Apart from constant attacks of ill-health, my parents continued absorbed in my unremitting battle with the British government and courts. In September Patrick received a ‘long letter from N, who is really ill-used by the Establishment with all its dirty ramifications’. On 16 October:
The post seemed ordinary enough, but it contained not another history of N’s trial but an explosive series of letters from Sir B[ernard] Braine, an MP & P[rivy] Councillor, to Min of State FO laying out FO’s complete & possibly criminal duplicity – concealment & even destruction of documents, all in favour of Ld A & his friends.
The voluminous correspondence was indeed explosive. The Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd was familiar with Lord Aldington, both socially and in the latter’s capacity as Deputy Conservative Party Chairman and a former junior minister. Well before my trial opened in 1989, the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence had secretly authorized the withdrawal from the Public Record Office of numerous files vital to the defence case. Many of these with equal secrecy were passed to the covertly government-commissioned ‘Cowgill Committee’, which in close collaboration with Aldington published a succession of professedly independent ‘reports’ before and after the trial, alleging that I had misrepresented evidence and engaged in other gratuitous chicanery in my book The Minister and the Massacres.
On discovering that a file essential to the conduct of my case was among those removed from public access during the trial, I had applied to the Public Record Office for its restoration. After a protracted delay, which conveniently lasted for the duration of the trial, I eventually made further application – to be informed that the file had become unfortunately ‘lost’. I reported this to my friend Sir Bernard Braine MP, then Father of the House of Commons. As a fellow Privy Councillor he took the matter up with Hurd, who responded that the file in question had just been discovered by a cleaner in a Foreign Office broom-cupboard!
After conducting his own investigation, Sir Bernard concluded:
This disgraceful activity … was designed to pervert the course of justice in a case concerned with one of the most shameful episodes in British history. I have been in parliament for 42 years, and have held office under two prime ministers. I cannot recollect a previous instance of officials conniving at the suppression of records in order to prevent justice being done in the courts.
While I continued my fruitless battle against the British Establishment, being represented in successive hearings without payment by eminent lawyers outraged by this and other evidence of covert official interference by Aldington’s colleagues and friends in government and the judiciary, Patrick and my mother remained frustrated and depressed by their inability to do much more than sympathize with my plight. It was in a way worse for them, being unable to assist in what was plainly becoming a battle that could not be won. In contrast, I was buoyed up by a combination of belief in the rectitude of our case, support pouring in from around the globe, and a rash conviction that we would nevertheless triumph in the end. In view of the undisguised antagonism of every judge before whom I appeared, my misguided optimism can with hindsight only be regarded as quixotic.
Towards the end of October I met Patrick during a visit to London (my mother was too weak to accompany him), when he was concerned to learn everything about our progress: ‘Pretty good dinner, much talk, he looks v well but thinner,’ as Patrick noted afterwards. He generously offered to pay our son Dmitri’s school fees for his first year at Eton. Beyond that, he could not be sufficiently confident of his financial position or health, but if we were prepared to take that risk he would continue paying for as long as was required. In the event the popularity of his books continued to accrue dramatically, and Dmitri eventually passed into Oxford, with Patrick throughout continuing his generous support.
Although Patrick’s (and my mother’s, naturally) assistance to their grandson was motivated by familial affection, it seems likely that he also derived vicarious gratification from seeing Dmitri enjoy the education he himself had been denied by his own father’s improvidence. Equally, it will be recalled how much he and my mother had sacrificed in their earlier, impoverished, days for the education of his son Richard.
Patrick crowned his kindnesses to us in 1991 by sending me for Christmas a magnificent copy of John Selden’s Titles of Honor (London, 1631). He had obtained this wonderfully erudite work in June from Stuart Bennett, and might justifiably have been a little reluctant to part with what he described in his accompanying letter as ‘a bulky great Christmas card’. Patrick’s letters to all his correspondents were invariably perceptive, funny and lively, and it comes as something of a shock when I find him complaining at about this time ‘how bad I am at writing letters – slow, laborious & I am afraid affected’.
