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One of our many dangerous [feats] and in retrospect foolish to the extreme, was to slip stream motor vehicles on our bicycles – normally lorries. Our favourite was to sit in wait for a BOAC coach coming from Heathrow to the air terminal in Gloucester Road. We would tuck in behind it and travel the length of the Great West Road at great speed and then overtake it at the Chiswick roundabout!
Eventually Richard became involved in a serious accident. Cycling home one day in the rain from games (a mode of transport conveniently enabling them to pocket their bus-fare allowance issued by the school), he crashed when making an awkward turn in the middle of Hammersmith Broadway. Skidding, he shot beneath a car ‘and cut myself to ribbons’. His prime concern was for the precious bicycle, whose frame was badly bent. The insurance company proved uncooperative, on grounds that the car was stationary at the moment of impact.
The repair was estimated at £10 13s. What could he do? Without his bicycle, he explained, he would have to start spending money daily on buses: could he possibly be sent £10? Patrick despatched a cheque by return of post, but the worry about Richard’s school progress – or lack of it – remained. Along with the cheque he sent practical advice to his son on mending his ways: he must apply himself consistently to his studies, answer correspondence by return, and generally become more self-disciplined. Richard responded with touching promises to mend his ways.
Although his intentions were good, school progress continued its downward slide. Towards the end of April, a letter arrived from his mother ‘enclosing a complaint from school about poor R’. By June he was agonizing over the imminent School Certificate examination (GCE), as his work became increasingly demanding and difficult. Alas, struggle as he might, the task proved too much, and he failed disastrously.
This unhappy news was not altogether unanticipated, and Patrick and my mother urgently discussed what was to be done. There was also the question of which branch of national service (the compulsory two years’ military service) would be suitable. Richard suggested: ‘Perhaps the Marine Commandos but one has to volunteer for five years and my mother does not like that. Then a friend suggested the engineering side; there to learn about mechanics. But please send your advice, because in the past it has always worked out well.’
Having himself, through little fault of his own, failed miserably in his own school studies, Patrick was determined that Richard should not suffer likewise. By the end of July my worried mother noted: ‘R. breaks up: what to do about him?’ As early as his return from holiday in Collioure in the previous year, Richard had urged that ‘if Dad is willing, I would like him to teach me Latin and Greek so that I could pass in them. I have got to pass.’
A swift decision was made that Richard should indeed come out to Collioure, where he could work undistracted to retake the examination. Hitherto the required subjects had comprised history, geography, and two English papers. They were not his strong fields, and he now enrolled in a correspondence course focused on mathematics and science, for which he had much greater aptitude.
On 12 August my mother and Patrick, accompanied as ever by Buddug, drove across France, camping on the way, to meet Richard at Dieppe. A week later they were back home in Collioure: ‘Got R’s hair cut & bought him respectable trousers. Dear R.’ There was no rush for the boy to begin work, since the examinations would not take place for a year. Initially, pleasant weeks were spent as before, swimming, walking, flying Richard’s new kite, and playing cards and draughts. My mother told him about her own children, to which Richard replied that ‘he saw Nik. at The Cottage [her parents’ house in Chelsea] & that he is good-looking and tall’.[fn6] (#litres_trial_promo) Hitherto my mother had not seen any photographs of my sister and me subsequent to the time when we were small children living at her parents’ home in North Devon during the War.
A modest upsurge in their finances about this time spurred my parents to think seriously about buying a house in England or Wales. In February my mother lamented: ‘Oh for a quiet home for P: it is a shame.’ Now they received particulars of a house in Cornwall, which sounded perfect for their needs. On 30 September 1954 they departed, together with Richard and their pets, ‘after sad and tearful goodbyes’ to all their faithful Collioure friends. So confident were they of finding a new home, that they had decided never to return.
Alas, the expedition proved one of those disasters by which they were intermittently afflicted throughout their lives. From the moment of their landing in England, everything went wrong. On disembarking, they attempted to smuggle the sedated Buddug and Pussit Tasset through customs in a suitcase. Unfortunately, a passenger informed on them, and the animals were impounded in quarantine. From Dover they drove seventeen hours through the night to Boskenna, in deepest Cornwall. Once installed there, my mother found that ‘Slugs got down St Loy taps & into marmalade. No beach, only sinister, slippery great rocks with bits of wreck everywhere & one crushed fish … Hated Boskenna … Cold, foul weather.’
The little family settled into dreary lodgings, ceaselessly battered by winter gales and drenching rain. They were cold, miserable, and badly missed their pets. Although Patrick tried to cheer Richard with tales of smugglers and a proposal to buy a small boat, the reality was too grim to be lightly overcome. A brief visit to my mother’s parents in London also went badly for some reason (‘Very, very painful week’), and by December they had had enough. On the 8th all three embarked at Dover for the return journey to Collioure.
Their troubles were not over. At Dover their trunks disappeared, and they missed the Boulogne boat. They finally caught a train ferry to Dunkirk, where their animals were returned to them. Then they experienced a ‘Nightmare drive from Dunkerque to St Omer instead of Calais through dark & rain & mud & detours & sugar-beet’. Near Toulouse the radiator fell off, and the car seized up. They left it at a garage, and continued the disastrous journey by train.
