Like everyone else in Britain, Georgette had had to learn to live with death and disaster. This she did, making a point of never showing fear regardless of what was going on in her head. Each evening she saw Ronald off on his Home Guard patrol fully alive to the possibility that he might not return. They did not speak their fears aloud, but Richard always remembered the feeling in the flat that summer and how he would say goodbye to his father with a knot in his stomach. Ronald was a leader in “C” Company and also, as Georgette humorously explained, “now Gas Company Instructor, Bombing Instructor, & No. 1 Sniper. In the event of invasion, he will retire to the grave he has himself dug, a rifle in one hand, a Mills bomb in the other, & a piece of blotting-paper between his teeth.”
They were not entirely happy in Brighton and by mid-summer Georgette was thinking of moving again. She and Ronald hoped to find rooms in London after the war and in July they visited Frere at his chambers in Albany. He had lived there since 1932 and thought the place might suit Georgette. She had never been inside Albany before, but she knew from her reading that the grand old building had been home to many famous writers, artists, actors, and politicians. The apartments (known as “sets” or chambers, never flats) were not large, but the location—just five hundred yards west of Piccadilly Circus, across the road from Hatchard’s bookshop and Fortnum & Mason, and near the London Library—was very appealing. “I rather fell for it,” Georgette confessed to Moore. “If we could get a large set we might consider it, as it isn’t expensive, & it’s wonderfully cloistral. Frere has Macaulay’s chambers—very nice, but not quite large enough for us.”
Unlike the Freres (who had a house in the country and mostly lived in Albany during the week) the Rougiers wanted a permanent residence. Georgette was cheered by the possibility of Albany, though she would not set her heart on it, realizing that “there may be some snags, like No Children or Dogs.” Richard was not yet ten and children under the age of thirteen were not allowed to live in Albany. He was home from The Elms for the summer holidays, having slowly adjusted to boarding school after a difficult beginning. All his life Richard remembered arriving at the station and having to drag his trunk through the snow to the school. He found the discipline harsh and the food unappetizing—as his mother discovered on reading a letter from him explaining why he had not written the previous week: “I did not write to you because we have been having that toad in the hole & I was feeling seedy & I couldn’t wright [sic] very well & I am out of energy.” Georgette thought this a superb explanation for not putting pen to paper and told Moore that he could expect a similar excuse from her regarding Pharaoh’s Daughter.
She had continued making notes for Family Affair through June but by mid-July still had written nothing of the new romance for Heinemann. “Such trouble as I have been having over that wretched girl, Faro’s Daughter! Or Pharaoh’s Daughter—which do you like?” she asked Frere. She had plenty of ideas for the book but still had not “unraveled” the plot. She did have a new sort of hero though, and confessed: “The schoolgirls won’t like his being a Mere Commoner, but I’m so fed-up with writing a lot of wash about improbable dukes and earls. He’s fabulously rich, however, but he dresses all anyhow, and hasn’t got a quizzing glass, or any graceful habits.”
Attempting to get past her “obstinate Muse” she wrote Frere a long, amusing letter about her struggles, regaling him with several pages of stream-of-consciousness prose. She wrote a great many letters in this style but the personal ones to Frere show her at her most relaxed. She could write to him unhindered, “speaking” on paper as if he were beside her and she was having to answer his constant (imagined) interruptions to her description of Pharaoh’s Daughter:
Because naturally it’s a very fine work, and immensely entertaining, absorbing, witty, scintillating and erudite. Well, what I mean is, it will be, when I get around to writing it. No, then, I haven’t started it, since you must know. Though what it’s got to do with you—well, not much, anyway. Don’t let’s argue about that! Let me SPEAK! Badgering me like this. Pestering me for the thing. Not giving me a moment’s peace. And just look at that set of somnambulists down at Kingswood! Do I ever get a letter from any one of them, asking me about my new book, and wanting to know when they can start advertising it? Oh, dear me, no!…And why on earth you should instantly assume that you won’t get the book in time to publish it this autumn I entirely fail to understand. Nothing I have said could possibly have given you that impression, so why you must needs get in such a temper about it—Do calm yourself! All I ever said was that from one cause and another—NO! Shut up! I am not going to explain what the causes were. Don’t be such a fool! Can’t you realize that if I were feeling inventive I should be writing the book, instead of this letter?
