The Light’s on at Signpost

by George MacDonald Fraser

  The Flashman series, of which there have been eleven so far, are all dedicated to Kath, and always will be. But for her that first manuscript would be mouldering in the attic, and if one thing made and has sustained me as a professional author it was her absolute certainty, from the very first, that it was going to happen. That kind of confidence is the ultimate encouragement, and it was essential in the early years when, with one novel published and the sequel under way, I took a deep breath, quit newspapers, and decided with considerable misgivings to try my luck as a full-time writer.

  Making a living from books alone is not easy, except for those who produce the big blockbusters, and I don’t know how I’d have done if it hadn’t been for a massive stroke of luck at the end of 1972. In three years’ free-lancing I had produced three Flashmans, the first volume of short stories about McAuslan and the Gordons, a history of the Anglo-Scottish Border reivers, The Steel Bonnets, which Kathy and I researched together, wading through State Papers, Tudor correspondence, and Privy Council records at Trinity College, Dublin, amassing great heaps of material which I then reduced to some sort of order in a tome of about 200,000 words.

  Then around Christmas 1972 Richard Lester and the Musketeers came over the horizon, and the world changed, as I’ve described in earlier chapters. Looking back on it, on the elations and disappointments, the triumphs and disasters, I am struck by how much kindness and sheer good fellowship and enthusiasm I encountered in the film world. I like film people, and their crazy trade. It is great fun, and rewarding not only in money, for as I’ve said it wafted Kathy and me to Hollywood and Budapest and Paris and Rome and Madrid and Yugoslavia and the Riviera and elsewhere, courtesy of prodigal producers.

  Flashman has sent us abroad, too, to Samarkand’s Golden Road and Custer’s last battlefield on Little Big Horn and the Number 10 saloon where Wild Bill Hickok died and the Black Hills and the snowbound road from Fort Laramie; to the jungle rivers of Borneo and the South China Sea and Hong Kong and the Pearl River at Canton; to the salt-mines of the Salzkammergut and the cottonwood banks of the Rio Grande and the Gila Forest where the Apaches rode their warpaths; to the Valley of the Kings and the wonderful bergs and glaciers of Alaska; across the Pacific and to the olive-groves above Delphi; on the Orient Express and through the back streets of Venice (which beat the canals, for my money); to Bent’s Fort and Singapore and Kit Carson’s house and Gattemalatta’s statue and the Windward Passage and the Suez Canal and Panama and the black sands of Tahiti…it has been quite a trip, and if I haven’t covered all Flashman’s tracks there have been the memoirs of old travellers to fill in the places I’ve missed.

  One likes what one knows, as Vincent Price wisely remarked, and alternating Flashman and various other books with movie scripts has been, for me, an ideal writing schedule. The big difference is that a film has to be written to satisfy not only the writer, but the producers and director, and ultimately the actors who are going to have to bring the thing to life. It is their movie, and you must write to suit them, especially the producers, who are paying you. It is a matter of compromise and fighting your corner when you’re right and giving way when you’re wrong, and if you’re lucky you’ll have wonderful casts and great crews and directors as brilliant and experienced as Lester and Fleischer and Hamilton to guide you, encourage you, put up with you and make it all work on the screen.

  With a novel you’re on your own, writing for yourself, with no one to satisfy except the reader at the end of the day. I am, and always have been, a secretive writer; I won’t talk about a book when I’m doing it, or even let my publishers know what it’s about until I’ve finished—when I read of writers (and Stevenson was one of them) who actually read their stuff aloud to friends as they go along, I’m baffled, for my toes curl under at the thought. I’ve never written a synopsis for a book, which I believe is quite common nowadays, to get the okay from a publisher in advance; I want what I write to be a surprise (to me, for one; I may know vaguely where I’m going when I start a book, but how I’ll get there I leave to chance as I go along, with, in the case of a Flashman, history providing the milestones). Nor have I ever written a second draft; I revise as I write, and when I’m done, that’s it. When Kathy has read it and given the thumbs up, which she has done unfailingly for more than thirty years, I’m not really worried about other opinions, although obviously the approval of agents and publishers is eagerly awaited.