Back at last in Collioure, the family appreciated what they had nearly lost. So far as their house-hunting expedition was concerned, ‘England was bad, we got too unhappy to keep up diary.’ In striking contrast, ‘Home looking perfectly beautiful & the most welcome thing I’ve known I think. Village so pleasant – everyone welcomed us.’
The Mediterranean climate helped, too: ‘For two days now it has been too warm for the Mirus [stove] even in the evenings – & in England there are tempests & snow-storms & hideous cold. We lunch daily on the beach.’
Normal routine was resumed at once, to everyone’s satisfaction. Patrick returned contentedly to his writing, and ‘R. works hard too’. At the end of the year Patrick had written to the Ministry of Labour and National Service in Penzance, requesting that Richard be permitted to postpone his national service until he had taken his GCE in June of the following year. Fortunately, this was granted.
That Christmas (1954) little presents were exchanged, but sadly the festival was marred by the underlying burden of ‘Horrid anxiety for money’. The lost luggage finally arrived, but there were hefty bills – including a couple of unexplained punctures to new tyres. As will grow more and more clear as their story unfolds, cars and my parents were not always happily matched.
Shortly after their return Patrick wrote his short story ‘The Thermometer’, which under very thin disguise depicts his unhappy childhood relationship with his father.[2] (#litres_trial_promo) On 15 January 1955 he recorded in his diary:
I finished a story – broken thermometer – 5000 [words] nearly – very heavy going. It felt dubious – a little embarrassing; self-quaintery is always to be feared in anything at all autobiographical about childhood – approving self-quaintery – own head on one side – oh so unconscious simper – poor one. M did not like it. This makes me hate her, which is monstrously unfair. Dread of losing grip.
My mother, who I do not doubt appreciated its autobiographical character, was indeed depressed on reading the story. However, Patrick now turned to a synopsis of a book for children based on Anson’s voyage around the globe from 1740 to 1744. This my mother found ‘quite beautiful and very exciting’. Three days later it was posted to his literary agent Curtis Brown, accompanied by high hopes.
On 2 February Richard’s eighteenth birthday was celebrated in style – the last they would ever enjoy together. Presents were bestowed, after which they set off for a jaunt in the car. The weather was beautifully sunny, and they ate a delicious picnic (‘stuffed olives; Tante’s pâté; camembert; cake [baked the previous evening by my mother]; meringues; lemon-curd tart’) in an olive grove beyond Banyuls. After supper at home, they went to the cinema in the square, where they watched The City under the Sea, dismissed by my mother as ‘an idiot film’, but which probably appealed to the youthful Richard as much as it did to me about the same time.[fn7] (#litres_trial_promo)
Life had belatedly begun to look up. A few days earlier a local peasant named Azéma had offered to sell them 300 square metres of vineyard and garden for 125,000 francs: i.e. about £110. Hitherto this would have been well beyond their means, but the final payment for The Road to Samarcand (of which more in the next chapter) and now an advance on signing the contract for The Golden Ocean could now be imminently counted upon.
My mother enquired of a neighbour whether the price was fair, and was reassured to learn that more had recently been asked for a similar parcel of land, which in contrast lacked a water supply. Everyone was very obliging. Azéma agreed that the money could be paid in instalments, beginning in April. Meanwhile they could work the property. In the event they managed to pay the whole sum in April.
After the disastrous two months wasted in Cornish house-hunting, they now found themselves landowners! On 12 February my mother wrote triumphantly: ‘We lunched on our earth.’ Patrick had longed for this moment ever since their arrival in France. He loved the sense of security and self-worth which came with ownership of even so modest a parcel of land. Despite unfortunate consequences of his initial insistence on following the advice of his seventeenth-century guide to agriculture, his four years’ gardening in Wales had afforded him considerable experience. Finally, the ability to grow their own vegetables and fruit promised a material saving on monthly outgoings.
As ever concerned to be master of his own trade, Patrick bought for 350 francs a practical builder’s manual by Pierre Certot, Pour construire ou réparer vous-même murs et bâtiments: Enseignement manuel en 12 leçons. Construction d’une pièce de cottage, de la pièce principale d’une petite maison rurale, d’une petite porcherie. Conseils divers, etc. (Paris, 1952). His battered copy is spattered with characteristically self-interrogatory notes, such as ‘* nonsense: it should be 120k – I beg his pardon; I read kilos for litres’, and ‘It is easier to pump with a wide pipe than a narrow one.’
Instructed further by friendly neighbours and assisted by Richard, with some old tools and borrowed shears they set to work pruning vines and fruit trees, and clearing the ground on the ‘aprons’ (terraces). Although their finances remained precarious, the world was becoming a better place. Advance copies of The Road to Samarcand arrived, and for just over a fortnight Patrick abandoned writing in order to assist in putting the vineyard in order, after which he established a regime of walking over from the town after breakfast to inspect their little estate, and again after lunch to take part in the labour.
Richard proved a pillar of strength, travelling with my mother to the Port-Vendres rubbish dump to collect stones for the ten terrace ramparts, shifting soil, planting vegetables, and watering. Their dog, whose seventh birthday was celebrated at this time, also felt called upon to play her part: ‘Buddug dug up the existing parsley.’
