The Exchange Control Commission in England, on being informed that I was an ex-serviceman living abroad for reasons of health, allowed my pension to be sent to France as it fell due, thus giving no more worry about travel allowance restrictions. I also convinced the Ministry of Pensions that my move to Menton was for reasons of health, so they agreed to pay for my artificial pneumothorax injections through the British Consular Service.
The local doctor who gave them put me in touch with the English wife of Doctor Schelbaum, who invited us to her Sunday teas, where we met some of the local residents. She also signed a card for us to use the English library in the town, and The Magic Mountain started me on a run through other novels by Thomas Mann. We had brought some Grey Walls Press publications from England, a few Penguin books and poetry anthologies, The Burnt Child (a newly published novel by the Swedish writer Stig Dagerman), Herbert Read’s Knapsack, a Shakespeare and, of course, my Bible.
A chalet, in a more remote part of the estate, was rented by an English writer and painter, Robert Culff, who also lived on little, but we spent some agreeable evenings, talking over makeshift suppers and a glass or two of wine. In warmer weather a German painter, Gowa, rented the tower of the main villa, and his friend Ilse Steinhoff, a literary agent from Paris, stayed there as well for a while.
Since arriving in France I had written Man Without a Home, a novel of 70,000 words, about a young English painter living on the Cote d’Azur who is drawn so deeply into the local expatriate community of elderly people that he is spiritually destroyed by it and has to flee back to the safe anonymity of his bedsitter in London. Ilse Steinhoff liked this, as well as my story ‘Uncle Ernest’, and took both to Paris to try and get them published.
The Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian accepted two articles about expatriate life on the Riviera, which brought in a few guineas, and my poem ‘New World’ came out in the little magazine Prospect, as well as two short pieces about Menton in the Scribe, needle-pricks of publication sufficient to keep hope going. Ruth was also writing poems and stories: we had pens, paper and a typewriter, and managed to put money by for postage and international response coupons. I did more work on The Deserters, so that even the coolest look backwards suggests that when youth and industry are harmoniously functioning hope becomes a natural part of the equation.
On summer evenings we cooked supper against a wall outside, and when it got dark sat in the house writing, or reading, or studying French grammar. We laughed a great deal, especially when I put on a D. H. Lawrence act, pillorying the worst of his turgid Plumed Serpent style, and talking to Ruth in a mock-Nottinghamshire accent. We called it ‘playing Bert and Frieda’, and also made fun of two over-artistic characters in a novel with the title No Peace Among the Olives.
The only noise around the house, apart from the rusty-pump braying of donkeys going up the nearby track into the mountains, came from an Aristophelian chorus of bullfrogs which in no sense diminished our feeling of living, albeit frugally, in a kind of paradise. We washed our clothes in an abandoned laundering trough in a hidden dip of the estate, then took advantage of its cold fresh water to bathe ourselves when no one was about. Mosquitoes were a nuisance in the hot weather, but they did not bite me. Had they done so, we joked, they would have zig-zagged away coughing. For Ruth, who was more to their taste, we had brought an army mosquito net from England.
A Nottingham tyre manufacturer, Mr Boak, who had heard of me from Hales, sent a note to the house asking me to call at the Royal Westminster Hotel in town, where he and his wife were staying on holiday. After a meal and a cigar he handed me, on leaving, a five pound note, which covered the cost of our food for nearly a fortnight. He and his wife Dolly later sent a sumptuous parcel of provisions, also containing a box of cigarettes. Ruth’s aunt despatched clothes and good things to eat from America, while my sisters Peggy and Pearl, as well as my mother, provided the occasional consignment of tea, powdered milk and tinned food.
Autumn came with storms and chill rain, but I had no wish to go back to England for greater comfort, which did not necessarily exist for me there in any case. My feeling was to remain where I was, and manage as best I could, as if more adventures and revelations would come by staying on the Continent.
Ruth decided to leave, mainly to try and get a divorce from her husband, and I was in no fair state of mind to ask her not to go, especially since we both thought she would perhaps come back when the divorce business was finished. After seeing her off from the station in the morning I went back to the house, and gloomily empty it seemed now that I had it to myself. In the afternoon, ever the conscientious advocate of the tidy billet, if not exactly domesticated, I swept the floors, cleaned the windows, and washed the towels. In the evening I lit a fire to cook supper, then put in some work on The Deserters.
When Robert Culff and the Corbettas went back to England, and Gowa departed for Germany, I had the estate more or less to myself. Between work I roamed around like a man of the woods, though kept my hair short by sufficient visits to the barber, and never went down to the town unless in good clothes and wearing a tie. As far as was possible I followed a routine, much as an old soldier might, and cooked a simple meal every evening.
A concierge guarded the estate at the main gate down on the avenue, and a caretaker lived with his family in a small bungalow near the main villa. Madame Boeri, the housewife, was a dark little woman who had two pretty daughters, and I suppose she took pity on what was thought to be my lonesome state, for she would occasionally appear at the door with a steaming dish of something good in her hands, which saved me cooking for a day or two.
A crop of succulent-seeming mushrooms grew in the meadow behind the house, and I plucked a dozen to cut up and fry in olive oil for supper. Quite soon after eating I was spectacularly sick, stricken throughout the night till nothing was left in my stomach, proof perhaps of an organism healthy enough to jettison whatever poison had been imbibed, though at certain moments it felt as if a Roman and lonely death might be on the cards. The experience made me realize that, after a Lucullan feast at the Borgias, those able to belch must have done so with smiles of more than ordinary relief.
By now I had written 250 pages of The Deserters. Ilse Steinhoff asked for more Nottingham stories, so I posted ‘Saturday Night’, about a barman’s view of a Bacchanalian working men’s booze-up, and ‘Blackcurrant’, concerning a black West African soldier who spends Christmas with a rough Nottingham family, and at the end of his stay begins to wonder whether or not they can be considered civilized.
In the same letter Ilse told me that someone in Paris, after reading ‘Man Without a Home’, had remarked that I was ‘a gifted writer’, causing me to hope that my luck was about to turn. In a further letter she wrote that the editor of Carrefour, a magazine which printed work by leading French writers, had asked for ‘Uncle Ernest’ to be translated so that it could be brought out the following year. She was also trying to get ‘Man Without a Home’ published in France, Germany or England. No one ran down those hundred or so steps with more hope than me, to see if there was any mail in the little tin box bolted to the gate on the road.