Finally came the festival itself, a picture of domesticity:
Christmas Day, & as beautiful a Nativity as I can remember, pure sun, never a cloud, clean air, cold in the shadow: I picked an opening standard rose-bud this morning & a full-blown rambler in the afternoon. Now, after dinner (smoked salmon from Galway, saddle of lamb, Christmas pud) I sit with a glass of brandy at hand …
In January 1992 Collioure was visited by heavy snow. At the end of the month Patrick wrote to his literary agent:
Did the papers tell you about our snow-storm? I think your gardening heart would have bled for me when the vile stuff retreated enough for me to go down & see what damage it had done. Flattened gardenias, cistuses, rosemary & the like I had expected, but not a broad-topped ancient arbutus, 25 feet high, snapped off with its trunk broken right through 2 or 3 feet from the ground, nor branches torn off the grapefruit-tree. Still, the broad beans, deep under snow, survived perfectly well …
Just before Christmas they had treated themselves to ‘an exceedingly powerful but silent motor-car, the idea being to drive Mary to England in it … I brought it home safely enough, but then it ran powerfully and silently into the garage wall.’ Shortly before travelling to London for a week Patrick undertook a trial run to Narbonne, to see how my mother would fare in so long a drive. Fortunately she found it comfortable, and on 27 February 1992 Patrick, wisely preferring a shorter journey by road, drove to Toulouse airport, whence they flew to Gatwick. Arrived in London, my mother found herself quite done up by the journey, and ‘the fuss at the end (finding keys, room etc) destroyed her and she went to bed’.
Next day Patrick was interviewed by the author Francis Spufford (‘Such an agreeable young man’), after which he was reluctantly driven to Kensington to be photographed. A couple of days later he signed three hundred copies of The Nutmeg of Consolation at Hatchard’s bookshop in Piccadilly. That evening his publishers held a dinner in his honour. The guests included T.J. Binyon, A.S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch, John Bayley, Penelope Fitzgerald, Richard Snow (who had written the recent enthusiastic review article which caused so potent a stir in the United States), A.N. Wilson, and other well-known figures in the literary world. Patrick was troubled to find ‘poor Alan [Judd] with no black tie, sad’. Patrick himself had been worried about tying his black tie correctly, having brought a made-up spare in case of emergency. His concern arose from a perennial fear (at times entering his dreams) of finding himself incorrectly dressed for a formal occasion. Richard Ollard made a ‘kind speech’, to which Patrick responded with what he modestly feared was a ‘feeble reply’.
Next morning Richard Ollard called, ‘bringing a man who wanted to shake my hand’. After this, Patrick was interviewed by Judd for BBC radio: this proved an intelligent exchange, which to his relief he felt went well. On the last day of his visit to London the dreaded event was all but anticipated, when he ‘was v nearly killed by a large van racing up towards Piccadilly as I crossed from Brooks’s to Boodles, thinking myself safe ½ way over’.
The visit, which had pleased Patrick and his publisher alike, had proved a great success. Back at home, he took time to overcome an anticlimactic restlessness (‘We both feel a general anxiety: it is not directed at any particular
cause, though causes can always be found’). Wrestling with tax returns continued a perennial headache, and he requested me to confirm if required that he was domiciled at our home in Berkshire. I naturally agreed, but have never discovered whether this proved advantageous or not. I rather doubt that Patrick really knew either.[fn7]
On 28 May they were greatly encouraged by yet another startling new development in my ongoing legal battle:
M could not finish dinner – lay down – early bed. I was following her about 1030 when N rang – such news! Guardian article prompted reply from a (I hope highly-placed & retired) Min of Defence official who told Guardian journalist that he was sick of the whole thing – the way the trial had been managed – all M of D resources open to Ld A – his counsel[fn8] briefed by Govt every evening – concealed documents – the lot. Journalist says this will be front-page news & an unholy stink.