At this juncture Patrick suffered a personal blow. News came from his family that his father, who had long been failing, had died of pneumonia at his home in Ealing. While their relationship had been only intermittently happy, he was unexpectedly moved by this melancholy intimation of mortality. As my mother confided to her diary: ‘Poor P., his father died. He went aller et retour to Paris to see his [step]mother & brother [Bernard, known as ‘Bun’]. R. was very sweet to me.’ This scarcely suggests that the melancholy news was malignantly withheld from Richard, as has been conjectured by one amiable critic.
The sorry tidings cannot have come as a total shock. In April 1953 Patrick had been informed (presumably by a member of his family) that his father had suffered a stroke, and in the following month Richard passed on a message from Patrick’s sister Nora that ‘your father is ill and has been taken to hospital’. Other allusions show that Patrick continued in regular contact with members of his family, several of whom evinced sympathetic interest in Richard.
Nevertheless, it is clear from my mother’s words that the final departure of this terrifying figure of Patrick’s youth had moved him. In the previous month he had written his short story ‘The Thermometer’, which described the fear and resentment with which he had viewed his harsh and distant parent as a small boy. There are clear indications that, as late as 1949, he had regarded his father’s grim persona as largely responsible for his increasingly paralysing bouts of depression and writer’s block.
Equally, it has been seen that he finally shed this inhibiting factor after settling in distant Collioure, where he managed to recover his equipoise. Nor should ‘The Thermometer’, which I have little doubt provides a realistic picture of his childhood experience, necessarily be regarded as an expression of his continuing feelings for his father, who had for two years languished a helpless invalid. At this stage of his literary career, Patrick continued deeply reliant on personal experience as matter for his fiction.
There were other memories on which he could draw, and death frequently has the effect of diminishing the bad and resurrecting the good. Charles Russ had enthusiastically supported Patrick’s early literary endeavours, negotiating their acceptance by publishers. He penned a glowing introduction to his precocious first novel Caesar, and Patrick in turn dedicated his next book Beasts Royal ‘To my father’. During the troubled days of his late adolescence, he found an apparently contented refuge in his father’s and stepmother’s house at Crowborough in Sussex.
My mother’s ‘poor Patrick’ confirms that Patrick was distressed by the news, since he would not have disguised his true feelings from her. Furthermore, he must unquestionably have been concerned for his stepmother, who had been consistently kind to him as a boy, and of whom he remained extremely fond.
It is important to appreciate Patrick’s reaction to this emotional occasion, not least because it has been misinterpreted to his lasting disfavour. A biography of Patrick devotes several pages of speculation to the event, the gist of which is that he:
never introduced his son to his father. He never spoke of his father to Richard, and he did not even tell Richard now that his grandfather had just died. The amazing thing is that a man of O’Brian’s insight not only was incapable of repairing his relationship with his father but fostered a similar father–son breach in his own house.[3] (#litres_trial_promo)
No evidence is cited to support these unpleasant charges, the burden of which is profoundly misleading.[fn8] (#litres_trial_promo) Poverty and distance, coupled with wartime travel conditions, might (we do not know) have precluded Patrick’s taking his son to Crowborough before his departure with my mother to Wales in 1945, when Richard was seven. While little communication appears to have passed thereafter between Patrick and his reclusive parent, Patrick’s siblings have confirmed to me that Charles Russ rarely corresponded with any of his children or grandchildren.
Although it is not impossible that Richard’s grandfather never communicated with him, other members of the family were concerned with the boy’s welfare. ‘Grandmother Russ’ (Patrick’s stepmother Zoe) visited Richard and his mother at their flat in Chelsea, as did Uncle Victor and other relatives. Richard unselfconsciously passed on family news from them to his father in France, and it is evident that there were no ‘forbidden areas’ in family discussions.
Unfortunately, Patrick was unable to travel to England for his father’s funeral, almost certainly in consequence of acute lack of funds. At the time of Charles Russ’s death, my mother wrote in her diary: ‘Despairing thoughts of no money to meet car’s lettre de change at end of month.’ However, Patrick’s brother Bun, a successful lawyer in Canada, had flown over to attend. It seems that Bun (as he certainly did on other occasions) generously paid for Patrick’s journey and hotel room in Paris, since my mother’s accounts record only trifling expenditure connected with what must have been a costly expedition.
It is frankly incredible to suppose that Patrick kept all this secret from Richard. Why on earth should he have done so? Besides, secrecy would have been all but impossible, closeted as the three of them were in the tiny flat in the rue Arago. The further charge that Patrick ‘fostered’ a breach with Richard himself will in due course be seen to be demonstrably unfounded, and confirms the extent to which such accusations represent no more than ill-natured conjecture.
A month before news arrived of his ailing father’s stroke, Patrick told my mother of an idea which had come to him of writing his ‘Chelsea novel’. More and more gripped by the concept, in May she observed ‘P. internally working on next novel’, and by June ‘P. is too deep in new novel to go back.’ It seems unlikely that it was coincidence that led Patrick to turn to such an introspective theme at a time when he was becoming aware that the once-daunting parent figure was slipping from the scene. Was he unconsciously afraid that his father’s death might deprive him of an identifiable explanation – or even pretext – for his continuing inability to realize his ambition?
