Though long before my marriage, my own intentions in going with Brian Hall to Paris were surprisingly innocent and not at all like the doctor’s. I wanted to see the sights and was not specially interested in the seamier side of the city. But the very first day I met a girl who was staying at the hotel; we shared the same sightseeing bus, and from then on ignored the ordinary tourist trips and went everywhere together. We went to restaurants, bistros, up the Eiffel Tower, along the Seine, to Montmartre and Montparnasse, and to the ballet where the language difficulty did not arise.
This, of course, was long before it was fashionable – indeed the done thing – to travel the world in one’s youth. Her name had an agreeably Elizabethan ring, Catherine Parr. She was travelling entirely alone and had so far been to Portugal, Spain, Italy and now France. She was an Australian, about my age, slim, elegant and adventurous, and she spoke no single word of any language but her own. She had sufficient confidence in her own not-negligible abilities to go where and get what she wanted. Her lack of languages did not incommode her. She was pretty and she simply smiled and pointed at whatever she wanted. After the second day together she smiled and pointed at me.
Three or four years after this, an elderly retired colonel whom I knew in Cornwall, and who himself knew Paris well, quizzed me about my first visit there, and incautiously I told him of my experiences. I mentioned my Australian friend, and added: ‘I must remember to send her a Christmas card.’
As he looked at me, a peculiar expression crossed his face which I found impossible to interpret. He looked surprised, even slightly shocked – or perhaps disappointed. I can only surmise such a reaction might come from the fact that he took the view of a first visit to Paris in the same light as my elderly doctor: eagerness to relish the glitter, the glamour, the wickedness of the world’s wickedest city. Of course he would have laughed had I told him of the doctor’s fiasco – and told him as if it had happened to me. I had sliced out of bounds on the first hole. Could happen to any feller. But you didn’t somehow go to Paris to indulge in an affair with an Australian girl, and, what was more, keep in touch with her after. Why, that could have happened in Huddersfield.
About the time of the sixth novel, mindful of the relative success of Seven Suspected, I embarked on another play. It was called Forsaking All Others. During the late Thirties, a talented young actor called Peter Bull had brought down a company of his friends and colleagues, taken over the Perranporth Women’s Institute for about ten weeks each summer, and put on a remarkable repertory of plays, professionally acted, directed and produced. People on holiday came from all over Cornwall to Perranporth to the plays, knowing they could rely on a quality of production rarely seen outside London. Peter Bull was a keen judge of talent, and among the people who came down with him were Frith Banbury, Pauline Letts, Pamela Brown, Joyce Redman, Judith and Roger Furse, and, appearing in the occasional play as ‘guest artistes’, were Hugh Sinclair, Robert Morley, Valerie Taylor and others. It was all heady and sophisticated stuff and it began to create a national name for itself.
I had come to know a few of them, though not well, and it was with awful trepidation in the late summer of 1938, happening to meet Peter Bull one day, I blurted out the fact that I had written a play and would he be very kind and read it? He said certainly he would, so I sent it to him when he returned to London. After a few weeks he wrote to invite me to supper next time I was in London. I went up the following week in high hopes but accompanying fears. The fears were realized. He saw me backstage of the Robert Morley play he was presenting in London, Goodness, How Sad!, and after a cheerful interchange and some complimentary remarks about my own play he added: ‘Of course, I wouldn’t put it on in London.’
I have no memory of the supper we had afterwards; I hope I was a good enough loser not to show disappointment; but towards the end of the meal he gave me the name of a producer friend of his to whom I might send the play for further consideration and advice. I thanked him and left, already foreseeing that his friend would read the play and return it with an encouraging note. Which is what happened. I felt demeaned by my own incompetence.
I do not think now that Forsaking All Others was nearly as good as Seven Suspected. It was more self-conscious, more pretentious. In the first play I had written uninhibitedly, bringing in the thrills and the laughs without a second thought. Forsaking All Others was full of second thoughts, and more serious, trying to go deeper and, on the whole, failing. Peter Bull was wholly right not to put it on. In the end I rewrote it as a novel and called it Strangers Meeting. It was the worst novel I ever wrote.