In fact the official in question was still en poste, and proved to have been appointed to head the covert government operation to pervert the course of justice. The journalist in question was Richard Norton-Taylor, a fearless investigator in the high tradition of the old Manchester Guardian. The yet braver official met him to explain the whole undercover operation, insisting only that their discussion should be held in the open on the Embankment, to obviate any risk of eavesdropping by the authorities. Subsequently my lawyers obtained copies of sensational documents, including obliging exchanges between government ministers and Lord Aldington, as well as with the purportedly independent ‘Cowgill Committee’ (Brigadier Cowgill, its ‘Chairman’, was discovered by a friend working at the international detective agency Kroll’s London office to be a former officer of MI6, with no scholarly qualifications anyone could discover). In addition, a list of the chief state papers withheld from the defence was revealed, including the crucial one that had been discovered in the broom cupboard, which eventually guided us to the official signal establishing the true date of Aldington’s departure from Austria in 1945. This was an issue vital to the defence case, on which it was now clear he had perjured himself throughout the trial in order to establish his alibi.
Meanwhile Patrick’s own work continued highly satisfactorily, with Norton announcing that they were spending $45,000 on advertising, and requesting his approval for a Patrick O’Brian newsletter.
At the beginning of June he flew again to London, primarily to attend a ceremony at the Royal Naval College, at which Richard Ollard was awarded the prestigious Caird Medal. That evening Patrick entertained Richard and his wife Mary to a lavish dinner at Brooks’s. Later Richard told me he felt strongly that Patrick should also have received the medal, but that he was in no way jealous and indeed extraordinarily complimentary to Richard.
In August Patrick received a letter passed on by Alan Judd from the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, containing warm praise for Master and Commander. This was William Waldegrave (subsequently Provost of Eton College), who became one of Patrick’s most enthusiastic admirers and friends, as well as a contributor to the British Library’s tribute to his achievement.
In October Patrick and my mother returned from another busy visit to London, to find the long-awaited permis de construire from the Mairie for final completion of the cloister. ‘We should have been furious if it had been refused but we do not quite know how we like it now that it is granted.’ Perhaps his agitation accounts for a more than ordinarily bad dream a couple of nights later: ‘indifferent sleep – waking mind imagining traps about tax & insurance, dreaming mind having M about to be hanged (for murder I think, clearly proved) & the embarrassed judge tying the knot in a fine new white noose.’
That autumn Patrick volunteered for his American publisher a picture of his sylvan refuge about the time of the vendange, in response to clamorous requests for information from admirers concerning their favourite author:
Here is the promised photograph of myself picking grapes. If you like to add any observations you may say that the vineyard is about 1000 feet up in the foothills of the Pyrenees; at its lower edge a cork-oak forest runs down to a distant stream; the Spanish frontier can be seen a few miles to the south, & on a peak to the W stands a 13C watch-tower [Madeloc] that guarded the coast from Moorish raiders. The vineyard itself is small, producing a full-bodied red wine drawn mostly from black & grey grenache with a fair amount of carignan & a little muscat, excellent as a vin nouveau, indifferent for the next four or five years but then improving steadily. There is a little stone house [casot] among the vines & here O’Brian sits writing in the high summer, when there are too many people on the coast: for although it is only twenty minutes drive away it is wonderfully quiet, peaceful, & rarely too hot. This remoteness however has its disadvantages, since wild boars live in the dense maquis above & the forest below: they grub up the stone-pine kernels sown in hope of a future grove, & although they do not eat the grapes their playful young skip about the terraces knocking them off when they are ripe & damaging the dry-stone walls, while the aged boars root in the earthworks designed to protect the little house and road from the equinoctial storms. But the boar is little to pay for the other creatures that live up here – golden orioles, bee-eaters, three kinds of eagle, ocellated lizards, badgers and the occasional genet, to say nothing of the honey-buzzards standing northwards by the thousand on their spring migration under a pale blue sky.
Patrick at Manay
In the New Year of 1993 Patrick began looking through the manuscripts of his published novels, some of which were ‘in horrid disorder & most inefficiently numbered’. His interest had been piqued by a recent enquiry from Boston University as to whether he would accept $3,000 for the entire collection to date. As the event would show, the sum offered was indeed ‘absurd’ (it was subsequently raised, but insufficiently to meet Patrick’s expectations), but the offer alerted him to the fact that the manuscripts clearly enjoyed considerable financial value.
A couple of days later Patrick experienced the next of a longstanding series of contretemps between him and their smart new motorcar: ‘on my return from below I ran the car into the coal-hole wall, spoiling the off door’. A fortnight later: ‘On the way [to Manay] I hit the protruding kerb by the Chiberton a frightful blow, losing the enjoliveur & denting the wheel. I am afraid it also dented M’s confidence in the driver, never v strong, perhaps irreparably.’ My mother’s misgiving was further justified, when next day, ‘looking forward to see whether any car were coming down, I ran straight on to an elevated iron & concrete drain-cover, stranding the car with an awful bang & grind …’
All this was par for the course, and Patrick swiftly recovered his equipoise:
Looking for the [Chicago] Sun remark (PO’B best in the world) I glanced through scores of reviews, many astonishingly good; & this together with those letters & a v curious realization that came to me walking that we probably had no more than 10 years if as much of real life put my spirits into an equally curious hurry.
It may have been this consciousness that led shortly afterwards to his return with my mother to:
the graveyard, where we found our own, small, low, quiet, utterly unpretentious, well made, 3 fine llosas covering it. Helène’s [Camps] family vault is just the other side of the path, we are between Pous & Serre, & we know most of the names all round. It is all I could wish, & I think in sight of the house, or nearly.
On 9 January 1993 Patrick received warm congratulations from Richard Ollard on receipt of the typescript of The Wine-Dark Sea, a title suggested by my mother. At its conclusion Patrick wrote of the exceptional labour involved in producing the novel:
Writing quite hard most of the day 6 pp I finished the book, not without a moderate satisfaction. It is true I forgot JA’s promised command & my early note of his v last words, but it don’t signify. When did I begin? Last year, for sure, & I should think that this is the longest-lasting, most interrupted book I have ever written. I began on 11 VI 91, which makes 18 months + It will be about 110000 [words] I think.
The n
ovel received as high praise as any of its predecessors, with Christopher Lehman-Haupt concluding a laudatory review in the New York Times: ‘Even without a dictionary or a nautical guide, the feel of M. O’Brian’s prose is so convincing that when you finally look up from his pages you are surprised to find that the room is not rocking. You could even get seasick from the stillness.’
Regrettably, Patrick’s satisfied mood was not permitted to last for long. Since the end of the previous year discussions had been in progress with Norton and Sheil Land regarding a proposed interview by Mark Horowitz, an American writer who was a particular admirer of the Aubrey–Maturin series. Patrick was at first a little reluctant, but given that Horowitz had been commissioned to write a lengthy piece for the influential New York Times, he agreed.
He booked Horowitz into a Collioure hotel, and drove to meet his aeroplane at Perpignan on 5 February. After dropping him at his hotel, Patrick encountered flooding at the foot of their hill, which obliged him to desert the car and ascend on foot. The dinner which had been arranged at home had in consequence to be abandoned, and Patrick booked the Chréa restaurant in the Port d’Avall for their visitor to dine alone. Although he had consented to the interview, he felt uneasy throughout much of the protracted five-night visit. As I have described Horowitz’s visit in some detail in the first volume of this biography, I will not repeat what I have written – save for one or two details omitted there.[2]
Despite fleeting moments of irritation, after dining together on the last night of the visit, Patrick described it as a ‘Pleasant meal … & we talked in an ordinary communicative manner: he said pretty things on parting. I am glad it ended so well.’ Writing a week later to Arthur Cunningham at the British Library, he cheerfully volunteered that ‘I hope he will write a good article: he certainly wrote a good review.’ It had boded well, when Horowitz reassured him before his arrival:
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