In the event Patrick made little attempt to tutor Richard during his long stay at Collioure in 1954. Not only was the boy enthusiastic enough about the subjects he had chosen to apply himself to without any necessity for supervision, but throughout this time his father had become immersed in writing The Golden Ocean. My mother, who taught her stepson French on the beach, was delighted to learn that ‘R. gets excellent reports on his course.’
With the arrival of warm weather, much time was spent beside the sea, taking long walks, exploring neighbouring places of interest such as the magnificent castle of Salses north of Perpignan, and entertaining a stream of friends. Richard began learning to drive, but sadly expenditure on the purchase of the vineyard eventually compelled the sale of the much-loved deux chevaux. On 25 April my mother drove to Perpignan, sold the car for 210,000 francs (about £200), in a rare fit of indulgence enjoyed ‘an immense lunch’ at the Duchesse de Berri restaurant, and took the train home. As has been seen, she and Patrick went straight to the Azémas, and paid the full price of the vineyard. ‘Vous voilà propriétaires définitifs,’ declared Madame Azéma. My mother triumphantly inscribed the joyous words in the margin of her diary.
Apart from benefiting from the strip of land to make the family self-sufficient in fruit, vegetables, wine and honey, their plan was to construct a small stone chamber beside the road at the top of the vineyard, where Patrick could write in peace, away from the hurly-burly of the rue Arago. Such cells, known as casots, are scattered about the nearby hillsides, being used by cultivators of vignobles to store their tools and provide shelter from the burning sun during breaks from cultivation.
In order to accomplish this, it was first necessary to excavate a recess at the top of the rocky slope, which could only be accomplished by means of explosives. After obtaining the requisite permit, Patrick bought a quantity of dynamite and detonators. These being required to be kept separate, the dynamite was kept under Richard’s bed. In later life Patrick proved less circumspect. Nearly half a century later, not long after his death, I looked into the high shelf of a cupboard in the narrow passage next to the bedroom where my mother and Patrick slept. There I discovered a brown paper parcel which proved to contain two sticks of dynamite together with a detonator.
No wiser than Patrick, I assumed they posed no danger, since their explosive power must surely have long ago dissipated. Some years later I recounted my discovery to an old school friend, a retired Army officer. He impressed on me that the explosive was undoubtedly more dangerous, having become unstable after the space of half a century. This alarmed me, and it was arranged for it to be removed and exploded by the gendarmerie. I still feel qualms when I think of my parents blithely sleeping for decades with their heads three or four yards from a package capable of blowing up the entire house.
Returning to 1955, Patrick and Richard travelled beyond Port-Vendres to Paulilles, where they purchased the explosives. Unfortunately they missed the return train, and trudged the weary miles home, each carrying a 10-kilogram load. Next, holes were prepared with pickaxes and sledgehammers, and faggots gathered to restrict the effect of explosions, after which mining began.
Patrick was convinced he could handle the detonations himself, until a massive explosion discharged a load of rock perilously close to him and Richard. Henceforward he grudgingly employed a pair of burly Catalan miners, Cardonnet and his friend Juan, who completed the work with professional skill. This was the limit of assistance required, and the family’s daily toil is recapitulated in detail in Patrick’s gardening diary he kept that year. Mining completed, there succeeded the arduous labour of shifting stones out of the recess created. Although he and my mother worked themselves to the bone, the satisfaction at finding themselves at long last working their own land was boundless.
My mother with Buddug at the well
The work continued throughout July, when thundery weather made the heat all but unbearable: ‘we drip and pour,’ recorded my mother: ‘I plunged naked into the basin [by the well] yesterday after stone-shifting.’
Patrick was anxious to keep bees, as he had done successfully in Wales. By June the first hive was installed, and before long they were enjoying their own honey. Over the years complaints arose from inhabitants of the Faubourg below that they were persistently being stung. When suspicion turned to the outskirts of the town, Patrick shifted the hives out of sight onto the flat roof of the house. To a policeman calling to enquire whether they kept bees, he blithely denied the fact. However, this arrangement proving inconvenient as well as risky, in 1965 the hives were reinstalled by arrangement with a neighbour in a vineyard at the foot of the ridge of the Saint Elme above the house.
Eventually, the sad moment came when Richard had to depart. On 29 June he took the train to Paris, whence he sent back cheerful postcards. He left behind farewell presents of sweets and cigarettes, took with him a basket of presents for my mother’s parents in Chelsea, and posted parcels to her small nieces and nephew.
Save for the disastrous weeks in Cornwall, which had dampened the spirits of all three, there is every indication that Richard had enjoyed a particularly happy time throughout his long stay. Acquisition of the vineyard provided rewarding occupation, while his correspondence course kept his thoughts almost as busy as they had been with pretty Susan Hodder-Williams. Back in England, he successfully sat the examination at Cardinal Vaughan School. A month later, he wrote to say that he had joined the Royal Navy.
Richard’s departure left a tincture of sadness over the little household. Clearly, his service in the Navy would allow him small opportunity to return to Collioure during the two-year spell. Such leave as he would obtain was most likely to be spent with his mother in Chelsea. What neither they nor Richard anticipated was that he would never return. As will be seen in the next chapter, this was not in consequence of any specific decision, but arose from a constant lack of funds, together with Richard’s determination to forge a way for himself in the world. Patrick had good reason to be proud of him, but much distress lay in the offing.
