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When a man wakes in the night and finds his head filled with remorse and bitter, old regret, if he chose he could reflect that no other man in the world would be suffering precisely that remorse nor exactly that regret … Of course, he would not choose to do so, for he would be too busy dodging about in his mind, trying to escape – unless, that is, he were occupied with feeling the wound to see how much it still hurt and trying to persuade himself that there was virtue in mere remorse.

Patrick O’Brian, ‘The Voluntary Patient’

With Secker & Warburg’s acceptance of Three Bear Witness in February 1951, Patrick had reason to feel confidence in his regenerated career as a writer. Not only was it his first adult novel, but the first novel he had published since Hussein in 1938. At last he had emerged from the creative chasm inflicted by the War with his accompanying personal crises of divorce and remarriage, followed by the dire impact of his troubled exile in North Wales.

At the same time, he had come to feel he had finally shed the oppressive effect of his father’s dark shadow. In the summer of 1949, shortly before his and my mother’s departure from Cwm Croesor, a solitary walk brought him to a precipitous, sunless valley amidst the mountains. ‘When I was going up to Llyn yr Adar there seemed to be a thing at the top of the high black barren cliff that forms the backside of Cnicht.’ What it was he found hard to identify:

I watched it for some time, but it did not move; and all the way along the valley I kept looking up, but it seemed immobile … When I came back it was still there. Gargoyle-ish, brooding, jutting out, small in the distance, but menacing and in control. The next time I went up to the lake it was not there.

This uncanny experience occurred when Patrick had attained the nadir of his increasingly frustrating Welsh exile, shortly before he made the dramatic decision to escape to sunny France. Returned from his walk, he wrote the powerful story ‘Naming Calls’, which was later published in The Last Pool. It recounts the terrifying experience of a writer who withdraws to a small house set in the sinister valley explored by Patrick. The tale concludes with the destruction of the frantic outcast, when a raging storm drives up the valley and dislodges ‘a vast mass of rock’ from the mountainside above: ‘Abel shrieked high and the door burst open, swinging wide and shuddering on its hinges.’ The elemental force of the tempest is unmistakably intended as an evocation of the man’s father, ‘a formidable, roaring tyrant’, whose spirit he had inadvertently conjured forth.

It is clear that Patrick had come to associate his oppressive malaise with his frequently bullying giant of a parent, who had repeatedly afflicted him with demoralizing terror during his infancy. Now, however, when in Three Bear Witness he adverted to the same uncanny episode, it was to dismiss it comfortingly as an unpleasant memory banished to the past. After a spasm of apprehension, ‘I felt positively merry – a glance upwards showed it there, of course, an insignificant rock, though curious. When I had finished my sandwiches it was gone.’[1]

Unfortunately, the couple’s financial predicament remained as alarming as ever. Secker’s acceptance of Three Bear Witness brought only the briefest respite. An advance of £100 was contracted on 1 February 1951, half on acceptance and half at publication. Sympathetic to his client’s worrying predicament, Spencer Curtis Brown charitably forwarded him the second £50, which was not otherwise due to be paid for at least another year. ‘Even agents can have kind hearts on occasion,’ he wrote to the publisher, who failed however to reimburse Curtis Brown in turn. Sadly, Curtis Brown’s generosity was all but negated by the rapacious grasp of government. As my mother learned: ‘C.B. now has to deduct income tax at 9/- in the £: with that & his 10% Testimonies £100 has shrunk to £49.’

While the prospect of his novel’s publication went far to restore Patrick’s self-esteem, until it was published openings for further literary employment remained constricted.[fn1] Shortly before their move to France, Patrick confessed to Warburg that he had ‘written himself out’, so far as short stories were concerned. Gradually, however, the colourful turbulence of Collioure brought him a fresh harvest of imaginative themes. During the year following November 1950, he composed no less than thirty-three short stories. Many were set in and around Collioure, drawing on his observations of the town, its inhabitants, customs and traditions.

Why then did he not launch at once into the work on Southern France, which he had discussed with Fred Warburg, and for which an option was stipulated in the contract for Three Bear Witness? It looks as though one of his recurrent failures of confidence inhibited his undertaking a full-scale book during the anticlimactic year which stretched between his completion of Three Bear Witness and its publication in the spring of 1952. Ever his own sternest critic, it was about this time that he penned this frank assessment of his approach to writing:

I often, or at least sometimes, like my writing when I am doing it, but so much more often I feel uneasy and ashamed afterwards. All the affectations, poses and ‘special’ attitudes stare out – hideously pimpled youth smirking in the looking-glass yet finds his confidence decay and enters a public room fingering himself – and often the ‘clever pieces’ appear shallow and dull as well as quite unauthoritative, the ‘poetic touches’ arty, long-winded and false, and dreadfully often the whole thing comes to pieces at the end – shuffles off in the lamest manner possible. This is because I think of a good beginning, grow excited and embark upon the story, taking it for granted that it will finish itself.

In November 1951 Patrick sent off his collection, provisionally entitled Samphire and Other Stories:

I have just posted the MS to Curtis Brown: yesterday I sent six stories to the New Yorker and one, with two poems, to Irish Writing.[fn2] That they may prosper. The postage was very expensive: I did not think about Spain [for cheap postage] until this morning. But even so I do not think I would have posted them from there; they are too precious, and I want to hear soon. After re-reading and re-typing both, I am fairly sure that Samphire is much better than The Lemon: not so clever, much more concentrated (the Lemon tries to say too much and grows diffuse) and because of the hatred in it, more lovingly handled. So I have called the book Samphire and put that story first. It was a slimmer parcel than usual, but it is between 60 and 65 thousand … I feel rather low now, with the typewriter folded up and the MS gone: I regret my hurry; I could have polished more.

Sadly, disappointment swiftly followed. A month later Fred Warburg wrote to Curtis Brown:

I have now had a report on the new stories of Patrick O’Brian, SAMPHIRE, and some of them are good, though others seem to us basically to fail. However I think it is absolutely essential that we publish the novel now called THREE BEAR WITNESS instead of TESTIMONIES and see if we can do well with it before committing ourselves to further work from O’Brian particularly in the short story field.

Eventually most of the stories were published in book form, although not for some years. It was an eclectic selection that Patrick had despatched. ‘Samphire’, on which he particularly prided himself, is simply summarized. A young couple is walking beside a seacliff: he complacent, insensitive, and possessed of a tiresomely adolescent sense of humour; she a quiet, nervous, sensitive girl, whose nerves are stretched to breaking point by her husband’s relentlessly patronizing jocularity. When he stretches down to pick a sprig of samphire, she suddenly loses self-control and vainly attempts to push him over the edge. Even the insensitive soul to whom she is married recognizes with shock the impassable gulf suddenly opened between them, and realizes that nothing will ever be the same again.

In 1985, Patrick explained to the publisher Bell and Hyman how he came to write the story:

I was reflecting … as I walked along the cliffs that overhang the sea near our house [at Collioure], and a striking example occurred to me – that of a particularly elegant, intelligent woman who in her extreme and utterly inexperienced youth had married a bore or, at least a man who had developed into a bore, a didactic eternally prating bore. At some point in my walk I noticed some plants growing quite far down on the rock face: the lines about the samphire-gatherer in King Lear drifted into my mind, & as I walked on in a vague, uneasy state of the two notions combined and this took form without any conscious effort on my part.

This account is not entirely candid. The story makes uneasy reading for me, since the husband is unmistakably a recognizable, if uncharitable, portrait of my father, and the delicate young wife my mother, who was eighteen when they married. It was lingering guilt, I suspect, that impelled Patrick to write a story stressing that the marriage was doomed from the outset, regardless of intervention by any third party.

The extent to which Patrick at this experimental stage of his literary career utilized his fiction as an instrument of attack or defence in relation to aspects of his own life is exemplified by two other stories in the collection. In the first, ‘The Flower Pot’, a couple of Germans, living in what is manifestly Collioure, lovingly tend six flower pots on their windowsill. A fierce tramontane blows up, an increasing gale tearing through the streets: one of the pots is dislodged, and kills a fisherman below. The man responsible is filled with horror:

A man struck dead, or maimed for ever: struck down and by his fault. The great wave of hatred rising from the street. The foreigners at René’s have killed père Matthieu. The pointing and the great just wave of hate; and his head only, peering from the window, peering down to meet the hatred and the pointing.

One might imagine this gloomy little tale arose from a flight of fancy, but for this notice in my mother’s diary for St Patrick’s Day 1951:

P. finished the Flower Pot yesterday … after we had been on the jetty. There was a fantastic dry warm wind three days ago which knocked the pinks off bedroom window-sill. It landed just beside M. Ribeille, who only laughed. We felt terribly guilty & P. has fastened all the pots with wire.

