Memoirs of a Private Man (11 page)

I had in fact over the previous ten years been ‘taking in the air' – the ambience – of the county in which I now lived. Like all my family, I had fallen in love with it, but unlike them, being more imaginative and of an impressionable age, I took in more – and eventually gave out more. Being quite unaware of the sublime superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, I got on well with the Celts, indeed found some affinity between them and my own North Country breed and upbringing.

I met them and liked them and laughed with them and talked to them, and listened, of course – to old miners and young rugby players, old fishermen, young laywers, middle-aged butcher boys, clerics and farmers, doctors and dentists and dustmen. And their wives and sisters and daughters. From many old men I heard about the mines and the county's strange history. Romantic, of course, with its stories of smuggling and wrecking, but equally interesting in its political and social life, the gambles of mining, the forty-four Members of Parliament, returned mostly through ‘rotten boroughs', the social life of Truro, the rich families and the poor. All this went along with my special appreciation of the tetchy, beautiful, unreliable weather, the great seas, the massive cliffs, the crying of the sea birds, the smell of heather and gorse, the tantrums of the wind.

I had read, of course, the ‘Cornish' novelists, and found them on the whole a disappointing lot. Some of them wrote good novels, but these could just as easily have happened in Devon or in Norfolk. The writers used the county because it was romantic, but never even tried to understand it. From these strictures I naturally excepted the real Cornish writers like Baring-Gould, Quiller-Couch, and Crosbie Garstin.

There had been growing in my mind a story which was unoriginal in its inception but which fortunately broke the mould as it went along. Before the war I had sketched out a few characters, then while I was waiting for call-up I used to walk to my mother's bungalow – furnished but empty since her coming to live with us – and there I began to write the first few chapters of
Ross Poldark
. It was a strange contrast for me between the formidable war news and the many complexities of modern life and the total isolation of an empty bungalow – a mile from my house – with a long lawn, a flowing stream and pastoral silences.

Sometimes late at night in bed I would read aloud a part of what I had written, while Jean's blue-grey eyes would mist over with the sleepiness she indignantly denied.

Necessarily all this was broken; and I did not begin to rewrite what I had written or to continue the story until the war was near its end. But while on watch in the daylight – and during the long nights – I would think and dream and consider the characters and allow them to grow. So that when the war was near its end and when to everyone's inexpressible joy it did end, the story was there for the writing.

I had no thought when I began
Ross Poldark
of a continuing series of books. It was just to be a story of eighteenth-century Cornwall, with a gloomy beginning and a happy ending, and that was that. In the course of it I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote, polishing and pruning, adding and subtracting, trying to get the perfect balance in each chapter between emotion and restraint. Some chapters I wrote nine times: each time I went to them they responded to something different in my own mood and had to be done again. In some ways I was very young – younger than my years – in spite of having been a professional writer so long; and I was too romantic. My approach to women was too romantic – it still is – but it was by then a part of my nature and was too inbred to be changed.

This novel, although preceded by a sort of ‘trailer' in the form of
The Forgotten Story
, was in fact a big departure from anything else I had written, being slower moving, concerned with mood and scene rather than action – though there was plenty of that too – and it took some imaginative stress to build up the historical background behind the characters. When my publishers saw it they liked it very much but suggested I should cut 20,000 words from the first half. It was the first time they had ever suggested any amendment since my very first novel. It was, I am sure, a genuine criticism on their part, but also it was activated by the extreme shortage of paper and their knowledge that an economy of forty pages would be a handsome saving of their short supply. I just said no. I said I regretted I wasn't willing to cut anything, so they took it as it was. Whether they were in any way justified I don't know, but no one ever since has said that the beginning was drawn-out or slow.

When the book came out it was a terrific success in Cornwall. W. H. Smith in Truro sold 700 copies in the month of December. It did not receive as many favourable reviews as
The Forgotten Story
, possibly because critics, a disillusioned race, don't care for romance. But it continued to sell moderately well all through the succeeding year – and it has never stopped selling in all the years since.

