So in September 1925 we all took a holiday in Perranporth – Cecil’s fiancée Elsie with us – and stayed at the Tywarnhayle Hotel for two weeks, in the little undeveloped village with its fantastic cliff formations – mostly man-made, by miners seeking tin – and its three miles of golden sands and its apparently balmy climate. The whole family saw the light and was converted. Cecil and Elsie desperately sought opinions of the possibility of work in the district or some opening that they might jointly or individually seize on. There was nothing. Simply nothing. As many have found before them, and since.
But eventually it became evident that opening a shop catering for the villagers in one form or another might provide an opportunity. It was an acknowledged fact that almost all the people in the village went to Truro on Wednesdays for market day and did all their real shopping there. In Perranporth there was a big grocer’s called The Red House which, although badly run, was surely going to prosper in due time. There was a corner shop opposite run by a man called Samuel Harvey Mitchell, which in its small way sold everything from paraffin to Cornish cream; one or two other small village shops, old-fashioned in habit and long-established, and a group of wooden huts on the way to the promenade in which you could buy newspapers, toys, sweets and some primitive beach equipment. But in the newly developing part of the village, overlooking the recently opened Boscawen Park and boating lake, a chemist called Polgreen had recently built a fine-looking house and shop, next to which was a solitary plot of land as yet unsold and undeveloped. There would be no more shops built beyond.
It still startles me to think what happened in two weeks. In that time a builder called Healey, owner of the plot and of the Red House, and the father of Donald Healey, the only man in the last fifty years to give his name to a British-designed and built motor car, had been approached, a sketch plan produced by his architect, Pitkeathley, and discussed and amended and agreed, and the deal done, for the building of a similar shop and premises to the Polgreens’. So far nobody had any firm idea as to what sort of shop it was going to be, but opinion in the village was earnestly canvassed, and a decision was precipitately taken, that what was most lacking in Perranporth was a go-ahead ladies’ and gentlemen’s outfitters. Elsie was clever with her needle but knew nothing more of the business than that, having worked in an insurance office. Cecil was good at figures but knew nothing more of the retail business either. Within the last three days of our stay my parents found a furnished bungalow on rising ground 300 yards from the proposed shop, and took it for twelve months from the 1st of November.
Thereupon everyone returned in triumph to Manchester where, burdened with a sick husband and still as delicate as ever herself, my mother set about leaving all her friends, selling up all our furniture and effects and moving 300 miles to a new life in the depths of an unknown Celtic county by the sea.
The decision was made to sell everything, even to pots and pans and pictures and beds and brooms and baking tins – retaining only the piano, a bookcase full of books and our silver and china, personal clothing and effects.
I don’t remember much of that time except the wrench of selling many things we had grown attached to. We were leaving other things behind, apart from friends. After his stroke, my father had a ragingly high blood pressure, and in those days there were no pills to control it. In a desperate clutch at anything, anything to make him better, he had taken first to Christian Science, in which his gentle brother-inlaw Dan had long been a believer, and then to spiritualism. Seances were held at our house at which a young medium while under the ‘control’ of one of her spirits would massage my father’s arm and leg, trying to bring back the muscle strength. One has to record that she was the first person to make him walk across the room without a stick, and in the nine months under her care he never had a fit. Later it was whispered that she had been exposed as a fraud. I can only speak of the improvement she brought in him and the fact that she refused any payment for her visits.
We must have seemed a strange crew arriving in that Cornish village where most people were still Cornish and new blood from up-country was then mercifully rare – I and my parents in the October, my brother and sister-in-law, newly married, the following April. We were semi-genteel, middle-middle-class, rather modest and retiring but with an underlying sense of position. This was particularly so in my mother’s case, who never forgot that she had been Miss Anne Mawdsley. It scarcely existed in my brother, who was the most un-class-conscious person I have ever met. I was not far behind – at that time – being almost totally unaware that there were people either superior or inferior to myself.
I remember saying to a woman called Dorothy Hunt, whose bungalow we eventually bought: ‘ It’s a bit difficult among all these new faces. I can’t remember who I’m supposed to know and who I’m not supposed to know.’ She said stiffly: ‘ I think the Cornish are just as good as we are, so there’s no reason to pick and choose one’s friends.’ I stared at her in total astonishment. I suppose I could have phrased it better, making it clear that I was talking solely about recognition, since in a city one would have looked a damned fool saying good afternoon to everyone one passed. But the idea that ‘ supposed to know’ implied some sort of social discrimination was utterly foreign to me.
Maybe at that time I was a bit of a literary snob – though snob is the wrong word. I had virtually nothing whatever to contribute to ordinary gossipy family chat, but if books were mentioned I came awake. So far as the company I kept was concerned, it might be said that although I had no great opinion of my own literary abilities, I had less of theirs.
