Patrick O'Brian

by Nikolai Tolstoy

  The Château Royal at Collioure from the Plage St Vincent

  After passing into the hands of the king of France in 1659, the castle was considered an important defence against any attempt by Spain to recover the province. From 1668 it was incorporated into the mighty chain of barrier fortresses erected by Louis XIV along the length of France’s extended frontiers. No longer, however, did it play a key defensive role. In 1642 it had taken less than four weeks for Louis XIII’s troops to batter their way through the town’s largely medieval defences. Furthermore, Collioure’s fortifications were primarily designed to resist an attack from the sea, whereas now they had to face the more likely prospect of a land assault. Accordingly Louvois, Minister for War, decided to upgrade the castle and its defences in accordance with current scientific military requirements. France’s greatest military engineer, Vauban, added the great outworks, with their magnificent scarps and counterscarps, which survive almost unscathed to the present day.[4]

  It was at this juncture that Collioure faced a brief crisis, which could have resulted in its disappearance from the map. Vauban, adjudging the town to be of scant value from a military point of view, urged that it be razed to the ground and its inhabitants moved to neighbouring Port-Vendres, which enjoys a much deeper harbour, and is more readily defensible on the landward side. Fortunately, Louvois overruled this draconian proposal, and the Château Royal and its surroundings were massively strengthened and extended. This in itself involved considerable destruction, since much of the old town and its church obstructed open space required to permit Vauban’s cannon unrestricted fields of fire. Accordingly the church and many other contiguous buildings were levelled to the ground, when the town was reconstructed in much the form it enjoys today. Her walls were massively rebuilt, on the seaward side of which gun embrasures at ground level still gaze out across the water towards the harbour mouth.[5]

  Paradoxically, it was this work of demolition which produced what is widely regarded as Collioure’s most picturesque feature. From 1684 work commenced on building a new church on the rocks beside the bay, and it is the view it affords from the town that comprises one of the chief attractions for visitors from all over the world.

  To protect the castle from domination by the hill to its north, Vauban constructed Fort Carré, a square fort above Fort Miradou with a deep dry moat, whose strength does not become apparent until one has ascended the hill. He also arranged construction of the lofty Fort Miradou itself, still occupied as a barracks by the French Army. (In my younger days, the quay proclaimed in large white-painted letters the defiant inscription ‘ALGÉRIE FRANÇAISE’.) Collioure conceivably possesses more fortifications to the square mile than anywhere else in France. On a ridge to the south perches the Château Saint-Elme, an attractive little star-shaped fort erected under the direction of the Emperor Charles V, when he arrived to inspect the defences of the region in 1538. At the other end of the ridge is a ruined early nineteenth-century fort named after General Dugommier, who in 1794 skilfully recaptured Saint-Elme from an invading Spanish force, which had occupied it to direct destructive fire on the Faubourg.

  Beyond the town the Pyrenees begin their grandiose ascent to the west, two mountains being dramatically crowned by thirteenth-century watchtowers, the Madeloc and Massane. A walk up the zigzag path through vineyards and above to the Madeloc reveals a succession of small forts on every other hilltop, together with an isolated roadside barracks, now roofless, which my parents at one point contemplated purchasing and converting into their home. Ironically, apart from the abortive Spanish assault of 1794, no enemy has in fact attempted any serious attack on France at this point since Vauban undertook his impressive labours.

  Relics of a more recent invasion today remain largely unremarked. The southern skirt of the harbour is occupied by the Faubourg of Port d’Avall, whose frontage boasts a fine round tower, erected in the eighteenth century as a customs post. The quay itself was built by Wehrmacht engineers during the Second World War, and a German gun emplacement (whose setting is vividly described in Patrick’s short story ‘The Walker’) also survives on the cliff edge beyond Fort Miradou.

  Appendix B

  Patrick and His First Wife Elizabeth

  It often happens that those are the best people, whose characters have been most injured by slanderers, as we usually find that to be the sweetest fruit which the birds have been pecking at.

  John Hawkesworth (ed.), The Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D. Dean of St. Patrick’s, Dublin (London, 1755–68), ii, p. 179

  The gravest charge levelled against Patrick relates to his desertion of his first wife Elizabeth, together with their two little children. Thus, in a review of Dean King’s biography published in the Observer (3 September 2000), Jan Morris dismissed Patrick’s alleged personal deceptions as trivial, while nevertheless condemning him as a man on grounds advanced by King:

  The life of innocent deceit takes on a profounder meaning, though, when one remembers that in 1940, O’Brian abandoned his wife, their three-year-old son and a handicapped baby, and went off with Mary Tolstoy, already the mother of the future writer Nicholas Tolstoy. This act of betrayal is perhaps a more real reason for O’Brian’s reluctance to talk about his early life. To judge by this book it was his only cause for shame, and his affair with Mary matured over the years into a long, happy and honourable marriage …

  Nevertheless, Morris oddly concluded with this harsh endorsement of King’s accusations: ‘In O’Brian … I am reading the work of an artificer, a contriver of genius and, well, a liar.’

  Morris’s judgement was measured, at least to the extent that it did little more than uncritically echo the findings of the book under review. Less so was an embittered tirade by a food writer named Rachel Cooke, published four years later and perpetuated on the internet. After a lofty dismissal of Patrick’s literary talent, she declared that, among other gross offences: ‘In 1940, O’Brian walked out on this girl, his son and a baby daughter, who had spina bifida.’ Overall: ‘The truth of it is that O’Brian was a horrible – some might even say vile – man: a snob, a liar and an atrocious father.’[1]

  I am grateful to Terry Zobeck for urging the necessity of responding to the prime accusation that he deserted his baby daughter on account of her terrible ailment. It is not my purpose to defend or condemn Patrick’s morality or conduct, but to set out the evidence as fully as it is known to me. He never discussed his first marriage with me, nor I imagine with anyone else save my mother.

  The charges relating to Patrick’s abandonment of his wife and family are grave, and readily summarized. Dean King’s biography provides the first and fullest version:

  The winter of 1939/40 was bitterly cold, with a North Sea wind that ravaged the Suffolk countryside. The duck-pond at Gadds Cottage froze solid, and one day Elizabeth badly burned her hand when she gripped the freezing handle of the outdoor water pump too long. Because of the war, coal and coke were rationed, but at least in the country Patrick could find brush and cut wood for fuel, and he could hunt for food. When snow covered the ground, he buckled on cross-country skis and went in search of hare and partridge … Whether Patrick walked out of Gadds Cottage after an argument or failed to return after a research trip to London is unknown. What exactly caused him to leave the family in that summer of 1940 is also unclear. An urge to be involved somehow in the war, not to be left out of history while helplessly caring for a doomed child, may have overwhelmed his sense of responsibility at home. He may have felt guilty about being the father of a crippled child, a stigma in that day since the malady was often attributed to the infirmity or wickedness of the parents. He might have been unable to stand the daily torment of watching and hearing his infant daughter suffer. Elizabeth was emotionally stretched to the limit … The tension exaggerated the personality differences between husband and wife and provided many reasons for resenting their current existence. Patrick’s creative endeavours suffered.[2]

  The first point to note is the paucity
of factual information on which King based his harsh indictment. Not only is the greater part of his charge (here italicized) self-evidently speculative, but in fact not one of his conjectures is correct. In particular, the notion that Patrick could have felt that ‘being the father of a crippled child, [was] a stigma in that day since the malady was often attributed to the infirmity or wickedness of the parents’ is patently absurd. Patrick’s father was a doctor, while his uncle Sidney was a distinguished Professor of Physics at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School. To suggest that anyone possessed of such a background, or indeed any other educated person at that time, might have subscribed to a superstition of so medieval a character beggars belief. No evidence is provided by King to substantiate his melodramatic surmise.

