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Patrick O’Brian: A Very Private Life
Nikolai Tolstoy
An intimate portrait of Patrick O’Brian, written by his stepson Nikolai Tolstoy. Patrick O’Brian was one of the greatest British novelists of the twentieth century, securing his place in literary history with the bestselling Aubrey–Maturin series, books that have sold millions of copies worldwide and been hailed as the best historical fiction of all time. An exquisite novelist, translator and biographer, O’Brian moved in 1949 to Collioure in the south of France, where he led a secluded life with his wife Mary and wrote all his major works. The twenty books that make up the beloved Aubrey–Maturin series earned O’Brian the epithet ‘Jane Austen at sea’ for their authentic depiction of Nelson’s navy, and the relationship between Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend and ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin. Outside his triumphant popularity in fiction, O’Brian also wrote erudite biographies of both Pablo Picasso and Joseph Banks, as well as publishing translations of Simone de Beauvoir and Henri Charrière. In A Very Private Life, Nikolai Tolstoy draws upon his close relationship with his stepfather, as well as his notebooks, letters and photographs, to capture a highly researched but intimate account of those fifty years in Collioure that were the richest of O’Brian’s writing life. With warm and honest reflection, this biography gives insight into the genius of the little-known man behind the much-loved writing. Tolstoy also tells how, through a sad irony, unjust attacks on O’Brian’s private life destroyed much of the happiness he had gained from his achievement just as his literary career attained greater acclaim.



PATRICK O’BRIAN
A Very Private Life
Nikolai Tolstoy



Copyright (#ud404ce8f-77ed-5bd9-80e1-096e623b10d2)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com)
This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019
Copyright © Nikolai Tolstoy 2019
Cover design by Heike Schüssler
Cover photograph © Steve Pyke / Getty Images
Nikolai Tolstoy asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All photographs courtesy of the author
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008350581
Ebook Edition © October 2019 ISBN: 9780008350604
Version: 2019-09-30

Dedication (#ud404ce8f-77ed-5bd9-80e1-096e623b10d2)
I dedicate this book to my late cousin Adrian Slack and his sister Julia, the dearest of friends as well as closest of relatives since those distant days of childhood at Appledore beside the Severn Sea.


At home in the cloister of Correch d’en Baus

Epigraph (#ud404ce8f-77ed-5bd9-80e1-096e623b10d2)
Indeed I cannot conceive a more perfect mode of writing any man’s life, than not only relating all the most important events of it in their order, but interweaving what he privately wrote, and said, and thought; by which mankind are enabled as it were to see him live, and to ‘live o’er each scene’ with him, as he actually advanced through the several stages of his life.
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (London, 1793), i, p. 6
CONTENTS
Cover (#u750d9b6f-e297-5854-bd47-8c810aea2de0)
Title Page (#u98edb5fc-4e99-5098-a98d-3316530ba0d3)
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Preface
I Collioure and Three Bear Witness
II The Catalans
III New Home and New Family
IV Voyages of Adventure
V In the Doldrums
VI A Family Man
VII Master and Commander
VIII The Green Isle Calls
IX Pablo Ruiz Picasso
X Shifting Currents
XI Muddied Waters
XII Travails of Existence
XIII Family Travails
XIV The Sunlit Uplands
XV Epinician Acclaims
XVI Triumph and Tragedy
XVII Melmoth the Wanderer
Envoi
Appendix A: Collioure: History and Landscape
Appendix B: Patrick and His First Wife Elizabeth
Appendix C: Patrick’s Sailing
Footnotes
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Nikolai Tolstoy
About the Publisher

Preface (#ud404ce8f-77ed-5bd9-80e1-096e623b10d2)
A fortnight after Patrick O’Brian’s death, the playwright David Mamet wrote of his literary achievement:
Recently I put down O’Brian’s sea novel ‘The Ionian Mission’ and said to my wife, ‘This fellow has created characters and stories that are part of my life.’
She said: ‘Write him a letter. He’s in his 80s. Write him and thank him. And when you are in England, look him up, go tell him.
‘How wonderful,’ she said, ‘to be alive, when he is still alive. Imagine living in the 1890s and being able to converse with Conan Doyle.’
Mamet promptly rehearsed the eulogium with which he would address his literary hero, and began preparing a letter of introduction at his breakfast table. Then, glancing at the newspaper beside him, he saw to his dismay an announcement of the melancholy news of Patrick’s death.[1] (#litres_trial_promo)
I have no doubt that Patrick would have been delighted by such praise from his acclaimed fellow writer, and that had my mother still been alive she would have inserted the letter in her box-file ‘Valuable Fans and very good reviews’. My hope is that, while nothing can quite replace a face-to-face conversation, this book may compensate by enabling Mamet and others of Patrick’s worldwide legion of admirers to learn much more of his life and personality than might have been obtained from any interview with the famously reclusive writer.
This book covers the latter part of Patrick O’Brian’s life, from the moment of his and my mother’s arrival at Collioure in the south of France in the autumn of 1949. It is the period during which he wrote all his major works. Since my mother’s death twenty years ago, I remain the sole intimate observer of Patrick’s astonishing career from impoverished and little-known writer in 1955, when I first met him, until his death at the height of his international fame at the turn of the millennium forty-five years later. Nevertheless, it never occurred to me at any point during his lifetime to compile his biography – not least because I was well aware of his detestation of inquisitive enquiries into his private life.
My unanticipated decision to undertake the task began in the aftermath of Patrick’s death at the beginning of the year 2000. I was witness to the acute distress caused him by the imminent appearance of an unauthorized biography.[fn1] (#litres_trial_promo) My dismay was briefly allayed by its publication soon afterwards, when I was asked to review it. My initial impression was that the book appeared largely harmless. Knowing little at the time about Patrick’s early life, and his relationship with his first wife Elizabeth and son Richard, I felt I had no reason not to accept the author’s account of Patrick’s life before I knew him as broadly accurate, and besides dismissed it as of little relevance to his reputation as a writer.
What I was not prepared for, however, was the startling extent to which a small but vociferous coterie of journalists and reviewers eagerly swallowed everything related in the book that could be interpreted as detrimental to Patrick’s reputation, regardless of its truth – or in many instances even likelihood.[fn2] (#litres_trial_promo) Regrettably, it was in some of the more meretricious cases that his detractors arranged for their pieces to be posted on the internet for futurity.
Before long it occurred to me that I was uniquely placed to provide a more balanced and credible picture. Not only had I known Patrick intimately throughout the greater part of his life,[fn3] (#litres_trial_promo) but in addition I possess almost all his personal papers, extending from his appearance in a pram at the age of one to his final melancholy sojourn in Dublin. This includes such invaluable sources as my mother’s and his own diaries covering every day of the greater part of the period 1945 to 1999, my mother’s financial accounts from 1945 to 1997, Patrick’s correspondence with his literary agents, publishers and admirers, manuscripts of many of his unpublished works, recorded interviews with his friends and family, extensive personal notes, preliminary drafts of his novels, his precious library, and much else. In addition, I knew intimately many of his and my mother’s friends inhabiting Collioure or visiting them there, almost all of whom are now sadly dead. However, I soon realized that, much more significantly than a desire to refute the damaging effect of media vilification, a biography based on authentic evidence would constitute a remarkable chronicle of love, endeavour, and in some ways unique triumph over daunting odds. In addition it would reveal much of the genesis and inspiration of his admired works of fiction and biography, which continue to enthral millions of readers around the world.
For the rest, it is my hope that this biography will enable readers to arrive at judgements based on evidence, rather than efflorescent imagination. In my experience, truth tends to be vastly more interesting than the most lurid of conjectures. I conclude with an assurance that I have suppressed nothing material from memories extending over five decades and the extensive archive in my possession, save one matter of trifling consequence which for the present I feel it proper to withhold.
Nikolai Tolstoy, 2019

I (#ud404ce8f-77ed-5bd9-80e1-096e623b10d2)
Collioure and Three Bear Witness (#ud404ce8f-77ed-5bd9-80e1-096e623b10d2)
I went in the loft & there found not only old account books so beautifully kept but our old formally-kept diaries of nearly 30 years ago. How vividly alive we were in those days, or seem to be in this reflection, & how v v little we lived & loved on.
Patrick’s diary, 9 December 1981
In the summer of 1945 Patrick and my mother Mary were compelled to leave London, following the abrupt termination of their wartime employment at Political Warfare Executive. Although they had been very happy during the three years’ tenancy of their elegant Queen Anne house in Chelsea, it was with buoyant excitement that they began their new life in a tiny cottage in a remote valley of North Wales. Patrick welcomed the prospect of entering on a romantic wilderness existence with my mother. His deprivation of many of the normal pleasures of childhood, above all the fellowship of contemporaries, made him by nature unusually self-sufficient. Furthermore, he and my mother were still young (Patrick being then thirty, and my mother twenty-nine), adventurous, and very much in love.
His ambitions were clear. Ever averse to dependence on others, he intended to live so far as possible by the work of his hands, while resuming his precocious career as a writer, which five years of war had compelled him to abandon. Prospects appeared as promising as might be. My mother possessed a modest private income on which they were able to scrape by in their two-roomed house at Cwm Croesor in Snowdonia, whose rent amounted to a mere £4 a year. They were fit, resourceful, and unmaterialistic: a perfect team. Neither ever baulked at hard work, and they rarely repined at the constraints of poverty. Over the bitter winter of 1945–46 they laboured undauntedly to make their home habitable, and toiled at their little garden in order to make themselves as self-sufficient as possible in the coming year. Patrick’s shooting and fishing among the mountains and lakes completed their supply of food.
Nevertheless, the spring of 1946 found him increasingly assailed by frustration and pessimism. Try as he would, his pen failed to flow with its former facility. While my mother’s faith in his talent as a writer never wavered, Patrick increasingly experienced prolonged bouts of writer’s block, a condition which by the end of their four years in Wales had all but overwhelmed him. Moving to a larger house nearby in the valley generated only the briefest spasm of revived creativity, and during the winter of 1948 –49 he began to despair of ever fulfilling his consuming ambition. He grew more and more tense, irritable, self-doubting, and agitated by agonizing thoughts of death and dissolution.[1] (#litres_trial_promo) In addition the long dark wet winters of North Wales imposed debilitating physical gloom over their lives. Eventually he and my mother decided that their only recourse was to effect a total severance with their current unhappy existence.
After living together for six years, in the summer of 1945 Patrick had married my mother, when he further adopted the decisive course of changing his surname from Russ to O’Brian. Contrary to widespread speculation when this was belatedly made public at the end of his life, I have shown elsewhere that he did not select his new name in order to pass himself off as an Irishman. Indeed, the name itself was chosen effectively at random. His overriding motive was to achieve a total break with his past: above all, to banish all association with his selfish and frequently tyrannical father. However, as failure dogged his every effort to extract himself from the grim predicament he found himself facing, he became increasingly troubled by an obsessive fear that his father’s destructive shadow hung over him, frustrating his every effort to break free. Even the rugged recesses of Snowdonia proved too little protection from the hated oppressor, whose presence he sensed looming above him in forbidding screes or tearing down the valley in raging storms, and eventually it seemed that a second flight afforded the only avenue for escape and renewal.
The bleak Welsh winters no longer proffered an invigorating challenge, but exerted a dampening gloom permeating the little household. By the early summer of 1949, the young couple fastened on the south of France, as refuge from the more and more desperate impasse into which Patrick found himself driven. He returned from an exploratory expedition with the exciting news that he had discovered the ideal spot where they could rebuild their lives.
The little town of Collioure lies on the Mediterranean coast, a few miles from the Spanish frontier. Years later, in his broadly autobiographical novel Richard Temple, Patrick provided a vivid sketch of the impression it first made on him:
The village stood on a rocky bay, with a huge castle jutting out into the middle, and a path led round underneath this castle to a farther beach and farther rocks … A jetty ran out at the end of the second beach … and as he walked along the jetty … he took in a host of vivid impressions – the brilliance of the open sea, white horses, the violet shadows of the clouds. From the end of the jetty the whole village could be seen, arranged in two curves; the sun had softened the colour of the tiled roofs to a more or less uniform pale strawberry, but all the flat-fronted houses were washed or painted different colours, and they might all have been chosen by an angel of the Lord … the high-prowed open fishing-boats were also painted with astonishing and successful colours: they lay in two rows that repeated the curves of the bay, and their long, arched, archaic lateen yards crossed their short leaning masts like a complexity of wings.[2] (#litres_trial_promo)
The couple arrived at the town in the beginning of September, which is generally one of the best months of the year on the Côte Vermeille. Tourists had departed, and the little town reverted to its workaday existence. The brilliant sunshine was tempered by a pleasant freshness in the air, with the Pyrenees looming behind the town standing out sharp and clear against a pure azure sky.
During his prefatory visit Patrick had already made a few friends. Among these was a beautiful Colliourencque[fn1] (#litres_trial_promo) (as the town’s female inhabitants are termed), Odette Boutet. Odette was married to a sculptor and painter named François Bernardi.[fn2] (#litres_trial_promo) They met again the day after Patrick’s return with my mother, when the two couples immediately became fast friends. During his initial visit Odette had helped Patrick find a small apartement on the second floor of 39, rue Arago,[fn3] (#litres_trial_promo) situated opposite a great gateway opening through the town wall onto the seafront. There was a living room, bedroom, a windowless nook known as ‘the black hole’, a bathroom with shower, and a tiny lavatory.
Always hospitable to a fault, when guests came to stay my parents customarily abandoned the bedroom, ensconcing themselves on lilos, inflatable mattresses, in the black hole. Electricity only arrived in the apartement nine months after their arrival. Inadequate heating was initially provided by a small bottled-gas cooker, and it was not until towards the end of 1953 that they managed to afford ‘a beautiful blue enamelled stove, a flexible desk-light for P. & various other things … Very pleased with stove. It was too heavy for P & me but P & Rimbaud managed.’ This was the Mirus, a handsome and extremely effective heater, capable of burning coal or wood. Cooking was conducted on a small ‘Wonder Oven’, operating on bottled gas.
Apart from the inevitable proliferation of tourist shops and restaurants and the regrettable removal of cobblestones from the streets, the appearance of Collioure within its town walls is not greatly changed since my parents first lived there. Most streets are so narrow that the inhabitants might almost touch hands from opposite windows. Behind the rue Arago, clustered houses along winding passages ascend the hillside to the base of Fort Miradou, while a couple of streets away the Place de la Mairie provided a pleasant refuge under the shade of its plane trees, where townspeople strolled and gossiped in the evenings.
In one major respect, however, Collioure has changed beyond recognition. Some time ago, when I was discussing the town with an old family friend, widow of a retired Colliourench fisherman, she described the new Musée de Collioure in the Faubourg. It contains many pleasing relics of former local life: fishing gear, old photographs, household implements, and so forth. ‘But one aspect it can never show,’ Hélène Camps observed emphatically, ‘is the incessant and extraordinary noise we all knew in those days’ – whether inside or outside the town. For many years all coastal road traffic to Spain passed through the heart of Collioure. Eventually this came to be diverted inland through a massive road tunnel constructed beyond the railway line.
In 1954 Patrick wrote this lively description for the American magazine Homes and Gardens:[fn4] (#litres_trial_promo)
Where the foothills of the Pyrenees plunge directly to the sea, the smooth-rounded Mediterranean sea that has bitten away the land in black cliffs there, the road winds and winds interminably: hair-pin bends writhe down to the gaunt bridges that stand over naked, dried up river-beds, and from each ravine the road twists upwards through cuttings in the red-black rock to the narrow back of the hill – up, and down again. It is a nightmare for a nervous driver in a hurry, for the lorries from Port Vendres, the buses and the cars tear furiously round the corners – blind corners – screaming brutally with their tyres, klaxons, horns. They all disregard the most elementary precautions (no Latin soul should ever drive a car) and a stranger might well demand whoever had established the theory that the French drive on the right side of the road.
But in the autumn, when the tide of summer cars has slackened, and before the schooners from the south have begun to bring up the oranges that load the lorries in the port, then one can walk safely on the road, follow its turning through the hills and look with tranquillity on the sea below or up to the mountains on the right hand.
This is the time of the vendanges. The hills, terraced with inconceivable labour to the height of the fertile land, are covered everywhere with vines, and the vines are ready.
Although families native to Collioure still live in and around the town, many houses and flats now sadly belong to absentee owners, a proportion of whom I understand do not even appear for some eleven months of the year. In contrast, Collioure in the Forties and Fifties was overwhelmingly home to Colliourench fishermen and their families. Most were closely interrelated through marriage, with links in many cases extending back for centuries. An unfortunate consequence of this was a never-ending spate of raucous conversations conducted throughout the day and much of the night, not only within the houses, whose windows for much of the year were opened wide to the mild air, but also between relatives or neighbours living on opposite sides of the narrow streets. My mother, who might have felt herself back in the Devonshire fishing village of her childhood, was able to tolerate this with fair equanimity. For the edgy and introspective Patrick, however, the hurly-burly proved a constant trial of his temper. His ears were jarred by hoarsely jocose cries of fishermen, high-pitched exchanges between wives and daughters, and maddening screams from their children. ‘Everyone evidently assumed everyone else was deaf,’ he once remarked to me.
Rare objections to the cacophony achieved little more than to exacerbate it:
Last night the Puits [the restaurant on the ground floor] made such a din: Mme R[imbaud]. told me Franco it was who threw the bottle last year: Pilar told her today. P[ilar] & F[ranco] keep cailloux [pebbles] on their window-sill.
This entry in my mother’s diary alludes to an outraged assault on late-night revellers in the restaurant on the ground floor. A year later, to her evident satisfaction, there was a repeat attack: ‘Last night someone threw a bottle outside the Puits: it made a fine noise.’ These incidents provoked inconclusive police and private investigations, all conducted at stentorian level on the spot, the fallout from which their friend Odette once told me had not entirely subsided half a century later.
As though this were not trial enough, Patrick understood barely a word of these vociferous exchanges, since almost everyone’s first or even sole language was Catalan. The occasional bilingual exchange was as often as not equally hard to understand. As my mother recorded:
The woman opposite went bankrupt, & left to live at Elne. There she took up with a man & they came back to live at her house here. His wife found out where they were, & on Sunday came & tried to get at them. They barred their door & she sat on a chair in the Street for six hours. A filthy scene (woman screeching French – man Catalan) by the arch 3 days ago must have been them, I think. The woman was dragging a 4–6 year old child with her.[fn5] (#litres_trial_promo)
If the human cacophony momentarily waned in the early hours, it was only to be replaced by horrid war cries uttered by the martial cats of Collioure, who waged internecine conflict around gutters, doorways, and up and down stairs – there being generally no doors at street level to communal entrances. Even my parents’ tough little Welsh hunt terrier Buddug could barely hold her own against these feline hosts of Midian. She was enabled to sally forth at will through an entrance cut in the door to the flat. One fine spring day my mother reported: ‘Cats (toms) infest stairs, & Budd rages. She came in with v. bloody nose this morning.’ Their morals were as depraved as their conduct was aggressive. On 9 September 1951 my mother adopted a kitten from the rue, whom she named Pussit Tassit, entering her arrival at the appropriate date in her childhood Christopher Robin Birthday Book. The following May, Patrick ‘saw our cat being covered in the street by a large black tom while half a dozen others sat quietly watching’.
My mother’s diary entries regularly attest to the strain imposed by the unrelenting cacophony:
‘Our rue gets more & more noisy’; ‘Oh God I am so sick with hearing vicious slaps & more vicious screaming at Martine. Patrick tried to read a T.S.E[liot]. poem [Burnt Norton] aloud yesterday but was drowned by the noise in the rue. Both boiled this morning as cats howling kept us from sleeping’; ‘V. bad night: noises’; ‘Street noises formidable’; ‘Neither of us can sleep: too much noise.’
When their neighbour Madame Rimbaud fell ill and was visited by the doctor, his ministrations were accompanied by well-intentioned ‘Shoutings of choruses of women down there all day’.
Despite the disadvantages of their cramped quarters and noisy surroundings, my parents remained at first broadly satisfied with their new home, and swiftly became profound lovers of Collioure and its inhabitants. Their isolated and unproductive life in Snowdonia had long strained Patrick’s nerves to desperation, and there could be no doubting the truth of his parting aphorism: ‘it is better to be poor in a warm country.’[fn6] (#litres_trial_promo)
In fact the weather at Collioure was far from being balmy throughout the entirety of the year. Winters could prove bitterly cold, and one snowstorm was so heavy that roofs collapsed beneath the weight. In January 1954 my mother recorded: ‘Snow thick from Al Ras to Massane; cold & it rained all night’, and shortly afterwards: ‘Rain in the night, & today the Dugommier hillside specked with snow. They say 15° [Fahrenheit] below zero at Font Romeu.’ I remember seeing in the town at that time photographs of what I recall as enormous waves frozen in mid-air as the sea hurled itself against the town walls. Life in the tiny flat above the rue Arago could be harsh indeed: ‘Ice on comportes in the rue; glacial wind. Mirus [stove] full blast hardly keeps us warm’; ‘Still 23° without, washing frozen into boards … Frightful cold: P. works au coin du feu.’
In spring the ‘maddening, howling tramontane’ battered the region for frustrating weeks, while in the autumn ‘Wind (from Spain) & clouds prevented plage. C’est le vent d’Espagne – il fait humide – c’est pas sain.’