Their dismay was understandable, but Patrick’s emphasis on the great wave of collective hatred arising against the hapless outsider plainly reflects his continuing sense of isolated insecurity, originating in the damaging circumstances of his solitary childhood.

Another tale illustrates Patrick’s propensity, at least in the early days of his literary career, to deploy his fiction as a weapon of psychic attack. ‘The Lemon’ concerns a man whose isolated existence has transformed him into a psychopath. The first part of the story comprises an arresting analysis of his bewildering condition, and its symptoms. Despite this, he is on good terms with his neighbours, who are:

working people, kind, sensible, very tolerant. Good people, my neighbours: all except the man and woman who kept the restaurant on the ground floor. They were a bad couple; the man a flashy, smarmy-haired little pompous rat; the woman a short-legged, hard-faced shrew of about forty … They drank heavily, quarrelled and screamed until dawn sometimes. Their place was frequented by their friends and by foreigners on the spree, and they bawled and sang and shrieked above the blaring wireless until four or five in the morning.

A sluttish waitress, ceaselessly singing loudly and tunelessly during the day, by night slept indiscriminately with the clientèle.

The restaurant in question is unmistakably Le Puits, which occupied the ground floor of the house in the rue Arago, two storeys below the flat in which Patrick and my mother lived. On 19 February my mother wearily recorded: ‘The Puits kept it up until 6 a.m.: an infernal racket.’ On 27 May Patrick stayed up most of the night writing ‘The Lemon’. In the story he (for I fear the nameless protagonist is he) creeps downstairs, removes the fuse controlling the lighting for the restaurant, and hurls a hand grenade (‘the lemon’) into the darkness. As he carefully restores the fuse and tiptoes back up to his apartement, a blinding flash and shattering roar proclaim the destruction of the entire crew of revellers in Le Puits. Ah, if only …[fn3]

Of the thirty-three stories Patrick wrote during the year 1950–51, nine were never published. Of these, three (‘Federico’, ‘Moses Henry’ and ‘Fort Carré’) appear to be lost. The manuscripts of the remaining six are in my possession, and make interesting reading. ‘Mrs Disher’ concerns an old man’s confused reflections on his dying housekeeper, while ‘The Clerk’ explores a disturbing memory of medieval antisemitism encountered in a remote English town by a visiting enthusiast for church architecture.

‘George’ (which he retitled ‘The Tubercular Wonder’) is the most revealing of these unpublished tales in respect of Patrick’s own life. In the first volume of this biography, I suggested that it provides an illuminating exposé of his troubled state of mind at the time he began his secret affair with my mother, betraying an overriding sense of guilt in respect of his betrayed wife Elizabeth.[2] The theme of another story, ‘Beef Tea’, recalls that of ‘Samphire’, with its dull and relentlessly facetious husband, who drives his long-suffering wife to insanity. It looks like a further attempt to dismiss the reproachful figure of my father, representing him as utterly impossible to live with.

The personal application of the story ‘A Minor Operation’, which is one of those published in the collection, speaks for itself. A young English couple come to live in an old French town by the sea. We learn that ‘they were virgins; virgins from principle, mystic and practical’. They are very poor, but so well liked by the inhabitants that they are continually sustained by regular gifts of food. Much of this popularity they put down to the ‘affectionate, well-mannered dog they had brought with them’. After a while Laurence is troubled by a severe affliction to his hand. Eventually an operation becomes necessary, which unexpectedly proves so sanguinary that the surgeons depart, leaving their patient for dead. However, he is not. Arising from the operating table, the victim races frantically back to his apartement, brutally kicks their beloved dog downstairs, and apparently (it is not entirely clear) kills his wife.

Patrick wrote the story on 12 and 13 June 1951, originally entitling it ‘A Nice Allegory’, and later ‘Hernia, Stranguary and Cysts’. That the couple is Patrick and my mother, and the dog their Buddug, is evident from the opening description. Three weeks earlier, my mother had written in her diary: ‘P. showed Dr Delcos swelling on his hand. It has to be removed.’ Five days later ‘P. had his hand done, fainted, poor P., is splinted & bound & in a sling.’ For over a fortnight he continued in great pain, suffering continual discharges of pus from the infected wound, and enjoying little sleep.

It looks as though this protracted suffering led Patrick, as in ‘The Lemon’, to reflect on how far an inordinate degree of psychological distress or physical pain might wholly distort a man’s nature, exposing the perilous fragility of the mind’s control over destructive elements of the subconscious. The threat is emphasized by the frenzied patient’s violent assault on the very beings to whom he is closest.

There exists what may be a tentative draft of the tale in one of Patrick’s notebooks. There he contemplates writing the story of ‘A very sensible childless pair [who] decide that the husband had best beget one on a healthy girl’. This he does, with predictably stressful effect on the wife. This perhaps appearing too trite or unrealistic a theme, it seems Patrick converted it into a savage melodrama, whose principal content derived from his own experience.

Another story written at this time is ‘William Temple’, which remains unpublished. Ultimately a precursor to Patrick’s novel Richard Temple (1962), it begins on an unmistakably autobiographical note. Like Patrick during his wartime service with Political Warfare Executive, Temple is employed by a branch of Intelligence whose members do not normally operate in occupied Europe. Again, I suspect like Patrick himself, ‘he had often pictured to himself William Temple as one of that great secret army that was being built up in France’. Unexpectedly, he is selected to be dropped on a special mission to the French Resistance ‘in the mountains between Spain and France’. After a realistic account of his reception by the maquis, he is diverted into a hunt for a magnificent boar, which he finally tracks down and shoots.

The story is very much longer than others written at this time, being reckoned by Patrick at 23,500 words. The indications are that it was at first intended as a novel, which for some reason came to an unanticipated halt. Possibly, with the (symbolic?) death of the boar, he simply found further inspiration lacking. At any rate, he decided to include it among the collection submitted to Fred Warburg. In view of its exceptional length, it was divided into two parts, oddly entitled ‘A Pair I’ and ‘A Pair II’. The adventure is fluently narrated, but from its length ill-suited to a collection of short stories.

Disheartened by Warburg’s rejection, Patrick brought his short-story writing to an abrupt close. Not until well over a year had passed did he attempt another. As his publisher pointed out, the twenty tales are widely varied in quality. Without straying into excessive analysis, it has to be said that in several cases the plots appear somewhat contrived, and I am inclined to suspect the baneful influence of Somerset Maugham in what appears to be Patrick’s apparent need to round off with a quirky or violent conclusion. Again, several stories are driven by a desire to sublimate personal fantasies, wish-fulfilments or resentments which do not always fully accord to dramatic requirement. More, too, might perhaps have been made of those descriptive passages at which Patrick excelled, evoking the Catalan people and their harsh but beguiling landscape.

Another possibility for generating desperately needed additional income occurred to Patrick at this time. In November 1951 Curtis Brown passed an enquiry to Fred Warburg: ‘Patrick asks if I know of any books which a publisher would like him to translate from the French. It occurs to me that he might be a very good translator. Have you by any chance any such book in mind?’

Warburg could offer nothing, and the proposal fell by the wayside. Eventually Curtis Brown was to be proved right, and Patrick became an admired translator of contemporary French writing. But another ten years were to pass before he was afforded opportunity to undertake that lucratively dependable employment.

Over the winter of 1950–51 the couple’s hopes were largely founded on the success of Three Bear Witness, for which Warburg had expressed such high regard. It was a desperately worrying time. In January 1952 my mother lamented that: ‘The year continues to go badly: Seckers don’t want W[illy Mucha]’s maquettes. Very much gloom.’ They were eager to have the dustjacket illustrated by their friend. At the beginning of the next month ‘Secker sent list with T.B.W. in it.’ A month later the strain had become almost unendurable: ‘I could not sleep for thinking of TBW, copies being liable to arrive any time now.’ Eventually, on 22 April, ‘TBW came; parcel on the stairs. P. infinitely kind, sat by me.’

Unhappily, the excitement proved ephemeral. Press reception in Britain was muted, and although one or two reviewers voiced approval of the book’s finer qualities, it slipped rapidly from public consciousness. For all their exceptional resilience and recurrent surges of optimism against hostile odds, for much of the time during the first two and a half years of their life in Collioure, Patrick and my mother found it hard to sustain their spirits. Foremost among concerns impossible to overlook was the grinding poverty of their existence, which continued poised on the brink of disaster.

Looking back, five months after their arrival in Collioure their bank balance stood at 600 francs (about 12 shillings). But for the unstinted generosity of their neighbours, and occasional contributions from my mother’s father, they could not possibly have survived. A year later my mother ruefully noted: ‘On Thursday the money had not arrived at the bank, so I borrowed 1000fr. The electricity came & demanded all we had save 5fr. so I went to Tante Alice for another 1000fr.’ In April 1951: ‘Accounts alarm me much: we spend far too much.’ By the end of that month: ‘Did month’s accounts: 11.000fr odd, much better. Two francs left in the house but will get bread and milk with “j’ai oublié mes sous & money should be at bank tomorrow”.’

