A Sort of Life (21 page)

‘What do you want?’

‘I thought yu’d be interested,’ she said, swinging it to and fro.

There certainly were rats, they pattered and rustled and squeaked in the roof and they remained noisy in our thatch until a man consented to come with a ferret and drive them out. In his tight breeches with his pointed face he looked like a ferret himself – it was said in the village that he had starved his wife to death.

After a few weeks we began to lose our fear of the strange country and life became happy enough, until the future started to cast a shadow. It was a life rich with new pleasures – the local wines, made out of almost anything vegetable, which could be bought from the brawny landlord Rathbone at the Volunteer (they had no effect on the head but a great effect on the legs), home-brewed bitter at the Noel Arms which was kept by the stepfather of a boy called Nigel Dennis, and an almost endless variety of walks, north, south, east and west, to Moreton-in-Marsh and Chipping Norton, Evesham and Broadway and Blockley and Bourton-on-the-Water. (The Pekinese, over-exercised by fifteen-mile walks, developed hysteria and had to be destroyed.) There were apples from our own garden and Cos lettuces which I had grown myself with the help of a gypsy gardener called Buckland who came once a week and put all the snails aside for his own supper.

The life of a village is intimate and dramatic. There is a sense of community. People talk. In a city there may be a suicide in the next street and you will never hear of it. It is difficult for me to understand how I could have spent hours with the bloodless creatures of my new novel,
Rumour at Nightfall
, which was yet another story of the Carlist rebellion, but set this time in a Spain I had never visited. It was as though I were unable to cut the
cord which bound me to that still-born book,
The Episode
. Didn’t I sometimes in a lucid moment measure the sentimental cardboard figures of my fancy against the people I met every day between the muddy lane where I lived and the Live and Let Live Inn? I don’t remember. Perhaps – even more important – I should have measured them against my own experience, against the memories of flight, rebellion and misery during those first sixteen years when the novelist is formed.

There had been, if I was to trust my uncle, something at least of the Greene character in
The Man Within
, if only that irrational desire to escape from himself which had led one Greene grandfather out of the Church and the other to die in St Kitts. A writer’s knowledge of himself, realistic and unromantic, is like a store of energy on which he must draw for a lifetime: one volt of it properly directed will bring a character alive. There is no spark of life in
The Name of Action
or
Rumour at Nightfall
because there was nothing of myself in them. I had been determined not to write the typical autobiographical novels of a beginner, but I had gone too far in the opposite direction. I had removed myself altogether. All that was left in the heavy pages of the second was the distorted ghost of Conrad. Only once, and that at the very beginning, had the book moved with a semblance of life, when a colonel played the part of a priest and heard the confession of one of his men, dying from a wound. It was a clumsy rehearsal for a scene better rendered ten years later in
The Power and the Glory
.

I find in my diary of that period some of the comedy and drama of the Cotswold life which was going on all around me.

‘Mass was taken by the priest from Foxcote; with a housekeeper he lives alone in a great old house above Ilmington, and sometimes wakes to see an owl sitting on his bedpost. The books in the library are allowed to go to rack and ruin for want of attention. He studies astronomy and preaches temperance and goes about the country on a knock-kneed horse. The landlord of the Seagrave Arms at Weston-sub-Edge, from whom I get the parsnip wine, serves him often with tea. According to him it is a distinction to have a knock-kneed horse. Only a good horse goes knock-kneed.’

‘A troop of strolling players, which gave performances here the other day, apparently quarrelled at Eynsham and divided. One family has come back here and is holding weekly dances at the town hall for a living. Cresswell, the rich deaf architect, who lives in the square, objected to the noise of motor-bicycles and has forced them to stop the dances at midnight. He tried to have moved the Wednesday sheep market which has been held in the square for hundreds of years, but in this he failed. He hunts, indeed with fishing it is his sole amusement, and in retaliation the farmers have warned him off their land. This is driving him from Campden for Campden’s good.’

‘Father Billsborough at Mass, preaching on Missions: “What a glorious sight! Seven thousand Zulus coming to Communion. We don’t see that in England.’” (It was always a joy to listen to Father Billsborough, the most loved man in Campden. I remember him when he asked for money to clean his little church, speaking of ‘Millions of dead flies breeding away on the ceiling’.)

