I was doubtful, thought at first of trying some other breeder; but the children were adamant. The dog was to be their Christmas present! And as for a defective tail, how utterly appropriate could that be? Garrick, Demelza’s dog, whose tail was part cut off at Redruth Fair! Daddy, it had to be!
The delivery date was fixed for mid-December. The puppy would be sent by train from Leicester and would arrive at Truro station at 5.30 a.m., where we were to collect him. The night before Jean and I were going to a hunt ball at Newquay (not that we hunted, but a few of our friends did). Newquay is about ten miles from Perranporth, and Truro from Perranporth is about the same. We arrived back from the ball about 3.30 a.m., changed, lay in bed for an hour and then set off to meet our new friend.
It was pitch black, of course, and Truro station was almost deserted; three old men, on a seat, a porter pushing an empty trolley, the long station dim lit. The train came in on time (as they often did on the old Great Western Railway) and at first only four people got off. Then we saw the luggage van at the other end and hastened towards it. Two boxes of books, a sheaf of newspapers, then something larger was carefully lowered down. It was our new puppy, already three times the size we had expected, who had made the journey from Leicester in a large laundry basket.
Garrick grew, and he grew, and he grew, like some monster in a fairy tale. The only part that did not grow, which remained stunted and misshapen, was his tail. What did that matter? Indeed it had its special significances. Well … but …
Did the breeding quirk that deformed the tail also imbue him with his outrageous amount of energy? Would this bounding, bouncing ever-enlarging bundle of vitality ever grow into a ponderous, dignified, warmly stately animal such as the one we had seen on the beach? Could a year or two’s ageing make all the difference?
Our house had two long halls meeting at an L turn. Indoors Garrick was as well behaved as a good-tempered child, settling into our ways and, it seemed, totally happy in them. We gave him his own bedroom, the last on the ground floor and near the back door. In the evenings he would lie stretched out in front of the fire in our drawing room, which was at the extreme end of the other arm of the L. At about 10 p.m. I would kneel down beside him and whisper in one great floppy ear, ‘Time for bed, Garrick.’ I never had to say it twice. He would cock a bloodshot eye at me and after a moment heave his great bulk onto its feet and proceed entirely on his own down the two long passages and slump into his own comfy bed to pass the night. Later Jean or I would go along and say good night to him.
As soon as he was free in the morning he would come lolloping up into our bedroom and salivate over my sheets until I gave him the digestive biscuit I had had waiting. In spite of his bulk and his great energies I never remember a solitary thing he broke in the house, not a plate, not a cup, not a glass. The perfect animal.
In the garden he was well behaved. I have a movie picture of him chasing Jean round the garden, grabbing at her skirt, but never, never tearing it.
As he grew we took him on increasingly long walks, and when we could we would let him off the lead. That was where the trouble began. He would charge about fascinated in finding new dogs to smell, birds to chase, motor bikes to pursue. Suddenly he would be deaf, or not choose to hear his name. Panting after a long run, we would eventually catch up with him, grab him by the double ruff and get the lead on him again. But even this was not much of a solution, for he would at once want to go ahead at twice our speed and drag one of us – or sometimes both – lurching after him. As he got larger he got more uncontrollable, and we had to resort to the chain collar which was supposed to tighten about his neck the more he pulled. This is a resort frowned on by some dog lovers because it is supposed to hurt the dog. With his great ruff it seemed to make no difference at all.
Jean took him many times to a training school for dogs in Camborne. Every time he behaved impeccably while he was there, even, Jean said, showing himself more intelligent than most of the rest, but reverting immediately when he got home.
The children thought much of him and made much of him, but were often away at school. He made much of us all; but he had no control over his roaming instincts. We could not spend all day superintending him. We would leave him snoozing comfortably on the back lawn and half an hour later the telephone would ring, sometimes from as far as three miles away, and a voice would say: ‘ Mr Winston Graham, we have a big white dog walking around in our vegetable garden … No, I don’t think he has done much damage. He let me read his collar. Could you come and collect him?’
Jean or I would go and collect him. It was amusing enough to begin, but repetition became wearisome. Garrick would react appropriately to harsh words or honeyed ones. There was no harm in him, never an ill intent.
Two factors weighed heavily against him. He had a passionate dislike of two-stroke motorbikes, and the local policeman rode a two-stroke motorbike. The policeman could, perhaps, be placated. Perhaps once only. The worse and much more dangerous prospect was that once or twice we had just succeeded in restraining him from chasing sheep. That in a district where sheep was the commonest form of farming was an amber light turning to red.
We began to think of selling our beloved dog, or even giving him away. Who would buy him, who would take him? Indeed, who would love him, as we did? We hung on for a while, hoping for the best. The climax came when one day we locked him in the house. He galloped up the stairs to the first floor, found the landing window ajar, pushed it open, squeezed his bulk through the narrow aperture and slid down the tiled roof and leapt or fell the remaining twelve feet to land on an escallonia hedge, and, hurrah, he was free! We returned to hear the phone ringing and were told that Garrick was up at a farm in Trevollas four miles away, playing with a half dozen other dogs.
After a fitful further six months we parted from our warmhearted, loving, rollicking split personality of a dog with grief and kisses all round.
We gave him to a professional footballer living near Newquay, who took a five-mile run every morning and needed a companion. I have always hoped he had found the companion to suit him.
In the twenty years following the publication of the fourth Poldark – Warleggan – I wrote (with only one exception, The Grove of Eagles) all modern novels, ten in total, five of which were filmed on the big screen and five – not always the same – were major book club choices in the US. In addition the huge Bertelsmann book club in Germany took two of those books and the Club degli Editori of Italy two. The cumulative effect was considerable. So was the oppressiveness of the tax situation. In those days so much was confiscated by the Inland Revenue that while one could live in fine style it was virtually impossible to accumulate money, and with the two children at expensive schools and a wife with a taste for good living at least the equal of my own, I was aware of the possible impermanence of prosperity. I was writing – as always – what I wanted to write and not what I thought the public wanted. Three of the ten books were not a particular success, but that was an acceptable proportion. Public taste is fickle. And tastes can change. It would be a good and timely precaution to retain a bit more of one’s earnings.
So towards the end of this period I began to look around. Our house, which we had occupied for thirteen years since the end of its commercial activities, badly lacked a garden. The house was built on rising ground overlooking the village, but it was made ground, from the stone and mineral refuse, the ‘attle’, of a long extinct mine, and a six–inch veneer of soil had been spread to cover the rock. There was never a trace of subsidence in the building, but gardening was not rewarding work. During the war we tried to plant potatoes, with ludicrous results. I wanted a garden, and preferably one with soil that rhododendrons and camellias would tolerate. Over the spine of Cornwall where the soil, though still fairly shallow, was superbly acid, and watered by the soft rains, these exotic plants luxuriated. Also, although the winds on the south coast were still savage, they were almost zephyr-like compared to the tempests which fell upon us on the n
orth coast. In Perranporth scarcely a tree flourished. To encourage a sycamore to grow a dozen feet high was a major achievement. On the other hand, lime-tolerant shrubs, bulbs, roses, low-growing bedding plants, gorse and heather and foxgloves and poppies brought a blaze of colour in the spring and early summer. At Treberran in favourable, specially created, pockets we had lovely flowers. I even made a rhododendron bed by bringing back soil in dustbins in the back of my Alvis from the other side of the county. The bed prospered. In spite of prophecies that the lime would get into the bed and eventually kill the plants, they were still flowering freely twenty years after we left.
But it was makeshift. Why should I go on tinkering with gardening, making do with the third rate, when I could have the best? If we moved, then clearly somewhere near Falmouth or St Austell were the areas to look in. It was a different, softer Cornwall, but it would still be within easy reach of the beaches we loved.
Yet southern Cornwall did not attract us so much to live in. Most of the small villages and towns by the sea had even in those days been invaded by the retired, from up county or locally, by genuine and would-be yachtsmen, by a certain social stuffiness that did not attract us. Perranporth, for all its gimcrack attempts to attract the tourist, was robustly alive and many of the families remained stubbornly Cornish. The very violence of the winds was a challenge and a stimulus.
And such a move would do nothing to solve the tax problem. Go abroad? Live abroad? Become a tax exile? Ever since the end of the war my wife and I, sun and sea worshippers and revelling as we did in the beaches of Cornwall, had taken our holidays further south where there was a hotter sun and a warmer sea: Italy, Greece, Spain, France, Yugoslavia, etc. Of these countries France was the most accessible, the one whose language we moderately understood, the most civilized and certainly the land where we had the most friends. If we left Treberran we ought to leave England, at least for an experimental period. We put Treberran up for sale with that in mind.
Again it was in a trough in house prices, and it took over a year to sell. But it happened in the end.
Two incidents I specially recall. One was soon after the sale when my son was home from school and we were out somewhere together and decided to have a bottle of champagne to celebrate the sale. He said quietly: ‘What is there to celebrate?’ So much for the opinion of both our children.
Being lumbered with a specially vivid imagination and being apparently able to see all sides of every question, I had agonized long about the decision to move, knowing that I was not deciding the future of one but of four. No one will ever know whether my decision was the right one.
The other incident occurred the night before we left. Half the furniture had gone into store and we were sleeping in our usual bedroom on the ground floor. In the later part of the night there was a loud crash, and when we went into the uncarpeted hall we found that a picture had fallen and smashed the glass. It was a John Speed map of Cornwall, dated 1614, a prized possession. The cord had broken. I still have the map, but sometimes wonder if it was an omen that we should never live in Cornwall again.
Having given – or lent – our cat to a friend, we left for London, and after six weeks in a furnished house there, drove off to the South of France in two cars, a Mini and a three-litre Alvis, laden with books, a few personal belongings and two children. Andrew, my son, being now seventeen, had passed his driving test, so we shared the driving between the three of us – though I think at that time I did not let Andrew drive the Alvis. Wherever we stopped we were surrounded by people staring at the Mini. It had come out in 1959 and this was the spring of 1960. Even in England it was a rarity (I had only been able to buy one because of a pull I had with a garage owner) and in France nothing like it, nothing so small, had ever been seen before. We should have been presented with a free Mini for the publicity we gave it in France.
For the previous two years we had driven down to the Côte d’Azur, and after a preliminary holiday in Italy, had ended up at Cap Ferrat and stayed at the Hôtel Voile d’Or. Michael Powell, the director of so many prestigious movies like The Red Shoes and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, owned it, having inherited it from his father, whose mistress, Madame Alice, ran it – together with Michael’s own wife, Frankie, who deserves a book to herself. Irish, pretty, fey, vague, extravagant of gesture and emotion, warm, throwaway, impulsive, generous, feckless and devil-may-care, Frankie knew everybody. The hotel was not well run but it was jolly, and whom might one not meet there? Not only did she know everyone in the film industry, she seemed to be on terms with half the artists and intellectuals of France.
Having got to know her pretty well in the two previous visits, I told her that we were coming to live in France and would like to rent a villa somewhere along the coast. She instantly discovered the Villa Caprice and took it on our behalf.
We therefore went down in March, halting on the high ground above Dijon to hear, on the fading long-wave BBC channel, the details of the latest British Budget, and then plunged onwards towards our Mediterranean summer.
The Villa Caprice was a four-bedroomed house, pleasant but small, perched directly above the road leading round the harbour. It could hardly have been more central: when we opened champagne, the corks would fly over the road and into the harbour. We settled there for the Easter holidays, and at the end of them the children went back to England until the summer break. We had brought a motor-powered Kleppermaster with us for sailing round the coast and for waterskiing. We also for a time hired my friend Max Reinhardt’s cabin cruiser with its two 40 h.p. Johnson engines. In late July our children came back, and over the summer holidays we had a succession of their friends to stay, as well as our niece Jacqui Williamson, who had a wonderful time.
