Читать книгу A Vineyard in the Dordogne - How an English Family Made Their Dream of Wine, Good Food and Sunshine Come True - Jeremy Josephs - Страница 8

THE SCENE MUST have been similar in countless English households that cold Christmas morning. Each and every seasonal tradition appeared to have been faithfully adhered to. Darting around from one room to the next carefully putting the finishing decorative touches to her stylish suburban home overlooking the eighteenth green of Hertfordshire’s Moor Park Golf Club and a lake designed by Capability Brown, Anne Ryman had gone out of her way to ensure the smooth running of the forthcoming festivities, with tree, tinsel, turkey and trimmings all attended to with impressive efficiency. It seemed that the only thing the attractive twenty-seven-year-old mother of two had been unable to organize in advance was for a thick blanket of snow to have fallen and settled during the night. For, despite the presence of a sharp chill in the air and an overnight frost, the Meteorological Office had correctly forecast that Christmas Day, 1966, was unlikely to witness even a single flake of snow.

But Anne had other reasons to be feeling particularly pleased with herself that morning: she was poised to produce a Christmas lunch which would make her the envy of family and friends alike. When she had popped an apple inside her huge 20lb turkey to both flavour and keep its meat moist, everything was ready. Then, sensing the enormous wave of excitement as her five-year-old son Hugh scrambled to unwrap his presents, while Corinne, fourteen months his junior, made short work of the paper covering hers, she paused to reflect on the silent miracle developing within her but over which she had not the slightest degree of control. Although delighted to have discovered that she had fallen pregnant for the third time, she was unaware that the sumptuous feast which she would shortly serve would also be providing nutrients and nourishment for a second little girl.

Anne Ryman had long been accustomed to the good life. Her parents, having excelled in the fiercely competitive world of heavy engineering in Scotland by specializing in the manufacture of cranes, had determined that their only child would have nothing but the best. They had headed south and settled in Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, so that Anne’s childhood and teenage years were as remote in character from the grease and grime of Glasgow’s industrial heartland as anything could possibly be. Always cosseted and often indulged, she had enjoyed an endless round of classes in classical dance, horse riding and lacrosse. Although they possessed ample funds with which to finance their various projects, academic excellence had never been Isobel and Bennie Butters’s overriding goal when it came to their daughter’s upbringing. The priority was rather to ensure that she should emerge as an elegant and refined young lady. Everything revolved around that. And how better to achieve such an objective than to send Anne off at the age of seventeen to the select Swiss finishing school of Mont Fertile, on the banks of Lake Geneva, just outside Lausanne?

Not that being dispatched overseas so summarily had given Anne any qualms at all. Indeed before long the Butters’s daughter, freed from the constraints of their sometimes stifling control, was having the time of her life.

Anne had had a passion for cooking for as long as she could remember, so after Switzerland it seemed an entirely natural progression to study at the Cordon Bleu Cookery School in London’s West End. The pretty débutante was one of sixteen students to enrol at the select school in Marylebone Lane that year, and one of just eight to graduate the following year. The school’s aims were clear-cut: it set out to teach its students how to cook first-class French food. With the English economy expanding rapidly in the late 1950s, Anne soon found herself recruited by the Glyn Mills Bank, situated in the heart of the City of London, where she was in turn issued with an equally unambiguous remit: to prepare and present stylish meals for the bank’s directors, either when lunching alone or keen to impress guests during more formal corporate entertaining. Responsible for the running of the bank’s large and fully equipped kitchen, and with one butler and two washers-up to assist her, Anne was in her element. Barely twenty, she was apparently able to organize and cope with anything. Asked by one of the directors to prepare dinner for sixty guests, she was not intimidated in the slightest. Having decided to serve lobster Newburg as the main course that evening, with its traditional wine and tomato sauce, she calmly ordered thirty lobsters and dealt with them herself when they arrived with their claws bound tightly in several large wooden crates which were stacked next to the kitchen’s sparkling white-tiled walls.