I returned to Cornwall feeling distinctly fed up. Sitting opposite me in the train was a woman I knew slightly from Perranporth called Ethel Jaggar. For six years she had been running a small private hotel, but was finding the strain too much for her. Her husband, a mining engineer in Nigeria, had recently been appointed to what was an improved and stable position and wanted her to sell the place and join him. She wanted badly to do this but, with war looming, property was a drag on the market. She was hopelessly stuck with it.
Treberran, as it was called, was the best house in the village. It had been built thirteen years before for a Dr T. F. G. Dexter, a well-known philologist whose family had made money out of soap, and he put up this large and handsome house for himself and his wife, with living-in accommodation for a man and wife as servants. When he died the Jaggars bought it, built further bedrooms on and enlarged the dining room and kitchens and ran it during the summer months as a guest house. When I got home I told Jean, my fiancée, and she arranged to go and see it. It was Sunday the 11th of November and I, who had over the years become involved in Toc H, was attending an evening service in the church. Near the end Jean knelt down beside me and said: ‘It’s lovely. I know the house, of course, from when the Dexters were there, but they’ve enlarged it marvellously.’
‘Did they say how much they wanted?’
She breathed a figure that was a monstrous sum for those days, and one that we did not think we could ever raise. But when we saw the house, together with my mother, we thought the opportunity too splendid not to strive for.
Indeed we were so hypnotized by the quality of the place that we never thought to bargain as to the price, but set about raising the money. Obtaining a large mortgage from a bank was in those days only slightly less difficult than tunnelling under the foundations and breaking into the safe, but somehow we persuaded them to put up two-thirds, and by hook, though not by crook, we raised the rest, my mother standing guarantor for much of it.
The period of the late Thirties – from about 1933 to 1939 – was a ghastly time in which to grow up. I was asked the other day how later depressions compared with that of the Thirties. I couldn’t answer. I simply didn’t remember.
Of course the depression of the Thirties was acute and grim and horrible. Unemployment rotted the cities. The shadow of the means test – whereby the unemployed were forced to sell their few disposable possessions before they could continue to claim the dole – stalked everywhere. I remember two contemporaries of mine who worked in the Manchester Town Hall coming in for a substantial legacy. When this got about, the council sacked them, informing them that in the present economic climate their jobs must be given to two men in greater need.
I was outrageously lucky to be cushioned against this menace. But the other menace to which we were all subjected was infinitely more lethal in every way than a world depression – though that depression was partly responsible for what was to come – being quite overshadowed. By Adolf Hitler.
A lot of wishful thinkers tried in those days to argue that German rearmament was simply a matter of national pride, that a desire to occupy the Rhineland was evidence of a proper wish to be reunited with their own people, that all the other Germans of Central Europe suffering under a foreign yoke should also be properly united with their own kin. Anschluss was all they wanted. Then it would be ‘ peace in our time’.
I remember one s
unny Sunday morning in October 1933 going down to the paper shop in Perranporth and seeing the headline: ‘ Germany Walks Out of the League of Nations’. It was Harvest Festival at Perranzabuloe Parish Church that day. A strange harvest. From that moment I never really believed the end could be anything but war. The black cloud of inevitability hung over the next six years.
For ten years after 1918 people were sick of war and wanted to hear no more of it, but later the mood changed and everyone wrote about it and everyone read it. For a decade the British people, and no doubt people everywhere, had been deluged with accounts of the last war, in autobiographies, in novels, in films, in plays. Films like H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1936) predicted what would happen when the next war broke out. And everywhere where pictures could be seen we saw the marching Germans, the massed battalions on parade, Hitler screaming his revenge and hate.
