Memoirs of a Private Man (15 page)

When the curate was moved to another living, he invited me to spend a weekend with him. I accepted, and we slept together two nights in a double bed. There was no thought in my mind that there was anything untoward in this, but if anything
had
happened I should have been as scandalized and angry as a Somerset Maugham spinster – not shocked out of prudery, but out of a total savage disgust.

As for the scoutmaster, I never saw him with other boys, but I would bet my bottom dollar he was one of those men to whom sex means almost nothing at all. There are some such men, and women, though it is unfashionable to suppose so.

I mention these matters here because when I joined the Savile in 1950 I believe it was the only one of the great London clubs who would accept ‘gays'. I never heard any such hint dropped in the election committee at the Savile, but let some hint of it be dropped in any other committee and the man would be quietly dropped too. In the Savile, it was not a factor in the equation. It was of no more relevance than if a candidate was married, single, or divorced. It was his behaviour in the club, and of course his intellect and his achievements, which were all that mattered. So long as he didn't, in Mrs Patrick Campbell's famous words, ‘frighten the horses', what he did outside the club was his own damned business. (I remember at one such committee a member saying, ‘The only trouble with this chap is that he looks like a Borstal boy.' A man opposite said, ‘ He'd be more interesting if he'd been one.')

At a time when all the taboos were still up one might have thought this tolerant attitude on the part of the Savile would have resulted in there being a large number of homosexual members. It did not seem so. Some perhaps I never noticed, for I never thought about it. A few were obviously gay, and as the moral climate relaxed, they became a little more overt.

This led to one of the best bits of repartee, at one of the round tables at the Savile, when a couple of members started teasing Humphrey Hare about his sex life. He bore this with his usual good temper, but eventually with a great laugh, for which he was famous, shouted: ‘What d'you expect me to do – go to bed with a horse?'

A little man at the other side of the table immediately remarked: ‘I thought the age of cavalry was past.'

Humphrey Hare was the son of a general, an old Etonian, an ex- Guardsman, a great friend of Compton Mackenzie, to whom he offered much candid advice on the subject of Monty's writing. Hare was completely bilingual and supplemented his private means by translating French books into English for various publishers. So good was he that he did not need to write anything down. As he read the French he would dictate the translation into a dictaphone and post it off when done.

Hare was a very handsome man, tall, erect, noisy, amiable. For some reason, Frank, our valet at the club, did not like him. He would come into my room with a cup of tea at 8 a.m. and say, ‘Mornin', sir. Nice cup of tea. Just eight o'clock,' and as he left the room he would add venomously: ‘Hare's asleep.' Fifteen minutes later he would return with my shoes duly polished and say, ‘Quarter after eight, sir. Plenty of time. Shall I run yir bath?' And then, as an angry postscript as he left: ‘Hare's asleep.'

I took these interchanges back to Cornwall, and it became a family saying, ‘Hare's asleep.'

Then one day in Venice when Jean and I were walking down the Merceria we met Humphrey Hare and his mother, who were holidaying like us. Jean was astounded to meet this tall broadshouldered Adonis, when she had thought from my stories that he was a small wizened man.

In view of his military background one would have expected Hare to be right wing in politics; in fact the very reverse. He fought in the Spanish Civil War on behalf of the government against Franco, and teamed up with two others of similar lineage and persuasion: Nancy Mitford and her then husband, Prod, as he was known in the Savile, that is the Hon. Peter Rennell Rodd.

As Franco began to gain the upper hand they were involved in the bitter rearguard action before Barcelona. One of the three then perpetrated one of the best puns of the decade. As they hastily chartered a ship to convey many of the government's most prominent supporters out of reach of Franco's vengeance, he – or she – said: ‘ Well, I've heard of people having all their eggs in one basket. I have never before heard of anyone having all their Basques in one exit.'

