Memoirs of a Private Man (16 page)

So towards the end of this period I began to look around. Our house, which we had occupied for thirteen years since the end of its commercial activities, badly lacked a garden. The house was built on rising ground overlooking the village, but it was made ground, from the stone and mineral refuse, the ‘attle', of a long extinct mine, and a six–inch veneer of soil had been spread to cover the rock. There was never a trace of subsidence in the building, but gardening was not rewarding work. During the war we tried to plant potatoes, with ludicrous results. I wanted a garden, and preferably one with soil that rhododendrons and camellias would tolerate. Over the spine of Cornwall where the soil, though still fairly shallow, was superbly acid, and watered by the soft rains, these exotic plants luxuriated. Also, although the winds on the south coast were still savage, they were almost zephyr-like compared to the tempests which fell upon us on the north coast. In Perranporth scarcely a tree flourished. To encourage a sycamore to grow a dozen feet high was a major achievement. On the other hand, lime-tolerant shrubs, bulbs, roses, low-growing bedding plants, gorse and heather and foxgloves and poppies brought a blaze of colour in the spring and early summer. At Treberran in favourable, specially created, pockets we had lovely flowers. I even made a rhododendron bed by bringing back soil in dustbins in the back of my Alvis from the other side of the county. The bed prospered. In spite of prophecies that the lime would get into the bed and eventually kill the plants, they were still flowering freely twenty years after we left.

But it was makeshift. Why should I go on tinkering with gardening, making do with the third rate, when I could have the best? If we moved, then clearly somewhere near Falmouth or St Austell were the areas to look in. It was a different, softer Cornwall, but it would still be within easy reach of the beaches we loved.

Yet southern Cornwall did not attract us so much to live in. Most of the small villages and towns by the sea had even in those days been invaded by the retired, from up county or locally, by genuine and would-be yachtsmen, by a certain social stuffiness that did not attract us. Perranporth, for all its gimcrack attempts to attract the tourist, was robustly alive and many of the families remained stubbornly Cornish. The very violence of the winds was a challenge and a stimulus.

And such a move would do nothing to solve the tax problem. Go abroad? Live abroad? Become a tax exile? Ever since the end of the war my wife and I, sun and sea worshippers and revelling as we did in the beaches of Cornwall, had taken our holidays further south where there was a hotter sun and a warmer sea: Italy, Greece, Spain, France, Yugoslavia, etc. Of these countries France was the most accessible, the one whose language we moderately understood, the most civilized and certainly the land where we had the most friends. If we left Treberran we ought to leave England, at least for an experimental period. We put Treberran up for sale with that in mind.

Again it was in a trough in house prices, and it took over a year to sell. But it happened in the end.

Two incidents I specially recall. One was soon after the sale when my son was home from school and we were out somewhere together and decided to have a bottle of champagne to celebrate the sale. He said quietly: ‘What is there to celebrate?' So much for the opinion of both our children.

Being lumbered with a specially vivid imagination and being apparently able to see all sides of every question, I had agonized long about the decision to move, knowing that I was not deciding the future of one but of four. No one will ever know whether my decision was the right one.

The other incident occurred the night before we left. Half the furniture had gone into store and we were sleeping in our usual bedroom on the ground floor. In the later part of the night there was a loud crash, and when we went into the uncarpeted hall we found that a picture had fallen and smashed the glass. It was a John Speed map of Cornwall, dated 1614, a prized possession. The cord had broken. I still have the map, but sometimes wonder if it was an omen that we should never live in Cornwall again.

Having given – or lent – our cat to a friend, we left for London, and after six weeks in a furnished house there, drove off to the South of France in two cars, a Mini and a three-litre Alvis, laden with books, a few personal belongings and two children. Andrew, my son, being now seventeen, had passed his driving test, so we shared the driving between the three of us – though I think at that time I did not let Andrew drive the Alvis. Wherever we stopped we were surrounded by people staring at the Mini. It had come out in 1959 and this was the spring of 1960. Even in England it was a rarity (I had only been able to buy one because of a pull I had with a garage owner) and in France
nothing
like it, nothing so small, had ever been seen before. We should have been presented with a free Mini for the publicity we gave it in France.