By the time she had given him an outline of the main plot points and characters, Georgette suddenly had a “Eureka!” moment and the book fell into place. She thanked Frere for “listening” and added: “I really think that’s done it. After weeks of fretting around in a sort of Hampton Court maze, too!”
She immediately began writing, with the story so clear in her mind that she was able to type it straight from her head on to the page (single-spaced because of the paper shortage). A month later the book was finished and Georgette triumphantly sent it to Moore. Despite her initial reservations about typing it herself (she only used three fingers) she was able to report that “it was a howling success, and I went on and on and on, with only one hitch, lasting for an hour, when I sat back, and wondered what was going to happen to the various persons assembled in the book!” Faro’s Daughter was another improbable “bubble” of a novel that would prove popular with wartime audiences and it earned Georgette a welcome £750 advance.
The financial pressure had eased a good deal since leaving Blackthorns. With the advances for Envious Casca and Faro’s Daughter and an unlooked-for £200 legacy from her Aunt Ilma Heyer (who had died in February) in hand, by September Georgette claimed she had not felt herself “to be sitting prettier” in her life. Buoyed up by the successful completion of Faro’s Daughter she thought she might “perpetrate as soon as possible a mystery (with love-interest, God damn it) for Uncle P. to publish in the spring.” But the Cornish saga was also “seething” in her brain begging to be written. Unable to dispossess herself of the idea for the book, Georgette repeatedly wrote to her agent about the novel, admitting that “the thing is getting hourly more Cold Comfort Farmish”15 and that she would have to get some “fruity” books on Cornwall because “that is where it all happened. I don’t have much say in the matter. This appallingly vital family has things exactly as it likes, and haunts me if I try to alter anything.” The Pendeans had now become the Penhallows and Cressy Hall had become Trevellin. The characters swarmed in her head, but it would be another six months before she wrote their story.
In September Georgette and Ronald moved to Hove, a few miles west along the coast from Brighton. They had leased a small service apartment at 27 Adelaide Crescent, one of a curving row of three-story white terrace houses with views across the sea. There was no kitchen (which suited Georgette perfectly) and she soon became great friends with the landlady, Mrs. Isabella Banton, who brought their meals up to them. There was a garden in the center of the crescent where Richard and Mrs. Banton’s daughter would play when he was home from school. Laryngitis had delayed Richard’s return to The Elms that summer and it was mid-September when Georgette finally took him back to school before going on to stay with Carola Oman in Hertfordshire.
Although her contact with Joanna Cannan had dwindled in recent years, Georgette’s friendship with Carola remained close. They wrote to each other often, visited whenever they could, and continued to share confidences about their work. Carola had asked her to correct the proofs and create an index for her latest book, Britain Against Napoleon. Georgette was delighted by the proposal. She thought Carola’s latest work “magnificent” and “preeminently a book for the well-read.” She returned home from Carola�
��s in good spirits only to be immediately cast down by the news that the Inspector of Taxes was investigating the sale of her copyrights to Heinemann the previous year. Georgette had declared the £750 as a capital sum and therefore not taxable, whereas the Inspector deemed it income and subject to tax. Having only recently cleared her overdraft Georgette was appalled by the thought that the Revenue “may demand some huge sum from me.” Ronald did his best to allay her concerns and promised to deal with the case but Georgette was not optimistic and felt sure she would eventually have to pay.
