At the same time as sending the book to Heinemann, never a believer in penny packets, I posted ‘Big John and the Stars’ to the BBC. This was a children’s story set in a prosperous kingdom of the Valley of Gold, a sort of Utopia much like Soller, which lacked only stars in the sky to make it perfect. The king promises his daughter in marriage to any man who can remedy this, while those who try but fail will be put to death. A blacksmith known as Big John accepts the challenge and, after many tribulations, succeeds.
A copy of the story ‘Saturday Night’, sent to my brother Brian, now a corporal on National Service with the army, came back with the comment that in his opinion ‘When you have the waiter fetch an order of eight pints, three glasses, two gins and oranges, one rum, a whisky, and three packets of Woodbines from the bar, it is wrong, because he wouldn’t be able to get all that on one tray’ — as indeed he wouldn’t.
Jim Donovan went back to London, and Mike Edmonds departed for Malaga, leaving all twelve rooms of the house for myself and Jup. My weight was down again, but more from debauchery than misery, which seemed much improvement. Having begun an affair, and wanting more privacy, I rented a room in a furnished house belonging to the friendly Nadal brothers. Every day Maria and Catalina, the folklore dancers who worked as waitresses at the Bar Nadal, came to make the large double bed, which had the graven image of a crucified man on the wall behind.
Working at a small table under the window, with a view of neighbouring house tops, I began writing about my childhood, contrasting the anguish and shortages of home life in the 1930s with the haven of the Burtons’ cottage, and recalling the idiosyncrasies of my blacksmith grandfather, about whom I hadn’t thought since his death in 1946. With the name of Brian Seaton for the main character, I tried to give the narrative an aspect of fiction, my imagination creating the life of his mother and father from the time before their marriage.
The story was satisfying to write, material seeming to come as much from my subconscious as from what was actually known about such people. In 50,000 words I took Brian to the age of thirteen, when the cottage, called The Nook, was bulldozed for redevelopment. After the handwritten draft was typed and put away I sat down to a steady rewriting of The Green Hills of Malaya, turning that also, as much as I was able, into fiction. I would break off from my work to eat a lunch of bread and salami, then open a bottle of wine and wait for the afternoon visit of my mistress, if she had been able to get away from her husband.
Her name was Pauline, and we had fallen in love on meeting at a table outside a café in the plaza one morning after she had done her shopping. For a while she was reluctant to come to bed, though eventually gave in, and our intense affair began. She was in her thirties, as handsome and beautiful as a Russian princess, and her husband had brought his family to Europe for a year so that he could write the Great American Novel undisturbed. They lived in a rented villa on the outskirts of the town, and I was friendly enough to read ‘Big John and the Stars’ to their seven-year-old daughter. Pauline would leave her playing in the garden, or the husband might have taken her by tram to the beach, and find some reason to come into town and be with me.
Bartolomeu Ferra, the postmaster, wrote articles for Ecos de Soller, the weekly newspaper of the town run off in a back room at the stationer’s. We met in the Bar Palacio one afternoon so that he could interview me, the piece appearing shortly before my departure for Malaga in late September. My name, in half-inch black letters, was spread across the page, part of a series called THOSE WHO VISIT us, in which I was said to be ‘un propogandista de Mallorca’ — after explaining my reasons for living on the island, and telling him that my journalism had always given a good impression of Soller.
Bartolomeu went on to describe me as a young bohemian with the soul of a child, but a person also who was full of experience and candour. I had no university degree, he wrote, only my pen and my talent, as well as an extensive knowledge gained from living in many countries of the Far East where I had worked as a wireless telegraphist. He also said that I occasionally made notes in an exercise book with my left hand, and stuffed black tobacco into a large curved pipe with the other. As a journalist and writer of fiction I had contributed to numerous magazines, as well as being such a friend of the Muses that success was sure to come in the hard fight to establish a position in the world of letters.
It wasn’t a matter of my believing or not. In one way I would have been happy to know that all he said was perfectly true, but the greater part of me discounted such eulogisms. The only person to know whether or not I was any good as a writer was myself, and a permanently underlying optimism allowed me to think so at times of rejection, such as when someone at Heinemann’s informed me that they were unable to make an offer for The Deserters, though would like to see Man Without a Home, which had been mentioned in a covering note. I posted a letter immediately to Ilse Steinhoff in Paris, asking her to send it from there.
My life had reached a balance between work and pleasure which was hardly to be achieved again. The affair with Pauline was in full and delectable spate and, as if to give even more time for it, my typewriter broke down and had to be left a week in Palma for repair.
I packed a picnic basket and walked ten kilometres to Deya with Elizabeth Trocchi, who wanted to meet Robert Graves. He was his usual gracious self and, inviting us to go for a swim, lent me a pair of — necessarily baggy — trunks. We descended the winding track 600 feet down between the olive trees to the beach, and after tea at the house later, walked the same way back to Soller.
Whenever I called at Elizabeth’s flat her four-year-old daughter Margo would run up and put her arms around my neck crying: ‘Daddy!’, so I was glad when Alex came at the end of September to see his family. He also wanted to have an issue of Merlin printed in Palma, since it was cheaper there than in Paris. Tall, thin and untidy, he had eyes which could change quickly from fanatical to vulnerable, or from dead to flashing a kind of uncertain fire. He spent one evening trying to contact people who might supply him with hash, but it seemed not to exist in a small town like Soller.
Over brandy in the plaza one night he told me he had earned 75,000 francs writing a pornographic novel for the Olympia Press series. By the end of our session he was merry enough to start advising me how to write, at which, being equally drunk, I could only reply that he didn’t know what he was talking about. We went on with our carouse until, about midnight, he got up and tottered across the square intending to tear down a poster of General Franco. Not wanting him given over to any rough treatment from the Guardias Civiles, I diverted him from this, and made sure he went home safe to bed. On leaving for Paris a few weeks later he neglected to pay the 7,000 pesetas printing bill for Merlin, and whether he ever did settle it, I don’t know.
When the two novels came back from Heinemann they were sent out again straight away. Hope, like energy, rose and fell, then lifted once more, much as we were taught at Radio School that the electromotive force of an alternating current goes through the positive and negative phases of an oscillatory circuit — in other words, something like my spirit, up and down in its various swings, whenever I sent work out and it was returned as unsuitable. Flipping the Holy Scriptures in my room one day while waiting for Pauline, my finger pressed on a verse from chapter nine of the First Book of Samuel, much like my mother’s old system, if system it could be called, though I was sure she still used it, an image which flashed to mind and stayed there strongly for a moment, as when she closed her eyes and, holding a pin, pricked the page of a racing paper to choose a horse on which to place sixpence or a shilling at the local bookie’s: ‘And they cut off his head, and stripped off his armour, and sent it into the land of the Philistines round about, to publish it in the house of their idols, and among the people.’