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Organizing just one event required about twelve letters. I’d decided to rent a house in Cheltenham and bring down my lovely and capable Irish daily to act as housekeeper. The council
didn’t see
the point of this at first, but financial argument won them round: it would be far cheaper than putting writers up in the hotel. From the writers’ point
of view it was better to be somewhere they could have a drink and sandwiches late at night after their show and talk to each other if they wanted to. I was allowed a part-time secretary and John
Moore eventually suggested Jackie Gomme, who had been his secretary. She was perfect: funny, literate and full of good-will. We’ve been friends ever since.

After about six months, I went back to the Arts Council with my list of exhibits. Oh, they said, if we’d realized there was as much as that about,
we
could have mounted the
exhibition for you, but it’s too late now. The least they could do was to pay for the carriage and insurance of the pieces, I said. They agreed.

The
Sunday Telegraph
evening was also having a bumpy ride. The paper wanted a symposium on ‘Sex in Literature’ to be chaired by their editor Donald McClaughlan. I’d
managed to persuade Joseph Heller to come from New York, Romain Gary from Paris and – a great coup – Carson McCullers, also from the US.

Then they announced that they’d invited Kingsley Amis to take part. I was furious. They hadn’t consulted me and I thought four people would be too many for the programme. They were
adamant, and even hinted that they mightn’t sponsor the event after all. I went to my cousin, Peregrine Worsthorne, then assistant editor, and he agreed that they couldn’t go back on
their word. I wrote to Amis, inviting him and his wife to stay a night in the house. No reply. I wrote again. I felt slightly frightened at the prospect of him coming: I thought he would be an
‘Angry Young Man’ who would think the whole thing was silly. I got a very nice letter back enclosing a copy of the earlier one he’d sent and accepting in a cordial manner.

By now I had a fair amount of generously donated manuscripts and took them one summer evening to my friend Anthony Hobson who had been the book auctioneer at Sotheby’s and who had kindly
consented to conduct the festival auction. Anthony had
married Tanya Winagradoff, whom I’d known slightly when she was a girl, and they now lived at Whitsbury near
Salisbury. Tanya was away the night I went there, but their firstborn, Emma, aged about two, received me in her bath. It was a beautiful sunlit summer evening and the house, with its exquisite
domestic view of small church and meadow rich with buttercups and Queen Anne’s Lace, made me suddenly long to live in the country. I’d brought the manuscripts for Anthony to see and
catalogue; they weren’t a remarkable collection, but he was very nice about it.

By August, the events were more or less organized. The festival programme, a sixty-page affair with reproductions of some of the paintings, would be printed just on time. I’d found a house
not far from the town hall. Tickets were beginning to sell and, except for the fact that I couldn’t galvanize the town council to advertise adequately, things seemed to be going well. Then,
about a week before we were due to start, I got a cable from the US: ‘McCullers requires full-time SRN. Please provide.’ I didn’t even know what an SRN
was
. Jackie did.
‘A State Registered Nurse,’ she said. There was a short silence, and then she added, ‘My sister is one.’ Would she? She might. She did.

The
Telegraph
had agreed to put Carson in Claridges Hotel for a few days before the festival began, and I went to see her there to make sure that Jackie’s sister, Jo, had arrived
and was looking after her.

I’d no idea then how extremely ill Carson had been and still was. A few months before she came to England, she had undergone an eight-hour operation on all the tendons in her left hand,
and at the same time, cancer had been discovered and she’d had a breast removed. They’d given her a suite, and I waited in the sitting room among the carnations and grapes until Jo
wheeled her in, small and frail, holding a glass of bourbon at an experienced tilt.

Her hair was cut very short with something of a fringe and her rather round face was entirely white with a compressed mouth and large grey eyes. She had the appearance of a decadent waif,
vulnerable but at the same time full of presence. I was in awe of her, and stammered a greeting, saying how honoured and delighted we were that she’d made the journey for
Cheltenham. She smiled, which utterly changed her face – it became irradiated with some inner happiness, joy even – transforming it with a kind of ethereal beauty, endearing to the
point of love. I’d only ever seen this before with Jessie, the crippled girl who’d come to stay at Clifton Hill.

