Memoirs of a Private Man (9 page)

Privately I sometimes ground my teeth just the same. I was a
published
novelist, for God's sake, with a collection of handsome volumes on my shelf, with my name on every one, and admirably favourable notices on the back covers. I was an established novelist, whose books were reviewed in the
Observer, The Times
, the
Financial Times
, and in places as far away as Otago and Kuala Lumpur. When I wrote I needed to have no qualms about whether the next book would be published: it was taken for granted.

Looking back on those days I realize now that what I grossly omitted to read were enough biographies and autobiographies of famous and best-selling authors who had written maybe six or even a dozen unsuccessful books, being forced to support themselves by other work – often uncongenial work – until one day they struck oil.

Anyway, there it was at that time, my new wife was wonderfully gifted, and such a dynamo of energy that the project was bound to be a success.

And it surely
was
a success – so far as it lasted, it could not have been more successful. But as we had all expected, Hitler was not to be satisfied with Austria and the Sudetenland. One August day I heard on the BBC that he had concluded a non-aggression pact with his lowering, suspicious neighbour to the east. A thunderstorm broke over the village that day, and in the middle of it I rushed down to Treberran and found Jean making her wedding cake in the company of Barbara Bryan-Haynes, her contemporary and friend who was helping to cook for her that summer. I came on their glowing happy faces with a look as thunderous as the weather and told them that war could now only be a matter of weeks. The wedding was fixed for the 18th of October, by which time the house would be blissfully empty. It has to be brought forward, I insisted. With a house booked to be full of people until mid-September, Jean said there was no way in which she could abandon her new commitment. We parted in mild dissension.

In the event, with war breaking out on September 3rd, I insisted on the wedding being not later than the 18th, so the paradox emerged that we, who had wanted to marry for several years, had in the event to be married by licence, with the sanction of the bishop. Coming back from Truro in my mother's car, I picked up a young man I knew in Toc H called Joe Stephens and gave him a lift home. On the way I explained about having just been in for the licence and the haste of the wedding.

Before I could get any further he broke into an embarrassed laugh and said: ‘ Oh, I didn't know you was in the same sort of trouble as me!'

After a rush to Plymouth to buy the wedding dress – the one ordered wouldn't be ready in time – and the choice of a single bridesmaid instead of three (my cousin's daughters heartbroken at not being able to get there) came the day, a Monday, sun and cloud with a fresh breeze; sixty guests, a wedding cake on which the icing had not sufficiently hardened, so that, towards the end of the breakfast, there was the risk that the lowest tier would not stand the strain (it was like the Leaning Tower of Pisa); an officiating vicar, Sir John Charles William Herschel, Bart. (great-grandson of the discoverer of Uranus), who either from the decrepitude of age or the stresses of the new war tried hard throughout the service to marry me to a girl called Christine; tea in Truro afterwards with my dearest friend, Fred Harris, and Jean'ssolitary bridesmaid Barbara, and then off to Mousehole for the beginning of our honeymoon.

Through the summer of 1939, on the fairly rare occasions when we had been able to get to the sea together, we had walked through the smaller surf, arms linked, planning a holiday in Scotland and singing or humming ‘Over the Sea to Skye'. This was now out of the question, with petrol rationing newly instituted, the blackout in force, evacuee children, air-raids expected. So we spent ten days at the Old Coastguard's Hotel in Mousehole and the Godolphin Arms in Marazion.

I will not pretend that I greatly enjoyed our honeymoon. (It didn't matter in the end, for we had so many marvellous ones later.) But at the time the war was too imminent (or do I mean immanent?). On our first morning we heard that the battleship the
Royal Oak
had been torpedoed and had sunk with few survivors. We took a fishing boat out to the Manacles, and the fisherman in charge of it congratulated us for being able to eat ham sandwiches in such a heaving sea. In the evening the blackout was so complete that going out of the hotel one could see nothing, only hear the hum of voices as people all round the horseshoe of the harbour came out of doors to talk neighbour to neighbour. One man, coming out of a pub, stumbled over a coil of rope and complained: ‘Tis dark as a bloody sack.'

