Drop, drop, drop.
Since nature’s pride is now a withered daffodil.’
In 1983 my wife began to lose a lot of weight she could ill spare, and her voice became hoarse and croaky. Emphysema was diagnosed, but she refused to believe she had this. She became in the next few years quite tiny and bent: it was strange for me to see her when I remembered her straight back, her sturdiness and her great vitality.
It cannot have gone unnoticed that I think my marriage was an extraordinarily lucky one, because it was such a happy one. The best of marriages have their ups and downs, but in half a century I recall only one serious quarrel, which lasted about half an hour, and in the course of which my wife threw part of our dinner service out of the window onto the lawn, but, when anger cooled, compelled herself to go out and pick up the pieces before the maids arrived in the morning.
For the most part I remember it as an association full of passion and laughter, constant amicable companionship and enduring love.
She died in December 1992, to the last issuing strict instructions as to how her Christmas pudding was to be cooked.
After the loss of a woman with whom one has lived in the greatest amity for much the larger part of one’s life, one is not a little bereft. When towards the end she would once or twice become a mite depressed, I would say to her: ‘ Don’t be so selfish. You can’t go and die on me. Think of me. I can’t go on without you.’ And, although light-heartedly expressed, I meant it – and totally believed it. But I have.
Sometimes if you wear a cheerful face to deceive, the deception begins to stick, and you end up by deceiving yourself. I was of course greatly helped by my family, though necessarily after a few weeks most were far distant. And a few very good friends, the Chapmans, Christopher Biggins, Angharad Rees, and some of Jean’s bridge friends such as Molly Burton. But the largest contribution came from a young woman called Gwen Hartfield. My wife had taken her on when Gwen was living nearby with a husband and a daughter of seven. She came to help in the house, but then, as Jean’s health deteriorated, she took over ever more of the housekeeping, and when Jean died she became my housekeeper, while continuing to see to her own husband and child, and this has continued ever since. Efficient, humorous,cheerful, witty and eccentric, she offered me friendly yet challenging companionship which I so much needed at that time, and which has never wavered. She has recently celebrated twenty years with us.
A year or two before Jean died we also took on a second helper (replacing one who left) called Tina Creelman, and a new young gardener, Robin Brown. These three formed a young and jolly triumvirate and have continued so ever since, making the big empty house more pleasant to live in and more tolerable to return to after one of my visits to London or my travels abroad.
I dedicated my novel Tremor to them, and they were my guests at the Savile Club for a birthday party that was given to me there a few years ago.
So a routine has set in, different and inferior to the one I lost, but becoming more to be enjoyed for its own sake as the years passed. I have usually been able to get abroad about three times a year and to stay at my club two or three nights every fortnight, and this has made for a very pleasant way of life.
Another recent dedicatee is Ann Hoffmann, who, working for me on a freelance basis for upwards of thirty-five years, has been an enormous help both as researcher and typist. Recently that help has become even more invaluable. Very early in my creative life I found it impossible to type correctly and at the same time to concentrate on the exact meaning and perception of what I was putting down. Some subtle communication was lost. (Jean was a great consultant, but no typist.)
I have therefore had a variety of typists of varying quality (or lack of it). Coming to live in Sussex meant losing whatever help I had had before, so I was extremely lucky to meet Ann by chance at a book launch at Elise Santoro’s bookshop in Crowborough, and a friendship blossomed. Although primarily a researcher, and a writer herself, she agreed to type for me if required. Thus a very friendly yet half-business association has grown up. I have never met anyone else who can copy a manuscript so error-free. This has been indispensable in view of the untidy nature of my later manuscripts, made ever worse by the cramped and spidery nature of my handwriting, which is showing the wear and tear of the years. Among other publications, Ann is the author of the definitive research manual, Research for Writers, which has recently gone into its seventh edition.
