Memoirs of a Private Man (7 page)

That sort of production was beyond me – fortunately, as it turned out. But all through this period Ward, Lock never seemed to hesitate for a moment about publishing each novel as it was finished. And they made no attempt to edit, to suggest, to criticize. Except for the request that I should tone down a few scenes in the first novel, everything was printed exactly as I submitted it to them – to the last comma. It was a very considerable act of faith on their part, and some years later when people told me I had outgrown their list I stayed on with them, feeling they deserved more profit from the association. Perhaps this treatment from my first publisher has bred in me an egotistical belief that when I have finished a book – about which I have never consulted anyone, except my wife – then what I have written is what I wanted to write, and it is said in the way I wanted to say it. Full stop.

After I married, my wife was the one confidante, willing to listen, to talk. Often she was just the listener, so that, in talking it over, I could work out my own problem; sometimes she contributed a vital thought. When writing the
Poldarks
I often went to her for information about country ways, and she drew on memories of her Cornish farmer cousins. Sometimes she seemed to have a sort of folk memory – of things she knew by instinct rather than experience.

Only twice have I had substantial advice from any other outside source, and both with books rewritten from earlier published novels. On
Woman in the Mirror
(formerly
The Giant's Chair
) Carol Brandt's advice was invaluable, and on
Cameo
(formerly
My Turn Next
) Marjory Chapman's equally so.

But if these were years of frustration, there were also years of development, and there were many compensations, not least that of living in Cornwall. Could one choose a better place to be a relative failure? Perranporth has one of the finest beaches in the world – I call it Hendrawna in the
Poldark
novels, Hendrawna being the name of a small area of the hinterland adjacent to that beach.

It was visited frequently by Tennyson, accompanied by his friend Henry Sewell Stokes, in the 1850s, and five years after Tennyson's death in 1892 a poem was published in the
Echo
, for the first time, I believe, and attributed to him. I don't think it has been included in any collected edition of his poems, but Henry Sewell Stokes should have known.

Hast thou ever in a travel
Through the Cornish lands,
Heard the great Atlantic roaring
On the firm, wide tawny flooring
Of the Perran sands?

Sea-rent gully where the billows
Come in great unrest;
Fugitives all white and reeking,
Flying from the vengeful Sea-king,
Striking from the west.

Level broadway, ever ermined
By the ocean verge;
Girt by sandhill, swelling, shoaling,
Down to imitate the rolling
Of the lordly surge.

Nine large files of troubled water
Turbulently come;
From the bosom of his mother,
Each one leaping on his brother,
Scatters lusty foam.

In the sky a wondrous silence,
Cloud-surf, mute and weird;
In the distance, still uplifting,
Ghostly fountains vanish, drifting,
Like a Druid's beard.

Spreading out a cloth of silver,
Moan the broken waves;
Sheet of phosphorescent foaming,
Sweeping up to break the gloaming
Stillness of the caves.

I lived within a mile of this beach, and was free to walk on it whenever the fancy took me, or along the cliffs which rose up between Perranporth and St Agnes. This is Cornwall at its gauntest, at its most iron-bound. For centuries these granite cliffs have withstood mountains of water flung at them by tempestuous seas – literally millions of tons of seawater hurled at them in every gale – and they have lost none of their grandeur, scarcely anything of their shape or form through measurable centuries. The land bordering the cliffs is the habitat of rabbit and gull and errant seabird, mice and stoat and all small things – preying on each other but not yet preyed upon by man. It is rampant with heather and tiny flowers and wind-driven gorse, nothing much being allowed by the gales to grow above three feet in height; uncultivable, empty, wild.

Or should I tire of the sea, there were valleys to walk in – and every valley with a hasty stream. Marlowe's ‘By shallow rivers to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals' does not apply to the Cornish streams. Birds, yes, in plenty, but the streams are always in a hurry as if they remember their heyday as vital adjuncts for the nearest mine – to provide water for the washing floors and the tin stamps and vital fresh water for the pumping engines which would corrode quickly if the acid minerals in the water they pump up were to be used.