Germany had been looked on with great sympathy during the early days of the post-war time. The Versailles Treaty had made her appear the sinned against rather than the sinning, and the reaction against the old wartime propaganda was notable in any company. After the Second World War France was bitterly criticized by later historians, who presumably were in the kindergarten at the time, for not sending French troops into the Rhineland when Hitler unilaterally occupied it. Had they done so, it is argued, Hitler would have fallen and the Second World War possibly been prevented. But had France done this – depriving the poor Germans of land which everyone agreed was their own – whether Hitler had fallen or not, France would have become a pariah among nations. The howl of execration from the entire British press would have been echoed throughout the world. Hitler, even if he temporarily fell, would have been re-elected by a mass vote of the German people, to whom he would have suddenly become a hero. For France, it was a no-win situation whatever happened.
Opposed to the later Hitler, the more triumphant Hitler, with his ‘Strength through Joy’ movements, his Youth Corps, his millions of healthy, vigorous, industrious, mindless young men, all pledged to live – or die – for the Führer, what had we to offer? Love on the Dole, hunger marches, Peace Pledge Unions, ‘Will-not-fight-forthe-Country’ motions, disarmament rallies, grey elderly politicians hesitating and dithering, a general and an understandable hatred of things military. Even the air races which fathered the Spitfire had to be funded privately. I remember a prominent member of the League of Nations Union coming to Cornwall and pleading that the Government should scrap just one more cruiser, so that the US and Japan might be softened in their claim for parity. I remember the Baldwin election in which, lying in his teeth that he was devoted to disarmament, he immediately on re-election began a very modest rearmament programme. He said, truly, that if he had not so lied he would never have been re-elected to do even that.
Curiously, the television series which has brought back that nightmare time most vividly to me was Fortunes of War, from the Olivia Manning novels. Watching it, one remembered the utter frustrated helplessness of the whole of Europe before the ruthless, disciplined, relentless brutality of the Hitler jackboot.
Many in England as late as 1938 wished to make peace, at almost any price. The Munich Agreement, denounced as a sell-out – as indeed it was – united the British people as they had never been before it, and gave them a priceless year in which to rearm.
It can of course be argued that a later generation grew up under a worse shadow, that of a nuclear war. The difference lay in the inevitability. And to some extent in one’s assessment of the Russian character. I had far more to lose in the Fifties than in the Thirties, but I never felt a tenth of the same oppressive, apprehensive conviction of doom.
My first meeting with my future wife had been when I was eighteen and she was fourteen. It was soon after our arrival in Cornwall and we were in church, she with her parents, I with mine. I think they spoke first, we being the newcomers. The meeting made no special impression on me; apparently it did on her. I just remember a stocky little girl with straight blonde hair, bobbed, under a school hat. We met again as families do in a small village. I saw her here and there over the next few years during school holidays; then slowly we became firm friends. This friendship was greatly fostered by her mother, who seemed to like me as much as her daughter did. Happily, unlike some mothers-in-law, she never changed her mind.
I spent the Christmas of 1936 in London; I can’t now remember why; but on January the 3rd 1937 I was home again and decided to go to a dance at the Droskyn Castle Hotel (then the foremost hotel in the district, now long since fallen from its high estate to become flats).
It was quite a smart dance and the hotel was gayly lit. I remember coming into the ballroom and seeing Jean Williamson sitting with some friends at a table across the floor. She had changed greatly from our first meeting. I looked at her carefully and then said to myself: ‘She’s the girl I’m going to marry.’
It was not so much a moment of enlightenment as one of recognition of what I should have known before. It was recognition that my life would be unacceptably arid without her. I can’t remember whether she was the best-looking girl in the room, but I vividly remember that she had so much more character than anyone else there, male or female. Again, this was not so much distinguished by any special behaviour on her part – it just lit her up.
Later in the evening when I was dancing with her I said: ‘ I can’t afford to marry yet, but when I can, will you marry me?’
Her smiling bright eyes met mine for a few seconds, then she said:
‘ I think I just might.’