Port d’Avall and Château St Elme under snow in 1954[fn7] (#litres_trial_promo)
Of course much of the year was generally hot, but even then freak weather could strike Collioure’s microclimate, arising from its situation between the mountains and the sea. July 1953 saw a ‘fantastic hail storm … River vast red flow.’ Much of this belongs to the past, owing to climate change, but is important to recall when reliving my parents’ early days in Collioure.
A hostile critic has conjectured that Patrick’s move to Collioure was undertaken ‘perhaps, in order to be a long way from the family he had abandoned’.[3] (#litres_trial_promo) In reality, seven years had passed since he finally left his first wife Elizabeth for my mother. Moreover, he continued in close touch with his young son Richard, the only other member of his immediate family, whom he had no intention of abandoning, while he maintained intermittent correspondence with his brothers, sisters and stepmother throughout the long years that lay ahead.
It is true that relations with his son had been troubled, although nothing approaching the extent alleged by subsequent critics. Richard O’Brian was, by his own admission, somewhat indolent as a child, and made unsatisfactory progress at the Devonshire preparatory school to which his father and my mother had sent him for two and a half years at great financial sacrifice to themselves. At the end of the summer term of 1947 Patrick was obliged to withdraw him, and set about teaching him at the house where he and my mother were living in North Wales. Although the boy’s education improved considerably in consequence, in some respects the experience was an unhappy one. Patrick’s own wretched childhood had left him constitutionally ill-equipped (for much of his adult life, at any rate) to deal with small children, a failing on occasion so pronounced as to be all but comical. Walking above Collioure in November 1951, he fled down a sidetrack on ‘seeing some beastly little boys’ – one of several similarly alarming encounters. He imposed what might now appear excessively rigorous discipline on his son during lessons. Although Richard regularly stayed with his mother in London during the ‘school holidays’, during his time in Wales he had missed her and his beloved boxer Sian acutely. Patrick and my mother were fond of dogs, but it was impossible to introduce Sian into the sheep-farming community of Cwm Croesor.
This regime continued for two years, during which time excruciating attacks of writer’s block made Patrick more and more testy and uncompromising in his efforts to educate the boy. It is likely that Patrick’s frustration with Richard’s lack of satisfactory progress was exacerbated by his own inability to achieve anything constructive in his writing. On the other hand, outside lessons he became in marked contrast a strikingly adventurous and imaginative parent. My mother’s unwavering affection, too, went far to ameliorate Richard’s life. Eventually, the ill-conceived scheme came to an end, with the departure of Patrick and my mother for Collioure in September 1949. That July Richard’s mother Elizabeth married her longstanding lover John Le Mee-Power, which enabled her to make a successful application to the courts to recover custody of her son.
Patrick was deeply concerned to secure the best education possible for Richard. In 1945 he had registered him for entry to Wellington College, a public school with a strong military tradition, with a view to his eventually obtaining a career in the Army. Unfortunately this was my father’s old school, which I in turn entered in January 1949. When my father was informed by Elizabeth that the O’Brians planned to send Richard there, he managed to persuade the Master of the undesirability of his attending the same school as me. The fact that my mother was at the time denied all contact with me presumably influenced the College’s concurrence with my father’s objection, which would now seem harsh and arbitrary. It is possible that some future unhappiness might have been avoided, had Richard and I been permitted to become friends from an early age.
The sincerity of Patrick’s concern to advance Richard’s education and future career cannot be doubted. The annual fees for Wellington were £160–£175 a year, which together with travel and additional expenses required a total expenditure of about £200 per annum. Yet his and my mother’s combined income for 1950–51 amounted to £341 6s 9d.[fn8] (#litres_trial_promo) Nor was the proposed sacrifice any fanciful project, since they had earlier paid about £170 a year for Richard’s preparatory school fees and expenses.[4] (#litres_trial_promo)
Eventually Richard came to believe that his father had contributed nothing material towards his education. In a press interview conducted over half a century later, he declared: ‘My father never offered to help … [I] had been sent to a boarding school in Devon by [my] mother … [My] mother found the fees increasingly difficult to pay.’[5] (#litres_trial_promo)
Although Richard is unlikely to have been concerned at the time by the question of who paid his school fees, in retrospect his mother’s poverty-stricken circumstances (by her own account, she earned ‘between £3. 10. 0. and £4. 0.0. a week’, from invisible mending conducted in their home) might have made it plain that it could not have been she. Nor, given her upright character, does it appear likely that she would have made any attempt to deceive her son over the issue. Again, the fact that it was to Patrick and my mother that Richard looked for provision of all extras, ranging from school uniform and games kit to pocket money and railway travel, must have made it plain at the time who was meeting the bills.
Richard’s memory could well have deceived him after half a century. Unfortunately, it is necessary to demonstrate that it did do so, in order to counter accusations levelled at Patrick by others.
Denied entry to Wellington, in the autumn of 1949 Richard was enrolled at Cardinal Vaughan School in Holland Park. A place was found for him by Father de Zulueta, aristocratic priest of the Roman Catholic church in Chelsea, where Richard and his mother lived. My mother’s accounts show that she and Patrick spent substantial sums on Richard each year, although this did not include school fees, the institution being funded by the London County Council. Occasional financial assistance was probably also contributed by my grandfather, who was then living in Upper Cheyne Row around the corner from Richard and his mother. My mother’s brother Howard, known to the family as ‘Binkie’, recalled: ‘My Father told me that Patrick’s son had been brought to him in a hungry state by that kind Father Zulu. I have no doubt but that Pa would have given him a hand out despite his aversion to Patrick.’
Some years ago I heard from an old schoolfriend of Richard’s. Bob Broeder remembered him well:
Richard stood out from the rest of us as he spoke in a refined accent while most of us spoke in what can only be described as a London accent. As boys do, we asked each other which schools we had come from. When it came to Richard, he told us that he had been educated [i.e. tutored] by his father. This made him stand out even more.
Miserable though it had in part been at the time, it seems that Richard had already come to value his father’s didactic course of instruction – as he undoubtedly did not long after this. He might, after all, have confined himself to naming the Devonshire preparatory school he had attended previously.
A letter sent by Richard to Collioure at this time recounts his progress. (Here as elsewhere I retain his delightfully idiosyncratic spelling, which adds to the charm of the correspondence.)
Dear Daddy and Mary, I am very sorry I did not reply to your letter. The only subject I find easy is Greek, but altogether I get on nicely, in Latin we are doing the Relative pronoun, in French we are learning the presents of some irregular and regular verbs, in history we are doing Tudor times, in arithemetic we are about to begin fractions, in algebra we have not started similtanious equations, in geometry we are learning Euclid 1 .13. I find home-work very boring, but I do it, so far I have had only three penances. Here is a bit of news for Mary, I have growen out of my good old boots, I can’t get them on though last two months I could, my mother says please can I have several pairs of socks and some pugams pyjamers. My Mother says I will be taking my Exam in the spring or else I might stay where I am. I like the idea of the feast and wished I was there, but we can’t buy wishing-carpets. I will try very hard for a silent dog whistle [for Buddug] when I have time but most propally I’ll end up some where else. Please could I have a little money? I am very glad you are in your new home, have you had a shower-bath, I think when I come over I will invent a sort of bellows which you start off and stop when you want. I have never heard of a Praying Montis. I do not like getting up early but I do. I hope you and Daddy and Buddug are well? With love from Richard.
The ‘Exam’ in question was the Common Entrance for admission to public schools. The attempt to enter Richard for Wellington having been blocked, Patrick now sought to have him admitted to St Paul’s, a prestigious London public school. This would have enabled him to attend as a day boy, thus avoiding the heavy expense of boarding. Richard prepared for the examination in the summer of 1950, which in the event poor academic progress appears to have prevented his sitting. There is incidentally a suggestion that my mother attempted to persuade her father to break the modest financial trust he had settled on her, in order that she might devote the capital to Richard’s education. A passage in Patrick’s autobiographical novel Richard Temple may well allude to such a plea: ‘On the same reasoning he [Mrs Temple’s father, Canon Harler] had refused to let her touch the capital of her little trust-fund to send Richard to a better school: besides, he had never approved of her marriage and would lend its results no countenance.’[6] (#litres_trial_promo)
Grim personal experience of the terrible financial crash of 1929 had left my grandfather with a visceral aversion to dispersion of capital.
Richard’s initial experience at Cardinal Vaughan had been less than happy. As his friend Bob Broeder further recalls:
As time went on he was the subject of verbal bullying and was given a nickname – ‘Sheep’s Brains’ … Things came to a head one day, when a large lad (who later went on to play rugby for the Wasps) confronted Richard & threatened him with violence. By this time I had had enough and although smaller than this lad I told him in no uncertain terms to pack it in. Psychology worked and he never troubled Richard again, the other boys saw what had happened and they in their turn left Richard alone.
Before long he had settled down well, at least with his fellow pupils. Writing to Collioure, he cheerfully declared: ‘Dear Daddy … I hope I pass the common entrance to St Pauls, though I am quite happy where I am.’ He and Bob Broeder had become fast friends. The latter retains a vivid memory of Richard’s cramped little home:
As time went by I was invited to his home to meet his mother. They lived in a flat on the first floor at 237, Kings Road Chelsea. Adjacent to the first floor landing was the kitchen/dining area then up some more stairs to the living room – quite large and very cold in Winter, despite a small fire.
I found his mother Elizabeth a small, charming and very well spoken lady with whom I had a good rapport. Little mention was ever made about his father, except that he lived in the south of France. At that age you accept things readily and don’t question.
Subsequently, Bob found conditions at Richard’s home materially improved:
One day I arrived at Richard’s home and went into the living-room with him, discovered it was no longer cold but nicely warm. He pointed to a brand new stove that had been installed in the fireplace and which gave out a marvellous warmth …
One Christmas I was invited to Christmas dinner. Elizabeth had prepared a wonderful feast. There was a complete roasted goose with all the trimmings – it was an unforgettable occasion. Elizabeth was a kind and generous lady who worked hard as a seamstress. I often saw her patiently repairing nylon stockings for customers. Such luxury items were hard to come by and then very expensive. She also worked at the Chelsea Arts Club in the evening.
Richard was now thirteen, when a combination of factors served to place his relationship with his father on an altogether happier basis. No longer confined in isolated contiguity with his at times testy parent, he was also outgrowing tiresome childish failings which all too easily provoked Patrick’s simmering wrath. The permanent rift which was one day to develop between them lay far in the future, and as will be seen did not in any case originate with Patrick. It looks as though Richard’s eventual decision to abandon relations with his father led him (as may too often occur in such unhappy cases) to reinterpret or confuse his memories of the past. Looking back from 2000, he recalled of this period:
Later, my father moved to France and I was delighted to return to my mother. Over the years I continued to visit my father and Mary but our relationship didn’t develop much further. He was not an easy person to get near. He was not affectionate; there were no quick hugs or pats on the shoulder. Nor was there much fun about him. Everything was a little bit heavy. He could also be very, very sarcastic. There was one incident that I remember clearly. He was extremely good at sharpening knives. ‘That looks interesting,’ I thought, so I had a go. His comment was: ‘I’ve seen angle-irons sharper than that.’ He could have thought of something pleasant to say.
I can confirm that Patrick was instinctively averse to ‘quick hugs or pats on the shoulder’, which he had rarely experienced in his own childhood. But so in my experience were many fathers at that time, and this, like much else in Richard’s subsequent assessment, suggests judgements formed in a radically different era. While the clumsy attempt at humour (which I suspect the knife-sharpening exchange to have been) may or may not have upset the boy at the time, there exists abundant evidence that Richard’s memory in later life could deceive him in material respects.
In the 1950s Patrick appears to have been unaware of any suggestion of coldness in their relationship. Pondering the matter, he jotted in a notebook:
The dialogue between a man and his son an inner dialogue. The well-known lack of communication is no more than a lack of contact on the surface – words, formal communication – and in fact the generations are linked to a sometimes intolerably intimate degree – secret glances instantly and wholly understood, disapproval felt, affectations detected hopelessly because hereditary …
This passage is further interesting, suggesting as it does Patrick’s sincere, if at times excessive, concern to eradicate failings in his son which he ascribed to his own boyhood experience.
Richard, like many of us on occasion, was undoubtedly capable of unconsciously ‘editing’ his early childhood memories long years after the event. An illuminating example is provided by an episode he recounted in a press interview, in which he attacked his father’s memory. ‘When I was five he sent me a present – a bottle of malt and cod liver oil, something no five-year-old would want. That was the year that [Richard’s sister] Jane died.’[7] (#litres_trial_promo)
This reads as though it were a direct memory of a long-distant event. In reality, he first learned of it from a letter discovered by his mother Elizabeth in ‘an old box’, which she sent to Richard’s daughter Joanna. Elizabeth’s letter is undated, but since Joanna was born in 1969 it is unlikely to have been written before the 1980s. The trove of material discovered in the old box included the letter in question (also undated), which conveyed birthday wishes and what Patrick described as ‘a rather revolting sort of birthday present – to wit, some malt and cod-liver oil. But reflect that it is good for you, and see if you can enjoy it.’ To this Patrick appended some amusing verses and accompanying sketches, after the style of Hilaire Belloc.
Elizabeth, whose memory must in this case be preferred to that of her then infant son, wrote that he was at the time not five as he later asserted, but ‘about 3 years old’ – i.e. two years before his sister Jane died. In view of Richard’s age, the letter plainly represented a jeu d’esprit, intended for the mother’s amusement rather than that of the small unlettered infant. Furthermore, given that we know nothing of the context, it seems not unlikely that Richard really was ill (his birthday was at the beginning of February), and the announcement that the medicine was a birthday present reflected nothing more than a private joke to be shared with his mother. Indeed, the letter concludes with a mock-sinister verse about a scorpion, on which Patrick commented: ‘I’m afraid that last one won’t appeal to you very much, but your mother might like it.’[fn9] (#litres_trial_promo)
Letters from Richard’s Chelsea home delighted my parents after their arrival in Collioure in 1949, including as they did many artless touches of boyhood enthusiasm. ‘I have been four day’s in bed with tonsilitis,’ he reported: ‘that means I will have my tonsils out, maybe I will grow wiser on account of my tonsils being cut out.’ He was beginning to evince encouraging interest in literature, and used the pocket money they sent him to buy such sterling boys’ fare as the works of Rider Haggard, Alexandre Dumas and R.M. Ballantyne. There were regular reports on Sian the boxer’s welfare and her occasional ‘weddings’, which resulted in numerous offspring. He attended his first communion at Chelsea’s Catholic church: ‘Father de Zulueta is giving me a Bible as my own [Authorized Version] is anti-catholic, however I shall keep it.’
Excitement mounted as across the river preparations began for the 1951 Festival of Britain in Battersea Park, which Richard roundly condemned as an expensive white elephant. He received letters from his father and my mother almost every week, money being punctiliously despatched whenever required, and at whatever sacrifice to the impoverished O’Brians. As a growing boy, he regularly required new clothing. On one occasion they provided him with a complete cricket outfit, which he was aware ‘was very expensive’. Gratifyingly, ‘when I put all the clothes on I looked like a proffessional cricketer’. Patrick took a keen interest in Richard’s sporting activity, and the latter responded with detailed accounts of matches: ‘Thank you for the lovely parcle of buscuits and advise on cricket.’ He was looking forward to coming out to France, but ‘was rather horrified at the thought of the journey.’ Furthermore, ‘I am afraid I have forgotten all my French as we say almost the same thing every lesson, “come and stand here”, “do you come here?” I think the master askes most silly questions.’ When my mother told him she was teaching Odette Bernardi to speak English, Richard rejoiced at the prospect of being able to speak to her.
In July 1949 the judge presiding over the custody hearing had ruled that Patrick ‘be at liberty to take the said child out of the jurisdiction of this Court to France for half of the Summer Holidays, the Respondent [Patrick] undertaking to return the said child within the jurisdiction at the end of the said period’.[8] (#litres_trial_promo) Richard accordingly spent part of his 1950 summer holiday at Collioure, which he hugely enjoyed. The next term he submitted an eight-page essay ‘on the most exicting part of the holidays’, with an account of a bullfight in the little arena beside the Collioure railway station. A healthy and active boy, he revelled in swimming from the plage St Vincent, exploring the neighbouring countryside, and walking with his father and stepmother in the Pyrenees. Nor was life lonely, as it had been to such an exacting extent in North Wales. Patrick and my mother had made close friends in the town since their arrival. Among their friends, Richard saw much of Odette and François Bernardi, as also the voluble and amusing painter Willy Mucha, and his attractive and equally garrulous (when permitted) wife Rolande.
That autumn Richard fastened on the career he wanted, writing eagerly to his father:
I am very happy at school. Please could you arrange for me to go into the Royal Navy, please? Please could you arrange for me to go into the Submarine Service? Could you write to the Admilaltary now, and find out what exams I must pass so I can be in at the age of 16. I am very keen for this to happen.
Patrick, whose own lack of formal education had prevented his gaining entrance to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, responded with enthusiasm. No career for his son could please him more, and Richard threw himself into the project with mingled energy and apprehension:
At school we are going to have the exams, which are horrors, on Thursday. The masters make it sound so easy and pleasant but I am dreading the results and the terrible report. Thank you so much about the Navy but I am afraid of the exams. I know that it is right for me to go into the R.N., and I will work very hard for it.
Patrick himself had never passed (quite likely never sat) a single examination during his drastically curtailed schooldays, and remained throughout his life markedly sympathetic toward children encountering problems with their school work. As it happened, on this occasion Richard’s results were good, and he evinced particular aptitude for geometry. A plea to have virtually all his clothes replaced (‘All the boys at school are well dressed and I am about the shabbiest one there’) immediately elicited a cheque for the substantial sum of £10/5/-, with a pair of goggles for swimming thoughtfully thrown in for good measure. His enthusiasm for mechanical toys also pleased Patrick, who loved dismantling and reassembling clocks and other intricate machinery.
Father and son further shared a common delight in the natural world. In March 1951 Patrick sent Richard a copy of Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter, and the boy was already looking forward to his next holiday in Collioure:
When I come over I shall bring the Union Jack tent, air-pistol, flute and one or two books, and (if I can get one) a little pet snake, the pet shop in lower Sloane Street may have a few young vipers.
Thank you so very for Tarka and the electrical book … Can one tame young hoopoos? I would like one. Do we often have sharks in the bay as Daddy told me he saw one?
In March 1951, Richard’s mother, with whom my mother regularly exchanged correspondence concerning Richard’s needs, wrote to report that her son was unhappy at home, and enquired whether he might be allowed to live permanently with them at Collioure.[fn10] (#litres_trial_promo) Poor Elizabeth had been ill for much of the winter, and was finding it an increasing strain combining her arduous work with looking after the lively boy in her little upstairs flat. My mother replied that they would be delighted to have him. However, Patrick, as always concerned for his son’s best interest, asked their old wartime friend Walter Greenway to take Richard out to tea, and discover how matters really stood. In due course my mother noted: ‘Walter wrote that Richard seems very happy & settled at Cardinal Vaughan’s school & he himself says he would not like to leave it & come here altogether.’
It turned out that Richard, who frequently struggled to keep up with school work, tended to grow restless and unhappy as the term drew to its close. At the same time, he looked forward to coming over ‘for the summer hols’.
My mother undoubtedly loved Richard as though he were her own son, and her affection can only have been accentuated by an unhappy exchange of correspondence in the early summer of 1951. In view of her desertion, and continued ‘living in sin’ with Patrick until their marriage in 1945, a court had granted my father custody of my sister Natasha and myself. He himself had remarried in 1943, and as a promising barrister with a substantial private income was in a position to provide a suitable home for us.


My mother in the early 1950s
I was to be sixteen in June 1951, and in April my mother wrote to the London solicitor who had handled her divorce proceedings, ‘to ask if in fact Nikolai can choose to know me if he likes after his 16th birthday’. After some delay the solicitor confirmed that there was no reason why she should not at least enquire. Accordingly, she wrote both to her parents, who remained in close contact with my sister and me, and also directly to me. I received the letter at Wellington College, accompanied by a birthday present of a handsome book: William Sanderson, A Compleat History of the Lives and Reigns of Mary Queen of Scotland, And of Her Son and Successor, James The Sixth, King of Scotland (London, 1656). My mother must somehow have learned of my devotion to the House of Stuart, following my enraptured introduction to Scott’s Waverley novels by the enlightened headmaster of my preparatory school.
Needless to say, I was delighted with the present, but bemused to know how to respond. Before I could do so, however, my father arrived at the College in a state of grim agitation. He was at pains to impress on me how appallingly my mother had behaved, not the least of her crimes being an insidious attempt to make contact with me by entering Richard for Wellington. He accordingly urged me not to reply. When I enquired what I should do with her present, he smiled and suggested I keep it. Although I felt instinctively that there was something not quite right about this, I complied, and still have the book.
Children tend to be remarkably adaptable to circumstances. I myself was generally unhappy at home. Probably as a consequence of the loss of his own mother at the age of three, followed by terrifying childhood experiences during and after the Russian Revolution, and finally my mother’s desertion, my poor father had become a solitary, parsimonious, and generally morose figure, while my Russian stepmother was a relentless scold, who made no secret of the fact that she resented my presence in the house. Although set in a delightful situation beside the Thames at Wraysbury near Windsor, our home appeared to me a gloomy prison visited by few: so much so, that each holiday I compiled a calendar, whose function was to record and strike out on a half-daily basis the approach of the longed-for return to my friends at school. Yet, despite this dismal condition, I accepted all that my father urged on me, and remained persuaded throughout my schooldays that my mother was a very wicked woman. Shortly after the episode described above, she received letters from my father and her mother, impressing on her the undesirability of approaching me when I was already experiencing emotional problems at home and school. It is not hard to picture her anguish. Fortunately, she had Patrick to sustain her. ‘Dear P.’, as she wrote appreciatively that night in her diary.
Small wonder, then, that my mother poured so much affection onto her young stepson. While he continued devoted to his own mother, he had long become correspondingly fond of his stepmother, and swiftly grew enraptured with life at Collioure. His nostalgia for the town was such, that on the occasion of one return to London he requested a phial of sand from the beach, which on its arrival he much prized: ‘The sand has turned moist as the air is damp. If you send me any more curios I can start a penny-peep-show-museum.’
At this time Patrick and my mother were living on a more and more heavily taxed income amounting to £48 a quarter from the trust established on my mother by her father, supplemented by modest literary and other irregular earnings. My mother in addition occasionally taught English to Colliourenchs and their children, translated and typed letters, and engaged in other modestly remunerative activities. From this meagre income they had to meet continual requests from the growing Richard and his mother for new clothes, school extras and private entertainment. This they invariably did to the best of their ability, and the fact that his requests feature with such blithe regularity in his correspondence confirms that they neither reproached nor stinted him.
Any unforeseen expenditure was in danger of sinking their precarious little boat. On 1 September 1951, my mother was ‘Rudely awakened this morning by cheque of £32 instead of expected seventy. We have £13 a month until March … Richard never wrote: P. wrote again to him today. Dreadful letter from Mrs. Power suddenly demanding “maintenance”.’ This was Richard’s mother, who had finally married her lover John Le Mee-Power in May 1949. On what grounds she believed she could now make a claim on Patrick was unclear, but nonetheless alarming. Some weeks later, however, my mother heard again from the unhappy Elizabeth: ‘Letter from … Mrs. Power: poor thing, husband gone two years ago, not enough money.’[fn11] (#litres_trial_promo) Power had proved to be a drunken, irresponsible bully. Elizabeth’s demand proved to be a momentary cry of despair, since by this time she appears to have accepted that my parents lacked any means of providing more financial help than that which they already lavished on Richard.
Now that Richard was fast becoming a young man, Patrick could share pleasures with him, imbuing them with that infectious enthusiasm which was one of his most endearing characteristics. Overall, the relationship had reached a happy modus vivendi. Patrick, my mother and Richard had grown into a compact little family, corresponding regularly and affectionately, and meeting from time to time for extended holidays and London treats. My mother’s parents, Howard and Frieda Wicksteed, as ever concerned for Richard’s welfare, regularly intervened to plug her recurrent financial holes. Fortunately, they lived in Upper Cheyne Row, a short walk around the corner from his mother in King’s Road. There Elizabeth eked out an existence marred by poverty and illness, while he continued devoted to her and she to him. Even the once bitter feud between Elizabeth and Patrick appears to have subsided into a mutually acceptable truce, with letters passing between the two households concerning Richard’s welfare, and my mother during visits to her parents calling to collect him from Elizabeth’s little upstairs flat round the corner. Other exchanges included Patrick’s arranging for her to be given their Hoover. How happy might it have been had these amicable relations continued! The only lasting sadness was that which constantly assailed my mother: deprivation of opportunity even to correspond with her own son and daughter Natasha. And whatever distressed my mother deeply troubled her devoted Patrick.
As this account has established, it is a regrettable but undeniable fact that Patrick was by nature and upbringing ill-suited to engage with young children, whose waywardness, unreflecting lack of tact and blithe innocence of the ways of the world tended all too readily to affront and alarm his fragile composure. However, once they attained an age which he regarded as providing a measure of rationality and intelligence, his attitude shifted remarkably. In one of his novels he describes how: ‘When Madeleine was a little girl she was a plain creature, and timid. Her form was the undistinguished, pudgy, shapeless form of most children.’ As an adolescent, however, she swiftly blossoms into a beautiful, intelligent, self-possessed young lady.[9] (#litres_trial_promo) It is clear that he recognized this evolutionary transformation from caterpillar to butterfly in the case of his son. Furthermore, as I have shown in the first volume of this biography, it is worthwhile to stress that it was only when teaching Richard that his patience was tried: outside the ‘classroom’ Patrick became charm and enthusiasm personified.
Following the move to France, Patrick’s equanimity was restored by the generally promising path of his literary work. Shortly before their departure from Cwm Croesor, he had assembled a collection of short stories. Although in 1947 he had published A Book of Voyages, an anthology of seafaring episodes, this slim collection was to comprise the sum total of his original published literary projects since 1939, when the first of its tales was written. Although reflecting his sparse creative output over the preceding decade, the stories are beautifully written and highly imaginative, and were received enthusiastically by his literary agent, Spencer Curtis Brown. He passed them in turn to Fred Warburg, of the publishers Secker & Warburg, who on the eve of Patrick’s departure for France expressed similar appreciation:
We have now read and admired the remarkable stories of Patrick O’Brien [sic], at present entitled COUNTRY CONTENTMENTS, and should certainly like to publish the book … We do not like the title proposed by O’Brien and tentatively suggest THE LAST POOL as a possibility.
Patrick had adopted the title Country Contentments from his copy of a delightful work of that name, a guide to rural activities by the seventeenth-century writer Gervase Markham, which Patrick had sought to put into practice in Wales.[10] (#litres_trial_promo) There seems little doubt, however, that Warburg’s choice was preferable (several stories in the collection are markedly discontented, being positively gloomy and even macabre), and The Last Pool (the title of the first story in the book) is what the title became. Curtis Brown stood firm in Patrick’s interest, insisting inter alia that he retain US rights for the book. Warburg gave way graciously on the issue, and the contract was signed on 27 September 1949. In it Patrick further committed himself ‘to write a book on Southern France and to proceed to France within the next two months in order to collect material for such a book’. For this ‘the publisher undertakes to pay to the Author forthwith the sum of £75 (seventy-five pounds) towards the expenses of the Author’s visit to France’. In fact, Patrick had by this time already crossed the Channel.
In addition the publisher obtained an option on Patrick’s next book, and when the two of them had lunched together on 24 August of that year Warburg learned that it was to be ‘a full length novel with a Welsh background’. Next day Warburg wrote to Spencer Curtis Brown, thanking him ‘for putting this most unusual book [The Last Pool] our way and very much hope it will have the success it deserves’. At the same time he (surely wisely) rejected Patrick’s tentative suggestion for the alternative title Dark Speech upon the Harp.
Patrick appears to have persuaded Secker that the prime motive of their journey was to gather material for the ‘book on Southern France’. Either way, the money came in extremely handy towards meeting the expense of their move. In the event, they arrived at Collioure shortly before the contract was completed. The removal cost £9.10/-, and since the rent of the flat in the rue Arago amounted to some £10 a year (which their genial landlord, M. Germa, seems to have collected erratically), for a while at least they should have been quite comfortably off. However, by next February they were alarmed by a statement from their bank in London, explaining that no more money could be forwarded, as they had attained the limit of £250 which it was at that time permitted to take abroad. Towards the end of May Patrick was still struggling to liberate Warburg’s £75 advance from an impassive bureaucracy. He noted grimly: ‘Wrote to C.J. Foreign Div. & Parry – The last two letters Mrs O’Brian wrote to you are still unanswered. This sort of treatment is really intolerable, and I must insist upon an immediate final.’
Unfortunately, it turned out that they did not qualify for remission of the advance.
At Warburg’s invitation, Patrick forwarded from my grandparents’ house in Chelsea (whose lease they had taken over from him at his departure in 1945) ‘some biographical scraps’ for inclusion on the dustjacket. Although Warburg thanked him for ‘the biographical material, which is excellent’, nearly eight months later he oddly repeated the request for ‘your biographical details, i.e. date and place of birth, education, appointments held and any other relevant information … speed is of the essence’. Since it was Patrick’s persistent habit to preserve copies of such material, it is hard to conceive of any reason why he should have failed to comply with the second request after being so prompt in fulfilling the first. It seems likely therefore that in the event Warburg decided against inclusion of a potted biography. As the sizeable dustjacket blurb implies that the tales arose out of the author’s own communing with the countryside which provides their setting, this may have appeared to suffice for a personal description.
The Last Pool was published on 17 August 1950. Its best stories contain some of Patrick’s finest writing, while all are entertaining. A Latin dedication ‘To Mary, my wife and Dearest Friend’ acknowledged her indispensable support and help. The book’s atmospheric green dustjacket design by Edward Bradbury, depicting three fine trout in the foreground, and shadowy images reflecting country sports circling dimly through refracted water, make it a handsome volume, now much sought by bibliophiles.
Reviews in the press were largely favourable: in some cases, enthusiastic. The novelist L.A.G. Strong perceptively described him as ‘A real new writer, with a voice of his own. He shows a real power to describe physical sensations.’ Patrick’s response to all this was guarded. In a letter to his editor Roger Senhouse written in the following February, he provided an assessment of critics which came from the heart: ‘I do grow passionate about criticism from fools, from people who have not really read what they criticise and from those whose aim is to show off; but I am really grateful for genuine criticism.’[fn12] (#litres_trial_promo)
He welcomed Senhouse’s comments on his next book, but clearly had coverage of The Last Pool in mind, for he continued with some sharp reflections on ‘the damned silly review Dunsany produced in the Observer. Did you see any worthwhile reviews of The Last Pool? I only saw a long and offensively fulsome one in the Irish Times, and a short and stupid one in the Spectator, apart from the Observer.’
At first glance, Patrick’s testy dismissal of the Observer review appears perverse. Lord Dunsany, a well-connected Irish peer, literary figure and keen rider to hounds, was surely ideally placed to review such a book. What seems particularly to have riled Patrick was a well-intentioned laudatory comment, much canvassed since: ‘This charming book by an Irish sportsman is a genuine collection of tales of the Irish countryside.’ For a start, it might suggest that Dunsany had done little more than glance through the text. Although five of the thirteen tales have Irish settings, a careful reader would have noted that the three located in Wales evince a much more fundamental grounding in local toponymy, landscape and speech.
Still more upsetting appears to have been Dunsany’s gratuitous allusion to the author as ‘an Irish sportsman’. This was presumably inferred by Dunsany from Patrick’s surname,[fn13] (#litres_trial_promo) together with the Irish setting of several of the stories. That an influential Irish writer publicly hailed him as a compatriot placed Patrick in an embarrassing quandary. As was explained in the first volume of this biography, his change of name was selected in order to banish an unbearable past – not to invent a new one. An obsessively private individual, the last thing he wanted was to find his personal life paraded before an inquisitive public. After all, Dunsany’s erroneous assumption could lead to his being derided as an imposter. What could he do? A correction (in the unlikely event of the newspaper’s publishing it) must inevitably invite enquiry into his actual background.
While this might be criticized as an absurdly paranoid reaction, it was to become unexpectedly justified when belated revelation of his change of name half a century later aroused bitter diatribes in the media beyond anything Patrick at his most vulnerable might have anticipated. He instinctively believed a substantial body of the literati to be an innately envious and consequently malevolent crew. Sadly, he lived to find this jaundiced view not altogether mistaken. It may surely be enquired, were he as concerned to lay claim to Irish ancestry as ill-natured critics have proclaimed, why he did not seize the opportunity to do so in The Last Pool, nor seek to profit from Lord Dunsany’s flattering allusion.[fn14] (#litres_trial_promo)
When Patrick came under pressure by publishers on other occasions to provide autobiographical notices, he either evaded doing so altogether, or submitted some patently humorous fantasy. The dustjacket of his early novel Hussein (1938), for example, informed its readers:
Patrick Russ has seen much of life in his 26 years. When he was stoking a Portuguese tramp steamer, he came to Rabat and made the acquaintance of two professional story-tellers with whom he wandered up and down French Morocco for a couple of months. It was from them, conversing in mixtures of French and Berber Arabic that he got much of the material widely current throughout the Mohammedan world, which goes to form the story of Hussein.
It is presumably the rarity of this dustjacket which has thus far protected Patrick from being accused by humourless critics of intending these imaginative exploits to be taken au pied de la lettre.[11] (#litres_trial_promo)
Although beautifully written, the stories in The Last Pool proved to be no more than a swansong to the otherwise alarmingly arid period from which he was at last emerging. I have described in the first volume of this biography how they were spasmodically compiled over the decade of 1939–49, during which time the interruption caused by wartime employment, followed by nearly four years of mounting writer’s block, eventually brought to fruition no more than this sparse collection. After their luncheon meeting in August 1949, Fredric Warburg noted: ‘I gathered that in this field he had, for the moment, written himself out.’ In fact, all he had had in mind for further writing was ‘a book on the French Catalans’.
It appears, however, that not long after their arrival at Collioure, Patrick began to find memories of life at Cwm Croesor flooding back. Now distanced from the life of hardship and frustration they had endured there, he began to picture it all anew in his mind’s eye. In a notebook he jotted down a plan for a novel set in the dark valley:
Do not forget the idea of having the man (or one of his friends) a sociologist nor overlook the possibility of presenting slabs of Welsh life in the manner either of direct reporting or now I come to think of it, what about having the farm situations seen from many angles – all the others 3rd person – no one being wholly true. From each slab one could regard the farm.
The ‘sociologist’, professional observer of the workings of humanity, is clearly derived from Patrick himself, and indeed in the finished work he appears under palpably thin disguise as its protagonist Pugh, who arrives as a visitor in the valley. The name itself was possibly drawn from ‘old Pugh’, a servant who worked at the house at Kempsey where Patrick had lived as a boy in 1923–24. He had retained in his mind a vivid picture of life in Cwm Croesor, as also its inhabitants, with whom he and my mother maintained warm if intermittent contact for several years after their departure. In January 1952 Bessie Roberts, the neighbouring farmer’s wife, sent them a charming photograph of their two young sons Gwynfor and Alun (‘Taken at school in September / With there love and many thanks to “Antie Vron”’),[fn15] (#litres_trial_promo) which my mother lovingly preserved.


