Long letters passed between me and Ruth, she also sending books, a little money now and again, newspapers and, on one occasion, two pair of shoes. English tobacco went into my pipe when it could be found, and I smoked an occasional cigar. Sometimes bored even with reading, elaborate red and black plans of imaginary cities were devised on the typewriter. I was learning how long twenty-four hours could be when living alone in an isolated place, but one day on the beach I made friends with Brenda Muldon, a fair and interesting young woman who worked at the Foreign Office. She was having a fortnight’s holiday with a French family, and after taking her to see the house where Katherine Mansfield had stayed in Garavan she came back to my place for tea.
A poetry reading was advertised in the library, to be given by Stan Noyes, a young American later to publish a novel based on his experiences in rodeo. He drove a car, and lived with his wife and child in a furnished villa in Nice. Also in the audience were John and Dorothy Tarr, John being about sixty and recently retired from the Monotype Corporation. He had published many articles, and a book called Printing Today, as well as several manuals on how to write Chancery script. During the years I was to know him he was working, though so slowly that progress was almost invisible, on a project called The History of Printed Letters.
As far as I know he had never been a member of the Communist Party, but vociferous left-wing views led him to refer to George Orwell as a traitor to the working class (whatever that’s supposed to be, I thought) for having written Animal Farm, though I told him the book made good enough sense to me. Later he would be infuriated when I teased him by saying that anyone who went on strike should be shot, which of course I didn’t believe.
Brought up as a Roman Catholic — one of his sisters was a nun — he was militantly anti-religion, which occasionally made his talk tedious. Later in Spain he took some interest in church affairs even if only, from his insider’s knowledge, to say more outrageous things about it. While still in France, he seemed much bemused by the fact that I was re-reading the Jewish Scriptures — from a Bible given to me at school.
Dorothy, a dark-haired bird-like woman ten years younger than John, had written a novel, yet bitterly resented his extravagance in spending the enormous sum of sixty pounds to have his library sent from London. Apart from John’s pension, extra income came from letting out rooms of their house in Kensington.
My allowance was sometimes late coming through, and the food intake had to be reduced. Ruth would send, illegally, an emergency pound note rolled in a New Statesman, or I would get food on credit from a small shop on the main road, rather surprised that they trusted me. By the middle of December I had no stationery, and used the backs of bookjackets to write a story called ‘Canning Circus’, later to become part of a chapter in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.
John and Dorothy, who lived in a rented flat, were friendly with a Russian-born man called Nick Nicholas, and his English wife Muriel. They took in boarders, and I had Christmas dinner there, paying the same nominal fee as the residents, enjoying my first glasses of vodka. Muriel had written a novel about her pre-war college life in England, which had a vaguely lesbian theme. Nick was in his fifties, a naturalized Englishman, of medium height and with steely blue eyes, who had spent twenty years as an officer in the Merchant Navy. He made violins as a hobby in a workshop behind the house, and drove a large black Jaguar.
He gave me his memoirs to read (everyone seemed to be writing or to have written a book) and in the chapters about life in Odessa before the Revolution I found certain passages questionable because they implied that the Jews of that time had left Russia voluntarily and not as a result of pogroms, and that the pogroms had in any case been greatly exaggerated. This I knew to be different, and John to his credit thought the same, though in saying so our remarks were brushed aside with a sly kind of humour.
Meanwhile in my solitude at Le Nid I read George Eliot’s novels, and went slowly through the single volume edition of Frazer’s Golden Bough, while François Mauriac’s Thérèse left me depressed. In almost every letter to Ruth I tried to persuade her to come back and live with me, but already in December I was thinking of going to Majorca, the Tarrs having left for Barcelona on their way there.
Ilse Steinhoff wrote to say that Carrefour wanted stories dealing with football, so I sent ‘The Match’, saved from the flames before leaving England. Around this time I wrote ‘The Criminals’, about a woman in Nottingham taking a hot bath and drinking gin in order to get an abortion.
By January 1953 seven stories, six poems and a novel were going the rounds, efforts which filled me with sufficient expectation to go on writing. Three stories were to become part of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning some years later, and these, I knew, had a surer touch of style than much of the other writing, as well as possessing that ‘slice of life’ which my Uncle Frederick had said my work must have before editors would show any interest. The themes were close to the people I had lived among, but about whom I felt as if looking across a deep chasm, at an existence which Fate had steered me away from. The rest of my writing, necessarily persisted in, was a cul de sac, but one in which accumulated a mass of material as humus out of which my true voice would eventually emerge, though I was not to know that at the time.
The last four months in Menton were a rollercoaster of misery and elation. On dank late autumn and winter evenings I sat in my warm and shuttered living room, well fed after supper, smoking contentedly, and reading, or writing at something or other. When the wind was still, silence was complete, sooner or later disturbed by the purr of the cat on her jumping to my knees, the scratch of my pen, the turn to a new page, or an involuntary cough from myself, otherwise a room void of sound — until the newly rising wind was strong enough to shake the trees in the olive grove. For a year I heard no music, a malnutrition of the soul unrealized at the time, but in all respects it was ever true, as Robert Burton wrote in his incomparable The Anatomy of Melancholy, that ‘fishes pine away for love and wax lean,’ and ‘love tyrannizeth in dumb creatures’.
Despair that struck would be made plain in the current letter to Ruth, but the tone was generally softened by the end. Stuck in a box in the middle of nowhere, and hardly knowing why, I was more alive than I had ever been, because that was where I lived and where I had no alternative except to be. Ruth was my lifeline, and suffered an avalanche of nearly eighty letters spilling from a rite of passage which, like all Fate’s turns of the wheel, was known to be necessary, and certainly not wasted — as one sees afterwards that nothing ever is.
Ruth did not know when she would be able to come back, so having money for my fare after weeks of frugality, I decided to go to Majorca. John and Dorothy Tarr, installed in a fully furnished villa for six pounds a month near the port of Soller, advised me to move there as well, since living was half the cost of France.
Hard to say how it happened, but there wasn’t enough luggage to hold all my goods, so I borrowed tools from the concierge and made a large wooden chest, complete with locks and handles. It was a job I enjoyed, thinking I might at last have inherited something from my clever-handed father. Apart from this, I had a steamer trunk, a large pigskin suitcase bought in Malaya, my faithful Remington typewriter, and Nell in her box to be carried by hand. For some reason I was unable to leave her behind.