The Light's on at Signpost (33 page)

In those days you were an officer of two regiments, one British, one Indian, and could choose to serve with one or the other. The young cadets just out from England mostly opted for Indian units, on the assumption that sepoys would be easier to command than ornery British swaddies who couldn’t wait to get out of the Army. Those of us who had been in the ranks had different priorities; I’d seen enough of India, and opted for my British regiment, the Gordons, with whom my great-uncle had served on Roberts’ march to Kandahar in 1879; he’s buried somewhere in Afghanistan. So out of India I went, first to Cairo, and then to Tripoli, North Africa, where the Gordons’ second battalion, the famous “Ninety-second” of Waterloo and elsewhere, were stationed in the very barracks which the US Air Force later bombed in reprisal against Colonel Gadaffi.

Tripoli was a happy time. Highland regiments are different from others, terribly military and tradition-conscious, yet marvellously friendly and informal. Gordons’ officers were a mixture of Sandhurst regulars, some of them English, and Scots of varying degrees; the lordly drawl mingled with the broad sing-song of Aberdeenshire in complete harmony. They were a family, and far closer to their men than officers usually were, even in that democratic time. But that is a very Highland thing with its roots in clanship, and comfortable though I’d been in the Border Regiment, among the Cumbrians with whom I’d grown up, in the Gordons I felt that at last I’d come home. I’ve written one book about my time in the Borders, but three about the Gordons, recounting my adventures (fiction mingled with a great deal of fact) with my
bête noire
Private McAuslan, the Dirtiest Soldier in the World. I’ve been told that he had his counterparts among the military misfits of other regiments, British and American and Commonwealth, but I can hardly believe they were as slovenly, disorderly, well-meaning and accident-prone, or tried their commanders
more sorely than he tried me. God bless him, wherever he is.

Service with the Gordons was punctuated by an unpleasantly nerve-racking period in Palestine, where the state of Israel was being born in a welter of terrorist bombings, ambushes, gunfire, reprisal, and mutual mistrust, with Jew and Arab at each other’s throats and the much-maligned British holding the ring, reaping the bitter harvest of our own sowing, and wishing we were well out of it. I was on Haifa beach, stood security on the Mount of Olives on Armistice Day, and for my sins commanded the Cairo–Jerusalem night train. In a way it was worse than Burma, where at least you knew who the enemy was; it is no fun having to take your revolver into the shower, or sleep in a room whose window has to be covered with barbed wire. Everyone has his own view, of course; mine is that of a British subaltern, who wanted only to be a soldier, not a referee or a policeman.

Yet curiously enough when I left the Army in 1947 I toyed with the idea of joining the Palestine Police (£10 a week, not bad money then) because I suspected that civilian life would be dull. Fortunately, through my father’s influence, I got a job as a trainee reporter on a weekly paper in Carlisle, and entered on the trade which cynical journalists describe as better than working and which (writing books and movies excepted) is the best job I know, or was in those days, before the rot set in—but I’ve already said my piece about that, and am well aware that I’m a fogey who will never get hot-metal newspapers out of his system, or forget the excitement of being a young reporter on the make in the typewriter age.

I’d been in newspapers only a few months when the most important thing in my life happened. I met, fell hopelessly in love with, and proposed to a glamorous reporter on another paper, Kathleen Margarette Hetherington, who was well ahead of me in the journalistic stakes, having worked on one of the big evening papers. To my delight she said “yes”…and here we are, thank God, more
than half a century later, with Simon a sheriff (judge) in Scotland; Caroline, who has somehow managed to combine being a barrister with writing nine novels and raising four of our eight grandchildren; and Nicholas, running his own company in London, staging shows and events which range from theatrical productions to installing dinosaurs in the Natural History Museum.