I have been under considerable pressure to buy at least a laptop computer. I have always turned the suggestions down for the reason that I have never done creative work on a typewriter. There is to me a lack of empathy. I have been told of the many extra advantages of word-processing, and I acknowledge them. But, apart from other reasons, I find that a sentence, a page, a book, assumes a different nature when it is first in manuscript, second in typescript, and third in page proofs. There is a separate, a welcome change, and each time one is able to see it in a new light.
Ann, of course, has long since become computer-literate.
The friendships which Jean and I made during the shooting of Poldark have, happily, continued.
An eminent man, who has had a good deal to do with television, remarked the other day that he had never known so many friendships – and enduring friendships – to develop between the actors in a TV series and the author and his wife. It said something, he added, important of both sides.
Angharad has remained a specially dear friend. She has visited me in a variety of hospitals in which from time to time I have reluctantly found myself. Young, pretty, smiling, bringing flowers or fruit or delicacies to eat, sometimes all three on one visit, she has lightened the eyes of doctors and nurses and, when recently I was in an accident ward, that of other patients. Angharad has just not changed. She could still play Demelza – Ross’s young wife – as she did in the late Seventies, and one would not notice the difference. A few years ago I invited my eighteen-year-old grandson, who had a terrible crush on her, to have lunch with her at Buck’s Club; and when it was over, and we had separated from her, I said: ‘Well, has it helped?’ He gave a convulsive sigh, and replied, ‘No.’
My popularity at the Savile Club shows a remarkable leap when I invite her to lunch. Men I hardly know, or others who at most would content themselves with a wave of the hand, think up excuses to come over and speak to me.
Robin Ellis was voted the sexiest man of his generation. When he was acting at Stratford, which was between the first and second Poldark series, his dressing room would be invaded by groups of adoring girls. Wherever he went, he was followed and feted.
When Clark Gable was between marriages, and rather suddenly and unexpectedly remarried, one of the Hollywood newspapers came out with a banner headline, ‘GABLE’S GONE, GIRLS’. Well, Robin ‘went’ by marrying an elegant and charming American girl. They had a splendid wedding, which Jean and I went to, and he has now, it seems, retired from acting and lives a quiet life in France, north of the Pyrenees. His friends see him too seldom.
Ralph Bates (George Warleggan) died tragically young, and his wife runs a fashionable shop supplying dresses and costumes for the stage. Their daughter, Daisy Bates, is in the television world and recently played John Thaw’s daughter in Kavanagh QC.
Jill Townsend (Elizabeth), during and after the filming, had a long association with Alan Price, but more lately it has broken up and she has gone back to America, where I have lost touch with her. (I once played snooker with Alan Price in Luxulyan Church Hall, while a scene was being prepared in the graveyard. It was a strange experience.) I put him up for the Savile Club, of which he remained a member for many years.
Christopher Biggins remains a close friend. It has always disappointed me that he has not received his due as a straight actor. Because of his size, his joviality, his keen sense of humour, he is always much in demand for light comic roles. (He seems to have made a corner for himself as a Pantomime Dame, and for this he is rightly in great demand and rightly renowned.) But c
asting directors should look again at his acting as Nero in I, Claudius and as Whitworth in the second Poldark series to see the range of his more serious talents, particularly in a role with a touch of the sinister, and they should make use of them.
Jane Wymark (Morwenna) is also a good friend. Shortly after the end of the series she married a man in the diplomatic service, and they have two children. Since they returned to England she has appeared in a number of TV plays. She is Patrick Wymark’s daughter, and although in Poldark she was required to play a quiet, gentle girl, trapped in a hateful marriage, she has, I am sure, the capacity to play dynamic, aggressive parts. Such as a woman barrister?
Paul Curran (Jud Paynter), alas, died.
Mary Wimbush (Prudie) is fortunately still with us.
David Delve (Sam Carne) has been on the stage a lot since Poldark. He played an important part in The Phantom of the Opera at Her Majesty’s Theatre, Haymarket, and stayed in it for two years.
The last time I saw Kevin McNally (Drake Carne) on the stage was when he played opposite Dame Maggie Smith in The Lady in the Van. Kevin played Alan Bennett, who wrote the play, and his personification of the author was pinpoint perfect. Years ago, on the set of Poldark, Robin Ellis said to me that Kevin McNally was the best actor in the production.
Chapter Eleven
I have recently rediscovered, having long thought them lost, the pocket diaries covering my early twenties. To read them one would think me a gardener and not much else. Occasionally a particularly good and exciting game of tennis is recorded, but most entries deal with sowing seeds, planting bulbs or herbaceous plants, picking or spraying or feeding roses or tomatoes, even cutting grass. Reading these diaries I astonish myself. Not perhaps for the preoccupation, but for the priority I gave that preoccupation in my diary.
When we lived in Manchester we had a normal town-size garden which my father would plant each summer; usually, in depressing conventionality, with geraniums and marguerites. Occasionally he would try to urge me to do something in the garden, but apart from regularly cutting the grass I paid only sulky attention to his proddings. (I remember once running over a frog with the cylinder lawn mower, discovering it eviscerated by the blades, and retreating into the kitchen to be sick while the maid cleared up the mess.)
Yet I did have a stirring of interest at an earlier age than this – about nine – when I picked up a book of my father’s called A Primer of Biology & Nature Study. I began to examine and identify the sombre trees of Victoria Park, and still have the book with the pressed leaves I picked to match the illustrations on the pages.
When we moved to Cornwall all was made over anew. A tree in Perranporth was a rarity. Up the valleys you could find the may trees, the nut trees, a few long elms, all shaven by the prevailing winds, but within a mile of the sea nothing. Low-growing shrubs and flowers were riotous, and in endless variety and number. The bungalow that my parents rented for eighteen months had a rockery crammed with strange new plants, things I had never seen or heard of before; things I would hardly bother to grow now, but then strange and exciting, really exciting.
When we transferred to the house we bought in Perrancombe we were about a mile from the sea and there were apple trees in the garden (all uprooted one screaming November night a few years later). Not infrequently in the winter the foam from the mountainous seas dashing against the cliffs of Cligga two miles away would drift over our garden and fall like soapsuds. The soil was hideously shallow because of the washing floors that had been there in the last century, but it was to this garden, of about half an acre, that all the early diary entries refer. My sister-in-law, seeking something derogatory to say about me at this time to my mother, would say: ‘He spends all his time with his head in a seed catalogue.’
It would be difficult to infer from these early diaries that I was an aspiring writer, a working writer, someone striving desperately to achieve a breakthrough and get something published, and so justify his existence. In later years – certainly for the last forty – I have always entered the approximate number of words written each day, and the total in the week. This isn’t possible when one is struggling with intractable problems in the early stages of a novel or later doing extensive revision, but, once launched, a record of work done in any day has a hypnotic effect. You are stuck on a page, stuck on a page, stuck on a page: movement comes at last, so one works for an extra couple of hours to keep up the average for the week. Romantics who are surprised by this method should refer to Trollope (who of course ruined his reputation for many years by confessing that he counted the words in his output).
When we bought Treberran, I brought leaf mould and soil in dustbins in the back of the Alvis from the other side of the county to make a bed for rhododendrons and camellias. Following the success of this, and aware that protection was all, I built two sunken gardens where the land sloped abruptly away and put up cement-block walls eight feet high and about a hundred and fifty feet in length. It was heavy work and frequently my stomach muscles protested. It seemed at times to take on a bizarre similarity to building the Pyramids: one could not lift the blocks high enough, so pushed them up sloping planks and at the top rolled them over and allowed them to clomp into place. In these protected hollows many attractive small shrubs grew and flowered. I believe they still flourish.
Moving to Sussex, I hoped for lovely rich soil and was deceived by the rhododendrons growing in the garden of the house we bought. In fact the soil is thick Sussex clay, and we lost every Himalayan rhododendron we tried – and that is pretty well all of them – and dozens of choice shrubs besides. But camellias have been wonderful and the less particular rhododendrons, of which there are many. We have probably the largest free-standing Magnolia grandiflora in the county, masses of azaleas, hydrangeas of every variety of blue and pink and white: lace caps, oddities like quercifolia and tricolor; tulip trees, judas trees, strawberry trees, fossil trees, nyssa trees, gunneras and liquidambars.