That was more or less the outlook for us all. The evil war news of the over-running and destruction of Poland, the home news of the introduction of rationing, of the prospective call-up into the services of all men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, the evacuation of millions of children, the endless decrees; these hardly made a favourable background for a peaceful, happy honeymoon. We also knew that the house we had left was not empty. Some people had stayed on because of the outbreak of war, others wanted to remain till Christmas; and there was the risk that such a large house would be commandeered either for troops or evacuees.

I saw a film a few years ago called
Hope and Glory
, which was set in London at the outbreak of war and during the Blitz. This showed men hurrying to recruiting stations as soon as war was declared and emerging a few weeks later khaki-clad and ready for the fray. Where this was dreamed up I don't know; probably from memories of the First World War. It was not true of the Second. Notices were issued that men should
not
flock to recruiting stations but wait to be called up in an orderly fashion so that total chaos could be avoided. Towards the end of 1939 there was a cartoon in
Punch
depicting one man in civilian clothes talking to a man in khaki. The first man says: ‘ In the Army, I see? You must have influence!'

When it came time for me to register I chose what I thought the least uncivilized of the three services, which was the navy. I won't catalogue all the ailments I had suffered in my teens and twenties; and when I was eventually called for a medical in the early summer of 1940 it obviously crossed my mind that I might be found partially unfit. However, on the day I sailed through everything and, but for one doctor, I would have passed A1. But the one doctor's little tick meant that I was out of the navy altogether – they would take only the best – and I must be turned over to the army. This occurred, but another medical followed, and at it I was downgraded from B to C.

I am reminded of Bob Hope's experience when, in the early days of the war, he was living in Hollywood and feeling that he should return to England and help in the war effort. Knowing that some of his friends had volunteered for the Canadian Air Force he asked one of them who had been accepted how he had got on.

‘ I suppose,' he said, ‘you have to go through a strict physical test?'

The other man growled at him: ‘ They'll take you if you're warrm.'

Well, my downgrading meant that at least for the time being, I wasn't warm enough. It didn't matter that I had a fair skill with words, persuasive or abusive – or that in maths I was ahead of most people – or that I was bursting with a desire to do Hitler down. Because I wasn't up to square bashing I was totally out.

Had I had influence in London something would of course have been fixed for me. (One reads in autobiographies of a dozen such instances.) As I had not, nothing was. Being newly married, very much in love, and with a hefty bank overdraft to sustain, it was not difficult to reconcile myself, at least for the time being, to the thought that a non-combatant's lot was not an unhappy one. When volunteers were invited for the Coastguard Service I applied.

At the first interview for this service a selected but not select group of volunteers was examined by a crusty elderly naval lieutenant. We gave our names and such other details as were asked for, and then after a bit of discussion he looked crossly round the room and said:

‘Well, there are twenty or more of you here and we only want seven. How am I going to select you?'

There was a pause, then he said: ‘No suggestions? Maybe you'd like to fight it out between you.'

I looked at my neighbours, summed them up and said: ‘I'll take my chance.'

‘Right,' he said instantly, ‘ you're in.' And I was. Later he made me station officer.

Such acts of braggadocio, I may say, don't occur frequently in my life.

The Auxiliary Coastguard Service, as it was properly called, was distinctly combatant, and under semi-naval discipline, but it was largely recruited from those too old or unfit to serve, and some of the patrols and the night watches were so local that one could sleep at home.