Patrick and Willy Mucha

The year 1952 opened with the anguished query: ‘Can we live on 10.500 fr a month until July? We will try.’

For over two years they frequently went hungry. Having cooked a modest feast for St Patrick’s Day in 1951, my mother reflected: ‘We are so used now to very plain living that we cannot eat much at feasts, we have no capacity.’ For everyday diet: ‘We live mainly on new potatoes, fried bread & bread-and-marmalade.’ Much of their modest shopping was conducted across the frontier in Spain, where prices were much lower. This regularly involved my mother’s walking to Port Bou and back: a 34-mile round hike, traversing successive steep rocky ridges.

Patrick’s parting words on leaving Wales were: ‘if you’re going to be poor, it’s better to be poor in a warm country’. This was to prove true in some respects, and the couple grew adept at living off the land. On 3 September 1951 my mother ‘picked 4 lbs. of blackberries in the river bed, & we made about 5 lbs of jelly’. In the same week they went gathering figs in the mountains at Col de Mollo. The task proved hazardous as well as arduous. ‘Got a dozen ripe ones; trees covered in green ones … P. in tree and I underneath when a chasseur shot at us: shots spat all round. Coming home met Marraine who said the chasseurs are “très mal élevés”, & said Come & see her for some anchovies.’

After a time Patrick, who had been a keen fisherman in Cwm Croesor, took his rod to join men angling at night from the jetty, regularly returning with anything up to half-a-dozen tasty daurades (bream).

But this monotonous and erratic diet was largely seasonal, and there were lengthy spans when little or nothing was available to be picked or caught. They might scarcely have survived, had their sustenance not been supplemented by the wonderful generosity of the warm-hearted Colliourenchs. Typical entries in my mother’s diary read: ‘Mlle Margot called me in with great mystery & filled my basket with huge cauli., 4 eggs, a big onion & 6 oranges, all with hideous embarrassment; she could not meet my eye’; ‘Tante gave us viande hâchée & bones & pâté & a pot au feu’; ‘Mlle Margot brought us 13 fresh eggs & a litre of ? Banyuls “pour demain”’ (Easter Day).

My parents never forgot this kindness, and remained lifelong friends with many of their affectionate neighbours, a sadly diminishing handful of whom remain. Within such a tight-knit community, mutual concern and charitable support were taken for granted. Links of family and friendship permeated the town. When the electrician Cadène was electrocuted at work, some 1,500 people attended his funeral. An incomer, having bought a house in the town, sought to eject the tenants on grounds that they had lately failed to pay rent. The husband had in fact always paid, but on falling ill temporarily proved insolvent. The huissier (bailiff) arrived, together with a removal van, to enforce their departure. The town rose in anger, and, despite the appearance of gendarmes from Port-Vendres, refused to permit the ejection. The van driver declared that he would not have accepted the employment, had he known it was not an ordinary removal, while the ringleader of the town’s resistance was discovered to be gentle Dr Delcos.

The Colliourenchs also possessed enchanting natural courtesy. When King George VI died in 1952, ‘Women come up & say how sorry about King, tears running down their faces. Tricolor at half-mast in place & at post office.’ Women in the shops explained to each other, as my mother passed by, ‘c’est son roi à Madame.’

One neighbour remained for some reason dubious about the extent of this Christian spirit, expressing her view with that decisive emphasis that characterizes the true Colliourencque. At the time of Odette Bernardi’s difficult divorce, my mother ‘offered that O. would be happier if F[rançois]. were to remove her from here, Mlle. M[argot]. agreed “parce que c’est un pays de perdition, Collioure”. She repeated this many times, saying that we do not know – the terrible character of Collioure, unlike any other village.’

As my mother commented on encountering such baffling pronouncements: ‘eh?’

In view of their life of constant privation, it is not surprising that she and Patrick were rarely free from one ailment or another. From June 1950 ‘medecine’ and ‘chemist’ feature remorselessly in their monthly household accounts. In February 1951, ‘P. looked & felt terribly poorly on the 17^th’. Dr Delcos paid regular visits, presenting no bill until that May, when additional expense arose from treatment of the dangerous cyst in Patrick’s hand. In February 1952 ‘P’s rheumatism very bad’; a few weeks later ‘P. went to dr. & had his left ear completely cleaned but it is stone deaf still. The right one hurt dreadfully. He came out with shirt wet through.’ A persistent requirement was medicine for his ‘nerves’. Similarly, my mother was visited by recurrent afflictions: ‘My tum in bad condition’; ‘I slept all afternoon – had vile headache’; ‘Medecine [M’s liver] 530 [francs]’.

Some of Patrick’s troubles appear to have stemmed from unremitting mental strain. ‘Medicine [P’s nervous turn]’, reads a characteristic entry in their account book. A bad attack, the nature of which is obscure, occurred in May 1952, when my mother was staying with her parents in England. At dinner with their neighbours the Rimbauds:

I smoked. In spite of pills I felt the usual trouble coming on, but escaped in time on pretext of seeking Almanach Catalá – on the stairs wondered very much where I was – at home (still on all fours) recovered with dear Buddug’s aid (she was very kind on finding that it was not all a great game, and stood quite still, just touching my face) washed, returned in reasonably good form, and was able to finish the evening without, I hope and trust, throwing any damp.

About this time Patrick compiled a six-page essay, perhaps with a vague view to publication, entitled ‘How to make the best of poverty’. The advice is pragmatic, being based on daily experience:

If you have to go a month on x p[ennies]. you must make do on fr. the first day, and on each day after that. Never rely on any bank, friend, publisher or business person to send money on a given day

Do not ever pretend to be rich, with the lower classes. Be as affable as can be with them, but always use a good deal of ceremony – M. and Mme., and formal greetings always.[fn4] If you have to borrow money, do it before you are destitute. Once you have no money at all (literally none) your mind, your values, are terribly distorted.

Careful instructions are given providing advice on giving up smoking: ‘The first few days are hard, but your increasing sense of smugness will carry you through. You end up on a wonderful moral pinnacle, and if you ever start to smoke again they taste exceedingly good.’

When the worst comes to the worst, ‘Exceedingly weak tea without milk is a good drink, if you take it piping hot.’ Even Buddug’s concerns were taken into account: ‘If you have a dog, feed it before your meal begins. You will find it comes too hard at the end.’

With regard to making ends meet:

The food that you can afford when you are very poor needs a great deal of care and preparation to be anything but sickeningly dull. With very great care it can be surprisingly good – garlic, herbs (especially thyme and parsley) flour and a little oil rightly used can give plain potatoes soul and substance.[fn5]

If there are two of you, you would be better advised to leap off a cliff than to allow wrangling to begin. As soon as you are wretched your subconscious, unsavoury mind begins to look about for a scapegoat: you must stop it from picking on the object nearest at hand – the almost invariable object, the loved one.

Furthermore, in a time of poverty you usually have little to do – you do not shop, you do not go out much, paid amusements stop, the sight of your acquaintance is unpleasant – so once quarrelling starts it goes on.

Regular daily routine was essential for preservation of morale:

It is important to maintain the appearance of ordinary life – regular meals (even if they consist of nothing at all but the thinnest tea), an afternoon walk. One has a tendency to stay in bed very late, to stop washing, not to shave … In extreme cases you must give in and go to bed but even then it can be done with a sort of decency. It is platitudinous to point out that you are much richer when you have reduced your needs to a minimum!

A poem written in the same notebook suggests the black despair which at times gripped him:

Sink: down in the grey sea

slowly down. The layers

silent, of depression. Down.

Through them.

No irritation, anger left

no hint of red

all grey dull and silence welling

up past your ears.

You sink your head

Down. Breathing slow

Down. Eyes unfocussed

One tear creeps down the bent

ash dying face.

As in North Wales during the summer of 1949, the prospect of death returned to haunt Patrick. At the end of April 1951, ‘P. said after yesterday’s tennis he gets partial black-outs while playing, which connect with feeling of other-worldness – of playing at being alive: a game which might be stopped at any moment.’

On 20 October he ‘wrote his death dream’, and about that time composed this grim verse, entitled ‘You will come to it’:

Do not suppose their motions pantomime

Because the thing they dig is dark, unseen

The mattock and the shovel swing in time

A near approach will show you what they mean.

On 11 May 1951 my mother, more buoyant by nature, experienced a remarkable vision:

A Dream: I died, & arrived on a shore that struck me as being like Lundy, from across a big grey sea. I worried about P coming, & he arrived soon after.[fn6] Was filled with immense feeling of relief because of two things: permanence in this existence, & continuence of free will // I am not aware of ever having felt unhappiness from the impermanence of this life, nor of regretting the loss of free will in the usual pre-conceived notion of Heaven. Have worked backwards & am now fully aware of both, though much comforted by the exceedingly vivid dream. The dream had no sequence of events, but was like a state of being. (That life there would go on for ever). (In the manner of owning a house instead of renting it).

