Patrick O'Brian

by Nikolai Tolstoy

  This is the time of the vendanges. The hills, terraced with inconceivable labour to the height of the fertile land, are covered everywhere with vines, and the vines are ready.

  Although families native to Collioure still live in and around the town, many houses and flats now sadly belong to absentee owners, a proportion of whom I understand do not even appear for some eleven months of the year. In contrast, Collioure in the Forties and Fifties was overwhelmingly home to Colliourench fishermen and their families. Most were closely interrelated through marriage, with links in many cases extending back for centuries. An unfortunate consequence of this was a never-ending spate of raucous conversations conducted throughout the day and much of the night, not only within the houses, whose windows for much of the year were opened wide to the mild air, but also between relatives or neighbours living on opposite sides of the narrow streets. My mother, who might have felt herself back in the Devonshire fishing village of her childhood, was able to tolerate this with fair equanimity. For the edgy and introspective Patrick, however, the hurly-burly proved a constant trial of his temper. His ears were jarred by hoarsely jocose cries of fishermen, high-pitched exchanges between wives and daughters, and maddening screams from their children. ‘Everyone evidently assumed everyone else was deaf,’ he once remarked to me.

  Rare objections to the cacophony achieved little more than to exacerbate it:

  Last night the Puits [the restaurant on the ground floor] made such a din: Mme R[imbaud]. told me Franco it was who threw the bottle last year: Pilar told her today. P[ilar] & F[ranco] keep cailloux [pebbles] on their window-sill.

  This entry in my mother’s diary alludes to an outraged assault on late-night revellers in the restaurant on the ground floor. A year later, to her evident satisfaction, there was a repeat attack: ‘Last night someone threw a bottle outside the Puits: it made a fine noise.’ These incidents provoked inconclusive police and private investigations, all conducted at stentorian level on the spot, the fallout from which their friend Odette once told me had not entirely subsided half a century later.

  As though this were not trial enough, Patrick understood barely a word of these vociferous exchanges, since almost everyone’s first or even sole language was Catalan. The occasional bilingual exchange was as often as not equally hard to understand. As my mother recorded:

  The woman opposite went bankrupt, & left to live at Elne. There she took up with a man & they came back to live at her house here. His wife found out where they were, & on Sunday came & tried to get at them. They barred their door & she sat on a chair in the Street for six hours. A filthy scene (woman screeching French – man Catalan) by the arch 3 days ago must have been them, I think. The woman was dragging a 4–6 year old child with her.[fn5]

  If the human cacophony momentarily waned in the early hours, it was only to be replaced by horrid war cries uttered by the martial cats of Collioure, who waged internecine conflict around gutters, doorways, and up and down stairs – there being generally no doors at street level to communal entrances. Even my parents’ tough little Welsh hunt terrier Buddug could barely hold her own against these feline hosts of Midian. She was enabled to sally forth at will through an entrance cut in the door to the flat. One fine spring day my mother reported: ‘Cats (toms) infest stairs, & Budd rages. She came in with v. bloody nose this morning.’ Their morals were as depraved as their conduct was aggressive. On 9 September 1951 my mother adopted a kitten from the rue, whom she named Pussit Tassit, entering her arrival at the appropriate date in her childhood Christopher Robin Birthday Book. The following May, Patrick ‘saw our cat being covered in the street by a large black tom while half a dozen others sat quietly watching’.

  My mother’s diary entries regularly attest to the strain imposed by the unrelenting cacophony:

  ‘Our rue gets more & more noisy’; ‘Oh God I am so sick with hearing vicious slaps & more vicious screaming at Martine. Patrick tried to read a T.S.E[liot]. poem [Burnt Norton] aloud yesterday but was drowned by the noise in the rue. Both boiled this morning as cats howling kept us from sleeping’; ‘V. bad night: noises’; ‘Street noises formidable’; ‘Neither of us can sleep: too much noise.’

  When their neighbour Madame Rimbaud fell ill and was visited by the doctor, his ministrations were accompanied by well-intentioned ‘Shoutings of choruses of women down there all day’.

  Despite the disadvantages of their cramped quarters and noisy surroundings, my parents remained at first broadly satisfied with their new home, and swiftly became profound lovers of Collioure and its inhabitants. Their isolated and unproductive life in Snowdonia had long strained Patrick’s nerves to desperation, and there could be no doubting the truth of his parting aphorism: ‘it is better to be poor in a warm country.’[fn6]

  In fact the weather at Collioure was far from being balmy throughout the entirety of the year. Winters could prove bitterly cold, and one snowstorm was so heavy that roofs collapsed beneath the weight. In January 1954 my mother recorded: ‘Snow thick from Al Ras to Massane; cold & it rained all night’, and shortly afterwards: ‘Rain in the night, & today the Dugommier hillside specked with snow. They say 15° [Fahrenheit] below zero at Font Romeu.’ I remember seeing in the town at that time photographs of what I recall as enormous waves frozen in mid-air as the sea hurled itself against the town walls. Life in the tiny flat above the rue Arago could be harsh indeed: ‘Ice on comportes in the rue; glacial wind. Mirus [stove] full blast hardly keeps us warm’; ‘Still 23° without, washing frozen into boards … Frightful cold: P. works au coin du feu.’

  In spring the ‘maddening, howling tramontane’ battered the region for frustrating weeks, while in the autumn ‘Wind (from Spain) & clouds prevented plage. C’est le vent d’Espagne – il fait humide – c’est pas sain.’

  Port d’Avall and Château St Elme under snow in 1954[fn7]

  Of course much of the year was generally hot, but even then freak weather could strike Collioure’s microclimate, arising from its situation between the mountains and the sea. July 1953 saw a ‘fantastic hail storm … River vast red flow.’ Much of this belongs to the past, owing to climate change, but is important to recall when reliving my parents’ early days in Collioure.

  A hostile critic has conjectured that Patrick’s move to Collioure was undertaken ‘perhaps, in order to be a long way from the family he had abandoned’.[3] In reality, seven years had passed since he finally left his first wife Elizabeth for my mother. Moreover, he continued in close touch with his young son Richard, the only other member of his immediate family, whom he had no intention of abandoning, while he maintained intermittent correspondence with his brothers, sisters and stepmother throughout the long years that lay ahead.

  It is true that relations with his son had been troubled, although nothing approaching the extent alleged by subsequent critics. Richard O’Brian was, by his own admission, somewhat indolent as a child, and made unsatisfactory progress at the Devonshire preparatory school to which his father and my mother had sent him for two and a half years at great financial sacrifice to themselves. At the end of the summer term of 1947 Patrick was obliged to withdraw him, and set about teaching him at the house where he and my mother were living in North Wales. Although the boy’s education improved considerably in consequence, in some respects the experience was an unhappy one. Patrick’s own wretched childhood had left him constitutionally ill-equipped (for much of his adult life, at any rate) to deal with small children, a failing on occasion so pronounced as to be all but comical. Walking above Collioure in November 1951, he fled down a sidetrack on ‘seeing some beastly little boys’ – one of several similarly alarming encounters. He imposed what might now appear excessively rigorous discipline on his son during lessons. Although Richard regularly stayed with his mother in London during the ‘school holidays’, during his time in Wales he had missed her and his beloved boxer Sian acutely. Patrick and my mother were fond of dogs, but it was impossible to introduce Sian into the sheep-farming community o
f Cwm Croesor.

  This regime continued for two years, during which time excruciating attacks of writer’s block made Patrick more and more testy and uncompromising in his efforts to educate the boy. It is likely that Patrick’s frustration with Richard’s lack of satisfactory progress was exacerbated by his own inability to achieve anything constructive in his writing. On the other hand, outside lessons he became in marked contrast a strikingly adventurous and imaginative parent. My mother’s unwavering affection, too, went far to ameliorate Richard’s life. Eventually, the ill-conceived scheme came to an end, with the departure of Patrick and my mother for Collioure in September 1949. That July Richard’s mother Elizabeth married her longstanding lover John Le Mee-Power, which enabled her to make a successful application to the courts to recover custody of her son.

  Patrick was deeply concerned to secure the best education possible for Richard. In 1945 he had registered him for entry to Wellington College, a public school with a strong military tradition, with a view to his eventually obtaining a career in the Army. Unfortunately this was my father’s old school, which I in turn entered in January 1949. When my father was informed by Elizabeth that the O’Brians planned to send Richard there, he managed to persuade the Master of the undesirability of his attending the same school as me. The fact that my mother was at the time denied all contact with me presumably influenced the College’s concurrence with my father’s objection, which would now seem harsh and arbitrary. It is possible that some future unhappiness might have been avoided, had Richard and I been permitted to become friends from an early age.

  The sincerity of Patrick’s concern to advance Richard’s education and future career cannot be doubted. The annual fees for Wellington were £160–£175 a year, which together with travel and additional expenses required a total expenditure of about £200 per annum. Yet his and my mother’s combined income for 1950–51 amounted to £341 6s 9d.[fn8] Nor was the proposed sacrifice any fanciful project, since they had earlier paid about £170 a year for Richard’s preparatory school fees and expenses.[4]

  Eventually Richard came to believe that his father had contributed nothing material towards his education. In a press interview conducted over half a century later, he declared: ‘My father never offered to help … [I] had been sent to a boarding school in Devon by [my] mother … [My] mother found the fees increasingly difficult to pay.’[5]

  Although Richard is unlikely to have been concerned at the time by the question of who paid his school fees, in retrospect his mother’s poverty-stricken circumstances (by her own account, she earned ‘between £3. 10. 0. and £4. 0.0. a week’, from invisible mending conducted in their home) might have made it plain that it could not have been she. Nor, given her upright character, does it appear likely that she would have made any attempt to deceive her son over the issue. Again, the fact that it was to Patrick and my mother that Richard looked for provision of all extras, ranging from school uniform and games kit to pocket money and railway travel, must have made it plain at the time who was meeting the bills.

  Richard’s memory could well have deceived him after half a century. Unfortunately, it is necessary to demonstrate that it did do so, in order to counter accusations levelled at Patrick by others.

  Denied entry to Wellington, in the autumn of 1949 Richard was enrolled at Cardinal Vaughan School in Holland Park. A place was found for him by Father de Zulueta, aristocratic priest of the Roman Catholic church in Chelsea, where Richard and his mother lived. My mother’s accounts show that she and Patrick spent substantial sums on Richard each year, although this did not include school fees, the institution being funded by the London County Council. Occasional financial assistance was probably also contributed by my grandfather, who was then living in Upper Cheyne Row around the corner from Richard and his mother. My mother’s brother Howard, known to the family as ‘Binkie’, recalled: ‘My Father told me that Patrick’s son had been brought to him in a hungry state by that kind Father Zulu. I have no doubt but that Pa would have given him a hand out despite his aversion to Patrick.’

  Some years ago I heard from an old schoolfriend of Richard’s. Bob Broeder remembered him well:

  Richard stood out from the rest of us as he spoke in a refined accent while most of us spoke in what can only be described as a London accent. As boys do, we asked each other which schools we had come from. When it came to Richard, he told us that he had been educated [i.e. tutored] by his father. This made him stand out even more.

  Miserable though it had in part been at the time, it seems that Richard had already come to value his father’s didactic course of instruction – as he undoubtedly did not long after this. He might, after all, have confined himself to naming the Devonshire preparatory school he had attended previously.

  A letter sent by Richard to Collioure at this time recounts his progress. (Here as elsewhere I retain his delightfully idiosyncratic spelling, which adds to the charm of the correspondence.)