Gwynfor and Alun Roberts
In September 1951 ‘Pierce sent £5 for the old bikes’ they had left behind to be sold, and four years after their settlement in France my mother was still singing Welsh songs. In addition to his memories, Patrick drew on the journal he had kept during the first nine months of their Welsh existence, on which he relied extensively for descriptive passages in his novel.
Long afterwards he provided this summary analysis of his work:
About forty years ago I did write a mildly experimental book called Testimonies in which all the main characters, having left this world, sat peacefully in the next, each independently delivering an account of his or her recent life to a simple, objective being whom readers of the fifties at once understood to be a kind of non-sectarian recording angel. The novel has just been reissued and to my astonishment many of those who read it today, or at least many reviewers, though very kind about the tale itself, are sadly puzzled by my angel. ‘Who is this investigator?’ they cry. ‘Who him? What is this guy doing around the joint?’
On another occasion he explained further:
I was writing hard, working on a novel called Testimonies, which I placed in Wales, though the situation it dealt with might just as well have arisen on the seacoast of Bohemia: I finished it very late one night and, in a state of near-prostration – how I wish I could, in a line or so, convey the strength of generalised emotion and delight at times like this, when one feels one is writing well. (I speak only for myself, of course.) The book was politely received in England, much more enthusiastically in the States where the intellectual journals praised it very highly indeed. It did not sell well, but New York magazines asked me for stories.[12] (#litres_trial_promo)
The claim that ‘the situation it dealt with might just as well have arisen on the seacoast of Bohemia’ must be taken with a large grain of salt. The valley setting is described with wonderful vividness, reflecting the fact that it is indeed the Cwm Croesor, unchanged (save for some readily identifiable toponyms), of their four years’ exile. In addition, so far as I have been able to identify them, virtually every character reflects a real individual. Broadly speaking, it is the melodramatic plot alone that derives from Patrick’s imagination.
It is not my purpose to analyse the story. With my mother excluded from the story, Pugh is a combination of Patrick as he really was, and in some respects what he wished to be. Pugh is a university Fellow at Oxford, who is preparing a learned tome on The Bestiary before Isidore of Seville. This was the topic selected by Patrick for a book he hoped would establish his scholarly credentials, on which he had worked in the British Museum before the War. He had also nurtured an early ambition to go up to Oxford, and enjoy the prestige of gaining academic qualification.
Pugh’s antecedents confirm the self-portrait. A forebear had established himself as a draper in Liverpool, while ‘my father, a sociable man, living in a time of acute social distinctions, felt the Liverpool-Welsh side of his ancestry keenly.[fn16] (#litres_trial_promo) He dropped all Welsh contacts and added his mother’s name, Aubrey, to ours. He had never cared for me to ask him about it.’[13] (#litres_trial_promo) Patrick’s grandfather had been a successful furrier in London, while his father embarked on a medical career. It is needless to emphasize the change of name, nor (in another context) the selection of ‘Aubrey’ as a gentlemanly alternative. (Pugh further has a close friend named Maturin!) For ‘Liverpool-Welsh’ may be read ‘German’, the original nationality of the Russ family.
The tall red-haired farmer Emyr Vaughan is Patrick’s neighbour Harri Roberts, while his comely wife Bessie provided the model for Bronwen, tragic heroine of the novel.[fn17] (#litres_trial_promo) Readers may wonder, but for myself I doubt that Patrick himself indulged in serious fantasies about Bessie Roberts. He admired and appreciated attractive women, but was too innately monogamous and devoted to my mother to harbour dangerously improper thoughts. Bessie was simply the model for the fictional Bronwen. Moreover it was a dramatic requirement that the heroine be living immediately below the brooding Pugh in his tiny cottage, while the Roberts farm was the only house adjacent to Fron Wen.
The taxi driver who brings Pugh to his cottage at the beginning was in real life Griffi Roberts, owner of the garage at Gareg, while the gwas (farm boy) John, Pugh’s informant on Welsh lore, was Edgar Williams, our good friend who still lives in Croesor. The originals of other characters are less readily identified today, but there can be little doubt that they reflect to various degrees others with whom Patrick came in contact.
The unmistakable extent to which Patrick drew on real people for his novel dismayed his friend Walter Greenway, who had stayed with him in Cwm Croesor. As Walter later told me, he feared it could cause offence in the valley. However, cordial Christmas greetings and other occasional communications continued to be exchanged annually between Collioure and Cwm Croesor,[fn18] (#litres_trial_promo) and doubtless Patrick assumed with good reason that few if any people there were likely, or even able, to read a book published in English.
Three Bear Witness (his American publisher retained Patrick’s preferred title Testimonies) was written in 1950, and as my mother only began keeping a diary from January 1951 I do not know as much as I could wish about its composition. With the physical hardship and mental turmoil of life in Cwm Croesor distanced in time and space, Patrick could contemplate his former existence dispassionately, even with nostalgia. Observing the mountains above Collioure, he noted one day: ‘I love the absolute hardness and contrast of the mountain and just that pure sky: the Cnicht ridge had it often.’ At about the same time he jotted down this verse:
The raven of the Pyrenees
Cries harsh and folds his wings to fall.
On Moelwyn Mawr the watcher sees
The folded tumble, hears the call.[fn19] (#litres_trial_promo)
The contract for The Last Pool provided for the publisher’s retention of an option on his next book, together with an opportunity to consider the proposed book about Southern France. Four months later, on 1 February 1951, Patrick signed the contract for Three Bear Witness. It was in many ways an experimental work, with the imaginative contrivance of the protagonists interrogated in turn for their versions of the same events by an unidentified ‘Recording Angel’. In later life he recalled that ‘I do remember that writing parts of it quite destroyed me’. He also felt it was the best book he had written, and remembered the night he finished it:
‘I was writing very hard that evening, and at three in the morning I went like so on my desk,’ he says, folding himself over his elbows in an exhausted swoon. ‘When I knew it was done I had the feeling of achievement and loss simultaneously’.[14] (#litres_trial_promo)
Although Patrick, always ill at ease when conducting interviews, was on occasion prone to modify or embroider his memories, it does indeed seem likely that the book was written under considerable stress. Poverty at the little apartement at 39, rue Arago was extreme at the time, and there was no knowing whether anyone beyond my mother would appreciate a book that meant so much to him. In fact her initial reaction was one of disapproval: ‘P. finished T.B. which I did not like.’ However, I suspect this was due to alarm at the extent to which their kindly Welsh neighbours featured in largely recognizable guise throughout the tale. Or was she disturbed by its hero Pugh’s silent adoration of the attractive farmer’s wife next door?
At Secker & Warburg, on the other hand, his editor Roger Senhouse expressed approval. He added some reservations – what he conceived to be excessive use of Welsh words and placenames, a need to locate the ‘Recording Angel’ in time or space, ‘the whole conception of the physical side of Pugh’s infatuation needs careful revision’, and so forth. Since it does not appear that the manuscript or proof of the book has survived, we have only glimpses of its original state, and the alterations Patrick was persuaded to accept. As the contract was signed on 1 February 1951, and Senhouse’s fairly drastic ‘improvements’ were forwarded via Curtis Brown a fortnight later, the book must have made its mark as it stood. By March, however, Patrick was expressing extreme annoyance with Senhouse. When in August they learned that he had been in their neighbourhood, my mother wrote: ‘We are relieved to have been away from Collioure & to have missed him. You can tell by his letters he is a pansey.’[fn20] (#litres_trial_promo)
Although no one at his publisher’s could guess the extent to which Pugh represented a self-portrait, Patrick resented Senhouse’s verdict:
Character of Pugh. Naturally I don’t want to make him a romantic hero, but there is surely no reason why even a middle-aged scholar should be so unsympathetic. He gives himself away: his hypochondria, his lack of affection, his timidity … and ineptitude (as opposed to mere helplessness and vagueness). All this is really sordid, and as a result I have found something repellent about the idea of his being madly in love.
The criticism is not altogether unfair, and naturally could not take into account Patrick’s unconscious motive, which was I believe in part to purge himself of characteristics of which he continued deeply ashamed. Pugh is endowed with much of the ‘difficult’ side of Patrick’s character, while being denied almost any of his compensating virtues: his mischievous humour, exemplary patience, pertinacity, resilience, courage, unselfishness and generosity. The underlying confessional function of the book meant that a more balanced portrayal of the real-life Pugh might not have acted as confession at all. The same process may be detected in Patrick’s other largely autobiographical novels, The Catalans and Richard Temple. In the latter case, the protagonist provides an extensive confession of his earlier degraded (‘silly’) existence. Significantly, this confession is vouchsafed during a protracted spell of imprisonment and torture, inflicted in order to extract ‘the truth’, and concludes with Temple’s liberation (by the French Resistance). Although it does not appear that Patrick was ever formally admitted to the Catholic Church, he occasionally implied that he was a communicant, and it is not difficult to imagine how the confessional would have appealed to his deep-rooted feelings of shame and guilt.
On one point to which he attached importance, Patrick felt compelled to give way. His title Testimonies was objected to by his English publisher on grounds that ‘it sounds far more like a treatise on codicils, or last words and testaments’. Next: ‘Senhouse wrote: they (or he alone) want to change the title from Testimonies to Bronwen Vaughan. I am against it, but I don’t want to offend them just at this point, so I left it up to him if they feel very strongly about it.’
Finally, the publishers settled on Three Bear Witness.
In her diary my mother reports that Patrick continued to find Senhouse patronizing, petty-minded and obstructive. In March 1951, ‘P. sent C[urtis].B[rown]. a card this morning, worried for Manuscript, & this afternoon had a letter from C.B. with loathesome comments from Senhouse & “a femal[e] reader” on Testimonies.’
Another irritating obstruction, likewise apparently ascribable to Senhouse, was a perverse disregarding of Patrick’s request for inclusion of the dedication: À mes amis de Collioure. This was no empty gesture, and in due course he presented complimentary copies to friends and neighbours. He even managed to sell one to a more prosperous acquaintance.
By the end of the year Patrick declared he could no longer work with Senhouse, and Spencer Curtis Brown wrote to Fred Warburg:
The confidential part of this letter is that apparently Patrick O’Brien really does not get on at all well with Roger Senhouse, so that if you want to keep him on your list, as I hope you will do, it might be a good plan if you could take over most of the correspondence with him. I have never found him in any way a difficult author, and I don’t believe that you would do so.
Warburg had been away in New York during the early part of the year, and now promptly complied with Spencer’s suggestion. In due course Patrick was to wreak characteristic punishment on his troublesome editor. Nearly forty years later, in The Letter of Marque (London, 1988, p. 27), Stephen Maturin learns of the fate of ‘poor Senhouse’, who ascended into the sky in a hot-air balloon whose excessive supply of gas ensured that he ‘was never seen again’.
On 3 January 1952 Warburg sent Patrick strong praise for the book, which he had at last found time to read:
I think you have written an extremely promising first novel and indeed even better than that, for in many ways the novel shows a maturity of outlook and a power of construction which augurs well for the future. I cannot somehow take too much interest in your male hero, although he is clearly and distinctly drawn …
On this issue Warburg was broadly at one with Senhouse. After explaining his reasons, he continued:
But these minor criticisms pale before the accomplishment in other directions, above all the splendid rendering of the Welsh Hills and vales, villages and villagers, and the eternal life of the farms and the treatment of animals, and the surely magnificent description you give of the sheep shearing which stands out in my mind with a clarity and vividness which prove how well you have done it.
One issue on which Patrick expressed a forceful view was the design of the dustjacket. At Collioure his good friend Willy Mucha had agreed to provide an abstract illustration, an offer which Patrick was anxious to see implemented. As he pointed out to Senhouse, Mucha was an artist of considerable reputation: ‘Matisse, Dufy, Braque and Léger think highly of him. (They have given him pictures that I envy enormously).’ The suggestion was however declined by Secker, as also by Harcourt Brace in America, and the collaboration of novelist and painter had to await publication of the more appropriate vehicle of The Catalans.
Finally, there remained the delicate issue of the author’s customary biographical notice. Both the promptness with which he had despatched one for The Last Pool (subsequently mislaid by the publisher), and the accuracy of its information, suggest that it was he who provided that which appears on the back sleeve of Three Bear Witness:
Patrick O’Brian was born in 1914, and started writing early. He produced four books before the war, and also worked for many years, in Oxford, Paris and Italy, on a book on Bestiaries. Most of this valuable material was, however, lost in the war.
During the war he drove an ambulance in London during the blitz, and later joined the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office.
He and his wife lived at one time in a remote Welsh valley, where Mr. O’Brian fished, shot and hunted whenever possible. He is at present living on the Mediterranean coast of France.
It will be noted that this broadly accurate autobiographical notice contains no allusion to Ireland, still less any claim to Irish nationality or origin. A close paraphrase of this potted biography features on the dustjacket of the American edition of Patrick’s later work Lying in the Sun, which was entitled The Walker and other stories in the USA. However, there it begins with the additional words ‘Patrick O’Brian was born in the West of Ireland and educated in England.’ It looks as though this item was added by a copywriter at Harcourt Brace – especially as Patrick omitted the notice altogether in the English edition.
The extent to which well-intentioned publishers occasionally made up for Patrick’s dislike of supplying personal data is illustrated by a comment made by my mother in 1952: ‘Irish Writing came with N.L.T.P.T.R.A.;[fn21] (#litres_trial_promo) very surprised to find biographical notes after I’d refused them because P. doesn’t like it.’ Fortunately, this issue remained for the present a minor irritation. Two overriding concerns exercised Patrick and my mother throughout this critical period in their lives. How was he to relaunch his literary career? And, still more pressingly, how might the impoverished couple survive financially?

II (#ud404ce8f-77ed-5bd9-80e1-096e623b10d2)
The Catalans (#ud404ce8f-77ed-5bd9-80e1-096e623b10d2)
When a man wakes in the night and finds his head filled with remorse and bitter, old regret, if he chose he could reflect that no other man in the world would be suffering precisely that remorse nor exactly that regret … Of course, he would not choose to do so, for he would be too busy dodging about in his mind, trying to escape – unless, that is, he were occupied with feeling the wound to see how much it still hurt and trying to persuade himself that there was virtue in mere remorse.
Patrick O’Brian, ‘The Voluntary Patient’
With Secker & Warburg’s acceptance of Three Bear Witness in February 1951, Patrick had reason to feel confidence in his regenerated career as a writer. Not only was it his first adult novel, but the first novel he had published since Hussein in 1938. At last he had emerged from the creative chasm inflicted by the War with his accompanying personal crises of divorce and remarriage, followed by the dire impact of his troubled exile in North Wales.
At the same time, he had come to feel he had finally shed the oppressive effect of his father’s dark shadow. In the summer of 1949, shortly before his and my mother’s departure from Cwm Croesor, a solitary walk brought him to a precipitous, sunless valley amidst the mountains. ‘When I was going up to Llyn yr Adar there seemed to be a thing at the top of the high black barren cliff that forms the backside of Cnicht.’ What it was he found hard to identify:
I watched it for some time, but it did not move; and all the way along the valley I kept looking up, but it seemed immobile … When I came back it was still there. Gargoyle-ish, brooding, jutting out, small in the distance, but menacing and in control. The next time I went up to the lake it was not there.
This uncanny experience occurred when Patrick had attained the nadir of his increasingly frustrating Welsh exile, shortly before he made the dramatic decision to escape to sunny France. Returned from his walk, he wrote the powerful story ‘Naming Calls’, which was later published in The Last Pool. It recounts the terrifying experience of a writer who withdraws to a small house set in the sinister valley explored by Patrick. The tale concludes with the destruction of the frantic outcast, when a raging storm drives up the valley and dislodges ‘a vast mass of rock’ from the mountainside above: ‘Abel shrieked high and the door burst open, swinging wide and shuddering on its hinges.’ The elemental force of the tempest is unmistakably intended as an evocation of the man’s father, ‘a formidable, roaring tyrant’, whose spirit he had inadvertently conjured forth.
It is clear that Patrick had come to associate his oppressive malaise with his frequently bullying giant of a parent, who had repeatedly afflicted him with demoralizing terror during his infancy. Now, however, when in Three Bear Witness he adverted to the same uncanny episode, it was to dismiss it comfortingly as an unpleasant memory banished to the past. After a spasm of apprehension, ‘I felt positively merry – a glance upwards showed it there, of course, an insignificant rock, though curious. When I had finished my sandwiches it was gone.’[1] (#litres_trial_promo)
Unfortunately, the couple’s financial predicament remained as alarming as ever. Secker’s acceptance of Three Bear Witness brought only the briefest respite. An advance of £100 was contracted on 1 February 1951, half on acceptance and half at publication. Sympathetic to his client’s worrying predicament, Spencer Curtis Brown charitably forwarded him the second £50, which was not otherwise due to be paid for at least another year. ‘Even agents can have kind hearts on occasion,’ he wrote to the publisher, who failed however to reimburse Curtis Brown in turn. Sadly, Curtis Brown’s generosity was all but negated by the rapacious grasp of government. As my mother learned: ‘C.B. now has to deduct income tax at 9/- in the £: with that & his 10% Testimonies £100 has shrunk to £49.’
While the prospect of his novel’s publication went far to restore Patrick’s self-esteem, until it was published openings for further literary employment remained constricted.[fn1] (#litres_trial_promo) Shortly before their move to France, Patrick confessed to Warburg that he had ‘written himself out’, so far as short stories were concerned. Gradually, however, the colourful turbulence of Collioure brought him a fresh harvest of imaginative themes. During the year following November 1950, he composed no less than thirty-three short stories. Many were set in and around Collioure, drawing on his observations of the town, its inhabitants, customs and traditions.
Why then did he not launch at once into the work on Southern France, which he had discussed with Fred Warburg, and for which an option was stipulated in the contract for Three Bear Witness? It looks as though one of his recurrent failures of confidence inhibited his undertaking a full-scale book during the anticlimactic year which stretched between his completion of Three Bear Witness and its publication in the spring of 1952. Ever his own sternest critic, it was about this time that he penned this frank assessment of his approach to writing:
I often, or at least sometimes, like my writing when I am doing it, but so much more often I feel uneasy and ashamed afterwards. All the affectations, poses and ‘special’ attitudes stare out – hideously pimpled youth smirking in the looking-glass yet finds his confidence decay and enters a public room fingering himself – and often the ‘clever pieces’ appear shallow and dull as well as quite unauthoritative, the ‘poetic touches’ arty, long-winded and false, and dreadfully often the whole thing comes to pieces at the end – shuffles off in the lamest manner possible. This is because I think of a good beginning, grow excited and embark upon the story, taking it for granted that it will finish itself.
In November 1951 Patrick sent off his collection, provisionally entitled Samphire and Other Stories:
I have just posted the MS to Curtis Brown: yesterday I sent six stories to the New Yorker and one, with two poems, to Irish Writing.[fn2] (#litres_trial_promo) That they may prosper. The postage was very expensive: I did not think about Spain [for cheap postage] until this morning. But even so I do not think I would have posted them from there; they are too precious, and I want to hear soon. After re-reading and re-typing both, I am fairly sure that Samphire is much better than The Lemon: not so clever, much more concentrated (the Lemon tries to say too much and grows diffuse) and because of the hatred in it, more lovingly handled. So I have called the book Samphire and put that story first. It was a slimmer parcel than usual, but it is between 60 and 65 thousand … I feel rather low now, with the typewriter folded up and the MS gone: I regret my hurry; I could have polished more.
Sadly, disappointment swiftly followed. A month later Fred Warburg wrote to Curtis Brown:
I have now had a report on the new stories of Patrick O’Brian, SAMPHIRE, and some of them are good, though others seem to us basically to fail. However I think it is absolutely essential that we publish the novel now called THREE BEAR WITNESS instead of TESTIMONIES and see if we can do well with it before committing ourselves to further work from O’Brian particularly in the short story field.
Eventually most of the stories were published in book form, although not for some years. It was an eclectic selection that Patrick had despatched. ‘Samphire’, on which he particularly prided himself, is simply summarized. A young couple is walking beside a seacliff: he complacent, insensitive, and possessed of a tiresomely adolescent sense of humour; she a quiet, nervous, sensitive girl, whose nerves are stretched to breaking point by her husband’s relentlessly patronizing jocularity. When he stretches down to pick a sprig of samphire, she suddenly loses self-control and vainly attempts to push him over the edge. Even the insensitive soul to whom she is married recognizes with shock the impassable gulf suddenly opened between them, and realizes that nothing will ever be the same again.
In 1985, Patrick explained to the publisher Bell and Hyman how he came to write the story:
I was reflecting … as I walked along the cliffs that overhang the sea near our house [at Collioure], and a striking example occurred to me – that of a particularly elegant, intelligent woman who in her extreme and utterly inexperienced youth had married a bore or, at least a man who had developed into a bore, a didactic eternally prating bore. At some point in my walk I noticed some plants growing quite far down on the rock face: the lines about the samphire-gatherer in King Lear drifted into my mind, & as I walked on in a vague, uneasy state of the two notions combined and this took form without any conscious effort on my part.
This account is not entirely candid. The story makes uneasy reading for me, since the husband is unmistakably a recognizable, if uncharitable, portrait of my father, and the delicate young wife my mother, who was eighteen when they married. It was lingering guilt, I suspect, that impelled Patrick to write a story stressing that the marriage was doomed from the outset, regardless of intervention by any third party.
The extent to which Patrick at this experimental stage of his literary career utilized his fiction as an instrument of attack or defence in relation to aspects of his own life is exemplified by two other stories in the collection. In the first, ‘The Flower Pot’, a couple of Germans, living in what is manifestly Collioure, lovingly tend six flower pots on their windowsill. A fierce tramontane blows up, an increasing gale tearing through the streets: one of the pots is dislodged, and kills a fisherman below. The man responsible is filled with horror:
A man struck dead, or maimed for ever: struck down and by his fault. The great wave of hatred rising from the street. The foreigners at René’s have killed père Matthieu. The pointing and the great just wave of hate; and his head only, peering from the window, peering down to meet the hatred and the pointing.
One might imagine this gloomy little tale arose from a flight of fancy, but for this notice in my mother’s diary for St Patrick’s Day 1951:
P. finished the Flower Pot yesterday … after we had been on the jetty. There was a fantastic dry warm wind three days ago which knocked the pinks off bedroom window-sill. It landed just beside M. Ribeille, who only laughed. We felt terribly guilty & P. has fastened all the pots with wire.
Their dismay was understandable, but Patrick’s emphasis on the great wave of collective hatred arising against the hapless outsider plainly reflects his continuing sense of isolated insecurity, originating in the damaging circumstances of his solitary childhood.
Another tale illustrates Patrick’s propensity, at least in the early days of his literary career, to deploy his fiction as a weapon of psychic attack. ‘The Lemon’ concerns a man whose isolated existence has transformed him into a psychopath. The first part of the story comprises an arresting analysis of his bewildering condition, and its symptoms. Despite this, he is on good terms with his neighbours, who are:
working people, kind, sensible, very tolerant. Good people, my neighbours: all except the man and woman who kept the restaurant on the ground floor. They were a bad couple; the man a flashy, smarmy-haired little pompous rat; the woman a short-legged, hard-faced shrew of about forty … They drank heavily, quarrelled and screamed until dawn sometimes. Their place was frequented by their friends and by foreigners on the spree, and they bawled and sang and shrieked above the blaring wireless until four or five in the morning.
A sluttish waitress, ceaselessly singing loudly and tunelessly during the day, by night slept indiscriminately with the clientèle.
The restaurant in question is unmistakably Le Puits, which occupied the ground floor of the house in the rue Arago, two storeys below the flat in which Patrick and my mother lived. On 19 February my mother wearily recorded: ‘The Puits kept it up until 6 a.m.: an infernal racket.’ On 27 May Patrick stayed up most of the night writing ‘The Lemon’. In the story he (for I fear the nameless protagonist is he) creeps downstairs, removes the fuse controlling the lighting for the restaurant, and hurls a hand grenade (‘the lemon’) into the darkness. As he carefully restores the fuse and tiptoes back up to his apartement, a blinding flash and shattering roar proclaim the destruction of the entire crew of revellers in Le Puits. Ah, if only …[fn3] (#litres_trial_promo)
Of the thirty-three stories Patrick wrote during the year 1950–51, nine were never published. Of these, three (‘Federico’, ‘Moses Henry’ and ‘Fort Carré’) appear to be lost. The manuscripts of the remaining six are in my possession, and make interesting reading. ‘Mrs Disher’ concerns an old man’s confused reflections on his dying housekeeper, while ‘The Clerk’ explores a disturbing memory of medieval antisemitism encountered in a remote English town by a visiting enthusiast for church architecture.
‘George’ (which he retitled ‘The Tubercular Wonder’) is the most revealing of these unpublished tales in respect of Patrick’s own life. In the first volume of this biography, I suggested that it provides an illuminating exposé of his troubled state of mind at the time he began his secret affair with my mother, betraying an overriding sense of guilt in respect of his betrayed wife Elizabeth.[2] (#litres_trial_promo) The theme of another story, ‘Beef Tea’, recalls that of ‘Samphire’, with its dull and relentlessly facetious husband, who drives his long-suffering wife to insanity. It looks like a further attempt to dismiss the reproachful figure of my father, representing him as utterly impossible to live with.
The personal application of the story ‘A Minor Operation’, which is one of those published in the collection, speaks for itself. A young English couple come to live in an old French town by the sea. We learn that ‘they were virgins; virgins from principle, mystic and practical’. They are very poor, but so well liked by the inhabitants that they are continually sustained by regular gifts of food. Much of this popularity they put down to the ‘affectionate, well-mannered dog they had brought with them’. After a while Laurence is troubled by a severe affliction to his hand. Eventually an operation becomes necessary, which unexpectedly proves so sanguinary that the surgeons depart, leaving their patient for dead. However, he is not. Arising from the operating table, the victim races frantically back to his apartement, brutally kicks their beloved dog downstairs, and apparently (it is not entirely clear) kills his wife.
Patrick wrote the story on 12 and 13 June 1951, originally entitling it ‘A Nice Allegory’, and later ‘Hernia, Stranguary and Cysts’. That the couple is Patrick and my mother, and the dog their Buddug, is evident from the opening description. Three weeks earlier, my mother had written in her diary: ‘P. showed Dr Delcos swelling on his hand. It has to be removed.’ Five days later ‘P. had his hand done, fainted, poor P., is splinted & bound & in a sling.’ For over a fortnight he continued in great pain, suffering continual discharges of pus from the infected wound, and enjoying little sleep.
It looks as though this protracted suffering led Patrick, as in ‘The Lemon’, to reflect on how far an inordinate degree of psychological distress or physical pain might wholly distort a man’s nature, exposing the perilous fragility of the mind’s control over destructive elements of the subconscious. The threat is emphasized by the frenzied patient’s violent assault on the very beings to whom he is closest.
There exists what may be a tentative draft of the tale in one of Patrick’s notebooks. There he contemplates writing the story of ‘A very sensible childless pair [who] decide that the husband had best beget one on a healthy girl’. This he does, with predictably stressful effect on the wife. This perhaps appearing too trite or unrealistic a theme, it seems Patrick converted it into a savage melodrama, whose principal content derived from his own experience.
Another story written at this time is ‘William Temple’, which remains unpublished. Ultimately a precursor to Patrick’s novel Richard Temple (1962), it begins on an unmistakably autobiographical note. Like Patrick during his wartime service with Political Warfare Executive, Temple is employed by a branch of Intelligence whose members do not normally operate in occupied Europe. Again, I suspect like Patrick himself, ‘he had often pictured to himself William Temple as one of that great secret army that was being built up in France’. Unexpectedly, he is selected to be dropped on a special mission to the French Resistance ‘in the mountains between Spain and France’. After a realistic account of his reception by the maquis, he is diverted into a hunt for a magnificent boar, which he finally tracks down and shoots.
The story is very much longer than others written at this time, being reckoned by Patrick at 23,500 words. The indications are that it was at first intended as a novel, which for some reason came to an unanticipated halt. Possibly, with the (symbolic?) death of the boar, he simply found further inspiration lacking. At any rate, he decided to include it among the collection submitted to Fred Warburg. In view of its exceptional length, it was divided into two parts, oddly entitled ‘A Pair I’ and ‘A Pair II’. The adventure is fluently narrated, but from its length ill-suited to a collection of short stories.
Disheartened by Warburg’s rejection, Patrick brought his short-story writing to an abrupt close. Not until well over a year had passed did he attempt another. As his publisher pointed out, the twenty tales are widely varied in quality. Without straying into excessive analysis, it has to be said that in several cases the plots appear somewhat contrived, and I am inclined to suspect the baneful influence of Somerset Maugham in what appears to be Patrick’s apparent need to round off with a quirky or violent conclusion. Again, several stories are driven by a desire to sublimate personal fantasies, wish-fulfilments or resentments which do not always fully accord to dramatic requirement. More, too, might perhaps have been made of those descriptive passages at which Patrick excelled, evoking the Catalan people and their harsh but beguiling landscape.
Another possibility for generating desperately needed additional income occurred to Patrick at this time. In November 1951 Curtis Brown passed an enquiry to Fred Warburg: ‘Patrick asks if I know of any books which a publisher would like him to translate from the French. It occurs to me that he might be a very good translator. Have you by any chance any such book in mind?’
Warburg could offer nothing, and the proposal fell by the wayside. Eventually Curtis Brown was to be proved right, and Patrick became an admired translator of contemporary French writing. But another ten years were to pass before he was afforded opportunity to undertake that lucratively dependable employment.
Over the winter of 1950–51 the couple’s hopes were largely founded on the success of Three Bear Witness, for which Warburg had expressed such high regard. It was a desperately worrying time. In January 1952 my mother lamented that: ‘The year continues to go badly: Seckers don’t want W[illy Mucha]’s maquettes. Very much gloom.’ They were eager to have the dustjacket illustrated by their friend. At the beginning of the next month ‘Secker sent list with T.B.W. in it.’ A month later the strain had become almost unendurable: ‘I could not sleep for thinking of TBW, copies being liable to arrive any time now.’ Eventually, on 22 April, ‘TBW came; parcel on the stairs. P. infinitely kind, sat by me.’
Unhappily, the excitement proved ephemeral. Press reception in Britain was muted, and although one or two reviewers voiced approval of the book’s finer qualities, it slipped rapidly from public consciousness. For all their exceptional resilience and recurrent surges of optimism against hostile odds, for much of the time during the first two and a half years of their life in Collioure, Patrick and my mother found it hard to sustain their spirits. Foremost among concerns impossible to overlook was the grinding poverty of their existence, which continued poised on the brink of disaster.
Looking back, five months after their arrival in Collioure their bank balance stood at 600 francs (about 12 shillings). But for the unstinted generosity of their neighbours, and occasional contributions from my mother’s father, they could not possibly have survived. A year later my mother ruefully noted: ‘On Thursday the money had not arrived at the bank, so I borrowed 1000fr. The electricity came & demanded all we had save 5fr. so I went to Tante Alice for another 1000fr.’ In April 1951: ‘Accounts alarm me much: we spend far too much.’ By the end of that month: ‘Did month’s accounts: 11.000fr odd, much better. Two francs left in the house but will get bread and milk with “j’ai oublié mes sous & money should be at bank tomorrow”.’