It was in October 1959, while working in the City, that Anne received an unexpected invitation to a dinner-dance at Wentworth Golf Club, in Surrey. Her cousin, Mike Dawson, a golfer who enjoyed a considerable reputation as a Scottish international, asked her if she might like to attend. Since he was engaged to be married, Anne knew very well that she had not been invited to accompany him that evening. What she did not know, however, was that her cousin happened to be a close friend of another golfing enthusiast, a highly eligible twenty-eight-year-old bachelor by the name of Henry Nicholas Ryman – Nick to all his friends.

‘I had imagined that there would be lots of people, that it was going to be a big party,’ she recalls. ‘But when we got there there was my cousin and his fiancée, together with another couple who were also engaged. The only one without a partner was Nick – and I soon realized that I was the partner for Nick. It was a blind date. I had no idea. It was all set up. I soon got over the shock of seeing us as a sixsome. Of course I had heard of the Ryman chain of shops. Nick and I chatted away and we got on very well. I was very naïve in those days though – much more interested in my horses than anything else.’

There were certainly no signs of any such reticence on the part of Nick Ryman. Quite the contrary. Here was a man who knew his mind.

‘When I saw Anne for the first time she nearly knocked me out. I thought to myself, what an absolutely beautiful girl. She was tall, blonde and blue-eyed – and with a sparkling personality to match. For me it was undoubtedly love at first sight.’

Unlike Anne, who continued to live with her parents in Gerrards Cross, obliging her to commute to the City, Nick had had his own flat for some six years in Dean’s Mews, a stone’s throw from Oxford Circus, in the heart of the West End. From there he had led the life of a wealthy young man about town, always nicely turned out in a smart suit and impeccable white shirt, and with not much more on his mind than business and golf. Like the woman he was happy to have been seated next to at the dinner-dance, he had enjoyed a rather privileged upbringing. For his twenty-first birthday present in 1952 his parents had bought him a two-seater Jaguar XK 120 in which, with hood down, wire wheels spinning and twin exhaust roaring, he would regularly roar through the Hertfordshire countryside en route to work with his elder brother Desmond, both young City gents tenaciously hanging on to their bowlers, determined not to lose them in the wind. All in all it was not a bad life. And yet Nick had come to tire of it. Even golf appeared momentarily to have lost its allure. With his thirtieth birthday beckoning, he had for some time taken the view that the moment had come to think of settling down. Having returned Anne to her parents’ home after their evening together, he harboured not the slightest doubt that she was the person he wanted to settle with. Three weeks later they were engaged.

Emotional and romantic by nature, Nick had popped the question at the Jolly Farmer pub in Chalfont St Peter, not far from Gerrards Cross. And as he did so he shared with Anne a dream which, for a number of years, he had chosen to keep to himself. ‘One day,’ he said, ‘we will buy a vineyard and live in France.’

‘This idea was most agreeable to me,’ Anne Ryman explains. ‘Because I had spent many holidays there, I could speak the language, and had always loved the food of France and the French way of life. But I still took Nick’s words with a huge pinch of salt.’

She was right to do so. Because of more immediate concern was the fact that Anne’s parents considered that matters matrimonial were proceeding altogether too hastily. While they were certainly in favour of the match, they nonetheless successfully pleaded the case for the passage of a modest period of time before the wedding ceremony should take place. But for Nick, who seemed to have been born with impatience in his genes, even eight months appeared an eternity. It was with some relief, therefore, that he finally heard the bells of St James’s Church ring out loud in Gerrards Cross on 8 June 1960. It was a typical English country wedding, with the reception held at Anne’s parents’ home in a specially erected marquee. Of course, there was only one candidate for the role of best man: the mischievous matchmaker Mike Dawson.

Similarly, there was only one choice of venue for their honeymoon. It had to be France. After spending one night in London, they loaded Nick’s latest Jaguar, a new grey XK 150S, on to the ferry at Dover and embarked upon a gastronomic tour of France.

‘I handed in my notice as soon as I got married,’ says Anne. ‘I had been very happy working at the bank, but that was the done thing in those days, at least in our circles. The wife didn’t work – that was unheard of. You had children, you were a lady of leisure – and that was it.’