For the previous two years we had driven down to the Côte d'Azur, and after a preliminary holiday in Italy, had ended up at Cap Ferrat and stayed at the Hôtel Voile d'Or. Michael Powell, the director of so many prestigious movies like
The Red Shoes
and
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp
, owned it, having inherited it from his father, whose mistress, Madame Alice, ran it – together with Michael's own wife, Frankie, who deserves a book to herself. Irish, pretty, fey, vague, extravagant of gesture and emotion, warm, throwaway, impulsive, generous, feckless and devil-may-care, Frankie knew everybody. The hotel was not well run but it was jolly, and whom might one not meet there? Not only did she know everyone in the film industry, she seemed to be on terms with half the artists and intellectuals of France.

Having got to know her pretty well in the two previous visits, I told her that we were coming to live in France and would like to rent a villa somewhere along the coast. She instantly discovered the Villa Caprice and took it on our behalf.

We therefore went down in March, halting on the high ground above Dijon to hear, on the fading long-wave BBC channel, the details of the latest British Budget, and then plunged onwards towards our Mediterranean summer.

The Villa Caprice was a four-bedroomed house, pleasant but small, perched directly above the road leading round the harbour. It could hardly have been more central: when we opened champagne, the corks would fly over the road and into the harbour. We settled there for the Easter holidays, and at the end of them the children went back to England until the summer break. We had brought a motor-powered Kleppermaster with us for sailing round the coast and for waterskiing. We also for a time hired my friend Max Reinhardt's cabin cruiser with its two 40 h.p. Johnson engines. In late July our children came back, and over the summer holidays we had a succession of their friends to stay, as well as our niece Jacqui Williamson, who had a wonderful time.

In effect it was a wonderful time for us all. We picnicked nearly every day, either on Passable Beach or on Paloma, or at sea. Most Fridays we drove to the market at Ventimiglia, where every week we found something new to splash our money on. Shoes, gloves, shirts, blouses, beach equipment, sheets, food, fruits, cakes – then further on into Italy where we usually managed to reach San Remo for a late bathe before lunch and then endless bathes after; beach football and tea and then the longish drive home along the Lower Corniche, stopping at some little hotel or restaurant for supper and reaching Cap Ferrat about 11 p. m. A fourteen-hour day of incomparable pleasure.

In the evenings there were parties or the local cinema or – rarely – we went to the Casino at Beaulieu, or to grand opera out of doors in Les Arènes in nearby Nice, or orchestral concerts given before Prince Rainier and Princess Grace in the Palace in Monaco.

I say ‘ rarely' to the Casino for I have never had any interest in gambling. In 1950, on our first trip to the United States aboard the first
Queen Elizabeth
, we had a little trouble when disembarking in finding a customs officer to mark our luggage.

We eventually found one, who in friendly fashion said: ‘Where are you staying, Mr Graham?'

I replied, the New Weston.

‘Aw,' he said, ‘that's real good. That's a real good bar. D'ye know during the war it was one of the few places in New York where you could squander money economically.'

I shook him by the hand and said: ‘My friend, this is something I have enjoyed doing all my life, but I have never been able to describe it before.'

I was doing just that in the South of France. To go to the Casino would have been in my view to squander money uneconomically. Besides being a bore.

We made a lot of interesting and entertaining friends: Graham and Kathleen Sutherland, Gregory and Veronique Peck, Princess Starraba; and others, like Jack and Doreen Hawkins and Prince and Princess Chula of Thailand, we had known in England. My daughter, being a natural blonde and very pretty though only fourteen-and-a-half, was besieged by handsome young French boys, who could not resist her. Among her other suitors were Steven Peck, Gregory's second son by his first wife, and his second wife's brother, Joe Passani, who was also her age.