A few weeks later Richard had settled contentedly into the service, enjoying the company of his comrades, and nurturing a fresh ambition to become a Fleet Air Arm pilot. Never a frequent letter writer (like many young men), he found himself so preoccupied that his correspondence grew more and more sporadic.
Meanwhile, having for the present lost a ‘son’ to whom she was devoted, my mother was about to resume relations with her real son, whom she had last encountered as a small boy at her parents’ home on the North Devon coast.
Throughout my schooldays there had been no communication between us, save my mother’s abortive attempt to resume contact on my sixteenth birthday. After leaving Wellington College in the summer of 1953, I enrolled in the Army as a regular soldier. After completing basic training in the Buffs (my local regiment) at Canterbury, I entered the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. By then I had developed an increasingly painful back ailment, which caused me to be invalided out of the Army in the spring of 1954. In June my mother sent me out of the blue a cheque for my nineteenth birthday, and we began exchanging letters.
In August of the following year she invited me to stay at Collioure. My stepmother had never disguised her dislike for me, and my father rarely showed me any affection. The time had come when I resolved to see the mother of whom I retained a bare half-dozen infant memories. That month I joined my father and stepmother for a typically strained holiday in northern Spain, and from there I journeyed at a leisurely rate in Spanish trains to Port Bou on the French Mediterranean frontier, and thence up the coast the three stops to Collioure. It being impossible to predict the precise time of my arrival, my mother remained on tenterhooks for two days. On the 29th she received ‘Letter from N., apparently woken up to the foolishness of going back to England before coming here, so he will reach Irun at 8 pm tomorrow en route for Collioure. I called on O[dette]., told her … Called on Tante & Marinette & told them: how they stared.’
Two days later: ‘Met trains all day, home beautifully neat under usual strain, but no Nikolai.’ Finally, on 1 September, I arrived at Collioure and made my way to the rue Arago. I climbed the steep staircase, knocked on the door, and there was my mother. I vividly recall Patrick standing a little behind, in that characteristic attitude which was to become so familiar, smiling with his head a little on one side and hands clasped before him.
My own emotions were confused, my mother being for me effectively a stranger, of whom I retained only the most fleeting of images. However, in consequence of my unhappy relationship with my father and stepmother, I found it exhilarating to find myself at home with contrastedly interesting and affectionate parents. My mother was understandably in raptures:
I had taught [her pupil] André his English, & P & I were sitting at tea when there was a knock, & it was N. Actually I am writing this on the 12th, being too excited before to write. I did not know how wonderful it would be to have N. again – Lord, Lord, I am so happy with P. & him, and so thankful. I would that R. were here too: he wrote to say that he is an Ordinary Seaman in the R.N., sounding very happy.
With hindsight, I fancy the visit might have gone better had Richard indeed been there, providing companionship of my own age. For the first fortnight all went well. My youthful enthusiasm for history overlapped closely – perhaps too closely – with Patrick’s own tastes. I browsed contentedly among his eclectic collection of books, which stood ranged against the wall in boxes he had carefully constructed to house them. We were a stone’s throw from the beach, and there was much to excite my passion for the Middle Ages in the ancient town. We travelled by bus to explore Andorra, still a wholly unspoilt medieval principality in the mountains.
By the time of my arrival, the walls and roof of the casot were all but completed. Like Richard, I assisted in my turn with the labours, my more modest contribution being attested to this day by a cement buttress beside the door bearing my initials. It was an exciting time for all, and my mother wrote exultantly: ‘We already plan next storey.’ (I am, incidentally, baffled by a writer’s claim that Patrick ‘built the hut by hand, something that O’Brian ironically would be ashamed of and very touchy about in later life when he became more established’. In reality, he was immensely proud of the fact that he had contributed so much of the labour, to which he regularly drew visitors’ attention when they called throughout the years that followed.)
I learned much about Patrick’s writing, and remember being particularly delighted by his good-humoured short story ‘The Virtuous Peleg’. His other writings were less to my adolescent taste, which was disinclined to stray beyond current obsessive enthusiasms. Unfortunately, those of his own works which would have appealed to me at the time remained inaccessible, since no copies of his early books published under the name Richard Patrick Russ were to be found in the house. Equally, the robustly exciting boys’ books The Road to Samarcand and The Golden Ocean had yet to be published.
It is hard for me now to be certain how far my faded image of those memorable three weeks remains entirely accurate. However, I do recall that after a week or so I began to find Patrick increasingly didactic and irritable, to an extent which swiftly became all but intolerable. Referring to himself on one occasion as ‘a writer who has been compared with Dostoevsky’ (which may conceivably have been true), he was openly contemptuous of my preferred reading: old-fashioned favourites such as Harrison Ainsworth, Charles Lever and R.D. Blackmore. Oddly enough, so far as I am aware Patrick had not read the one ‘good’ writer whose works I also loved – Walter Scott.[fn9] (#litres_trial_promo) However, he possessed the 1839 ten-volume edition of J.G. Lockhart’s classic biography of his father-in-law, which on discovering my enthusiasm he presented to me during my stay. Glancing at it now, I suffer once again an acute pang of nostalgia, fancying myself back in the snug little flat at 39, rue Arago.
