New-found prosperity was also offering a new perspective. We had had fun and a deal of anxiety and responsibility in running our private hotel. It was good while it lasted, but we now had a family, and Jean had become asthmatic. Our first intention was to put it up as a going concern and move to some comfortable small house; but this was superseded by an even more agreeable prospect. We could shut the doors of Trebarran with a bang and then just go on living in it as a private residence. Before it was enlarged it had been one of the most attractive houses in the district; let it revert to its original purpose, and if we had far too many bedrooms we could shut them up or spread ourselves to occupy more of them. My wife was pregnant again, and in March 1946 we had a daughter, whom we called Rosamund.
In the years when we ran Treberran as a small hotel, only one – the summer of 1939 – had in any way been a normal one. After that it was always wartime. But through it we met many charming and delightful people, some of whom were to have a strong influence on my future.
In late 1940, a fellow writer called Max Murray, who had come to Cornwall to escape the Blitz with his wife Maisie Grieg – the enormously prolific author – who was having a baby, told me that his friend, Benno Moiseiwitsch, the famous pianist, needed a holiday away from the bombs; could I put him up? I was overwhelmed at the thought, for I had heard Moiseiwitsch a number of times giving recitals in London before the war, and I had a tremendous admiration for his playing. Except for two Dutchmen (bulb growers, very nice men, who had been crossing the Atlantic when Germany invaded Holland and found themselves stranded in England) our house was just then empty. If it had not been, I would have emptied it for Moiseiwitsch.
My mother had sold her piano when she came to live with us, but we had my mother-in-law’s upright Bechstein, which was a pretty good instrument. We had this put in his bedroom so that he could use it when he had the mind. So he arrived with his wife and his small son, Boris; and it was an enchanting three weeks. All of them, Benno, Annie and Boris, were unpretentious and delightful. God knows what we must have seemed like: certainly young and eager but so desperately short of food and fuel and staff. Their life in London was the height of sophistication (I was to sample it later) but they never complained or showed any dissatisfaction with anything in the house. Within a week we were friends, laughing together at the war’s deprivations.
He practised three to five hours a day. It was like a separate spirit in the house, singing, intoning, inhabiting every corner of one’s existence. He would take a light breakfast in his room and then practise for the rest of the morning, smoking incessantly. An hour of scales and wonderful arpeggios, then more complicated finger exercises written by one or other of the great teachers of the past. After lunch he would rest for a while and begin again about four, this time playing pieces that he would soon be giving at a concert. Particularly he played the more difficult parts – and they are infinitely difficult – of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor, which he was to perform shortly in Liverpool. And he learned, for the first time, Beethoven’s Concerto No. 3 in D Minor at our house; the whole thing from beginning to end. He had no objection to my sitting with him while he played, when I had time, sometimes giving running commentaries on the object of a particular passage or what he was trying to do with it. At six he would stop and very often walk down to the Perranporth Hotel for a drink with Max Murray and me. After dinner he would play bridge, usually with the two Dutchmen and my mother. He was an infinitely witty man, sometimes destructively so, but never to or about his friends. I may be prejudiced but I have always thought he played Rachmaninov better than the composer himself; without sentimentality but with more true emotion. (I have very recently discovered, to my surprise and pleasure, that this was also Rachmaninov’s view.)
One day when we were walking down to the Perranporth Hotel together we passed two friends of my mother’s, a Mrs Retallack and a Mrs Trevithick. They were both in their seventies, dressed in the height of bourgeois fashion, gloved, jewelled, austere, prim. After they had passed, Benno said to me: ‘Ah, I see the ladies of the town are back on their evening beat.’
He had a dog called Rach, named after his old friend Rachmaninov. Benno’s comment when I met the dog was: ‘ One word from me and he does exactly as he likes.’
At Christmas we went up to see the Murrays, and Maisie gave Benno a gift wrapped in expensive glittery paper. Before he opened it he said: ‘Oh, Maisie, thank you. It’s just what I’ve always wanted.’
