It was a pretty grim time, with constant visits from the doctor, great heat, no air conditioning in the hotel and only a lazy fan stirring the air, me with a bad stomach and damaged eardrums from flying from New Orleans to Miami in an unpressurized plane, the intense darkness of the nights and the hum of the mosquitoes. The doctor told me not to fly again for a year, so while we waited for a ship – they were scarce even in those days – we took a trip to Eleuthera. How it has been developed since those days I don’t know, but it was then primitive in the extreme. The only vessel on which we could travel was the coastguard cutter because of the narrowness of the harbour. Jungle almost overgrew the few bumpy tracks, giant waves broke on white sandy beaches, with land crabs scuttering everywhere and, of course, the ubiquitous mosquito. We stayed at the solitary hotel, called French Leave, which – an innovation, I thought, in those days – had a central reception hall, lounge and dining room, and accommodation in small bungalows separate from the hotel. When we stepped out of our bungalow after dark to go to the main building, or vice versa, the mosquitoes fell on us like a cloud of MiGs. The hotel was run by a middle-aged well-educated Englishman and his wife. He had been a gunrunner for the Mexicans until a few years before.
One isolated modern colonial-style house belonged to a Colonel McGrath and his wife, the writer Rosita Forbes. They had been permanently settled there for years, but she told me that in early 1940 she felt she must return to England to do what work she could to help in the war effort. She arrived at Liverpool just after Dunkirk and the collapse of France.
While the customs officer was examining her baggage she said to him, ‘ Isn’t it awful! Could it possibly be worse?’
He looked up and said: ‘What? Oh, well, yes. It’s been raining like this for days.’
While in Nassau we were able to attend a famous trial in which a man was accused of blackmail, following the murder of Sir Harry Oakes. We also got to know a fortune teller called Madame Grenadine who for some reason not made explicit had had to leave her rooms in Half Moon Street, Mayfair, in a hurry, and came to live in a distant British colony, where she had established a thriving practice. She told us that both the prosecuting and the defending barristers in this notorious court case had come to her for advice and for her to prophesy the outcome.
Leaving her rooms one day, where we had been to take tea with her, not advice, I spotted a peculiar thing like a little wrapped mummy hanging on a tree. I pointed it out. She said casually, ‘Oh, someone has put an obeah on me.’
In retrospect it may seem nothing; but seen in the brief twilight before the sudden fall of night, with palms rustling and the oversweet smell of dying blossoms, it was ominous and nasty.
On another occasion when we called in, a white man and woman were leaving with their son of about sixteen. When they had gone Madame Grenadine said: ‘They came to see if I could help their son. But I can’t. He’s got leprosy.’
I always intended to write a novel – but never did – about the Bahamas, which seemed to me in those days to combine the worst features of British Colonialism and American Big Business. They also had the fascinating problem of the ‘poor whites’, the original white settlers who kept strictly to themselves over the generations and interbred so constantly that all sorts of lovely complaints seemed to be endemic, such as mental deficiency and susceptibility to leprosy. I was advised by my crystal-gazing lady friend to read a book called Pink Pearl, A Study of Bahamanian Degeneracy, but, again, never did.
We returned to England on the Reina del Pacifico, a fine ship but returning in ballast; and a force-8 gale made the eight-day crossing very uncomfortable. Particularly for Jean with her recurrent asthma.
After a few days at home to re-meet our children and to recuperate, and with Jean due for her next visit to Harley Street, we went up to London together and I took a look at the finished movie, made during my absence, of Night Without Stars. I could not follow the story.
It seemed that after I had gone Tony Pelissier had decided he didn’t like my screenplay and had rewritten it as he thought best.
In fact the whole film was an example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions. Everybody had worked very hard to make it a success, and neither the producer, the director nor the writer was without talent, but it turned out a disaster. These things, as we know, can happen so easily either on stage or screen, and it is virtually impossible to point a finger at the cause.
Of my six films made, four are constantly repeated on TV. The two which are seldom shown are Night Without Stars and The Sleeping Partner – which was another even damper squib, though since this was taken wholly out of my hands and made in America I feel no responsibility for it. (The novel was also later made into a successful one-hour TV film by John Jacobs for Anglia.)
Although Night Without Stars was such a failure, my friendship with Hugh Stewart and Anthony Pelissier was unimpaired. I never, of course, in all my life ever had any friction with Hugh, but it is probably a testimony to us both that Anthony and I used to enjoy each other’s company until he died.
The other formative influence in 1950, one that I have already briefly mentioned, was that I became a member of the Savile Club. In early 1945 Peter Latham had suggested it, and when I was in London invited me to dine there to see how it appealed to me. In fact, having always been so much a loner, club life did not appeal at all; and at that first dinner I sat with the eminent zoologist Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell on my right and H. G. Wells opposite me. Wells must have been about eighty at the time. I remember he wore a grey herringbone suit with a dark red tie and shirt with the wings of the collar in disarray. He was polite but uncommunicative. He had just published his last book, called Mind at the End of its Tether. Neither he nor Chalmers Mitchell at that late time in their lives were exactly apostles of lightness and joy, and I thanked Peter very much and asked to be excused. At about the same time I had also seen a fair amount of the Savage Club as Benno Moiseiwitsch’s guest, and he had similarly put the suggestion that he would like to propose me for membership of the Savage. Again, I thanked him and pleaded the excuse that I lived in Cornwall and wasn’t really the clubbable type.