From the very earliest days I had wanted to write. At the age of five I dictated a story to my mother which began: “Oh, look,” said Tom to his mother, “There is a dead man on the doorstep!” That was as far as the story went. I can’t remember whether it was inspiration that dried up first or my mother’s patience. I won a special essay prize, open to a number of schools, the subject being ‘The Horrors of War’. It was my first meeting, aged ten, with the high master of the Manchester Grammar School, Mr Paton, who had helped to judge and who presented the prize. He made the now-expected joke about my Christian name, since by then my namesake had become famous. There was an occasion when our doctor came to see me and, being in a rarely jovial mood, stuck his stethoscope on the end of my nose and said: ‘I hope you’re not capable of a terminological inexactitude.’ It was shortly after Winston Churchill in the Commons had declared that some statement of the Opposition was ‘A lie!’ and had been told by the Speaker that this was not parliamentary language; so he had amended it.
Actually I was better at maths than literature, disgustingly inept at foreign languages – which would have been so useful in later life – and good at most other things. When it was finally decided I was not strong enough to face the rigours of the journey to and from Manchester Grammar School, my father went to see the headmaster of the Long-sight Grammar School and asked him what he thought I might be likely to do well at. The head replied, ‘He’ll succeed at anything he sets his mind to.’
I don’t know how true that was, but certainly my mother must have had an inordinate belief in the abilities of her ewe lamb. Of course it suited her to have me living at home; and probably she felt if the worst came to the worst she could buy me a bookshop somewhere where I could marry and live out my life comfortably enough. And of course it suited me just as marvellously to live at home and not to be dependent on my earnings for the bare essentials.
In the liverish eye of my relatives I was something of a drip. Since school, when I had appeared so ‘clever’, I had seemed to go to seed. I sharpened up to play tennis or go on the beach or tramp the cliffs or go to the cinema or in pursuit of a girl, but I did not seem interested in any gainful occupation. I got up very late in the mornings and stayed up very late at night. (Kinder to reverse the description of this routine, one being the outcome of the other.) Since, in the house my parents bought in Cornwall, we had no electricity, this meant read
ing or studying by ‘Aladdin’ lamps, or by one candle only in the bedroom, and not infrequently I would read till 3 a. m. My eyes did not have so much demanded of them again until the war, when as a coastguard I would illegally read – usually poetry – by the light of a torch.
I can understand how very irritating it must have been to my father – an intensely practical man who, though with musical leanings, was wholly wedded to the business ethic – to have this tall, thin, frequently jolly, but frail, drooping, sometimes ungracious son, who had no real ambition – no ambition at least that was realizable – and spent most of the day with his nose in a book. And who, through indifferent health and his mother’s pampering, was such a disappointment.
Many snide remarks came my way from outside, and my sisterin-law never missed an opportunity to point out to my mother, after my father died, what a useless member of society I was becoming.
In his first two years in Cornwall my father recovered sufficiently to be able to take long walks, to play bridge, to write with his left hand and to do a little gardening. On his last birthday he wrote to his mother: ‘My dear Mother, Sixty! I can hardly believe it!’ I had had no real idea how old he was, but it so happened that he left the letter open on the writing table, and, going for an envelope, I inadvertently saw it. I had supposed him somewhere in his midfifties, and sixty – to an eighteen-year-old – seemed immensely aged.
That same year, on a November afternoon, six years almost to the day after his first stroke, a lady at the door roused me from sleep – I had nodded off to sleep with my head on the page of the novel I was trying to write – to say that my father was ill in the garden. I hurried out, hoping it was just another fit, but it soon became clear that this was a second stroke – this time it had affected the whole of his left side. We got him to bed somehow. He could not speak or move at all, only his weakened right hand endlessly flexed and unflexed, as he had got into the habit of doing to try to strengthen it; that, and a fluttering of one eye.
‘Can you hear me, Father?’ I would say, and he would wink. It was the only communication left. He died a week later, survived by his eighty-five-year-old mother in Blackburn. Life is not kind – nor is it in any way even-handed. At sixty I was at the peak of my career, though already burdened with a wife crippled in just the same way as my father had been. Happily ‘burden’ simply does not apply to her; but living with a handicap and living under threat is not conducive to high spirits. She was a miracle. Always optimistic, even when first paralysed, always cheerful, always loving.
At that time, the time of my father’s death, and for a long while before and after it, I was appallingly shy of telling anyone I wanted to be a writer, fearing total ridicule – which such a statement would probably have received. The year before he died I had bitterly offended him because he suddenly said to me one day: ‘ When’s your novel going to be finished?’ It was the first time he had ever mentioned the subject. I replied: ‘Oh, this year, next year, sometime, never.’ It was a rude and unworthy reply, but I was only just turned eighteen and he spoke with what the French call pudeur, as if he were lifting the corner on some distinctly disreputable occupation. I curled up inside instantly, like a prodded snail, and those were the only words I could think to say.
The idea that I should ever make a living out of such scribblings seemed derisory. And it probably was. I lived a quiet, unadventurous, retired life when, if I really meant to succeed at this strange profession, I should have been plunging into all aspects of living with the gusto and the enterprise of an explorer. Once when Somerset Maugham was asked by an anxious American mother how she could best help her son, who wanted to be a writer, he replied: ‘Give him five thousand dollars and tell him to go to the devil.’ This advice no doubt would have been appropriate for me.
I did not know a single author, however insignificant, or publisher, however small-time, and I don’t think I knew that people called agents existed.
My first full novel, after a long and arduous struggle with an earlier book, got itself written when I was twenty-one. It took me ten weeks – then I retired to bed with complete exhaustion and a stomach complaint. Later I typed the book and sent it to a publisher, who returned it within two weeks with a rejection slip. I then fired it at another, who kept it a month. Then I sent it to Hodder & Stoughton, who kept it five months before sending it back saying the book had distinct promise but wasn’t quite strong enough for their list, but if I wrote a second they would like to consider it. Heartened and encouraged, I shoved the first novel away in a drawer and began my second. When this was finally finished I sent it away in great hope, whereupon Hodder & Stoughton returned it with a conventional rejection slip.
I had now been writing for five years and had virtually nothing to show for it. Surely mine was a pipe dream, as everyone else thought and knew and had been trying to tell me for ages? Why didn’t I wake up and stir myself and get some regular decent honest work? I was untrained for any profession, but I could surely turn my hand to something practical and realizable.
About this time, having written two unpublishable novels, I found myself involved in amateur theatricals in the village Women’s Institute. I acted in one or two small pieces, and at once it struck me how perfectly frightful the dialogue was, and how equally awful the contrived events and denouements. So, while keeping the titles and the general storylines, I began to rewrite the pieces and found the audience most happily responding. The authors got their minute royalties, and we got the laughs.
Just then there was a popular movement to raise money for the unemployed, and someone, interested in what I’d done, said why didn’t I write a three-act play and it could be put on at the local cinema for this good cause. So I sat down and wrote a play in six weeks, called it Seven Suspected, and this was eventually produced and played to a full and appreciative house for three nights. It was never printed, but copies circulated in typescript, and it was produced in Truro, Camborne, Hayle, Bury, Hendon and elsewhere, always with great success. Looking back, one particular feature strikes me – hardly a line had to be altered from the first draft. When one thinks of authors writing and rewriting scenes endlessly until the moment of first production, this seems preposterous. Of course it was only played by amateurs, who probably didn’t know any better, but every line was speakable, and when actors found their lines producing laughs they didn’t want to change them.
Coincident with this, there appeared on the horizon a Captain and Mrs Craddock, who had taken a house for six months in St Agnes. She was actually a real, live authoress and had published novels – many novels – under her maiden name of Elizabeth Carfrae. A great and important person indeed! She was taken up and lionized by what passed in the district for society, and she heard of my play and helped with its production and was generally very kind and generous to me. When she knew I had written a novel she asked to see it and sent it up with a note to her agent, J. B. Pinker, who had it read and sent it back, saying he did not think he could place it.
At the end of the six months the Craddocks abruptly departed, leaving unpaid bills everywhere, and were never heard of again. It is a characteristic of some authors which I have always determined to avoid. She was published by Mills & Boon, and nowadays we all know about them: ‘ not lit., my dear, but Romance with a capital R!’ I shouldn’t have minded. Indeed I should have been delighted to be published by anyone.
I have always valued her kindness in trying to help me.
In all this my mother took little part. She enjoyed her bridge and my company and my chauffeuring her around. She virtually took no sides in the opinion war. I do not know, and now I shall never know, how much she believed in my ability. (Oh, she believed tremendously in my ability – was I not her son? – but I mean my ability to make a living out of writing.) She was a great one for taking the easy way, for postponing the awkward encounter, for letting things be. She had a son at home – she could just afford to keep him and herself in a pleasant degree of comfort: why should s
he thrust me out to make a sort of living in some uncongenial job or – even more to be deplored – push me off to live among the viceridden streets of London, to sink or swim, as many better men had done?
But although she was unkind enough to pass on the occasional sneer, she never personally interfered nor enquired in a way which would cause embarrassment to me. I was my own man. It was a comfortable life for us both – a million miles too comfortable for me.
I am happy she lived just long enough to see the first explosions of success.
My father’s younger sister, Mollie, was unmarried, deeply romantic and intense about everything. She was enraptured to learn that one of her nephews wanted to be a writer. She and my parents must have discussed me at length on many occasions, but I never knew the substance of the talks. Anyway, her approach to me was much more tactful than her brother’s, and although I must have been as tight as a crab so far as my own writing was concerned we did have endless talks about literature and about writing in general. She was an aspirant and failed writer of children’s stories herself. Whether she believed any more than my father in an ultimate commercial success for me I know not, but she encouraged me in every way she could. In the end I let her read my first novel. I cannot remember whether she said she liked the book when she read it – she was always fiercely candid – but she declared passionately that it was quite wrong to keep it stuffed in a drawer and that it must be tried on other publishers. She persuaded me to retype a few pages that were dog-eared and then lovingly bound it into two volumes, with stitched sheets and cardboard sides so that it opened easily and looked like a book. I sent it off to Messrs. Ward, Lock & Co. Ltd.