Memoirs of a Private Man (5 page)

Anyway, that night I was afraid to go in to the house, so fell on my knees, the doormat scratching them, to pray to a God I had never properly been introduced to that she was still alive – that somehow she was still alive. When eventually I summoned the courage to go in I discovered that my mother was dozing and the doctor and the nurse had turned the gas down and come downstairs to discuss the situation with my father. I should have learned from that that the imagination – my imagination – can always put two and two together and make six. It has been doing so ever since.

All this made my parents ready for a move. My mother with catarrh all the year and bronchitis every winter because of the ‘dampness' of Victoria Park; my father a restive, frustrated cripple still only in his mid-fifties but forcibly retired by ill-health; and now my near-death and hers – there was nothing any longer to keep us in Manchester. The idea was to move to Southport, or perhaps to St Anne's, which is the better, residential end of Blackpool, and which they knew suited my mother's health. Together they could find a pleasant bungalow and face a long retirement. But behold my brother, frustrated beyond measure in his dead-end job, desperately wanting to marry, and now, suddenly, totally besotted in his desire to live in Cornwall. He didn't mind
what
he did, however menial, so long as it was in Cornwall.

So in September 1925 we all took a holiday in Perranporth – Cecil's fiancée Elsie with us – and stayed at the Tywarnhayle Hotel for two weeks, in the little undeveloped village with its fantastic cliff formations – mostly man-made, by miners seeking tin – and its three miles of golden sands and its apparently balmy climate. The whole family saw the light and was converted. Cecil and Elsie desperately sought opinions of the possibility of work in the district or some opening that they might jointly or individually seize on. There was nothing. Simply nothing. As many have found before them, and since.

But eventually it became evident that opening a shop catering for the villagers in one form or another might provide an opportunity. It was an acknowledged fact that almost all the people in the village went to Truro on Wednesdays for market day and did all their real shopping there. In Perranporth there was a big grocer's called The Red House which, although badly run, was surely going to prosper in due time. There was a corner shop opposite run by a man called Samuel Harvey Mitchell, which in its small way sold everything from paraffin to Cornish cream; one or two other small village shops, old-fashioned in habit and long-established, and a group of wooden huts on the way to the promenade in which you could buy newspapers, toys, sweets and some primitive beach equipment. But in the newly developing part of the village, overlooking the recently opened Boscawen Park and boating lake, a chemist called Polgreen had recently built a fine-looking house and shop, next to which was a solitary plot of land as yet unsold and undeveloped. There would be no more shops built beyond.

It still startles me to think what happened in two weeks. In that time a builder called Healey, owner of the plot and of the Red House, and the father of Donald Healey, the only man in the last fifty years to give his name to a British-designed and built motor car, had been approached, a sketch plan produced by his architect, Pitkeathley, and discussed and amended and agreed, and the deal done, for the building of a similar shop and premises to the Polgreens'. So far nobody had any firm idea as to what
sort
of shop it was going to be, but opinion in the village was earnestly canvassed, and a decision was precipitately taken, that what was most lacking in Perranporth was a go-ahead ladies' and gentlemen's outfitters. Elsie was clever with her needle but knew nothing more of the business than that, having worked in an insurance office. Cecil was good at figures but knew nothing more of the retail business either. Within the last three days of our stay my parents found a furnished bungalow on rising ground 300 yards from the proposed shop, and took it for twelve months from the 1st of November.

Thereupon everyone returned in triumph to Manchester where, burdened with a sick husband and still as delicate as ever herself, my mother set about leaving all her friends, selling up all our furniture and effects and moving 300 miles to a new life in the depths of an unknown Celtic county by the sea.

The decision was made to sell everything, even to pots and pans and pictures and beds and brooms and baking tins – retaining only the piano, a bookcase full of books and our silver and china, personal clothing and effects.