Lundy is the island in the Bristol Channel where my mother spent many happy holidays when living as a girl in North Devon. What I am sure she did not know, is that it was regarded by the pagan Celts as a location of the Otherworld, where the souls of the dead are received.[fn7]

The couple endured this extreme poverty for well over two years. It was on 2 May 1952 that their affairs suddenly altered dramatically for the better. Publication of Three Bear Witness had proved a material disappointment, both in reviews and sales. But good news was on the way.

‘I was scrubbing the black hole floor’, wrote my mother,

when P. came in almost breathless saying ‘Such news, M’. It was S.C.B.’s [Spencer Curtis Brown] letter to say Harcourt, Brace want TBW [to be called Questions & Answers over there] for 750 dollars. Quite knocked up, both of us … For the first time on such an occasion we are not wild: no rushings out & spendings, nor the desire to do so. Could eat but little lunch, anyway … We walked to P. Vendres after tea, feeling upset & disturbed with our wealth. Saw wirelesses, but spent nothing.

Six days later Curtis Brown sent news almost as exciting. The American advance was to be sent direct to France, which, with a modicum of discretion, meant they need not pay the penal British income tax! ‘We are so happy & settled in our economy that this wealth worries us,’ exclaimed my mother. Charming prospects opened up on every side. ‘We plan a 3000 mile round trip of Spain & Portugal’; ‘Take many turns around Collioure in a day, to look at cars.’ As concerns the latter, it is fortunate that they were not able to anticipate just how premonitory was to prove a sight glimpsed by my mother, given their alarming proclivity for experiencing traffic crashes: ‘On way home [from the dentist in Elne] saw vast car turned on its side in ditch, eh?’ Patrick did not as yet possess a driving licence, being content for the present for my mother to take the wheel.

Excited plans began for purchase of a car, while Patrick further contemplated buying a sailing boat which was for sale in the harbour. The latter disappointingly turned out to be in too poor condition to be worth even the modest 8,000 francs demanded, but a car they had to have. The noisy and crowded little streets of Collioure appeared ever more unbearably claustrophobic, and they longed for means of occasional escape. Friends in England offered them their Opel for £100, an offer so enticing that my mother travelled to London in July to bring it back, but from the moment she arrived, everything began to go wrong. Additional expenses mounted by the hour: garage bill, ferry fare, tax, French import duty … my poor mother was in despair: ‘I think my heart is breaking & I never want to see the Opel again, and how I love P. and am utterly lonely.’

Eventually the Bank of England prohibited the Opel’s export, and the same afternoon another car rammed the wretched car, breaking an indicator and smashing a window.

Altogether my mother totted up that she had spent a precious £35 on this fruitless errand, and her despair was only alleviated when her father, with whom she stayed in Chelsea, gave her £20. Battered and exhausted, she returned to Collioure, accompanied by Patrick’s son Richard, who was now to spend his first summer holiday with them, camping in Andorra. After his eventual return to England my mother noted despairingly: ‘Street noises formid able’, and a week later she and Patrick returned by bus to Andorra in the hope of completing a house purchase they had planned during their visit to that country. In the event a pied-à-terre was sadly to prove beyond their means.

Life looked up in the latter part of the year, but even in their days of direst poverty they rarely allowed themselves to feel downcast for very long, no matter how heavily the dice appeared loaded against them. They swam, walked, sunbathed on the plage St Vincent, and when they could afford it played tennis on the baking-hot hard court in the moat of the Château Royal. The plage in particular provided an ever-present refuge from their claustrophobic little apartement, although it had its own occasional hazards – noisy tourists, rowdy children, and (for Patrick that June): ‘A disagreeable day … A gull shat all over me, the rug and Thos. Mann.’

Odette and Buddug on the plage St Vincent

Odette Boutet (then Bernardi) recalls an occasion when my mother and she swam the traversée across the harbour, from La Balette on the south side of the bay to the plage St Vincent opposite. It being the first swim of the season, and the water icy, on emerging they found they lacked strength for the return swim. Accordingly they walked back past the town and Port d’Avall in their bathing costumes. It was an unusual sight in those days, and the contrasted attractions of the two brown-limbed young women – Odette dark-haired and olive-skinned, and my mother fair-haired and blue-eyed – drew much attention from the (chiefly male, I assume) inhabitants along the way.

In the evenings they read, played chess, or engaged in an improvised form of bridge for two. Although an enthusiast for both games, Patrick was (like Stephen Maturin) but a middling achiever at such pastimes, who more often than not found himself beaten by my mother. Once, after a particularly hard-fought contest, Patrick wrote defiantly on the score-sheet: ‘Bridge, a silly game. BY ORDER P. O’BRIAN. SEPT 1951’.

Ever adventurous, from time to time they escaped the town to explore the mountains. Their close friend Odette, who was quite as audacious, frequently accompanied them. In June 1951 the three of them (five, including Buddug and Odette’s dog Rubill) travelled on foot to the forest behind the Tour Massane, where they camped beside the wood. That night boars could be heard grunting close by. Peering from their tents at the moonlit glade, they were alarmed to discover a large female boar leading her offspring, and quickly clasped the dogs’ muzzles to prevent their alerting the irascible parent. The expedition was voted a great success on their return, despite Odette’s temporarily losing her voice from exhaustion.

Next month they set off on a much more ambitious expedition, camping for nearly seven weeks in and around Andorra. As ever, they found the little Pyrenean principality entirely beautiful, and largely untouched by the modern world. After a week they were joined by Odette and Rubill. The latter was promptly attacked by four fierce dogs, from which she was barely saved by the two courageous women. So far from displaying gratitude, Rubill constantly eyed their provisions, only to be as regularly forestalled by the vigilant Buddug. Prices in Andorra were much lower than in France, farmers hospitable to the campers, and the weather benign. Their diet was supplemented by wild strawberries and trout from mountain streams. Buildings were picturesquely medieval, and transport off the few main roads was conducted by cows drawing haycarts, while on steep slopes mules dragged loads of hay on angled wooden platforms.

Fortunately the dauntless campers were hardy, and carried on their backs tents, sleeping bags, cooking utensils, and even a heavy wind-up gramophone and collection of records. Odette remembered their dancing under the moonlight to Bach and Beethoven. It was on this or another of their expeditions that she recalled their getting lost one day in a heavy mist. After hours of more and more anxious wandering, they stumbled at last on their camp, having unwittingly strayed in a wide circle. Despite their hardihood, femininity persisted. Venturing beyond the camp to relieve themselves one day, the two young women were startled by a large snake, and fled shrieking back to safety.

In the meantime my parents’ concern was aroused by distressing news from Richard. As described earlier, Patrick was delighted when his son expressed ambition to join the Royal Navy. Nothing had been heard from him for some time, when on 23 May 1952 Patrick received what he described as ‘a sickening letter from Richard’. The news was indeed bad. He had failed the examination to Dartmouth, and the longed-for career was denied him. ‘I am very disappointed as I had worked hard and got nothing for it,’ he explained sadly. He possessed considerable natural aptitude for mathematics, and was skilled with his hands, but as he freely confessed was all but hopeless at exams. Regrettably, Patrick’s response has not survived. Given his own comparably abysmal experience, together with his understanding attitude towards similar disappointments on other occasions, I feel confident his reaction would have been supportive. Moreover, he knew that Richard was additionally occupied on Saturdays by such work as he could find to supplement his mother’s meagre income.

In July, as was mentioned earlier, Richard returned with my mother from London to Collioure, where he spent the summer holiday from July to September. (As the court judgment had ruled that Richard was to spend half of each summer holiday with his father, his mother clearly approved the extended arrangement.) This time he brought with him a good school report, and showed keen interest in joining the Merchant Navy. My parents had made extensive preparations, requiring further dangerous inroads into their ever-strained finances, to ensure that he had the most enjoyable holiday they could provide.

Tents, lilos and other camping gear having been purchased, on 8 August the little party set off crammed into an excursion bus full of excited boy scouts. Arrived once more in the mountains of Andorra, they encamped in pine forests. Here the modern world impinged barely at all. The first person they met was a cowherd, with ‘his woolly dogs; his cows are all round, many with bells’.[fn8] Richard and Patrick went fishing in a nearby lake, and returned to one of my mother’s wonderful improvised meals: ‘Fries very successful; lunch today was chops, potatoes, garlic, onion & tomato stew. Dear Budd seems happy & eats heartily.’ She was on heat, but fortunately the herd’s dogs were all bitches, save one male incapacitated by age. After a swim in a nearby river, they returned to camp, where ‘golden eagles flew right over us, being mobbed by choughs or crows’.

Next day my mother went to obtain milk from the cowherd, who ‘was asleep under a rock with his arm round his pet lamb who had its head on his shoulder’. The excitement grew briefly too much for Richard, who was sick at supper. Next morning, however, he proved right as rain, and after lunch went on a further fishing expedition with his father. In their absence my mother picked bowls of bilberries and raspberries for lunch.

The herd proved to be guardian of the sheep of the commune of Encamp. Patrick asked whether a hut could be found for them to sleep in. While the cowherd enquired with the Consul of Encamp, Patrick set off to buy food and change money in the town of Andorra. Meanwhile, as my mother wrote in her diary that evening, ‘R. & I did nothing but laze, & we played piquet.’ The journey to Encamp was pursued along very rough forest tracks, and the next day Patrick succumbed to a bad attack combining fever and diarrhoea, which proved to be dysentery. For several days he remained in acute distress, the pain eventually alleviated by the local remedy of boiled rice, together with Entero-Viaform pills obtained from an Andorran chemist.

Richard, who continued in rude health, went off fishing again, and on his return was ‘very cheerful, keeps roaring from his tent’. Before long they were installed in primitive beehive huts used by the shepherds of Encamp. ‘R’s hut: how he worked at clearing & levelling the floor. P. crept over to look at it: it looks dangerous about its roof, is exposed & draughty but very, very beautiful.’

On 19 August my mother left Patrick, who remained sick in their camp, and obtained a lift to Andorra from a pleasant Frenchman. Arrived in the sleepy capital, she enquired about buying a home in the principality, as a refuge from the turmoil of town life in Collioure. By chance it was to the Consul of Encamp that she was directed for information, having been given a paper explaining the law on foreigners owning land in Andorra, together with a letter of introduction. After one and a quarter hours’ walk, my mother arrived in Encamp. At the Consul’s house, nine of his assembled relatives read the letter in turn: ‘some aloud’. This protracted introduction concluded, the Consul himself read the paper and letter, murmuring benignly: ‘Benez, Madame’ – but could not be pressed to name a price.

A visit afterwards with Patrick to inspect a suitable site involved a hair-raising drive by an accommodating local up a mountainside. My mother, normally immune to vertigo, confessed that she had ‘never been more frightened in my life as when we swerved fast round corners that cambred away into 10000 feet of abyss, on the outside of the road’. ‘Vous n’avez pas peur, Madame?’ enquired their driver solicitously. Frustratingly, it proved necessary to postpone the elusive question of the proposed purchase until after their return home, and they returned to camp ‘depressed, to fold & carry up tents’.

The great holiday adventure was drawing to a close: ‘Felt very sad to leave Andorra.’ After erratic journeyings by bus, they picked up the delightful touristic yellow train (it still runs) offering spectacular views of the Pyrenees, until they arrived at the picturesque fortified town of Villefranche de Conflent, in the narrow defile of the Têt. Finally, late on the evening of 23 August they arrived in Collioure, by which time even Buddug was exhausted.

Next day there was great excitement, when a massive backlog of correspondence awaiting their return at the post office was retrieved to be studied over breakfast. It included a parcel of complimentary copies of Testimonies from the USA, together with ‘Wonderful reviews from N.Y. Times & N.Y. Herald Tribune, Harper’s Bazaar wanting short stories’. Spencer Curtis Brown wrote to report that requests for foreign rights to the novel were pouring in – from Italy, Germany, Norway.

Despite his continuing ill-health and exhaustion, Patrick plunged back into his neglected writing. The holiday had been a brilliant success – if dangerously expensive. There remained but 55,000 francs (about £50) in their account. Nevertheless, he and my mother had decided that Richard, being now fourteen, should receive a quarterly allowance to spend as he chose. ‘Yesterday P. told R. about his £52 a year: R. much impressed & so pleasant about it.’ Naturally he could have had little idea of the sacrifice involved. A week later my worried mother ‘Went to P[ort]. Vendres & paid tax. So depressed.’

During the remaining fortnight of the holiday, Richard spent his days swimming, playing tennis, watching the sardana danced in the square, attending divine service at the old church by the harbour, and revelling in my mother’s rich cooking. ‘Made enormous rice – moules & sèches & all. Mme Oliva made us an ailloli. Dear R. likes everything.’ He made friends with Odette’s young son Robert, and travelled one day to Perpignan to buy a new chain for Buddug; on another he went to Port Bou on a shopping exped ition with my mother: ‘pleasant morning’. Willy Mucha invited him to stay with them whenever he liked. He made friends on every side. There was work, too, for him and my mother. At dawn on 4 September they were invited to assist René Aloujes with his vendange. They toiled from 6 a.m. until 9, paused for a hefty breakfast until 10.30, and continued until noon: ‘R. worked very well. Grapes not very good. A very steep, difficult vigne to work.’

In the evenings after supper the three stayed up playing endless games of racing demon and ‘prawns’ eyes’, in the company of Buddug, Pussit, and a new member of the family: ‘Kitten comes in to play; a very good, clean kitten.’

Eventually, the sad day arrived for Richard’s departure on 7 September. He was given a lively send-off, loaded with exciting gifts. The garrulous Willy Mucha bustled up, bearing a dried flying fish as a parting token. Finally, ‘R. got 7 pm train, so sad P & I: the house is dreary.’

A few days later they were rewarded with a letter, bubbling over with enthusiasm:

Thank you very much for a wonderful holiday; the boys will not believe my experiences, especially the golden-eagles. What a good time we all had. Thank you so much.

Andorra was about the most marvellous country that I have ever been to. What fishing it was! What fun it was in the camp …

Very [sic] thing was in tact and whole when I got home: even to scorpion and flying-fish and mostofall my porron.[fn9] I have a huge collection now dominated by my banderilla. Every-body shrinks from the scorpion, believing it to be alive. My precious [Andorran] flag is now the envy of all the boys at school who are extremely jelous …

The whole form, one and all and dumbfounded when I produced the [clasp] knife.[fn10] One boy produced a ‘sharp knife’, he skinned his arm but did not cut hair, all he succeeded in was cutting himself.

In addition, Patrick had concealed a sophisticated fishing reel in his luggage at departure, which further excited his friends’ admiration. As Richard explained, this was ‘a pleasant and exciting surprise’, especially as ‘Finn and Atkins, both seized with fishing mania have reels, not of my superior type … I am very much envied in that way to.’

With the reticence characteristic of schoolboys in those distant unsentimental days, Richard omitted to report a distressing aspect of his otherwise triumphant return to Cardinal Vaughan School. As before, I am indebted to his friend Bob Broeder for this revealing account:

When we returned to school for the autumn term, our English teacher set us the task of writing a composition about what we did in the summer holidays. Most of us wrote the usual mundane contents but Richard wrote a masterpiece, describing his journey to the South of France and how he and his father met and spent some time with El Cordobes a renowned Spanish bullfighter.[fn11]

Having read it myself I admired his descriptive narrative, his English was marvellous, remarkable and interesting, his father had taught him well. The next time we had English, the teacher handed all the exercise books back to all the pupils except Richard. In front of the whole class the teacher made the announcement that he had asked for a factual essay, not an imaginary one – holding Richard’s up to the class. This, he declared, was the work of a fertile imagination without an ounce of reality. I stood up to protest – saying I had postcards to prove that in no way did imagination play any part in his beautiful essay but was told in no uncertain terms to shut up and to sit down, if I didn’t obey the outcome would be a trip to the Discipline master with the inevitable thrashing. It goes without saying that Richard was distraught and very angry. I clearly remember that both I and several classmates tried to console him but the anger had never left him during the rest of his time at the school. I remember his mother was also very upset.

Richard’s indignation was fully justified, but his exceptional capacity to harbour resentment may also be noted.

Back in Collioure, Patrick and my mother had resumed their daily struggle. There were compensations to their existence, however. Much of the physical structure of the town stems from medieval times, and among the population there breathed memories of a picturesque past. While most of the inhabitants are Roman Catholics, there has long been a sizeable Protestant minority, who congregate at their Temple above the Château Royal. Relations between these two branches of the Christian religion have traditionally long been cordial. The only hint of disparagement I heard of occurred in the name of a local pastry, known as a jésuite. Gazing through the window of the pâtisserie in the Port d’Avall, Patrick explained to me that when you bite into one – it proves to be hollow!

At the time he and my mother arrived in the town, there survived numerous customs and practices redolent of beliefs older even than the conversion to Christianity. Popular theology could be a trifle speculative – as this exchange recorded by my mother on May Day 1954 attests:

When I arrived at Mimi Choux’s this morning she was in the middle of condemning someone for stating that angels are bald. ‘N’est-ce pas, Madame O’Brian, que dans toutes les reproductions les anges ont toujours les cheveux bouclés?’[fn12]

A generally equable syncretism between the Church and pagan practices and beliefs survived locally well into the middle of the twentieth century. It was quite common for brides to appear in an advanced state of pregnancy at their weddings. ‘About the number of marriages with the girl pregnant’, my mother was told, it is ‘quite natural, people rigole [laugh] and joke but are not méchants with the girl; there is no onus [blame] on the man at all.’