If the wife’s responsibility was indeed to raise a family, Anne Ryman certainly did not allow the grass to grow under her feet. For precisely nine months and six days after she was wed she gave birth to her first child, a handsome, fair-haired boy named Hugh, whose mouth and nose, some said, appeared to be miniature replicas of his mother’s.

Nick’s love affair with France was nothing new. It could be traced back at least to 1946, when his father decided that they should attend the French Grand Prix at Reims.

‘I don’t know whether it was the garlic or the Gauloises, but I fell for the place right away,’ Nick recalls. ‘I got this waft as soon as we landed in Dunkirk and it was heaven. First of all we stopped at Soissons, and we then went on to have one excellent meal after another. I admired the attitudes in France. The racing drivers left Reims from the garages in their houses and headed off towards the racetrack, with all the gendarmes telling everybody to get out of the way. It was most exciting – the food, the wine, the cars. To my young mind that excitement equalled France – and I became determined to try to live some part of my life there.’

This was perhaps a rather grandiose ambition for a fifteen-year-old boy barely out of school. He had fared rather well in his School Certificate, true enough, but he hardly had an impressive list of qualifications to his name. Yet he was adamant that he would pursue his studies no further. But how would his father react to his unilateral declaration that the formal period of his education was now complete? Evidently with no great concern, for he simply said, ‘Very well, if that’s your decision then come into the warehouse on Monday.’

Having himself left school at the age of fourteen, ‘Ginger Jack’ Ryman knew that he was not in a strong position to argue the case for a prolongation of study. Besides, it had always been his hope that both his sons would one day follow in his footsteps by entering into the family stationery business. And now they had.

When this trade feature appeared, H. J. Ryman Ltd had already been in business for over thirty years.

A busy branch of H. J. Ryman Ltd in London’s Mayfair before the Second World War, and one of the company’s business cards.

It was his own father, H. J. Ryman, who had started the firm shortly before the turn of the century, in 1893, the publishers Collins having partly funded the venture. To begin with the business was based entirely in the West End, the first shop being situated at the Oxford Street end of Great Portland Street. H.J. Ryman then proceeded to expand, opening branches in Victoria Street, Brompton Road and Albemarle Street, and before long shops appeared in Watford and Harrow, much further from the centre of town. By the time Nick and Desmond’s grandfather died in 1931 he had succeeded in expanding the business into a highly profitable group of eleven retail outlets.

H. J. Ryman clearly had a knack of getting his own way. Not even the First World War could deter him. He considered that his son Jack had served England honourably enough, first in the Westminster Dragoons, where he had learned to ride, and then as a lieutenant in the machine-gun corps. Unlike many Jack had somehow managed to survive that carnage. To his surprise, when still stationed in France, he was suddenly called before his commanding officer and informed that no further military duties would be required of him. The hand of H. J. Ryman was not difficult to detect. He had taken it upon himself to write to both Lloyd George and bureaucrats alike that his son was now required to run the family business, and urgently at that. Against all the odds it had done the trick.

Jack’s heart, however, never really lay in the world of paper, pens and pencils. He was more of a committee man and he saw to it that he was never short of a meeting to attend. For not only was he chairman of the local council at Chorleywood for thirteen consecutive years, but also managed to find time to chair the planning committee of Hertfordshire County Council, sit on the bench as a magistrate at Watford, act as a special commissioner for income tax in London and assist in the administration of the board of the local fire brigade. Little wonder, then, that the firm of H. J. Ryman Ltd saw virtually no expansion during his time at the helm. Not that it was easy to keep any business going, however well-established, during the Second World War. The head office was entirely burnt out during the Blitz and one shop front in the Strand was blown out so many times during almost continuous German bombing raids on London that Jack Ryman could think of no better solution than to replace the windows with hinged wooden boards, so that every time they were blasted they would simply flap back again. With paper strictly rationed and fountain pens difficult to come by, he showed much initiative by diversifying into the supply and sale of map flag pins, which family and friends would make and bag up by the hundred during the evenings at their homes in and around Chorleywood. His firm was soon supplying most of the map rooms both in Whitehall and elsewhere. Lloyd George would surely have been proud.