I don't remember much of that time except the wrench of selling many things we had grown attached to. We were leaving other things behind, apart from friends. After his stroke, my father had a ragingly high blood pressure, and in those days there were no pills to control it. In a desperate clutch at anything, anything to make him better, he had taken first to Christian Science, in which his gentle brother-inlaw Dan had long been a believer, and then to spiritualism. Seances were held at our house at which a young medium while under the ‘control' of one of her spirits would massage my father's arm and leg, trying to bring back the muscle strength. One has to record that she was the first person to make him walk across the room without a stick, and in the nine months under her care he never had a fit. Later it was whispered that she had been exposed as a fraud. I can only speak of the improvement she brought in him and the fact that she refused any payment for her visits.

We must have seemed a strange crew arriving in that Cornish village where most people were still Cornish and new blood from up-country was then mercifully rare – I and my parents in the October, my brother and sister-in-law, newly married, the following April. We were semi-genteel, middle-middle-class, rather modest and retiring but with an underlying sense of position. This was particularly so in my mother's case, who never forgot that she had been Miss Anne Mawdsley. It scarcely existed in my brother, who was the most un-class-conscious person I have ever met. I was not far behind – at that time – being almost totally unaware that there were people either superior or inferior to myself.

I remember saying to a woman called Dorothy Hunt, whose bungalow we eventually bought: ‘ It's a bit difficult among all these new faces. I can't remember who I'm supposed to know and who I'm not supposed to know.' She said stiffly: ‘ I think the Cornish are just as good as we are, so there's no reason to pick and choose one's friends.' I stared at her in total astonishment. I suppose I could have phrased it better, making it clear that I was talking solely about recognition, since in a city one would have looked a damned fool saying good afternoon to everyone one passed. But the idea that ‘ supposed to know' implied some sort of social discrimination was utterly foreign to me.

Maybe at that time I was a bit of a
literary
snob – though snob is the wrong word. I had virtually nothing whatever to contribute to ordinary gossipy family chat, but if books were mentioned I came awake. So far as the company I kept was concerned, it might be said that although I had no great opinion of my own literary abilities, I had less of theirs.

From the very earliest days I had wanted to write. At the age of five I dictated a story to my mother which began: “Oh, look,” said Tom to his mother, “There is a dead man on the doorstep!” That was as far as the story went. I can't remember whether it was inspiration that dried up first or my mother's patience. I won a special essay prize, open to a number of schools, the subject being ‘The Horrors of War'. It was my first meeting, aged ten, with the high master of the Manchester Grammar School, Mr Paton, who had helped to judge and who presented the prize. He made the now-expected joke about my Christian name, since by then my namesake had become famous. There was an occasion when our doctor came to see me and, being in a rarely jovial mood, stuck his stethoscope on the end of my nose and said: ‘I hope you're not capable of a terminological inexactitude.' It was shortly after Winston Churchill in the Commons had declared that some statement of the Opposition was ‘A lie!' and had been told by the Speaker that this was not parliamentary language; so he had amended it.

Actually I was better at maths than literature, disgustingly inept at foreign languages – which would have been so useful in later life – and good at most other things. When it was finally decided I was not strong enough to face the rigours of the journey to and from Manchester Grammar School, my father went to see the headmaster of the Long-sight Grammar School and asked him what he thought I might be likely to do well at. The head replied, ‘He'll succeed at anything he sets his mind to.'

I don't know how true that was, but certainly my mother must have had an inordinate belief in the abilities of her ewe lamb. Of course it suited her to have me living at home; and probably she felt if the worst came to the worst she could buy me a bookshop somewhere where I could marry and live out my life comfortably enough. And of course it suited me just as marvellously to live at home and not to be dependent on my earnings for the bare essentials.

In the liverish eye of my relatives I was something of a drip. Since school, when I had appeared so ‘clever', I had seemed to go to seed. I sharpened up to play tennis or go on the beach or tramp the cliffs or go to the cinema or in pursuit of a girl, but I did not seem interested in any gainful occupation. I got up very late in the mornings and stayed up very late at night. (Kinder to reverse the description of this routine, one being the outcome of the other.) Since, in the house my parents bought in Cornwall, we had no electricity, this meant reading or studying by ‘Aladdin' lamps, or by one candle only in the bedroom, and not infrequently I would read till 3 a. m. My eyes did not have so much demanded of them again until the war, when as a coastguard I would illegally read – usually poetry – by the light of a torch.