Once, later on in the war, we saw that Moiseiwitsch was giving a concert in Plymouth. I was on duty but Jean contrived to take the time off and made the two-hour journey by train. When she got there all seats were sold. So she went round to the stage door and Benno immediately commanded that she be given a special seat by herself on the platform.
We remained friends until his death, and when Andrew was christened, Annie Moiseiwitsch was his godmother. Benno stayed with us twice more, as our true guest, and I stayed with him at his home in Berkhamsted and helped to time his playing of Chopin’s thirty-two preludes, which he was shortly to record. I went with him often as his guest to the Savage Club, where I met Mark Hamburg, James Agate, and others of that set and played an occasional game of bridge but never poker, which was Benno’s favourite. I remember on one occasion sitting behind him while he was at the poker table; he was on a winning streak and a club servant came to tell him that his taxi had arrived to take him to Paddington, where he was to catch the overnight train for Swansea for a concert on the morrow. He told the servant to cancel the taxi, he would catch a later train. I said to him: ‘But you’ve got a sleeper booked. If you catch a later train it will mean sitting up all night.’ ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, ‘I’m only playing the Rachmaninov No. 2.’
It was my misfortune to be with him on the morning that he received word from the surgeon that his beautiful forty-five-yearold second wife, Annie, had inoperable cancer.
A second meeting was even more formative for me, and again it was with a musician. I cannot remember at all how it came about that a Lieutenant Peter Latham, stationed at Penhale, wanted his wife and daughter to spend a few weeks in Perranporth so that he could see more of them. I suppose someone recommended us, and presently I met this tall, thin, gangling middle-aged man who had the utmost charm in the world.
He worked at the Royal Academy, teaching and examining, and was later to become Gresham Professor of Music. He had served in the First World War, and had been severely wounded, with the result that he shambled as he walked, and had a deformed shoulder. Being intensely patriotic, he had at once applied to rejoin his regiment when the Second World War broke out, and the War Office, with its usual perception, appointed him to be a gunnery instructor, a subject about which he knew virtually nothing. So he had been sent to Penhale Camp where morning gunnery practice took place, shooting at a target being towed at a (fairly) safe distance by a slowmoving biplane.
This was the beginning of another friendship, which lasted until Peter’s death, and then Angela’s death many years later. They became close friends – even closer than Benno and Annie. We again had the piano moved into the bedroom, and Peter, when off duty, would come along and play there. Though clearly he could not begin to match Moiseiwitsch’s brilliance, he was a fine pianist and an immense musicologist, with a fund of reminiscence and anecdote and funny stories and limericks, many of them scabrous – the jolliest and most lovable of men. His wife, a pretty, eccentric, intellectual, sparkling woman, was by profession a fresco artist, and when The Last Supper in Milan was showing uncheckable signs of deterioration she was invited by the Italian government to go to see it and advise on its preservation and restoration. After the war we saw them many times at their home in Hampstead, and they came, like Benno, to stay with us as our non-paying guests in Cornwall when Treberran had become a private house again.
Peter and Benno opened up to me a world that before I had only been groping to find – a world in which conversation was n
o longer chatter, in which anecdote was not gossip, in which wit and fun and intellectual debate were all.
But the strongest influence Peter Latham had on my life was to put me up for membership of the Savile Club – of which much more later.
I remember another guest at Treberran, a Dr Dancy – whose elder son later became headmaster of Marlborough – saying to me one day towards the end of the war: ‘ When this war is over it will be the beginning of a new life for you.’ He spoke even more truly than he knew.
Chapter Six
During the war I had become friendly with the actress Valerie Taylor, who was then married to Hugh Sinclair. They owned a bungalow in Perranporth, and between intervals of work we visited each other’s houses and had suppers together. She was a highly strung, highly articulate, highly intelligent, beautiful but rather overpowering young woman, who was full of ideas, and one evening she told me what she thought was a brilliant opening for a film. I in my downto-earth style agreed that it was an interesting idea. Of course it was no more than an idea at this stage: it lacked a story, as almost all ideas do (people often confuse the two), but a month or so later I said to her: ‘I’ve been thinking of your opening, Valerie, and it’s certainly an interesting one. If I were writing it, I would, I think, tend to develop it this way …’ She immediately lit up, and henceforward rang me up persistently, full of suggestions and wanting to know if I was making progress.