‘A lot of didicoes and travellers about, which are the local names for gypsies and tramps. A woman came to the door with a baby and a basket of clothes-pegs yesterday, and this morning at breakfast someone was singing in the lane. The tramps all seem to carry kittens with them on trolleys.’

‘There was a band of pea-pickers at the station, a rough-looking man with a wooden leg, his wife (a worn, curiously refined woman) and his three children, two girls of about six and four, and a boy who could not have been more than two. We got into conversation. I found it hard to understand what the man said, but suddenly realized that he was telling me that the boy had “the smartest upper-cut since Jimmy Wilde. You go down on your knees to him and he’ll give you a couple before you know where you are. Nothing can hurt that child. He fell off a hay-wagon yesterday and a car ran over his neck in Evesham once and he got up laughing.” The pea-picker had once been a boxer himself and claimed to have been England’s hope as a heavy-weight, but apart from his leg his hands had been ruined by labour. He held them out, calloused and trembling. “Your son will be champion instead,” I suggested. “Oh,” he said, “I’ve a better son than this, twenty-three years old, but he’s lost his nerve. If the bookmakers put up one thousand pounds he wouldn’t fight. He went to Birmingham against a man heavier than himself and he knocked him out so he never got up again.” “They couldn’t do anything to him?” I asked. “They kept him hanging about for four months, and now nothing will tempt him to fight.”’

Of Charles Wade and his manor at Snowshill (Wade was a great collector of antiques with an estate in St Kitts, and he had built a remarkable model railway and village in the grounds of his manor): ‘Wade, until late in the evening when nearly everybody had gone hardly spoke at all. Bow-legged in knickerbockers and bedroom slippers with dark greying hair bobbed over his shoulders, a blue striped shirt of the “gents haberdashery” kind and a black evening tie; when he speaks he mouths his words and leaves them inchoate as though he were not used to speaking at all, and when he laughs at some rather obvious joke of a farcical physical kind he bellows like a child with open mouth. His collection is as much a toy to him as his model railway and village, and he reads nothing but Jeffery Farnol and that aloud, making appropriate noises with pieces of old iron. He can be suddenly insulting, and sitting on the floor in front of a log fire, the only light, I had a terror that he was going to insult me with a suddenness which would leave me at a loss. I lay in bed that night discussing him, and the thought of his thin walnut face and his open mouth laughing made my flesh creep.’

‘In the High Street a butcher shook young living rats out of a steel cage for the fat foxhounds to eat, which sprawl with blood-shot eyes and stupid bodies on the grass gnawing bones. The villagers gathered at their doors and watched with amusement. All the way up the street I could hear the squealing of the rats.’

‘Passed the lake in Northwick Park where Mrs Keiton drowned herself the other day, walking out from one of the council houses in Broad Campden after dark on one of the bitterest nights of a cold month.’

‘During breakfast the rat-catcher mysteriously appeared with a spade and a brush and cleared our path of snow, and went again before we could pay him anything. He will never ask for money, too proud to do more than accept it when proffered, though he was not too proud to starve his wife to death.’

‘The old man who sells the
News of the World
on Sunday mornings was found yesterday by his wife hanging dead; he was seventy-three and Greenall, our daily, says that he could no longer stand his wife’s nagging.’

‘All yesterday and today Martha Hedges has been moving from her cottage to the almshouses at the other end of the village, pushing her things in an old pram, very old and pink and jaunty. Polishing her pictures on the doorstep.’

‘Charley Sykes, the Campden madman, who used to parade the village heavily bearded and in rags, talking and waving his stick, has been frozen to death in his cottage at Broad Campden. Nothing in the room but a broken chair, straw where he used to sleep, and a stink. He was a gentleman, the son of a doctor; his real name was Seitz, and he is said to have gone mad from overwork during his medical examination. He was a wonderfully handsome youth and there are photographs of him in flannels with a tennis racket. He is said to have been at St John’s College, Oxford. He had some money but lived in absolute squalor and begged. Fred Hart put out sixpence for him every week. The Evesham police are said once to have tried to arrest him for begging, and the story goes that he flung two policemen over a hedge. He used to walk in and out of Evesham, nine miles each way, lurching along bent almost double. Once he is said to have made his way out to India to see his relations, but they would have nothing to do with him … He died in the upper room of his cottage, and to get him down they put the web with which they lower coffins into the ground round his shoulders and dragged him down head first, his legs bumping on the stairs. Then they crammed him into the coffin in the clothes he wore and nailed him down. According to Greenall the fleas jumped on them from his wrists. There were sixteen pairs of boots in the cottage.’

