it was evident that crops had been grown in the old days he dug in seaweed to renew the fertility of the soil and planted the basic vegetables. The Codds gave every appearance of enjoying their life-style, and their house was full of laughter. To outsiders such as us this came close to an idyllic existence, and it was clear that this was an experience that had a considerable effect on Loke.
Reuben had made two rooms habitable, and a trickle of visitors who were inevitably interested in bird-life had begun to arrive. The island possessed immense colonies of seabirds, in particular Manx shearwaters, and our presence coincided with the end of a successful experiment carried out in connection with these. R. M. Lockley, the famous ornithologist then living on the neighbouring island of Skokholm, had carried out a study of the shearwaters living and nesting by the tens of thousands in the burrows on the grassy slopes of the cliffs of the island. During the breeding season birds were taken from their holes and released at various distances from home. It was found that a bird released 220 miles from the nesting hole took ten hours to find its way back, and one released in Spain was found in its burrow after two weeks. The Skomer experiment was more ambitious, for a bird was taken by plane to South Africa. This time it took just under 3 weeks to cover the enormous distance. The bird arrived in good shape, with the loss of a few ounces, but clearly anxious to resume its nesting routine. What was even more extraordinary, according to our informants, was that the shearwaters’ powerful homing instinct was not exclusively directional, for it had been proved that in preference to a direct flight overland a bird might choose a longer and circuitous oceanic route.
Loke chased after his wrens endlessly with camera and recording gear, but it was the researches carried out here into the mysteries of birds’ instincts that captured his imagination. This was life as he wished to be allowed to live it, but he was overshadowed by the melancholy knowledge that within days he would return to Singapore and the compulsions of the world of affairs.
‘Surely it’s yours to choose what you prefer to do?’ I suggested.
‘I must admit I would like to spend the rest of my life taking photographs of birds.’
‘And can’t you?’
‘No, but it’s impossible to explain why.’
He was a ruler of an empire it gave him little pleasure to possess: an empire of cinemas, rubber, tin and real estate, and he had become one of the rich men of the world. Yet now he admitted that he would return to Singapore with reluctance. His wealth stalked him like a dragon, for custom committed him to the pursuit of riches for which he had little inclination, for, removed from his background, his tastes proved frugal and austere. In the introduction to his book, A Company of Birds, published when he was accepted as the best bird photographer in Asia, he lays the blame on destiny: ‘I was destined to be a business man,’ he writes. Of his ornithology he adds an explanation. ‘Every man needs some invisible means of support.’ How sad that the empty rituals of a man of affairs should have usurped so much of his life.
Loke went off to Singapore and I back to Tenby in time to assist the Prices in a grand reception of potential converts to Beth Miriam held in the fort’s banqueting hall, from which not only the sinister hook in the roof but the bearskin rug with its unsettling eyes had now been removed. There I stayed for two more months, walking, between visits to my mother in Carmarthen, along the gaunt cliff-tops, and living largely on excellent seaweed bread, cockles which abounded in the Tenby sands, and odds and ends of mutton delivered secretly on alternate days. Towards the end of September autumn made its dramatic appearance with Atlantic gales that drew veils of spray across the sky and filled the rooms with the cannonade of huge Atlantic breakers. At their most violent these batterings spread a vibration through the rock that could be felt in the tips of the fingers pressed against an outer wall. There were days, too, when it was impossible to ‘go ashore’. In compensation fresh food became unexpectedly available, for small fish, killed or only stunned, were sometimes thrown out of the water and landed on lower ledges where they could be reached.
By the time of this passage through the equinoctial frontier, little had been done to expand the framework of the Guatemalan book. Documents galore, some in old Spanish, remained to be read, and I was beginning to doubt whether these conditions—which I was assured by the locals were no more than a sample of what was to come—would be conducive to literary labours. Mrs Price and Rose Sharon left suddenly to open a mission in Cardiff, earlier than had been intended. Taking me into her confidence, Eiluned told me that she had felt it advisable to cut short the mission in Tenby as Rose Sharon had fallen in love with our butcher, who she regarded as unsuitable as a prospective member of her family, although he offered himself for conversion.
