Memoirs of a Private Man (10 page)

On one occasion rather more than halfway along the beach I found a crate. It was undamaged, had open slats, and through the openings you could see an eighteen-inch-long, four-inch-wide object wrapped in waterproof sacking, and suspended, to protect it from damage or jolting within the three-foot-square crate, by steel springs tautly secured to the bars of the crate. I approached it with caution, but there were only numbers on the crate and no indication whether it was British or German. I debated what to do. The enormous trek back, with the long wait and the trek out and back again? It looked like no bomb I'd ever seen – nor in fact like anything else I had ever seen. Clearly it was of value, and was either explosive or, more probably, delicate and must not be jolted for that reason. I found one or two stones on that enormously unstony beach and threw them at the crate, but they only shook it slightly. The sensible thing was to shoot at it and make sure it was safe, but I did not like to destroy what might be some valuable item of equipment.

I went up to it again and saw that the springs were simply hooked by tension to the sides of the crate and so could be unhooked. With a good deal of care I gently unlatched it until only one hook remained. This was more difficult but it eventually yielded and I slid the object out of the crate and began my trek home, the thing dangling from my hand like a spring-heeled puppet.

When, having wended my way through the sparse holiday-makers and climbed the steep hill, I reached the coastguard look-out I found myself the most unpopular man in Great Britain. Compared to me, Hitler was a friend. Although I hung the object on a wire fence some twenty feet from the little station, every one of my fellow coastguards joined in condemning my foolish and dangerous action, an action which not only endangered my life but, more importantly, their own. I rang Coombes in Plymouth, and spoke to him and then to a bomb disposal officer and answered a number of questions. The officer didn't think it was explosive, so Coombes, who was coming for one of his inspections the following day, said he would look at it when he came.

For these inspections all seven of us had to be present, and they all stood around with the greatest alarm and annoyance while he examined my find. The top of the waterproof covering was secured by a metal ring. As he removed it he suddenly shouted: ‘
Ph-izz!
' Six of the coastguards jumped a foot in the air. Coombes had a great sense of humour.

My curiosity as to the identity of my find was never entirely satisfied. I was told it was a newly introduced type of radio valve, but accepted that with a pinch of salt.

On another occasion, in mid-June, when I was double banking, an alarm came through that two soldiers from Penhale Camp – three miles along the beach – had been cut off by the tide and were on the cliffs and in danger of drowning. Lifesaving apparatus was sent for from St Agnes and a group of us, headed by the irascible Mr Sparrock, made for the cliffs beyond Flat Rocks. In mid-June in fine weather there is no real darkness in Cornwall. At two in the morning the sun has long sunk but the sky over the sea is a luminous cobalt already promising a dawn two hours off. It was such a night when we set out to rescue the soldiers, windless, more gloaming than dark, the tide coming to the full, hissing over the sand; rock pools and shadowed cliffs, faint stars in the distant sky, shaded lanterns, splashing feet. It was wonderful to be alive on such a night.

The upshot of our rescue operation was that we climbed the cliffs and after a while located the soldiers. But, by the time we got the rope ladders in place and clambered down over the precipice, the soldiers, helped by the tide which had now begun to ebb, had fled. In spite of strenuous enquiries, they were never identified. They had been breaking camp and somehow got back undiscovered.

The fury of the rescue team knew no bounds. ‘If I got near them,' fumed Sparrock, ‘I'd help them up the frigging cliffs with the toe of me frigging boot.' He was particularly mad because on the way to the rescue he had stumbled and fallen flat on his face in a footdeep sandy pool. For me that was the high spot of a thoroughly delightful night.

The next day, bleary from lack of sleep, I had to attend the funeral of an old friend at St Agnes, a fine Belgian violinist called Dupont who at one time had been leader of King Edward VII's private orchestra. In the warm, glittering midday, scented with the roses flowering in the churchyard, my stomach kept giving convulsive jerks. If anyone saw it I hope they thought I was weeping. In fact I was trying helplessly to control the laughter brought on by memories of the night.