Today I remain shamefully conscious of the fact that the growing coldness which developed between us during my stay was very far from being Patrick’s sole responsibility, as I then believed it to be. I still recall with painful embarrassment how prone I was at the time to faults not uncommon among young men of twenty. Uncompromising political views, assertions of belief as incontrovertible fact, and related failings made me no more tolerable to my elders than many another immature youth awkwardly poised between adolescence and manhood.
On 13 September my parents’ old friend and colleague from their wartime service with Political Warfare Executive, the American academic Jack Christopher, came to stay. Lodgings were found for him with the Azémas, while he spent each day with us. A tall, mild-mannered scholar, he was co-author of a recently published two-volume History of Civilization. I recall Patrick’s humorously condemning the work, on the grounds that it omitted to mention a battle between the O’Tooles and the Danes – a joke repeated from a passage in The Golden Ocean, which he had just completed. While Jack was a model of discretion and politeness, Patrick at times used his presence to ‘punish’ me in a manner he not seldom employed when irritated, deliberately excluding me from conversations, in the course of which he occasionally let fall none too subtle allusions to my deficiencies.
Recollection of this first visit still pains me. Indeed, I was for long inclined to accept almost the entirety of blame for the mutual ill-feeling which increasingly pervaded my stay, until many years later I came to read my mother’s diary account of my visit: ‘N. left on 19th: when it started going bad I do not remember. Only I do remember being in the middle of it & trying & trying to think of something to bring things back to pleasantness.’
As her normal reaction to any such awkwardness was to support Patrick, right or wrong, I am inclined to infer that she sensed the faults were not all on one side. Long afterwards, I was told by their friend Mary Burkett that Patrick angrily declared on my departure that he would never allow me in the house again! This was the only such occasion of which I am aware when my mother put her foot down, insisting she would continue to see me regardless.
Fortunately the unpleasantness blew over, and the letter I wrote back after my return reads as though all had been warmth and light. Over the decades to come, I confess that Patrick and I continued at times to find each other difficult, or even downright insufferable. But each in his own way was, I believe, conscious that blame lay not all on one side, and such unpleasant clashes were invariably overcome and dismissed – lessening considerably, too, as the years passed by. However, there is no escaping the certainty that, had I not been my mother’s son, I would never have been invited to Collioure again.
IV (#ulink_0ff6dab8-8504-5b1d-be6e-07bafad1f7b2)
Voyages of Adventure (#ulink_0ff6dab8-8504-5b1d-be6e-07bafad1f7b2)
From tho yles that I haue spoken of before in the lond of Prestre Iohn, that ben vnder erthe as to vs that ben o this half, and of other yles that ben more furthere beyonde, whoso wil pursuen hem for to comen ayen right to the parties that he cam fro and so enviroune alle erthe; but what for the yles, what for the see, and for what strong rowynge, fewe folk assayen for to passen that passage, all be it that men myghte don it wel that myght ben of power to dresse him thereto, as I haue seyd you before. And therfore men returnen from tho yles aboueseyd be other yles costyng fro the lond of Prestre Iohn.
M.C. Seymour (ed.), Mandeville’s Travels (Oxford, 1967), p. 223
By 1954 Patrick’s inspiration appeared to be flagging. Many authors will recognize the symptoms, when we find him turning to revisiting old notes and uncompleted earlier ventures. Among the latter was a novel for boys, which he felt might prove worth reviving. On 15 December 1945, not long after their arrival in Wales, he wrote in his journal:
I have just re-read that Samarcand tale. It is better than I had supposed, and it is well worth finishing. Suffers from want of central plot. It is hardly more than a series of incidents, more or less probable, fortuitously connected. M. is typing the rehashed novel. I hope it may not prove a disappointment, but it was poor stuff to begin with.
This indicates that the manuscript was among those efforts which he wrote in a flurry of creativity just before war broke out. However, the debilitating attack of writer’s block which assailed him during their four years’ stay in Wales obstructed any further endeavour in that direction, and eventually he found himself unable to progress beyond chapter six.[1] (#litres_trial_promo)
Under pressure, he tended to look back to those exhilarating pre-war days, when inspiration apparently flowed unhampered by doubts. In November 1952 my mother observed that Patrick was ‘thinking of Samarkand’. Once again, nothing came of it, and a further year passed by when ‘P. took out Samarcand & looked at it.’ This time he experienced a sudden flow of inspiration, and on 26 January 1954 ‘P. did 2000 words of S.’ He was sufficiently pleased with his progress to write next day to his literary agent Naomi Burton at Curtis Brown in New York, enquiring whether Harcourt Brace might take the completed work.
By the beginning of February 1954 the book was well under way, when Naomi responded to my mother with a ‘fine misunderstanding about me leaving P[atrick]., & she says send Samarcand to her’. This appeared encouraging, so far as it went, and Patrick raced ahead to the conclusion. Ten days later he came to bed at 1.30 in the morning, ‘having finished Samarcand. He could not sleep, & looks so poorly today. S. posted …’
They had sent their sole typescript of the text, and an agonizing wait culminated on 24 April with a letter from Naomi containing the dispiriting news that Harcourt Brace was not interested. The precious typescript itself did not return until 6 May, when they forwarded it to Spencer Curtis Brown in London. Their relief and excitement may be imagined when, on 17 June, they learned that the publishers Rupert Hart-Davis were ‘“very enthusiastic” about dear Samarcand & suggest £100 advance’. On 24 June a contract was signed for ‘a Juvenile work by the Proprietor at present entitled “THE ROAD TO SAMARCAND”’, with the advance payable in successive tranches of £50 on delivery and £50 on publication.