To round off perhaps a rather sad occasion, Mrs Price asked me if I would join them in a verse of that cheerful valedictory hymn beginning ‘Now praise we all our Lord’, to be sung, she insisted, in Welsh. A little nervously I agreed and, after a couple of run-throughs to try out the words, I added my soft, baritone croaking to their soaring voices. Routine compliments at the end were shown up for what they were by Mrs Price’s verdict, ‘Well, to be perfectly frank, Mr Lewis, bach, there’s no-one will say that as a singer you’re not better than a fisherman.’
In the spring of 1948 I returned to London where I sounded out the market for a short first novel. I took advice from a mentor in such matters, a member of Routledge who had published my photographs taken in Southern Arabia. ‘It’s publishable,’ he said bleakly, ‘but perhaps not for us.’ ‘Why not start at the top and go for Jonathan Cape, and then work your way down? You’ve nothing to lose.’
This I did, and to my utter surprise received a letter from Cape’s reader Daniel George asking me to call to discuss modifications which might make the book acceptable for publication. But when I phoned to arrange an appointment, George came on the line with the incredible news that Jonathan Cape had now read the book and would take it as it was. This left me with a feeling almost of having offered myself under false pretences. Cape at this time had reached the summit of its prestige as indisputably the leading literary publisher in Britain. Within a decade of its foundation in 1921, the firm had published such stars of the literary firmament as C. M. Doughty, author of the classic Arabia Deserta, H.G. Wells, Sinclair Lewis and T.E. Lawrence—a literary performer who was to make the fortune of the firm. These names were followed by James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Graves, and many more of their calibre, so that by the late thirties there were few writers of world-wide prominence who had escaped inclusion in the Cape list.
Summoned to an interview with Daniel George, I was led into his presence at 30 Bedford Square. After glimpses of patrician Georgian interiors, I found him in an oblong cubby-hole, so narrow that it might have been a segment of a corridor. Daniel, hunched at his desk, was hardly visible among a thicket of manuscripts piled to a considerable height on the floor, the window ledges and his desk. In some cases these looked no more promising than the dog-eared, red-taped documentation shoved into odd corners of an old-fashioned lawyer’s office. Others had been expensively bound for presentation and I was to learn that both extremes were disapproved of, and lessened the author’s chances of success.
Daniel was extremely affable, with a pleasantly sardonic sense of humour that he allowed to come frequently into play. When I commented on the accumulation of hopeful effort over which he presided, he said that he had his method of dealing with it. It was probably at our next meeting that he mentioned this method as being an adaptation of the one invented by his predecessor, the celebrated Edward Garnett. According to an account in the book published by Michael Howard, the firm’s junior director, Garnett ‘would turn over a few pages and quickly make up his mind whether to read [the book] carefully, and if so put it on one side to be sent down to his flat’.
Garnett had read about ten manuscripts a week. Whether reading them or not, Daniel George had to deal with an immensely larger number. His system was to read the first page, then perhaps two or three pages from the middle of the book, before turning to the end, the whole process occupying perhaps a quarter of an hour. He told me that he was easily put off, as by a single sentence in bad English, pretentious imagery, or ridiculous subject matter. A famous author of that day, venturing upon autobiography, had fatally embarked on page one on an affectionate account of his earliest memory of himself seated on a chamber-pot. Daniel was merciless with literary affectation, and with the repetitive pet phrases with which some authors studded their work. Double negatives were hunted down with ferocity, a special bête noire being a sentence that begun with ‘It was as if—’. Sometimes persons in high places wishing to try their hand at writing books responded vigorously and with effect to Daniel’s criticisms. It was just before our first meeting that he had caused an uproar by attempting to turn down a book of favourite poems by Lord Wavell, then Viceroy of India. Although Daniel George protested that many of the poems had been sketchily remembered and incorrectly quoted, he was officially silenced and the book became a bestseller under the title Other Men’s Flowers.