A curious custom which might have suggested anticlericalism or simple hooliganism was evidently neither, and bore a significance now possibly lost:

Also asked Rimbaud about the bands of youths banging on curé’s door. He says it is ‘sans méchanceté’ & has always been done (he was v. active in his time) & nobody really minds. They bang on the doors of their young women. If dégâts [damage] result, complaints are made to mayor & youths pay up, but it doesn’t go to the police.

A practice of having a sprig of hawthorn blessed by the curé taken to the fields to ensure a good harvest presumably reflected the archaic folk belief that its prickles repel witches, ever prowling abroad with the malign intent of blighting the crops of honest Christians.[3]

Not all magic was benign, however:

Mme Rimbaud’s tale: yesterday, she alone in the house, a woman selling lace. I don’t want any lace. And why don’t you want any lace? Because I don’t want any lace. Then the woman said if she would not buy any lace, she, who knew how to tell the cards, would put a ‘malédiction’ on her. That evening she had such a head she did not know whether it was the result of the malediction, or what.

Fortunately there existed magical cures, as well as curses. The Rimbauds ‘had an old woman in to cure [their daughter] Martine with a herb cataplasm’. An interesting ritual efficaciously removed headaches. On 10 July 1953, completion of a difficult piece of writing left Patrick with an acute migraine. Next day their landlord, M. Germa:

told us Georgette [his wife] was having the sun taken out of her head by her mother, with water in a bottle, & prayers. We demurred, & he said he believed it because Jaquie had had it done (bubbles rose in the bottle of water) & three days after his sick headache had gone.

On another occasion Mme Rimbaud similarly had the sun removed from her head by a cousin. When my mother enquired how this was done, she mentioned not only the bottle, but ‘a handkerchief folded in a certain way, “et certainement qu’elle en a dit des prières. Je ne sais pas, moi.”’ The disclaimer suggests that the ‘prières’ may not have been altogether Christian in character.

A particularly potent author of cures was the martyr St Blaise, who, as a consequence of his miraculous survival of strangulation or decapitation (accounts differ), specialized in healing sore throats.[4] When my mother was confined to bed with a severe cold, ‘Mimi Chou kindly gave me a packet of lump sugar & pastilles blessed on St Blaise’s day.’ On another occasion she regaled her with a detailed account of the healing process. Saint Blaise being outside Collioure for a stroll one day with Our Lord, the pair bumped into Satan, who coolly informed them: ‘I’m off to strangle someone.’ ‘Nong, Nong, Nong!’ exclaimed Jesus and Blaise together, in pronounced Catalan accents: ‘You’re not doing that!’ This pious narrative acted as preface to the charm that effected the cure: a formula strongly characteristic of pagan ritual, in which Christian figures were frequently substituted for their heathen predecessors.[5]

The calendar year was marked by a succession of colourful festivals. On 27 February 1952 Patrick was delighted by the Mardi Gras carnival, which he observed from their balcony winding joyously along the rue Arago, and then descended to follow it to the Place de la Mairie. There were fine floats, followed by men disguised as bears and monkeys:

I saw them pass down the boulevard and then arrive in the Place: immense crowd, charmed: Diego lost in delight. Music – a band to each float. Funny remarks on floats all written in French. Attention Ours méchants et singe vicieu [‘dangerous bears and vicious monkey’] … Remarkable dancing of 2 pairs of mariés [married couples]. Immobility of masks: singe (sacking? young Germa) probably making singe faces underneath; but quite invisible – vast addition to general effect. Mlle Margot convulsed by bears – pointing, laughing, red in the face with pleasure. M. le Curé not visible – no wonder – Ash Wednesday. Religious aspect quite lost to view … Many children dressed up – rouged, powdered – some in Catalan dress – attractive – some as F[airy]. Queens or some such – less attractive.

Each year on Ascension Day an assemblage of small children, beautifully dressed, gathered outside the church to attend their first Communion. The quatorze juillet was in contrast a comparatively modest bucolic occasion. ‘Procession has just passed up the rue,’ noted my mother, ‘small boys carrying torches or tricolors, with the garde-champêtre [local policeman], followed by local band.’ In the evening there was dancing in the Place, and a display of fireworks in and around the bay. The cheerful informality of the occasion delighted Patrick, who another year was gratified to record: ‘Fête Nationale: very scruffy procession except [Dr] Delcos in his tricolore sash.’

Patrick made notes on customs and other items of local interest, such as this recipe for ridding a child of worms: ‘Le bon vermifuge[:] frot the child’s bosom with garlic and hang a necklace of garlic round the child’s neck ça les étouffe.’ He further compiled a list of ‘Sobriquets’ of local families, some of which feature in his novel The Catalans. Thus one bore the surname ‘L’Empereur – because when he was a baby the Emperor dandled him’. Patrick told me this occurred when Napoleon III was passing through Collioure. At the other political extreme was the family Cravatrouge (Catalan En cravat rougt), one of whom had been ‘le premier radical’ of the town. Another is of mysterious provenance: Piétine dans la boue (‘Trample in the Mud’): Catalan Pitg a fangc.

The French Republic being a relative newcomer in Collioure’s ancient history,[fn13] the town’s major annual celebration is the Feast of St Vincent, Collioure’s patron saint, on 16 August. Until the beginning of the last century, when it was prohibited by the atheist administration of President Émile Combes, a boat bearing the saint’s relics plied from his little chapel on the rock across the harbour, to be ceremonially received on the beach by the curé with a ritual exchange conducted in Catalan.[6] A bullfight in the town’s arena by the railway station was one of many celebrations marking the festive occasion. In 1953 my mother passed ‘Picasso visible in café des Sports – merry, pink, active. He was président of this year’s corrida.’ The evening’s firework display is especially magnificent, usually surpassing that of the quatorze juillet. On one such occasion in the early 1960s, we ascended the ridge above the house to obtain a panoramic view of cascades of fire erupting high into the night sky from the beach, as also from fishing boats moored about the harbour. The highlight of the evening occurred when the French Army, then occupying the Château Royal, blew up with one mighty roar what appeared to be their entire reserve of high explosive. From an invisible vineyard above us echoed an answering primitive bellow of approval from a solitary enthusiast, which greatly pleased Patrick.

It was not just innate curiosity which led him to conduct careful observation and recording of traditional ways in Collioure. Just before he left England in September 1949, it was seen earlier that he had agreed to write a book about Southern France for submission to his publishers, Secker & Warburg. Although he kept the project in mind, over two years were to pass before he hit on the idea of utilizing the knowledge he had acquired for the alternative purpose of writing a novel. Before that, the indications are that he planned a descriptive account of the life and landscape of the Côte Vermeille, and it was to that end that he noted its more colourful aspects, and encouraged my mother to record observations in her diary. Naturally gregarious, consorting daily with shopkeepers and neighbours, and being more proficient in French and Catalan than Patrick, she was the more productive worker in this field.

It was during the summer of 1951 that the idea of writing a novel with Collioure as its picturesque setting had germinated in Patrick’s mind. He and my mother had become concerned with, and to some extent involved in, the divorce of their good friend Odette. On 2 March 1951 my mother accompanied her and her father to lend support in a hearing at the court in Céret. Odette’s husband François Bernardi, a successful sculptor and painter, had deserted her for an older but extremely beautiful woman. Next day Patrick sketched a plot based around the affair. Although his initial plan seems to have been to produce a short story, the scheme is sufficiently detailed to suggest the possibility of fuller treatment.

His initial reaction was one of indecision:

It sounds a commonplace little romance. Perhaps I could lift it out of the rut by showing the gradual development of Odette’s character – she should be mature at the end, and at last spiritually free of the [her] family’s domination – and the parallel development of François’ to something like unselfishness and honesty. The moral being that you have got to be free of domination (by cant or by family) before you are any good.

A great difficulty would be the presentation: it could hardly be done from outside (the all-knowing observer) and I hardly know whether I could manage it from inside each character.

Patrick does not appear to have been at all troubled by the possibility that informed readers might identify the protagonists. (His friend Walter Greenway was similarly concerned lest people in Cwm Croesor discover the extent of their potentially embarrassing portrayal in Three Bear Witness.) Nor, more surprisingly, does this thought seem to have worried my mother. It seems they generally espoused the view that Patrick’s literary work stood apart from the material world: connections between them hardly mattered. Equally, they may not unreasonably have assumed that no one in Collioure was likely to read the book.