Meanwhile events moved well for me in the United States, and it can be said that from 1950 until 1970 three-quarters of my affluence came from across the Atlantic. One after another of the books I wrote were Book Club choices, and paperback sales abounded. In England sales were steady but unexciting by comparison. When
Marnie
hit the headlines in 1962 I remarked in a press interview at the time that I was ‘ the most successful unknown novelist in England', and the phrase stuck and has often been repeated. Now that the great flush of the
Poldark
television series is long past, perhaps there is a chance that it may become true again.

The strange imbalances in the public awareness of my prosperity may also be partly the reason why so many innocent souls thought the TV series had ‘made' me. One dear lady from Cornwall wrote to me saying I must think it strange achieving success at last after ‘writing away all these years'. Cornish and West Country newspapers sometimes still contribute to this myth.

Though fond of animals – particularly cats, of which for many years we had two Siamese – I never until my middle life owned a dog.

But walking across the beach at Perranporth one day we saw a huge white dog with great floppy paws, ponderous but gentle movements, a tail like one of the Prince of Wales's feathers, and a dignified but friendly manner. The two children, aged about ten and six, fell in love at first sight. We approached the owners, who said it was a Pyrenean mountain dog, and they had got him from a breeder in Leicester. The outcome, after much discussion, was that I wrote to the breeder and asked if they had a puppy for sale. They replied that they had not, but one of their bitches was expected to give birth in September. By Christmas we could have the puppy. With considerable excitement we agreed. We all decided that he should be called Garrick. What more suitable?

In November we heard from the breeder. A male puppy had duly arrived, sound in wind and limb, soon would be fully house-trained and was lively and intelligent. There was one slight hitch. Due to some breeding quirk, he had a slightly defective tail. It would probably, the dealer said, grow naturally as the dog developed; but if we felt this slight imperfection was not acceptable another of their bitches was expecting in April, and we could instead put in an order for this puppy for next June. If we preferred to go ahead with our present order they would reduce the price by X guineas (I forget what).

I was doubtful, thought at first of trying some other breeder; but the children were adamant. The dog was to be their
Christmas present
! And as for a defective tail, how utterly appropriate could that be? Garrick, Demelza's dog, whose tail was part cut off at Redruth Fair! Daddy, it had to be!

The delivery date was fixed for mid-December. The puppy would be sent by train from Leicester and would arrive at Truro station at 5.30 a.m., where we were to collect him. The night before Jean and I were going to a hunt ball at Newquay (not that we hunted, but a few of our friends did). Newquay is about ten miles from Perranporth, and Truro from Perranporth is about the same. We arrived back from the ball about 3.30 a.m., changed, lay in bed for an hour and then set off to meet our new friend.

It was pitch black, of course, and Truro station was almost deserted; three old men, on a seat, a porter pushing an empty trolley, the long station dim lit. The train came in on time (as they often did on the old Great Western Railway) and at first only four people got off. Then we saw the luggage van at the other end and hastened towards it. Two boxes of books, a sheaf of newspapers, then something larger was carefully lowered down. It was our new puppy, already three times the size we had expected, who had made the journey from Leicester in a large laundry basket.

Garrick grew, and he grew, and he grew, like some monster in a fairy tale. The only part that did not grow, which remained stunted and misshapen, was his tail. What did that matter? Indeed it had its special significances. Well … but …

Did the breeding quirk that deformed the tail also imbue him with his outrageous amount of energy? Would this bounding, bouncing ever-enlarging bundle of vitality ever grow into a ponderous, dignified, warmly stately animal such as the one we had seen on the beach? Could a year or two's ageing make all the difference?

Our house had two long halls meeting at an L turn. Indoors Garrick was as well behaved as a good-tempered child, settling into our ways and, it seemed, totally happy in them. We gave him his own bedroom, the last on the ground floor and near the back door. In the evenings he would lie stretched out in front of the fire in our drawing room, which was at the extreme end of the other arm of the L. At about 10 p.m. I would kneel down beside him and whisper in one great floppy ear, ‘Time for bed, Garrick.' I never had to say it twice. He would cock a bloodshot eye at me and after a moment heave his great bulk onto its feet and proceed entirely on his own down the two long passages and slump into his own comfy bed to pass the night. Later Jean or I would go along and say good night to him.