It was into this environment of blotting paper, ink, ledgers and staples of all shapes and sizes that Nick Ryman stepped, full of energy and enthusiasm, at the age of fifteen. In consideration of his labour in the firm’s central warehouse in Clipstone Street he received a wage of £3 5s 6d per week. The young boy who had found school boring and who could hardly wait to step into the adult world of work suddenly found himself spending the greater part of his waking hours in a dingy, dusty and undeniably dirty warehouse in central London, selecting and packing up bulk stock in order to dispatch it to the firm’s various branches around the capital and elsewhere. And as he did so, young Nick knew that he had never been happier in his life.

Born on 15 November 1931 in Chorleywood, Hertfordshire, Nick Ryman had spent his formative years on the family’s four-and-a-half-acre estate named Sunshine House, once a home for blind babies before the building burnt to the ground. This was rather embarrassing for Nick’s father, who happened to be in charge of the local fire brigade at the time. Amid the ashes and remains of Sunshine House, however, he had been able to detect a potential for development and promptly proceeded to purchase and reconstruct the entire site. But with the Rymans as its occupants the house did not always live up to its cheery name. For while Nick enjoyed an easy, relaxed relationship with his father, with whom as he grew up he shared an active interest in cars, things were altogether more strained with his mother.

This enduring tension was almost entirely attributable to the fact that she suffered acutely with rheumatoid arthritis – so much so that shortly before the outbreak of war in 1939, at the age of forty-one, she retired to bed, and seldom budged from it again. One attempt was made to correct by surgery a hip which had been troubling her, but since the operation was not particularly successful, she vowed that she would never again subject herself to such an ordeal. There was a wheelchair to hand, although it came to be used only sparingly since it always required an enormous amount of effort to get her in and out of it. The consequence of all this was that she remained bedridden until her death just a few months before her eightieth birthday.

‘It therefore wasn’t a normal, happy upbringing,’ Nick remembers. ‘You went to see mother every morning and evening. She wasn’t a very happy or healthy lady. But I did inherit from her two things: a great sense of humour – in spite of her illness – and one hell of a temper.’

Outside of the home, though, there was much happiness to be found. Especially during the summer months when, together with Desmond and their sister Judith, Nick would set out to explore the sandy beaches of Dorset’s Studland Bay. The family’s network of prime commercial sites in central London could also occasionally confer the odd and unexpected advantage. One such was a ringside seat in the Whitehall branch, perfectly placed for the boss’s five-year-old son to view the coronation of George VI in May 1937.

Thirteen years on it was Nick’s turn to serve King and Country. By then his C.V. could at least refer to some work experience – almost three years in the Ryman’s warehouse plus a short spell behind the counter in their Great Portland Street branch – but it still made far from impressive reading. Perhaps national service would give him a new sense of direction. In fact it took him off to Egypt. And before he could think too deeply about the wisdom of having opted for Africa, he found himself whisked far away from the Clipstone Street warehouse to the remote location of El Kirsh, situated in the canal zone between Port Said and Suez. Thriving on the discipline meted out by the army, he soon rose in rank from private to second lieutenant, with some thirty people under his command. He enjoyed himself enormously, responding well to the military’s brand of man management and insistence on punctuality – a training which would in due course serve him in good stead. In charge of a platoon of petrol tankers and with a staff car at his disposal, he would often venture away from his base camp and out into the desert on his own.

‘One day I drove off of the beaten track and sat myself down on a sand dune. And I thought to myself, right, Ryman, what are you going to do for the rest of your life? As I sat there it was like looking into infinity. I remembered the wonderful taste and smell of the only wine I ever tasted as a child, Château d’Yquem, which my mother had introduced me to, and considered to be the finest sweet white wine in the world. I thought too of my travels around France with my father. And I decided there and then, whilst sitting on my private sand dune, as I call it now, that I would like to buy a small vineyard and to live at least some of my life in France. It was just a private thought that flashed through my mind. But I do remember how very powerful it was.’