Daniel and I went on to see a good deal of each other, and when I felt that it would not be inappropriate to do so, I asked him if the beginning, middle and ending method had been applied in my case, and he confirmed that it had. What had probably saved the day for me was that he had opened the manuscript at a page describing the destruction by artillery fire of an Arab village in Algeria. The gunner in search of some clearly defined object in a background of heat-haze and shapeless mud huts had chosen with huge reluctance to range on a tethered horse. He read on, and I was saved. I asked Daniel what Jonathan Cape liked about the book and he said, ‘It’s about abroad. He never goes anywhere except New York on business. The only books he really enjoys reading are about travel, and he said yours could have been one. He’d have probably liked it better if you’d have left out the plot.’
Samara was within a few months of publication when I made a second visit to Bedford Square, in early 1949, having been invited to lunch with Jonathan Cape himself. It had been mentioned by Daniel that Irish stew inevitably featured on these occasions, and this was frequently burnt. Such authors as were favoured with an invitation to lunch, knew the place as ‘Heartburn House’. Daniel George and the poet William Plomer, who helped out with the reading of manuscripts, were also to be there, and in a brief aside Daniel warned me that Jonathan had just returned from an Easter holiday at Eastbourne with his wife, of which we must expect to be treated to a lengthy description. Both these men stood in awe of their employer who, having started work as an errand boy at Hatchard’s bookshop, Piccadilly, had read as many as he could of the books he delivered and through them prepared himself for admission to the world of the famous and the great.
He proved to be tall, imposing and stately, like the most eminent of Strache’s eminent Victorians, cultivating intentionally, it might have been, a slightly outdated appearance. By reputation he was autocratic and blunt, but no-one could have been more courteous on this occasion. He made a brief but kindly reference to my book, after which the conversation moved on as foreseen to the Eastbourne holiday.
‘Normally I am an early riser,’ Jonathan began, ‘never later than seven. On holiday my wife and I set out to spoil ourselves. A real English breakfast in bed. Eight o’clock to the minute. By nine we’re out on the front.’
I took a cautious mouthful of the Irish stew. I had been hoping in a diplomatic and round-about fashion to bring the conversation to the subject of Cape’s most successful and famous author, Lawrence of Arabia. For years in my youth, long after Lawrence had broken his neck on a Brough Superior motorbike, I constantly ran into people who believed he was still alive. Some even believed that his reported death was no more than a trick by which this huge, if preposterous figure, had been spirited away to re-appear under a different name as a semi-divine defender of the Empire. Nevertheless, as Daniel had assured me, the Eastbourne holiday monopolised the agenda.
‘Routine can be enjoyable,’ Jonathan said. ‘In the morning two brisk lengths of the Marine Parade, and in the afternoon one. Beneficial both to health and appetite. We’re both believers in a square meal at midday, and something light before turning in. Did you say you knew Eastbourne?’
‘Vaguely,’ I said.
‘We stay at Queen’s,’ Jonathan said. ‘The only place to have been awarded an H for merit. Most afternoons we settle to an hour or so of Strauss in the Garden Court, and at five we often pop in at the Southview Café for one of their excellent Welsh rarebits. Something they do very well.’
With that Eastbourne was dismissed. ‘And what are your plans for the future?’ he asked me.
‘I’m hoping to do something about Guatemala,’ I told him.
He pretended not to have heard, and I repeated what I’d said.
Jonathan smiled austerely, and shook his head. ‘Always write a book about Nelson,’ he said. ‘Never write a book about South America.’
Back in the office I tackled Daniel George.
‘Do what he says,’ Daniel said. ‘Write a book about Nelson. He’ll probably publish it. Jonathan has the market at his finger tips. If he says South America won’t sell, it won’t.’
‘What about Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure?’
‘The adventure sold, not Brazil. It could have happened anywhere. Most of the people who bought the book didn’t know where Brazil was. In any case, from what you say your Guatemalan book is going to keep you busy for five or six years. What are you going to live on?’
I packed the Guatemalan material away for another time, and made a start on another novel, Within the Labyrinth, describing the Machiavellian Italian scene at the end of the war.
A year later, having submitted the typescript of this book, another lunch at Heartburn House took place, incredibly enough just after Jonathan Cape had returned from holiday. Since my first lunch at Bedford Square I had made a quick excursion to Eastbourne to study its topography and could now speak of the place in a more intelligent fashion. Together in spirit we walked the Marine Promenade twice in the morning and once in the afternoon, listened briefly to Strauss in the Garden Court and were self-indulgent with the Welsh rarebit in the Southview Café. Jonathan responded to my encouragement.
‘So what’s to come next?’ he asked. ‘Not Guatemala, I hope.’
‘Not if you’re against it.’
‘How much work have you put into it so far?’
‘I’ve travelled round the country and talked to a lot of people. The Indians go in for the most amazing ceremonies. Few people have seen them. There’s a village where a man volunteers to be crucified at Easter. In another place they’re supposed to sacrifice a child to the god Mundo every ten years by throwing it down a volcano. I should also add I’ve read a good deal, my hope being rather to put the thing on a scientific basis. I should have to go back again, of course.’
Jonathan raised his hand to his mouth, then yawned enormously. ‘Put it on ice,’ he said.
William Plomer said something about there being a market for a child’s book on Indians, and Jonathan turned hastily to the subject of travel. ‘We’ve done well with it in the past. But why not go somewhere people will want to read about? Say Indo-China, for example. Nothing’s been written about the place for years. There’s certainly a book in that.’
The outcome was an offer by Jonathan to back a book on Indo-China and finance travel in the country for a journey taking up to three months. A logistics problem now arose. In the matter of travel, tickets could be bought to any place in the world, but since the war the amount of cash that a traveller could take out of the country was limited to £100. Using his influence, Jonathan was able to increase the sum for this particular journey to £200, but it was difficult to see how this could cover the cost of internal travel and subsistence in a country so vast. In hope of helping the situation I bought a gold watch with the intention of selling this if funds ran out. Jonathan also gave me an introduction to Peter Fleming at The Times, who provided a commissioning letter without which travel would have been impossible in a country ravaged by war.
Oliver Myers was back in the Middle East, although archaeological digs were now a thing of the past. In the four years since our last meeting, at Stonehenge, he had entered the Diplomatic Service, but we continued to keep in contact by letter. Having discovered that the Air France plane from Paris to Saigon stopped at Beirut, it was my hope to be able to break my journey there and see something of him again.
When in London I liked to stay, as before, with the Corvajas, with whom I remained on affectionate terms, although there was something unreal in the tacit and never-questioned assumption that Ernestine would eventually reappear. It was to this address that I arranged for the proofs of Within the Labyrinth to be sent so that I could correct them before leaving.
The proofs, however failed to arrive, so I rang up the publisher and was told that by mistake they had been sent to 4 Gordon Square. This was about a hundred yards away so I walked across to collect them, only to discover that a second Norman Lewis lived at this address, and that he, too, was a Cape author who had recently completed a hugely successful updated version of Roger’s Thesaurus. Unfortunately, I was told, the second N.L. had left the country only two days before, and was presumed to have taken my proofs with him. Three days later I stepped down from the Air France plane at Beirut, where Oliver awaited me. ‘We’re having a little party for you at the embassy,’ he said, and minutes later I suffered a surprise from which I have never wholly recovered, for the first introduction was to the man with whom I shared names, who had also stopped off at Beirut on his way to some Eastern destination. It was a circumstance that further encouraged Oliver’s fascination with the paranormal, and inspired him to begin a work to be entitled The Mechanisms of Coincidence, although the book was never finished.