So I had a very, very ‘lucky' war. (One of my friends who was called up at the same time as me went down in the
Repulse
.) Apart from occasional bombings at Penhale three miles away, and the drifting in of corpses or unexploded mines, our duties were boring rather than dangerous. The constant regular – or rather irregular – hours on watch and patrolling the cliffs and beaches in all weathers, from the crystalline sunshine of a June day to the blinding force-10 night gale, when one clutched at anything to stay on one's feet, gave me the sort of health I had never had before. It was a prolonged sea voyage without often being afloat. And though I had little time to write I had immense areas of time to think, to meditate, and to dream, so that, when the war ended, ideas and scenes and stories came out, much matured from what they had been before. Also, more than ever previously, I came to watch and understand the sea and to love Cornwall in a new way. When I began to write
Poldark
I drew on this part of my life as in another dimension.

When the newly recruited coastguards assembled in July 1940 we were a motley crew of seven, under a regular officer from St Agnes, called Sparrock, and a senior commander from Plymouth, called Coombes. Coombes was a fatherly old chap, Sparrock a martinet. We had no uniform of any sort and our total defence equipment was one Ross rifle. These rifles were relics of the First World War and had been kept in store in Canada for twenty-odd years before being shipped across to supply the Home Guard and people like ourselves with the object of resisting the parachutists and landing craft of a professional German invasion army. I sometimes pictured myself taking it in turns with my compatriots to aim a single potshot at Nazi invaders equipped with automatic weapons and hand grenades. Fortunately for the survival of these reminiscences, it never happened.

Our watches were of six hours a day, plus a one-week-in-six of patrols. The day watches were always on one's own. But in the hours of darkness one worked in pairs. I loved the solitariness, the isolation, but six hours sitting with another man who would perhaps talk for two hours nonstop and then snore for an hour – though he was not supposed to – could be boring to desperation. One of the men I double-banked with was a Protestant Irishman – one of the landed gentry whose house had been burned down during the ‘ Troubles' and had fallen on, relatively, hard times. Early on, a cask of some liquid was washed ashore and appropriated by him (since he had found it). Our local chemist, confronted with a sample, pronounced it to be pure spirit. Waller, the Irishman, used it in his motor cycle with some success, but then discovered it was
drinkable
. He was scandalized that he should have wasted any of it on his motorcycle. Thereafter, until it was all drunk, he was an awkward customer to share six hours of darkness with. Every twenty minutes or so he would make an excuse and go out to see if his motor bicycle was safe and come back with breath that was ignitable. As time went on each night, he would become steadily more quarrelsome; so there were occasions when one was not far from a private war of one's own.

Another man, Sampson, an old sailor, had the sort of blinkered, one-track mind which was interesting to study but indescribably boring to be with. He had a restricted number of views on a restricted number of subjects. One only had to mention the relevant word, and it was like putting a penny in a slot: the reaction was instant and utterly predictable. The dangers of having such a mind were sometimes fascinatingly demonstrated. Once at the beginning of a watch we were visited by Sparrock, and Sampson was sharply reprimanded. I heard the interchange. Sampson was so indignant that he talked about it without a stop for the whole six hours. At the beginning of that time his memory faithfully reproduced the interchange. But over the hours it gradually altered with each telling, so that by the end of the watch it was Sampson who was putting the officer in his place.

I used him as one of three models for Jud Paynter.

Laced with the deadly dull routine were the occasional emergencies: the mines drifting in on the beach, the corpses wedged among the rocks, the stray German raider, the bombed convoys, the Spitfire diving into the sea, the invasion scares; but in the main it was watching the horizon, an occasional practice with Sten guns – when they eventually came – and the telephoning of the passage of ships along the coast.

As always short of stamina, I used to find the six-mile walk to the end of the beach and back, usually over soft sand and carrying our one precious but very heavy Ross rifle, a physical trial, so I bought a Smith & Wesson .45 from an officer just back from France, and was given permission to carry that instead. When well out of earshot of the general public, with illimitable stretches of empty beach on all sides of me, I would take pot shots at pieces of flotsam brought up on the tide.

The thing I disliked most to discover – after decomposed corpses – was a mine. We were forbidden, of course, to tamper with them, so it meant trudging back to the village, telephoning Plymouth and then, when the bomb disposal man arrived two hours later, walking back to where the mine had been seen and watching the operation from a safe distance.