I burned stories, articles, poems, as well as a couple of notebooks and many first drafts — hard to say why, for they could have been left safely enough at home. Perhaps in a primitive way I wanted to signal the importance of the break about to take place. Or maybe to sacrifice something rough yet precious to the gods for the promise of a safe journey and eventual return which, I could hardly have known, would not be for six years.
Stories not put into the conflagration were ‘The Fishing Boat Picture’, about a postman whose estranged wife keeps coming back to his house and borrowing the picture so that she can pawn it and get money for booze. I also kept ‘Uncle Ernest’, based on my Uncle Eddie (the Tramp) and his disastrous friendship with two young girls, as well as ‘The Match’, my one and only football story.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Ruth and I had acquired a kitten known as Nell and, not wanting to leave her behind, mocked up a passport, made her a travelling box into which we threw a raw herring, and took her with us to France. After the steamer trunk was booked through to Menton, and the rest of our suitcases — plus the cat box — was wheelbarrowed on board by a porter at Newhaven, we went into the saloon for a three-course lunch, thus missing the standard ‘Last of England’ vision, painted and written about so many times, as the boat chopped its way out of the harbour.
It was 10 January 1952, and The Flying Enterprise was foundering in the North Atlantic, heaving waves doing their storm-force best to stuff Great Britain up the Skagerrak. Such unfriendly turbulence made me sick the whole five hours across, the first time any sea had done so, a spectacular throwing-up to Dieppe being my no doubt colourful version of ‘The Last of England’, which after all came out in spite of myself, except for the part of it I cared to hang on to by the time the coast of France was visible through the lashing rain, which didn’t seem to be much.
It was the kind of day when minutes were only of value after they had gone by, sensibility fairly void till the train steamed into Paris. We saw our trunk through the customs, then followed a porter with the rest of our luggage to a bus for the Gare d’Austerlitz.
France was strangely familiar, and in the third-class carriage we got what sleep was possible sitting upright. Dazed and in love, imagining she was mine at last and I was hers, we leaned against each other, fair hair and dark, blue eyes and brown, on one level too exhausted to care about what we were undertaking, but on another every impression was sharp and welcome. One lives for the moment at such an age, as if each is an encapsulated raindrop having to change its shape — and in the nature of things it always did — before drying up.
In the morning there was a dining-car breakfast of brioche and croissant, butter and toast, and good coffee after the wartime acorn dust of England. The sky was blue above sharply drawn and ashy-coloured mountains, and the sea didn’t stop till reaching Africa: a transition total and sublime. Lemon and orange trees were in full fruit, and there were clouds of deep yellow mimosa, tricolour fields of carnations close to the railway, neat stations and exotic towns noted on the map in my out of date Blue Guide. The awakening was almost as different as that on the troopship five years before on steaming through the Suez Canal, except that now I was not alone.
Luggage remained at the station so that we could shop for bread, milk and sugar, then walk the short way out of Menton to the gate of the Corbetta estate on the Avenue Cernuschi. The concierge gave us the key to the house, and advised us to cut off the hairpin bends of the cart track by ascending flights of narrow steps with a low stone wall to either side, taking us up the hundred-metre height through eucalyptus, pine, red-berried arbutus bushes, and flowered mimosa trees with their overpowering scent.
The stone-built house, called ‘Le Nid’, was in an olive grove, and had five small rooms, with a grape vine over the door which was to give luscious fruit in late summer. We went out to gather wood, and in a short time stood before a fire drinking tea. The cat lapped at bread and milk, then went to explore its new surroundings. Later in the day I borrowed a handcart from the concierge, and manoeuvred our cases and trunk up the hairpin bends, back to our nest that was cold indeed when sunlight faded from the trees.
Corbetta hadn’t arrived as planned, for his wife had been taken ill on the motor trip down, so in our empty kitchen-living room we pushed trunk and cases together, spread sheets and blankets on top, as well as a hammock which wouldn’t be possible to use till the weather became warmer, and managed to get some sleep. On the third morning we woke from our uneven platform to see a few centimetres of snow over the grass.
An outside staircase led to the upper rooms, and in bad weather one needed a raincoat to go to bed. There was electric light, as well as a fireplace for heat and cooking in the living room. To keep the blaze going I chopped mimosa boughs from a nearby thicket, and we stripped bark from eucalyptus trunks for kindling, filling the living room with smoky fragrance. Water for all purposes came from a pump a couple of hundred yards away, opposite the main villa, and on drawing the first bucket in the morning tiny green frogs fell from the iron spout and hopped across the gravel to nearby bushes, returning to their favourite damp ground after we had gone.
When Corbetta arrived he provided some furniture, but the weather continued damp and cold, downpours as heavy as in the monsoons I had known. One night twenty people were killed on a neighbouring hill, their houses carried away by landslides. It was a fight for survival, anticipated in the kind of goods we had brought with us, yet not quite imagined in the reality, as little ever can be. A telegram came from Ruth’s mother enquiring after our safety.
Not able to afford meat — and I couldn’t stand the thought of horse flesh, though it was quite cheap — we lived mostly on fruit and vegetables, with the occasional egg or herring mixed into a dish of rice. Women selling produce on the pavement outside the market hall by the Old Town gave us good weight, and sometimes put extra vegetables into our basket if we arrived at the end of the morning. We stood in line for stale bread at the baker’s, on days when it was sold at half price.
Someone told us that if we went to Ventimiglia, ten miles inside Italy, people at the station would ask us to change lire into francs, which only foreigners could do on their passports at the bank. In return we were given enough commission to cover our fares, as well as buy pasta, Parmesan cheese, tomato paste and tins of jam. This was a great help to our eating, but after a few weeks the law was changed so that it could no longer be done. On the day we discovered this the young Italian through whom the transactions had taken place told us that if we purchased a ladies’ watch, from a friend of his, we would be able to sell it for twice as much in France.
With the elegant little timepiece in my pocket we walked the fourteen kilometres home, through the finest scenery on the Riviera. The weather was warm, and every flower in bloom, with oranges and lemons on the trees. The route, by the Hanbury Gardens, was the old Roman road between France and Italy, formerly traversed by such notables as Catherine of Siena, Machiavelli and Napoleon Bonaparte. On another day’s ramble we reached the mountain village of St Agnes, where the café proprietor would not let us pay for our glasses of wine.
Visiting Monte Carlo to dispose of our ladies’ watch, we found that no shop would touch it without the required customs clearance certificate, and so we lost some of what had been gained on our money-changing trips, though the watch was good for a few years on Ruth’s wrist. I went into the casino to see the gaming tables, but only as an observer, Ruth having to stay outside because her passport showed she was not yet twenty-one.