In the meantime my personal life was not without vicissitudes. With the constant risk of evacuees being billeted on us, the house could not be allowed to remain empty except for our small family; so, as a protection from worse things, paying guests – of whom there were a few around – must be taken all winter and through the next summer and the winter after that, etc., etc., etc. It meant no rest for my young wife, and, beset by staff problems, rationing, blackout precautions in a house with an excessive number of windows, and every other sort of wartime restriction, it was not the sort of early married life we had pictured.

But we were together a lot, which was far more than I had ever dreamed possible, once war had broken out. And so far as one could see, unless some better use were found for my unimaginable talents in London, or the war casualties became so high that the barrel had to be scraped clean, I was likely to remain in Cornwall.

Sometimes I made unpatriotic use of the meagre allowance of petrol we were permitted, and drove around in search of food to feed our guests. There was a farm in Roseland, owned by the friend of a friend, where a few discreet eggs could be bought. Driving home we reached Truro. It was market day and busy, and just as I entered the town I touched my horn at a pedestrian and the damned thing stuck and would not stop. It is not a large town, but it seemed large that day. I drove right down the hill, through the crowded streets and up the other side with the horn relentlessly blaring. Everyone stood and stared. It was as well I was not picked up because in addition to a wife and baby son in the car I had eight dozen blackmarket eggs in the boot.

To complicate things a little more in our home life, my mother, always a difficult person to satisfy where maids were concerned, had by early 1940 run through a succession of them and been left frequently adrift and untended; so in the end we said she must come and live with us, at least for the duration of the war; though I think we all knew it meant for the duration of her life. We were able to give her a private sitting room, and the arrangement worked fairly well.

By 1943 the airfield at Trevellas, two miles away, was fully operational, and one day a flight lieutenant called and told us we must provide accommodation for six pilot officers. For this the Government would pay us 6d a night.

Of course we welcomed the young men – all younger than I was – and we made many warm friendships, none of which, alas, endured. Our young men were constantly changing; and not many survived the war. We lost two while they were staying with us – not from enemy action but from hideously ordinary flying accidents. They were the cream of youth: supremely fit, intelligent, high-spirited, zestful, courageous but fatalistic. There were some Poles among them too – equally splendid men. I have written about two of them in my novel
Cameo
.

A further complication in our lives, though a happy one, was the birth of our first child, a son, Andrew, in June 1942 – about the time of the Battle of Stalingrad. But while Jean was carrying him – clearly as a result of the tension and overwork of the last three years – she developed asthma, a complaint which was almost to kill her in the next half decade. She began to have savage monthly attacks, from which after two days in bed she would begin to crawl about, thin and wasted but with the tremendous stamina that she had, rapidly becoming her old self again. Then she would have about three weeks before the next attack. This, plus half a hotel to run, six young airmen to be seen to on occasion, a delicate mother-in-law who could do nothing in the house, and now a young baby to tend, was more than enough for one young woman.

Of course we got away from time to time, thanks to my motherin-law and one or two other people who could temporarily take the load; and these short holidays – in spite of everything much more high-spirited than our honeymoon, because now the dangers were out in the open and could be faced and some of them already defeated – quickly made up for anything lacklustre in the first. Several times we went to London and ignored the air-raids with theatre-and concert-going. Once at the ballet at Sadler's Wells we saw a young girl dancing one of her first key roles. When we came out, the sky was ablaze with searchlights. We hoped they were out to welcome the arrival of Margot Fonteyn.