The children all arrived in the 1950s, after we had come home from a year spent working as reporters on a daily paper in Canada. That had been our independent fling, but now life got serious. It was a time of heavy work, shortage of money, and great happiness, with Kathy carrying the major burden of running the home and rearing the family while I was in succession a reporter, sub-editor, foreign news editor, leader writer, features editor, and finally deputy editor of the oldest continuously-published daily newspaper in the world, the
Glasgow Herald
. Working on a daily means that you are something of an absentee father, out of circulation evening, night, and morning, and seeing the children at weekends, and how their wives cope is something that daily newspapermen can never quite understand. What made it worse in my case was that I spent much free time moonlighting on an evening paper, covering rugby matches, and writing bits and pieces for my own paper to boost our tight budget, but we got by; we were quite a team, Kathy and I, and our reward is that when the children get together and reminisce, they seem to be looking back on a time of laughter and happiness.

By the mid-fifties, I had the newspaperman’s dream of writing a best-seller, and had produced one historical novel which no one would publish. Meanwhile I ploughed ahead with the bits and pieces aforesaid, earning a few extra quid a week with the wonderful bonus of hearing Kathy laughing in the next room at what I’d written—for humour paid best and came most easily to me; I knew by then I was a “light” writer or nothing.

How the idea of Flashman came into my head I do not know.
I had read
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
as a boy, and recognised the bullying rotter as the most interesting character in the book, and at some point in 1966 I must have asked myself (not for the first time) what could have happened to him after he was expelled from Rugby in drunken disgrace. Two things combined to make me look for the answer. One, I had just spent two weeks in Borneo and Malaya (my only “foreign” journalism) during the anti-terrorist campaign, and got the smell of the Orient and soldiering again. Two, I had just spent three months as acting editor before reverting again to deputy, and the prospect of twenty years in the job was not inviting. Kathy tells me that I said: “I’m going to write us out of this.”

I wrote
Flashman
in nightly bursts after coming home from work; in all it took ninety hours, no advance plotting, no revisions, just tea and toast and cigarettes at the kitchen table. Halfway through I broke my arm and couldn’t type, and had put the book from my mind when Kathy asked if she could read what I’d done. When she did, her reaction was to quote a line from
The Treasure of the
Sierra Madre
: “Boy, you don’t know the riches you’re standing on!” She is the best judge I know, indeed, the only one, so I finished it, and for two years publisher after publisher in Britain and the US turned it down—one eminent agent wouldn’t even handle it—until I was ready to give up. Not Kathy; she
knew
it was going to succeed, so off went the battered manuscript yet again, this time to an agency who had tried valiantly with my first novel, and whose fine old Highland name appealed to me, John Farquharson. That king of literary agents, George Greenfield, tried five more houses unsuccessfully, and struck oil with the sixth, the small firm of Herbert Jenkins, publishers of Wodehouse and little other fiction. They enthused, Christopher MacLehose especially, and published
Flashman
just as I wrote it.

The result was remarkable, and instructive. It wasn’t a best-seller—none of my books has been—but it got splendid reviews, the
film rights were sold, and various foreign language rights, starting with Finland of all places, but what took me flat aback was the reception to the American edition. I’d written the book in the first person, as the memoir of Sir Harry Flashman, VC, admired military hero (he having concealed his perfidy and cowardice successfully for sixty years), and had appended a spoof introduction about the manuscript being discovered in a saleroom, plus footnotes. This was done for fun, not to deceive. My publishers had agreed that no one would take it for a genuine memoir for a moment, and indeed, no British reviewer did (although one seemed to be hedging his bets), but in the States
one-third
of about fifty reviews hailed it as the real thing. Since some of the reviewers were academics, this was alarming; one even described it as the most important literary discovery since the Boswell Papers. The
New York Times
rather mischievously rounded up all the reviews which had taken it as genuine, and I reflected that there were some universities from whom I could never expect an honorary degree.

I cannot be a hypocrite and say that I wasn’t amused, but I do sympathise genuinely with those who were deceived. I’m as gullible as the next man, and there are works of whose authenticity I have honest doubts—Louis Le Golif ’s
Memoirs of a Buccaneer
, for example, and a script I was once shown of an allegedly true memoir of a nineteenth-century slave-trader. It depends on the mood in which you approach a book, how it strikes you at first glance, and whether you
want
to believe it. Readers still ask me whether Flashman was real or not, plainly hoping that he was. Others, alas, are in no doubt, like the students who occasionally write to request a sight of the original manuscript, and wonder why he is missing from the Dictionary of National Biography.