Chapter Five
Jean Williamson’s father had been in the navy all his life. He had been a gunnery officer on board the Royal Oak at the Battle of Jutland, and among his other medals was that of the Order of St John, awarded by the Russians; though this must have been given him for some earlier adventure. Gunfire damaged his eardrums, and when I first met him he was already deaf.
At the end of the First World War he was sent as a gunnery expert to superintend the dismantling and blowing up of all the explosives at Nobel’s Dynamite Works, which had been situated on the Cornish cliffs about two miles outside the tiny village of Perranporth. Thinking his task might run for a couple of years at least, he bought a pleasant, largeish square-built house on the hill above the village and brought his wife and two children from Devonport to live there. But after six months he was transferred to Portland. As his next appointment was also likely to be temporary, his wife and family remained at Perranporth, and that is where his children grew up.
It must have been an unspoiled Cornish village then – some years before even we arrived. Jean remembered the mine opening on the cliffs a quarter of a mile out of the village, and the difficulty they had in hauling the huge cylinder for the engine up the steep hill, with eight horses straining at the traces and the wheels of the wagon inches deep in sticky mud. They failed to get it up the cliff road and so had to go up St George’s Hill – almost as bad – and round the corner into Tywarnhayle Road and then to the cliff and the mine.
Unknown to any of the happy Williamson family at this time, the Geddes Axe was pending, whereby the navy was savagely truncated in a post-war retrenchment, and Commander Williamson, at the age of just fifty, found himself redundant. The navy had been his life from the age of eighteen, and without it he had no life at all. He lived another twenty-one years, and took on a variety of paid and unpaid jobs, but fundamentally – although he could be jolly enough on occasion – he remained a moody and an embittered man. I remember when the Second World War broke out he immediately packed his bag, waiting to be called up, although by then he was sixty-eight.
Among Samuel Williamson’s earliest friends in the navy was a sturdy, cheerful, devil-may-care young man called Charles Alexander. Charles was a good bit the older, had run away to sea when a boy, had served before the mast in the clipper ship Thermopylae, sister to the Cutty Sark, and had finally joined the navy as an AB in 1873. When he married Emma Mitchell, a Cornish g
irl living in Plymouth, he sailed away to the Antipodes almost immediately after and did not see his eldest daughter until she was three and a half years old. The navy had little regard for the family life of its sailors in those days.
In the fullness of time Charles brought his friend Sam back to his home in Devonport, and Sam, now thirty-nine, proposed to Charles’s eldest daughter, who was twenty-six. Two children came of this marriage, Reginald, who eventually went into the banking world, and Jean, who married me.
When Charles Alexander eventually retired, first from the navy and then from the dockyard, they moved to Camelford and lived there for the rest of their lives. My wife, though born in Devonport, had a lot of Cornish cousins and was herself a quarter of Cornish blood. (The other quarters being London, Derbyshire and Scottish.) When her father was prematurely axed they were still living in Perranporth, and her mother, called to subsist on the miserly pension of a commander in the Royal Navy, had begun to ‘take guests’ at their home in the village, so my future wife was not without some experience in her new profession. But ours was of course an altogether bigger venture.
It was agreed – I’m not now quite sure why, possibly on the reasoning that married life and a new and exacting occupation shouldn’t be attempted at the same time – that she should run Trebarran herself – with such suitable help as she could muster – during the summer of 1939, and that we should be married in the October. And so she took on the new enterprise. Let down by the abysmal professional types whom she first engaged, she quickly reverted to friends of her own class and one or two good working types in the village, and somehow made an outstanding success of her first summer. I continued to live at home and go up daily, chiefly to supervise the ordering and to do the accounts, paying bills and making them out, at all of which, following my mercantile ancestry, I was good. Having been spoon-fed all my life, I knew nothing of the rolled-up-sleeves side of the enterprise. And to do my beloved wife justice, she never expected it of me.