Now, in 1950, I was invited to spend a night or two with Hugh Stewart and his wife Frances in order to discuss the film of Night Without Stars, and almost immediately Hugh asked me why I didn’t become a member of the Savile Club. By then I was a little more inured to the prospect, and I told him that a chap called Peter Latham had suggested this five years ago, that I had said no, but now, having seen so much more of London in the interim, I might think of it more seriously.
‘I’ll see Peter,’ he said. ‘You must come to lunch there with him and we’ll talk it over.’
I did. We did. My name went down in the book, and in the July I was elected a member. And shortly, within a year, I began to feel that, in addition to Cornwall, I had another home.
Chapter Seven
The Savile Club in those days was an extraordinary institution, like no other club, I believe, in the world. It is not now quite what it was but is still very good.
When William Golding was made a Nobel Prize winner a few years ago, the Savile put up a small notice on the board congratulating him, and listing the seven previous Nobel Prize winners who had been members of the club. (In fact it is seventeen, as the historian of the Savile Club, Anthony Garrett Anderson, has established.) The other literary names were W. B. Yeats and Rudyard Kipling, the rest being scientists, astronomists, physicists. The club coruscated with great names: Hardy, Stevenson, Elgar, Priestley, Wells, Walton, Vaughan Williams, Cockcroft, Rutherford, Chadwick, J. J. Thompson. It was a place where the great went to relax; it could be as unceremonious as a public school, as intellectual as the best university, as Bohemian as a Soho restaurant.
When I first joined, the place seemed to be full of eccentrics and intellectuals, of raconteurs, wits and half-wits. Looking back, I suppose most of the members of the club were fairly ordinary chaps by temperament who
had distinguished themselves in some walk of life. But the men I met and came to know by staying in the club, not just using it for occasional meals, were the nucleus, the hard core of regular attenders who got the most out of the club by putting the most in; and it was these men whose ranks I intermittently joined and by whom I was accepted. I remember Sir David Milne, the then head of the Scottish Office, saying to me in the billiard room one night: ‘You’ll do. I thought you were too quiet, but I see you’re going to be one of us.’
When Benno Moiseiwitsch heard I was thinking of joining the Savile he said it was ‘ the snob’s club’. He could hardly have been more wrong, unless one included intellectual snobbery, of which there was a reasonable amount. So far as class was concerned the sign over every Toc H meeting place, ‘All Rank Abandon Ye Who Enter Here’, would equally have applied to the Savile.
I came to look forward to my visits: they were a tremendous mental stimulus. While remaining dedicated to Cornwall, I found this the first break in the total commitment of earlier years.
One thing that concerned me a little about my evenings at the club was the amount of hard drinking that went on. By some extraordinary piece of good fortune, excessive drink never appealed to me – though I could always take a modest amount and love it – but it startled me to see how much some of my new friends put away. Many of them were very famous men – and all were pretty well at the top of whatever particular tree they had chosen to climb – it seemed wasteful of talent and good health to pour so much down their throats. God knows, I was not censorious, or they would soon have detected it; and I was able to get along on my limited intake without its being noticeable. But I couldn’t help but think, ‘If you become President of this or Chairman of that, or the leading authority on some aspect of astronomy or architecture or disease or whatever, there must have been a lot of dedicated striving – whatever the talent – to reach such eminence; is this excess really the best way to celebrate it?’
As a committed heterosexual I have never paid much attention to homosexuality. I have never felt strongly on the subject at all – except some resentment at the purloining of that lovely old threeletter word of twelfth-century French, used to describe a happy condition, now turned into a word to describe a sexual preference. But aside from that …
Two of my closest friends when I first went to live in Cornwall were (a) a bachelor Scout master and (b) a widowed curate. As a schoolboy I knew the facts of life, but little more, but I knew precisely where my own instincts lay.
When the curate was moved to another living, he invited me to spend a weekend with him. I accepted, and we slept together two nights in a double bed. There was no thought in my mind that there was anything untoward in this, but if anything had happened I should have been as scandalized and angry as a Somerset Maugham spinster – not shocked out of prudery, but out of a total savage disgust.
As for the scoutmaster, I never saw him with other boys, but I would bet my bottom dollar he was one of those men to whom sex means almost nothing at all. There are some such men, and women, though it is unfashionable to suppose so.
I mention these matters here because when I joined the Savile in 1950 I believe it was the only one of the great London clubs who would accept ‘gays’. I never heard any such hint dropped in the election committee at the Savile, but let some hint of it be dropped in any other committee and the man would be quietly dropped too. In the Savile, it was not a factor in the equation. It was of no more relevance than if a candidate was married, single, or divorced. It was his behaviour in the club, and of course his intellect and his achievements, which were all that mattered. So long as he didn’t, in Mrs Patrick Campbell’s famous words, ‘frighten the horses’, what he did outside the club was his own damned business. (I remember at one such committee a member saying, ‘The only trouble with this chap is that he looks like a Borstal boy.’ A man opposite said, ‘ He’d be more interesting if he’d been one.’)
At a time when all the taboos were still up one might have thought this tolerant attitude on the part of the Savile would have resulted in there being a large number of homosexual members. It did not seem so. Some perhaps I never noticed, for I never thought about it. A few were obviously gay, and as the moral climate relaxed, they became a little more overt.
This led to one of the best bits of repartee, at one of the round tables at the Savile, when a couple of members started teasing Humphrey Hare about his sex life. He bore this with his usual good temper, but eventually with a great laugh, for which he was famous, shouted: ‘What d’you expect me to do – go to bed with a horse?’
A little man at the other side of the table immediately remarked: ‘I thought the age of cavalry was past.’
Humphrey Hare was the son of a general, an old Etonian, an ex- Guardsman, a great friend of Compton Mackenzie, to whom he offered much candid advice on the subject of Monty’s writing. Hare was completely bilingual and supplemented his private means by translating French books into English for various publishers. So good was he that he did not need to write anything down. As he read the French he would dictate the translation into a dictaphone and post it off when done.
Hare was a very handsome man, tall, erect, noisy, amiable. For some reason, Frank, our valet at the club, did not like him. He would come into my room with a cup of tea at 8 a.m. and say, ‘Mornin’, sir. Nice cup of tea. Just eight o’clock,’ and as he left the room he would add venomously: ‘Hare’s asleep.’ Fifteen minutes later he would return with my shoes duly polished and say, ‘Quarter after eight, sir. Plenty of time. Shall I run yir bath?’ And then, as an angry postscript as he left: ‘Hare’s asleep.’
I took these interchanges back to Cornwall, and it became a family saying, ‘Hare’s asleep.’
Then one day in Venice when Jean and I were walking down the Merceria we met Humphrey Hare and his mother, who were holidaying like us. Jean was astounded to meet this tall broadshouldered Adonis, when she had thought from my stories that he was a small wizened man.
In view of his military background one would have expected Hare to be right wing in politics; in fact the very reverse. He fought in the Spanish Civil War on behalf of the government against Franco, and teamed up with two others of similar lineage and persuasion: Nancy Mitford and her then husband, Prod, as he was known in the Savile, that is the Hon. Peter Rennell Rodd.
As Franco began to gain the upper hand they were involved in the bitter rearguard action before Barcelona. One of the three then perpetrated one of the best puns of the decade. As they hastily chartered a ship to convey many of the government’s most prominent supporters out of reach of Franco’s vengeance, he – or she – said: ‘ Well, I’ve heard of people having all their eggs in one basket. I have never before heard of anyone having all their Basques in one exit.’
Chapter Eight
Meanwhile events moved well for me in the United States, and it can be said that from 1950 until 1970 three-quarters of my affluence came from across the Atlantic. One after another of the books I wrote were Book Club choices, and paperback sales abounded. In England sales were steady but unexciting by comparison. When Marnie hit the headlines in 1962 I remarked in a press interview at the time that I was ‘ the most successful unknown novelist in England’, and the phrase stuck and has often been repeated. Now that the great flush of the Poldark television series is long past, perhaps there is a chance that it may become true again.
The strange imbalances in the public awareness of my prosperity may also be partly the reason why so many innocent souls thought the TV series had ‘made’ me. One dear lady from Cornwall wrote to me saying I must think it strange achieving success at last after ‘writing away all these years’. Cornish and West Country newspapers sometimes still contribute to this myth.
Though fond of animals – particularly cats, of which for many years we had two Siamese – I never until my middle life owned a dog.
But walking across the beach at Perranporth one day we saw a huge white dog with grea
t floppy paws, ponderous but gentle movements, a tail like one of the Prince of Wales’s feathers, and a dignified but friendly manner. The two children, aged about ten and six, fell in love at first sight. We approached the owners, who said it was a Pyrenean mountain dog, and they had got him from a breeder in Leicester. The outcome, after much discussion, was that I wrote to the breeder and asked if they had a puppy for sale. They replied that they had not, but one of their bitches was expected to give birth in September. By Christmas we could have the puppy. With considerable excitement we agreed. We all decided that he should be called Garrick. What more suitable?
In November we heard from the breeder. A male puppy had duly arrived, sound in wind and limb, soon would be fully house-trained and was lively and intelligent. There was one slight hitch. Due to some breeding quirk, he had a slightly defective tail. It would probably, the dealer said, grow naturally as the dog developed; but if we felt this slight imperfection was not acceptable another of their bitches was expecting in April, and we could instead put in an order for this puppy for next June. If we preferred to go ahead with our present order they would reduce the price by X guineas (I forget what).