The Flashman series, of which there have been eleven so far, are all dedicated to Kath, and always will be. But for her that first manuscript would be mouldering in the attic, and if one thing made and has sustained me as a professional author it was her
absolute certainty, from the very first, that it was going to happen. That kind of confidence is the ultimate encouragement, and it was essential in the early years when, with one novel published and the sequel under way, I took a deep breath, quit newspapers, and decided with considerable misgivings to try my luck as a full-time writer.

Making a living from books alone is not easy, except for those who produce the big blockbusters, and I don’t know how I’d have done if it hadn’t been for a massive stroke of luck at the end of 1972. In three years’ free-lancing I had produced three Flashmans, the first volume of short stories about McAuslan and the Gordons, a history of the Anglo-Scottish Border reivers,
The Steel Bonnets
, which Kathy and I researched together, wading through State Papers, Tudor correspondence, and Privy Council records at Trinity College, Dublin, amassing great heaps of material which I then reduced to some sort of order in a tome of about 200,000 words.

Then around Christmas 1972 Richard Lester and the Musketeers came over the horizon, and the world changed, as I’ve described in earlier chapters. Looking back on it, on the elations and disappointments, the triumphs and disasters, I am struck by how much kindness and sheer good fellowship and enthusiasm I encountered in the film world. I like film people, and their crazy trade. It is great fun, and rewarding not only in money, for as I’ve said it wafted Kathy and me to Hollywood and Budapest and Paris and Rome and Madrid and Yugoslavia and the Riviera and elsewhere, courtesy of prodigal producers.

Flashman has sent us abroad, too, to Samarkand’s Golden Road and Custer’s last battlefield on Little Big Horn and the Number 10 saloon where Wild Bill Hickok died and the Black Hills and the snowbound road from Fort Laramie; to the jungle rivers of Borneo and the South China Sea and Hong Kong and the Pearl River at Canton; to the salt-mines of the Salzkammergut and the cottonwood banks of the Rio Grande and the Gila Forest where the
Apaches rode their warpaths; to the Valley of the Kings and the wonderful bergs and glaciers of Alaska; across the Pacific and to the olive-groves above Delphi; on the Orient Express and through the back streets of Venice (which beat the canals, for my money); to Bent’s Fort and Singapore and Kit Carson’s house and Gattemalatta’s statue and the Windward Passage and the Suez Canal and Panama and the black sands of Tahiti…it has been quite a trip, and if I haven’t covered all Flashman’s tracks there have been the memoirs of old travellers to fill in the places I’ve missed.

One likes what one knows, as Vincent Price wisely remarked, and alternating Flashman and various other books with movie scripts has been, for me, an ideal writing schedule. The big difference is that a film has to be written to satisfy not only the writer, but the producers and director, and ultimately the actors who are going to have to bring the thing to life. It is
their
movie, and you must write to suit them, especially the producers, who are paying you. It is a matter of compromise and fighting your corner when you’re right and giving way when you’re wrong, and if you’re lucky you’ll have wonderful casts and great crews and directors as brilliant and experienced as Lester and Fleischer and Hamilton to guide you, encourage you, put up with you and make it all work on the screen.

With a novel you’re on your own, writing for yourself, with no one to satisfy except the reader at the end of the day. I am, and always have been, a secretive writer; I won’t talk about a book when I’m doing it, or even let my publishers know what it’s about until I’ve finished—when I read of writers (and Stevenson was one of them) who actually read their stuff aloud to friends as they go along, I’m baffled, for my toes curl under at the thought. I’ve never written a synopsis for a book, which I believe is quite common nowadays, to get the okay from a publisher in advance; I want what I write to be a surprise (to me, for one; I may know vaguely where I’m going when I start a book, but how I’ll get there I leave to chance as I go along, with, in the case of a Flashman, history
providing the milestones). Nor have I ever written a second draft; I revise as I write, and when I’m done, that’s it. When Kathy has read it and given the thumbs up, which she has done unfailingly for more than thirty years, I’m not really worried about other opinions, although obviously the approval of agents and publishers is eagerly awaited.