And certainly easier to dwell upon than to achieve. However, having completed his national service and returned to the family stationery business, Nick suddenly found himself taken to one side by his father. Desmond had likewise been summoned for a quiet word.

‘Right,’ Jack began. ‘It’s now up to you two boys. Either you make it or you break it. But from now on I’m going to run my life looking after my county council, my urban district council and my fire brigade. I’ll be much happier to leave you two to do whatever you think fit with the business.’

Nick and Desmond Ryman needed little reminding of the fact that they were the joint heirs apparent to the Ryman business. The deferential attitude of many staff members, some of whom had been in the firm’s employ since the early days with H. J. Ryman, drove that message home almost daily. But aged only twenty and twenty-two respectively, neither Nick nor Desmond ever envisaged taking control so speedily. With his father’s words still ringing in his ears, Nick’s mind raced ahead. If he rose to the challenge then there was surely no reason why his dream should not lie firmly within his grasp. The formula was quite straightforward: make enough money first.

‘I thought that I was extraordinarily lucky to have found myself in this position, with such a bright future ahead of me. But that meant that we had to work hard and make the business bigger and better. My brother and I had a little head office where we used to sit and plot and plan together. We were both ambitious. Not that we were terribly scientific about it, mind you – we just did it by the seat of our pants. Some of the old shops were looking a bit run-down. We knew that we had to modernize and get out of London if our plans were ever to come to fruition. It was Desmond, though, who always took the lead, and I followed. I always looked up to him, ever since I was a child. My contribution might have been to question if we could afford something; whether or not it was likely to prove profitable, and so on. But he was the driving force of the business without any question.’

‘Absolute nonsense,’ Desmond retorts. ‘I don’t know why he talks down his own role so much. We were joint managing directors. Nick was not the junior partner in any way, shape or form. I might have been the ideas man, but he had the key role of trying to keep the firm’s finances together.’

Whatever their respective talents, it was clear that the brothers complemented one another. Wherever they went, whatever they did or decided, it was invariably together. Not that this constituted a dramatic departure from the past, for Nick and Desmond were always to be found playing together as children on Chorleywood Common, and spent long hours challenging each other to rounds of golf from the very moment each boy had learned how to swing a club. Twenty years on they remained inseparable, travelling into town on the same train, with Desmond getting on at Chorleywood, Nick at Moor Park, two stations nearer London, only to arrive at work and share the same office – and with hardly ever a cross word between them. Nor did the close of the working day signal an end to their intimate involvement in each other’s lives, for there was a large circle of mutual golfing friends in England and family holidays were spent together at their shared seventeenth-century farmhouse just inland from S’Agaro on Spain’s Costa Brava.

If there was indeed some special chemistry between them, then it was soon put to good effect. The brothers opened up branches in the Midlands, Manchester and Scotland, often buying out existing businesses en route. By the late fifties they had manoeuvred themselves into a position whereby they were able to go public by taking over Dudley and Co, a small and struggling company listed on the London Stock Exchange. As their firm flourished, the programme of expansion continued apace. Within twenty years turnover increased sixty-four fold, from £250,000 to £16 million per annum. Over seventy new sites were opened, either through acquisitions or the establishment of new premises. With shops prominently positioned in high streets and shopping centres throughout the land, Ryman had become a household name.

For both brothers, good business became synonymous with good living. Nick had an endless succession of expensive cars – Ferraris, Bentleys and the like – and enjoyed an equally extravagant and luxurious lifestyle. He became an adept helicopter pilot and an active member of the Helicopter Club of Great Britain. So too did the energetic Anne, on one occasion winning much admiration by successfully landing a Hughes 300 helicopter on the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle. Each of their three children, privately educated at the best schools, was given a horse as they grew up: Tiger for Hugh, Champagne Perry for Corinne and Knocky for Camilla, born in the summer of 1967. For those looking in from the outside, the Rymans were unquestionably the epitome of success.