It seems astonishing to me today that, while I was making careful notes of the vivid life around me, I was content to pursue my romantic and derivative tale to its disastrous conclusion – to publication, to the sale of only 1,200 copies, and finally to a review in a popular paper which opened my eyes at last to the worthlessness of all the work I had done till then.

My three guaranteed years of security had been squandered. Thanks to Peter Fleming I was reviewing novels now in the
Spectator
every fortnight, but I was deep in debt to my publishers, a debt from which I was only freed by the war ten years later – I had even had to borrow an extra twenty-five pounds to pay my income tax. If
The Man Within
had shown promise, it was the brief promise of a dud rocket on Guy Fawkes night. It made no difference to me that the review which had opened my eyes to my fool’s progress was by an author, Frank Swinnerton, for whom I had little respect – I knew the truth when I read it. There was nothing for me to do but dismantle all that elaborate scaffolding built from an older writer’s blue print, write it off as apprentice work and start again at the beginning. Never again, I swore, would I read a novel of Conrad’s – a vow I kept for more than a quarter of a century, until I found myself with
Heart of Darkness
in a small paddle boat travelling up a Congo tributary in 1959 from one leper colony to another. I had to begin again naked, and perhaps it was for that reason I chose an adventure story, imagining it might be easier to write, a mistake difficult to understand, since I had learnt with
The Name of Action
how hard it was to make physical action simple and exciting.

I wrote the book, to the music of Honegger’s
Pacific 231
on my gramophone, with a sense of doom. It is always hard for me to reread an old book, but in the case of
Stamboul Train
it is almost impossible. The pages are too laden by the anxieties of the time and the sense of failure. It was not only the two previous novels that had failed: I had wasted time and effort on a life of Lord Rochester which Heinemann had without hesitation turned down, and I was too uncertain of myself to send it elsewhere. By the time I finished
Stamboul Train
the days of security had almost run out. Even my dreams were full of disquiet – I remember how in one I was condemned to prison for five years and I woke depressed by the thought that my wife would be over thirty when we lived with each other again. The dream proved to be the germ of my next novel,
It’s a Battlefield
, but I didn’t realize it then, for even before
Stamboul Train
was finished I had begun to plan its successor – a novel about spiritualism and incest, with only two main characters, a fraudulent spiritualist and his sister. The sister was to move through the corruption of her surroundings failing to see that the criminality of her beloved brother had any real importance. A little of the incestuous story must have sunk back into my unconscious to emerge again four years later in
England Made Me
.

The scenes for the book were to be set in Nottingham and London. Those two cities represented the real world to me: I had done with castles in Spain, and perhaps because my decision had been made at a deeper level than the conscious, I had a dream, which I found at least half encouraging. I dreamt that I received from Heinemann an advance copy of a new novel. It was printed on bad paper; it was badly bound with a bad title, and the novel was to be published at the derisive price of ninepence. The publisher obviously cared nothing for the book, but when I opened it I had immediately the sense of strong firm writing and was saddened at the thought that in such a poor format the novel would neither be reviewed nor bought.

On 4 August I noted in my diary, ‘Sent off typescript to Heinemann. Is my position at its worst? Although I have been given till 15 September to pay the remainder of my income tax, I am to all intents minus about thirty pounds, with no guarantee of any money or employment after this month.’ At the end of August my contract with Heinemann and Doubleday would be over. Nearly a fortnight passed without a word from Heinemann, and I noted, ‘The suspense is becoming terrible,’ and, when at last the letter arrived, ‘I took it half way upstairs and opened it with fingers which really trembled’. It was strange what a few words of encouragement did for me. My financial situation was still the same: the unearned royalties on my previous books would absorb any small success
Stamboul Train
might achieve. Nonetheless hope was reborn and I noted the same day a new theme for a novel which was already ousting the story of the spiritualist: ‘A large inclusive picture of a city, the connecting link the conviction of a man for the murder of a policeman. Is it politic to hang him? And the detectives go out through the city listening …’