Memoirs of a Private Man (32 page)

The following day I slithered up and down the hills to Falmouth to get the brakes seen to. It was not a good beginning for a new driver. In those days, of course, there was no driving test to pass. ‘If in trouble put both feet down,' directed presumably, and hopefully, to the brake and clutch. I had had an unlucky career as a cyclist, and my brother and sister-in-law came to the conclusion, which they gladly imparted to my mother, that Winston ‘ would be no good with a car'.

The second was a Wolseley Hornet, that triumph of British engineering which had a very small six-cylinder engine noted for its excessive cylinder wear and no compensating increase in quietness. It also had a ‘twin top' gear specially suitable, they said, for overtaking. Unfortunately the two top gear ratios were so close that, going up Cornish hills, one was often forced to drop into second and grind up at a funeral pace.

Third was a Standard Flying Twenty, a handsome car for those days: probably it would be rated as a three-litre now. I bought it secondhand from Ronnie Neame, who directed my first film and who had had it from a naval lieutenant who had kept it unused during the war, so that the engine and all moving parts were in very good condition. But the bodywork was poor, so I arranged to have it overhauled and resprayed. I remember picking it up in London: it was transformed, beautiful and black and shiny. But the engine was missing badly. I drove it to Piccadilly, where I had arranged to meet my film agent and Anthony Kimmins, the film director, who had a project to put to me. I parked outside – one could in those days – but my attention to his proposition was a little absent-minded, as I wondered how I was going to be able to drive this shiny black beast back to Cornwall on the morrow if the engine was going to run as if fifteen out of the twenty horses had glanders.

I should, no doubt, have had a better sense of proportion, for nothing came of the meeting, and when I returned to the car it refused to start at all. I got the bonnet up and discovered that during the respray three out of the six plugs had had their operative ends playfully – or accidentally – hammered down so that there was no gap left for the plug to spark. I was eventually able to buy a new set and, when installed, drove the car back to my club where I took a late dinner and bed. The car had been parked at a busy part of the north side of Piccadilly for five hours.

The Standard served us well and it was years before I sold it and bought a three-litre drophead Alvis. This was also a four-seater, but two-door and not so roomy.

The Alvis became the pride of our lives. Its suspension was very hard, but its roadholding and acceleration were superb. Without any attempt at all to go faster, I knocked an hour and a half off trips between London and Cornwall. It was in this car that I took my family on an annual holiday from Cornwall.

It was seven years before I could bring myself to change the Alvis, which I eventually did for a 3.4 Jaguar Saloon.

It was extraordinary to find a return of my travelling time between places to something like that of the old Standard. The new Jaguar, however good-looking it was and however silent and reliable the engine, however comfortable to ride in at modest speeds, was to me like a coffin on wheels. Coming from a car that glued itself to the road, I had a number of narrow escapes, not of hitting another car but of going off the road at a corner. The suspension was woefully soggy, the roadholding, in a fast car, really dangerous. But provided you didn't actually drive it into a ditch, it was very trouble-free, and we kept the car for quite a while, along with a secondary car of assorted kinds: various Minis, a Riley (new style, alas), an Austin Healey Sprite.

When I sold the Jaguar I bought an Aston Martin DB6. This was the fastest thing I have ever driven. Its road-holding was still not as good as the Alvis but it was infinitely faster. At over 90 m.p.h. the Alvis began to smell of engine oil. The fastest I ever drove was in the first Aston: 140 mph on the Turin autostrada.

The engine was beautiful – none of that nonsense spread by envious rivals that after one crossing of London it needed a retune. You could drive it very fast indeed on the Continental motorways, yet the next day would be in the choked traffic of Monte Carlo, and it would crawl along the Riviera without a vestige of snatch. But the clutch was a brute.