  Dear Daddy and Mary, I am very sorry I did not reply to your letter. The only subject I find easy is Greek, but altogether I get on nicely, in Latin we are doing the Relative pronoun, in French we are learning the presents of some irregular and regular verbs, in history we are doing Tudor times, in arithemetic we are about to begin fractions, in algebra we have not started similtanious equations, in geometry we are learning Euclid 1 .13. I find home-work very boring, but I do it, so far I have had only three penances. Here is a bit of news for Mary, I have growen out of my good old boots, I can’t get them on though last two months I could, my mother says please can I have several pairs of socks and some pugams pyjamers. My Mother says I will be taking my Exam in the spring or else I might stay where I am. I like the idea of the feast and wished I was there, but we can’t buy wishing-carpets. I will try very hard for a silent dog whistle [for Buddug] when I have time but most propally I’ll end up some where else. Please could I have a little money? I am very glad you are in your new home, have you had a shower-bath, I think when I come over I will invent a sort of bellows which you start off and stop when you want. I have never heard of a Praying Montis. I do not like getting up early but I do. I hope you and Daddy and Buddug are well? With love from Richard.

  The ‘Exam’ in question was the Common Entrance for admission to public schools. The attempt to enter Richard for Wellington having been blocked, Patrick now sought to have him admitted to St Paul’s, a prestigious London public school. This would have enabled him to attend as a day boy, thus avoiding the heavy expense of boarding. Richard prepared for the examination in the summer of 1950, which in the event poor academic progress appears to have prevented his sitting. There is incidentally a suggestion that my mother attempted to persuade her father to break the modest financial trust he had settled on her, in order that she might devote the capital to Richard’s education. A passage in Patrick’s autobiographical novel Richard Temple may well allude to such a plea: ‘On the same reasoning he [Mrs Temple’s father, Canon Harler] had refused to let her touch the capital of her little trust-fund to send Richard to a better school: besides, he had never approved of her marriage and would lend its results no countenance.’[6]

  Grim personal experience of the terrible financial crash of 1929 had left my grandfather with a visceral aversion to dispersion of capital.

  Richard’s initial experience at Cardinal Vaughan had been less than happy. As his friend Bob Broeder further recalls:

  As time went on he was the subject of verbal bullying and was given a nickname – ‘Sheep’s Brains’ … Things came to a head one day, when a large lad (who later went on to play rugby for the Wasps) confronted Richard & threatened him with violence. By this time I had had enough and although smaller than this lad I told him in no uncertain terms to pack it in. Psychology worked and he never troubled Richard again, the other boys saw what had happened and they in their turn left Richard alone.

  Before long he had settled down well, at least with his fellow pupils. Writing to Collioure, he cheerfully decla
red: ‘Dear Daddy … I hope I pass the common entrance to St Pauls, though I am quite happy where I am.’ He and Bob Broeder had become fast friends. The latter retains a vivid memory of Richard’s cramped little home:

  As time went by I was invited to his home to meet his mother. They lived in a flat on the first floor at 237, Kings Road Chelsea. Adjacent to the first floor landing was the kitchen/dining area then up some more stairs to the living room – quite large and very cold in Winter, despite a small fire.

  I found his mother Elizabeth a small, charming and very well spoken lady with whom I had a good rapport. Little mention was ever made about his father, except that he lived in the south of France. At that age you accept things readily and don’t question.

  Subsequently, Bob found conditions at Richard’s home materially improved:

  One day I arrived at Richard’s home and went into the living-room with him, discovered it was no longer cold but nicely warm. He pointed to a brand new stove that had been installed in the fireplace and which gave out a marvellous warmth …

  One Christmas I was invited to Christmas dinner. Elizabeth had prepared a wonderful feast. There was a complete roasted goose with all the trimmings – it was an unforgettable occasion. Elizabeth was a kind and generous lady who worked hard as a seamstress. I often saw her patiently repairing nylon stockings for customers. Such luxury items were hard to come by and then very expensive. She also worked at the Chelsea Arts Club in the evening.

  Richard was now thirteen, when a combination of factors served to place his relationship with his father on an altogether happier basis. No longer confined in isolated contiguity with his at times testy parent, he was also outgrowing tiresome childish failings which all too easily provoked Patrick’s simmering wrath. The permanent rift which was one day to develop between them lay far in the future, and as will be seen did not in any case originate with Patrick. It looks as though Richard’s eventual decision to abandon relations with his father led him (as may too often occur in such unhappy cases) to reinterpret or confuse his memories of the past. Looking back from 2000, he recalled of this period: