The fury of the rescue team knew no bounds. ‘If I got near them,’ fumed Sparrock, ‘I’d help them up the frigging cliffs with the toe of me frigging boot.’ He was particularly mad because on the way to the rescue he had stumbled and fallen flat on his face in a footdeep sandy pool. For me that was the high spot of a thoroughly delightful night.
The next day, bleary from lack of sleep, I had to attend the funeral of an old friend at St Agnes, a fine Belgian violinist called Dupont who at one time had been leader of King Edward VII’s private orchestra. In the warm, glittering midday, scented with the roses flowering in the churchyard, my stomach kept giving convulsive jerks. If anyone saw it I hope they thought I was weeping. In fact I was trying helplessly to control the laughter brought on by memories of the night.
In the meantime my personal life was not without vicissitudes. With the constant risk of evacuees being billeted on us, the house could not be allowed to remain empty except for our small family; so, as a protection from worse things, paying guests – of whom there were a few around – must be taken all winter and through the next summer and the winter after that, etc., etc., etc. It meant no rest for my young wife, and, beset by staff problems, rationing, blackout precautions in a house with an excessive number of windows, and every other sort of wartime restriction, it was not the sort of early married life we had pictured.
But we were together a lot, which was far more than I had ever dreamed possible, once war had broken out. And so far as one could see, unless some better use were found for my unimaginable talents in London, or the war casualties became so high that the barrel had to be scraped clean, I was likely to remain in Cornwall.
Sometimes I made unpatriotic use of the meagre allowance of petrol we were permitted, and drove around in search of food to feed our guests. There was a farm in Roseland, owned by the friend of a friend, where a few discreet eggs could be bought. Driving home we reached Truro. It was market day and busy, and just as I entered the town I touched my horn at a pedestrian and the damned thing stuck and would not stop. It is not a large town, but it seemed large that day. I drove right down the hill, through the crowded streets and up the other side with the horn relentlessly blaring. Everyone stood and stared. It was as well I was not picked up because in addition to a wife and baby son in the car I had eight dozen blackmarket eggs in the boot.
To complicate things a little more in our home life, my mother, always a difficult person to satisfy where maids were concerned, had by early 1940 run through a succession of them and been left frequently adrift and untended; so in the end we said she must come and live with us, at least for the duration of the war; though I think we all knew it meant for the duration of her life. We were able to give her a private sitting room, and the arrangement worked fairly well.
By 1943 the airfield at Trevellas, two miles away, was fully operational, and one day a flight lieutenant called and told us we must provide accommodation for six pilot officers. For this the Government would pay us 6d a night.
Of course we welcomed the young men – all younger than I was – and we made many warm friendships, none of which, alas, endured. Our young men were constantly changing; and not many survived the war. We lost two while they were staying with us – not from enemy action but from hideously ordinary flying accidents. They were the cream of youth: supremely fit, intelligent, high-spirited, zestful, courageous but fatalistic. There were some Poles among them too – equally splendid men. I have written about two of them in my novel Cameo.
A further complication in our lives, though a happy one, was the birth of our first child, a son, Andrew, in June 1942 – about the time of the Battle of Stalingrad. But while Jean was carrying him – clearly as a result of the tension and overwork of the last three years – she developed asthma, a complaint which was almost to kill her in the next half decade. She began to have savage monthly attacks, from which after two days in bed she would begin to crawl about, thin and wasted but with the tremendous stamina that she had, rapidly becoming her old self again. Then she would have about three weeks before the next attack. This, plus half a hotel to run, six young airmen to be seen to on occasion, a delicate mother-in-law who could do nothing in the house, and now a young baby to tend, was more than enough for one young woman.
Of course we got away from time to time, thanks to my motherin-law and one or two other people who could temporarily take the load; and these short holidays – in spite of everything much more high-spirited than our honeymoon, because now the dangers were out in the open and could be faced and some of them already defeated – quickly made up for anything lacklustre in the first. Several times we went to London and ignored the air-raids with theatre-and concert-going. Once at the ballet at Sadler’s Wells we saw a young girl dancing one of her first key roles. When we came out, the sky was ablaze with searchlights. We hoped they were out to welcome the arrival of Margot Fonteyn.
During my time as a coastguard I spent many long hours looking down at the remains of a wreck. Only the weed-grown timbers showed, a skeleton of a French ship called La Seine which had been driven ashore in a January gale in 1900. Waller, the Irishman, a vividly vigorous sixty-year-old, as soon as he saw it wanted to put the wreck to good use and, standing in water sometimes up to his shoulders, since wrecks always create pools around themselves, he rigged up a very long rope between the coastguard station and the wreck and erected an endless whip, whereby a thinner line with baited hooks upon it could be rotated out to sea at full tide and back again. It was a Heath Robinson contrivance, but after a few false starts it suddenly worked in abundance, and one night we found ourselves with two dozen mackerel and two huge skate. Food was so short that I telephoned my wife and, pregnant though she was, she walked the mile from our house and traversed the singlefile precipitous cliff path to the station. It was nine o’clock on a wild black winter’s night, and when I heard a rattle of stones I went out with the Ross rifle and challenged her.