Taxation demands would always be a sore point but for now she seemed resigned to her fate at the hands of the Inland Revenue. She had recently signed a new contract with Heinemann and knew that, provided she kept on writing, her income was guaranteed for several years ahead. The contract was on the old terms, for she had told Moore not to “try to force up the advance: my books are just ticking over, I think, and I am thankful that Charlie doesn’t suggest a smaller advance.” Typically, Georgette continued to underestimate both her value to the firm and her ability to earn back her advance—something she always achieved within the first twelve months (or sooner) after publication. She made no protest when Heinemann introduced a new clause into her contract exempting them from paying the twenty-five percent royalty “so long as the high costs resulting from war conditions prevail.” She was far more concerned by the suggestion that Heinemann were prepared to publish her books without having read them.
Georgette strongly disapproved of this policy and told Moore she could not “see why any publisher should be obliged to produce an inferior work, no matter whom it is written by.” So far from being flattered by the firm’s apparent view of her as infallible, she did not want Heinemann to assume that everything she wrote was worth publishing: “The more I think about it the less I like it. I don’t want to be published on terms like that. In a more practical spirit, it is a maxim of the house that Heinemann publishes authors, not books. They won’t turn down my first flop, but I hope to God they would turn down the second.”
In October Georgette was frustrated to discover that Hodder were planning to release Envious Casca the same week that Heinemann were publishing Faro’s Daughter. “They have had time to bring the book out twice over by now,” she crossly told Moore. “Casca was in their hands before I had even thought out the plot of Faro’s Daughter.” But Hodder were themselves “feeling aggrieved,” believing that they had an unwritten agreement with Georgette that her detective novels and period romances should alternate. She had no recollection of any such arrangement and insisted that she “should have deprecated such a suggestion, foreseeing the possibility of my not wishing, at some future date, to write a modern novel.” Although she felt it her “right to work on whatever sort of book I feel inclined to tackle,” she assured Moore that her next novel would be Family Affair which Hodder could publish in the spring: “if obsession counts Family Affair ought to be among my best books.”
15 Cold Comfort Farm was Stella Gibbons’s 1932 bestselling novel.
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Why, why, Frere, do all these people who think it is rather easier than falling off a post NEVER WRITE A BOOK THEMSELVES?
—Georgette Heyer
Family Affair languished through November and December 1941. Georgette had been afflicted with a skin condition and the prescribed treatment of increasing amounts of arsenic had only made her worse: “I cannot describe to you the horror—!” she told Moore. “I have been in bed for a week, wholly unable even to sign my name. Better now, having jettisoned the cure.” She remained ill for some weeks, however, “suffering from Aftermath, which includes such oddments as weakened heart, abnormally low blood-pressure, and blurred sight.” To make matters worse, Ronald’s mother’s mental condition was deteriorating and in November they had been forced to move her from Horsham to a nursing-home in Hove. On 31 December, after three anxious, difficult weeks, Jean Rougier died.
Although she had not always got on with her mother-in-law, Georgette felt the strain of her slow, painful passing. Ever since her son Leslie’s death, Jean Rougier had become increasingly ill and frail and, despite her own poor health, Georgette had given her as much time and attention as she could manage. The final days had been particularly hard as she and Ronald had kept a bedside vigil. Georgette had felt “worn to shreds with the anxiety, and the strain of waiting for an end which was inevitable from the start.” Afterwards she described Jean Rougier’s death as “a most merciful release and no occasion for mourning.”
By mid-January Georgette was feeling better and planning a serial for Woman’s Weekly, who had offered £500 for a light modern romance. Her agent was enthusiastic about the commission and suggested that the story might do for her next novel. She found the suggestion irritating: “You are getting a little out of touch with this author, Mr. Moore! I am going to write a book about the Penhallows: just bear that fact in mind, and we shall get along fine.” But her Cornish saga was again delayed when Richard fell ill with whooping cough. Georgette found it impossible to write with her son at home and in such poor health. When, in mid-February, Ronald succumbed to tonsillitis and she came down with a cold she decided to give up “the unequal struggle” and take the family to a favorite haunt of theirs at Cleeve Hill in Gloucestershire where there was nothing “but a golf-course & lovely walks; & we expect to be thoroughly braced.”