  The passages marked in bold in this Appendix, while accurate, represent no more than King’s unacknowledged inference from family photographs reproduced between pages 236 and 237 of his book. Although he omits to say so, apart from this such factual elements as are to be found in his four-page account of the Russ family’s stay at Gadds Cottage derive exclusively from Richard Russ, who was in 1940 aged three, and not yet five when he and his mother in fact left the house. Given his age at the time, it is unsurprising that Richard’s recollections amount to no more than that his parents kept ducks and a goat, that he on one occasion dropped cutlery into their pond and on another broke a duck’s egg, and that his uncle and aunt fed him hard-boiled eggs at their final departure on the eve of the little boy’s fifth birthday. Interestingly, what he does not suggest is that his father was notably absent from the household during this time. When the journalist Ben Fenton spoke to him not long after his interview with Dean King, he found that Richard ‘had little memory of the early part of his childhood when his parents were still married …’[3]

  Nevertheless, at the time of publication of King’s book, Richard repeated the charges in the press:

  O’Brian left, returned to London and lived alone in Chelsea where he drove ambulances during the war and continued with his writing … I was four years old when he just got up and left without any warning or reason. I think he did it on the spur of the moment. It was a selfish thing to do. One of my uncles had to drive over and take my mother, my sister and me to his house and look after us … I think he couldn’t cope with the grief and shame of having a disabled child. There was a stigma attached to it in those days. He took it as a reflection on himself.[4]

  That Richard was entitled to resent his father’s desertion of his mother is unquestionable. However, I must again emphasize that my task is not to act as judge of my stepfather’s morality, but insofar as is possible to ascertain the facts relating to the accusations.

  The first point to note is the startling inaccuracy in King’s chronology, when he asserts that Patrick deserted his family in ‘that summer of 1940’. The date appears to have been arbitrarily introduced by King himself, who cites no evidence in its support. It is contradicted by both Elizabeth and Richard himself, who subsequently stated: ‘I was five when he left us to pursue his affair with Mary, Countess Tolstoy, back in London.’[5] Richard’s fifth birthday was on 2 February 1942. The precise year of Patrick’s ultimate departure might appear insignificant, until the circumstances be considered.

  It is on Dean King’s account of Patrick’s abandonment of his family and their consequent evacuation of Gadds Cottage ‘in that summer of 1940’ that denunciations of his departure in consequence of his discovering Jane’s incurable sickness rest in their entirety. From the contemporary testimony of her mother Elizabeth we learn that: ‘From 1938 to 1942 he [Patrick] lived with me in Suffolk and was supported by me and his brother. In 1942 he left me and went to London …’[6]

  Thus, we learn on impeccable authority that Patrick ‘lived with’ Elizabeth and their children throughout the whole of baby Jane’s tragically brief life! Moreover, there are other factors to consider. Dean King was unaware that Patrick and my mother had in fact begun their affair in the summer of 1939, when he was twenty-four and my mother twenty-two. The year is established from evidence in my possession. As I now believe, the precise date of their first encounter was 4 July of that year. In her diary for that date in 1966, my mother wrote cryptically ‘MP day’ – that being their customary affectionate joint acronym. Given therefore that Patrick was conducting a passionate affair with her from the summer of 1939 onwards, how may this be reconciled with Elizabeth’s assertion under oath that he lived with her, without her detecting any appearance of infidelity, until 1942 or 1943? Her divorce and custody proceedings provided Elizabeth with the strongest motive for representing Patrick as an unkind, unfaithful husband and cold-hearted parent. Her solicitors would naturally have pressed her to provide damaging evidence in support of her applications. What could be more dreadful than his having gratuitously abandoned his child on discovering that she suffered from an incurable illness?

  On the other hand, the reader may well wonder how even the most confiding of wives could have described an absentee husband as ‘living with her’. Clearly he was not, as King and his followers have assumed, absent so far as Elizabeth was concerned. Yet how is this to be reconciled with the fact that, from 1940 onwards, Patrick and my mother were conducting a secretive affair in Chelsea, of which Elizabeth remained ignorant until September 1943, when she was belatedly alerted by a neighbour?[fn1] Surely Patrick could not be in two places at once?