The money was welcome (though as ever slow to arrive), and high hopes were pinned on the novel’s success. However, when The Road to Samarcand was published in February 1955, the outcome proved disappointing. Reviews were sparse and varied. While the naval historian Oliver Warner gave it a cautious thumbs up in Time and Tide, the Times Literary Supplement’s anonymous reviewer tartly derided its conclusion – ‘as absurd politically as it is geographically’. The criticism may have been directed against the protagonists’ dramatic escape from Tibet in a Russian helicopter, discovered intact in a snowdrift. The story comprises many exciting adventures, of a character familiar to readers of early boys’ journals such as Boys’ Own Paper and Chums, wherein a daring English lad, customarily accompanied by an excitable Irishman and laconic Scot, survives a succession of hair’s-breadth perils at the hands of sinister foreigners. Patrick’s contribution to the latter is an evil Bolshevik agent named Dimitri Mihailovitch, who has his neck deservedly broken by the youthful hero’s uncle Sullivan. Evidently Patrick could not resist according this scoundrel my unfortunate father’s Christian name and patronymic!
The pre-war genesis of The Road to Samarcand represented a throwback to Patrick’s earlier success with children’s stories. However, while Caesar and Hussein were delightful original creations, it is hard not to concede that Samarcand represents something of a pastiche of the boys’ books that he loved during his lonely and imaginative childhood.[fn1] (#litres_trial_promo)
Derrick, the boy hero of Samarcand, is an orphan assigned to the custody of his uncle Terry Sullivan, master of the schooner Wanderer plying the China Sea. Sullivan and his Scottish companion Ross are the protagonists of Patrick’s three immediately preceding published short stories, the third of which (‘No Pirates Nowadays’) is effectively prefatory to the events recounted in the novel.[fn2] (#litres_trial_promo) The crew includes a comical Chinese cook Li Han, whose exotic English provides a lively source of humour. Together with the eccentric and resourceful archaeologist Professor Ayrton, the friends survive perilous adventures in China and Tibet, battling Chinese warlords and Bolshevik agents, eventually coming through against all odds and acquiring the customary treasure.
I suspect that Patrick’s voracious reading as a boy in Willesden Green or his Devonshire preparatory school included Under the Chinese Dragon: A Tale of Mongolia, published in 1912. The author, Captain F.S. Brereton, was a prolific creator of rousing boys’ adventure stories. The hero of his tale is a brave orphan boy, David, who outwits dangerous Russian anarchists, and afterwards joins Professor Padmore on the China Station. Among the crew is an excitable French cook Alphonse (who must in turn be derivative of the more celebrated comic cook Alphonse in Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain), whose quaint speech is juxtaposed with that of faithful Chinese attendants. They are attacked by pirates, undergo stirring adventures in China and on the Mongolian frontier, and conclude by finding a hoard of valuable objects, including documents which enable David to recover the inheritance of which he had been cheated.
Although well written and fast-moving, Samarcand may perhaps be regarded as a retrograde step in Patrick’s writing at this time. To do him justice, I think it likely that the novel represented a distillation of half-remembered early reading, rather than overt plagiarism. In any case, much of it, as has been seen, was written at an early stage of his literary evolution. Although it was published at the time in Germany and Sweden, a publisher could not be found in the United States until 2007.
Nevertheless, 1955 was to prove a pivotal year in Patrick’s life. It was purely fortuitous that his son Richard’s final departure coincided with my first arrival in Collioure. As has also been seen, it was in this year that my mother and Patrick established themselves permanently at Collioure, buying the vineyard at Correch d’en Baus, and beginning work on building the casot and upper room of the home they would inhabit for the rest of their lives. Finally, January 1955 saw what may be regarded as the inception of Patrick’s enduring contribution to world literature.
Here I would emphasize that nothing in the unhappy contretemps arising during my first visit (described in the previous chapter) stinted one of Patrick’s most amiable characteristics: his unfailing generosity. I had returned to England laden with presents, ranging from an open razor and leather strop, which I used for years, to a precious copy of The Trial of James Stewart in Aucharn in Duror of Appin, for the Murder of Colin Campbell, Esq (Edinburgh, 1753). This is the now rare book which inspired Stevenson’s Kidnapped. When Patrick bought it in early 1945, he noted in his diary:
Before reading Catriona [the sequel to Stevenson’s Kidnapped] I went through James Stewart’s trial, which was very good, if somewhat repetitious reading. Unfortunately I chanced to see the result before reading it, which rather spoilt the suspense for the last speeches, but before that it was positively exciting. It is impossible to see it objectively, having read Kidnapped but I am sure I could never have made such a tale of it.