Patrick and Willy Mucha
The year 1952 opened with the anguished query: ‘Can we live on 10.500 fr a month until July? We will try.’
For over two years they frequently went hungry. Having cooked a modest feast for St Patrick’s Day in 1951, my mother reflected: ‘We are so used now to very plain living that we cannot eat much at feasts, we have no capacity.’ For everyday diet: ‘We live mainly on new potatoes, fried bread & bread-and-marmalade.’ Much of their modest shopping was conducted across the frontier in Spain, where prices were much lower. This regularly involved my mother’s walking to Port Bou and back: a 34-mile round hike, traversing successive steep rocky ridges.
Patrick’s parting words on leaving Wales were: ‘if you’re going to be poor, it’s better to be poor in a warm country’. This was to prove true in some respects, and the couple grew adept at living off the land. On 3 September 1951 my mother ‘picked 4 lbs. of blackberries in the river bed, & we made about 5 lbs of jelly’. In the same week they went gathering figs in the mountains at Col de Mollo. The task proved hazardous as well as arduous. ‘Got a dozen ripe ones; trees covered in green ones … P. in tree and I underneath when a chasseur shot at us: shots spat all round. Coming home met Marraine who said the chasseurs are “très mal élevés”, & said Come & see her for some anchovies.’
After a time Patrick, who had been a keen fisherman in Cwm Croesor, took his rod to join men angling at night from the jetty, regularly returning with anything up to half-a-dozen tasty daurades (bream).
But this monotonous and erratic diet was largely seasonal, and there were lengthy spans when little or nothing was available to be picked or caught. They might scarcely have survived, had their sustenance not been supplemented by the wonderful generosity of the warm-hearted Colliourenchs. Typical entries in my mother’s diary read: ‘Mlle Margot called me in with great mystery & filled my basket with huge cauli., 4 eggs, a big onion & 6 oranges, all with hideous embarrassment; she could not meet my eye’; ‘Tante gave us viande hâchée & bones & pâté & a pot au feu’; ‘Mlle Margot brought us 13 fresh eggs & a litre of ? Banyuls “pour demain”’ (Easter Day).
My parents never forgot this kindness, and remained lifelong friends with many of their affectionate neighbours, a sadly diminishing handful of whom remain. Within such a tight-knit community, mutual concern and charitable support were taken for granted. Links of family and friendship permeated the town. When the electrician Cadène was electrocuted at work, some 1,500 people attended his funeral. An incomer, having bought a house in the town, sought to eject the tenants on grounds that they had lately failed to pay rent. The husband had in fact always paid, but on falling ill temporarily proved insolvent. The huissier (bailiff) arrived, together with a removal van, to enforce their departure. The town rose in anger, and, despite the appearance of gendarmes from Port-Vendres, refused to permit the ejection. The van driver declared that he would not have accepted the employment, had he known it was not an ordinary removal, while the ringleader of the town’s resistance was discovered to be gentle Dr Delcos.
The Colliourenchs also possessed enchanting natural courtesy. When King George VI died in 1952, ‘Women come up & say how sorry about King, tears running down their faces. Tricolor at half-mast in place & at post office.’ Women in the shops explained to each other, as my mother passed by, ‘c’est son roi à Madame.’
One neighbour remained for some reason dubious about the extent of this Christian spirit, expressing her view with that decisive emphasis that characterizes the true Colliourencque. At the time of Odette Bernardi’s difficult divorce, my mother ‘offered that O. would be happier if F[rançois]. were to remove her from here, Mlle. M[argot]. agreed “parce que c’est un pays de perdition, Collioure”. She repeated this many times, saying that we do not know – the terrible character of Collioure, unlike any other village.’
As my mother commented on encountering such baffling pronouncements: ‘eh?’
In view of their life of constant privation, it is not surprising that she and Patrick were rarely free from one ailment or another. From June 1950 ‘medecine’ and ‘chemist’ feature remorselessly in their monthly household accounts. In February 1951, ‘P. looked & felt terribly poorly on the 17
’. Dr Delcos paid regular visits, presenting no bill until that May, when additional expense arose from treatment of the dangerous cyst in Patrick’s hand. In February 1952 ‘P’s rheumatism very bad’; a few weeks later ‘P. went to dr. & had his left ear completely cleaned but it is stone deaf still. The right one hurt dreadfully. He came out with shirt wet through.’ A persistent requirement was medicine for his ‘nerves’. Similarly, my mother was visited by recurrent afflictions: ‘My tum in bad condition’; ‘I slept all afternoon – had vile headache’; ‘Medecine [M’s liver] 530 [francs]’.
Some of Patrick’s troubles appear to have stemmed from unremitting mental strain. ‘Medicine [P’s nervous turn]’, reads a characteristic entry in their account book. A bad attack, the nature of which is obscure, occurred in May 1952, when my mother was staying with her parents in England. At dinner with their neighbours the Rimbauds:
I smoked. In spite of pills I felt the usual trouble coming on, but escaped in time on pretext of seeking Almanach Catalá – on the stairs wondered very much where I was – at home (still on all fours) recovered with dear Buddug’s aid (she was very kind on finding that it was not all a great game, and stood quite still, just touching my face) washed, returned in reasonably good form, and was able to finish the evening without, I hope and trust, throwing any damp.
About this time Patrick compiled a six-page essay, perhaps with a vague view to publication, entitled ‘How to make the best of poverty’. The advice is pragmatic, being based on daily experience:
If you have to go a month on x p[ennies]. you must make do on
fr. the first day, and on each day after that. Never rely on any bank, friend, publisher or business person to send money on a given day
Do not ever pretend to be rich, with the lower classes. Be as affable as can be with them, but always use a good deal of ceremony – M. and Mme., and formal greetings always.[fn4] (#litres_trial_promo) If you have to borrow money, do it before you are destitute. Once you have no money at all (literally none) your mind, your values, are terribly distorted.
Careful instructions are given providing advice on giving up smoking: ‘The first few days are hard, but your increasing sense of smugness will carry you through. You end up on a wonderful moral pinnacle, and if you ever start to smoke again they taste exceedingly good.’
When the worst comes to the worst, ‘Exceedingly weak tea without milk is a good drink, if you take it piping hot.’ Even Buddug’s concerns were taken into account: ‘If you have a dog, feed it before your meal begins. You will find it comes too hard at the end.’
With regard to making ends meet:
The food that you can afford when you are very poor needs a great deal of care and preparation to be anything but sickeningly dull. With very great care it can be surprisingly good – garlic, herbs (especially thyme and parsley) flour and a little oil rightly used can give plain potatoes soul and substance.[fn5] (#litres_trial_promo)
If there are two of you, you would be better advised to leap off a cliff than to allow wrangling to begin. As soon as you are wretched your subconscious, unsavoury mind begins to look about for a scapegoat: you must stop it from picking on the object nearest at hand – the almost invariable object, the loved one.
Furthermore, in a time of poverty you usually have little to do – you do not shop, you do not go out much, paid amusements stop, the sight of your acquaintance is unpleasant – so once quarrelling starts it goes on.
Regular daily routine was essential for preservation of morale:
It is important to maintain the appearance of ordinary life – regular meals (even if they consist of nothing at all but the thinnest tea), an afternoon walk. One has a tendency to stay in bed very late, to stop washing, not to shave … In extreme cases you must give in and go to bed but even then it can be done with a sort of decency. It is platitudinous to point out that you are much richer when you have reduced your needs to a minimum!
A poem written in the same notebook suggests the black despair which at times gripped him:
Sink: down in the grey sea
slowly down. The layers
silent, of depression. Down.
Through them.
No irritation, anger left
no hint of red
all grey dull and silence welling
up past your ears.
You sink your head
Down. Breathing slow
Down. Eyes unfocussed
One tear creeps down the bent
ash dying face.
As in North Wales during the summer of 1949, the prospect of death returned to haunt Patrick. At the end of April 1951, ‘P. said after yesterday’s tennis he gets partial black-outs while playing, which connect with feeling of other-worldness – of playing at being alive: a game which might be stopped at any moment.’
On 20 October he ‘wrote his death dream’, and about that time composed this grim verse, entitled ‘You will come to it’:
Do not suppose their motions pantomime
Because the thing they dig is dark, unseen
The mattock and the shovel swing in time
A near approach will show you what they mean.
On 11 May 1951 my mother, more buoyant by nature, experienced a remarkable vision:
A Dream: I died, & arrived on a shore that struck me as being like Lundy, from across a big grey sea. I worried about P coming, & he arrived soon after.[fn6] (#litres_trial_promo) Was filled with immense feeling of relief because of two things: permanence in this existence, & continuence of free will // I am not aware of ever having felt unhappiness from the impermanence of this life, nor of regretting the loss of free will in the usual pre-conceived notion of Heaven. Have worked backwards & am now fully aware of both, though much comforted by the exceedingly vivid dream. The dream had no sequence of events, but was like a state of being. (That life there would go on for ever). (In the manner of owning a house instead of renting it).
Lundy is the island in the Bristol Channel where my mother spent many happy holidays when living as a girl in North Devon. What I am sure she did not know, is that it was regarded by the pagan Celts as a location of the Otherworld, where the souls of the dead are received.[fn7] (#litres_trial_promo)
The couple endured this extreme poverty for well over two years. It was on 2 May 1952 that their affairs suddenly altered dramatically for the better. Publication of Three Bear Witness had proved a material disappointment, both in reviews and sales. But good news was on the way.
‘I was scrubbing the black hole floor’, wrote my mother,
when P. came in almost breathless saying ‘Such news, M’. It was S.C.B.’s [Spencer Curtis Brown] letter to say Harcourt, Brace want TBW [to be called Questions & Answers over there] for 750 dollars. Quite knocked up, both of us … For the first time on such an occasion we are not wild: no rushings out & spendings, nor the desire to do so. Could eat but little lunch, anyway … We walked to P. Vendres after tea, feeling upset & disturbed with our wealth. Saw wirelesses, but spent nothing.
Six days later Curtis Brown sent news almost as exciting. The American advance was to be sent direct to France, which, with a modicum of discretion, meant they need not pay the penal British income tax! ‘We are so happy & settled in our economy that this wealth worries us,’ exclaimed my mother. Charming prospects opened up on every side. ‘We plan a 3000 mile round trip of Spain & Portugal’; ‘Take many turns around Collioure in a day, to look at cars.’ As concerns the latter, it is fortunate that they were not able to anticipate just how premonitory was to prove a sight glimpsed by my mother, given their alarming proclivity for experiencing traffic crashes: ‘On way home [from the dentist in Elne] saw vast car turned on its side in ditch, eh?’ Patrick did not as yet possess a driving licence, being content for the present for my mother to take the wheel.
Excited plans began for purchase of a car, while Patrick further contemplated buying a sailing boat which was for sale in the harbour. The latter disappointingly turned out to be in too poor condition to be worth even the modest 8,000 francs demanded, but a car they had to have. The noisy and crowded little streets of Collioure appeared ever more unbearably claustrophobic, and they longed for means of occasional escape. Friends in England offered them their Opel for £100, an offer so enticing that my mother travelled to London in July to bring it back, but from the moment she arrived, everything began to go wrong. Additional expenses mounted by the hour: garage bill, ferry fare, tax, French import duty … my poor mother was in despair: ‘I think my heart is breaking & I never want to see the Opel again, and how I love P. and am utterly lonely.’
Eventually the Bank of England prohibited the Opel’s export, and the same afternoon another car rammed the wretched car, breaking an indicator and smashing a window.
Altogether my mother totted up that she had spent a precious £35 on this fruitless errand, and her despair was only alleviated when her father, with whom she stayed in Chelsea, gave her £20. Battered and exhausted, she returned to Collioure, accompanied by Patrick’s son Richard, who was now to spend his first summer holiday with them, camping in Andorra. After his eventual return to England my mother noted despairingly: ‘Street noises formid able’, and a week later she and Patrick returned by bus to Andorra in the hope of completing a house purchase they had planned during their visit to that country. In the event a pied-à-terre was sadly to prove beyond their means.
Life looked up in the latter part of the year, but even in their days of direst poverty they rarely allowed themselves to feel downcast for very long, no matter how heavily the dice appeared loaded against them. They swam, walked, sunbathed on the plage St Vincent, and when they could afford it played tennis on the baking-hot hard court in the moat of the Château Royal. The plage in particular provided an ever-present refuge from their claustrophobic little apartement, although it had its own occasional hazards – noisy tourists, rowdy children, and (for Patrick that June): ‘A disagreeable day … A gull shat all over me, the rug and Thos. Mann.’


Odette and Buddug on the plage St Vincent
Odette Boutet (then Bernardi) recalls an occasion when my mother and she swam the traversée across the harbour, from La Balette on the south side of the bay to the plage St Vincent opposite. It being the first swim of the season, and the water icy, on emerging they found they lacked strength for the return swim. Accordingly they walked back past the town and Port d’Avall in their bathing costumes. It was an unusual sight in those days, and the contrasted attractions of the two brown-limbed young women – Odette dark-haired and olive-skinned, and my mother fair-haired and blue-eyed – drew much attention from the (chiefly male, I assume) inhabitants along the way.
In the evenings they read, played chess, or engaged in an improvised form of bridge for two. Although an enthusiast for both games, Patrick was (like Stephen Maturin) but a middling achiever at such pastimes, who more often than not found himself beaten by my mother. Once, after a particularly hard-fought contest, Patrick wrote defiantly on the score-sheet: ‘Bridge, a silly game. BY ORDER P. O’BRIAN. SEPT 1951’.
Ever adventurous, from time to time they escaped the town to explore the mountains. Their close friend Odette, who was quite as audacious, frequently accompanied them. In June 1951 the three of them (five, including Buddug and Odette’s dog Rubill) travelled on foot to the forest behind the Tour Massane, where they camped beside the wood. That night boars could be heard grunting close by. Peering from their tents at the moonlit glade, they were alarmed to discover a large female boar leading her offspring, and quickly clasped the dogs’ muzzles to prevent their alerting the irascible parent. The expedition was voted a great success on their return, despite Odette’s temporarily losing her voice from exhaustion.
Next month they set off on a much more ambitious expedition, camping for nearly seven weeks in and around Andorra. As ever, they found the little Pyrenean principality entirely beautiful, and largely untouched by the modern world. After a week they were joined by Odette and Rubill. The latter was promptly attacked by four fierce dogs, from which she was barely saved by the two courageous women. So far from displaying gratitude, Rubill constantly eyed their provisions, only to be as regularly forestalled by the vigilant Buddug. Prices in Andorra were much lower than in France, farmers hospitable to the campers, and the weather benign. Their diet was supplemented by wild strawberries and trout from mountain streams. Buildings were picturesquely medieval, and transport off the few main roads was conducted by cows drawing haycarts, while on steep slopes mules dragged loads of hay on angled wooden platforms.
Fortunately the dauntless campers were hardy, and carried on their backs tents, sleeping bags, cooking utensils, and even a heavy wind-up gramophone and collection of records. Odette remembered their dancing under the moonlight to Bach and Beethoven. It was on this or another of their expeditions that she recalled their getting lost one day in a heavy mist. After hours of more and more anxious wandering, they stumbled at last on their camp, having unwittingly strayed in a wide circle. Despite their hardihood, femininity persisted. Venturing beyond the camp to relieve themselves one day, the two young women were startled by a large snake, and fled shrieking back to safety.
In the meantime my parents’ concern was aroused by distressing news from Richard. As described earlier, Patrick was delighted when his son expressed ambition to join the Royal Navy. Nothing had been heard from him for some time, when on 23 May 1952 Patrick received what he described as ‘a sickening letter from Richard’. The news was indeed bad. He had failed the examination to Dartmouth, and the longed-for career was denied him. ‘I am very disappointed as I had worked hard and got nothing for it,’ he explained sadly. He possessed considerable natural aptitude for mathematics, and was skilled with his hands, but as he freely confessed was all but hopeless at exams. Regrettably, Patrick’s response has not survived. Given his own comparably abysmal experience, together with his understanding attitude towards similar disappointments on other occasions, I feel confident his reaction would have been supportive. Moreover, he knew that Richard was additionally occupied on Saturdays by such work as he could find to supplement his mother’s meagre income.
In July, as was mentioned earlier, Richard returned with my mother from London to Collioure, where he spent the summer holiday from July to September. (As the court judgment had ruled that Richard was to spend half of each summer holiday with his father, his mother clearly approved the extended arrangement.) This time he brought with him a good school report, and showed keen interest in joining the Merchant Navy. My parents had made extensive preparations, requiring further dangerous inroads into their ever-strained finances, to ensure that he had the most enjoyable holiday they could provide.
Tents, lilos and other camping gear having been purchased, on 8 August the little party set off crammed into an excursion bus full of excited boy scouts. Arrived once more in the mountains of Andorra, they encamped in pine forests. Here the modern world impinged barely at all. The first person they met was a cowherd, with ‘his woolly dogs; his cows are all round, many with bells’.[fn8] (#litres_trial_promo) Richard and Patrick went fishing in a nearby lake, and returned to one of my mother’s wonderful improvised meals: ‘Fries very successful; lunch today was chops, potatoes, garlic, onion & tomato stew. Dear Budd seems happy & eats heartily.’ She was on heat, but fortunately the herd’s dogs were all bitches, save one male incapacitated by age. After a swim in a nearby river, they returned to camp, where ‘golden eagles flew right over us, being mobbed by choughs or crows’.
Next day my mother went to obtain milk from the cowherd, who ‘was asleep under a rock with his arm round his pet lamb who had its head on his shoulder’. The excitement grew briefly too much for Richard, who was sick at supper. Next morning, however, he proved right as rain, and after lunch went on a further fishing expedition with his father. In their absence my mother picked bowls of bilberries and raspberries for lunch.
The herd proved to be guardian of the sheep of the commune of Encamp. Patrick asked whether a hut could be found for them to sleep in. While the cowherd enquired with the Consul of Encamp, Patrick set off to buy food and change money in the town of Andorra. Meanwhile, as my mother wrote in her diary that evening, ‘R. & I did nothing but laze, & we played piquet.’ The journey to Encamp was pursued along very rough forest tracks, and the next day Patrick succumbed to a bad attack combining fever and diarrhoea, which proved to be dysentery. For several days he remained in acute distress, the pain eventually alleviated by the local remedy of boiled rice, together with Entero-Viaform pills obtained from an Andorran chemist.
Richard, who continued in rude health, went off fishing again, and on his return was ‘very cheerful, keeps roaring from his tent’. Before long they were installed in primitive beehive huts used by the shepherds of Encamp. ‘R’s hut: how he worked at clearing & levelling the floor. P. crept over to look at it: it looks dangerous about its roof, is exposed & draughty but very, very beautiful.’
On 19 August my mother left Patrick, who remained sick in their camp, and obtained a lift to Andorra from a pleasant Frenchman. Arrived in the sleepy capital, she enquired about buying a home in the principality, as a refuge from the turmoil of town life in Collioure. By chance it was to the Consul of Encamp that she was directed for information, having been given a paper explaining the law on foreigners owning land in Andorra, together with a letter of introduction. After one and a quarter hours’ walk, my mother arrived in Encamp. At the Consul’s house, nine of his assembled relatives read the letter in turn: ‘some aloud’. This protracted introduction concluded, the Consul himself read the paper and letter, murmuring benignly: ‘Benez, Madame’ – but could not be pressed to name a price.
A visit afterwards with Patrick to inspect a suitable site involved a hair-raising drive by an accommodating local up a mountainside. My mother, normally immune to vertigo, confessed that she had ‘never been more frightened in my life as when we swerved fast round corners that cambred away into 10000 feet of abyss, on the outside of the road’. ‘Vous n’avez pas peur, Madame?’ enquired their driver solicitously. Frustratingly, it proved necessary to postpone the elusive question of the proposed purchase until after their return home, and they returned to camp ‘depressed, to fold & carry up tents’.
The great holiday adventure was drawing to a close: ‘Felt very sad to leave Andorra.’ After erratic journeyings by bus, they picked up the delightful touristic yellow train (it still runs) offering spectacular views of the Pyrenees, until they arrived at the picturesque fortified town of Villefranche de Conflent, in the narrow defile of the Têt. Finally, late on the evening of 23 August they arrived in Collioure, by which time even Buddug was exhausted.
Next day there was great excitement, when a massive backlog of correspondence awaiting their return at the post office was retrieved to be studied over breakfast. It included a parcel of complimentary copies of Testimonies from the USA, together with ‘Wonderful reviews from N.Y. Times & N.Y. Herald Tribune, Harper’s Bazaar wanting short stories’. Spencer Curtis Brown wrote to report that requests for foreign rights to the novel were pouring in – from Italy, Germany, Norway.
Despite his continuing ill-health and exhaustion, Patrick plunged back into his neglected writing. The holiday had been a brilliant success – if dangerously expensive. There remained but 55,000 francs (about £50) in their account. Nevertheless, he and my mother had decided that Richard, being now fourteen, should receive a quarterly allowance to spend as he chose. ‘Yesterday P. told R. about his £52 a year: R. much impressed & so pleasant about it.’ Naturally he could have had little idea of the sacrifice involved. A week later my worried mother ‘Went to P[ort]. Vendres & paid tax. So depressed.’
During the remaining fortnight of the holiday, Richard spent his days swimming, playing tennis, watching the sardana danced in the square, attending divine service at the old church by the harbour, and revelling in my mother’s rich cooking. ‘Made enormous rice – moules & sèches & all. Mme Oliva made us an ailloli. Dear R. likes everything.’ He made friends with Odette’s young son Robert, and travelled one day to Perpignan to buy a new chain for Buddug; on another he went to Port Bou on a shopping exped ition with my mother: ‘pleasant morning’. Willy Mucha invited him to stay with them whenever he liked. He made friends on every side. There was work, too, for him and my mother. At dawn on 4 September they were invited to assist René Aloujes with his vendange. They toiled from 6 a.m. until 9, paused for a hefty breakfast until 10.30, and continued until noon: ‘R. worked very well. Grapes not very good. A very steep, difficult vigne to work.’
In the evenings after supper the three stayed up playing endless games of racing demon and ‘prawns’ eyes’, in the company of Buddug, Pussit, and a new member of the family: ‘Kitten comes in to play; a very good, clean kitten.’
Eventually, the sad day arrived for Richard’s departure on 7 September. He was given a lively send-off, loaded with exciting gifts. The garrulous Willy Mucha bustled up, bearing a dried flying fish as a parting token. Finally, ‘R. got 7 pm train, so sad P & I: the house is dreary.’
A few days later they were rewarded with a letter, bubbling over with enthusiasm:
Thank you very much for a wonderful holiday; the boys will not believe my experiences, especially the golden-eagles. What a good time we all had. Thank you so much.
Andorra was about the most marvellous country that I have ever been to. What fishing it was! What fun it was in the camp …
Very [sic] thing was in tact and whole when I got home: even to scorpion and flying-fish and mostofall my porron.[fn9] (#litres_trial_promo) I have a huge collection now dominated by my banderilla. Every-body shrinks from the scorpion, believing it to be alive. My precious [Andorran] flag is now the envy of all the boys at school who are extremely jelous …
The whole form, one and all and dumbfounded when I produced the [clasp] knife.[fn10] (#litres_trial_promo) One boy produced a ‘sharp knife’, he skinned his arm but did not cut hair, all he succeeded in was cutting himself.
In addition, Patrick had concealed a sophisticated fishing reel in his luggage at departure, which further excited his friends’ admiration. As Richard explained, this was ‘a pleasant and exciting surprise’, especially as ‘Finn and Atkins, both seized with fishing mania have reels, not of my superior type … I am very much envied in that way to.’
With the reticence characteristic of schoolboys in those distant unsentimental days, Richard omitted to report a distressing aspect of his otherwise triumphant return to Cardinal Vaughan School. As before, I am indebted to his friend Bob Broeder for this revealing account:
When we returned to school for the autumn term, our English teacher set us the task of writing a composition about what we did in the summer holidays. Most of us wrote the usual mundane contents but Richard wrote a masterpiece, describing his journey to the South of France and how he and his father met and spent some time with El Cordobes a renowned Spanish bullfighter.[fn11] (#litres_trial_promo)
Having read it myself I admired his descriptive narrative, his English was marvellous, remarkable and interesting, his father had taught him well. The next time we had English, the teacher handed all the exercise books back to all the pupils except Richard. In front of the whole class the teacher made the announcement that he had asked for a factual essay, not an imaginary one – holding Richard’s up to the class. This, he declared, was the work of a fertile imagination without an ounce of reality. I stood up to protest – saying I had postcards to prove that in no way did imagination play any part in his beautiful essay but was told in no uncertain terms to shut up and to sit down, if I didn’t obey the outcome would be a trip to the Discipline master with the inevitable thrashing. It goes without saying that Richard was distraught and very angry. I clearly remember that both I and several classmates tried to console him but the anger had never left him during the rest of his time at the school. I remember his mother was also very upset.
Richard’s indignation was fully justified, but his exceptional capacity to harbour resentment may also be noted.
Back in Collioure, Patrick and my mother had resumed their daily struggle. There were compensations to their existence, however. Much of the physical structure of the town stems from medieval times, and among the population there breathed memories of a picturesque past. While most of the inhabitants are Roman Catholics, there has long been a sizeable Protestant minority, who congregate at their Temple above the Château Royal. Relations between these two branches of the Christian religion have traditionally long been cordial. The only hint of disparagement I heard of occurred in the name of a local pastry, known as a jésuite. Gazing through the window of the pâtisserie in the Port d’Avall, Patrick explained to me that when you bite into one – it proves to be hollow!
At the time he and my mother arrived in the town, there survived numerous customs and practices redolent of beliefs older even than the conversion to Christianity. Popular theology could be a trifle speculative – as this exchange recorded by my mother on May Day 1954 attests:
When I arrived at Mimi Choux’s this morning she was in the middle of condemning someone for stating that angels are bald. ‘N’est-ce pas, Madame O’Brian, que dans toutes les reproductions les anges ont toujours les cheveux bouclés?’[fn12] (#litres_trial_promo)
A generally equable syncretism between the Church and pagan practices and beliefs survived locally well into the middle of the twentieth century. It was quite common for brides to appear in an advanced state of pregnancy at their weddings. ‘About the number of marriages with the girl pregnant’, my mother was told, it is ‘quite natural, people rigole [laugh] and joke but are not méchants with the girl; there is no onus [blame] on the man at all.’
A curious custom which might have suggested anticlericalism or simple hooliganism was evidently neither, and bore a significance now possibly lost:
Also asked Rimbaud about the bands of youths banging on curé’s door. He says it is ‘sans méchanceté’ & has always been done (he was v. active in his time) & nobody really minds. They bang on the doors of their young women. If dégâts [damage] result, complaints are made to mayor & youths pay up, but it doesn’t go to the police.
A practice of having a sprig of hawthorn blessed by the curé taken to the fields to ensure a good harvest presumably reflected the archaic folk belief that its prickles repel witches, ever prowling abroad with the malign intent of blighting the crops of honest Christians.[3] (#litres_trial_promo)
Not all magic was benign, however:
Mme Rimbaud’s tale: yesterday, she alone in the house, a woman selling lace. I don’t want any lace. And why don’t you want any lace? Because I don’t want any lace. Then the woman said if she would not buy any lace, she, who knew how to tell the cards, would put a ‘malédiction’ on her. That evening she had such a head she did not know whether it was the result of the malediction, or what.
Fortunately there existed magical cures, as well as curses. The Rimbauds ‘had an old woman in to cure [their daughter] Martine with a herb cataplasm’. An interesting ritual efficaciously removed headaches. On 10 July 1953, completion of a difficult piece of writing left Patrick with an acute migraine. Next day their landlord, M. Germa:
told us Georgette [his wife] was having the sun taken out of her head by her mother, with water in a bottle, & prayers. We demurred, & he said he believed it because Jaquie had had it done (bubbles rose in the bottle of water) & three days after his sick headache had gone.
On another occasion Mme Rimbaud similarly had the sun removed from her head by a cousin. When my mother enquired how this was done, she mentioned not only the bottle, but ‘a handkerchief folded in a certain way, “et certainement qu’elle en a dit des prières. Je ne sais pas, moi.”’ The disclaimer suggests that the ‘prières’ may not have been altogether Christian in character.
A particularly potent author of cures was the martyr St Blaise, who, as a consequence of his miraculous survival of strangulation or decapitation (accounts differ), specialized in healing sore throats.[4] (#litres_trial_promo) When my mother was confined to bed with a severe cold, ‘Mimi Chou kindly gave me a packet of lump sugar & pastilles blessed on St Blaise’s day.’ On another occasion she regaled her with a detailed account of the healing process. Saint Blaise being outside Collioure for a stroll one day with Our Lord, the pair bumped into Satan, who coolly informed them: ‘I’m off to strangle someone.’ ‘Nong, Nong, Nong!’ exclaimed Jesus and Blaise together, in pronounced Catalan accents: ‘You’re not doing that!’ This pious narrative acted as preface to the charm that effected the cure: a formula strongly characteristic of pagan ritual, in which Christian figures were frequently substituted for their heathen predecessors.[5] (#litres_trial_promo)
The calendar year was marked by a succession of colourful festivals. On 27 February 1952 Patrick was delighted by the Mardi Gras carnival, which he observed from their balcony winding joyously along the rue Arago, and then descended to follow it to the Place de la Mairie. There were fine floats, followed by men disguised as bears and monkeys:
I saw them pass down the boulevard and then arrive in the Place: immense crowd, charmed: Diego lost in delight. Music – a band to each float. Funny remarks on floats all written in French. Attention Ours méchants et singe vicieu [‘dangerous bears and vicious monkey’] … Remarkable dancing of 2 pairs of mariés [married couples]. Immobility of masks: singe (sacking? young Germa) probably making singe faces underneath; but quite invisible – vast addition to general effect. Mlle Margot convulsed by bears – pointing, laughing, red in the face with pleasure. M. le Curé not visible – no wonder – Ash Wednesday. Religious aspect quite lost to view … Many children dressed up – rouged, powdered – some in Catalan dress – attractive – some as F[airy]. Queens or some such – less attractive.
Each year on Ascension Day an assemblage of small children, beautifully dressed, gathered outside the church to attend their first Communion. The quatorze juillet was in contrast a comparatively modest bucolic occasion. ‘Procession has just passed up the rue,’ noted my mother, ‘small boys carrying torches or tricolors, with the garde-champêtre [local policeman], followed by local band.’ In the evening there was dancing in the Place, and a display of fireworks in and around the bay. The cheerful informality of the occasion delighted Patrick, who another year was gratified to record: ‘Fête Nationale: very scruffy procession except [Dr] Delcos in his tricolore sash.’
Patrick made notes on customs and other items of local interest, such as this recipe for ridding a child of worms: ‘Le bon vermifuge[:] frot the child’s bosom with garlic and hang a necklace of garlic round the child’s neck ça les étouffe.’ He further compiled a list of ‘Sobriquets’ of local families, some of which feature in his novel The Catalans. Thus one bore the surname ‘L’Empereur – because when he was a baby the Emperor dandled him’. Patrick told me this occurred when Napoleon III was passing through Collioure. At the other political extreme was the family Cravatrouge (Catalan En cravat rougt), one of whom had been ‘le premier radical’ of the town. Another is of mysterious provenance: Piétine dans la boue (‘Trample in the Mud’): Catalan Pitg a fangc.
The French Republic being a relative newcomer in Collioure’s ancient history,[fn13] (#litres_trial_promo) the town’s major annual celebration is the Feast of St Vincent, Collioure’s patron saint, on 16 August. Until the beginning of the last century, when it was prohibited by the atheist administration of President Émile Combes, a boat bearing the saint’s relics plied from his little chapel on the rock across the harbour, to be ceremonially received on the beach by the curé with a ritual exchange conducted in Catalan.[6] (#litres_trial_promo) A bullfight in the town’s arena by the railway station was one of many celebrations marking the festive occasion. In 1953 my mother passed ‘Picasso visible in café des Sports – merry, pink, active. He was président of this year’s corrida.’ The evening’s firework display is especially magnificent, usually surpassing that of the quatorze juillet. On one such occasion in the early 1960s, we ascended the ridge above the house to obtain a panoramic view of cascades of fire erupting high into the night sky from the beach, as also from fishing boats moored about the harbour. The highlight of the evening occurred when the French Army, then occupying the Château Royal, blew up with one mighty roar what appeared to be their entire reserve of high explosive. From an invisible vineyard above us echoed an answering primitive bellow of approval from a solitary enthusiast, which greatly pleased Patrick.
It was not just innate curiosity which led him to conduct careful observation and recording of traditional ways in Collioure. Just before he left England in September 1949, it was seen earlier that he had agreed to write a book about Southern France for submission to his publishers, Secker & Warburg. Although he kept the project in mind, over two years were to pass before he hit on the idea of utilizing the knowledge he had acquired for the alternative purpose of writing a novel. Before that, the indications are that he planned a descriptive account of the life and landscape of the Côte Vermeille, and it was to that end that he noted its more colourful aspects, and encouraged my mother to record observations in her diary. Naturally gregarious, consorting daily with shopkeepers and neighbours, and being more proficient in French and Catalan than Patrick, she was the more productive worker in this field.
It was during the summer of 1951 that the idea of writing a novel with Collioure as its picturesque setting had germinated in Patrick’s mind. He and my mother had become concerned with, and to some extent involved in, the divorce of their good friend Odette. On 2 March 1951 my mother accompanied her and her father to lend support in a hearing at the court in Céret. Odette’s husband François Bernardi, a successful sculptor and painter, had deserted her for an older but extremely beautiful woman. Next day Patrick sketched a plot based around the affair. Although his initial plan seems to have been to produce a short story, the scheme is sufficiently detailed to suggest the possibility of fuller treatment.
His initial reaction was one of indecision:
It sounds a commonplace little romance. Perhaps I could lift it out of the rut by showing the gradual development of Odette’s character – she should be mature at the end, and at last spiritually free of the [her] family’s domination – and the parallel development of François’ to something like unselfishness and honesty. The moral being that you have got to be free of domination (by cant or by family) before you are any good.
A great difficulty would be the presentation: it could hardly be done from outside (the all-knowing observer) and I hardly know whether I could manage it from inside each character.
Patrick does not appear to have been at all troubled by the possibility that informed readers might identify the protagonists. (His friend Walter Greenway was similarly concerned lest people in Cwm Croesor discover the extent of their potentially embarrassing portrayal in Three Bear Witness.) Nor, more surprisingly, does this thought seem to have worried my mother. It seems they generally espoused the view that Patrick’s literary work stood apart from the material world: connections between them hardly mattered. Equally, they may not unreasonably have assumed that no one in Collioure was likely to read the book.
In October my parents assisted in bringing in the grape harvest. ‘Vendanged for Vincent Atxer’, noted my mother. ‘Too long, did not like the V[incent].A[txer].s. O[dette]. was there, objectionable. Told us the équipe [working party] in the plains was very grossier [coarse]. Youths rolled women in the dust, took girl’s trousers off.’[fn14] (#litres_trial_promo) Next day there was a further vendange, at which my mother was evidently annoyed by ‘O[dette]. horseplay moustissing the men.’[fn15] (#litres_trial_promo) On the third day my mother and Patrick ‘Worked from 8.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. Beastly children. Very, very fatigued.’ My mother was far from being a prude, and it is possible that she objected to Patrick’s observing their beautiful friend behaving in so wantonly provocative a manner. The sultry Odette was a lissom creature of the South, who amid the grape harvest under the burning sun appeared almost an elemental being.[fn16] (#litres_trial_promo)
Four days later, Patrick ‘sketched out vendange tale’. It seems likely that this was the basis of chapter VIII of The Catalans, with its vivid depiction of the exhausting physical labour and pain incurred in gathering the grapes, together with the erotically charged relationship between the intellectual outsider, Alain Roig, and the lovely Catalan girl Madeleine, who has been deserted by her painter husband Francisco. The episode builds up to a heated climax, with Alain’s symbolic rape of Madeleine:
With a quick pace he was up to her. He knocked her to the ground. She fell on her knees, and crouching over her he gripped her hair and ears, pressed his teeth hard against her forehead, and in the surrounding cries and laughter he crowed three times, loud like a cock.
Patrick appears at first to have remained undecided precisely what use he might make of these possibilities, until on 18 December he took my mother for a walk up to the Madeloc tower. It was a beautiful day: passing the old barracks (which at one point they envisaged as a permanent refuge from the town), with partridges flying around, they collected wild daffodil bulbs to plant in their window box. Buddug cavorted, madly hunting and catching nothing. As they walked, Patrick for the first time unfolded his idea for a novel on the theme of life among the local Catalans.
Patrick, toying with various approaches to his novel, was struck down yet again by one of his nervous attacks and retired to bed, where he received the usual medication. So bad was the bout on this occasion, that he had to force himself not to think of the book lest the pangs recur. Not until 9 January 1952 did he recover sufficiently to begin working on it. At the end of the month my mother called on Odette to collect information about the social structure of the town, a factor which was to be vividly delineated in the novel. On 6 February ‘P. showed me first chapter of novel: terribly impressed & happy.’ With my mother’s enthusiasm buoying him up, Patrick now found the book advancing with increasing satisfaction. Despite intermittent setbacks and misgivings, he worked throughout the summer, until he finally laid down his pen on 12 September. ‘Much fatigued & terribly pale, kept lying on bed feeling faint,’ as my concerned mother noted.
However, the task was completed, and both were enthusiastic over the result. In May Patrick had toyed with the title Interested Motives, but eventually settled on The Catalans. My mother threw herself into typing the text, and on 2 October copies were sent to Harcourt Brace in New York, and Rupert Hart-Davis in London.
No sooner were the parcels despatched, than an anticlimactic reaction set in. On 5 November ‘Nervous tension over Catalans suddenly overwhelming. It matters so hideously.’ Might it suffer the same distressing fate as the collection of short stories, on which such high hopes had been pinned?
Three weeks passed by, during which they attempted to distract themselves with household improvements. ‘Wait, wait, wait, for post.’ Finally, on 26 November 1952, came news as good as might be hoped for. A telegram arrived from Naomi Burton at Curtis Brown in New York, announcing that Harcourt Brace had offered to take The Catalans at the same rate as Testimonies. Since the book was complete, they would shortly receive a second time within the year the princely sum of $750, tax-free!
Exultation reigned in the little apartement. ‘Very, very happy,’ rejoiced my mother. Patrick promptly wrote to Andorra concerning the building plot for which they had been negotiating. Then they jumped up, and ‘walked to P[ort]. Vendres without noticing the way’. My mother was ‘unable to resist giving P. gloves, camera (whose shutter won’t work & Patau [the photographer] is shut) & pineapple in tin. All these were for his birthday’ on 12 December. Three days later the contract arrived.
The book represents in many ways a tribute to the rugged land he had come to love, and its lively inhabitants. Among them they now had many fast friends, and were accepted as honorary Colliourenchs. It is the more fortunate, consequently, that the novel was not translated at the time into French or Catalan, since it included matter that must surely have provoked offence and dismay in some quarters.
The greatest pleasure I derive from Patrick’s novel lies in the exquisite evocation of Collioure (barely disguised as ‘Saint-Felíu’), and its stark hinterland of vineyards and mountains. Here is enshrined forever the old Collioure, before the destruction of ancient customs, language, clothing, music; the end of the fishing industry, and the building of rank upon rank of lotissements on the skirts of the town. Fortunately, enough of the old town survives in physical form for it to be possible to people it again in imagination, viewed in the light of Patrick’s loving recreation in The Catalans.
Several of his extended pen portraits are taken from the life. The account of the vendange in chapter VIII, with its vivid depiction of the toil involved, culminating in Alain’s climactic ‘rape’ of the lubricious Madeleine, drew extensively on Patrick’s own experience during those three backbreaking days in October 1951, when Odette’s provocative behaviour privately scandalized my mother.[fn17] (#litres_trial_promo) Again, the festival in the central place of the town, recounted in chapter IX, echoes the Carnival witnessed by Patrick in February 1952.
For the biographer the book contains much of interest. The figure of Dr Alain Roig, returning from long exile in the Far East to resolve a domestic crisis at home, stands (like Pugh in Three Bear Witness) in material respects for Patrick himself. A detached, reflective outsider, he is concerned to observe and dissect the psychological turmoil by which he finds himself surrounded. At one point he ascends the town rampart, where he contemplates from on high the tumbled confusion of houses below:
He passed it carefully over in review, looking for changes and for known, personal landmarks. It was exactly as he remembered it, as he thought of it when he was away, exactly the same and yet with an additional strength of life, a vibrant immediacy: his memory, however sentimental with the distance, might not have provided the shrilling of the cicadas in the oleaster that grew tortuously from a crevice in the wall below, the play of the dancing, shimmering air, the flick and dart of the lizards, and the distant sound of men hauling on a boat.
This was what Patrick himself enjoyed, observing (at times with binoculars) the world from an inaccessible vantage-point, like the peregrine falcon in his adolescent short story of that title.
Familiar, too, from Patrick’s own experience are the internecine intrigue and feuding which Alain encounters among his family. The Roig family members represent in varying degree a dysfunctional collection, an affliction largely originating in the character of Alain’s deceased uncle: ‘an evil-tempered man, powerful, dom ineering, and restless; a ferocious domestic bully. It was not that Alain blamed his Uncle Hercule then; he accepted him as a force of nature and hated him without forming any judgment.’
All this is too close to Patrick’s experience of his oppressive father Charles Russ for coincidence, and the damaging effect he exerted in varying degrees on his offspring.
Alain’s return to Saint-Felíu arose from a summons to save his cousin Xavier, Uncle Hercule’s son, from what leading members of the family regard as a wholly inappropriate marriage. Alain himself ‘was sorry for Xavier … There was something very moving, in those days, in the sight of that proud, cold young man being humiliated and bully-ragged, and bearing it with a pale, masked fortitude.’
There can be no doubt that Xavier is a figure similarly deriving from Patrick’s character and experience, and the relationship between the dead father and his young son mirrors closely his own experience.
Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the bullying father figure is the way that the distorted relationship repeats itself in succeeding generations. Despite (or rather, because of) his harsh upbringing, Xavier in turn replicates the tyrant in his relationship with his own son Dédé. Although resolved at first to treat the child with the kindness his father never gave him, Xavier grows more and more dissatisfied with the boy, finding him intolerably weak, inadequate and sly. He tries educating Dédé himself, but the child’s foolish frivolity and sullen impertinence goad him into subjecting him to repeated beatings. While acknowledging that he had become the oppressor he so loathed in his father, Xavier confesses himself now incapable of acting otherwise.
This unsavoury episode unmistakably reflects both Patrick’s assessment of his own nature as a child, and his treatment of his son Richard, when he rashly attempted to tutor him in Wales in 1948–49. In this respect the experiment proved miserable for both father and son, as Patrick himself appears to have acknowledged following his arrival in France. What persuaded him to revisit that unhappy time, above all making Xavier excoriate his son in repellently disparaging terms? The explanation is, I suspect, that here as elsewhere Patrick utilized his writing on occasion as means of exorcizing his own shortcomings. He possessed no confidant beyond my mother, and even with her it seems unlikely that he found himself able to enlarge on actions he had come to regard with profound shame. He successively employed his three autobiographical novels (Three Bear Witness, The Catalans and Richard Temple) as vehicles for such confessions. The approach was presumably effective, as thereafter he appears to have felt he had effectively exhausted the theme.[fn18] (#litres_trial_promo)
The extremity of Xavier’s cruelty, and the inadequacy of his justification, are so hyperbolical as to suggest that Patrick expected readers to find the first as repugnant as the second was implausible. I suspect that, by grossly exaggerating his own misconduct, Patrick privately acknowledged it as indefensible. Its function was plainly cathartic. From a biographical point of view, the section in question (chapter IV) should be read in context. Xavier’s savagely frank account of his neglect and ill-treatment of his wife and son is set in the form of a confession, accompanied by expressed desire for absolution. Finding his formal confession to the town priest inadequate, he confides his lack of humanity and consequent fear of damnation to his sympathetic cousin Alain. Alain himself represents an alternative personification of Patrick: the gentle, inquisitive, sage adviser, which is how I for one found him when he confronted problems affecting those close to him. Chapters VIII and IX of The Catalans, recounting events from Alain’s perspective, derive almost verbatim from Patrick’s own experience.
Thus, one underlying function of The Catalans is to provide Patrick’s own confession. More than once in conversation with me he adverted to the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, laying sardonic emphasis on the writer’s ingenuous account of his callous treatment of his children. Unsurprisingly, my mother observed that, on completion of Xavier’s bitter self-examination, Patrick found himself emotionally drained. ‘P. finished Chapter IV & got terribly depressed.’[9] (#litres_trial_promo)
The one person whom Patrick clearly would not have wished to understand the reality behind the father–son divide in The Catalans was his own son Richard. Equally, he must have appreciated the likelihood that the boy would read the book. As has already been seen, he followed his father’s literary career with filial pride. On learning in October 1953 of the book’s completion, he supplied a practical suggestion:
I am very glad to hear that you are having a holiday after completing the book. It seems to me that no sooner is one book out than you have finished another. Instead of writing with your hand why not get a tape machine or some such gadget or would that wreck everything? I do hope it comes out as you would wish it.
Next July, he enquired of my mother:
Has Dad heard anything of the last novel, and what is the title. Over in one shop (bookshop) I was peering round and I heard a customer ask for The Frozen Flame [the title of the British edition of The Catalans]. It was a terrific thrill to hear that, especially when I know my father wrote it.
His friend Bob Broeder remembers the sensation this aroused at school: ‘Richard brought in a book written by his father, the book was called “The Frozen Flame” by Patrick O’Brian. Richard was very proud of this and the whole class were now more than happy to be associated with a boy whose father was an author.’
As has been seen, once Patrick had renounced the ill-considered scheme of acting as his son’s teacher, a renunciation which coincided with Richard’s arrival at years of discretion, their relationship became unremittingly warm. The boy proved more and more capable of appreciating the literature that Patrick loved. In January 1952 he sent Richard copies of Thackeray’s Henry Esmond and W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions. It is scarcely conceivable that in 1953 he would have published anything he believed likely to prove wounding to the boy. It seems he was confident that Xavier’s confession would be read purely as a literary construct.
Regarding the element of savage exaggeration in Xavier’s confession, it is further worth considering a linked episode (what Patrick himself terms ‘the parallel disaster’), in which his morbid concern to exaggerate the heinousness of his sin becomes yet more evident. Xavier acquires a dog, which proves disobedient and ill-behaved: so much so, that he thrashes it until he eventually ‘reduced it to a cowering, hysterical, incontinent, useless cur’.[10] (#litres_trial_promo)
Both Patrick and my mother were fond of dogs, and adored their own Welsh hunt terrier Buddug. In the early summer of 1952, while he was in the midst of writing The Catalans, my mother was obliged to visit England in pursuit of the disastrous Opel car. Always uneasy in her absence, Patrick became increasingly on edge as the days went by, and when after three weeks on the day of her expected return he received a telegram announcing its postponement to the following day, he found himself ‘feeling very much the pathetic poor one and generally angry. Poor Budd chose this one day to be bad, and I whipped her sore.’
The nature of her crime and the harshness of the punishment remain undisclosed. Two aspects are, however, clear. In the first place, Patrick was confessedly in an exceptional state of tension. Secondly, this was almost certainly the sole occasion on which the faithful Buddug was ever ‘whipped’. Not only is there no record in my mother’s diary of such an occurrence at any other time, but I am confident she would not have permitted it. It was surely this uncharacteristic episode that inspired Patrick’s awkwardly obtruded account of Xavier’s sadistic treatment of his dog. Patrick was deeply ashamed of having lost his temper with Buddug, and inserted the passage in his novel as a further form of exorcism or self-castigation.[fn19] (#litres_trial_promo)
Finally, on this significant topic, there remains Patrick’s passing allusion to the formal act of confession, which Xavier finds inadequately emollient when he repairs to the town curé, Father Sabatier. What he required was not a bland rite of forgiveness, but surgical exposure and extraction of the moral cancer of which his conscience accused him.
In 1960 he and my mother spent several months in London, coming every day to see me in hospital, where I was confined after a severe back operation. Despite the bitter circumstances of her divorce, my mother remained throughout her life deeply attached to the Russian Orthodox Church, in which she had married my father, and my sister and I were baptized. During this time she and Patrick became regular attenders at our Russian church in Emperor’s Gate, where they came to know and admire the parish priest. Father George Sheremetiev was a remarkable figure. Head of one of Russia’s greatest aristocratic families, he had previously been a cavalry officer in the Imperial Army. More importantly, he possessed a truly noble character: wise, perceptive, and holy in the truest sense. I regularly confessed to him, and like his other parishioners invariably found his admonitions perceptive and inspiring.
So impressed were my parents by Father George, that they asked him to marry them – their civil union of 1945 being unrecognized by the Church. Since Patrick would have appreciated from my mother how beneficial was the rite, it seems possible that he himself engaged in confession at this time – perhaps of an informal character. In the Aubrey–Maturin novels, Stephen Maturin is consistently portrayed as a Laodicean Catholic, verging on deism. However, after a particularly sumptuous dinner at Ashgrove Cottage, he congratulates Mrs Aubrey, adding jocularly: ‘When next I see Father George I shall have to admit to the sin of greed …’[11] (#litres_trial_promo) That Maturin had a confessor at all comes to the reader as a surprise, and that the latter bore so apparently English a name seems further anomalous (one would expect him to have been Irish or Catalan). On the one hand, we never read of Maturin’s participation in a Catholic service, while on the other numerous instances attest to Patrick’s pleasure in assigning the names of his acquaintances to characters in his books. Is this what happened here? Did Patrick eventually make the confession he had sought to express through his early novels?
I have dealt with the confessional element in The Catalans at some length, as it would be dangerously easy in the absence of knowledge of Patrick’s emotional state of mind to take Xavier’s rant against his son Dédé as a reflection of his own attitude towards his son Richard.[12] (#litres_trial_promo) In fact, given the warmth of their relationship at the time of writing, such an assumption appears wholly implaus ible. Furthermore, even had Patrick perversely decided to blackguard his own son in print, my mother would have registered the strongest objection. She loved the boy almost as much as she did his father. In December 1952, she wrote fondly: ‘Horrid letter from Mrs. Power [Elizabeth] about poor R., & letter from the school … Started V necked jersey for R. One of school complaints is that he wears my jersey, & Mrs P says he has lived in it since he got it. Cannot help feeling pleased.’
The year 1952 ended on a note of cautious optimism. My parents entertained high hopes for the success of The Catalans in the USA, and with luck in Britain too. Contemplating his next project, Patrick returned to notes he had compiled in the British Museum before the War for his planned book on medieval bestiaries. Hitherto the scheme had barely left the drawing board, but now as Christmas approached he completed a 10,000-word draft, which he planned to send with a synopsis of the remainder to his US and British publishers. In the event, it seems that their newly gained wealth allowed pleasurable distractions to interrupt the work sufficiently long for it to be abandoned permanently. It is a pity the draft has not survived, since his notes and provisional chapters in my possession indicate that Patrick could have produced an entertaining work on the subject.
All this is, however, to anticipate the book’s publication. It would be a year at least before The Catalans appeared in print, and what was to be done during the agonizing months of anticipation that lay ahead? Christmas drew near, with nothing happening as it should. On 19 December my mother was dismayed to find they had spent that year more than 60,000 francs on entertainment alone. The 22 of December proved worse: it was the ‘Black Day’, when they learned that the New Yorker had after all turned down the collection of stories submitted with such high hopes six weeks earlier. On Christmas Eve they received Richard’s school report: it likewise proved damning, provoking further depression. Christmas cards arrived, including one from Patrick’s stepmother Zoe, of whom he was very fond, and kind neighbours called with gifts. The festival was quietly enjoyed, but they decided they could not afford to give each other the customary presents.
Although the need for economy was pressing, they had managed to amass sufficient funds five days after Christmas to purchase for 100,000 francs a Citroën 2CV, popularly known as a ‘deux chevaux’. This was in due course to prove an even greater asset than the alternative prospect of an Andorran bolt-hole, which they now found themselves reluctantly obliged to abandon.