Despite his hankering after France, Nick’s nature remained quintessentially English, especially his stiff upper lip. In the world of commerce his reluctance to express feelings of any kind had not hindered him in the slightest. On the contrary, his cool and distanced disposition had helped to make him a most effective negotiator. Not so, however, at home. He was a strict and non-communicative father with all of his children but most particularly with his son, and this apparent inability to demonstrate love or affection of any kind was already having a very negative impact on Hugh, Corinne and Camilla alike.

Not that Nick was sensitive to any such shortcomings in his behaviour. He had other matters on his mind. He could see that with the arrival of the first supermarkets in England the whole concept of retailing was changing. There appeared to be a general move away from traditional counter service, with everything stored away in drawers, and into the brave new world of self-selection. Sainsbury’s had detected this and adapted accordingly. But for Ryman the key question was whether or not what was good for groceries was going to be good for stationery too. The brothers judged that on balance the answer was likely to be yes.

It was a high-risk strategy. But when the first Ryman self-service shop opened in New Bond Street there was an immediate and overwhelmingly positive response. It was deemed to be so avant-garde, in fact, that it prompted a leader article in The Times. One by one each shop was scheduled for its refit, and one by one the elegant, hand-made mahogany counters and fittings which had graced the first Ryman shops during the latter part of the reign of Queen Victoria were chopped up and burned. Whatever would the firm’s founder have made of that?

Other ideas dating from the ancien régime were in due course dispensed with too; the Ryman brothers determined to brighten up their shops both inside and out. Filing cabinets were sprayed in bright yellows, reds and whites; box and lever arch files were now sold in blues, greens and pinks. The aim was to get away from the grey image of the past, and it proved a commercial triumph for the firm. And when, in 1967, Nick and Desmond acquired the Conran group, Terence Conran’s input gave still more flair to their work, propelling the Rymans into the forefront of the ever-changing world of design.

Success was the watchword. But in the process of acquiring it Nick Ryman eventually came to realize that his thirst for further expansion had been entirely quenched. After the best part of twenty years building up the business, for him the adrenalin of challenge was no longer there. ‘It all became too big,’ he explains. ‘There were so many administrative tasks to do, with analysts constantly coming down to work out how much profit we might have made on this day or that, and boardroom politicking all of the time. I felt that I had seen and done it all. In the end I really wasn’t interested in going into the office any more, or talking about business at all. I just wanted to switch off and walk away.’

But how was he to free himself from his carefully crafted gilded cage? Always at his most incisive while soaking in the bath, as usual one morning Nick peeled off his clothes, stretched his slim six-foot frame, and prepared to relax mind and body alike. As he luxuriated in his bathtub he could see that there were few exit routes available to him. On the one hand he appeared to be entirely isolated – the only member of either Ryman family manifestly malcontent with his lot. Yet at the same time he was far from alone, for any decision he might wish to take was inextricably bound up with Desmond’s intentions and vision of the future. There was clearly only one road to salvation, Nick concluded, pulling the plug from his bath, and that was for an outside purchaser suddenly to present himself, unexpected and unannounced, and offer a hugely inflated sum for the business which, by common consent, it would be sheer folly to refuse. Pure fantasy, of course, for, despite its success, there was no queue of prospective purchasers jostling with one another to acquire the stationery empire. Not that this meant that Nick’s earlier dreams had been extinguished. He recalls his thoughts, as he contemplated the London weather in the autumn of 1968.

‘Outside the sky is grey and bleak. A brief flash of Indian summer came and went a week or so ago. Today it can’t make up its mind whether to rain or not and I can’t make up my mind whether I need to turn the central heating on. “Why don’t I go and live where it is warm?” I say to myself. “Why don’t I go and live in the country, where life is quieter, where one can get away from sweating humanity? Why indeed don’t I go and live in France? Surely life would be somehow more exotic, more colourful, more romantic? After all they take food and wine seriously, the French. And if I owned my own vineyard and grew a few vegetables, I’d be more or less self-sufficient before I began.”’

But so far the nearest Nick had ever got to making this vision become a reality was in building up his interest in wine. As the years went by he managed to establish a first-class collection. He was only too well aware though that a cellar in Moor Park, however well stocked, was a far cry from owning a vineyard in the Médoc or Provence.