I can understand how very irritating it must have been to my father – an intensely practical man who, though with musical leanings, was wholly wedded to the business ethic – to have this tall, thin, frequently jolly, but frail, drooping, sometimes ungracious son, who had no real ambition – no ambition at least that was realizable – and spent most of the day with his nose in a book. And who, through indifferent health and his mother's pampering, was such a disappointment.

Many snide remarks came my way from outside, and my sisterin-law never missed an opportunity to point out to my mother, after my father died, what a useless member of society I was becoming.

In his first two years in Cornwall my father recovered sufficiently to be able to take long walks, to play bridge, to write with his left hand and to do a little gardening. On his last birthday he wrote to his mother: ‘My dear Mother, Sixty! I can hardly believe it!' I had had no real idea how old he was, but it so happened that he left the letter open on the writing table, and, going for an envelope, I inadvertently saw it. I had supposed him somewhere in his midfifties, and sixty – to an eighteen-year-old – seemed immensely aged.

That same year, on a November afternoon, six years almost to the day after his first stroke, a lady at the door roused me from sleep – I had nodded off to sleep with my head on the page of the novel I was trying to write – to say that my father was ill in the garden. I hurried out, hoping it was just another fit, but it soon became clear that this was a second stroke – this time it had affected the whole of his left side. We got him to bed somehow. He could not speak or move at all, only his weakened right hand endlessly flexed and unflexed, as he had got into the habit of doing to try to strengthen it; that, and a fluttering of one eye.

‘Can you hear me, Father?' I would say, and he would wink. It was the only communication left. He died a week later, survived by his eighty-five-year-old mother in Blackburn. Life is not kind – nor is it in any way even-handed. At sixty I was at the peak of my career, though already burdened with a wife crippled in just the same way as my father had been. Happily ‘burden' simply does not apply to her; but living with a handicap and living under threat is not conducive to high spirits. She was a miracle. Always optimistic, even when first paralysed, always cheerful, always loving.

At that time, the time of my father's death, and for a long while before and after it, I was appallingly shy of telling anyone I wanted to be a writer, fearing total ridicule – which such a statement would probably have received. The year before he died I had bitterly offended him because he suddenly said to me one day: ‘ When's your novel going to be finished?' It was the first time he had ever
mentioned
the subject. I replied: ‘Oh, this year, next year, sometime, never.' It was a rude and unworthy reply, but I was only just turned eighteen and he spoke with what the French call
pudeur
, as if he were lifting the corner on some distinctly disreputable occupation. I curled up inside
instantly
, like a prodded snail, and those were the only words I could think to say.

The idea that I should ever make a
living
out of such scribblings seemed derisory. And it probably was. I lived a quiet, unadventurous, retired life when, if I really meant to succeed at this strange profession, I should have been plunging into all aspects of living with the gusto and the enterprise of an explorer. Once when Somerset Maugham was asked by an anxious American mother how she could best help her son, who wanted to be a writer, he replied: ‘Give him five thousand dollars and tell him to go to the devil.' This advice no doubt would have been appropriate for me.

I did not know a single author, however insignificant, or publisher, however small-time, and I don't think I knew that people called agents existed.

My first full novel, after a long and arduous struggle with an earlier book, got itself written when I was twenty-one. It took me ten weeks – then I retired to bed with complete exhaustion and a stomach complaint. Later I typed the book and sent it to a publisher, who returned it within two weeks with a rejection slip. I then fired it at another, who kept it a month. Then I sent it to Hodder & Stoughton, who kept it five months before sending it back saying the book had distinct promise but wasn't quite strong enough for their list, but if I wrote a second they would like to consider it. Heartened and encouraged, I shoved the first novel away in a drawer and began my second. When this was finally finished I sent it away in great hope, whereupon Hodder & Stoughton returned it with a conventional rejection slip.