I have used this interest in gardens in only two novels – if you except Demelza’s garden at Nampara: in the 1992 novel, Stephanie, and an early novel, The Giant’s Chair, later republished as Woman in the Mirror.
I have often been asked why I will not allow the early books to come out again as they originally were.
Many people must have suffered from time to time the frustration of having discovered a novelist, new to them, of enjoying enormously this first book, and of next picking one up on some airport bookstall by the same author and finding it horribly inferior. In annoyance they turn to the front page and discover it was published twenty or thirty years ago. The novelist’s writing has improved. Many novelists do so improve. I have. A few hardly need to, they come to their craft fully equipped, like Graham Greene or Rudyard Kipling. Good for them. If my first book were half as good as The Man Within or Plain Tales from the Hills I would be happy to see it in reprint on any bookstall. As it was not, even relatively not, I refuse to take people’s money for what virtually is a con.
Rewriting I know is confusing for the bibliophile, but I am not concerned with the bibliophile. I am concerned for the reader and for myself. One or two of the earlier novels, though lacking much, had good central ideas. Good ideas that could have been treated better. So it has suited me to try to treat them better. It has been a stimulus to try. And a stimulus is what makes one write.
My friendship with other authors has not been extensive, in spite of seven years on the Committee of Management of the Society of Authors, plus two years as its chairman. Through this I came to know many writers superficially, and a few better, but these mainly are from the Savile Club: Compton Mackenzie, J. B. Priestley, Nigel Balchin, John Moore, Eric Linklater.
I first met Somerset Maugham at the Savile when he was a guest at the club. At that time I was a tremendous admirer of his work – still am, if to a less absolute degree – and when introduced I told him what a rare pleasure it was to meet him.
‘As it happens,’ I said, ‘I was in Istanbul last
April when you were there, but we didn’t meet. Then I was in Athens a month later when you were there, and we didn’t meet. And oddly enough, last October, I was in New York at the same time, and we have the same publisher but we didn’t meet.’
He looked up at me, screwing up small keen eyes in a small keen face, and said: ‘It seems to me you have been tr-tr-trying to avoid me.’
The last time I saw Maugham was when Denys Kilham Roberts, then Secretary-General of the Society of Authors, invited him and Compton Mackenzie to lunch at the Savile, and asked me to make up the four. With a mischievous chuckle he said he thought we should have a rich entertainment. He was wrong. These two men, roughly contemporaries, Maugham nine years the elder, had seen and experienced so much of the writer’s world as companions, as rivals, as overseers of the literary scene, that they must have had a hundred things to talk about and discuss. Not so. For some reason they were suspicious; they eyed each other like unacquainted cats, Maugham monosyllabic, Monty talking to Denys or me; even silences occurred now and then. Of course it was fairly friendly, but it was a guarded courtesy more than anything else.
I was at Mackenzie’s seventieth birthday party and his eightieth. After the first he went off to a night club with Eric Linklater where, legend has it, Eric was heard to be calling for black women. At 10.30 the next morning Monty was in his favourite seat at the Savile, dark blue pinstripe suit, crimson bow tie, clean, well-shaven, spruce, having already done a broadcast that morning at the BBC, and was now giving us his verbal plans for what he would write in the next ten years. The morning after his eightieth birthday party, having in the previous decade completed his schedule, he was in precisely the same spot making plans for the next ten years. He completed nine of them.
Monty Mackenzie was a great talker, a great raconteur – sometimes one dared to harbour the heresy that he was a better talker than he was a writer – but of all his reminiscences only one sticks in my mind, and that is an account he gave me of a visit to Henry James at Rye. James had known Monty as a child, and after lunch they talked for a while about the technique of the novel. James said: