by Alec Waugh
They were the last nights I was to spend there; I only once came again to Bishop’s Hull for my Aunt Mildred’s funeral, my Uncle George having shortly after the war moved to another parish. If I had known it was to be my last visit I would have taken a more nostalgic inventory of the pictures, the furniture, the decorations I should never see again.
It all looked very much as it had in 1911, that miraculously long hot summer when Middlesex so nearly won the county championship. There had been a great deal of building in the neighbourhood, and there was a succession of small houses along the road out from Taunton, but the field that lay opposite the vicarage garden was still used agriculturally, so that looking from my bedroom I had a sense of being in the open country, in the big house of a considerable estate. There was no longer a gardener, just a boy who came in two days a week; the greenhouses were no longer used, weeds grew in the paths, and the two thatched summerhouses that had served as forts during my days of childhood make-believe had slid into collapse. In my grandfather’s day the lawn had been used for both tennis and croquet, and in the porch there were a couple of targets which had been set up for archery. It was many years since there had been any parties or games at Bishop’s Hull. Yet my uncle and aunts had a horror of throwing anything away. When they eventually moved to another vicarage they took with them the rotting targets, the croquet hoops and mallets, and stringless tennis racquets. They also took with them all the old clothes that my grandmother had worn in Delhi in the 1850s, including the air cushions which she had placed in her carriage when she was pregnant, and of which the rubber had long since perished. My grandmother’s second husband had been quite well to do, but they had been an improvident couple, pennywise and pound foolish, and they did not leave a great deal to their children. Perhaps it was because of this that my aunts and uncle were so anxious to hold on to all the relics of their former affluence. I was grateful to them for this. My childhood was very real to me as I spent those two days surrounded by objects that recalled it.
The youthful student of history is led to believe that the happiness of the individual depends on the rise and fall of his country’s fortunes; that an English family must have been exuberant in 1588 after the defeat of the Armada, and bowed in gloom in 1782 after the loss of the thirteen colonies. But that is not invariably the case. One’s own fortunes do not run parallel with one’s country’s – certainly they did not in the case of my old friend A. D. Peters. I had arranged to have dinner with him on my first Saturday in London at the Savile Club, of which we were both members. I had imagined that we should have a long and serious talk about the effect that the gold standard crisis would have upon the literary market. Not at all.
‘What are your immediate plans?’ he asked.
‘I was thinking of trying some short stories.’
‘I didn’t mean that. Are you coming back to London?’
I shook my head. The one evening that I had spent at Underhill had warned me that London would be restless during the next two weeks. There was certain to be a general election shortly and till that was over, social life in London would be disorganised. A week earlier I had been planning a return to Villefranche. But that was now impossible, not only, or indeed not mainly because the value of the pound abroad was so uncertain but because a Briton saw it as his duty not to go abroad unless he had an essential reason. We had been trusted to ‘Buy British’ and not to take sterling out of the country. Buy British. South African wine instead of French. I could see no alternative to a return to Chagford. I explained this to Peters. ‘In that case, you won’t need your flat’, he said. ‘Will you let me use it?’
‘What on earth for?’
‘I’ve left Helen.’
It was a complete surprise to me. I had thought that they were an ideally happy couple.
‘Is there somebody else?’ I asked.
‘Yes, but she’s not the reason. How soon can I have your flat?’
‘As soon as you like.’
His need of my flat hastened my return to Chagford. There was no reason for me to stay in London, spending money needlessly. I stayed for a few days at Underhill. I took my mother to see ‘Victoria and her Hussar’ and ‘The Ringer’ which was on at the Golders Green Hippodrome. On the Friday I took my father to a morning showing of a film in London. We lunched at the Savile, where we met A. D. Peters and Earle Welby, then I caught the three thirty from Waterloo to Exeter.
Norman Webb was there to meet me. ‘You’re a pint and a half late,’ he said. He always judged the lateness of a train by the amount of beer that he could consume while he was waiting for it.
My return to Chagford was symbolic of the country’s temper; the English were coming home to man their defences, in the face of the foe. My Uncle George’s prophecy had proved correct. The Duke of Connaught, who had a villa in Cap Ferrat, announced that he would spend the winter in Sidmouth. Later in the year he was interviewed on a news film, strolling along the waterfront, wrapped in a heavy coat. There was a palm tree in the background.
One by one the semi-expatriates who had spent their Augusts stretched on beaches in the sun, returned each with his own story of the difficulties he had had in raising the fare home. How the French had enjoyed pretending that the pound was valueless! Patrick Balfour was one of them. I had written to him in August telling him of my discovery of Easton Court. He now asked me to book a room for him. His return was a great piece of good fortune for the hotel. Patrick was in a difficult position. He had just, but only just, enough money to finance a winter in the South of France, staying with friends and in small hotels. But he could not afford to live in London. The rent from his flat was one of his few assets. He had to find in England some equivalent for Villefranche – a place where he could live cheaply and work. Liking Easton Court at sight, he decided to make it his winter base.
He was and is a very social person. He needed a place not only where he could write but where he could see his friends. Easton Court answered all his problems. He wrote round to his friends, urging them to visit him. He was popular and his appeals were answered. During that autumn the hotel was visited by Alan Pryce-Jones, John Collier, Helen Kapp, Piers Synott, Christopher Hobhouse, Godfrey Winn, Edward Sackville West. My brother Evelyn paid his first visit in November. Thanks to Patrick there was a steady stream of guests, and what is more important precisely the kind of guest that the hotel wanted – members of the same group of artistic bohemians who knew each other and knew about each other. A visitor would have got the impression that they were guests in a country house. Patrick publicised their visits. Within six months, the hotel was an established locality in gossip columns, and Mrs Cobb was able with a clear conscience to order architects and builders to erect behind the original farmhouse an L-shaped modern two-storied wing, with central heating, invisible from the road, that would accommodate a dozen guests.
The hotel was to flourish for a quarter of a century and the pattern of its life was set during that first autumn. A licence to serve alcohol was never acquired, and Mrs Cobb was wise in not pressing for one. It would have ruined the special atmosphere. Motorists would have started dropping in. At Moreton-Hampstead there was a big hotel, a converted private house, owned by the Southern Railway. Bright young people on a golfing holiday might well have said to one another after dinner, ‘I hear that there are always some amusing young women at the Easton Court. Let’s test the rumour.’ Mrs Cobb was anxious to preserve her privacy. Her guests could drink hard liquor in their rooms; they could have wine or beer upon their tables. After dinner they could, if they wished, drive out to one of the local inns and drink beer in the taproom. She herself organised a cocktail session in her own room every evening.
She lived in conditions that would have astonished her fellow members of seaboard society. Her whole life was conducted in a single room on the ground floor of what had presumably once been a stables. It was not a very large room. It contained a large double bed, and a few chairs. In the bay window was a table and du
ring the day the space occupied by the bay window was the hotel’s office. Beside the fireplace was a dog basket, that was filled at night by a small malodorous dog called ‘Nannie’. The hotel’s telegraphic address was ‘Nannie’. Opening off the bedroom was a narrow passage where a curtain concealed a succession of coat-hangers. At the end of the passage was the bathroom and the toilet. The passage was littered with indiscriminate articles; there was a cooking stove; a table for preparing drinks; there was a number of full and emptying bottles. Nothing could have been further removed from the style in which her children lived. Here every evening her closer friends among the guests would assemble for a preprandial sundowner. In that first autumn we concentrated upon a concoction of Canadian Club Whisky and pure fruit juice, in equal proportions, with the fruit juice consisting of three-quarters orange juice and one quarter lemon. A teaspoonful of sugar was added. It was iced and stirred, not shaken.
The evening cocktail was an amenity greatly appreciated by the female guests. It was not unusual for young men to arrive accompanied by females. Mrs Cobb maintained appearances, and would not allow unmarried couples to share a room, but she put herself out to make unofficial ladies feel at home. In those days – this happened after all forty years ago – young women were often chary of accompanying young men on trips, because they did not like ‘the way the servants looked at them’. Mrs Cobb made them feel respectable and respected.
It is not easy to describe Caroline Cobb. She was short and dumpy. She was a ramshackle kind of woman, but to present her as resembling one of Helen Hokinson’s club women, would be to leave out her sense of humour. She could be very funny. She was excellent company. Yet she did not indulge in monologues. She encouraged good talk in others. She liked bohemians, and in particular welcomed writers. Several of the bedrooms were furnished with small refectory tables, which served admirably as desks. Most writers like to spread their papers round them and, later, Mrs Cobb was to advertise the hotel in the P.E.N. Club news as ‘understanding writers’ ways’ and ‘providing stout tables’.
Within a year the hotel had become well known in the world of authorship, and the ‘Cobbwebbs’ became familiar figures in London parties. In June 1940 when France fell and a special ship was sent to take Americans home, although her family and friends urged her to return, Caroline stood her ground, courageously but wisely. ‘What would I do in New York,’ she asked, ‘sit around over martinis in the Colony?’ But that was said for effect. That was not the real reason. During her ten years she had become identified with England’s interests. If the country was to be invaded, she preferred to share the adversities as she had shared the good times of the English. To run a hotel in the country, was her contribution to the war effort. And a very valuable contribution it was too. Many of us took our leaves there, and Evelyn – convalescent after an accident – went there to write Brideshead Revisited. In war time, as in peace time, Easton Court played an important role in the lives of many of us. After the war the tradition was maintained. Its stout tables continued to support the manuscripts of, among many others, Patrick Leigh Fermour, Louise Brogan, C. P. Snow and Pamela Hansford Johnson. It has figured and will figure in many memoirs.
It was England’s devaluation of the pound, and Patrick Balfour’s need of a quiet base in the country that got it started. But unless that pretty housemaid’s interest had been woken by a chauffeur’s cap, Patrick Balfour would not have ever heard of it.
XII
My father’s diary records against October 9 ‘weather improved,’ and it was a singularly lovely autumn. Morning after morning a red gold sun shone on to a lawn glistening with dew and mist. It was so warm that I could sit in the garden working. The sky was blue: with an occasional dove-coloured cloud drifting slowly over it. Beside the wall flanking a Tudor gateway ran a bed of chrysanthemums dotted with a few late roses. It was six years since I had spent an autumn in England, in the country. During those years I had seen much beauty: the palm trees of the Pacific, the blue mountains of New South Wales, the brown rivers of Malaya; but the rounded, varied, many-coloured beauty of north Devon had a softer, deeper, tenderer appeal.
There were stables close to the hotel. Most afternoons I rode for a couple of hours through high-hedged lanes looking down over the low rounded hills, across patterned valleys to the smoke of villages: thatched roofs; square-spired churches. Very calm it was and peaceful. It was hard to believe that its security was menaced; that English people would not live here dreamily in peace for centuries, as they had for centuries.
Most evenings I stopped for a glass of cider at the Ring of Bells in North Bovey; letting my horse graze upon the green. North Bovey is a very lovely village. Thatched, low-built, white-washed, it is built on a slope and in a circle. The Ring of Bells is set back a little. Seated in its porch, you see, framed in the oblong gap between two white walls, through the wide-spread boughs of an oak tree, the outline of the church, and the gilt hands of its clock. The inn-keeper then was a little old woman close on eighty, grey-haired and wrinkled, and a spinster. She wore a long, black silk dress with a miniature set as a brooch in its high-boned collar. The house had been in her family for three generations. Farmhands and an occasional groom came to sit beside me in the porch. We would chatter casually of football and the weather. Dusk would be falling when I left. The horse with its nose set for home would canter back through the narrow lanes. Low mists drifted along the hills. Lights showed in the valleys. The far purple of Dartmoor deepened into black.
During the mornings I worked on a series of short stories. None of them came to much. There were then so many magazines in England that a story had to be very bad, or very, very good not to find a purchaser; and all of these stories were sold eventually in England, but Carl Brandt had no illusions about them. They were not worth sending out, he said. The American market was very difficult and if I wanted to break into it, I should have to work a great deal harder. Which was of course perfectly true. I was very casual with those short stories. I did not live with them before I wrote them. I was enjoying myself too much, in lively company. Moreover there was the hourly excitement of public events.
The General Election was fixed for October 27. Every day brought fresh evidence of the energy with which the country was settling down to its huge task of restoration. I wrote those stories with a minute part of myself. One of the stories has an interest, however, apart from any quality it possessed. I had the idea of a perfect murder. Two strangers meet in a pub; they each admit that their lives are ruined by the existence of one single person in their life. In the case of one man it is a wife. In the case of the other, it is an aunt from whom he will inherit a fortune. If that one person were to die then the world would be cloudless. ‘If I were to murder my wife,’ says the one, ‘I should certainly be discovered. I am the one person who would profit. They would check my movements. I could have no alibi.’
‘I am in exactly the same position,’ says the other. ‘If my aunt were to die, I should be suspect from the start.’ He pauses. ‘But if I were to murder your wife, no one would suspect me. Why should anyone connect me with your wife, and you would have a cast-iron alibi.’
‘In the same way I could murder your aunt with impunity.’ They agree to perform each his own murder for the other.
As far as I know, the idea was my own completely. I made a twelve hundred word short story out of the idea and sold it to the Evening News for seven guineas. Twenty years later I saw a film ‘Strangers on a Train’ based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith, that was constructed on the same idea. In 1958 Nicholas Blake published a novel called A Penknife In My Heart. The postscript said, ‘After this book had gone to press, I discovered that the basis of its plot is similar to that of a novel by Patricia Highsmith, Strangers on a Train published in 1950 by the Cresset Press and made into a film. I had never read this novel or seen the film nor do I remember hearing about them.’
It is very easy for two writers to get the same idea simultaneously. In 1953–4 Ni
cholas Montserrat, whom I have never met, was at work in South Africa on a novel very similar to the one on which I was at work in the South of France. The main plot concerned a British colony in the tropics, that is afflicted by racial and political unrest. This unrest is accerbated by an unscrupulous journalist. Without his articles bloodshed could have been avoided, but because of them there is violence and sudden death. Montserrat set his story in Africa, I set mine in the West Indies. His was called The Tribe That Lost Its Head, mine, Island in the Sun. The various sub-plots were completely different, but the books were basically the same. They were both published in 1956 and made the best seller lists for about the same number of weeks.
Certain ideas are in the air, and different writers catch them independently; that is after all what timing is. The best example of this is the spate of warbooks that appeared in 1928–9, All Quiet on the Western Front, Goodbye to All That, Her Privates We, Undertones of War, Death of a Hero, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man. No publisher, no press agent, could have foreseen this boom. Books of such quality could not have been written in a hurry to meet a sudden need. There was no question of Chatto & Windus ringing up Aldington and saying, ‘There’s a demand for war memoirs. Why not write us yours? The books, all of them, were quietly and deeply digested. During 1927 and early 1928 a number of ex-soldiers found themselves wanting to relive their war years. Immediately after the war, they had been abjured, ‘nothing about the war. We all want to forget that.’ But when a book insists upon getting written, it gets written. And the fact that in 1927 so many writers were feeling impelled to relive their war experiences, would have been an indication to anyone who had known they were – which no one could have known – that in a very short time their contemporaries would be wanting to read about the war, the writer being usually ahead of his time. H. G. Wells said that timeliness was the secret of best-sellerdom. It is not that a novelist writes what he thinks the public wants to read; but that he is impelled to write about what the public will be wanting to read shortly. Being in tune with one’s time is being ahead of one’s time, but not too far ahead of it; the public will be able to catch up with you.