After eighteen months I took the car back and ordered an automatic. In the jargon of the fashionable motor world, this new car would, they said, be built specially for me, my name on it, so to speak, from the beginning. But the automatic Aston was not a great car. It was as powerful as its predecessor, and at speed seemed to settle its back down securely on the road, but it was too low geared. At 120 m.p.h., which it would reach quickly and effortlessly, the rev-counter would be showing 6,000, in the red zone. It was also too low slung and grated on awkward dips (such as crossing King Harry Ferry). And it burnt out exhaust systems at a great rate. The new Avon tyres with which it was fitted lasted 9,000 miles, then I had seven punctures in five weeks. (The Pirelli tyres with which I replaced them not only improved the roadholding, they lasted almost for ever.)

About this time I started buying Alfa Romeos as a second car. I went to look for a Lancia in a showroom on the Bayswater Road, and saw a drophead Alfa Spyder in the window. I never got any further. The salesman, seeing my interest, said: ‘ It's a fun car, sir.' I thought this a piece of conventional salesmanship, but in fact it proved to be the truth. Insofar as driving a car is ever anything more than a means of getting from place to place nowadays, the Alfa provided it. Though, of course, a much smaller and lighter car, it had almost all the qualities of the Alvis, with a more comfortable ride and fewer foibles. It is the car by which I now judge all others for suspension and roadholding. In the course of the years I had three of them: white, pagoda yellow, and dove grey.

When I sold the second Aston I fell for the new Jaguar XJS twelvecylinder model, and kept it for nine years before buying a second. The early XJSs had a very bad reputation for unreliability, but apart from one recurring fault, which took a time to sort out, it did me extremely well, and the second was even better. It is wonderfully quiet, with none of that throttle roar of the Aston (which some people love), very powerful, very easy to drive, and very fast. I have done 125 in the last one, and there still seemed a little more in it. It still does not corner as well as the Alvis and the Alfa, but I have no other complaint.

In addition to my own car I have rented many in different parts of the world, the United States, North and South Africa, Australia and most countries of Western Europe. On my first visit to Hollywood I hired a car to drive down the coast as far as La Jolla and San Diego, requesting a ‘ compact' car, as they call them. The car was late arriving and they apologized for this and for the fact that they didn't have a compact. They awarded me a Chevrolet Bel Air, which measured 17 feet 9 inches. It was the first automatic car I had ever driven. They didn't even bother to turn the engine off: I signed the papers, they bundled our luggage into the enormous boot and edged me into the driving seat. Then they leaned in at the open window and said: ‘ That's OK, Mr Graham, just don't use your left foot.'

Driving on the opposite side of the road has seldom troubled me. (I remember once leaving Compiègne and taking the wrong way round a roundabout. In England this would have resulted in a barrage of flashing lights and blaring horns. The French just ignored me until I came to my senses.) But being launched out into the Los Angeles traffic and trying to ignore one's left foot was another matter. At the first lights we jerked to a violent halt. Both our heads tried to go through the windscreen. We proceeded in a volley of jolts and jerks – and here again the American drivers, though I was driving an American car, seemed to sense that I was a Limey and merited their forbearance, for I never heard an impatient horn.

Presently we spotted a sign pointing to the required highway and we were really off. Even this did not imbue any sense of confidence or ease, for we found ourselves part of a convoy of enormous automobiles all proceeding together down a four-lane highway at sixty miles an hour. There was no way of getting out of it. We could not accelerate without breaking the law. We almost came to be on nodding terms with our fellow travellers to right and left. At long last the congestion began to thin out.

I said to Jean: ‘What's that noise?'

‘ The radio,' she said.

‘ Who switched it on?'

‘ They must have. It was on when we left.'

I hadn't heard it. Imminence of death concentrates the mind wonderfully.

When
The Walking Stick
was published in America, Double-day invited me to go over to publicize the book. When issuing the invitation Ken McCormick, the most distinguished editor Doubleday have ever had, said to me: ‘Mind, we shall expect you to work hard.' I said OK, and despite this Jean, who had just had her premonitory stroke, chose to come with me.

It was an interesting experience. I gave a talk (lecture) and four interviews in Washington, six interviews – two on television, two on radio and two to the press – in New York, a similar number in Chicago and rather more in Detroit and San Francisco. It isn't an experience I want to repeat, but I saw it as a challenge.