In short, in between finishing Ross Poldark and beginning Demelza and celebrating the end of the war and completing our last ‘season’ at Treberran and getting demobilized from the Coastguard Service and looking after my mother, who was ill, and Jean’s mother, who was ill, and Jean, who was intermittently ill but most of the time doing her usual ball-of-fire act, and awaiting the birth of our second child, I was working on a screenplay with Valerie Taylor which eventually became Take My Life. When it was finished – finally, finally finished – she took it up to London and tried to interest various film friends in it. Some of them liked it but all said it was far too expensive to be put on.
The screenplay as it finally evolved concerned a young British opera singer, Phillipa, who comes with an Italian company to Covent Garden. On the first night, on which she plays the lead, her husband, Nicholas, an ex-army officer, is there and encounters Elizabeth, an old lover of his who is playing in the orchestra, and Phillipa sees them together. In their flat after the opera her tension after a night’s success causes her to challenge him about his old affair, and in the quarrel which follows she throws a scent bottle, which hits him on the forehead. He walks angrily out.
In the meantime Elizabeth returns to her flat and is followed by a man who knows her and forces his way into her flat and murders her, but not before he has sustained a wound on his forehead similar to Nick’s.
Nick is accused of her murder. He claims that he has never been near the murdered woman’s flat, until a witness identifies him.
It was too expensive to produce, everyone said, until Valerie asked the advice of Clive Brook, and he recommended his agent, Christopher Mann Ltd.
The Mann office was then at the height of its prestige; the most powerful agent in London. If it took you up, you were on the ladder. It succeeded in selling Take My Life to the Rank Organisation, and the film was eventually made by Cineguild, one of its most distinguished subsidiaries, the company which had made the then famous film Brief Encounter.
At the time we were writing this script Valerie was engaged in a passionate love affair with a mining engineer called William Saunders, whom, after divorcing Hugh, she eventually married. As she was always quite incapable of getting names right, William often became Winston, and Winston, William. As a result the rumour spread around that I was having an affair with the lady. Indeed perhaps her husband was himself not too sure, for when a couple of years later I wrote the film as a novel and sent him a copy he replied to thank me and to say that perhaps the book should have been called ‘ Take My Wife’.
My daughter, Rosamund, was born during a brief and significant snowstorm on the 1st of March 1946, just after the film had been bought and when I was about halfway through Demelza. She brought us extra luck. Only a few weeks after this the Rank Organisation, in the guise of Cineguild, decided that Take My Life was just the sort of film that the burgeoning British film industry wanted and that Valerie and I must be encouraged – indeed drawn into the industry full-time as a special pair of writers capable of turning out more films of the same kind and quality. After a few brief interviews with Valerie on her own, she being in London, they decided that I must be the guiding, inspiring light in the partnership, so they telephoned me, inviting me to London to consult on the making of Take My Life and other possible films. I said I was sorry but I was just finishing a novel but I’d be glad to come up in two or three months’ time. This shocked them and they telephoned back that if I would come up in two days’ time they would pay me £80 a week (for today’s equivalent, multiply by at least twenty) and provide me with a free flat in Hallam Street and a secretary to take down my lightest word. This, when I accepted, they did; also I had a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce to take me down to Denham every day. I must say, although a new boy, that I was treated with the utmost respect and kindness by everyone in the industry.
Rosamund was only six weeks old when I went to London, but Jean came with me, leaving our two children in the fairly safe hands of a nurse called Christine and two grandmothers.