III (#ulink_a76134c5-399d-5984-8214-5f5ce8f83a3a)
New Home and New Family (#ulink_a76134c5-399d-5984-8214-5f5ce8f83a3a)
I descended a little on the Side of that delicious Valley, surveying it with a secret kind of Pleasure (though mix’d with other afflicting Thoughts) to think that this was all my own, that I was King and Lord of all this Country indefeasibly, and that I had a Right of Possession; and if I could convey it I might have it in Inheritance, as completely as any Lord of a Manor in England.
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
After more than three years’ stressful poverty in their little flat in Collioure, early in 1953 Patrick and my mother found their financial situation greatly improved by the warm reception his publishers accorded The Catalans. Since it had been submitted complete, substantial advances of $750 from Harcourt Brace in the States, and £100 from Hart-Davis in England, arrived at the beginning of the year.
Reviews proved encouraging. As a biographer I am primarily concerned with autobiographical aspects of the novel, but as a literary achievement it has gained high esteem. In 1991 the American novelist Stephen Becker wrote to Patrick:
I never told you how I enjoyed meeting an early (if older) version of Stephen [Maturin] in Alain Roig – and allow me to state that I found The Catalans not only first-rate but wise and moving … It is spacious and rich, and all of life is there – land and sea and sky, arts and sciences, food and drink, body and mind and spirit.
Constricted living conditions and the incessant cacophony of the narrow rue Arago had for some time made the couple long for a refuge in the countryside. Attempts to buy or build in Andorra had been frustrated, and despite encouraging praise for Patrick’s latest novel, their income remained too unpredictable to accumulate any capital of substance.
However, these unexpectedly large advances had at least enabled them to buy a car, which afforded means of escape from their stiflingly constrained existence. In the New Year, they found themselves in a position to fulfil this dream. They bought their little deux chevaux in Perpignan, which filled them with delight. Patrick noted that the number-plate included an M for Mary, and my mother ecstatically confided to her diary: ‘Car dépasses all our expectations in every way.’ Kind Tante Alice, the butcher, let them use her abattoir for a garage, and that day they drove the car up to the rim of the castle glacis, where it was formally photographed. Proud Buddug perched inside, no doubt foreseeing further camping expeditions.


The deux chevaux
If so, she was right. After a couple of days spent motoring happily around the neighbourhood, the three of them set forth on their long-deferred major expedition around the Iberian peninsula. On 21 January 1953 they drove over the Pyrenees by the pass at Le Perthus, arriving in Valencia two days later. Patrick was concerned that precious memories of a journey from which he hoped to profit might fade, and began keeping a detailed journal.
The moment they entered Spain, they were confronted by the homely ways of that then picturesque land, when solicitous customs officers asked them to take a stranded woman with them as far as Figueras. At Tarragona, Patrick was delighted by the prospect of the cathedral by night: ‘It was very much bigger than I had expected, and far nobler. Wonderful dramatic inner courts all lit by dim lanterns – bold low arches – theatrical staircases.’
He experienced an uncanny sensation, which was not new to him: ‘But I had, probably quite unnecessarily, the disagreeable impression of being stared at.’ This persistent fancy conceivably originated in his troubled childhood, when he never knew when the next thunderbolt might strike, whether from his moody father, or one of a succession of harsh governesses.
They took photographs with their new camera, of which I retain the negatives. Unfortunately, health problems continued to dog them. My mother suffered from a stomach complaint causing loss of appetite, and Patrick painfully twisted his ankle while photographing the Roman aqueduct.
The car, however, proved a sterling success: ‘A 2 CV. is certainly the car for Spain. Quite often the roads are fairly good (or have been so far) and then they suddenly degenerate into the most appalling pot-holed tracks as they pass through villages: there was one hole this afternoon that must have been a foot deep.’
In Tortosa, their progress was impeded by a ‘shocking assembly of carts: tiny donkey carts; carts drawn by one or two mules tandem – even three or one horse and a donkey in front: carts with barrels slung deep, carts with hoods and bodies made of wickerwork and carpet, all milling slowly about Tortosa.’
Nor did the Guardia Civil please Patrick: ‘nasty, impudent, overdressed, over-armed fellows, with a tin-god expression all over their faces’. However, as Patrick tended to view the British police with almost comparable distaste, his disparagement need perhaps not be taken over-literally. In any case, before long he encountered cause to moderate his view: ‘The Guardia Civil are strange souls: one whom we asked the way grew excited: he had the appearance of a man about to have a fit. Others seem normal enough, and even cheerful.’
Although largely apolitical by nature, Patrick, like many young people in the Thirties, had nurtured sympathy for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, and corresponding distaste for the regime of General Franco. While he never altered this view, he was frequently obliged to adjust his condemnation of the regime to the languid realities of everyday life in contemporary Spain.
He was greatly intrigued by remarkable contrasts with France, which struck them at almost every turn of their exploration. It used to be said that ‘Europe stops at the Pyrenees’, a dramatic contrast which both frustrated and intrigued Patrick:
I have not mentioned the countryside at all. There hardly is any, properly speaking. The country and the village are English inventions. Here there are plantations, barren stretches, small towns. There is something wrong with it all. I wish I could put my finger on it. The little towns and their inhabitants are shockingly rude, hard and brutal.
At the same time, Patrick admired the ‘vast plantations of olives (magnificent ancient trees on pink and grey soil) and carobs, and there are charming orange groves – much lower bushes than I had expected, much closer together and carrying twenty times as much fruit – as well as patches of good-looking plough.’
The people likewise appeared to belong to a distinct, all but timeless world. Stephen Maturin’s Catalan homeland would not be difficult to evoke, after glimpsing such vignettes as when they encountered ‘between Tortosa and Vinaróz the two old tall men in blue knee breeches, one smoking a pipe, with a black handkerchief round his head and white stockings, the other in blue stockings: Catalan espadrilles worn as far as here … gipsies, barefoot, with long gold earrings.’
Continuing southwards, it became apparent how few houses in the country possessed piped water: ‘We have found the reason for the amphorae. They are for taking water to houses, and they have no bottoms because they never stand up – always in baskets or stands. A terrible number of houses have no water. There is a cart with a barrel and a great many cruches: that is the mains.’
At Sorbas they came upon a community apparently living in caves tunnelled out of the soft rock. It being Sunday, thousands of them were moving along the road in their best clothes, ‘girls (some of them) with flowers in their hair, a young man bicycling with a guitar’.
Undisguised curiosity evinced by crowds in the town at the strangers’ arrival in their midst predictably angered Patrick, but the kingdom of Granada delighted him, with its exotic Moorish castles and ‘charming little red houses with red tiled roofs’.
Patrick’s childhood fascination with the exploration of exotic lands was constantly gratified. Arrived at the summit of a pass south of Valencia, ‘we could see an enormous moon-like country bare light green-gray rock in dusty white soil, jagged, arbitrary mountains in all directions, and below us a deep valley, terraced in swirling curves.’
Now, on the coast east of Malaga, they came upon Motril:
with its Moorish castle, perhaps the finest we have ever seen. And the backward view of Motril and the great headland beyond it, with the sky and the sea (lateen sails upon it) bluer than one can describe, with bits of the Sierra Nevada in the lefthand corner of the field of vision, that is a view, all right.
At Gibraltar they were briefly separated from Buddug, who was placed in quarantine in kennels at the end of the town. The friendly policeman who escorted them there also showed them HMS Vanguard lying in dock, and then took them to a pleasant hotel: ‘That evening we walked about until we were quite done up. It is an astonishing place: Spain still predominates, in spite of a very strong element of pre-war England with a dash of India.’
Unconscious seeds of Patrick’s future literary creations were being sown. He found Vanguard ‘very rosy and youthful’, admired the Georgian houses, and noted with approbation ‘Cheap Jack and Cheap John’s Stores’, together with Oxford marmalade.
While staying on the Rock, Patrick and my mother paid a brief visit to Tangiers. Crossing the strait, they saw dolphins, while ‘A kind mariner pointed out Cape Trafalgar.’ On disembarking, they found themselves in a world still more enticingly exotic than Spain: ‘We wandered up a street where everybody seemed to be going, a crowded street. But crowded with such people. Moors in djellabahs and slippers, pale Moors like Europeans but with fezzes, slim veiled women veiled [sic], blue or white …’
Delighted with their brief but memorable visit, they returned to be regaled by affectionate dolphins: ‘Not only did they skip and play, but they came right into the ship and swam immediately along the cutwater, having immense fun with the rush of the water. They kept pace effortlessly, turning, rolling, jostling one another.’
Details of these and other curious encounters are frequently accompanied by Patrick’s sketches in the margins of his journal. Back in Gibraltar they spent a whole afternoon searching for a birthday present for the growing Richard, before they eventually succeeded in hunting down a leather-cased shaving kit. At dusk they climbed the Rock to view the apes, and next morning set off for Cadiz – which regrettably proved ‘the rudest town so far, the ugliest and the dirtiest’. Patrick’s resolve to drink sherry at Jerez was frustrated, when a café could only provide him with ‘something just as good’. In fact the mysterious beverage proved ‘quite good’, while an awkward confrontation was narrowly avoided:
While we were drinking it up – precious little there was – I had my back to the street, facing M. She told me afterwards that all the time there were men, respectably dressed men, leering at her from behind my back, and making gestures of invitation. Perhaps it was as well that I did not see them, because I was feeling profoundly depressed and bloody-minded, and there would have been a scene.
After exploring the region around Malaga, they returned to Motril. By then they decided they had endured all they needed of Spain: ‘It is impossible to say how agreeable Collioure appeared in the sordid brutality of Motril.’
Patrick invariably grew restless and ill-at-ease when away from their snug home for long, but buoyed up by the prospect of return ‘we began to hope that we were mistaken and that the inland Andalusian was a decent creature’. A visit to the Alhambra aroused Patrick’s ‘surprise at the extraordinary good taste of the Spanish authorities’. Crossing the mountains en route for Cordoba, he enthused over the presence of a number of magnificent red kite, noting too that: ‘Here the little irises began all along the side of the road, on the hill leading out of Jaen, and for hundreds of miles after.’ Cordoba’s mosque ‘was utterly dull from outside … but inside – dear Lord, what grandeur’.
Even this splendour was eclipsed on their return to Seville:
We did see the Cathedral at once, and that was a glorious sight: it seemed to me profoundly religious, and very, very much more important than Córdoba. The severe, clean austerity of what we might call the furnishings was intensely gratifying. No geegaws at all, except Columbus’ tomb. (And that, being alone, was impressive too, in its way).
After a night in ‘the cheapest (and rudest)’ hotel in town, they revisited the cathedral, where Patrick observed the relics, including ‘a piece of Isidore’ (the seventh-century Spanish scholar), about whom he had intended to write when preparing his book of bestiaries before the War.
After obtaining paperwork from the Portuguese consul, they drove to Huelva and crossed into Portugal by boat across ‘the brown and yellow Guadiana, heaving gently, with tremendous rain beating down upon the mariners and dribbling through the hood’. On disembarking, ‘The rain stopped suddenly and a complete double rainbow stood on the Spanish side of the river: an omen, I trust.’
It appears to have been, for within hours they found Portugal more congenial than Spain:[fn1] (#litres_trial_promo)
All the way we kept remarking the extraordinary difference the frontier had made – little ugly crudely painted houses, blood red and ochre or raw blue, perforated chimneys like cast iron stoves, ugly, barefoot people, intense cultivation, comparatively dull country, no Guardia Civil, no Franco Franco Franco (spontaneous enthusiasm in durable official paint), no rude staring, no excessive poverty. Even the gipsies … looked different: they had not that pariah air, and they wore skirts to the ground and wooden, heel-less slippers. But the greatest difference was at Lagos: not only was there no wild-beasting at all, but when we were walking on the sand we said good-day to some ordinary youths. They took off their caps and bowed.
In Lagos they were taken to watch the masquerade taking place in various clubs. So great was the crush, that they were obliged to hover in doorways. But Patrick found the masks ‘very funny indeed, almost all of them’. They learned that the clubs were graded according to social status: ‘The last was the top, and there, it is true, there were some solemn old gentlemen dancing with masked females. It was unbelievable that so many people should inhabit one small town, or rather village.’
That afternoon they paid their respects to one of England’s great naval victories, sitting in a shelter overlooking Cape St Vincent, an 800-foot cliff plunging sheer below them. On the way they passed a working windmill. Ever fascinated by technology of the past, Patrick stopped to photograph it. ‘The miller, a rough-looking but kind and sensible man, invited us in, and explained his mill, made us plunge our hands in the flour, moved the top, stopped the sails, and did everything he could to be agreeable – went to a great deal of trouble.’
Patrick sketched careful diagrams of the workings of the sails and internal machinery. During a digression to Faro he likewise drew some fishing boats, being particularly taken with the prophylactic eye (with splendid eyebrow) painted on each boat’s bow, a mysterious mop of wool adorning the prow.
The Portugal visited by Patrick appeared little changed since Wellington’s day. Patrick noted with pleased surprise: ‘No advertisement posters yet in Portugal. None at all.’ On the road to Lisbon:
As soon as we passed out of the Algarve the hideous man’s hat (black) worn over cotton scarf began to vanish – women here wear velour hat, flattened, with broad coloured ribbon or wide straw hat. Shoes rare – stockings cut at ankle for bare foot. Men in woollen stockings caps dangling to neck. Pleasant boy’s faces under black hats (bow behind).
Lisbon proved well up to expectation: ‘The sudden view of the Tagus with Lisbon the other side was as grand as anything I have ever seen.’ After strolling into the centre, ‘we wandered along the river and admired a square-rigged Portuguese naval training ship’. Amid the capital’s architectural glories, my mother was rewarded by a glimpse of ‘a windscreen wiper for sale called Little Bugger’.
Making their way across country to the northern frontier, the travellers encountered weather and countryside less congenial. Back in Spain, Patrick attended mass at Santiago, but was strangely unimpressed by town or cathedral. Passing Corunna, they became alarmingly trapped for a while in a snowdrift beyond Villalba. Fortunately the summit of the hill proved not far, and Patrick stumbled behind on foot as my mother gingerly enticed the car towards it. ‘When we reached the sea at Ribadeo (a very pleasant looking place … hundreds of duck down on the water; tufted duck mostly – and every promise of trout, if not of salmon too) we suddenly saw the Cordillera, pure white with deep snow.’
Passing through Basque country, where ‘the red berets were worn quite naturally’, they came to Guernica, scene of an infamous German air raid during the Civil War – ‘and a melancholy sight it was – every building new, almost, and still a number of ruins’. Driving as fast as they could along precipitous coastal roads, frequently blocked by landslides, they finally gained the frontier at Irun. ‘A toll-bridge, and we were in France again. French customs pleasant, sensible – Budd’s utter fury at their touching sacred car and even prodding food parcels.’
The fine French roads sped them across country, and on 18 February 1953, ‘in spite of the snow we were home at half past five, with an enormous post’. The news was generally good, especially a welcome cheque for £100 from Rupert Hart-Davis. Their neighbours the Rimbauds were warmly welcoming, as was their cat Pussit Tassit (who had managed to become pregnant). ‘How pleasant it is, our own place, and how queer the familiarity.’ Patrick calculated that they had travelled 3,674 miles, at a total motoring cost of 17,236 francs (about £15).
They had been away from home for a month, the longest foreign tour (not counting England) in which they ever engaged. Although there is little direct evidence of the use to which it may have been applied in his literary work,[fn2] (#litres_trial_promo) there can be no doubt that Patrick’s extended immersion into the dramatically archaic world of Spain and Portugal as it was then played a significant function in conferring the astonishing gift for immersion in past worlds which represents so marked an aspect of his historical fiction. Nearly thirty years later he came upon his diary record, noting wistfully: ‘I read abt our journey in darkest Spain 1953 – forgotten or misremembered details – how it all comes to life!’
At the time, however, it seems that Patrick was pondering further work on contemporary themes. Shortly after their return, he reverted to his planned series of short stories. In March he wrote ‘The Walker’, and on 7 April my mother ‘Sent off The Walker, The Crier, The Silent Woman & The Tailor to C[urtis]B[rown] New York.’ Unfortunately, the last three tales have not survived.
Although the journey around the Iberian peninsula had proved both entertaining and (it was hoped) an inspiring source for future writing, before long Patrick and my mother found themselves reverting to continued frustration over their mode of existence in their cramped quarters in the rue Arago. During a brisk March walk up to the Madeloc tower, they ‘Agreed on discontent with present way of life: sick of peasants so close to our life, need garden & hens & bees so as to be able really to save mon[ey].’
Time appeared slipping by, without adequate achievement to slow its passage. In April Patrick received news from his family in England that his once-dreaded giant of a father had suffered a stroke. Patrick, who throughout his life kept in regular touch with his family, must already have been aware of his declining health. A profoundly formative era of his past, wretched though it had largely been, appeared to be approaching extinction within the vortex of vanished years. It was at this time (1953) that he began work on an autobiographical novel, which in its final form completed years later evoked years of childhood and adolescence, filling him with a complex amalgam of nostalgia, resentment, and shame.[fn3] (#litres_trial_promo) His work on this project, which preoccupied him intermittently over the next two years, will be recounted in due course. As ever, my mother played a strongly supportive role in the writing, and was deservedly gratified by Patrick’s heartfelt acknowledgement: ‘P. gave me immense pleasure by saying he values me most as critic.’
Further matter for concern arose again concerning Patrick’s son Richard. Poor reports from school, together with a ‘horrible letter’ from his mother, persuaded Patrick and my mother to ‘decide to take R. & have him work for the school cert. with us, by a correspondence course’. The project was, however, postponed for the present, until July when Richard arrived for his summer holiday at Collioure.
Enterprising as ever, he ignored his mother’s apprehensive objections, cycling all the way from Dieppe, to whose Poste Restante my mother transmitted 5,000 francs for travelling expenses.[fn4] (#litres_trial_promo) Equipped only with a school atlas as guide, Richard arrived cheerful and excited at the beginning of August.
Collioure proved particularly lively and sociable on this occasion. Within days of Richard’s arrival he made a memorable contact. Two schoolmistresses from England came to stay in the town, accompanied by four of their pupils. One of the pair, Mary Burkett, met my parents and became a friend for some years (she had an aunt living near Collioure). It was not long before Richard became friends with the schoolgirls, and one in particular attracted his close attention.
One evening my mother invited the girls to dinner, after which Richard and another boy named Pat entertained their new friends:
All day preparing dinner (Spanish rice). V. successful, whole school. They are wonderfully pleasant young things. After dinner Pat came, & he & Richard escorted Susan, Wendy, Anne-Louise & Jill to fair. R. home at midnight. He prefers Susan, & Pat Wendy. Susan is the best.
Thereafter romance blossomed, and Richard and Susan were together every day until 26 August, when sadly the school party returned to England. No sooner had they been waved off at Perpignan railway station than ‘R. wrote to Susan: says he is going to see her the day after he reaches London.’ They continued in touch, until on 10 September Richard himself returned to England:
R. had one [letter] from Sue & ever since (2 pm) has been writing back to her. P. took R’s bike to P. Vendres & sent it off. Saw R. off at Port-Vendres very sadly, in great wind & with black & purple sky. R. said this has been his best holiday. The house is so sad without him.
Richard had always loved his holidays in Collioure, but this time there had been especial reason for enjoyment. On his return to London, he wrote: ‘Thank you both so very much for the best holiday that I have ever had. And it really was the best.’ He and Susan had now become fast friends:
The [Cardinal Vaughan] school’s secretary stopped me and asked whether the Mr O’Brian that had written The Catalans[fn5] (#litres_trial_promo) was my father. With huge pride I said ‘Yes’. Susan has shown me a revue of the Frozen Flame [the book’s British title] and it looked very good …
Now I am going to begin. Susan sent me a card saying that would I like to hear a lecture on ‘Everest’. Well Susan brought her two brothers and there [sic] two friends to hear the lecture … Her brothers are extremely pleasant to say the very least. And the lecture given by Hunt, Edmund Hillary and Low was absolutely superb …
Susan also invited me down to their house for lunch and tea. Was I scared, as at the last tea-party I sat down on the tea-pot. Her parents are wonderful, they really are. Their house, gee. Susan had told me that it was a small thing. Sixteen rooms and grounds that have a tennis court, flower garden kitchen garden, goat-house and hen house and a tool shed.
Susan’s father, Paul Hodder-Williams, a director of the publishing firm of Hodder & Stoughton, was editor of Sir John Hunt’s bestseller The Ascent of Everest, which he was shortly to publish. The parents’ wealth and status in no way inhibited their friendliness to the shy but enthusiastic sixteen-year-old boy. As for their pretty daughter:
Seeing Susan again was terrific only her hair is a bit darker. She has gone back to school today. Ah. I asked her parents if I could take her out during the Christmas holidays, and to my delight they immediately said ‘Yes’, so that’s quite all right. Quite where to take her I don’t really know. Please could I have every suggestion however mad? She likes her bracelet. Soon she will be sending some of those photos that the girls took of her, they should be marvellous. She is still the same. What a wonderful girl she is.
In December my mother stayed with her parents in Chelsea, when she saw much of Richard. For him the outstanding moment was when she took him to see Richard Burton and Claire Bloom acting in Hamlet at the Old Vic. This was Richard’s first visit to the theatre, and he was enraptured by the ‘perfect’ production. Two days later he took my mother to the cinema, and a couple of days were spent in hunting down his first grown-up suit.
At Christmas Susan sent my parents a copy of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses on behalf of her friends and their two schoolmistresses, thanking them again for their kindness throughout their stay at Collioure. Nothing more is recorded of this charming romance, which graphically illustrates my mother’s and Patrick’s talent for empathy with the young, especially in their amours. Within a few years they were to evince similar sympathy for me and my occasionally troubled youthful love affairs.
It was in August 1953 that ‘Mary [Burkett] took photographs of P for H[arper’s].B[azaar]. (only one came out, but it is very good).’
Eventually, as tended on occasion to occur, Patrick took mysterious offence at something Mary Burkett may or may not have done. In later years I came to know her, when I was able to reassure her that it was unlikely to have been in consequence of any particular offence on her part. Patrick’s writing was not going well at the time, and it was clearly in large part the strain which frequently made it hard for him to sustain close friendships at a remove. A chapter of Mary Burkett’s privately published biography is devoted to their friendship. Unfortunately, it includes much factual misrepresentation, despite the fact that when in August 2005 I stayed at her lovely home Isel House in the Lake District, we talked nostalgically of those long-departed days.[1] (#litres_trial_promo)
A gift Mary had brought from England to Collioure long outlasted their friendship. On 21 July 1954 my mother cryptically recorded that ‘Mary Burkett arrived about 10, she brought us book-binding stuff.’ This was a parcel of early legal documents, which she had saved at a solicitor’s office clearance. Patrick tended to make heavy use of his beloved leather-bound books, with the result that their spines often became badly worn. In later years he replaced the damaged ones with strips cut from the sturdy paper used by seventeenth-century lawyers.