His son Hugh, however, was more than happy with what his father had to offer. He would sometimes go down to the cellar merely to inhale the smell of the wooden cases and bottles of wine lying there gathering dust. And whenever his father organized a dinner or luncheon, it was only a matter of time before young Hugh would appear on the scene, politely asking for the cork and bottle, whose label he would carefully soak off and add to his considerable collection.

Sometimes, however, he would show less respect for his father’s liquid treasures, quietly slipping down to the cellar with his sister Corinne as his partner in crime. They knew exactly what they were heading for – the bottles of champagne. Their hearts pounding for fear of being caught, they would play out the scene again and again, allowing themselves just enough time to take one or two sips before effecting a hasty escape. But then drinking had never been the primary purpose of their clandestine visits. Their aim was altogether more straightforward: having given the bottle of champagne a most vigorous shaking, they would risk everything to see how far they could get its cork to fly through the air, driven on by the lure of records crying out to be broken.

Hugh’s antics might not have given the impression of a shy and sensitive boy, singularly ill at ease with his father. Yet Hugh was always treated strictly and was often at the receiving end of Nick’s sharp tongue. He came to hear one particular message so many times that it took on the air of an all too familiar refrain. ‘What you need, my boy, is two years in the army.’

However, Hugh was not yet old enough for national service, which had, in any case, as his father knew full well, long since been abolished. Nick turned his attentions to boarding school, the time honoured means to a rigorous education favoured by the English middle classes. Not that Nick had himself been sent away from home as a child. Nor did he apparently consider it as an option for either of his daughters.

In some respects whether or not Nick was happy with what he had achieved was irrelevant, for his business now seemed to possess an unstoppable momentum of its own. Together the brothers had succeeded in transforming eleven retail units into no fewer than eighty-four. Thanks to their efforts and enterprise the firm had become the biggest commercial stationers in the land. Nick thus had every reason to remain confident that sooner or later these rather flattering figures would indeed arouse the interest of an outside buyer, setting him free at last.

It was Spain, though, not France, which for Nick had become synonymous with freedom, at least for a few weeks of the year. However, holidaying on the Costa Brava during the summer of 1969, Anne Ryman walked into the family’s farmhouse kitchen one morning to prepare lunch, only to find her husband collapsed on the floor and unconscious. Nick had been in a rather spectacular waterskiing accident the previous day, but since he had managed to clamber back on to the speedboat, no one had given the incident any more thought. Anne, however, struggling to remain calm and in control, had immediately summoned assistance and driven Nick to the local clinic, from where a specialist was contacted.

The doctor wasted little time in deciding on the appropriate course of action. ‘We are going to have to operate straight away,’ he declared. ‘It’s imperative that we relieve the pressure on the brain.’ And to drive his point home to Anne he sketched out a picture of her husband’s head on an adjacent wall. He repeated that the problem had to be tackled by surgery as a matter of the utmost urgency.

‘No, you’re not going to do that. Absolutely not,’ Anne Ryman replied.

‘You do realize then, I hope,’ the doctor continued, ‘that you are taking your husband’s life in your own hands.’

But Anne was adamant, refusing to be hurried into agreeing to an extremely delicate exploratory operation. On the contrary, she insisted, the most satisfactory solution was for her husband to be flown back to England. She hurried off to find a telephone in order to contact Desmond at the firm’s headquarters in London. Within an hour he had organized everything.

‘I hired a jet from Luton airport and managed to get one of the leading brain specialists from St Thomas’ Hospital to agree to come out on the plane with us, together with Nick’s GP. When we got out there we met this little chap who said that he wanted to drill a hole in Nick’s head in order to have a look. I told him that we weren’t going to have anything like that happen in Spain.’

The local specialist had no intention of arguing with the growing Ryman entourage now at his hospital. He knew perfectly well what was going to happen if his advice was not acted upon within a matter of hours. And with that in mind, he sent for a priest, who, on being advised of Nick’s critical condition, proceeded to administer the last rites.

For Nick, still in a coma as his plane climbed into the skies above Spain, the prognosis was very grim indeed. The fight was on for his life – not his dreams.