A faint voice came through the windy darkness. ‘ It’s your wife!’
Unfortunately the large canvas bag she had brought wasn’t big enough to take the skate lying down, so to speak, and when she came to cut it up next morning rigor mortis had set in, and she was confronted with a huge crescent-shaped fish covered with sharp abrasive scales. We ate it in due time. But presently news of Waller’s enterprise reached headquarters and it was put a stop to.
After the war, when the little coastguard station was converted into a sophisticated, instrument-crammed building concerned to measure the height of waves (waves, it seems, diminish on their long journey from the Mexican Gulf, but they do not alter their relative size, one to another), the remains of the wreck were blown up so as not to disturb the pattern of the sea. But from 1940 onwards I stared at it and thought long about it: it seemed a wonderful relic of an age long past – although in fact it was then only forty years gone. Indeed one of the seven of us on watch, a man called Tom Mitchell – Farmer Tom, to distinguish him from all the other Mitchells in the village – had seen the vessel actually come in and the following day, as a boy of nine, had clambered over the ship. He was able to tell me all the details of the wreck, and I pondered over the lives of the people who had been drowned and those – the majority – who had been saved.
On one of my infrequent days off I took my wife to Falmouth and found a rather disreputable cafe–restaurant where the proprietor did not send round to take your orders but bargained fiercely with you as you came in as to which joint you should have some slices of, these being arrayed on the counter at his side. As sometimes happens with an author, two fairly disparate scenes come together to make a novel, and from these scenes – the shipwreck and the cafe – emerged The Forgotten Story.
It was published in the spring of 1945 while the war was still at a crucial stage. It seemed to me at the time that it was written too hastily and too casually and had been scribbled down in the spare moments of a broken and traumatic few years. I have never written a novel I thought less we
ll of at the time. The previous book, The Merciless Ladies, most of it written before the war, had come out in 1944 and was now beginning to sell. I was sufficiently clearsighted to be aware that this was largely due to the times: shortage of newsprint, shortage of new novels, and a public which, deprived of many other outlets, was reading more than ever before. All the same I thought well of this book and feared that the publication of what seemed to me to be a relatively trivial novel like The Forgotten Story would do my growing reputation no good at all. As publication date drew near I became more and more anxious and worried, so that at the end if someone had offered me £50 to withdraw the book I should have done so.
In the event The Forgotten Story, simple though it was, drew a new critical attention and soon began to sell on its own merits apart from any popularity born of a newsprint shortage. The Merciless Ladies, in my view now, was a rather pretentious, ‘literary’ novel, which, if I had ambitions to suppress anything, should have been the better target. In later years I rewrote it entirely and, I hope, ironed out some of the worst bugs. But there seems no doubt that, judging as objectively as possible, The Forgotten Story is far the better of the two. So can one totally deceive oneself at the time.
I remember walking up to the coastguard station one day just before the end of the war with the glowing – dizzying – knowledge in my heart that the recently published The Forgotten Story was earning me around £50 a week. Fifty pounds a week! Today’s equivalent is about £1,000. At this rate I would shortly be rich and independent.
After that a lot of things happened more or less together. Just before we were married I had told Jean one evening that I had an idea to write an historical novel about Cornwall. For a young woman who had a sublime faith in my abilities, she – for once – looked doubtful. I think it crossed her mind that I was really attempting too much.
I had in fact over the previous ten years been ‘taking in the air’ – the ambience – of the county in which I now lived. Like all my family, I had fallen in love with it, but unlike them, being more imaginative and of an impressionable age, I took in more – and eventually gave out more. Being quite unaware of the sublime superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, I got on well with the Celts, indeed found some affinity between them and my own North Country breed and upbringing.
I met them and liked them and laughed with them and talked to them, and listened, of course – to old miners and young rugby players, old fishermen, young laywers, middle-aged butcher boys, clerics and farmers, doctors and dentists and dustmen. And their wives and sisters and daughters. From many old men I heard about the mines and the county’s strange history. Romantic, of course, with its stories of smuggling and wrecking, but equally interesting in its political and social life, the gambles of mining, the forty-four Members of Parliament, returned mostly through ‘rotten boroughs’, the social life of Truro, the rich families and the poor. All this went along with my special appreciation of the tetchy, beautiful, unreliable weather, the great seas, the massive cliffs, the crying of the sea birds, the smell of heather and gorse, the tantrums of the wind.
I had read, of course, the ‘Cornish’ novelists, and found them on the whole a disappointing lot. Some of them wrote good novels, but these could just as easily have happened in Devon or in Norfolk. The writers used the county because it was romantic, but never even tried to understand it. From these strictures I naturally excepted the real Cornish writers like Baring-Gould, Quiller-Couch, and Crosbie Garstin.
There had been growing in my mind a story which was unoriginal in its inception but which fortunately broke the mould as it went along. Before the war I had sketched out a few characters, then while I was waiting for call-up I used to walk to my mother’s bungalow – furnished but empty since her coming to live with us – and there I began to write the first few chapters of Ross Poldark. It was a strange contrast for me between the formidable war news and the many complexities of modern life and the total isolation of an empty bungalow – a mile from my house – with a long lawn, a flowing stream and pastoral silences.
Sometimes late at night in bed I would read aloud a part of what I had written, while Jean’s blue-grey eyes would mist over with the sleepiness she indignantly denied.
Necessarily all this was broken; and I did not begin to rewrite what I had written or to continue the story until the war was near its end. But while on watch in the daylight – and during the long nights – I would think and dream and consider the characters and allow them to grow. So that when the war was near its end and when to everyone’s inexpressible joy it did end, the story was there for the writing.
I had no thought when I began Ross Poldark of a continuing series of books. It was just to be a story of eighteenth-century Cornwall, with a gloomy beginning and a happy ending, and that was that. In the course of it I rewrote and rewrote and rewrote, polishing and pruning, adding and subtracting, trying to get the perfect balance in each chapter between emotion and restraint. Some chapters I wrote nine times: each time I went to them they responded to something different in my own mood and had to be done again. In some ways I was very young – younger than my years – in spite of having been a professional writer so long; and I was too romantic. My approach to women was too romantic – it still is – but it was by then a part of my nature and was too inbred to be changed.
This novel, although preceded by a sort of ‘trailer’ in the form of The Forgotten Story, was in fact a big departure from anything else I had written, being slower moving, concerned with mood and scene rather than action – though there was plenty of that too – and it took some imaginative stress to build up the historical background behind the characters. When my publishers saw it they liked it very much but suggested I should cut 20,000 words from the first half. It was the first time they had ever suggested any amendment since my very first novel. It was, I am sure, a genuine criticism on their part, but also it was activated by the extreme shortage of paper and their knowledge that an economy of forty pages would be a handsome saving of their short supply. I just said no. I said I regretted I wasn’t willing to cut anything, so they took it as it was. Whether they were in any way justified I don’t know, but no one ever since has said that the beginning was drawn-out or slow.
When the book came out it was a terrific success in Cornwall. W. H. Smith in Truro sold 700 copies in the month of December. It did not receive as many favourable reviews as The Forgotten Story, possibly because critics, a disillusioned race, don’t care for romance. But it continued to sell moderately well all through the succeeding year – and it has never stopped selling in all the years since.
Before this I was well on with the second Poldark novel, Demelza. Towards the end of Ross Poldark it became clear that I had far more to say and to tell than could be contained within a single book. There had to be another, and perhaps even one after that. Not only did Ross and Demelza grip my thoughts but all the lesser characters: the Martins, the Carters, Dwight Enys and Karen Smith, the Bodrugans, the Chynoweths, and of course the Warleggans. These people had come alive and clamoured for attention.
So Demelza came into being. All through the time I was in the Coastguard Service I had come particularly to appreciate being alone. I remembered the strange stimulating isolation of those few months in 1940 when, awaiting call-up, I had written the first chapters of Ross Poldark. In the final few weeks before being demobilized – since there was little now we could constructively do – I had shamelessly carried my books up to the coastguard station and spent the time writing. When the station was closed I looked for somewhere else. On the opposite side of the beach was a wooden bungalow, nearly always uninhabited except for a few weeks in high summer. It belonged to a Mr Harry Tremewan. I went to see him and hired it.
I have had a lot of happiness in my life, but those next few months rank high among the high spots. Each day about ten I left our house, with a few books under my arm and a haversack on my back containing perhaps potatoes, boiled ham, a tomato, lettuce, a few slices of
bread and some butter, and walked through the village and out onto the sandy beach – sometimes with the tide miles out, sometimes with it thundering and hissing at my feet, sometimes having to wade through sputtering surf up to my knees – and at the other side climb the Flat Rocks and go into the bungalow where, collecting dust even from yesterday, would be the pile of reference books and old papers that had already accumulated. Sitting in my deckchair in the immense silences, I would pick up the book in which I had been writing yesterday and continue with the story.
It was a remarkable experience. Sometimes in moments of critical self-examination I had asked myself if I was really a novelist or just a craftsman with a story-telling ability. In writing Demelza I knew myself with conviction to be a novelist. What I was writing was not a planned thing, it was organic, with the characters working out their own destiny. Sitting there in the grey old empty bungalow, I felt like a man driving a coach and four, roughly knowing the direction in which the coach would travel, but being pulled along by forces only just under his control. It was physically and mentally both exhausting and exhilarating. Every now and then after a long passage the coach, as it were, would lurch to a stop with a halfdozen possible roads opening ahead and no signposts. A day or two of agonizing indecision; then the road would be chosen and we would be off again. Occasionally during the day I would go out and stroll around the bungalow and watch the gulls and the translucent tides, feel the wind on my face: it was a mile or so from the old coastguard station but with a different, gentler view. At about five I would pack the haversack, take up the written work, and begin the walk back in the glimmering twilight with the sea far out and the waves glinting like mirages on the wet sand. I was going back each evening to the real world, waiting to welcome me at home; but it is doubtful which to me just then was the more real. All I knew was that I was writing something out of my very guts, and that I was content.
Memoirs of a Private Man Page 8