It was not to be. So far from recovering, Richard spent the entire holiday “in bed, running an erratic and incomprehensible temperature.” His parents brought two doctors in to attend him but blood tests proved inconclusive. His mother was anxious and his father concerned (though they both continued—in typically British style—to refer to their son affectionately as “the brat”) and Georgette got no writing done. Desperate to get on with the Penhallows she planned to engage a tutor for Richard on their return to Hove so that she would have mornings free to write. She had also revived her ambition to write Stark Harry (her proposed book about Henry V) after receiving a letter from Frere:
He will publish whatever I want to write, & thinks well of my suggestion that I should do something more worth while than these frippery romances. He says good books are selling better than bad ones, & tells me Macmillan has subscribed over 10,000 of Miss West’s new magnum opus!16 Isn’t that a cheering thought? Anyway, Frere says, Write what you feel like, & take as long over it as you want to, & throw off the ’tec novel & the serial in between whiles. He says “you can do them on your head”—little recking that at the moment I couldn’t even do them the right way up. So it may well be that I shall have a stab at Stark Harry. What do you think about it? (Don’t you like the spurious diffidence with which I consult you & Frere about what I’ve really made up my mind to do anyway? But in these bad times I really would be amenable to reason, if you both advised me against any dire course.)
Georgette longed to write a serious book and still had plans to write a biography, but her ambitions were postponed by their decision to leave Brighton.
Ronald was now well-established in London and, although he enjoyed the daily train journey (during which he and three friends played bridge at a reserved table in the first-class carriage), after nearly six years of commuting he felt he wanted to live closer to his work. Georgette, too, was tired of never seeing her friends and had concluded that Hove did not agree with her. Early in 1942 she decided that they were both “sick of being homeless. So, provided we don’t get invaded or blitzed this spring or summer, we think seriously of setting up house again, this time in London.”
But there could be no move until Richard was well again. Further tests had indicated that his “blood seems to be in a very rotten state, and he has to be fed up, given as much sunlight as possible, and kept from getting overtired.” Georgette found it difficult to write with her son ill at home though she longed to get on with Family Affair: “The Penhallows are seething in my brain, and if only I could have a month’s peace and quiet I could get them down red-hot onto paper. What Uncle
Percy will say about them I don’t know, and shudder to think.”
Aware of the firm’s Nonconformist views, she was concerned that an arch-conservative like Percy Hodder-Williams would look askance at any novel that began “Jimmy the Bastard was cleaning boots.” Nor was he likely to admire a cast of characters that included several illegitimate children, a daughter who was “obviously a lesbian (I shan’t actually say so, but anyone would have to be soft-headed not to grasp it),” a number of lusty sons with a propensity for getting the female servants pregnant, another son with “pansy boy-friends,” and a weak second wife who would eventually murder the novel’s tyrannical, foul-mouthed patriarch. But Georgette was obsessed by their story: “It’s no use begging me not to write this book: these astounding people have been maturing in my head for months.”
Contrary to Jane Aiken Hodge’s suggestion that the book was written “at a bad time in Georgette Heyer’s life, the nearest she ever came to a breakdown,” Georgette was now in excellent health and enthusiastic about the new novel. She began writing in earnest in March and within a fortnight had written forty thousand words. Her landlady, Isabella Banton, always remembered Georgette “sitting at the side of the fire writing on her lap and living with real people.”17 These were the Penhallows, so utterly alive to Georgette that they poured from her pen. She reveled in the intensity of the writing, which frequently overflowed into long letters about the book to Frere and Moore. As the novel took shape and Adam Penhallow’s domineering personality filled its pages Georgette recognized its difference to her other books. “It would be a subtle thing to lead Uncle Percy to expect the worst,” she told her agent:
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