In October my parents assisted in bringing in the grape harvest. ‘Vendanged for Vincent Atxer’, noted my mother. ‘Too long, did not like the V[incent].A[txer].s. O[dette]. was there, objectionable. Told us the équipe [working party] in the plains was very grossier [coarse]. Youths rolled women in the dust, took girl’s trousers off.’[fn14] Next day there was a further vendange, at which my mother was evidently annoyed by ‘O[dette]. horseplay moustissing the men.’[fn15] On the third day my mother and Patrick ‘Worked from 8.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m. Beastly children. Very, very fatigued.’ My mother was far from being a prude, and it is possible that she objected to Patrick’s observing their beautiful friend behaving in so wantonly provocative a manner. The sultry Odette was a lissom creature of the South, who amid the grape harvest under the burning sun appeared almost an elemental being.[fn16]

Four days later, Patrick ‘sketched out vendange tale’. It seems likely that this was the basis of chapter VIII of The Catalans, with its vivid depiction of the exhausting physical labour and pain incurred in gathering the grapes, together with the erotically charged relationship between the intellectual outsider, Alain Roig, and the lovely Catalan girl Madeleine, who has been deserted by her painter husband Francisco. The episode builds up to a heated climax, with Alain’s symbolic rape of Madeleine:

With a quick pace he was up to her. He knocked her to the ground. She fell on her knees, and crouching over her he gripped her hair and ears, pressed his teeth hard against her forehead, and in the surrounding cries and laughter he crowed three times, loud like a cock.

Patrick appears at first to have remained undecided precisely what use he might make of these possibilities, until on 18 December he took my mother for a walk up to the Madeloc tower. It was a beautiful day: passing the old barracks (which at one point they envisaged as a permanent refuge from the town), with partridges flying around, they collected wild daffodil bulbs to plant in their window box. Buddug cavorted, madly hunting and catching nothing. As they walked, Patrick for the first time unfolded his idea for a novel on the theme of life among the local Catalans.

Patrick, toying with various approaches to his novel, was struck down yet again by one of his nervous attacks and retired to bed, where he received the usual medication. So bad was the bout on this occasion, that he had to force himself not to think of the book lest the pangs recur. Not until 9 January 1952 did he recover sufficiently to begin working on it. At the end of the month my mother called on Odette to collect information about the social structure of the town, a factor which was to be vividly delineated in the novel. On 6 February ‘P. showed me first chapter of novel: terribly impressed & happy.’ With my mother’s enthusiasm buoying him up, Patrick now found the book advancing with increasing satisfaction. Despite intermittent setbacks and misgivings, he worked throughout the summer, until he finally laid down his pen on 12 September. ‘Much fatigued & terribly pale, kept lying on bed feeling faint,’ as my concerned mother noted.

However, the task was completed, and both were enthusiastic over the result. In May Patrick had toyed with the title Interested Motives, but eventually settled on The Catalans. My mother threw herself into typing the text, and on 2 October copies were sent to Harcourt Brace in New York, and Rupert Hart-Davis in London.

No sooner were the parcels despatched, than an anticlimactic reaction set in. On 5 November ‘Nervous tension over Catalans suddenly overwhelming. It matters so hideously.’ Might it suffer the same distressing fate as the collection of short stories, on which such high hopes had been pinned?

Three weeks passed by, during which they attempted to distract themselves with household improvements. ‘Wait, wait, wait, for post.’ Finally, on 26 November 1952, came news as good as might be hoped for. A telegram arrived from Naomi Burton at Curtis Brown in New York, announcing that Harcourt Brace had offered to take The Catalans at the same rate as Testimonies. Since the book was complete, they would shortly receive a second time within the year the princely sum of $750, tax-free!

Exultation reigned in the little apartement. ‘Very, very happy,’ rejoiced my mother. Patrick promptly wrote to Andorra concerning the building plot for which they had been negotiating. Then they jumped up, and ‘walked to P[ort]. Vendres without noticing the way’. My mother was ‘unable to resist giving P. gloves, camera (whose shutter won’t work & Patau [the photographer] is shut) & pineapple in tin. All these were for his birthday’ on 12 December. Three days later the contract arrived.

The book represents in many ways a tribute to the rugged land he had come to love, and its lively inhabitants. Among them they now had many fast friends, and were accepted as honorary Colliourenchs. It is the more fortunate, consequently, that the novel was not translated at the time into French or Catalan, since it included matter that must surely have provoked offence and dismay in some quarters.

The greatest pleasure I derive from Patrick’s novel lies in the exquisite evocation of Collioure (barely disguised as ‘Saint-Felíu’), and its stark hinterland of vineyards and mountains. Here is enshrined forever the old Collioure, before the destruction of ancient customs, language, clothing, music; the end of the fishing industry, and the building of rank upon rank of lotissements on the skirts of the town. Fortunately, enough of the old town survives in physical form for it to be possible to people it again in imagination, viewed in the light of Patrick’s loving recreation in The Catalans.

Several of his extended pen portraits are taken from the life. The account of the vendange in chapter VIII, with its vivid depiction of the toil involved, culminating in Alain’s climactic ‘rape’ of the lubricious Madeleine, drew extensively on Patrick’s own experience during those three backbreaking days in October 1951, when Odette’s provocative behaviour privately scandalized my mother.[fn17] Again, the festival in the central place of the town, recounted in chapter IX, echoes the Carnival witnessed by Patrick in February 1952.

For the biographer the book contains much of interest. The figure of Dr Alain Roig, returning from long exile in the Far East to resolve a domestic crisis at home, stands (like Pugh in Three Bear Witness) in material respects for Patrick himself. A detached, reflective outsider, he is concerned to observe and dissect the psychological turmoil by which he finds himself surrounded. At one point he ascends the town rampart, where he contemplates from on high the tumbled confusion of houses below:

He passed it carefully over in review, looking for changes and for known, personal landmarks. It was exactly as he remembered it, as he thought of it when he was away, exactly the same and yet with an additional strength of life, a vibrant immediacy: his memory, however sentimental with the distance, might not have provided the shrilling of the cicadas in the oleaster that grew tortuously from a crevice in the wall below, the play of the dancing, shimmering air, the flick and dart of the lizards, and the distant sound of men hauling on a boat.

This was what Patrick himself enjoyed, observing (at times with binoculars) the world from an inaccessible vantage-point, like the peregrine falcon in his adolescent short story of that title.

Familiar, too, from Patrick’s own experience are the internecine intrigue and feuding which Alain encounters among his family. The Roig family members represent in varying degree a dysfunctional collection, an affliction largely originating in the character of Alain’s deceased uncle: ‘an evil-tempered man, powerful, dom ineering, and restless; a ferocious domestic bully. It was not that Alain blamed his Uncle Hercule then; he accepted him as a force of nature and hated him without forming any judgment.’

All this is too close to Patrick’s experience of his oppressive father Charles Russ for coincidence, and the damaging effect he exerted in varying degrees on his offspring.

Alain’s return to Saint-Felíu arose from a summons to save his cousin Xavier, Uncle Hercule’s son, from what leading members of the family regard as a wholly inappropriate marriage. Alain himself ‘was sorry for Xavier … There was something very moving, in those days, in the sight of that proud, cold young man being humiliated and bully-ragged, and bearing it with a pale, masked fortitude.’

There can be no doubt that Xavier is a figure similarly deriving from Patrick’s character and experience, and the relationship between the dead father and his young son mirrors closely his own experience.

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of the bullying father figure is the way that the distorted relationship repeats itself in succeeding generations. Despite (or rather, because of) his harsh upbringing, Xavier in turn replicates the tyrant in his relationship with his own son Dédé. Although resolved at first to treat the child with the kindness his father never gave him, Xavier grows more and more dissatisfied with the boy, finding him intolerably weak, inadequate and sly. He tries educating Dédé himself, but the child’s foolish frivolity and sullen impertinence goad him into subjecting him to repeated beatings. While acknowledging that he had become the oppressor he so loathed in his father, Xavier confesses himself now incapable of acting otherwise.

This unsavoury episode unmistakably reflects both Patrick’s assessment of his own nature as a child, and his treatment of his son Richard, when he rashly attempted to tutor him in Wales in 1948–49. In this respect the experiment proved miserable for both father and son, as Patrick himself appears to have acknowledged following his arrival in France. What persuaded him to revisit that unhappy time, above all making Xavier excoriate his son in repellently disparaging terms? The explanation is, I suspect, that here as elsewhere Patrick utilized his writing on occasion as means of exorcizing his own shortcomings. He possessed no confidant beyond my mother, and even with her it seems unlikely that he found himself able to enlarge on actions he had come to regard with profound shame. He successively employed his three autobiographical novels (Three Bear Witness, The Catalans and Richard Temple) as vehicles for such confessions. The approach was presumably effective, as thereafter he appears to have felt he had effectively exhausted the theme.[fn18]

The extremity of Xavier’s cruelty, and the inadequacy of his justification, are so hyperbolical as to suggest that Patrick expected readers to find the first as repugnant as the second was implausible. I suspect that, by grossly exaggerating his own misconduct, Patrick privately acknowledged it as indefensible. Its function was plainly cathartic. From a biographical point of view, the section in question (chapter IV) should be read in context. Xavier’s savagely frank account of his neglect and ill-treatment of his wife and son is set in the form of a confession, accompanied by expressed desire for absolution. Finding his formal confession to the town priest inadequate, he confides his lack of humanity and consequent fear of damnation to his sympathetic cousin Alain. Alain himself represents an alternative personification of Patrick: the gentle, inquisitive, sage adviser, which is how I for one found him when he confronted problems affecting those close to him. Chapters VIII and IX of The Catalans, recounting events from Alain’s perspective, derive almost verbatim from Patrick’s own experience.