I knew London moderately well from regular if impecunious visits before the war and hectic short feverish breaks during the war to brave the bombs and see the latest plays; but I knew nothing of the opulent vistas of the film world. Encouraged by the government, Rank was pouring in his millions and trying to double the output of the British film industry. It was a time of a sudden wild prosperity, when the films being made seemed to justify the expansion. Productions like Great Expectations, The Seventh Veil, The Wicked Lady, This Happy Breed were pouring out, showing both quality and popular appeal. Mr Rank’s Young Ladies were being brought in and groomed for stardom. (Some achieved it, most are long forgotten.) But what apparently was not foreseen was that you cannot suddenly quadruple the production of an artistic industry and rely on the talent to be there instantly in ample supply.
The Mann office in those days had three partners: Christopher Mann himself was a small, dapper, seemingly modest and insignificant figure, who would slip unobtrusively in and out of the office, with a stub of cigarette endlessly between his lips, and who wielded great power in the industry by packaging films, i.e. bringing together a subject, a star, a producer, a director and a writer and arranging the finance. (He did none of these things for Take My Life, but much for me later.) Chris had a passion for Madeleine Carrol and had been responsible for putting her into most of her starring roles; when she went to America their affair (apparently always unconsummated) fell through and he married Eileen Joyce, the fine Australian pianist.
The second partner was his brother-in-law, Alan Grogan, who had married Winifred Mann, Chris’s sister. Alan was a much more imposing character, 6ft 3ins tall, well-built, dark, goodlooking, humorous, a man with a very astute sense of values and a keen musician. Winifred Grogan was a small delicate woman, as inscrutable, until you got to know her, as her brother. She and Alan were devoted to each other. She had borne one child, a son, but had shortly afterwards contracted tuberculosis and given it to her son. She survived but the child died, and she was too delicate to have more. I used to reckon that the ultimate in marital accord was achieved by them when they took a passenger into their twoseater E-type Jaguar. Winifred, a slight woman, would sit over the gear box and change gear for Alan, while he declutched. They even double-declutched successfully.
The third partner was Aubrey Blackburn, a charming, goodlooking middle-aged man who dealt chiefly with the acting side of the business and whom I saw quite rarely.
Jean and I travelled up that cold day in April by the Cornish Riviera Express, and went to the pa
latial offices of Christopher Mann Ltd. in Park Lane. It was on the seventh floor, lushly furnished, and commanded a fine view over the Park and Marble Arch. I cannot imagine any agent today being able to afford such grandeur.
I met Alan Grogan and Christopher Mann, and Jean was left in Winifred’s charge while Alan took me off at once to meet the group who were going to make Take My Life: Anthony Havelock-Allan, heir to a baronetcy he later inherited, Ronald Neame, Gordon Wellesley, who was a story editor for Rank, and one or two others. They did not, however, want me immediately for Take My Life but to work for a couple of weeks on a film, already scripted, called Pleasure Beach, by Frank Tylsley. They were not happy with the script and wanted me to produce some new ideas. For this two weeks’ work they offered me £150 over and above what they were offering me to come to London. (Remember, please, the discrepancy with today’s figures. You could get a good single bedroom at a respectable Bloomsbury hotel for 8/6 a night, bed and breakfast. The Cumberland was 12/6. Claridges was £3. (Now it is £300.) You could buy a brand-new car for £125.) Ever willing to have a go at a new idea, I accepted, not knowing what on earth they were really looking for. I had never seen a film script before, except the one Valerie Taylor had produced as an example on which to model the technical side of our own story.
Right at the end of the war was a strange time to be suddenly rocketed into such an exotic and glamorous world. With clothing coupons limiting one’s ideas, I hadn’t bought a suit for eight years, and that was not a very good one at the outset. That first week, before she returned to our burgeoning family, Jean jetted off to Petticoat Lane and there was able not only to buy clothes for herself ‘off the ration’ but also to buy clothing coupons for me so that within a week I had been able to get a reasonable jacket and trousers – from, I think, Jaeger – and also to go to a good tailor in Cork Street, who in the fullness of time and after numerous fittings produced the most beautiful suit I have ever had.