Carson’s left arm was in plaster. She was in constant pain, although she never mentioned it, and though the bourbon and painkillers helped her, I think her love for and friendship with
Mary Mercer sustained her. She frequently referred to her. Once, later in her stay, she said she’d like to take a present back for Mary, and I suggested going to Cameo Corner, a shop that
sold antique jewellery. Oh, yes, she’d love me to take her. So, one afternoon we went in a taxi, with Jo. Antique jewellery was plentiful and inexpensive in those days, and Carson spent a
good hour making her choice and was very excited when it was made and we were going back to her hotel. ‘I want to give it to her
now
!’

She wanted me to have supper with her for all three nights before Cheltenham began but it was impossible, I’d so much to do. I said I’d ring her every day, and I’d send my
brother to have supper with her because I thought she’d like him. He went, and she did. ‘She stays the same, whatever she’s talking about,’ he said afterwards.

The BBC wanted me to do an hour-long interview with her for
Bookstand
on television. It took place in a strange room on the ground floor of Claridges. It had no windows and several doors,
and it quickly became clear that one of them led to what sounded like the washing-up headquarters. At intervals there were noises that sounded like 365 fish forks falling from a great height into a
metallic sink. I’d prepared my questions as far as I could and all went well, until I’d finished. The BBC had only brought one camera and they wanted me to ask all the questions again
so they could shoot me asking them. The snag was that I had no list, and as
it’s possible to ask a great many questions in an hour, I had little or no idea of their order,
or of what I’d actually asked. They played bits back to me and I made frantic notes, and the fish forks continued to plunge while the room got hotter and hotter and more and more airless. I
made them let Carson go, at least, as she was exhausted, and I spent a frightful half-hour trying to cover the old ground.

I went down to Cheltenham the day before the festival began. The exhibition had to be hung, and the local gallery owner was now saying he’d have nothing to do with it. There were many
other last-minute hitches, not least of which was that driving through the town there was no sense of an impending festival. I didn’t feel the council was putting much effort into it. By now,
the whole thing had attracted a good deal of media attention, and I’d unwisely let slip to one journalist my disappointment at local interest, saying I might just as well have left the whole
thing alone as it was nearly impossible without local support. The one o’clock news announced that I was about to resign, and I was visited by some of the council to ask me to do no such
thing. Of course I wouldn’t, but I didn’t have the guts to add that they could have helped more. Many local people
did
help and were enthusiastic, but arts festivals of any kind
weren’t regarded then as possible money spinners for the local community, and so many things that run easily now were difficult then.

Once it got started, the festival went well. There were three events a day in the town hall – three especially for schools. Pete, who had always remained a friend, was loyal and helpful,
and gave a lecture on whales with one of the first recordings of their amazing voices. Laurens Van der Post lectured, I think, on Kalahari bushmen. There was an event with playwrights and another
on autobiography, to which Laurie contributed. On the Thursday evening, 4 October 1962, we had the
Sunday Telegraph
’s event on ‘Sex in Literature’. Tom Maschler escorted
Joseph Heller, Colin drove Carson and Jo down, Romain Gary arrived alone in a dark overcoat with a high stiff collar in which he looked romantically
foreign, and Kingsley Amis
came with his wife Hilly. The event wasn’t a great success: the chairman didn’t know how to draw out any of the writers, and it was rather stilted and uncertain.

I do remember Kingsley saying at one point how much he disliked what he called ‘hairy-chested’ sex in novels, but there weren’t many light moments. Afterwards we all drove to a
hotel in the country for dinner, and I sat next to Kingsley. Afterwards we went back to the house I’d rented, where the Amises were to stay: Carson had gone back to London and the others had
also dispersed. Hilly said she was tired and wanted to go to bed. Kingsley wanted to stay up and drink. I didn’t feel I could leave him to drink alone so I stayed up with him. What had begun
as a duty turned, during the ensuing hours, into something quite different.

We talked and talked until four a.m.– about our work, our lives, our marriages and each other. I was going to spend a week with Cyril Frankel and Stephen, his friend, in the South of
France. Kingsley was going to Majorca with his family to see Robert Graves and have a holiday. ‘If I ring you up, will you see me in London?’ Yes. When he kissed me, I felt as though I
could fly.