Patrick, photographed by Mary Burkett in 1953
Books so repaired, reposing comfortably on the bookshelves looking down upon me as I write, include his much-loved set of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1824), Camden’s History of The most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth, Late Queen of England (1675), Cowley’s Works (1681) and Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy (1743). Of particular interest is Patrick’s copy of William Burney, A New Universal Dictionary of the Marine (London, 1815), upon which he largely relied for his understanding of the workings of the Royal Navy in the eighteenth century, before he subsequently acquired the yet more apt Falconer’s An Universal Dictionary of the Marine (1769). Normally such amateurish repairs would detract greatly from the collector’s value of the books. However, in this case I find them enhanced, being constantly reminded of the pleasure they afforded their impassioned owner.
The year 1954 opened with an accruing worry inflicted on the hard-tried couple, whose financial situation remained precarious as ever. Patrick’s son Richard had always encountered difficulty with academic work. He would be seventeen in February, and the time had approached when he must consider a career. His ambition to enrol at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth having proved sadly abortive, it became essential to find a satisfactory alternative. It was a worrying prospect, not alleviated when on 15 January my mother noted: ‘R’s report came: very sad.’
However, their overriding concern was with his well-being. Richard and his friend Bob Broeder had become cycling enthusiasts, which involved them in many adventurous exploits – of which their parents fortunately remained unaware. On occasion they would ride as far as Brighton, a hundred-mile round journey, and took to recklessly hurtling at some 60 mph down precipitous Reigate Hill, after removing their brakes. Bob recalls that:
One of our many dangerous [feats] and in retrospect foolish to the extreme, was to slip stream motor vehicles on our bicycles – normally lorries. Our favourite was to sit in wait for a BOAC coach coming from Heathrow to the air terminal in Gloucester Road. We would tuck in behind it and travel the length of the Great West Road at great speed and then overtake it at the Chiswick roundabout!
Eventually Richard became involved in a serious accident. Cycling home one day in the rain from games (a mode of transport conveniently enabling them to pocket their bus-fare allowance issued by the school), he crashed when making an awkward turn in the middle of Hammersmith Broadway. Skidding, he shot beneath a car ‘and cut myself to ribbons’. His prime concern was for the precious bicycle, whose frame was badly bent. The insurance company proved uncooperative, on grounds that the car was stationary at the moment of impact.
The repair was estimated at £10 13s. What could he do? Without his bicycle, he explained, he would have to start spending money daily on buses: could he possibly be sent £10? Patrick despatched a cheque by return of post, but the worry about Richard’s school progress – or lack of it – remained. Along with the cheque he sent practical advice to his son on mending his ways: he must apply himself consistently to his studies, answer correspondence by return, and generally become more self-disciplined. Richard responded with touching promises to mend his ways.
Although his intentions were good, school progress continued its downward slide. Towards the end of April, a letter arrived from his mother ‘enclosing a complaint from school about poor R’. By June he was agonizing over the imminent School Certificate examination (GCE), as his work became increasingly demanding and difficult. Alas, struggle as he might, the task proved too much, and he failed disastrously.
This unhappy news was not altogether unanticipated, and Patrick and my mother urgently discussed what was to be done. There was also the question of which branch of national service (the compulsory two years’ military service) would be suitable. Richard suggested: ‘Perhaps the Marine Commandos but one has to volunteer for five years and my mother does not like that. Then a friend suggested the engineering side; there to learn about mechanics. But please send your advice, because in the past it has always worked out well.’
Having himself, through little fault of his own, failed miserably in his own school studies, Patrick was determined that Richard should not suffer likewise. By the end of July my worried mother noted: ‘R. breaks up: what to do about him?’ As early as his return from holiday in Collioure in the previous year, Richard had urged that ‘if Dad is willing, I would like him to teach me Latin and Greek so that I could pass in them. I have got to pass.’
A swift decision was made that Richard should indeed come out to Collioure, where he could work undistracted to retake the examination. Hitherto the required subjects had comprised history, geography, and two English papers. They were not his strong fields, and he now enrolled in a correspondence course focused on mathematics and science, for which he had much greater aptitude.
On 12 August my mother and Patrick, accompanied as ever by Buddug, drove across France, camping on the way, to meet Richard at Dieppe. A week later they were back home in Collioure: ‘Got R’s hair cut & bought him respectable trousers. Dear R.’ There was no rush for the boy to begin work, since the examinations would not take place for a year. Initially, pleasant weeks were spent as before, swimming, walking, flying Richard’s new kite, and playing cards and draughts. My mother told him about her own children, to which Richard replied that ‘he saw Nik. at The Cottage [her parents’ house in Chelsea] & that he is good-looking and tall’.[fn6] (#litres_trial_promo) Hitherto my mother had not seen any photographs of my sister and me subsequent to the time when we were small children living at her parents’ home in North Devon during the War.
A modest upsurge in their finances about this time spurred my parents to think seriously about buying a house in England or Wales. In February my mother lamented: ‘Oh for a quiet home for P: it is a shame.’ Now they received particulars of a house in Cornwall, which sounded perfect for their needs. On 30 September 1954 they departed, together with Richard and their pets, ‘after sad and tearful goodbyes’ to all their faithful Collioure friends. So confident were they of finding a new home, that they had decided never to return.
Alas, the expedition proved one of those disasters by which they were intermittently afflicted throughout their lives. From the moment of their landing in England, everything went wrong. On disembarking, they attempted to smuggle the sedated Buddug and Pussit Tasset through customs in a suitcase. Unfortunately, a passenger informed on them, and the animals were impounded in quarantine. From Dover they drove seventeen hours through the night to Boskenna, in deepest Cornwall. Once installed there, my mother found that ‘Slugs got down St Loy taps & into marmalade. No beach, only sinister, slippery great rocks with bits of wreck everywhere & one crushed fish … Hated Boskenna … Cold, foul weather.’
The little family settled into dreary lodgings, ceaselessly battered by winter gales and drenching rain. They were cold, miserable, and badly missed their pets. Although Patrick tried to cheer Richard with tales of smugglers and a proposal to buy a small boat, the reality was too grim to be lightly overcome. A brief visit to my mother’s parents in London also went badly for some reason (‘Very, very painful week’), and by December they had had enough. On the 8th all three embarked at Dover for the return journey to Collioure.
Their troubles were not over. At Dover their trunks disappeared, and they missed the Boulogne boat. They finally caught a train ferry to Dunkirk, where their animals were returned to them. Then they experienced a ‘Nightmare drive from Dunkerque to St Omer instead of Calais through dark & rain & mud & detours & sugar-beet’. Near Toulouse the radiator fell off, and the car seized up. They left it at a garage, and continued the disastrous journey by train.
Back at last in Collioure, the family appreciated what they had nearly lost. So far as their house-hunting expedition was concerned, ‘England was bad, we got too unhappy to keep up diary.’ In striking contrast, ‘Home looking perfectly beautiful & the most welcome thing I’ve known I think. Village so pleasant – everyone welcomed us.’
The Mediterranean climate helped, too: ‘For two days now it has been too warm for the Mirus [stove] even in the evenings – & in England there are tempests & snow-storms & hideous cold. We lunch daily on the beach.’
Normal routine was resumed at once, to everyone’s satisfaction. Patrick returned contentedly to his writing, and ‘R. works hard too’. At the end of the year Patrick had written to the Ministry of Labour and National Service in Penzance, requesting that Richard be permitted to postpone his national service until he had taken his GCE in June of the following year. Fortunately, this was granted.
That Christmas (1954) little presents were exchanged, but sadly the festival was marred by the underlying burden of ‘Horrid anxiety for money’. The lost luggage finally arrived, but there were hefty bills – including a couple of unexplained punctures to new tyres. As will grow more and more clear as their story unfolds, cars and my parents were not always happily matched.
Shortly after their return Patrick wrote his short story ‘The Thermometer’, which under very thin disguise depicts his unhappy childhood relationship with his father.[2] (#litres_trial_promo) On 15 January 1955 he recorded in his diary:
I finished a story – broken thermometer – 5000 [words] nearly – very heavy going. It felt dubious – a little embarrassing; self-quaintery is always to be feared in anything at all autobiographical about childhood – approving self-quaintery – own head on one side – oh so unconscious simper – poor one. M did not like it. This makes me hate her, which is monstrously unfair. Dread of losing grip.
My mother, who I do not doubt appreciated its autobiographical character, was indeed depressed on reading the story. However, Patrick now turned to a synopsis of a book for children based on Anson’s voyage around the globe from 1740 to 1744. This my mother found ‘quite beautiful and very exciting’. Three days later it was posted to his literary agent Curtis Brown, accompanied by high hopes.
On 2 February Richard’s eighteenth birthday was celebrated in style – the last they would ever enjoy together. Presents were bestowed, after which they set off for a jaunt in the car. The weather was beautifully sunny, and they ate a delicious picnic (‘stuffed olives; Tante’s pâté; camembert; cake [baked the previous evening by my mother]; meringues; lemon-curd tart’) in an olive grove beyond Banyuls. After supper at home, they went to the cinema in the square, where they watched The City under the Sea, dismissed by my mother as ‘an idiot film’, but which probably appealed to the youthful Richard as much as it did to me about the same time.[fn7] (#litres_trial_promo)
Life had belatedly begun to look up. A few days earlier a local peasant named Azéma had offered to sell them 300 square metres of vineyard and garden for 125,000 francs: i.e. about £110. Hitherto this would have been well beyond their means, but the final payment for The Road to Samarcand (of which more in the next chapter) and now an advance on signing the contract for The Golden Ocean could now be imminently counted upon.
My mother enquired of a neighbour whether the price was fair, and was reassured to learn that more had recently been asked for a similar parcel of land, which in contrast lacked a water supply. Everyone was very obliging. Azéma agreed that the money could be paid in instalments, beginning in April. Meanwhile they could work the property. In the event they managed to pay the whole sum in April.
After the disastrous two months wasted in Cornish house-hunting, they now found themselves landowners! On 12 February my mother wrote triumphantly: ‘We lunched on our earth.’ Patrick had longed for this moment ever since their arrival in France. He loved the sense of security and self-worth which came with ownership of even so modest a parcel of land. Despite unfortunate consequences of his initial insistence on following the advice of his seventeenth-century guide to agriculture, his four years’ gardening in Wales had afforded him considerable experience. Finally, the ability to grow their own vegetables and fruit promised a material saving on monthly outgoings.
As ever concerned to be master of his own trade, Patrick bought for 350 francs a practical builder’s manual by Pierre Certot, Pour construire ou réparer vous-même murs et bâtiments: Enseignement manuel en 12 leçons. Construction d’une pièce de cottage, de la pièce principale d’une petite maison rurale, d’une petite porcherie. Conseils divers, etc. (Paris, 1952). His battered copy is spattered with characteristically self-interrogatory notes, such as ‘* nonsense: it should be 120k – I beg his pardon; I read kilos for litres’, and ‘It is easier to pump with a wide pipe than a narrow one.’
Instructed further by friendly neighbours and assisted by Richard, with some old tools and borrowed shears they set to work pruning vines and fruit trees, and clearing the ground on the ‘aprons’ (terraces). Although their finances remained precarious, the world was becoming a better place. Advance copies of The Road to Samarcand arrived, and for just over a fortnight Patrick abandoned writing in order to assist in putting the vineyard in order, after which he established a regime of walking over from the town after breakfast to inspect their little estate, and again after lunch to take part in the labour.
Richard proved a pillar of strength, travelling with my mother to the Port-Vendres rubbish dump to collect stones for the ten terrace ramparts, shifting soil, planting vegetables, and watering. Their dog, whose seventh birthday was celebrated at this time, also felt called upon to play her part: ‘Buddug dug up the existing parsley.’
At this juncture Patrick suffered a personal blow. News came from his family that his father, who had long been failing, had died of pneumonia at his home in Ealing. While their relationship had been only intermittently happy, he was unexpectedly moved by this melancholy intimation of mortality. As my mother confided to her diary: ‘Poor P., his father died. He went aller et retour to Paris to see his [step]mother & brother [Bernard, known as ‘Bun’]. R. was very sweet to me.’ This scarcely suggests that the melancholy news was malignantly withheld from Richard, as has been conjectured by one amiable critic.
The sorry tidings cannot have come as a total shock. In April 1953 Patrick had been informed (presumably by a member of his family) that his father had suffered a stroke, and in the following month Richard passed on a message from Patrick’s sister Nora that ‘your father is ill and has been taken to hospital’. Other allusions show that Patrick continued in regular contact with members of his family, several of whom evinced sympathetic interest in Richard.
Nevertheless, it is clear from my mother’s words that the final departure of this terrifying figure of Patrick’s youth had moved him. In the previous month he had written his short story ‘The Thermometer’, which described the fear and resentment with which he had viewed his harsh and distant parent as a small boy. There are clear indications that, as late as 1949, he had regarded his father’s grim persona as largely responsible for his increasingly paralysing bouts of depression and writer’s block.
Equally, it has been seen that he finally shed this inhibiting factor after settling in distant Collioure, where he managed to recover his equipoise. Nor should ‘The Thermometer’, which I have little doubt provides a realistic picture of his childhood experience, necessarily be regarded as an expression of his continuing feelings for his father, who had for two years languished a helpless invalid. At this stage of his literary career, Patrick continued deeply reliant on personal experience as matter for his fiction.
There were other memories on which he could draw, and death frequently has the effect of diminishing the bad and resurrecting the good. Charles Russ had enthusiastically supported Patrick’s early literary endeavours, negotiating their acceptance by publishers. He penned a glowing introduction to his precocious first novel Caesar, and Patrick in turn dedicated his next book Beasts Royal ‘To my father’. During the troubled days of his late adolescence, he found an apparently contented refuge in his father’s and stepmother’s house at Crowborough in Sussex.
My mother’s ‘poor Patrick’ confirms that Patrick was distressed by the news, since he would not have disguised his true feelings from her. Furthermore, he must unquestionably have been concerned for his stepmother, who had been consistently kind to him as a boy, and of whom he remained extremely fond.
It is important to appreciate Patrick’s reaction to this emotional occasion, not least because it has been misinterpreted to his lasting disfavour. A biography of Patrick devotes several pages of speculation to the event, the gist of which is that he:
never introduced his son to his father. He never spoke of his father to Richard, and he did not even tell Richard now that his grandfather had just died. The amazing thing is that a man of O’Brian’s insight not only was incapable of repairing his relationship with his father but fostered a similar father–son breach in his own house.[3] (#litres_trial_promo)
No evidence is cited to support these unpleasant charges, the burden of which is profoundly misleading.[fn8] (#litres_trial_promo) Poverty and distance, coupled with wartime travel conditions, might (we do not know) have precluded Patrick’s taking his son to Crowborough before his departure with my mother to Wales in 1945, when Richard was seven. While little communication appears to have passed thereafter between Patrick and his reclusive parent, Patrick’s siblings have confirmed to me that Charles Russ rarely corresponded with any of his children or grandchildren.
Although it is not impossible that Richard’s grandfather never communicated with him, other members of the family were concerned with the boy’s welfare. ‘Grandmother Russ’ (Patrick’s stepmother Zoe) visited Richard and his mother at their flat in Chelsea, as did Uncle Victor and other relatives. Richard unselfconsciously passed on family news from them to his father in France, and it is evident that there were no ‘forbidden areas’ in family discussions.
Unfortunately, Patrick was unable to travel to England for his father’s funeral, almost certainly in consequence of acute lack of funds. At the time of Charles Russ’s death, my mother wrote in her diary: ‘Despairing thoughts of no money to meet car’s lettre de change at end of month.’ However, Patrick’s brother Bun, a successful lawyer in Canada, had flown over to attend. It seems that Bun (as he certainly did on other occasions) generously paid for Patrick’s journey and hotel room in Paris, since my mother’s accounts record only trifling expenditure connected with what must have been a costly expedition.
It is frankly incredible to suppose that Patrick kept all this secret from Richard. Why on earth should he have done so? Besides, secrecy would have been all but impossible, closeted as the three of them were in the tiny flat in the rue Arago. The further charge that Patrick ‘fostered’ a breach with Richard himself will in due course be seen to be demonstrably unfounded, and confirms the extent to which such accusations represent no more than ill-natured conjecture.
A month before news arrived of his ailing father’s stroke, Patrick told my mother of an idea which had come to him of writing his ‘Chelsea novel’. More and more gripped by the concept, in May she observed ‘P. internally working on next novel’, and by June ‘P. is too deep in new novel to go back.’ It seems unlikely that it was coincidence that led Patrick to turn to such an introspective theme at a time when he was becoming aware that the once-daunting parent figure was slipping from the scene. Was he unconsciously afraid that his father’s death might deprive him of an identifiable explanation – or even pretext – for his continuing inability to realize his ambition?
In the event Patrick made little attempt to tutor Richard during his long stay at Collioure in 1954. Not only was the boy enthusiastic enough about the subjects he had chosen to apply himself to without any necessity for supervision, but throughout this time his father had become immersed in writing The Golden Ocean. My mother, who taught her stepson French on the beach, was delighted to learn that ‘R. gets excellent reports on his course.’
With the arrival of warm weather, much time was spent beside the sea, taking long walks, exploring neighbouring places of interest such as the magnificent castle of Salses north of Perpignan, and entertaining a stream of friends. Richard began learning to drive, but sadly expenditure on the purchase of the vineyard eventually compelled the sale of the much-loved deux chevaux. On 25 April my mother drove to Perpignan, sold the car for 210,000 francs (about £200), in a rare fit of indulgence enjoyed ‘an immense lunch’ at the Duchesse de Berri restaurant, and took the train home. As has been seen, she and Patrick went straight to the Azémas, and paid the full price of the vineyard. ‘Vous voilà propriétaires définitifs,’ declared Madame Azéma. My mother triumphantly inscribed the joyous words in the margin of her diary.
Apart from benefiting from the strip of land to make the family self-sufficient in fruit, vegetables, wine and honey, their plan was to construct a small stone chamber beside the road at the top of the vineyard, where Patrick could write in peace, away from the hurly-burly of the rue Arago. Such cells, known as casots, are scattered about the nearby hillsides, being used by cultivators of vignobles to store their tools and provide shelter from the burning sun during breaks from cultivation.
In order to accomplish this, it was first necessary to excavate a recess at the top of the rocky slope, which could only be accomplished by means of explosives. After obtaining the requisite permit, Patrick bought a quantity of dynamite and detonators. These being required to be kept separate, the dynamite was kept under Richard’s bed. In later life Patrick proved less circumspect. Nearly half a century later, not long after his death, I looked into the high shelf of a cupboard in the narrow passage next to the bedroom where my mother and Patrick slept. There I discovered a brown paper parcel which proved to contain two sticks of dynamite together with a detonator.
No wiser than Patrick, I assumed they posed no danger, since their explosive power must surely have long ago dissipated. Some years later I recounted my discovery to an old school friend, a retired Army officer. He impressed on me that the explosive was undoubtedly more dangerous, having become unstable after the space of half a century. This alarmed me, and it was arranged for it to be removed and exploded by the gendarmerie. I still feel qualms when I think of my parents blithely sleeping for decades with their heads three or four yards from a package capable of blowing up the entire house.
Returning to 1955, Patrick and Richard travelled beyond Port-Vendres to Paulilles, where they purchased the explosives. Unfortunately they missed the return train, and trudged the weary miles home, each carrying a 10-kilogram load. Next, holes were prepared with pickaxes and sledgehammers, and faggots gathered to restrict the effect of explosions, after which mining began.
Patrick was convinced he could handle the detonations himself, until a massive explosion discharged a load of rock perilously close to him and Richard. Henceforward he grudgingly employed a pair of burly Catalan miners, Cardonnet and his friend Juan, who completed the work with professional skill. This was the limit of assistance required, and the family’s daily toil is recapitulated in detail in Patrick’s gardening diary he kept that year. Mining completed, there succeeded the arduous labour of shifting stones out of the recess created. Although he and my mother worked themselves to the bone, the satisfaction at finding themselves at long last working their own land was boundless.


My mother with Buddug at the well
The work continued throughout July, when thundery weather made the heat all but unbearable: ‘we drip and pour,’ recorded my mother: ‘I plunged naked into the basin [by the well] yesterday after stone-shifting.’
Patrick was anxious to keep bees, as he had done successfully in Wales. By June the first hive was installed, and before long they were enjoying their own honey. Over the years complaints arose from inhabitants of the Faubourg below that they were persistently being stung. When suspicion turned to the outskirts of the town, Patrick shifted the hives out of sight onto the flat roof of the house. To a policeman calling to enquire whether they kept bees, he blithely denied the fact. However, this arrangement proving inconvenient as well as risky, in 1965 the hives were reinstalled by arrangement with a neighbour in a vineyard at the foot of the ridge of the Saint Elme above the house.
Eventually, the sad moment came when Richard had to depart. On 29 June he took the train to Paris, whence he sent back cheerful postcards. He left behind farewell presents of sweets and cigarettes, took with him a basket of presents for my mother’s parents in Chelsea, and posted parcels to her small nieces and nephew.
Save for the disastrous weeks in Cornwall, which had dampened the spirits of all three, there is every indication that Richard had enjoyed a particularly happy time throughout his long stay. Acquisition of the vineyard provided rewarding occupation, while his correspondence course kept his thoughts almost as busy as they had been with pretty Susan Hodder-Williams. Back in England, he successfully sat the examination at Cardinal Vaughan School. A month later, he wrote to say that he had joined the Royal Navy.
Richard’s departure left a tincture of sadness over the little household. Clearly, his service in the Navy would allow him small opportunity to return to Collioure during the two-year spell. Such leave as he would obtain was most likely to be spent with his mother in Chelsea. What neither they nor Richard anticipated was that he would never return. As will be seen in the next chapter, this was not in consequence of any specific decision, but arose from a constant lack of funds, together with Richard’s determination to forge a way for himself in the world. Patrick had good reason to be proud of him, but much distress lay in the offing.
A few weeks later Richard had settled contentedly into the service, enjoying the company of his comrades, and nurturing a fresh ambition to become a Fleet Air Arm pilot. Never a frequent letter writer (like many young men), he found himself so preoccupied that his correspondence grew more and more sporadic.
Meanwhile, having for the present lost a ‘son’ to whom she was devoted, my mother was about to resume relations with her real son, whom she had last encountered as a small boy at her parents’ home on the North Devon coast.
Throughout my schooldays there had been no communication between us, save my mother’s abortive attempt to resume contact on my sixteenth birthday. After leaving Wellington College in the summer of 1953, I enrolled in the Army as a regular soldier. After completing basic training in the Buffs (my local regiment) at Canterbury, I entered the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. By then I had developed an increasingly painful back ailment, which caused me to be invalided out of the Army in the spring of 1954. In June my mother sent me out of the blue a cheque for my nineteenth birthday, and we began exchanging letters.
In August of the following year she invited me to stay at Collioure. My stepmother had never disguised her dislike for me, and my father rarely showed me any affection. The time had come when I resolved to see the mother of whom I retained a bare half-dozen infant memories. That month I joined my father and stepmother for a typically strained holiday in northern Spain, and from there I journeyed at a leisurely rate in Spanish trains to Port Bou on the French Mediterranean frontier, and thence up the coast the three stops to Collioure. It being impossible to predict the precise time of my arrival, my mother remained on tenterhooks for two days. On the 29th she received ‘Letter from N., apparently woken up to the foolishness of going back to England before coming here, so he will reach Irun at 8 pm tomorrow en route for Collioure. I called on O[dette]., told her … Called on Tante & Marinette & told them: how they stared.’
Two days later: ‘Met trains all day, home beautifully neat under usual strain, but no Nikolai.’ Finally, on 1 September, I arrived at Collioure and made my way to the rue Arago. I climbed the steep staircase, knocked on the door, and there was my mother. I vividly recall Patrick standing a little behind, in that characteristic attitude which was to become so familiar, smiling with his head a little on one side and hands clasped before him.
My own emotions were confused, my mother being for me effectively a stranger, of whom I retained only the most fleeting of images. However, in consequence of my unhappy relationship with my father and stepmother, I found it exhilarating to find myself at home with contrastedly interesting and affectionate parents. My mother was understandably in raptures:
I had taught [her pupil] André his English, & P & I were sitting at tea when there was a knock, & it was N. Actually I am writing this on the 12th, being too excited before to write. I did not know how wonderful it would be to have N. again – Lord, Lord, I am so happy with P. & him, and so thankful. I would that R. were here too: he wrote to say that he is an Ordinary Seaman in the R.N., sounding very happy.
With hindsight, I fancy the visit might have gone better had Richard indeed been there, providing companionship of my own age. For the first fortnight all went well. My youthful enthusiasm for history overlapped closely – perhaps too closely – with Patrick’s own tastes. I browsed contentedly among his eclectic collection of books, which stood ranged against the wall in boxes he had carefully constructed to house them. We were a stone’s throw from the beach, and there was much to excite my passion for the Middle Ages in the ancient town. We travelled by bus to explore Andorra, still a wholly unspoilt medieval principality in the mountains.
By the time of my arrival, the walls and roof of the casot were all but completed. Like Richard, I assisted in my turn with the labours, my more modest contribution being attested to this day by a cement buttress beside the door bearing my initials. It was an exciting time for all, and my mother wrote exultantly: ‘We already plan next storey.’ (I am, incidentally, baffled by a writer’s claim that Patrick ‘built the hut by hand, something that O’Brian ironically would be ashamed of and very touchy about in later life when he became more established’. In reality, he was immensely proud of the fact that he had contributed so much of the labour, to which he regularly drew visitors’ attention when they called throughout the years that followed.)
I learned much about Patrick’s writing, and remember being particularly delighted by his good-humoured short story ‘The Virtuous Peleg’. His other writings were less to my adolescent taste, which was disinclined to stray beyond current obsessive enthusiasms. Unfortunately, those of his own works which would have appealed to me at the time remained inaccessible, since no copies of his early books published under the name Richard Patrick Russ were to be found in the house. Equally, the robustly exciting boys’ books The Road to Samarcand and The Golden Ocean had yet to be published.
It is hard for me now to be certain how far my faded image of those memorable three weeks remains entirely accurate. However, I do recall that after a week or so I began to find Patrick increasingly didactic and irritable, to an extent which swiftly became all but intolerable. Referring to himself on one occasion as ‘a writer who has been compared with Dostoevsky’ (which may conceivably have been true), he was openly contemptuous of my preferred reading: old-fashioned favourites such as Harrison Ainsworth, Charles Lever and R.D. Blackmore. Oddly enough, so far as I am aware Patrick had not read the one ‘good’ writer whose works I also loved – Walter Scott.[fn9] (#litres_trial_promo) However, he possessed the 1839 ten-volume edition of J.G. Lockhart’s classic biography of his father-in-law, which on discovering my enthusiasm he presented to me during my stay. Glancing at it now, I suffer once again an acute pang of nostalgia, fancying myself back in the snug little flat at 39, rue Arago.
Today I remain shamefully conscious of the fact that the growing coldness which developed between us during my stay was very far from being Patrick’s sole responsibility, as I then believed it to be. I still recall with painful embarrassment how prone I was at the time to faults not uncommon among young men of twenty. Uncompromising political views, assertions of belief as incontrovertible fact, and related failings made me no more tolerable to my elders than many another immature youth awkwardly poised between adolescence and manhood.
On 13 September my parents’ old friend and colleague from their wartime service with Political Warfare Executive, the American academic Jack Christopher, came to stay. Lodgings were found for him with the Azémas, while he spent each day with us. A tall, mild-mannered scholar, he was co-author of a recently published two-volume History of Civilization. I recall Patrick’s humorously condemning the work, on the grounds that it omitted to mention a battle between the O’Tooles and the Danes – a joke repeated from a passage in The Golden Ocean, which he had just completed. While Jack was a model of discretion and politeness, Patrick at times used his presence to ‘punish’ me in a manner he not seldom employed when irritated, deliberately excluding me from conversations, in the course of which he occasionally let fall none too subtle allusions to my deficiencies.
Recollection of this first visit still pains me. Indeed, I was for long inclined to accept almost the entirety of blame for the mutual ill-feeling which increasingly pervaded my stay, until many years later I came to read my mother’s diary account of my visit: ‘N. left on 19th: when it started going bad I do not remember. Only I do remember being in the middle of it & trying & trying to think of something to bring things back to pleasantness.’
As her normal reaction to any such awkwardness was to support Patrick, right or wrong, I am inclined to infer that she sensed the faults were not all on one side. Long afterwards, I was told by their friend Mary Burkett that Patrick angrily declared on my departure that he would never allow me in the house again! This was the only such occasion of which I am aware when my mother put her foot down, insisting she would continue to see me regardless.
Fortunately the unpleasantness blew over, and the letter I wrote back after my return reads as though all had been warmth and light. Over the decades to come, I confess that Patrick and I continued at times to find each other difficult, or even downright insufferable. But each in his own way was, I believe, conscious that blame lay not all on one side, and such unpleasant clashes were invariably overcome and dismissed – lessening considerably, too, as the years passed by. However, there is no escaping the certainty that, had I not been my mother’s son, I would never have been invited to Collioure again.