In effect it was a wonderful time for us all. We picnicked nearly every day, either on Passable Beach or on Paloma, or at sea. Most Fridays we drove to the market at Ventimiglia, where every week we found something new to splash our money on. Shoes, gloves, shirts, blouses, beach equipment, sheets, food, fruits, cakes – then further on into Italy where we usually managed to reach San Remo for a late bathe before lunch and then endless bathes after; beach football and tea and then the longish drive home along the Lower Corniche, stopping at some little hotel or restaurant for supper and reaching Cap Ferrat about 11 p. m. A fourteen-hour day of incomparable pleasure.
In the evenings there were parties or the local cinema or – rarely – we went to the Casino at Beaulieu, or to grand opera out of doors in Les Arènes in nearby Nice, or orchestral concerts given before Prince Rainier and Princess Grace in the Palace in Monaco.
I say ‘ rarely’ to the Casino for I have never had any interest in gambling. In 1950, on our first trip to the United States aboard the first Queen Elizabeth, we had a little trouble when disembarking in finding a customs officer to mark our luggage.
We eventually found one, who in friendly fashion said: ‘Where are you staying, Mr Graham?’
I replied, the New Weston.
‘Aw,’ he said, ‘that’s real good. That’s a real good bar. D’ye know during the war it was one of the few places in New York where you could squander money economically.’
I shook him by the hand and said: ‘My friend, this is something I have enjoyed doing all my life, but I have never been able to describe it before.’
I was doing just that in the South of France. To go to the Casino would have been in my view to squander money uneconomically. Besides being a bore.
We made a lot of interesting and entertaining friends: Graham and Kathleen Sutherland, Gregory and Veronique Peck, Princess Starraba; and others, like Jack and Doreen Hawkins and Prince and Princess Chula of Thailand, we had known in England. My daughter, being a natural blonde and very pretty though only fourteen-and-a-half, was besieged by handsome young French boys, who could not resist her. Among her other suitors were Steven Peck, Gregory’s second son by his first wife, and his second wife’s brother, Joe Passani, who was also her age.
Gregory
Peck had been married to his second wife only five years at this time, and had two young children by her. They had taken a large villa with a huge swimming pool just behind the Voile d’Or, and Madame Passani, his new mother-in-law, was with them. She was a distinguished Russian woman, still in her forties, an intellectual of great charm and force of character, with formidable good looks that appeared and disappeared with her moods. Gregory was not present much at first, being still bound up in the making of The Guns of Navarone, which was running months over schedule, but Madame Passani – or Shoshone – took a great fancy to us, and our friendships blossomed and lasted for years. Her charm of character and personality made a great impression on me, and generations later she surfaced as Shona in The Green Flash.
I think her husband, who had some time ago disappeared from the scene, was half-French, half-Italian, and Veronique must have resembled him more than her mother, being a dark, attractive Latin. Joe, her much younger brother, who is now a successful surgeon in California, always looked the Russian to me.
After we had returned to England, Gregory and Veronique Peck also moved to England on a new film he was making, and the friendship ripened. We went as a foursome to theatres and restaurants; also we spent a day with them at the house they had rented in Denham, where Veronique showed her comic abilities by mimicking some elderly earl they knew playing croquet. Once when staying in Cornwall a maid came to the table where we were dining and said in a trembling voice: ‘You’re wanted on the phone, Mr Graham. It’s – it’s Greg – Gregory Peck.’
Later, when we went to Hollywood we dined with them and were on the best of terms. Some years then passed when our only exchange was of Christmas cards.
Then one year I heard that Gregory was going to Venice for the Film Festival, so I wrote to him and suggested we should meet there. There was no reply. I asked my agent to get in touch with his agent, which he did. No response. When we reached Venice I sent him round by hand a note from the Danieli to the Gritti, but it brought no reply, and we never met thereafter.
Memoirs of a Private Man Page 12