Despite this rueful acknowledgement, while being fortuitously in a position to compare it with its prime source, Patrick’s diffident self-criticism provides a premonition of his eventual mastery of one of the most difficult (yet oddly underrated) of literary achievements, the historical novel. In 1945, a month after reading Catriona, he had skimmed through:
Dr Goldsmith’s History of Rome [1782], abridged by himself, as a preparation for Gibbon. A poor piece of work, I think, though I liked ‘through desarts filled with serpents of various malignity’. All somewhat Little Arthur-ish.[2] (#litres_trial_promo) One gets the impression that the Romans were an appallingly bloody-minded lot – true maybe – but what is far worse, and quite false is the impression that they were modern men (insofar as they were men, and not names) acting in an incomprehensible way in a vacuum. It is not history – hardly chronicle. It seems to me that works like the Hammonds’ English labourer are worth more than a dozen such works, as far as inculcating an historical sense goes.
This trenchant criticism might be levelled at all too many historical novelists. Indeed, the indications are that it was about this time that Patrick himself came to shed his earlier jejune concept of historical fiction. In January 1940 he had written a melodramatic short story about a crusading knight, John of Bellesme, which owes more to the romantic novels of high adventure written by the Sussex novelist Jeffery Farnol than to anything actually occurring during the Middle Ages. Although Patrick preserved the manuscript, he must surely have been relieved in later years that it was never published.[3] (#litres_trial_promo)
His only other transitory attempt at historical fiction appears to have been written about the same time. Published in The Last Pool, ‘The Trap’ is much inferior to its fellow tales set in Patrick’s own day. Although as ever well written, its tale of a daring youth who fares forth to poach in the grounds of a tyrannical squire is too reminiscent of the stock characters and standard predicaments of juvenile fiction to carry much conviction.[4] (#litres_trial_promo)
Following a flurry of creativity over the momentous winter of 1939–40, it seems that Patrick’s wartime employment, first as an ambulance driver in the Blitz, then as an operative with Political Warfare Executive, effectively diverted him from writing. Finding himself, for the first time in his life, unexpectedly in possession of a settled income, he bought many books, chiefly in the second-hand shops of Cecil Court. These he read and clearly absorbed, but it was only as the War drew inexorably towards its close over the winter of 1944–45 that his authorial ambition became reawakened.
The fact that there is frustratingly little documentation for this period of his literary life is in itself suggestive. He began keeping a pocket diary on 1 January 1945, and the care with which he preserved his diaries thereafter makes it unlikely that earlier copies have perished. In it, as well as in memorandum books compiled about the same time, Patrick began entering comments on his reading, together with suggestions for books he contemplated writing. The indications are that, although the war years provided him with a period of respite from creative work, they were also a time of protracted parturition. His perceptive condemnation, on the one hand, of Goldsmith’s trite Roman history, and on the other his unqualified praise for Stevenson’s masterpiece Kidnapped, indicate his dawning understanding of the realities of historiography, together with its glamorous offspring, the historical novel.
Mention of Stevenson’s two great books leads me incidentally to wonder whether Patrick may not also have been unconsciously influenced by the Scottish author’s creation of paired contrasted characters (David Balfour and Allan Breck), their attitudes reflecting disparate political and social aspects of the age: an antithesis which at the same time enriches a memorable friendship.
Again, I wonder whether his new-found propensity for imbuing his narrative with humour – grotesque and farcical, light-hearted and ironical, at times cheerfully vulgar – had lain submerged beneath a long-held conviction that adult literature represented an essentially serious business. His natural sense of humour, ironical and exuberant, took long to emerge in his work.[fn3] (#litres_trial_promo) At times I put this belated development down to the influence of Somerset Maugham, whom Patrick like many of his contemporaries rated high in the literary scale. But there can surely be little doubt that the enduring precarious state of his finances played its part in producing an entrenched state of gloom.
After Hussein, only his sparkling short stories ‘The Green Creature’ and ‘The Virtuous Peleg’ fully revealed Patrick’s propensity for laughter in court. However, an observant follower of his literary career would have noted how his anthology A Book of Voyages (1947) reproduced specimens of choice rococo passages which afforded him perceptible delight.
As was mentioned in the last chapter, the theme Patrick selected for his fresh venture was Commodore Anson’s celebrated voyage around the globe in 1740–44. One reason for this choice was almost certainly the fact that his library was well equipped for the purpose. He had first grown familiar with the story from the concise account included in Beatson’s six-volume Naval and Military Memoirs of Great Britain, which he bought before the War.[5] (#litres_trial_promo) Subsequently he acquired the Reverend Richard Walter’s account of Anson’s voyage, published in 1762, together with its accompanying (now rare) handsome quarto volume of maps and plates.[6] (#litres_trial_promo)
For the social, literary and political history of the time he profited greatly from a present fortuitously given by my mother. In February 1945, ‘M[ary]. very civilly gave me the Gentleman’s Magazine 1743–4–5. Masses of information, both solid and (what is more in some ways) ephemeral. Handsome panelled calf. Vilely printed – hard to realise that any verse can be good in such a dress.’[fn4] (#litres_trial_promo)
In the following month Patrick read the latest Hornblower novel, on which he commented in his diary:
Forester’s The Commodore is, I think, the first new novel I have ever bought. It seems much more extravagant than paying a guinea for, say, the learned job. It’s a good tale, but not as satisfying as the other Hornblower stories. Smacks a little of formula and wants design. Also, it has not a great deal of meat, or if it has, a greater length is required to give it body.
Patrick could not have dreamed that he would one day write his own novel The Commodore, which I imagine most readers would concur entirely avoids the faults he ascribes to Forester’s work.