In Washington the lecture was to the English-Speaking Union, and I had taken a good deal of trouble to prepare what I was going to say, which was to be fairly wide-ranging and including speculation as to the future of the novel both in America and in England. Five minutes before I went on the platform the editor from Doubleday said to me: ‘Make it nice and folksy. And don't forget to talk about your new novel.'

Swallowing my script, I began by saying that I had originally intended to talk about the novel in general but it had been suggested to begin that I talk first about one novel in particular, etc. etc.

It was a full house, and there was one tall middle-aged lady in the front row who fixed me with an eye and shook her head disapprovingly. After going on a couple of minutes more I hastened to add that nevertheless I wanted to make this lecture fairly wideranging, and shortly I would be broadening my approach. I glanced down and saw the lady shake her head disapprovingly at me again. I made a fairly good joke, to which most of the audience responded, but she still didn't like me at all.

I went on, trying to avoid her gaze and consoling myself that there were about 299 people in the room who didn't necessarily feel as she felt. Nevertheless it was disconcerting. It took me about another five minutes to realize that disapproval was not the expression on her face, and that she suffered from a nervous tic, causing her head to jerk negatively from side to side at irregular intervals.

One thinks of the Maugham story in which there is a woman who jerks her head backwards in such a way that she seems to be inviting every man she meets to come with her into her bedroom.

As it happened, I almost felt I was receiving such an invitation at the dinner of the Association of American Publishers the following night. I was put next to a really beautiful girl whose father ran a bookstore in North Carolina.

As soon as I sat down she said: ‘Oh, Mr Graham, I'm real glad to be setten' next to you. I took you to bed with me last night, but I was feeling sleepy so we didn't get very far.'

I was about to reply on what I thought was the same plane, telling her that it would give me the greatest pleasure to help her to try again, when I gazed into her liquid brown eyes and saw not a spark of humour in them. Not for the first time I remarked to myself on the dangers of a common language. No French girl would have said that, but I would have understood the signals better.

In Detroit my fellow guest on a television programme was Muhammad Ali, or Cassius Clay: that is, we were joint guests. He was then at the height of his powers as one of the greatest of heavyweights, and in the height of his youth and good looks. Quizzed closely by the host about his attitude to patriotism, colour bars, conscription, etc., he was, I thought, very reasonable and very well behaved. None of the bragging, macho attitude one had come to associate with his name in the media.

We shared a taxi back to the hotel and shared a lift to our rooms. The lift attendant was a pretty young black girl. Ali gave his floor number as 5, I gave mine as 12. As he got out of the lift he gave the lift girl a smile. We then went up to floor 22.

I said: ‘No, I wanted twelve.'

‘ Oh, sorry, suh,' she said, ‘I was goin' wa-ay up to heaven.'

In Chicago I did my usual round, including the famous Kup's talk show, to which about a dozen personalities were invited and over a period of three hours were casually questioned on this and that, and one was given a cup by the host Kupcinet and told one might have it filled with the liquid of one's choice. Unknown to us in the cloistered circle of the TV lights, a violent storm broke over Chicago while we were there, decimating a carnival procession, organized by the Puerto Ricans to commemorate some anniversary, and flooding the streets. My wife, who had come with me to the studio, had a grandstand view of it all, saw the dancing girls drenched and the long display floats stripped of their hangings. When at last I came out we had great difficulty in getting back to our hotel, and when we reached it the kitchens were six feet deep in water and the lifts had failed. (By a crowning mercy one service lift still operated.) It seems that in their eagerness to cover the whole area of the lakeside city in concrete, the planners had not allowed for drainage to cope with emergencies.

While I was in Chicago I was invited by a journalist I knew to attend the seventieth birthday party of ‘ one of the last gangsters', a man called Paddy Bauler. He had been a bootlegger and was said to have personally shot and killed a policeman years ago, but nothing could be proved. I have his invitation before me now. It has a Hong Kong postmark and carries a rather splendid frontispiece with a Chinese painting of cloud-covered mountains. Inside it states in large letters: