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I descended a little on the Side of that delicious Valley, surveying it with a secret kind of Pleasure (though mix’d with other afflicting Thoughts) to think that this was all my own, that I was King and Lord of all this Country indefeasibly, and that I had a Right of Possession; and if I could convey it I might have it in Inheritance, as completely as any Lord of a Manor in England.

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

After more than three years’ stressful poverty in their little flat in Collioure, early in 1953 Patrick and my mother found their financial situation greatly improved by the warm reception his publishers accorded The Catalans. Since it had been submitted complete, substantial advances of $750 from Harcourt Brace in the States, and £100 from Hart-Davis in England, arrived at the beginning of the year.

Reviews proved encouraging. As a biographer I am primarily concerned with autobiographical aspects of the novel, but as a literary achievement it has gained high esteem. In 1991 the American novelist Stephen Becker wrote to Patrick:

I never told you how I enjoyed meeting an early (if older) version of Stephen [Maturin] in Alain Roig – and allow me to state that I found The Catalans not only first-rate but wise and moving … It is spacious and rich, and all of life is there – land and sea and sky, arts and sciences, food and drink, body and mind and spirit.

Constricted living conditions and the incessant cacophony of the narrow rue Arago had for some time made the couple long for a refuge in the countryside. Attempts to buy or build in Andorra had been frustrated, and despite encouraging praise for Patrick’s latest novel, their income remained too unpredictable to accumulate any capital of substance.

However, these unexpectedly large advances had at least enabled them to buy a car, which afforded means of escape from their stiflingly constrained existence. In the New Year, they found themselves in a position to fulfil this dream. They bought their little deux chevaux in Perpignan, which filled them with delight. Patrick noted that the number-plate included an M for Mary, and my mother ecstatically confided to her diary: ‘Car dépasses all our expectations in every way.’ Kind Tante Alice, the butcher, let them use her abattoir for a garage, and that day they drove the car up to the rim of the castle glacis, where it was formally photographed. Proud Buddug perched inside, no doubt foreseeing further camping expeditions.

The deux chevaux

If so, she was right. After a couple of days spent motoring happily around the neighbourhood, the three of them set forth on their long-deferred major expedition around the Iberian peninsula. On 21 January 1953 they drove over the Pyrenees by the pass at Le Perthus, arriving in Valencia two days later. Patrick was concerned that precious memories of a journey from which he hoped to profit might fade, and began keeping a detailed journal.

The moment they entered Spain, they were confronted by the homely ways of that then picturesque land, when solicitous customs officers asked them to take a stranded woman with them as far as Figueras. At Tarragona, Patrick was delighted by the prospect of the cathedral by night: ‘It was very much bigger than I had expected, and far nobler. Wonderful dramatic inner courts all lit by dim lanterns – bold low arches – theatrical staircases.’

He experienced an uncanny sensation, which was not new to him: ‘But I had, probably quite unnecessarily, the disagreeable impression of being stared at.’ This persistent fancy conceivably originated in his troubled childhood, when he never knew when the next thunderbolt might strike, whether from his moody father, or one of a succession of harsh governesses.

They took photographs with their new camera, of which I retain the negatives. Unfortunately, health problems continued to dog them. My mother suffered from a stomach complaint causing loss of appetite, and Patrick painfully twisted his ankle while photographing the Roman aqueduct.

The car, however, proved a sterling success: ‘A 2 CV. is certainly the car for Spain. Quite often the roads are fairly good (or have been so far) and then they suddenly degenerate into the most appalling pot-holed tracks as they pass through villages: there was one hole this afternoon that must have been a foot deep.’

In Tortosa, their progress was impeded by a ‘shocking assembly of carts: tiny donkey carts; carts drawn by one or two mules tandem – even three or one horse and a donkey in front: carts with barrels slung deep, carts with hoods and bodies made of wickerwork and carpet, all milling slowly about Tortosa.’

Nor did the Guardia Civil please Patrick: ‘nasty, impudent, overdressed, over-armed fellows, with a tin-god expression all over their faces’. However, as Patrick tended to view the British police with almost comparable distaste, his disparagement need perhaps not be taken over-literally. In any case, before long he encountered cause to moderate his view: ‘The Guardia Civil are strange souls: one whom we asked the way grew excited: he had the appearance of a man about to have a fit. Others seem normal enough, and even cheerful.’

Although largely apolitical by nature, Patrick, like many young people in the Thirties, had nurtured sympathy for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, and corresponding distaste for the regime of General Franco. While he never altered this view, he was frequently obliged to adjust his condemnation of the regime to the languid realities of everyday life in contemporary Spain.

He was greatly intrigued by remarkable contrasts with France, which struck them at almost every turn of their exploration. It used to be said that ‘Europe stops at the Pyrenees’, a dramatic contrast which both frustrated and intrigued Patrick:

I have not mentioned the countryside at all. There hardly is any, properly speaking. The country and the village are English inventions. Here there are plantations, barren stretches, small towns. There is something wrong with it all. I wish I could put my finger on it. The little towns and their inhabitants are shockingly rude, hard and brutal.

At the same time, Patrick admired the ‘vast plantations of olives (magnificent ancient trees on pink and grey soil) and carobs, and there are charming orange groves – much lower bushes than I had expected, much closer together and carrying twenty times as much fruit – as well as patches of good-looking plough.’

The people likewise appeared to belong to a distinct, all but timeless world. Stephen Maturin’s Catalan homeland would not be difficult to evoke, after glimpsing such vignettes as when they encountered ‘between Tortosa and Vinaróz the two old tall men in blue knee breeches, one smoking a pipe, with a black handkerchief round his head and white stockings, the other in blue stockings: Catalan espadrilles worn as far as here … gipsies, barefoot, with long gold earrings.’

Continuing southwards, it became apparent how few houses in the country possessed piped water: ‘We have found the reason for the amphorae. They are for taking water to houses, and they have no bottoms because they never stand up – always in baskets or stands. A terrible number of houses have no water. There is a cart with a barrel and a great many cruches: that is the mains.’

At Sorbas they came upon a community apparently living in caves tunnelled out of the soft rock. It being Sunday, thousands of them were moving along the road in their best clothes, ‘girls (some of them) with flowers in their hair, a young man bicycling with a guitar’.

Undisguised curiosity evinced by crowds in the town at the strangers’ arrival in their midst predictably angered Patrick, but the kingdom of Granada delighted him, with its exotic Moorish castles and ‘charming little red houses with red tiled roofs’.

Patrick’s childhood fascination with the exploration of exotic lands was constantly gratified. Arrived at the summit of a pass south of Valencia, ‘we could see an enormous moon-like country bare light green-gray rock in dusty white soil, jagged, arbitrary mountains in all directions, and below us a deep valley, terraced in swirling curves.’

Now, on the coast east of Malaga, they came upon Motril:

with its Moorish castle, perhaps the finest we have ever seen. And the backward view of Motril and the great headland beyond it, with the sky and the sea (lateen sails upon it) bluer than one can describe, with bits of the Sierra Nevada in the lefthand corner of the field of vision, that is a view, all right.

At Gibraltar they were briefly separated from Buddug, who was placed in quarantine in kennels at the end of the town. The friendly policeman who escorted them there also showed them HMS Vanguard lying in dock, and then took them to a pleasant hotel: ‘That evening we walked about until we were quite done up. It is an astonishing place: Spain still predominates, in spite of a very strong element of pre-war England with a dash of India.’

Unconscious seeds of Patrick’s future literary creations were being sown. He found Vanguard ‘very rosy and youthful’, admired the Georgian houses, and noted with approbation ‘Cheap Jack and Cheap John’s Stores’, together with Oxford marmalade.

While staying on the Rock, Patrick and my mother paid a brief visit to Tangiers. Crossing the strait, they saw dolphins, while ‘A kind mariner pointed out Cape Trafalgar.’ On disembarking, they found themselves in a world still more enticingly exotic than Spain: ‘We wandered up a street where everybody seemed to be going, a crowded street. But crowded with such people. Moors in djellabahs and slippers, pale Moors like Europeans but with fezzes, slim veiled women veiled [sic], blue or white …’

Delighted with their brief but memorable visit, they returned to be regaled by affectionate dolphins: ‘Not only did they skip and play, but they came right into the ship and swam immediately along the cutwater, having immense fun with the rush of the water. They kept pace effortlessly, turning, rolling, jostling one another.’

Details of these and other curious encounters are frequently accompanied by Patrick’s sketches in the margins of his journal. Back in Gibraltar they spent a whole afternoon searching for a birthday present for the growing Richard, before they eventually succeeded in hunting down a leather-cased shaving kit. At dusk they climbed the Rock to view the apes, and next morning set off for Cadiz – which regrettably proved ‘the rudest town so far, the ugliest and the dirtiest’. Patrick’s resolve to drink sherry at Jerez was frustrated, when a café could only provide him with ‘something just as good’. In fact the mysterious beverage proved ‘quite good’, while an awkward confrontation was narrowly avoided:

While we were drinking it up – precious little there was – I had my back to the street, facing M. She told me afterwards that all the time there were men, respectably dressed men, leering at her from behind my back, and making gestures of invitation. Perhaps it was as well that I did not see them, because I was feeling profoundly depressed and bloody-minded, and there would have been a scene.

After exploring the region around Malaga, they returned to Motril. By then they decided they had endured all they needed of Spain: ‘It is impossible to say how agreeable Collioure appeared in the sordid brutality of Motril.’

Patrick invariably grew restless and ill-at-ease when away from their snug home for long, but buoyed up by the prospect of return ‘we began to hope that we were mistaken and that the inland Andalusian was a decent creature’. A visit to the Alhambra aroused Patrick’s ‘surprise at the extraordinary good taste of the Spanish authorities’. Crossing the mountains en route for Cordoba, he enthused over the presence of a number of magnificent red kite, noting too that: ‘Here the little irises began all along the side of the road, on the hill leading out of Jaen, and for hundreds of miles after.’ Cordoba’s mosque ‘was utterly dull from outside … but inside – dear Lord, what grandeur’.

Even this splendour was eclipsed on their return to Seville:

We did see the Cathedral at once, and that was a glorious sight: it seemed to me profoundly religious, and very, very much more important than Córdoba. The severe, clean austerity of what we might call the furnishings was intensely gratifying. No geegaws at all, except Columbus’ tomb. (And that, being alone, was impressive too, in its way).

After a night in ‘the cheapest (and rudest)’ hotel in town, they revisited the cathedral, where Patrick observed the relics, including ‘a piece of Isidore’ (the seventh-century Spanish scholar), about whom he had intended to write when preparing his book of bestiaries before the War.

After obtaining paperwork from the Portuguese consul, they drove to Huelva and crossed into Portugal by boat across ‘the brown and yellow Guadiana, heaving gently, with tremendous rain beating down upon the mariners and dribbling through the hood’. On disembarking, ‘The rain stopped suddenly and a complete double rainbow stood on the Spanish side of the river: an omen, I trust.’

It appears to have been, for within hours they found Portugal more congenial than Spain:[fn1]

All the way we kept remarking the extraordinary difference the frontier had made – little ugly crudely painted houses, blood red and ochre or raw blue, perforated chimneys like cast iron stoves, ugly, barefoot people, intense cultivation, comparatively dull country, no Guardia Civil, no Franco Franco Franco (spontaneous enthusiasm in durable official paint), no rude staring, no excessive poverty. Even the gipsies … looked different: they had not that pariah air, and they wore skirts to the ground and wooden, heel-less slippers. But the greatest difference was at Lagos: not only was there no wild-beasting at all, but when we were walking on the sand we said good-day to some ordinary youths. They took off their caps and bowed.

In Lagos they were taken to watch the masquerade taking place in various clubs. So great was the crush, that they were obliged to hover in doorways. But Patrick found the masks ‘very funny indeed, almost all of them’. They learned that the clubs were graded according to social status: ‘The last was the top, and there, it is true, there were some solemn old gentlemen dancing with masked females. It was unbelievable that so many people should inhabit one small town, or rather village.’

That afternoon they paid their respects to one of England’s great naval victories, sitting in a shelter overlooking Cape St Vincent, an 800-foot cliff plunging sheer below them. On the way they passed a working windmill. Ever fascinated by technology of the past, Patrick stopped to photograph it. ‘The miller, a rough-looking but kind and sensible man, invited us in, and explained his mill, made us plunge our hands in the flour, moved the top, stopped the sails, and did everything he could to be agreeable – went to a great deal of trouble.’

Patrick sketched careful diagrams of the workings of the sails and internal machinery. During a digression to Faro he likewise drew some fishing boats, being particularly taken with the prophylactic eye (with splendid eyebrow) painted on each boat’s bow, a mysterious mop of wool adorning the prow.

The Portugal visited by Patrick appeared little changed since Wellington’s day. Patrick noted with pleased surprise: ‘No advertisement posters yet in Portugal. None at all.’ On the road to Lisbon:

As soon as we passed out of the Algarve the hideous man’s hat (black) worn over cotton scarf began to vanish – women here wear velour hat, flattened, with broad coloured ribbon or wide straw hat. Shoes rare – stockings cut at ankle for bare foot. Men in woollen stockings caps dangling to neck. Pleasant boy’s faces under black hats (bow behind).

Lisbon proved well up to expectation: ‘The sudden view of the Tagus with Lisbon the other side was as grand as anything I have ever seen.’ After strolling into the centre, ‘we wandered along the river and admired a square-rigged Portuguese naval training ship’. Amid the capital’s architectural glories, my mother was rewarded by a glimpse of ‘a windscreen wiper for sale called Little Bugger’.

Making their way across country to the northern frontier, the travellers encountered weather and countryside less congenial. Back in Spain, Patrick attended mass at Santiago, but was strangely unimpressed by town or cathedral. Passing Corunna, they became alarmingly trapped for a while in a snowdrift beyond Villalba. Fortunately the summit of the hill proved not far, and Patrick stumbled behind on foot as my mother gingerly enticed the car towards it. ‘When we reached the sea at Ribadeo (a very pleasant looking place … hundreds of duck down on the water; tufted duck mostly – and every promise of trout, if not of salmon too) we suddenly saw the Cordillera, pure white with deep snow.’

Passing through Basque country, where ‘the red berets were worn quite naturally’, they came to Guernica, scene of an infamous German air raid during the Civil War – ‘and a melancholy sight it was – every building new, almost, and still a number of ruins’. Driving as fast as they could along precipitous coastal roads, frequently blocked by landslides, they finally gained the frontier at Irun. ‘A toll-bridge, and we were in France again. French customs pleasant, sensible – Budd’s utter fury at their touching sacred car and even prodding food parcels.’

The fine French roads sped them across country, and on 18 February 1953, ‘in spite of the snow we were home at half past five, with an enormous post’. The news was generally good, especially a welcome cheque for £100 from Rupert Hart-Davis. Their neighbours the Rimbauds were warmly welcoming, as was their cat Pussit Tassit (who had managed to become pregnant). ‘How pleasant it is, our own place, and how queer the familiarity.’ Patrick calculated that they had travelled 3,674 miles, at a total motoring cost of 17,236 francs (about £15).

They had been away from home for a month, the longest foreign tour (not counting England) in which they ever engaged. Although there is little direct evidence of the use to which it may have been applied in his literary work,[fn2] there can be no doubt that Patrick’s extended immersion into the dramatically archaic world of Spain and Portugal as it was then played a significant function in conferring the astonishing gift for immersion in past worlds which represents so marked an aspect of his historical fiction. Nearly thirty years later he came upon his diary record, noting wistfully: ‘I read abt our journey in darkest Spain 1953 – forgotten or misremembered details – how it all comes to life!’

At the time, however, it seems that Patrick was pondering further work on contemporary themes. Shortly after their return, he reverted to his planned series of short stories. In March he wrote ‘The Walker’, and on 7 April my mother ‘Sent off The Walker, The Crier, The Silent Woman & The Tailor to C[urtis]B[rown] New York.’ Unfortunately, the last three tales have not survived.

Although the journey around the Iberian peninsula had proved both entertaining and (it was hoped) an inspiring source for future writing, before long Patrick and my mother found themselves reverting to continued frustration over their mode of existence in their cramped quarters in the rue Arago. During a brisk March walk up to the Madeloc tower, they ‘Agreed on discontent with present way of life: sick of peasants so close to our life, need garden & hens & bees so as to be able really to save mon[ey].’

Time appeared slipping by, without adequate achievement to slow its passage. In April Patrick received news from his family in England that his once-dreaded giant of a father had suffered a stroke. Patrick, who throughout his life kept in regular touch with his family, must already have been aware of his declining health. A profoundly formative era of his past, wretched though it had largely been, appeared to be approaching extinction within the vortex of vanished years. It was at this time (1953) that he began work on an autobiographical novel, which in its final form completed years later evoked years of childhood and adolescence, filling him with a complex amalgam of nostalgia, resentment, and shame.[fn3] His work on this project, which preoccupied him intermittently over the next two years, will be recounted in due course. As ever, my mother played a strongly supportive role in the writing, and was deservedly gratified by Patrick’s heartfelt acknowledgement: ‘P. gave me immense pleasure by saying he values me most as critic.’

Further matter for concern arose again concerning Patrick’s son Richard. Poor reports from school, together with a ‘horrible letter’ from his mother, persuaded Patrick and my mother to ‘decide to take R. & have him work for the school cert. with us, by a correspondence course’. The project was, however, postponed for the present, until July when Richard arrived for his summer holiday at Collioure.

Enterprising as ever, he ignored his mother’s apprehensive objections, cycling all the way from Dieppe, to whose Poste Restante my mother transmitted 5,000 francs for travelling expenses.[fn4] Equipped only with a school atlas as guide, Richard arrived cheerful and excited at the beginning of August.

Collioure proved particularly lively and sociable on this occasion. Within days of Richard’s arrival he made a memorable contact. Two schoolmistresses from England came to stay in the town, accompanied by four of their pupils. One of the pair, Mary Burkett, met my parents and became a friend for some years (she had an aunt living near Collioure). It was not long before Richard became friends with the schoolgirls, and one in particular attracted his close attention.

One evening my mother invited the girls to dinner, after which Richard and another boy named Pat entertained their new friends:

All day preparing dinner (Spanish rice). V. successful, whole school. They are wonderfully pleasant young things. After dinner Pat came, & he & Richard escorted Susan, Wendy, Anne-Louise & Jill to fair. R. home at midnight. He prefers Susan, & Pat Wendy. Susan is the best.

Thereafter romance blossomed, and Richard and Susan were together every day until 26 August, when sadly the school party returned to England. No sooner had they been waved off at Perpignan railway station than ‘R. wrote to Susan: says he is going to see her the day after he reaches London.’ They continued in touch, until on 10 September Richard himself returned to England:

R. had one [letter] from Sue & ever since (2 pm) has been writing back to her. P. took R’s bike to P. Vendres & sent it off. Saw R. off at Port-Vendres very sadly, in great wind & with black & purple sky. R. said this has been his best holiday. The house is so sad without him.

Richard had always loved his holidays in Collioure, but this time there had been especial reason for enjoyment. On his return to London, he wrote: ‘Thank you both so very much for the best holiday that I have ever had. And it really was the best.’ He and Susan had now become fast friends:

The [Cardinal Vaughan] school’s secretary stopped me and asked whether the Mr O’Brian that had written The Catalans[fn5] was my father. With huge pride I said ‘Yes’. Susan has shown me a revue of the Frozen Flame [the book’s British title] and it looked very good …

Now I am going to begin. Susan sent me a card saying that would I like to hear a lecture on ‘Everest’. Well Susan brought her two brothers and there [sic] two friends to hear the lecture … Her brothers are extremely pleasant to say the very least. And the lecture given by Hunt, Edmund Hillary and Low was absolutely superb …

Susan also invited me down to their house for lunch and tea. Was I scared, as at the last tea-party I sat down on the tea-pot. Her parents are wonderful, they really are. Their house, gee. Susan had told me that it was a small thing. Sixteen rooms and grounds that have a tennis court, flower garden kitchen garden, goat-house and hen house and a tool shed.

Susan’s father, Paul Hodder-Williams, a director of the publishing firm of Hodder & Stoughton, was editor of Sir John Hunt’s bestseller The Ascent of Everest, which he was shortly to publish. The parents’ wealth and status in no way inhibited their friendliness to the shy but enthusiastic sixteen-year-old boy. As for their pretty daughter:

Seeing Susan again was terrific only her hair is a bit darker. She has gone back to school today. Ah. I asked her parents if I could take her out during the Christmas holidays, and to my delight they immediately said ‘Yes’, so that’s quite all right. Quite where to take her I don’t really know. Please could I have every suggestion however mad? She likes her bracelet. Soon she will be sending some of those photos that the girls took of her, they should be marvellous. She is still the same. What a wonderful girl she is.

In December my mother stayed with her parents in Chelsea, when she saw much of Richard. For him the outstanding moment was when she took him to see Richard Burton and Claire Bloom acting in Hamlet at the Old Vic. This was Richard’s first visit to the theatre, and he was enraptured by the ‘perfect’ production. Two days later he took my mother to the cinema, and a couple of days were spent in hunting down his first grown-up suit.

At Christmas Susan sent my parents a copy of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses on behalf of her friends and their two schoolmistresses, thanking them again for their kindness throughout their stay at Collioure. Nothing more is recorded of this charming romance, which graphically illustrates my mother’s and Patrick’s talent for empathy with the young, especially in their amours. Within a few years they were to evince similar sympathy for me and my occasionally troubled youthful love affairs.

It was in August 1953 that ‘Mary [Burkett] took photographs of P for H[arper’s].B[azaar]. (only one came out, but it is very good).’

Eventually, as tended on occasion to occur, Patrick took mysterious offence at something Mary Burkett may or may not have done. In later years I came to know her, when I was able to reassure her that it was unlikely to have been in consequence of any particular offence on her part. Patrick’s writing was not going well at the time, and it was clearly in large part the strain which frequently made it hard for him to sustain close friendships at a remove. A chapter of Mary Burkett’s privately published biography is devoted to their friendship. Unfortunately, it includes much factual misrepresentation, despite the fact that when in August 2005 I stayed at her lovely home Isel House in the Lake District, we talked nostalgically of those long-departed days.[1]

A gift Mary had brought from England to Collioure long outlasted their friendship. On 21 July 1954 my mother cryptically recorded that ‘Mary Burkett arrived about 10, she brought us book-binding stuff.’ This was a parcel of early legal documents, which she had saved at a solicitor’s office clearance. Patrick tended to make heavy use of his beloved leather-bound books, with the result that their spines often became badly worn. In later years he replaced the damaged ones with strips cut from the sturdy paper used by seventeenth-century lawyers.

Patrick, photographed by Mary Burkett in 1953

Books so repaired, reposing comfortably on the bookshelves looking down upon me as I write, include his much-loved set of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (1824), Camden’s History of The most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth, Late Queen of England (1675), Cowley’s Works (1681) and Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy (1743). Of particular interest is Patrick’s copy of William Burney, A New Universal Dictionary of the Marine (London, 1815), upon which he largely relied for his understanding of the workings of the Royal Navy in the eighteenth century, before he subsequently acquired the yet more apt Falconer’s An Universal Dictionary of the Marine (1769). Normally such amateurish repairs would detract greatly from the collector’s value of the books. However, in this case I find them enhanced, being constantly reminded of the pleasure they afforded their impassioned owner.

The year 1954 opened with an accruing worry inflicted on the hard-tried couple, whose financial situation remained precarious as ever. Patrick’s son Richard had always encountered difficulty with academic work. He would be seventeen in February, and the time had approached when he must consider a career. His ambition to enrol at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth having proved sadly abortive, it became essential to find a satisfactory alternative. It was a worrying prospect, not alleviated when on 15 January my mother noted: ‘R’s report came: very sad.’

However, their overriding concern was with his well-being. Richard and his friend Bob Broeder had become cycling enthusiasts, which involved them in many adventurous exploits – of which their parents fortunately remained unaware. On occasion they would ride as far as Brighton, a hundred-mile round journey, and took to recklessly hurtling at some 60 mph down precipitous Reigate Hill, after removing their brakes. Bob recalls that:

One of our many dangerous [feats] and in retrospect foolish to the extreme, was to slip stream motor vehicles on our bicycles – normally lorries. Our favourite was to sit in wait for a BOAC coach coming from Heathrow to the air terminal in Gloucester Road. We would tuck in behind it and travel the length of the Great West Road at great speed and then overtake it at the Chiswick roundabout!

Eventually Richard became involved in a serious accident. Cycling home one day in the rain from games (a mode of transport conveniently enabling them to pocket their bus-fare allowance issued by the school), he crashed when making an awkward turn in the middle of Hammersmith Broadway. Skidding, he shot beneath a car ‘and cut myself to ribbons’. His prime concern was for the precious bicycle, whose frame was badly bent. The insurance company proved uncooperative, on grounds that the car was stationary at the moment of impact.

The repair was estimated at £10 13s. What could he do? Without his bicycle, he explained, he would have to start spending money daily on buses: could he possibly be sent £10? Patrick despatched a cheque by return of post, but the worry about Richard’s school progress – or lack of it – remained. Along with the cheque he sent practical advice to his son on mending his ways: he must apply himself consistently to his studies, answer correspondence by return, and generally become more self-disciplined. Richard responded with touching promises to mend his ways.

Although his intentions were good, school progress continued its downward slide. Towards the end of April, a letter arrived from his mother ‘enclosing a complaint from school about poor R’. By June he was agonizing over the imminent School Certificate examination (GCE), as his work became increasingly demanding and difficult. Alas, struggle as he might, the task proved too much, and he failed disastrously.

This unhappy news was not altogether unanticipated, and Patrick and my mother urgently discussed what was to be done. There was also the question of which branch of national service (the compulsory two years’ military service) would be suitable. Richard suggested: ‘Perhaps the Marine Commandos but one has to volunteer for five years and my mother does not like that. Then a friend suggested the engineering side; there to learn about mechanics. But please send your advice, because in the past it has always worked out well.’

Having himself, through little fault of his own, failed miserably in his own school studies, Patrick was determined that Richard should not suffer likewise. By the end of July my worried mother noted: ‘R. breaks up: what to do about him?’ As early as his return from holiday in Collioure in the previous year, Richard had urged that ‘if Dad is willing, I would like him to teach me Latin and Greek so that I could pass in them. I have got to pass.’

A swift decision was made that Richard should indeed come out to Collioure, where he could work undistracted to retake the examination. Hitherto the required subjects had comprised history, geography, and two English papers. They were not his strong fields, and he now enrolled in a correspondence course focused on mathematics and science, for which he had much greater aptitude.

On 12 August my mother and Patrick, accompanied as ever by Buddug, drove across France, camping on the way, to meet Richard at Dieppe. A week later they were back home in Collioure: ‘Got R’s hair cut & bought him respectable trousers. Dear R.’ There was no rush for the boy to begin work, since the examinations would not take place for a year. Initially, pleasant weeks were spent as before, swimming, walking, flying Richard’s new kite, and playing cards and draughts. My mother told him about her own children, to which Richard replied that ‘he saw Nik. at The Cottage [her parents’ house in Chelsea] & that he is good-looking and tall’.[fn6] Hitherto my mother had not seen any photographs of my sister and me subsequent to the time when we were small children living at her parents’ home in North Devon during the War.

A modest upsurge in their finances about this time spurred my parents to think seriously about buying a house in England or Wales. In February my mother lamented: ‘Oh for a quiet home for P: it is a shame.’ Now they received particulars of a house in Cornwall, which sounded perfect for their needs. On 30 September 1954 they departed, together with Richard and their pets, ‘after sad and tearful goodbyes’ to all their faithful Collioure friends. So confident were they of finding a new home, that they had decided never to return.

Alas, the expedition proved one of those disasters by which they were intermittently afflicted throughout their lives. From the moment of their landing in England, everything went wrong. On disembarking, they attempted to smuggle the sedated Buddug and Pussit Tasset through customs in a suitcase. Unfortunately, a passenger informed on them, and the animals were impounded in quarantine. From Dover they drove seventeen hours through the night to Boskenna, in deepest Cornwall. Once installed there, my mother found that ‘Slugs got down St Loy taps & into marmalade. No beach, only sinister, slippery great rocks with bits of wreck everywhere & one crushed fish … Hated Boskenna … Cold, foul weather.’

The little family settled into dreary lodgings, ceaselessly battered by winter gales and drenching rain. They were cold, miserable, and badly missed their pets. Although Patrick tried to cheer Richard with tales of smugglers and a proposal to buy a small boat, the reality was too grim to be lightly overcome. A brief visit to my mother’s parents in London also went badly for some reason (‘Very, very painful week’), and by December they had had enough. On the 8th all three embarked at Dover for the return journey to Collioure.

Their troubles were not over. At Dover their trunks disappeared, and they missed the Boulogne boat. They finally caught a train ferry to Dunkirk, where their animals were returned to them. Then they experienced a ‘Nightmare drive from Dunkerque to St Omer instead of Calais through dark & rain & mud & detours & sugar-beet’. Near Toulouse the radiator fell off, and the car seized up. They left it at a garage, and continued the disastrous journey by train.

Back at last in Collioure, the family appreciated what they had nearly lost. So far as their house-hunting expedition was concerned, ‘England was bad, we got too unhappy to keep up diary.’ In striking contrast, ‘Home looking perfectly beautiful & the most welcome thing I’ve known I think. Village so pleasant – everyone welcomed us.’

The Mediterranean climate helped, too: ‘For two days now it has been too warm for the Mirus [stove] even in the evenings – & in England there are tempests & snow-storms & hideous cold. We lunch daily on the beach.’

Normal routine was resumed at once, to everyone’s satisfaction. Patrick returned contentedly to his writing, and ‘R. works hard too’. At the end of the year Patrick had written to the Ministry of Labour and National Service in Penzance, requesting that Richard be permitted to postpone his national service until he had taken his GCE in June of the following year. Fortunately, this was granted.

That Christmas (1954) little presents were exchanged, but sadly the festival was marred by the underlying burden of ‘Horrid anxiety for money’. The lost luggage finally arrived, but there were hefty bills – including a couple of unexplained punctures to new tyres. As will grow more and more clear as their story unfolds, cars and my parents were not always happily matched.

Shortly after their return Patrick wrote his short story ‘The Thermometer’, which under very thin disguise depicts his unhappy childhood relationship with his father.[2] On 15 January 1955 he recorded in his diary:

I finished a story – broken thermometer – 5000 [words] nearly – very heavy going. It felt dubious – a little embarrassing; self-quaintery is always to be feared in anything at all autobiographical about childhood – approving self-quaintery – own head on one side – oh so unconscious simper – poor one. M did not like it. This makes me hate her, which is monstrously unfair. Dread of losing grip.

My mother, who I do not doubt appreciated its autobiographical character, was indeed depressed on reading the story. However, Patrick now turned to a synopsis of a book for children based on Anson’s voyage around the globe from 1740 to 1744. This my mother found ‘quite beautiful and very exciting’. Three days later it was posted to his literary agent Curtis Brown, accompanied by high hopes.

On 2 February Richard’s eighteenth birthday was celebrated in style – the last they would ever enjoy together. Presents were bestowed, after which they set off for a jaunt in the car. The weather was beautifully sunny, and they ate a delicious picnic (‘stuffed olives; Tante’s pâté; camembert; cake [baked the previous evening by my mother]; meringues; lemon-curd tart’) in an olive grove beyond Banyuls. After supper at home, they went to the cinema in the square, where they watched The City under the Sea, dismissed by my mother as ‘an idiot film’, but which probably appealed to the youthful Richard as much as it did to me about the same time.[fn7]

Life had belatedly begun to look up. A few days earlier a local peasant named Azéma had offered to sell them 300 square metres of vineyard and garden for 125,000 francs: i.e. about £110. Hitherto this would have been well beyond their means, but the final payment for The Road to Samarcand (of which more in the next chapter) and now an advance on signing the contract for The Golden Ocean could now be imminently counted upon.

My mother enquired of a neighbour whether the price was fair, and was reassured to learn that more had recently been asked for a similar parcel of land, which in contrast lacked a water supply. Everyone was very obliging. Azéma agreed that the money could be paid in instalments, beginning in April. Meanwhile they could work the property. In the event they managed to pay the whole sum in April.

After the disastrous two months wasted in Cornish house-hunting, they now found themselves landowners! On 12 February my mother wrote triumphantly: ‘We lunched on our earth.’ Patrick had longed for this moment ever since their arrival in France. He loved the sense of security and self-worth which came with ownership of even so modest a parcel of land. Despite unfortunate consequences of his initial insistence on following the advice of his seventeenth-century guide to agriculture, his four years’ gardening in Wales had afforded him considerable experience. Finally, the ability to grow their own vegetables and fruit promised a material saving on monthly outgoings.

As ever concerned to be master of his own trade, Patrick bought for 350 francs a practical builder’s manual by Pierre Certot, Pour construire ou réparer vous-même murs et bâtiments: Enseignement manuel en 12 leçons. Construction d’une pièce de cottage, de la pièce principale d’une petite maison rurale, d’une petite porcherie. Conseils divers, etc. (Paris, 1952). His battered copy is spattered with characteristically self-interrogatory notes, such as ‘* nonsense: it should be 120k – I beg his pardon; I read kilos for litres’, and ‘It is easier to pump with a wide pipe than a narrow one.’

Instructed further by friendly neighbours and assisted by Richard, with some old tools and borrowed shears they set to work pruning vines and fruit trees, and clearing the ground on the ‘aprons’ (terraces). Although their finances remained precarious, the world was becoming a better place. Advance copies of The Road to Samarcand arrived, and for just over a fortnight Patrick abandoned writing in order to assist in putting the vineyard in order, after which he established a regime of walking over from the town after breakfast to inspect their little estate, and again after lunch to take part in the labour.

Richard proved a pillar of strength, travelling with my mother to the Port-Vendres rubbish dump to collect stones for the ten terrace ramparts, shifting soil, planting vegetables, and watering. Their dog, whose seventh birthday was celebrated at this time, also felt called upon to play her part: ‘Buddug dug up the existing parsley.’

At this juncture Patrick suffered a personal blow. News came from his family that his father, who had long been failing, had died of pneumonia at his home in Ealing. While their relationship had been only intermittently happy, he was unexpectedly moved by this melancholy intimation of mortality. As my mother confided to her diary: ‘Poor P., his father died. He went aller et retour to Paris to see his [step]mother & brother [Bernard, known as ‘Bun’]. R. was very sweet to me.’ This scarcely suggests that the melancholy news was malignantly withheld from Richard, as has been conjectured by one amiable critic.

The sorry tidings cannot have come as a total shock. In April 1953 Patrick had been informed (presumably by a member of his family) that his father had suffered a stroke, and in the following month Richard passed on a message from Patrick’s sister Nora that ‘your father is ill and has been taken to hospital’. Other allusions show that Patrick continued in regular contact with members of his family, several of whom evinced sympathetic interest in Richard.

Nevertheless, it is clear from my mother’s words that the final departure of this terrifying figure of Patrick’s youth had moved him. In the previous month he had written his short story ‘The Thermometer’, which described the fear and resentment with which he had viewed his harsh and distant parent as a small boy. There are clear indications that, as late as 1949, he had regarded his father’s grim persona as largely responsible for his increasingly paralysing bouts of depression and writer’s block.

Equally, it has been seen that he finally shed this inhibiting factor after settling in distant Collioure, where he managed to recover his equipoise. Nor should ‘The Thermometer’, which I have little doubt provides a realistic picture of his childhood experience, necessarily be regarded as an expression of his continuing feelings for his father, who had for two years languished a helpless invalid. At this stage of his literary career, Patrick continued deeply reliant on personal experience as matter for his fiction.

There were other memories on which he could draw, and death frequently has the effect of diminishing the bad and resurrecting the good. Charles Russ had enthusiastically supported Patrick’s early literary endeavours, negotiating their acceptance by publishers. He penned a glowing introduction to his precocious first novel Caesar, and Patrick in turn dedicated his next book Beasts Royal ‘To my father’. During the troubled days of his late adolescence, he found an apparently contented refuge in his father’s and stepmother’s house at Crowborough in Sussex.

My mother’s ‘poor Patrick’ confirms that Patrick was distressed by the news, since he would not have disguised his true feelings from her. Furthermore, he must unquestionably have been concerned for his stepmother, who had been consistently kind to him as a boy, and of whom he remained extremely fond.

It is important to appreciate Patrick’s reaction to this emotional occasion, not least because it has been misinterpreted to his lasting disfavour. A biography of Patrick devotes several pages of speculation to the event, the gist of which is that he:

never introduced his son to his father. He never spoke of his father to Richard, and he did not even tell Richard now that his grandfather had just died. The amazing thing is that a man of O’Brian’s insight not only was incapable of repairing his relationship with his father but fostered a similar father–son breach in his own house.[3]

No evidence is cited to support these unpleasant charges, the burden of which is profoundly misleading.[fn8] Poverty and distance, coupled with wartime travel conditions, might (we do not know) have precluded Patrick’s taking his son to Crowborough before his departure with my mother to Wales in 1945, when Richard was seven. While little communication appears to have passed thereafter between Patrick and his reclusive parent, Patrick’s siblings have confirmed to me that Charles Russ rarely corresponded with any of his children or grandchildren.

Although it is not impossible that Richard’s grandfather never communicated with him, other members of the family were concerned with the boy’s welfare. ‘Grandmother Russ’ (Patrick’s stepmother Zoe) visited Richard and his mother at their flat in Chelsea, as did Uncle Victor and other relatives. Richard unselfconsciously passed on family news from them to his father in France, and it is evident that there were no ‘forbidden areas’ in family discussions.

Unfortunately, Patrick was unable to travel to England for his father’s funeral, almost certainly in consequence of acute lack of funds. At the time of Charles Russ’s death, my mother wrote in her diary: ‘Despairing thoughts of no money to meet car’s lettre de change at end of month.’ However, Patrick’s brother Bun, a successful lawyer in Canada, had flown over to attend. It seems that Bun (as he certainly did on other occasions) generously paid for Patrick’s journey and hotel room in Paris, since my mother’s accounts record only trifling expenditure connected with what must have been a costly expedition.

It is frankly incredible to suppose that Patrick kept all this secret from Richard. Why on earth should he have done so? Besides, secrecy would have been all but impossible, closeted as the three of them were in the tiny flat in the rue Arago. The further charge that Patrick ‘fostered’ a breach with Richard himself will in due course be seen to be demonstrably unfounded, and confirms the extent to which such accusations represent no more than ill-natured conjecture.

A month before news arrived of his ailing father’s stroke, Patrick told my mother of an idea which had come to him of writing his ‘Chelsea novel’. More and more gripped by the concept, in May she observed ‘P. internally working on next novel’, and by June ‘P. is too deep in new novel to go back.’ It seems unlikely that it was coincidence that led Patrick to turn to such an introspective theme at a time when he was becoming aware that the once-daunting parent figure was slipping from the scene. Was he unconsciously afraid that his father’s death might deprive him of an identifiable explanation – or even pretext – for his continuing inability to realize his ambition?

In the event Patrick made little attempt to tutor Richard during his long stay at Collioure in 1954. Not only was the boy enthusiastic enough about the subjects he had chosen to apply himself to without any necessity for supervision, but throughout this time his father had become immersed in writing The Golden Ocean. My mother, who taught her stepson French on the beach, was delighted to learn that ‘R. gets excellent reports on his course.’

With the arrival of warm weather, much time was spent beside the sea, taking long walks, exploring neighbouring places of interest such as the magnificent castle of Salses north of Perpignan, and entertaining a stream of friends. Richard began learning to drive, but sadly expenditure on the purchase of the vineyard eventually compelled the sale of the much-loved deux chevaux. On 25 April my mother drove to Perpignan, sold the car for 210,000 francs (about £200), in a rare fit of indulgence enjoyed ‘an immense lunch’ at the Duchesse de Berri restaurant, and took the train home. As has been seen, she and Patrick went straight to the Azémas, and paid the full price of the vineyard. ‘Vous voilà propriétaires définitifs,’ declared Madame Azéma. My mother triumphantly inscribed the joyous words in the margin of her diary.

Apart from benefiting from the strip of land to make the family self-sufficient in fruit, vegetables, wine and honey, their plan was to construct a small stone chamber beside the road at the top of the vineyard, where Patrick could write in peace, away from the hurly-burly of the rue Arago. Such cells, known as casots, are scattered about the nearby hillsides, being used by cultivators of vignobles to store their tools and provide shelter from the burning sun during breaks from cultivation.

In order to accomplish this, it was first necessary to excavate a recess at the top of the rocky slope, which could only be accomplished by means of explosives. After obtaining the requisite permit, Patrick bought a quantity of dynamite and detonators. These being required to be kept separate, the dynamite was kept under Richard’s bed. In later life Patrick proved less circumspect. Nearly half a century later, not long after his death, I looked into the high shelf of a cupboard in the narrow passage next to the bedroom where my mother and Patrick slept. There I discovered a brown paper parcel which proved to contain two sticks of dynamite together with a detonator.

No wiser than Patrick, I assumed they posed no danger, since their explosive power must surely have long ago dissipated. Some years later I recounted my discovery to an old school friend, a retired Army officer. He impressed on me that the explosive was undoubtedly more dangerous, having become unstable after the space of half a century. This alarmed me, and it was arranged for it to be removed and exploded by the gendarmerie. I still feel qualms when I think of my parents blithely sleeping for decades with their heads three or four yards from a package capable of blowing up the entire house.

Returning to 1955, Patrick and Richard travelled beyond Port-Vendres to Paulilles, where they purchased the explosives. Unfortunately they missed the return train, and trudged the weary miles home, each carrying a 10-kilogram load. Next, holes were prepared with pickaxes and sledgehammers, and faggots gathered to restrict the effect of explosions, after which mining began.

Patrick was convinced he could handle the detonations himself, until a massive explosion discharged a load of rock perilously close to him and Richard. Henceforward he grudgingly employed a pair of burly Catalan miners, Cardonnet and his friend Juan, who completed the work with professional skill. This was the limit of assistance required, and the family’s daily toil is recapitulated in detail in Patrick’s gardening diary he kept that year. Mining completed, there succeeded the arduous labour of shifting stones out of the recess created. Although he and my mother worked themselves to the bone, the satisfaction at finding themselves at long last working their own land was boundless.

My mother with Buddug at the well

The work continued throughout July, when thundery weather made the heat all but unbearable: ‘we drip and pour,’ recorded my mother: ‘I plunged naked into the basin [by the well] yesterday after stone-shifting.’

Patrick was anxious to keep bees, as he had done successfully in Wales. By June the first hive was installed, and before long they were enjoying their own honey. Over the years complaints arose from inhabitants of the Faubourg below that they were persistently being stung. When suspicion turned to the outskirts of the town, Patrick shifted the hives out of sight onto the flat roof of the house. To a policeman calling to enquire whether they kept bees, he blithely denied the fact. However, this arrangement proving inconvenient as well as risky, in 1965 the hives were reinstalled by arrangement with a neighbour in a vineyard at the foot of the ridge of the Saint Elme above the house.

Eventually, the sad moment came when Richard had to depart. On 29 June he took the train to Paris, whence he sent back cheerful postcards. He left behind farewell presents of sweets and cigarettes, took with him a basket of presents for my mother’s parents in Chelsea, and posted parcels to her small nieces and nephew.

Save for the disastrous weeks in Cornwall, which had dampened the spirits of all three, there is every indication that Richard had enjoyed a particularly happy time throughout his long stay. Acquisition of the vineyard provided rewarding occupation, while his correspondence course kept his thoughts almost as busy as they had been with pretty Susan Hodder-Williams. Back in England, he successfully sat the examination at Cardinal Vaughan School. A month later, he wrote to say that he had joined the Royal Navy.

Richard’s departure left a tincture of sadness over the little household. Clearly, his service in the Navy would allow him small opportunity to return to Collioure during the two-year spell. Such leave as he would obtain was most likely to be spent with his mother in Chelsea. What neither they nor Richard anticipated was that he would never return. As will be seen in the next chapter, this was not in consequence of any specific decision, but arose from a constant lack of funds, together with Richard’s determination to forge a way for himself in the world. Patrick had good reason to be proud of him, but much distress lay in the offing.

A few weeks later Richard had settled contentedly into the service, enjoying the company of his comrades, and nurturing a fresh ambition to become a Fleet Air Arm pilot. Never a frequent letter writer (like many young men), he found himself so preoccupied that his correspondence grew more and more sporadic.

Meanwhile, having for the present lost a ‘son’ to whom she was devoted, my mother was about to resume relations with her real son, whom she had last encountered as a small boy at her parents’ home on the North Devon coast.

Throughout my schooldays there had been no communication between us, save my mother’s abortive attempt to resume contact on my sixteenth birthday. After leaving Wellington College in the summer of 1953, I enrolled in the Army as a regular soldier. After completing basic training in the Buffs (my local regiment) at Canterbury, I entered the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. By then I had developed an increasingly painful back ailment, which caused me to be invalided out of the Army in the spring of 1954. In June my mother sent me out of the blue a cheque for my nineteenth birthday, and we began exchanging letters.

In August of the following year she invited me to stay at Collioure. My stepmother had never disguised her dislike for me, and my father rarely showed me any affection. The time had come when I resolved to see the mother of whom I retained a bare half-dozen infant memories. That month I joined my father and stepmother for a typically strained holiday in northern Spain, and from there I journeyed at a leisurely rate in Spanish trains to Port Bou on the French Mediterranean frontier, and thence up the coast the three stops to Collioure. It being impossible to predict the precise time of my arrival, my mother remained on tenterhooks for two days. On the 29th she received ‘Letter from N., apparently woken up to the foolishness of going back to England before coming here, so he will reach Irun at 8 pm tomorrow en route for Collioure. I called on O[dette]., told her … Called on Tante & Marinette & told them: how they stared.’

Two days later: ‘Met trains all day, home beautifully neat under usual strain, but no Nikolai.’ Finally, on 1 September, I arrived at Collioure and made my way to the rue Arago. I climbed the steep staircase, knocked on the door, and there was my mother. I vividly recall Patrick standing a little behind, in that characteristic attitude which was to become so familiar, smiling with his head a little on one side and hands clasped before him.

My own emotions were confused, my mother being for me effectively a stranger, of whom I retained only the most fleeting of images. However, in consequence of my unhappy relationship with my father and stepmother, I found it exhilarating to find myself at home with contrastedly interesting and affectionate parents. My mother was understandably in raptures:

I had taught [her pupil] André his English, & P & I were sitting at tea when there was a knock, & it was N. Actually I am writing this on the 12th, being too excited before to write. I did not know how wonderful it would be to have N. again – Lord, Lord, I am so happy with P. & him, and so thankful. I would that R. were here too: he wrote to say that he is an Ordinary Seaman in the R.N., sounding very happy.

With hindsight, I fancy the visit might have gone better had Richard indeed been there, providing companionship of my own age. For the first fortnight all went well. My youthful enthusiasm for history overlapped closely – perhaps too closely – with Patrick’s own tastes. I browsed contentedly among his eclectic collection of books, which stood ranged against the wall in boxes he had carefully constructed to house them. We were a stone’s throw from the beach, and there was much to excite my passion for the Middle Ages in the ancient town. We travelled by bus to explore Andorra, still a wholly unspoilt medieval principality in the mountains.

By the time of my arrival, the walls and roof of the casot were all but completed. Like Richard, I assisted in my turn with the labours, my more modest contribution being attested to this day by a cement buttress beside the door bearing my initials. It was an exciting time for all, and my mother wrote exultantly: ‘We already plan next storey.’ (I am, incidentally, baffled by a writer’s claim that Patrick ‘built the hut by hand, something that O’Brian ironically would be ashamed of and very touchy about in later life when he became more established’. In reality, he was immensely proud of the fact that he had contributed so much of the labour, to which he regularly drew visitors’ attention when they called throughout the years that followed.)

I learned much about Patrick’s writing, and remember being particularly delighted by his good-humoured short story ‘The Virtuous Peleg’. His other writings were less to my adolescent taste, which was disinclined to stray beyond current obsessive enthusiasms. Unfortunately, those of his own works which would have appealed to me at the time remained inaccessible, since no copies of his early books published under the name Richard Patrick Russ were to be found in the house. Equally, the robustly exciting boys’ books The Road to Samarcand and The Golden Ocean had yet to be published.

It is hard for me now to be certain how far my faded image of those memorable three weeks remains entirely accurate. However, I do recall that after a week or so I began to find Patrick increasingly didactic and irritable, to an extent which swiftly became all but intolerable. Referring to himself on one occasion as ‘a writer who has been compared with Dostoevsky’ (which may conceivably have been true), he was openly contemptuous of my preferred reading: old-fashioned favourites such as Harrison Ainsworth, Charles Lever and R.D. Blackmore. Oddly enough, so far as I am aware Patrick had not read the one ‘good’ writer whose works I also loved – Walter Scott.[fn9] However, he possessed the 1839 ten-volume edition of J.G. Lockhart’s classic biography of his father-in-law, which on discovering my enthusiasm he presented to me during my stay. Glancing at it now, I suffer once again an acute pang of nostalgia, fancying myself back in the snug little flat at 39, rue Arago.

Today I remain shamefully conscious of the fact that the growing coldness which developed between us during my stay was very far from being Patrick’s sole responsibility, as I then believed it to be. I still recall with painful embarrassment how prone I was at the time to faults not uncommon among young men of twenty. Uncompromising political views, assertions of belief as incontrovertible fact, and related failings made me no more tolerable to my elders than many another immature youth awkwardly poised between adolescence and manhood.

On 13 September my parents’ old friend and colleague from their wartime service with Political Warfare Executive, the American academic Jack Christopher, came to stay. Lodgings were found for him with the Azémas, while he spent each day with us. A tall, mild-mannered scholar, he was co-author of a recently published two-volume History of Civilization. I recall Patrick’s humorously condemning the work, on the grounds that it omitted to mention a battle between the O’Tooles and the Danes – a joke repeated from a passage in The Golden Ocean, which he had just completed. While Jack was a model of discretion and politeness, Patrick at times used his presence to ‘punish’ me in a manner he not seldom employed when irritated, deliberately excluding me from conversations, in the course of which he occasionally let fall none too subtle allusions to my deficiencies.

Recollection of this first visit still pains me. Indeed, I was for long inclined to accept almost the entirety of blame for the mutual ill-feeling which increasingly pervaded my stay, until many years later I came to read my mother’s diary account of my visit: ‘N. left on 19th: when it started going bad I do not remember. Only I do remember being in the middle of it & trying & trying to think of something to bring things back to pleasantness.’

As her normal reaction to any such awkwardness was to support Patrick, right or wrong, I am inclined to infer that she sensed the faults were not all on one side. Long afterwards, I was told by their friend Mary Burkett that Patrick angrily declared on my departure that he would never allow me in the house again! This was the only such occasion of which I am aware when my mother put her foot down, insisting she would continue to see me regardless.

Fortunately the unpleasantness blew over, and the letter I wrote back after my return reads as though all had been warmth and light. Over the decades to come, I confess that Patrick and I continued at times to find each other difficult, or even downright insufferable. But each in his own way was, I believe, conscious that blame lay not all on one side, and such unpleasant clashes were invariably overcome and dismissed – lessening considerably, too, as the years passed by. However, there is no escaping the certainty that, had I not been my mother’s son, I would never have been invited to Collioure again.