I have no fear of heights when heights are presented by flying in planes, or standing at the top of the Empire State Building or the Eiffel Tower and looking down. But I have a morbid fear of climbing, which I have expressed in scenes in several of my novels:
Night without Stars
and
The Loving Cup
, for example. This stems almost certainly from an early occasion in Cornwall. I used to climb all over the great cliffs, without much thought to the risk, and usually on my own, and one day I decided to explore Sobey's Ladder, which is a narrow mineshaft not far from Wheal Prudence – driven from part way down the black cliffs to the sea below. (Sobey was a miner who used to keep a boat on a ledge down there and use it for fishing.) When I was part way down I slipped and fell about six feet. There I clung on, with jagged rocks licked by the sea a hundred feet below. Slightly concussed, bruised and cut on shoulder and leg, nothing worse, I crawled slowly back to the top, lay there on the sloping grass gasping, and in the confusion of my swimming head it felt as if the grassy floor I had reached was slowly tilting until I was in danger of sliding off over the edge into the sea. There was no one within a mile, and the sun had just set.

I don't remember how long it took to get home, but it was the end of cliff-climbing for me. For years after I had a nightmare of picking my way along a narrow path with cliffs looming above me and the sea licking below, and the pathway gradually narrowing until it petered out.

In the
Poldark
novels Sobey's Ladder has been attributed to a man called Kellow.

After the publication of my third novel, on one of my visits to London I met a man called Brian Hall. He was a junior partner in the firm of Gordon Harbord, a successful theatrical agency. At a party at their offices where I was excited to meet a number of British actors of the day (does anyone ever remember Isobel Elsom?), Brian Hall told me he was shortly going to Paris, and invited me to go with him. After an anxious counting of my shekels, I agreed. We travelled overnight from Southampton to Le Havre and stayed at a pleasant enough small hotel. Brian had told me that he would be pretty busy every day so I would have to fend for myself. This suited me.

I thought of this first visit a couple of years ago when I was talking to an elderly doctor at the Savile Club, and he told me of his own first visit to Paris many years before, when he was twenty-one.

‘It was my first time abroad, y'know. The first time on my own. So, as I had heard so much about the Paris brothels, their luxury, their charm, I decided to try one. So I made enquiries and then went along to a house and rang the bell. I don't mind telling you I was a bit het up. Well, the door opened and Madame stood on the threshold. She smiled at me and welcomed me in. Ever been to a Paris brothel, Graham? Well, it was quite impressive, I tell you. Big room she showed me into – crimson velvet curtains, gold chairs, etc. But standing in this room were a row of girls, various shapes and sizes, in different states of undress. They stood there and looked at me and I looked at them. In a row, like chorus girls about to go on stage. Some not bad-looking either. But a few of ' em were so oddly rigged out that I thought they looked rather silly. They appealed to my sense of humour, d'you know. I smiled and stifled a laugh. They smiled back and one or two tittered in response. Maybe I was a bit strung up but I began to laugh more openly. There was more tittering from the girls, and then in no time we were all laughing together!

‘ Madame touched my hand. She said: “ Monsieur, I think I have something more suitable for you.”

‘ So she took my arm and guided me out of this room and down a passage and opened a door at the other end and gently let me through. It was pretty dark and it took a minute or so to see where I was. D'you know where I was? D'you know where she'd shown me? As the door shut behind me I saw I was standing in the backyard among the dustbins!'

Though long before my marriage, my own intentions in going with Brian Hall to Paris were surprisingly innocent and not at all like the doctor's. I wanted to see the sights and was not specially interested in the seamier side of the city. But the very first day I met a girl who was staying at the hotel; we shared the same sightseeing bus, and from then on ignored the ordinary tourist trips and went everywhere together. We went to restaurants, bistros, up the Eiffel Tower, along the Seine, to Montmartre and Montparnasse, and to the ballet where the language difficulty did not arise.

This, of course, was long before it was fashionable – indeed the done thing – to travel the world in one's youth. Her name had an agreeably Elizabethan ring, Catherine Parr. She was travelling entirely alone and had so far been to Portugal, Spain, Italy and now France. She was an Australian, about my age, slim, elegant and adventurous, and she spoke no single word of any language but her own. She had sufficient confidence in her own not-negligible abilities to go where and get what she wanted. Her lack of languages did not incommode her. She was pretty and she simply smiled and pointed at whatever she wanted. After the second day together she smiled and pointed at me.

Three or four years after this, an elderly retired colonel whom I knew in Cornwall, and who himself knew Paris well, quizzed me about my first visit there, and incautiously I told him of my experiences. I mentioned my Australian friend, and added: ‘I must remember to send her a Christmas card.'

As he looked at me, a peculiar expression crossed his face which I found impossible to interpret. He looked surprised, even slightly shocked – or perhaps disappointed. I can only surmise such a reaction might come from the fact that he took the view of a first visit to Paris in the same light as my elderly doctor: eagerness to relish the glitter, the glamour, the wickedness of the world's wickedest city. Of course he would have laughed had I told him of the doctor's fiasco – and told him as if it had happened to me. I had sliced out of bounds on the first hole. Could happen to any feller. But you didn't somehow go to
Paris
to indulge in an
affair
with an
Australian
girl, and, what was more,
keep in touch with her after
. Why, that could have happened in Huddersfield.

About the time of the sixth novel, mindful of the relative success of
Seven Suspected
, I embarked on another play. It was called
Forsaking All Others
. During the late Thirties, a talented young actor called Peter Bull had brought down a company of his friends and colleagues, taken over the Perranporth Women's Institute for about ten weeks each summer, and put on a remarkable repertory of plays, professionally acted, directed and produced. People on holiday came from all over Cornwall to Perranporth to the plays, knowing they could rely on a quality of production rarely seen outside London. Peter Bull was a keen judge of talent, and among the people who came down with him were Frith Banbury, Pauline Letts, Pamela Brown, Joyce Redman, Judith and Roger Furse, and, appearing in the occasional play as ‘guest artistes', were Hugh Sinclair, Robert Morley, Valerie Taylor and others. It was all heady and sophisticated stuff and it began to create a national name for itself.

I had come to know a few of them, though not well, and it was with awful trepidation in the late summer of 1938, happening to meet Peter Bull one day, I blurted out the fact that I had written a play and would he be very kind and read it? He said certainly he would, so I sent it to him when he returned to London. After a few weeks he wrote to invite me to supper next time I was in London. I went up the following week in high hopes but accompanying fears. The fears were realized. He saw me backstage of the Robert Morley play he was presenting in London,
Goodness, How Sad!
, and after a cheerful interchange and some complimentary remarks about my own play he added: ‘Of course, I wouldn't put it on in London.'

I have no memory of the supper we had afterwards; I hope I was a good enough loser not to show disappointment; but towards the end of the meal he gave me the name of a producer friend of his to whom I might send the play for further consideration and advice. I thanked him and left, already foreseeing that his friend would read the play and return it with an encouraging note. Which is what happened. I felt demeaned by my own incompetence.

I do not think now that
Forsaking All Others
was nearly as good as
Seven Suspected
. It was more self-conscious, more pretentious. In the first play I had written uninhibitedly, bringing in the thrills and the laughs without a second thought.
Forsaking All Others
was full of second thoughts, and more serious, trying to go deeper and, on the whole, failing. Peter Bull was wholly right not to put it on. In the end I rewrote it as a novel and called it
Strangers Meeting
. It was the worst novel I ever wrote.

I returned to Cornwall feeling distinctly fed up. Sitting opposite me in the train was a woman I knew slightly from Perranporth called Ethel Jaggar. For six years she had been running a small private hotel, but was finding the strain too much for her. Her husband, a mining engineer in Nigeria, had recently been appointed to what was an improved and stable position and wanted her to sell the place and join him. She wanted badly to do this but, with war looming, property was a drag on the market. She was hopelessly stuck with it.