As soon as he was free in the morning he would come lolloping up into our bedroom and salivate over my sheets until I gave him the digestive biscuit I had had waiting. In spite of his bulk and his great energies I never remember a solitary thing he broke in the house, not a plate, not a cup, not a glass. The perfect animal.

In the garden he was well behaved. I have a movie picture of him chasing Jean round the garden, grabbing at her skirt, but never, never tearing it.

As he grew we took him on increasingly long walks, and when we could we would let him off the lead. That was where the trouble began. He would charge about fascinated in finding new dogs to smell, birds to chase, motor bikes to pursue. Suddenly he would be deaf, or not choose to hear his name. Panting after a long run, we would eventually catch up with him, grab him by the double ruff and get the lead on him again. But even this was not much of a solution, for he would at once want to go ahead at twice our speed and drag one of us – or sometimes both – lurching after him. As he got larger he got more uncontrollable, and we had to resort to the chain collar which was supposed to tighten about his neck the more he pulled. This is a resort frowned on by some dog lovers because it is supposed to hurt the dog. With his great ruff it seemed to make no difference at all.

Jean took him many times to a training school for dogs in Camborne. Every time he behaved impeccably while he was there, even, Jean said, showing himself more intelligent than most of the rest, but reverting immediately when he got home.

The children thought much of him and made much of him, but were often away at school. He made much of us all; but he had no control over his roaming instincts. We could not spend all day superintending him. We would leave him snoozing comfortably on the back lawn and half an hour later the telephone would ring, sometimes from as far as three miles away, and a voice would say: ‘ Mr Winston Graham, we have a big white dog walking around in our vegetable garden … No, I don't think he has done much damage. He let me read his collar. Could you come and collect him?'

Jean or I would go and collect him. It was amusing enough to begin, but repetition became wearisome. Garrick would react appropriately to harsh words or honeyed ones. There was no harm in him, never an ill intent.

Two factors weighed heavily against him. He had a passionate dislike of two-stroke motorbikes, and the local policeman rode a two-stroke motorbike. The policeman could, perhaps, be placated. Perhaps once only. The worse and much more dangerous prospect was that once or twice we had just succeeded in restraining him from chasing sheep. That in a district where sheep was the commonest form of farming was an amber light turning to red.

We began to think of selling our beloved dog, or even giving him away. Who would buy him, who would take him? Indeed, who would love him, as we did? We hung on for a while, hoping for the best. The climax came when one day we locked him in the house. He galloped up the stairs to the first floor, found the landing window ajar, pushed it open, squeezed his bulk through the narrow aperture and slid down the tiled roof and leapt or fell the remaining twelve feet to land on an escallonia hedge, and, hurrah, he was free! We returned to hear the phone ringing and were told that Garrick was up at a farm in Trevollas four miles away, playing with a half dozen other dogs.

After a fitful further six months we parted from our warmhearted, loving, rollicking split personality of a dog with grief and kisses all round.

We gave him to a professional footballer living near Newquay, who took a five-mile run every morning and needed a companion. I have always hoped he had found the companion to suit him.

In the twenty years following the publication of the fourth
Poldark
–
Warleggan
– I wrote (with only one exception,
The Grove of Eagles
) all modern novels, ten in total, five of which were filmed on the big screen and five – not always the same – were major book club choices in the US. In addition the huge Bertelsmann book club in Germany took two of those books and the Club degli Editori of Italy two. The cumulative effect was considerable. So was the oppressiveness of the tax situation. In those days so much was confiscated by the Inland Revenue that while one could live in fine style it was virtually impossible to accumulate money, and with the two children at expensive schools and a wife with a taste for good living at least the equal of my own, I was aware of the possible impermanence of prosperity. I was writing – as always – what I wanted to write and not what I thought the public wanted. Three of the ten books were not a particular success, but that was an acceptable proportion. Public taste is fickle. And tastes can change. It would be a good and timely precaution to retain a bit more of one's earnings.