  If Kathy makes a suggestion, I think hard about it. Once in the middle of a Flashman I was unhappy about the way it was going, and took the unprecedented step of asking her to read the story so far and tell me what she thought; she agreed that the thing had gone off the rails at such-and-such a point, and then said: “You’re good at court-rooms; suppose there was a trial somewhere.” I thought about that; there didn’t seem to be an immediate opening for a trial, but it might be a good thing to plot towards one at the end. Inspiration struck when I was having a shower, I redirected the plot…and Flash for Freedom! ends in a court-room.

  Again, in the first book, when Flashman hurled a herculean dwarf into a snake-pit by sheer main strength, she thought he should do it by some appropriately crafty trick…and so he does. She will have forgotten these things, but I remember gratefully, possibly because I am not normally receptive to suggestions, which I suppose makes me an editor’s nightmare. I make no apology for this; they’re my books, and while I’m grateful to have mistakes or inconsistencies and repetitions pointed out (I’ve just been grateful twice in the same paragraph, to show what I mean) I permit no other editorial interference. It goes into print as I’ve written it, without so much as a comma altered, and if any changes seem advisable, I’ll make them myself.

  Possibly I’m an egomaniac—and unusual, for I gather that many authors allow, and even encourage, editors to help them write their books. I don’t, because I’m not aware that anyone else is fit or qualified to make Stradivarius’s violins for him, and have no evidence that an editorial hand would benefit work that I have thought hard about and written with as much care as I can command. I know what I want to say; it may be tripe, but it’s my tripe, no one else’s. I sat open-mouthed hearing Angus Wilson confess that “young editors” had rewritten some of his work, adding mournfully that he supposed they knew best. I couldn’t credit it—some vain oaf, no doubt with a degree in creative punctuation from the University of Peebles and probably not a book to his name, had dared to “edit” Angus Wilson? I’ve also heard a horror story about some vandal who “edited” Wodehouse, even. If words fail me…well, they’re going to be my words.

  Nor am I impressed when I hear that Hemingway felt indebted to the editor who cut his million words by three-quarters. For all I or Hemingway or anyone else knows, that book, uncut, may have been a masterpiece; we have only the word of an editor that it wasn’t. In my youthful ignorance I once told a Dickens addict that the great man could have done with a stern sub-editing; he silenced me properly by replying: “But I don’t want him subbed. I want him all.”

  My resistance to editorial interference was recognised early in our acquaintance by Christopher MacLehose, who published most of my books. He let me alone, and his successors have done likewise, with the exception of an American who changed my punctuation throughout a book—and had to change it back. Once I refused to make substantial changes in a book, and took it to another publisher, who accepted it as it stood. I say this not in triumph but for the record (and perhaps to encourage other authors to ask themselves, when faced with an editor’s opinion: “Does this person really know better than I do?”)

  Another reason why I’m probably the Editor’s Curse is that I simply can’t be bothered to think about a book once I’ve finished it; my only interest then is to see that it gets into print untampered. Which prompts the frequently-asked questions: do I never get tired of Flashman? Yes, invariably. Having completed a volume of his Papers, I never want to see or think about the brute again (not for a few years anyway). It is a relief to turn to som
ething else, preferably a subject I haven’t tried before. This thirst for variety probably stems from journalism, where you might turn from covering a schools’ rugby match to writing a light piece about your children’s visit to Santa Claus, sub-edit a travel article on the Horn of Africa, and round off the evening’s work with a leading article on unrest in Chile (thank God for the Economist and Herald Tribune) or the state of the Glasgow underground.