IV (#ulink_0ff6dab8-8504-5b1d-be6e-07bafad1f7b2)
Voyages of Adventure (#ulink_0ff6dab8-8504-5b1d-be6e-07bafad1f7b2)
From tho yles that I haue spoken of before in the lond of Prestre Iohn, that ben vnder erthe as to vs that ben o this half, and of other yles that ben more furthere beyonde, whoso wil pursuen hem for to comen ayen right to the parties that he cam fro and so enviroune alle erthe; but what for the yles, what for the see, and for what strong rowynge, fewe folk assayen for to passen that passage, all be it that men myghte don it wel that myght ben of power to dresse him thereto, as I haue seyd you before. And therfore men returnen from tho yles aboueseyd be other yles costyng fro the lond of Prestre Iohn.
M.C. Seymour (ed.), Mandeville’s Travels (Oxford, 1967), p. 223
By 1954 Patrick’s inspiration appeared to be flagging. Many authors will recognize the symptoms, when we find him turning to revisiting old notes and uncompleted earlier ventures. Among the latter was a novel for boys, which he felt might prove worth reviving. On 15 December 1945, not long after their arrival in Wales, he wrote in his journal:
I have just re-read that Samarcand tale. It is better than I had supposed, and it is well worth finishing. Suffers from want of central plot. It is hardly more than a series of incidents, more or less probable, fortuitously connected. M. is typing the rehashed novel. I hope it may not prove a disappointment, but it was poor stuff to begin with.
This indicates that the manuscript was among those efforts which he wrote in a flurry of creativity just before war broke out. However, the debilitating attack of writer’s block which assailed him during their four years’ stay in Wales obstructed any further endeavour in that direction, and eventually he found himself unable to progress beyond chapter six.[1] (#litres_trial_promo)
Under pressure, he tended to look back to those exhilarating pre-war days, when inspiration apparently flowed unhampered by doubts. In November 1952 my mother observed that Patrick was ‘thinking of Samarkand’. Once again, nothing came of it, and a further year passed by when ‘P. took out Samarcand & looked at it.’ This time he experienced a sudden flow of inspiration, and on 26 January 1954 ‘P. did 2000 words of S.’ He was sufficiently pleased with his progress to write next day to his literary agent Naomi Burton at Curtis Brown in New York, enquiring whether Harcourt Brace might take the completed work.
By the beginning of February 1954 the book was well under way, when Naomi responded to my mother with a ‘fine misunderstanding about me leaving P[atrick]., & she says send Samarcand to her’. This appeared encouraging, so far as it went, and Patrick raced ahead to the conclusion. Ten days later he came to bed at 1.30 in the morning, ‘having finished Samarcand. He could not sleep, & looks so poorly today. S. posted …’
They had sent their sole typescript of the text, and an agonizing wait culminated on 24 April with a letter from Naomi containing the dispiriting news that Harcourt Brace was not interested. The precious typescript itself did not return until 6 May, when they forwarded it to Spencer Curtis Brown in London. Their relief and excitement may be imagined when, on 17 June, they learned that the publishers Rupert Hart-Davis were ‘“very enthusiastic” about dear Samarcand & suggest £100 advance’. On 24 June a contract was signed for ‘a Juvenile work by the Proprietor at present entitled “THE ROAD TO SAMARCAND”’, with the advance payable in successive tranches of £50 on delivery and £50 on publication.
The money was welcome (though as ever slow to arrive), and high hopes were pinned on the novel’s success. However, when The Road to Samarcand was published in February 1955, the outcome proved disappointing. Reviews were sparse and varied. While the naval historian Oliver Warner gave it a cautious thumbs up in Time and Tide, the Times Literary Supplement’s anonymous reviewer tartly derided its conclusion – ‘as absurd politically as it is geographically’. The criticism may have been directed against the protagonists’ dramatic escape from Tibet in a Russian helicopter, discovered intact in a snowdrift. The story comprises many exciting adventures, of a character familiar to readers of early boys’ journals such as Boys’ Own Paper and Chums, wherein a daring English lad, customarily accompanied by an excitable Irishman and laconic Scot, survives a succession of hair’s-breadth perils at the hands of sinister foreigners. Patrick’s contribution to the latter is an evil Bolshevik agent named Dimitri Mihailovitch, who has his neck deservedly broken by the youthful hero’s uncle Sullivan. Evidently Patrick could not resist according this scoundrel my unfortunate father’s Christian name and patronymic!
The pre-war genesis of The Road to Samarcand represented a throwback to Patrick’s earlier success with children’s stories. However, while Caesar and Hussein were delightful original creations, it is hard not to concede that Samarcand represents something of a pastiche of the boys’ books that he loved during his lonely and imaginative childhood.[fn1] (#litres_trial_promo)
Derrick, the boy hero of Samarcand, is an orphan assigned to the custody of his uncle Terry Sullivan, master of the schooner Wanderer plying the China Sea. Sullivan and his Scottish companion Ross are the protagonists of Patrick’s three immediately preceding published short stories, the third of which (‘No Pirates Nowadays’) is effectively prefatory to the events recounted in the novel.[fn2] (#litres_trial_promo) The crew includes a comical Chinese cook Li Han, whose exotic English provides a lively source of humour. Together with the eccentric and resourceful archaeologist Professor Ayrton, the friends survive perilous adventures in China and Tibet, battling Chinese warlords and Bolshevik agents, eventually coming through against all odds and acquiring the customary treasure.
I suspect that Patrick’s voracious reading as a boy in Willesden Green or his Devonshire preparatory school included Under the Chinese Dragon: A Tale of Mongolia, published in 1912. The author, Captain F.S. Brereton, was a prolific creator of rousing boys’ adventure stories. The hero of his tale is a brave orphan boy, David, who outwits dangerous Russian anarchists, and afterwards joins Professor Padmore on the China Station. Among the crew is an excitable French cook Alphonse (who must in turn be derivative of the more celebrated comic cook Alphonse in Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain), whose quaint speech is juxtaposed with that of faithful Chinese attendants. They are attacked by pirates, undergo stirring adventures in China and on the Mongolian frontier, and conclude by finding a hoard of valuable objects, including documents which enable David to recover the inheritance of which he had been cheated.
Although well written and fast-moving, Samarcand may perhaps be regarded as a retrograde step in Patrick’s writing at this time. To do him justice, I think it likely that the novel represented a distillation of half-remembered early reading, rather than overt plagiarism. In any case, much of it, as has been seen, was written at an early stage of his literary evolution. Although it was published at the time in Germany and Sweden, a publisher could not be found in the United States until 2007.
Nevertheless, 1955 was to prove a pivotal year in Patrick’s life. It was purely fortuitous that his son Richard’s final departure coincided with my first arrival in Collioure. As has also been seen, it was in this year that my mother and Patrick established themselves permanently at Collioure, buying the vineyard at Correch d’en Baus, and beginning work on building the casot and upper room of the home they would inhabit for the rest of their lives. Finally, January 1955 saw what may be regarded as the inception of Patrick’s enduring contribution to world literature.
Here I would emphasize that nothing in the unhappy contretemps arising during my first visit (described in the previous chapter) stinted one of Patrick’s most amiable characteristics: his unfailing generosity. I had returned to England laden with presents, ranging from an open razor and leather strop, which I used for years, to a precious copy of The Trial of James Stewart in Aucharn in Duror of Appin, for the Murder of Colin Campbell, Esq (Edinburgh, 1753). This is the now rare book which inspired Stevenson’s Kidnapped. When Patrick bought it in early 1945, he noted in his diary:
Before reading Catriona [the sequel to Stevenson’s Kidnapped] I went through James Stewart’s trial, which was very good, if somewhat repetitious reading. Unfortunately I chanced to see the result before reading it, which rather spoilt the suspense for the last speeches, but before that it was positively exciting. It is impossible to see it objectively, having read Kidnapped but I am sure I could never have made such a tale of it.
Despite this rueful acknowledgement, while being fortuitously in a position to compare it with its prime source, Patrick’s diffident self-criticism provides a premonition of his eventual mastery of one of the most difficult (yet oddly underrated) of literary achievements, the historical novel. In 1945, a month after reading Catriona, he had skimmed through:
Dr Goldsmith’s History of Rome [1782], abridged by himself, as a preparation for Gibbon. A poor piece of work, I think, though I liked ‘through desarts filled with serpents of various malignity’. All somewhat Little Arthur-ish.[2] (#litres_trial_promo) One gets the impression that the Romans were an appallingly bloody-minded lot – true maybe – but what is far worse, and quite false is the impression that they were modern men (insofar as they were men, and not names) acting in an incomprehensible way in a vacuum. It is not history – hardly chronicle. It seems to me that works like the Hammonds’ English labourer are worth more than a dozen such works, as far as inculcating an historical sense goes.
This trenchant criticism might be levelled at all too many historical novelists. Indeed, the indications are that it was about this time that Patrick himself came to shed his earlier jejune concept of historical fiction. In January 1940 he had written a melodramatic short story about a crusading knight, John of Bellesme, which owes more to the romantic novels of high adventure written by the Sussex novelist Jeffery Farnol than to anything actually occurring during the Middle Ages. Although Patrick preserved the manuscript, he must surely have been relieved in later years that it was never published.[3] (#litres_trial_promo)
His only other transitory attempt at historical fiction appears to have been written about the same time. Published in The Last Pool, ‘The Trap’ is much inferior to its fellow tales set in Patrick’s own day. Although as ever well written, its tale of a daring youth who fares forth to poach in the grounds of a tyrannical squire is too reminiscent of the stock characters and standard predicaments of juvenile fiction to carry much conviction.[4] (#litres_trial_promo)
Following a flurry of creativity over the momentous winter of 1939–40, it seems that Patrick’s wartime employment, first as an ambulance driver in the Blitz, then as an operative with Political Warfare Executive, effectively diverted him from writing. Finding himself, for the first time in his life, unexpectedly in possession of a settled income, he bought many books, chiefly in the second-hand shops of Cecil Court. These he read and clearly absorbed, but it was only as the War drew inexorably towards its close over the winter of 1944–45 that his authorial ambition became reawakened.
The fact that there is frustratingly little documentation for this period of his literary life is in itself suggestive. He began keeping a pocket diary on 1 January 1945, and the care with which he preserved his diaries thereafter makes it unlikely that earlier copies have perished. In it, as well as in memorandum books compiled about the same time, Patrick began entering comments on his reading, together with suggestions for books he contemplated writing. The indications are that, although the war years provided him with a period of respite from creative work, they were also a time of protracted parturition. His perceptive condemnation, on the one hand, of Goldsmith’s trite Roman history, and on the other his unqualified praise for Stevenson’s masterpiece Kidnapped, indicate his dawning understanding of the realities of historiography, together with its glamorous offspring, the historical novel.
Mention of Stevenson’s two great books leads me incidentally to wonder whether Patrick may not also have been unconsciously influenced by the Scottish author’s creation of paired contrasted characters (David Balfour and Allan Breck), their attitudes reflecting disparate political and social aspects of the age: an antithesis which at the same time enriches a memorable friendship.
Again, I wonder whether his new-found propensity for imbuing his narrative with humour – grotesque and farcical, light-hearted and ironical, at times cheerfully vulgar – had lain submerged beneath a long-held conviction that adult literature represented an essentially serious business. His natural sense of humour, ironical and exuberant, took long to emerge in his work.[fn3] (#litres_trial_promo) At times I put this belated development down to the influence of Somerset Maugham, whom Patrick like many of his contemporaries rated high in the literary scale. But there can surely be little doubt that the enduring precarious state of his finances played its part in producing an entrenched state of gloom.
After Hussein, only his sparkling short stories ‘The Green Creature’ and ‘The Virtuous Peleg’ fully revealed Patrick’s propensity for laughter in court. However, an observant follower of his literary career would have noted how his anthology A Book of Voyages (1947) reproduced specimens of choice rococo passages which afforded him perceptible delight.
As was mentioned in the last chapter, the theme Patrick selected for his fresh venture was Commodore Anson’s celebrated voyage around the globe in 1740–44. One reason for this choice was almost certainly the fact that his library was well equipped for the purpose. He had first grown familiar with the story from the concise account included in Beatson’s six-volume Naval and Military Memoirs of Great Britain, which he bought before the War.[5] (#litres_trial_promo) Subsequently he acquired the Reverend Richard Walter’s account of Anson’s voyage, published in 1762, together with its accompanying (now rare) handsome quarto volume of maps and plates.[6] (#litres_trial_promo)
For the social, literary and political history of the time he profited greatly from a present fortuitously given by my mother. In February 1945, ‘M[ary]. very civilly gave me the Gentleman’s Magazine 1743–4–5. Masses of information, both solid and (what is more in some ways) ephemeral. Handsome panelled calf. Vilely printed – hard to realise that any verse can be good in such a dress.’[fn4] (#litres_trial_promo)
In the following month Patrick read the latest Hornblower novel, on which he commented in his diary:
Forester’s The Commodore is, I think, the first new novel I have ever bought. It seems much more extravagant than paying a guinea for, say, the learned job. It’s a good tale, but not as satisfying as the other Hornblower stories. Smacks a little of formula and wants design. Also, it has not a great deal of meat, or if it has, a greater length is required to give it body.
Patrick could not have dreamed that he would one day write his own novel The Commodore, which I imagine most readers would concur entirely avoids the faults he ascribes to Forester’s work.
Patrick’s criticism of Hornblower seems not unjust. However, as his comment on Stevenson’s Catriona indicates, he did not at the time feel sufficiently confident of his own abilities to attempt a ‘meatier’ historical novel. It was not until nearly a decade later that inspiration struck quite suddenly. On 4 July 1954 my mother wrote in her diary: ‘I typed fourth story,[fn5] (#litres_trial_promo) & P. thought of Anson juvenile.’ It is intriguing to note that Patrick remained caught up by the notion that exciting adventure stories were exclusively appropriate to a youthful readership, despite his having appreciated Kidnapped and Catriona, which enthral readers of any age.
The remainder of the year was taken up with house-hunting, concluding with the disastrous visit to Cornwall in October and November recounted in the previous chapter. By the New Year of 1955, however, Patrick with a flash of clarity grasped the way forward. It was on the cold evening of 19 January that:
P. wrote boy & thermometer tale & I got so depressed. But today he showed me wonderful notes & pieces of Stag[7] (#litres_trial_promo) & synopsis of Anson which are quite beautiful & very exciting … P. wrote to Phebe Snow who answered that yes, Hart-D. might advance on synopsis of Anson.
Rupert Hart-Davis had already proved happy enough with The Road to Samarcand to agree a contract for ‘the next Boy’s book to be written by the PROPRIETOR following “THE ROAD TO SAMARCAND”’.
The ‘boy & thermometer tale’ to which my mother referred is the indignant autobiographical account of Patrick’s childhood terror of his generally grim, authoritarian father. ‘The Stag at Bay’ seems also likely to reflect some aspect of Patrick’s psychological breakthrough. The story concerns a self-righteous, priggish author unwittingly cuckolded by his young wife.
The protagonist Edwin is portrayed as suffering from an attack of writer’s block. He has been commissioned to write a piece on marriage for a women’s magazine:
The article was proving much more difficult than he had expected. It was not for lack of raw material … and it was not for lack of experience or thought. Marriage was a subject that he had thought about a great deal, deeply, and he had supposed that the profound part of the article would be the easiest: yet although he was in the right mood, costive and solemn, the words would not form themselves into an orderly and harmonious procession. They remained in his head, swirling in grand but indeterminate shapes; or if they had any concrete existence at all it was in the form of scrappy notes, odd words jotted down …
Meanwhile, as he struggles with an article intended to define the high ideals of marriage amid the squalid débris of a neglected flat, Edwin’s wife has engaged in an affair with an elderly playboy cousin – not from love or lust, but merely ‘to know, to really know, what adultery was like’: ‘She sloughed the anxiously contriving housewife, dropped ten years from her appearance, and responded to his cheerful obscenity with an assured impudence that no longer shocked her inner mind.’
The moral of the tale is clear. Life is overtaking the drudgery of the laborious author, who writes with ponderous difficulty about an institution which has in his case atrophied, while his amoral young wife instinctively grasps at fleeting pleasure before it becomes too late. The writer’s block is plainly Patrick’s own. The ‘pink, virginal and inviting’ young wife was doubtless suggested by the ever-present figure of my mother, while the customary pristine neatness of the flat in the rue Arago happened at the time of writing to be uncharacteristically chaotic, owing to the need to dry and iron quantities of dirty clothes brought back from their extended trip to Cornwall. As my mother acknowledged, ‘place looks like inferior old clothes shop’. The fictional wife’s flighty enjoyment of a sensual affair possibly suggests a metaphor for Patrick’s dawning realization that successful writing should be fun. Certainly nothing suggests that Patrick ever suspected – still less, had reason to suspect – infidelity on my mother’s part.
It is nevertheless a measure of Patrick’s commitment to the ideology of high-mindedness that he regarded rollicking adventure stories as essentially immature: ‘Anson juvenile’, as he termed it. This derogation may indeed have proved fortunate, enabling him to cast away inhibition, writing from the heart. His cheerful tentative opening passages have survived in a notebook:
At half-past eight on the drizzling morning of Tuesday May the 22nd, 1739, the uproar outside the rectory of Ballynasaggart reached its height; for at that moment Peter …
The Rev. Mr Septimus O’Toole behaved extremely well in the troubles of 1715; he was also a very considerable scholar – his commentary upon the Stoic philosophers of the Lower Empire had given him …
When the troubles of 1715 broke out upon the land, the Rev. Mr Octavius Murphy published a little small pamphlet entitled The Idea of an Expedient King in favour of the Hanoverian succession; and this did more for him, in the matter of worldly success, than the three octavo volumes of his Commentary upon the Stoic Philosophers or the square quarto of his Pelagius Refuted …
All three drafts were discarded, possibly because Patrick came to realize that in reality the Jacobite risings of 1715 exerted little impact on repressed Ireland. He further toyed with the idea of ‘Funny lower deck character who spells with a wee [substitution of w for v] and patronises Irish person on a/c of he don’t speak English proper or at least not wery.’ Eventually, he decided to open in medias res, with Peter Palafox riding away to Cork and high adventure across the glimmering billows of the western sea. Almost at once the writing began to flow with wonderful facility. As my mother happily observed, ‘P. wrote beautiful beginning for Golden Ocean after days of pain.’
On 22 January 1955 she posted a synopsis of the novel to Curtis Brown. A week later: ‘Things go well. Rupert will … give advance & contract for The Golden Ocean.’ So inviting was the encouragement from all sides, that progress continued unchecked. As my mother excitedly commented on 2 April, ‘P. is back at work since 31st: Golden Ocean is perfectly splendid.’ The book was completed in July, and posted to England with high hopes. On the 27th my mother returned from the doctor after tearing a muscle when working on the foundations of the new house. ‘P. met me, Oh Joy bringing kind letter about Golden Ocean from Ruth Simon (H[art-]D[avis]). She thinks too that it is quite lovely.’
Changes to chapter I were proposed by the publisher (did the original version begin with one of the trial opening paragraphs?). Patrick was happy with the suggestions: ‘P. & I worked on G. Ocean, P. cutting & substituting, I reading for a list of sea-terms. It is such a LOVELY book,’ enthused my mother. By the end of October, ‘P. finished beautiful diagram of Centurion for Ocean, I typed list [of sea-terms] he made.’ Both diagram and sea-terms drew extensively on Patrick’s copy of Dr Burney’s revised edition of Falconer’s Universal Dictionary of the Marine.[8] (#litres_trial_promo) It was not until 1971 that he obtained a copy of the original (1769) edition, which was more apt for the chronological setting of his novels. Burney, however, served him well – so much so, that the spine came clean away from overuse, and as has been seen was eventually rebacked by Patrick in vellum in 1989.
The Golden Ocean is indeed a wonderfully happy book: lively, good-humoured, exciting, and convincing as a vision of a past era to an extent which only a tiny modicum of historical novels ever attains. At last Patrick had succeeded in weaning himself off gloomy and introspective themes, and thrown himself into a creation which displayed to marvellous effect his natural genius. Like Dumas recounting the grandiose excesses of Porthos, he subsequently recalled that ‘I wrote the tale in little more than a month [between Testimonies and Richard Temple], laughing most of the time. It made no great impression, nor did I expect it to do so; but it had pleasant consequences.’[9] (#litres_trial_promo)
And all composed in that little crooked nest above the rue Arago, permeated by the sounds and smells of the south!
Reviews were generally laudatory, the most perceptive being that of the academic T.J. Binyon in the Times Literary Supplement, who described it as: ‘wholly absorbing and wonderfully funny, like the best children’s books it can be appreciated fully only by adults’.[fn6] (#litres_trial_promo)
In 1970 Patrick confided to his diary that ‘I am childishly attached to the book’, and seven years later he described it to his editor Richard Ollard as ‘a book I look back upon with affection – it was such fun to write, & it came flowing out in a month or two’. As has been seen, ‘a month or two’ represents no more than pardonable exaggeration, for it is clear that his pen did indeed run happily away with him.
There followed a German contract for the novel, for which he received £40 advance and royalties. Much more rewarding was its acceptance by the John Day Company in America, whose contract provided for advances totalling $750 and royalties.
1956 proved a generally quiet and unproductive year. None of the family came to stay. I was preoccupied during the summer with preparations for my entrance examination to Trinity College Dublin, while Richard was absent from home beginning his national service in the Royal Navy. However, in January 1957 exciting news reached the little house in Collioure, which had by now been accorded the Catalan name Correch d’en Baus. On the back of an envelope containing one of her stepson Richard’s letters, my mother has written: ‘R is at Toulon! Patrick goes in eight days (on the first of Feb.) to see him, and perhaps I go also. Do I take my beautiful robe with me please?’
Unfortunately, nothing more is recorded of this event, though the happy expedition was presumably undertaken. On the other side of the envelope my mother wrote further: ‘Hurray Hurray Hurray’, and jotted down train times for travel between Collioure and Toulon. Relations could not have been closer between Richard, his father, and his stepmother, despite their enforced separation.
Throughout this time building work continued on the first-floor living room and kitchen above the casot, which among other benefits would provide room for Richard and me when we came to stay. Although Patrick concealed himself when writing in the casot, in order to avoid being distracted by the exuberant discourse of the workmen above, it was unfortunately impossible to escape them altogether, as this indignant note shows:
May 8th or 9th 1957. I am sitting here – a dark, coldish spitting late afternoon – waiting for the Men to go, so that I do not have to go up & say anything myself. Allez, bon soir. A demain – à demain, eh!
And this stupid situation (I would rather go back now for tea. I would rather have gone back some time ago) this silly indeterminate stuffed state comes from old Oliva’s ill-temper this morning which (its effect continuing) makes it impossible for me to be there watching him crépir [roughcasting] & occasionally helping without truckling.
I had thought of making some observations about all this but they are rather muddled & it really does not seem worth while. I am terrified of the English, French & American income tax people: less the people than the Thing, of which they are the righteous & I am sure complacent powerful hands. Blind but percipient tentacles, slow, slow, ridiculous; & then terribly fast & efficient.
If the English do not send the rebate we are destroyed: as it is can we ever pay for all this ghastly house? It engulfs material: and now it no longer belongs to me at all: I am, at times & on sufferance, a dull kind of labourer, while the capable ones – Oliva’s rough capability is depressing, very – while they walk about & spit & piss on the walls.
Now the silly, silly little man is peering about outside. I pretend not to see him. He is looking for the saw. I still do not see him. Enlightened self interest. He was not looking for the saw but the marteline & the marteau. Just how silly can one get?
Fortunately Patrick’s elder brother Bun in Canada came to their aid with a generous ‘loan’ (seemingly intended as a gift) of several hundred dollars. Despite this, Patrick underwent bouts of restlessness and discontent. In November my mother wrote sadly to Richard, saying that his father and Willy Mucha had taken to sitting up late, complaining about their common lack of inspiration.
Fortunately, it was shortly after this that Patrick’s literary career revived. In due course, the commercial success and gratifying critical acclaim of The Golden Ocean led to a request for a sequel. On 30 December 1957 Rupert Hart-Davis signed a contract with Patrick for a novel to be entitled ‘THE VOYAGE OF THE WAGER’. As with its predecessor, the stipulation was for £100 advance, half to be paid on signature and half on delivery.


Patrick breakfasting on the balcony of the casot in more contented mood
In the course of researching Anson’s voyage for The Golden Ocean, Patrick had come across the extraordinary plight of the crew of a ship of the fleet, which he had found no occasion to mention in the novel. On 14 May 1741 the storeship Wager was wrecked on the coast of Chile, a terrible storm preventing the crew’s rescue. The survivors underwent appalling hardships during their protracted struggle for survival in that desolate region. Eventually, a remnant managed to reach Valparaiso, whence they sailed to England, arriving in February 1745. This fortunate group included Midshipman (later Admiral) John Byron, grandfather of the poet. In 1768 he published a vivid account of their ordeal, which drew great attention then and thereafter.
While Peter Palafox, engaging Irish hero of The Golden Ocean, reappears in the tale, Patrick introduced two fresh protagonists. These are the dashing historical Jack Byron himself, and his fictional comrade Tobias Barrow. Tobias is the adopted son of a wealthy squire, Mr Elwes, a neighbour of the Chaworth family, with whom Jack and his sister live. While Jack and Tobias become fast friends, as a malevolent Whig Mr Elwes was regarded with disfavour by the well-born Tory Chaworths.
Mr Elwes had acquired his riches from successful practice as a surgeon and dubious investment in South Sea stock. He adopted Tobias, with the dual intent of bringing him up as his apprentice, and indulging a hobbyhorse project of educating him to become a marvel of omniscience. As the system involved almost unceasing daily toil and ‘the most severe whippings’, it did not prove a happy home for the boy. Moreover, while he achieved a considerable hoard of knowledge, principally in Latin, Greek and the physical sciences, in addition to an encyclopaedic understanding of natural history, in other respects he failed his oppressive patron’s expectations dismally. Nor was his situation likely to be improved by the imminent arrival of a stepmother, ‘an odious woman with a dark red face’, who ‘hated Tobias at first sight’. Faced with this distasteful prospect, he attaches himself to Jack, accompanying him to serve with Anson’s squadron in the great expedition to harry the Spaniards.
Tobias is an eccentric solitary, a boy-man with an obsession for collecting and studying exotic creatures: ‘he had spent all his days in that strange, dark, unsocial house, with odd, unsatisfactory servants perpetually coming and going.’ Hopelessly absent-minded and inattentive to appearances, he all but falls overboard on boarding ship.
It is not hard to detect the original of Tobias. As a boy, Patrick led a lonely and unloved existence in various grim and silent homes. There he was subjected to the harsh whims, including it seems severe beatings, of his cold and selfish father – likewise an eccentric medical man – who engaged in desultory attempts to instruct his young son. Again, the extent to which Mr Elwes’s Whig principles antagonize his better-bred Tory neighbours recalls Dr Russ’s attachment to the Liberal Party, which Patrick came to believe accounted for their isolation and supposed ostracism at Lewes by the local Tory nobility and gentry.[fn7] (#litres_trial_promo)
Dreamy and impractical, Tobias sought refuge in varied fields of esoteric learning – just as had Patrick, during long periods of abandonment to his own devices. While Patrick was fortunate to avoid having an unpleasant stepmother, he was regularly tyrannized by a succession of largely ill-qualified governesses. Again, at sea Tobias resents the rough pranks of his youthful messmates in the cockpit of the Wager. His ordeal most likely echoed the stiff and awkward Patrick’s own unhappy experience during his brief service as a cadet in the RAF, later (as I have suggested) recalled in his short story ‘The Happy Despatch’.[10] (#litres_trial_promo)

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