Gregory Peck had been married to his second wife only five years at this time, and had two young children by her. They had taken a large villa with a huge swimming pool just behind the Voile d'Or, and Madame Passani, his new mother-in-law, was with them. She was a distinguished Russian woman, still in her forties, an intellectual of great charm and force of character, with formidable good looks that appeared and disappeared with her moods. Gregory was not present much at first, being still bound up in the making of
The Guns of Navarone
, which was running months over schedule, but Madame Passani – or Shoshone – took a great fancy to us, and our friendships blossomed and lasted for years. Her charm of character and personality made a great impression on me, and generations later she surfaced as Shona in
The Green Flash
.

I think her husband, who had some time ago disappeared from the scene, was half-French, half-Italian, and Veronique must have resembled him more than her mother, being a dark, attractive Latin. Joe, her much younger brother, who is now a successful surgeon in California, always looked the Russian to me.

After we had returned to England, Gregory and Veronique Peck also moved to England on a new film he was making, and the friendship ripened. We went as a foursome to theatres and restaurants; also we spent a day with them at the house they had rented in Denham, where Veronique showed her comic abilities by mimicking some elderly earl they knew playing croquet. Once when staying in Cornwall a maid came to the table where we were dining and said in a trembling voice: ‘You're wanted on the phone, Mr Graham. It's – it's Greg – Gregory Peck.'

Later, when we went to Hollywood we dined with them and were on the best of terms. Some years then passed when our only exchange was of Christmas cards.

Then one year I heard that Gregory was going to Venice for the Film Festival, so I wrote to him and suggested we should meet there. There was no reply. I asked my agent to get in touch with his agent, which he did. No response. When we reached Venice I sent him round by hand a note from the Danieli to the Gritti, but it brought no reply, and we never met thereafter.

He always seemed such a normal, charming, courteous man that this lack of response has long puzzled me. It could, I suppose, have had something to do with the tragic loss of his son.

During that summer in France we bathed and sunbathed and boated and socialized and drove up and down the coast in our big open Alvis, and went to the Festival of Flowers in Nice, and an August fiesta there with fireworks of extravagant variety, and to the Monte Carlo Grand Prix, and to other events wherever and whenever the fancy took us.

A girl called Penny, who was at school with Rosamund in England, and of an age, arrived to stay for a couple of weeks. Compared to Rosamund's piquant good looks, she was quite awful. Her black hair was lank, she walked with a limp, her eyes were lacklustre, her skin pasty, she didn't have much to say for herself. Jean looked her over for a couple of days and then took her in hand. She found the shuffling limp was due to ill-fitting shoes; she bought her new ones – with high heels. Penny was taken to a hairdresser, and came out with her straight dull black hair shining like a sword and draping attractively over one side of her face. A new dress, a bit of tactful make-up and she was transformed. The lacklustre in her eyes disappeared overnight. She was killing. For the first few days of Penny's stay, Rosamund found her friend a drag on her cheerful activities. After that she was slightly chagrined to find gazes straying from her to this sultry dark-eyed girl with the brilliant eyes and the fresh complexion and the elegant walk. No filmic transformation was greater. It was
Roman Holiday
over again.

A big American aircraft carrier came in to Villefranche Bay. Rosamund decided to take a pedalo, along with Penny, from Passable Beach to reconnoitre. Only when they came back did we discover that Penny could not swim. Thereafter they had two American sailors who came over to see them whenever they were free. We nicknamed them Mutt and Jeff. But in imagination I began to compose a letter to Penny's parents: ‘It is with the deepest regret that I have to inform you that in a drowning accident in Villefranche Bay …'

At the end of the summer holidays our two children went back to England to school, and, a bit later, when our lease of Villa Caprice expired, we followed. We could have renewed the lease but did not.

We had had a wonderful time. A few years later Philip Larkin, writing of expatriate authors, speaks of:

… the shit in the shuttered chateâu
Who does his five hundred words
Then parts out the rest of the day
Between bathing and booze and birds.

I didn't have a shuttered chateau but a pleasant small villa and the possibility of buying some property nearby. I was never a boozer, but wine was plentiful and cheap. I was happily married but that was not exactly a liability. But I was ready to go home.