  Perhaps that explains why, in the intervals of eleven historical picaresques, three volumes of short stories, and about twenty film scripts, I have been only too glad to write one straight history, a burlesque fantasy on every swashbuckler I ever read or saw (The Pyrates), a rather dark morality tale—at least I meant it to have a moral—in what I hope was a reasonable imitation of Elizabethan English (The Candlemass Road), a couple of radio plays for the BBC, an immensely long novel (conventional for once) about a Western gunfighter in Edwardian England (Mr American), an illustrated comparison of historical movies with the real events and characters they set out to portray (The Hollywood History of the World), and a couple of books to which I have already referred, Black Ajax, and my recollections of infantry soldiering in Burma with XIVth Army, Quartered Safe Out Here.

  CONCLUSION

  That is the story so far, or as much of it as I have room for. There were many topics that I’d have liked to touch on, but I’d have needed a second volume: something of my parental family, an ordinary doctor’s house seen through the eyes of childhood in those far-off years “before the war”; more about our children and their childhood—and that astonishing unexpected bonus that you get at the end of the day if you’re lucky…grandchildren; adventures in the newspaper trade on both sides of the Atlantic; my brief career as an encyclopedia salesman in Toronto (three days knocking on doors and not a set sold, not even to the distraught householder who erupted from his cellar covered in foam, demanding: “Do your goddam books tell how to fix a washing machine?”); my views on arts and letters and all that (as if you’d care); observations on the rise and fall of Carlisle United and the eccentricities of the Partick Thistle—and a bizarre episode which has just come back to me from the closing days of the Burma war, when I suspect, but can’t be sure, that I may have been duped into helping to run guns into China. It may have been a legitimate operation, but I very much doubt it, and can only plead my gormless trusting youth, my fatal habit of doing what my elders told me, and the fact that there were some damned odd characters floating about the Far East in 1945.

  And I can only mention memories of enchanted evenings at the theatre: Carmen outdoors in Budapest, Fledermaus in Bad Ischil, Lohengrin in Leningrad (well, the first act); little Julie Andrews’ debut in Starlight Roof in 1948; Leonard “Mr Spock” Nimoy as Sherlock Holmes in Century City: the buxom blondes bouncing in the Leningrad Music Hall, a display which left me wondering how Kruschev had the nerve to protest at the can-can as performed in Hollywood; Gielgud in Hamlet and Blithe Spirit on alternate nights in Bangalore; Laurel and Hardy resplendent in full fig of kilt and bowler hats; Andy Stewart knocking them dead in the Gaiety, Isle of Man, and the finest stand-up comedian I have ever seen, a true jester in the old tradition, the inimitable Ken Dodd.

  All that by the way. Since it has been such a mixed bag of a book, the following anecdote may fit in well enough, and indeed may not be a bad note to end on, for it points up one of the themes I’ve belaboured, the difference between then and now. Anyway, I have to tell it, because twenty-odd years ago I promised my old Colonel, the late great Reggie Lees of the 2nd Battalion, Gordon Highlanders, that I would set it down, and it’s about time. It is the true story of one Wee Wullie, a Scottish soldier and hero, which I fictionalised in a story in one of my earliest books, The General Danced at Dawn, and Reggie, who had soldiered with him since the first war, was concerned that I should set the record straight some day.

  The story as I wrote it was about this Herculean roughneck whose regimental life was one long brawl with the military police and provost staff, a wild man and a nuisance out of the line but worth two in the day of battle, who performed an amazing solo march through the Western Desert in ’42 without food or water, and carrying a captured German; he was out on his feet when a patrol came upon him, the German was dead, but Wee Wullie was still marching, refusing to give up. His rescuers had to stop him in his tracks forcibly; one of them said he thought he could have gone on forever.

  Now that actually happened in the desert war, but not to Wee Wullie; I never discovered who the real man was, but I borrowed his story and ascribed it to Wee Wullie (no matter why) whose heroism was of a different nature, but no less worthy in its self-sacrifice and sheer unconquerable courage. It happened when he and the Colonel were prisoners of the Japanese on the infamous Siam railway (they were among those who built the celebrated Kwai bridge). You know what that was like; you’ve seen the pictures of those half-starved emaciated scarecrows whom those dirty little yellow bastards set to slave labour in appalling conditions. Many of them died; among the survivors were a few that my battalion picked up as we came south towards Rangoon, and they were like wasted ghosts. If you’d seen them you’d have thought twice about buying a Honda or a Toyota (but I know that’s unreasonable after fifty years; I can’t help the way I feel about those people, that’s all).