  Paradoxically, there exists a sense in which he could. Elizabeth had accepted from the outset of their marriage that Patrick’s struggle for their financial survival obliged him to be absent on frequent occasions for weeks or even months on end. Thus he spent the first half of 1937 in Ireland, writing his novel Hussein – the book he dedicated on its publication in the following spring to his ‘dear wife and small son’. Immediately on his return to their home in London he departed for two or three months to Italy as a paid courier. At the beginning of 1939 he and Elizabeth were for some reason living at separate addresses in Chelsea when their daughter Jane was born.[fn2] Later that summer he spent time seriously ill in hospital, and afterwards disappeared for a while – allegedly to recuperate. In fact he had by this time met my mother, and may have seized the opportunity to spend time secretly with her.[7]

  On the eve of their departure from London, Patrick addressed two affectionate letters to Elizabeth from his parents’ house in Sussex, where he was still recuperating from his summer illness. The second was in verse, in which he dwelt romantically on their coming bucolic existence, when he would provide a living from fields and hedgerows, ‘quite happy to be / Alone with Campaspe [baby Jane’s second name] and Richard and thee’. Patrick’s words are so fond as to indicate that he continued to love his wife and children, despite the sudden onset of his overwhelming passion for my mother. Such situations have been known, and there is in addition reason to believe that Patrick remained for a time apprehensive that my mother’s implausible passion for her impecunious married writer might fade as swiftly as it had arisen.

  After a year spent with his family in the Suffolk countryside, Patrick left Gadds Cottage for London in the autumn of 1940, where he joined my mother driving ambulances for the London Auxiliary Ambulance Service in Chelsea during the Blitz. Not only was this a gratifying patriotic duty, but in Patrick’s case it provided him for the first time in his life with a regular income. The relief this afforded his impoverished little family cannot be exaggerated. Patrick’s total income from his writing in 1939–40 amounted to £6 16s 6d for his short story ‘No Pirates Nowadays’ (on receipt of which he noted with palpable relief ‘Hack’s price, but very acceptable’), and ‘The Mayfly Rise’, which earned twelve guineas ‘just when funds had completely run out’. It was their dire impecuniosity that compelled Patrick and Elizabeth to withdraw to rural Norfolk, where they led a near-subsistence existence in the rented cottage found by Patrick’s brother Victor.

  Now, in the late autumn of 1940, Patrick found himself in possession of a modest but nonethel
ess sufficient income of £3 a week! He forwarded the whole of this on a regular basis to Elizabeth, who conceded in custody proceedings a few years later that ‘he provided me with three pounds a week to maintain myself, our daughter (now deceased) and Richard’.

  Patrick’s service with the ambulance unit required an eight-hour shift throughout a six-day week at all hours of day and night under exceptionally hazardous conditions, with Sunday providing scant time to recover for the next stint.[8] If Patrick’s visits home were at times few and far between, there is no reason why his absence should have aroused untoward suspicion. Their situation was no different from that of millions of young couples in those fraught days. Again, wartime conditions made travel difficult at any time. The fact is that withdrawal into the countryside represented normal experience for more than two million children (including my sister and me) and a proportionate number of mothers during that perilous time.

  A year later, in September 1941, Patrick obtained a post at the headquarters of Political Warfare Executive (PWE) at 2, Fitzmaurice Place (afterwards Bush House), where he and my mother worked until the end of the war. As he had a half-day free on Saturday and all of Sunday, while his income was increased to five pounds a week, there would have been little now to prevent his paying regular visits to his family in Norfolk. That he did so on a fairly constant basis surely provides the likeliest explanation of Elizabeth’s otherwise baffling testimony that he continued living with her throughout that time. In addition, evidence attests to the fact that Patrick remained throughout this period deeply attached to his children, regardless of his relationship with their mother.