Before this I was well on with the second
Poldark
novel,
Demelza
. Towards the end of
Ross Poldark
it became clear that I had far more to say and to tell than could be contained within a single book. There had to be another, and perhaps even one after that. Not only did Ross and Demelza grip my thoughts but all the lesser characters: the Martins, the Carters, Dwight Enys and Karen Smith, the Bodrugans, the Chynoweths, and of course the Warleggans. These people had come alive and clamoured for attention.

So
Demelza
came into being. All through the time I was in the Coastguard Service I had come particularly to appreciate being alone. I remembered the strange stimulating isolation of those few months in 1940 when, awaiting call-up, I had written the first chapters of
Ross Poldark
. In the final few weeks before being demobilized – since there was little now we could constructively do – I had shamelessly carried my books up to the coastguard station and spent the time writing. When the station was closed I looked for somewhere else. On the opposite side of the beach was a wooden bungalow, nearly always uninhabited except for a few weeks in high summer. It belonged to a Mr Harry Tremewan. I went to see him and hired it.

I have had a lot of happiness in my life, but those next few months rank high among the high spots. Each day about ten I left our house, with a few books under my arm and a haversack on my back containing perhaps potatoes, boiled ham, a tomato, lettuce, a few slices of bread and some butter, and walked through the village and out onto the sandy beach – sometimes with the tide miles out, sometimes with it thundering and hissing at my feet, sometimes having to wade through sputtering surf up to my knees – and at the other side climb the Flat Rocks and go into the bungalow where, collecting dust even from yesterday, would be the pile of reference books and old papers that had already accumulated. Sitting in my deckchair in the immense silences, I would pick up the book in which I had been writing yesterday and continue with the story.

It was a remarkable experience. Sometimes in moments of critical self-examination I had asked myself if I was really a novelist or just a craftsman with a story-telling ability. In writing
Demelza
I knew myself with conviction to be a novelist. What I was writing was not a planned thing, it was organic, with the characters working out their own destiny. Sitting there in the grey old empty bungalow, I felt like a man driving a coach and four, roughly knowing the direction in which the coach would travel, but being pulled along by forces only just under his control. It was physically and mentally both exhausting and exhilarating. Every now and then after a long passage the coach, as it were, would lurch to a stop with a halfdozen possible roads opening ahead and no signposts. A day or two of agonizing indecision; then the road would be chosen and we would be off again. Occasionally during the day I would go out and stroll around the bungalow and watch the gulls and the translucent tides, feel the wind on my face: it was a mile or so from the old coastguard station but with a different, gentler view. At about five I would pack the haversack, take up the written work, and begin the walk back in the glimmering twilight with the sea far out and the waves glinting like mirages on the wet sand. I was going back each evening to the real world, waiting to welcome me at home; but it is doubtful which to me just then was the more real. All I knew was that I was writing something out of my very guts, and that I was content.

New-found prosperity was also offering a new perspective. We had had fun and a deal of anxiety and responsibility in running our private hotel. It was good while it lasted, but we now had a family, and Jean had become asthmatic. Our first intention was to put it up as a going concern and move to some comfortable small house; but this was superseded by an even more agreeable prospect. We could shut the doors of Trebarran with a bang and then just go on living in it as a private residence. Before it was enlarged it had been one of the most attractive houses in the district; let it revert to its original purpose, and if we had far too many bedrooms we could shut them up or spread ourselves to occupy more of them. My wife was pregnant again, and in March 1946 we had a daughter, whom we called Rosamund.

In the years when we ran Treberran as a small hotel, only one – the summer of 1939 – had in any way been a normal one. After that it was always wartime. But through it we met many charming and delightful people, some of whom were to have a strong influence on my future.