Thus, one underlying function of The Catalans is to provide Patrick’s own confession. More than once in conversation with me he adverted to the Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, laying sardonic emphasis on the writer’s ingenuous account of his callous treatment of his children. Unsurprisingly, my mother observed that, on completion of Xavier’s bitter self-examination, Patrick found himself emotionally drained. ‘P. finished Chapter IV & got terribly depressed.’[9]

The one person whom Patrick clearly would not have wished to understand the reality behind the father–son divide in The Catalans was his own son Richard. Equally, he must have appreciated the likelihood that the boy would read the book. As has already been seen, he followed his father’s literary career with filial pride. On learning in October 1953 of the book’s completion, he supplied a practical suggestion:

I am very glad to hear that you are having a holiday after completing the book. It seems to me that no sooner is one book out than you have finished another. Instead of writing with your hand why not get a tape machine or some such gadget or would that wreck everything? I do hope it comes out as you would wish it.

Next July, he enquired of my mother:

Has Dad heard anything of the last novel, and what is the title. Over in one shop (bookshop) I was peering round and I heard a customer ask for The Frozen Flame [the title of the British edition of The Catalans]. It was a terrific thrill to hear that, especially when I know my father wrote it.

His friend Bob Broeder remembers the sensation this aroused at school: ‘Richard brought in a book written by his father, the book was called “The Frozen Flame” by Patrick O’Brian. Richard was very proud of this and the whole class were now more than happy to be associated with a boy whose father was an author.’

As has been seen, once Patrick had renounced the ill-considered scheme of acting as his son’s teacher, a renunciation which coincided with Richard’s arrival at years of discretion, their relationship became unremittingly warm. The boy proved more and more capable of appreciating the literature that Patrick loved. In January 1952 he sent Richard copies of Thackeray’s Henry Esmond and W.H. Hudson’s Green Mansions. It is scarcely conceivable that in 1953 he would have published anything he believed likely to prove wounding to the boy. It seems he was confident that Xavier’s confession would be read purely as a literary construct.

Regarding the element of savage exaggeration in Xavier’s confession, it is further worth considering a linked episode (what Patrick himself terms ‘the parallel disaster’), in which his morbid concern to exaggerate the heinousness of his sin becomes yet more evident. Xavier acquires a dog, which proves disobedient and ill-behaved: so much so, that he thrashes it until he eventually ‘reduced it to a cowering, hysterical, incontinent, useless cur’.[10]

Both Patrick and my mother were fond of dogs, and adored their own Welsh hunt terrier Buddug. In the early summer of 1952, while he was in the midst of writing The Catalans, my mother was obliged to visit England in pursuit of the disastrous Opel car. Always uneasy in her absence, Patrick became increasingly on edge as the days went by, and when after three weeks on the day of her expected return he received a telegram announcing its postponement to the following day, he found himself ‘feeling very much the pathetic poor one and generally angry. Poor Budd chose this one day to be bad, and I whipped her sore.’

The nature of her crime and the harshness of the punishment remain undisclosed. Two aspects are, however, clear. In the first place, Patrick was confessedly in an exceptional state of tension. Secondly, this was almost certainly the sole occasion on which the faithful Buddug was ever ‘whipped’. Not only is there no record in my mother’s diary of such an occurrence at any other time, but I am confident she would not have permitted it. It was surely this uncharacteristic episode that inspired Patrick’s awkwardly obtruded account of Xavier’s sadistic treatment of his dog. Patrick was deeply ashamed of having lost his temper with Buddug, and inserted the passage in his novel as a further form of exorcism or self-castigation.[fn19]

Finally, on this significant topic, there remains Patrick’s passing allusion to the formal act of confession, which Xavier finds inadequately emollient when he repairs to the town curé, Father Sabatier. What he required was not a bland rite of forgiveness, but surgical exposure and extraction of the moral cancer of which his conscience accused him.

In 1960 he and my mother spent several months in London, coming every day to see me in hospital, where I was confined after a severe back operation. Despite the bitter circumstances of her divorce, my mother remained throughout her life deeply attached to the Russian Orthodox Church, in which she had married my father, and my sister and I were baptized. During this time she and Patrick became regular attenders at our Russian church in Emperor’s Gate, where they came to know and admire the parish priest. Father George Sheremetiev was a remarkable figure. Head of one of Russia’s greatest aristocratic families, he had previously been a cavalry officer in the Imperial Army. More importantly, he possessed a truly noble character: wise, perceptive, and holy in the truest sense. I regularly confessed to him, and like his other parishioners invariably found his admonitions perceptive and inspiring.

So impressed were my parents by Father George, that they asked him to marry them – their civil union of 1945 being unrecognized by the Church. Since Patrick would have appreciated from my mother how beneficial was the rite, it seems possible that he himself engaged in confession at this time – perhaps of an informal character. In the Aubrey–Maturin novels, Stephen Maturin is consistently portrayed as a Laodicean Catholic, verging on deism. However, after a particularly sumptuous dinner at Ashgrove Cottage, he congratulates Mrs Aubrey, adding jocularly: ‘When next I see Father George I shall have to admit to the sin of greed …’[11] That Maturin had a confessor at all comes to the reader as a surprise, and that the latter bore so apparently English a name seems further anomalous (one would expect him to have been Irish or Catalan). On the one hand, we never read of Maturin’s participation in a Catholic service, while on the other numerous instances attest to Patrick’s pleasure in assigning the names of his acquaintances to characters in his books. Is this what happened here? Did Patrick eventually make the confession he had sought to express through his early novels?

I have dealt with the confessional element in The Catalans at some length, as it would be dangerously easy in the absence of knowledge of Patrick’s emotional state of mind to take Xavier’s rant against his son Dédé as a reflection of his own attitude towards his son Richard.[12] In fact, given the warmth of their relationship at the time of writing, such an assumption appears wholly implaus ible. Furthermore, even had Patrick perversely decided to blackguard his own son in print, my mother would have registered the strongest objection. She loved the boy almost as much as she did his father. In December 1952, she wrote fondly: ‘Horrid letter from Mrs. Power [Elizabeth] about poor R., & letter from the school … Started V necked jersey for R. One of school complaints is that he wears my jersey, & Mrs P says he has lived in it since he got it. Cannot help feeling pleased.’

The year 1952 ended on a note of cautious optimism. My parents entertained high hopes for the success of The Catalans in the USA, and with luck in Britain too. Contemplating his next project, Patrick returned to notes he had compiled in the British Museum before the War for his planned book on medieval bestiaries. Hitherto the scheme had barely left the drawing board, but now as Christmas approached he completed a 10,000-word draft, which he planned to send with a synopsis of the remainder to his US and British publishers. In the event, it seems that their newly gained wealth allowed pleasurable distractions to interrupt the work sufficiently long for it to be abandoned permanently. It is a pity the draft has not survived, since his notes and provisional chapters in my possession indicate that Patrick could have produced an entertaining work on the subject.

All this is, however, to anticipate the book’s publication. It would be a year at least before The Catalans appeared in print, and what was to be done during the agonizing months of anticipation that lay ahead? Christmas drew near, with nothing happening as it should. On 19 December my mother was dismayed to find they had spent that year more than 60,000 francs on entertainment alone. The 22 of December proved worse: it was the ‘Black Day’, when they learned that the New Yorker had after all turned down the collection of stories submitted with such high hopes six weeks earlier. On Christmas Eve they received Richard’s school report: it likewise proved damning, provoking further depression. Christmas cards arrived, including one from Patrick’s stepmother Zoe, of whom he was very fond, and kind neighbours called with gifts. The festival was quietly enjoyed, but they decided they could not afford to give each other the customary presents.

Although the need for economy was pressing, they had managed to amass sufficient funds five days after Christmas to purchase for 100,000 francs a Citroën 2CV, popularly known as a ‘deux chevaux’. This was in due course to prove an even greater asset than the alternative prospect of an Andorran bolt-hole, which they now found themselves reluctantly obliged to abandon.