The next morning, after breakfast, they left, and I struggled through the day hardly able to keep my eyes open. I missed one of the events – and fell into a stupor on my bed.

On the last night of the festival there was a supper in the Pump Room, with a cabaret and the auction, and – a great concession – a display of fireworks over the lake. It turned out
to be the first festival that made a profit, and I was awarded three hundred pounds for my work as an honorary gift.

I spent the week in France with Cyril and Stephen, sleeping a lot because I felt incredibly tired, and telling myself it was no good falling in love with Kingsley, who was
married with three children. I’d simply be back in the familiar peripheral position, waiting for phone calls: surely I’d learned enough about what that was like to know it deflected me
from writing and made me miserable. Surely by now I’d learned
that
. When I got back to London, and was winding up festival business, Kingsley rang me. And I found myself instantly
agreeing to meet him in a bar in Leicester Square.

If I try to think now about the first thing that attracted me to him so much it was his honesty with himself. During our evening in Cheltenham he’d been describing his background in rather
extreme terms. I’d said, ‘But you don’t talk like that,’ and he’d said he’d changed how he talked. ‘How
did
you talk?’ and he’d looked
at me very steadily and said, ‘Like this,’ and reproduced it. ‘I’m not posh – like you.’ I didn’t feel posh and told him, and I couldn’t see how he
talked mattering in the least, but I loved him for telling me, although I didn’t admit it at the time.

Falling in love is an imperceptible business and I was afraid of it. It was also clear to me that, although he made it plain that he wanted an affair with me, he said nothing about love. When I
met him in the bar he said, ‘Before we even have a drink I have to tell you something.’ He’d booked a room in a nearby hotel. He knew it was presumptuous, but he’d done it
anyway and he needed to know at once how I felt about that. If I didn’t want to spend the
night with him, he must cancel the room or it wouldn’t be fair on the
hotel. I spent the night with him.

So there I was, having yet another affair with a married man. He told me he’d decided to live in Majorca – had rented a house in Soller and was going there to write. They were all
going. ‘I shall only be able to get back here two or three times a year, so I shouldn’t see much of you.’ He went on to say that we’d have to be very discreet. ‘If it
came out, I will blacken you – I want you to know that.’ It all sounded unpropitious – and yet somehow relieving. How could I be in love with somebody I saw three times a year?
But three times a year was better than nothing, and I’d had nothing for a long time.

I decided I’d accept what came. Perhaps I wouldn’t be in love with him, would manage to enjoy a light-hearted affair with no strings attached. I asked him about the thing that
mattered to me most. Should I be able to write to him? Oh, yes, he would arrange that. ‘And I shall want to write to you. All the time.’ They weren’t going for some months because
he had to continue his teaching at Peterhouse in Cambridge until Easter. Easter seemed far away.

That winter he had various pretexts for coming to London. Tom Maschler, who had taken over at Jonathan Cape, lent us his house and was utterly discreet and kind. This was good because if we went
about London in the daytime we kept encountering people, such as Violet Powell, Anthony Powell’s wife, on a railway platform very early in the morning. We met V. S. Pritchett in a restaurant
that we’d thought safe until Kingsley said, ‘Hello, Victor!’ and he was sitting in the next banquette. We had to conduct a feverishly unreal ‘jolly good pals’
conversation for the rest of the meal. In the end we only went out in the evening when it was dark.

During that winter, he met Cyril Frankel, with whom I was still working, and my brother Colin, whom he liked at once as they made each other laugh. I met Bill Rukeyser whom
I
liked at
once.
He’d been a student at Princeton when Kingsley was teaching there and approached him in the library saying that he’d heard Kingsley had done an imitation of
President Roosevelt on shortwave radio during the war, would he do it for him? Kingsley obliged, whereupon forty-one teachers from Iowa surged in to see the library. This was one of
Kingsley’s party pieces and I never tired of it. He was marvellous at making sounds, noises of anything – motorbikes, anti-aircraft guns, destroyers whooping, atmospheric radio
interruptions – anything at all, and he could do any voice that came to his mind. He was particularly convincing as a robot, and used to write messages to me as one.