In late 1940, a fellow writer called Max Murray, who had come to Cornwall to escape the Blitz with his wife Maisie Grieg – the enormously prolific author – who was having a baby, told me that his friend, Benno Moiseiwitsch, the famous pianist, needed a holiday away from the bombs; could I put him up? I was overwhelmed at the thought, for I had heard Moiseiwitsch a number of times giving recitals in London before the war, and I had a tremendous admiration for his playing. Except for two Dutchmen (bulb growers, very nice men, who had been crossing the Atlantic when Germany invaded Holland and found themselves stranded in England) our house was just then empty. If it had not been, I would have emptied it for Moiseiwitsch.

My mother had sold her piano when she came to live with us, but we had my mother-in-law's upright Bechstein, which was a pretty good instrument. We had this put in his bedroom so that he could use it when he had the mind. So he arrived with his wife and his small son, Boris; and it was an enchanting three weeks. All of them, Benno, Annie and Boris, were unpretentious and delightful. God knows what we must have seemed like: certainly young and eager but so desperately short of food and fuel and staff. Their life in London was the height of sophistication (I was to sample it later) but they never complained or showed any dissatisfaction with anything in the house. Within a week we were friends, laughing together at the war's deprivations.

He practised three to five hours a day. It was like a separate spirit in the house, singing, intoning, inhabiting every corner of one's existence. He would take a light breakfast in his room and then practise for the rest of the morning, smoking incessantly. An hour of scales and wonderful arpeggios, then more complicated finger exercises written by one or other of the great teachers of the past. After lunch he would rest for a while and begin again about four, this time playing pieces that he would soon be giving at a concert. Particularly he played the more difficult parts – and they are infinitely difficult – of Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor, which he was to perform shortly in Liverpool. And he learned, for the first time, Beethoven's Concerto No. 3 in D Minor at our house; the whole thing from beginning to end. He had no objection to my sitting with him while he played, when I had time, sometimes giving running commentaries on the object of a particular passage or what he was trying to do with it. At six he would stop and very often walk down to the Perranporth Hotel for a drink with Max Murray and me. After dinner he would play bridge, usually with the two Dutchmen and my mother. He was an infinitely witty man, sometimes destructively so, but never to or about his friends. I may be prejudiced but I have always thought he played Rachmaninov better than the composer himself; without sentimentality but with more true emotion. (I have very recently discovered, to my surprise and pleasure, that this was also Rachmaninov's view.)

One day when we were walking down to the Perranporth Hotel together we passed two friends of my mother's, a Mrs Retallack and a Mrs Trevithick. They were both in their seventies, dressed in the height of bourgeois fashion, gloved, jewelled, austere, prim. After they had passed, Benno said to me: ‘Ah, I see the ladies of the town are back on their evening beat.'

He had a dog called Rach, named after his old friend Rachmaninov. Benno's comment when I met the dog was: ‘ One word from me and he does exactly as he likes.'

At Christmas we went up to see the Murrays, and Maisie gave Benno a gift wrapped in expensive glittery paper. Before he opened it he said: ‘Oh, Maisie, thank you. It's just what I've always wanted.'

Once, later on in the war, we saw that Moiseiwitsch was giving a concert in Plymouth. I was on duty but Jean contrived to take the time off and made the two-hour journey by train. When she got there all seats were sold. So she went round to the stage door and Benno immediately commanded that she be given a special seat by herself on the platform.

We remained friends until his death, and when Andrew was christened, Annie Moiseiwitsch was his godmother. Benno stayed with us twice more, as our true guest, and I stayed with him at his home in Berkhamsted and helped to time his playing of Chopin's thirty-two preludes, which he was shortly to record. I went with him often as his guest to the Savage Club, where I met Mark Hamburg, James Agate, and others of that set and played an occasional game of bridge but never poker, which was Benno's favourite. I remember on one occasion sitting behind him while he was at the poker table; he was on a winning streak and a club servant came to tell him that his taxi had arrived to take him to Paddington, where he was to catch the overnight train for Swansea for a concert on the morrow. He told the servant to cancel the taxi, he would catch a later train. I said to him: ‘But you've got a sleeper booked. If you catch a later train it will mean sitting up all night.' ‘It doesn't matter,' he said, ‘I'm only playing the Rachmaninov No. 2.'