During my time as a coastguard I spent many long hours looking down at the remains of a wreck. Only the weed-grown timbers showed, a skeleton of a French ship called
La Seine
which had been driven ashore in a January gale in 1900. Waller, the Irishman, a vividly vigorous sixty-year-old, as soon as he saw it wanted to put the wreck to good use and, standing in water sometimes up to his shoulders, since wrecks always create pools around themselves, he rigged up a very long rope between the coastguard station and the wreck and erected an endless whip, whereby a thinner line with baited hooks upon it could be rotated out to sea at full tide and back again. It was a Heath Robinson contrivance, but after a few false starts it suddenly worked in abundance, and one night we found ourselves with two dozen mackerel and two huge skate. Food was so short that I telephoned my wife and, pregnant though she was, she walked the mile from our house and traversed the singlefile precipitous cliff path to the station. It was nine o'clock on a wild black winter's night, and when I heard a rattle of stones I went out with the Ross rifle and challenged her.

A faint voice came through the windy darkness. ‘ It's your
wife
!'

Unfortunately the large canvas bag she had brought wasn't big enough to take the skate lying down, so to speak, and when she came to cut it up next morning rigor mortis had set in, and she was confronted with a huge crescent-shaped fish covered with sharp abrasive scales. We ate it in due time. But presently news of Waller's enterprise reached headquarters and it was put a stop to.

After the war, when the little coastguard station was converted into a sophisticated, instrument-crammed building concerned to measure the height of waves (waves, it seems, diminish on their long journey from the Mexican Gulf, but they do not alter their relative size, one to another), the remains of the wreck were blown up so as not to disturb the pattern of the sea. But from 1940 onwards I stared at it and thought long about it: it seemed a wonderful relic of an age long past – although in fact it was then only forty years gone. Indeed one of the seven of us on watch, a man called Tom Mitchell – Farmer Tom, to distinguish him from all the other Mitchells in the village – had seen the vessel actually come in and the following day, as a boy of nine, had clambered over the ship. He was able to tell me all the details of the wreck, and I pondered over the lives of the people who had been drowned and those – the majority – who had been saved.

On one of my infrequent days off I took my wife to Falmouth and found a rather disreputable cafe–restaurant where the proprietor did not send round to take your orders but bargained fiercely with you as you came in as to which joint you should have some slices of, these being arrayed on the counter at his side. As sometimes happens with an author, two fairly disparate scenes come together to make a novel, and from these scenes – the shipwreck and the cafe – emerged
The Forgotten Story
.

It was published in the spring of 1945 while the war was still at a crucial stage. It seemed to me at the time that it was written too hastily and too casually and had been scribbled down in the spare moments of a broken and traumatic few years. I have never written a novel I thought less well of at the time. The previous book,
The Merciless Ladies
, most of it written before the war, had come out in 1944 and was now beginning to sell. I was sufficiently clearsighted to be aware that this was largely due to the times: shortage of newsprint, shortage of new novels, and a public which, deprived of many other outlets, was reading more than ever before. All the same I thought well of this book and feared that the publication of what seemed to me to be a relatively trivial novel like
The Forgotten Story
would do my growing reputation no good at all. As publication date drew near I became more and more anxious and worried, so that at the end if someone had offered me £50 to withdraw the book I should have done so.

In the event
The Forgotten Story
, simple though it was, drew a new critical attention and soon began to sell on its own merits apart from any popularity born of a newsprint shortage.
The Merciless Ladies
, in my view now, was a rather pretentious, ‘literary' novel, which, if I had ambitions to suppress anything, should have been the better target. In later years I rewrote it entirely and, I hope, ironed out some of the worst bugs. But there seems no doubt that, judging as objectively as possible,
The Forgotten Story
is far the better of the two. So can one totally deceive oneself at the time.

I remember walking up to the coastguard station one day just before the end of the war with the glowing – dizzying – knowledge in my heart that the recently published
The Forgotten Story
was earning me around £50 a week. Fifty pounds a week! Today's equivalent is about £1,000. At this rate I would shortly be rich and independent.

After that a lot of things happened more or less together. Just before we were married I had told Jean one evening that I had an idea to write an historical novel about Cornwall. For a young woman who had a sublime faith in my abilities, she – for once – looked doubtful. I think it crossed her mind that I was really attempting too much.