  The story of the Colonel and Wee Wullie in the Jap prison camp, as I was told it, is as follows:

  Some big metal files went missing, and the Jap commander went berserk. The Colonel, who knew nothing about the files, was interrogated, and limped for the rest of his life. “They set about me with a crowbar at first, and then by the grace of God they changed it for a pick handle.” They might have beaten him to death, who knows, but then Wee Wullie came forward and said he’d taken the files. He hadn’t, so of course he couldn’t tell the Japs where they were, but they stopped hammering the Colonel and turned their attention to the regimental hard man, and when they had finished they decided to make an example of him in a most unpleasant, most Japanese way.

  They got a bundle of files like the missing ones, great two-foot iron bars, and made Wullie stand on the parade ground holding them before him. It was about 100 degrees in the shade, and just standing at attention would have been horrible enough, but carrying that cruel weight it must have been torture, without water or shade or even the relief of movement. What sanction or threat the Japs used to make him do it, I never learned; my informant (not the Colonel, who had been in no fit state to know what was happening) said threats would have been useless anyway; Wee Wullie took it as a challenge, himself against the Japs.

  So he stood in the sun. He stood all day, holding the files, swaying a little now and then, the sweat streaming down his face beneath the balmoral bonnet which was his only shield. The Japanese sentry who had been set to guard him actually passed out in the awful heat, but Wullie went on standing.

  Night came, and his comrades in the huts could barely see the huge figure in the dark, but when day broke he was still on his feet. When the sun came up and turned the parade into a furnace, he seemed to waver a little, and they wondered if he would fall. His eyes were closed, and they wondered if he was still conscious. He opened his eyes, but didn’t speak, just stood with the files before him, his elbows in his sides.

  Just after noon, when he had been standing for more than twenty-four hours, the Jap commandant, who had been watching from his veranda, marched up to him and barked at him to fall out. Wullie stood for a few seconds, as though gathering himself, and then, plainly struggling to keep his balance, bent down and laid the files on the ground. Then he straightened up, very slowly squared his enormous shoulders, threw the commandant a salute, took one careful step forward and then another, until he was quick marching, none too steadily, but marching until he reached a hut, and there he fell full length on a cot and lay like one dead. “I swear to God he couldn’t see, or hear hardly, or know what the hell was happening, but he wasn’t going to fall down in front of the Japs. We had to pour
a drink into him, into his mouth all cracked and swollen black, and we wondered if he would go west, but next morning he was up and about again.” Thus my informant, and that is all I know, for twenty years later all the Colonel said about my fiction was: “You’ll have to tell the true story some day, you know.” So I have.

  Why do I say it’s a good note to end on? Because it’s a fine story about a fine man, but also because, as I’ve said already, it enables me to make the comparison between then and now. I am not complaining or criticising, because I’ve no right to; I am not sounding off (says he, who could make Schopenhauer sound like Tommy Cooper), I am simply looking here, upon this picture, and on this, and feeling sorry for today. And I’m aware that I’m repeating myself, but it’s worth saying once more: when I read of policemen being given hundreds of thousands of pounds because they were upset by doing what policemen used to do as a matter of course, or firemen being counselled and compensated after a disaster which would once have been regarded as an unpleasant day’s work, and people being “traumatised” by hardship or harrowing experience which their grandparents would have taken in their stride, and children being taught the “grieving process” of weeping and laying flowers…well, while I know Wee Wullie would be the last man on earth to imagine himself being used to read a lesson or point a moral, I can’t help thinking of him and what, in every sense of the word, he stood for.

  Next time I roll paper into my machine it will, I hope, be to write some fiction, on what subject I don’t know yet. Flashy still has a few trails to flee along, and there are other ideas I might like to tackle, vague trains of thought that always remind me of Robert Service’s poem about his own favourite literary creation, which ends: