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I went in the loft & there found not only old account books so beautifully kept but our old formally-kept diaries of nearly 30 years ago. How vividly alive we were in those days, or seem to be in this reflection, & how v v little we lived & loved on.

Patrick’s diary, 9 December 1981

In the summer of 1945 Patrick and my mother Mary were compelled to leave London, following the abrupt termination of their wartime employment at Political Warfare Executive. Although they had been very happy during the three years’ tenancy of their elegant Queen Anne house in Chelsea, it was with buoyant excitement that they began their new life in a tiny cottage in a remote valley of North Wales. Patrick welcomed the prospect of entering on a romantic wilderness existence with my mother. His deprivation of many of the normal pleasures of childhood, above all the fellowship of contemporaries, made him by nature unusually self-sufficient. Furthermore, he and my mother were still young (Patrick being then thirty, and my mother twenty-nine), adventurous, and very much in love.

His ambitions were clear. Ever averse to dependence on others, he intended to live so far as possible by the work of his hands, while resuming his precocious career as a writer, which five years of war had compelled him to abandon. Prospects appeared as promising as might be. My mother possessed a modest private income on which they were able to scrape by in their two-roomed house at Cwm Croesor in Snowdonia, whose rent amounted to a mere £4 a year. They were fit, resourceful, and unmaterialistic: a perfect team. Neither ever baulked at hard work, and they rarely repined at the constraints of poverty. Over the bitter winter of 1945–46 they laboured undauntedly to make their home habitable, and toiled at their little garden in order to make themselves as self-sufficient as possible in the coming year. Patrick’s shooting and fishing among the mountains and lakes completed their supply of food.

Nevertheless, the spring of 1946 found him increasingly assailed by frustration and pessimism. Try as he would, his pen failed to flow with its former facility. While my mother’s faith in his talent as a writer never wavered, Patrick increasingly experienced prolonged bouts of writer’s block, a condition which by the end of their four years in Wales had all but overwhelmed him. Moving to a larger house nearby in the valley generated only the briefest spasm of revived creativity, and during the winter of 1948 –49 he began to despair of ever fulfilling his consuming ambition. He grew more and more tense, irritable, self-doubting, and agitated by agonizing thoughts of death and dissolution.[1] In addition the long dark wet winters of North Wales imposed debilitating physical gloom over their lives. Eventually he and my mother decided that their only recourse was to effect a total severance with their current unhappy existence.

After living together for six years, in the summer of 1945 Patrick had married my mother, when he further adopted the decisive course of changing his surname from Russ to O’Brian. Contrary to widespread speculation when this was belatedly made public at the end of his life, I have shown elsewhere that he did not select his new name in order to pass himself off as an Irishman. Indeed, the name itself was chosen effectively at random. His overriding motive was to achieve a total break with his past: above all, to banish all association with his selfish and frequently tyrannical father. However, as failure dogged his every effort to extract himself from the grim predicament he found himself facing, he became increasingly troubled by an obsessive fear that his father’s destructive shadow hung over him, frustrating his every effort to break free. Even the rugged recesses of Snowdonia proved too little protection from the hated oppressor, whose presence he sensed looming above him in forbidding screes or tearing down the valley in raging storms, and eventually it seemed that a second flight afforded the only avenue for escape and renewal.

The bleak Welsh winters no longer proffered an invigorating challenge, but exerted a dampening gloom permeating the little household. By the early summer of 1949, the young couple fastened on the south of France, as refuge from the more and more desperate impasse into which Patrick found himself driven. He returned from an exploratory expedition with the exciting news that he had discovered the ideal spot where they could rebuild their lives.

The little town of Collioure lies on the Mediterranean coast, a few miles from the Spanish frontier. Years later, in his broadly autobiographical novel Richard Temple, Patrick provided a vivid sketch of the impression it first made on him:

The village stood on a rocky bay, with a huge castle jutting out into the middle, and a path led round underneath this castle to a farther beach and farther rocks … A jetty ran out at the end of the second beach … and as he walked along the jetty … he took in a host of vivid impressions – the brilliance of the open sea, white horses, the violet shadows of the clouds. From the end of the jetty the whole village could be seen, arranged in two curves; the sun had softened the colour of the tiled roofs to a more or less uniform pale strawberry, but all the flat-fronted houses were washed or painted different colours, and they might all have been chosen by an angel of the Lord … the high-prowed open fishing-boats were also painted with astonishing and successful colours: they lay in two rows that repeated the curves of the bay, and their long, arched, archaic lateen yards crossed their short leaning masts like a complexity of wings.[2]

The couple arrived at the town in the beginning of September, which is generally one of the best months of the year on the Côte Vermeille. Tourists had departed, and the little town reverted to its workaday existence. The brilliant sunshine was tempered by a pleasant freshness in the air, with the Pyrenees looming behind the town standing out sharp and clear against a pure azure sky.

During his prefatory visit Patrick had already made a few friends. Among these was a beautiful Colliourencque[fn1] (as the town’s female inhabitants are termed), Odette Boutet. Odette was married to a sculptor and painter named François Bernardi.[fn2] They met again the day after Patrick’s return with my mother, when the two couples immediately became fast friends. During his initial visit Odette had helped Patrick find a small apartement on the second floor of 39, rue Arago,[fn3] situated opposite a great gateway opening through the town wall onto the seafront. There was a living room, bedroom, a windowless nook known as ‘the black hole’, a bathroom with shower, and a tiny lavatory.

Always hospitable to a fault, when guests came to stay my parents customarily abandoned the bedroom, ensconcing themselves on lilos, inflatable mattresses, in the black hole. Electricity only arrived in the apartement nine months after their arrival. Inadequate heating was initially provided by a small bottled-gas cooker, and it was not until towards the end of 1953 that they managed to afford ‘a beautiful blue enamelled stove, a flexible desk-light for P. & various other things … Very pleased with stove. It was too heavy for P & me but P & Rimbaud managed.’ This was the Mirus, a handsome and extremely effective heater, capable of burning coal or wood. Cooking was conducted on a small ‘Wonder Oven’, operating on bottled gas.

Apart from the inevitable proliferation of tourist shops and restaurants and the regrettable removal of cobblestones from the streets, the appearance of Collioure within its town walls is not greatly changed since my parents first lived there. Most streets are so narrow that the inhabitants might almost touch hands from opposite windows. Behind the rue Arago, clustered houses along winding passages ascend the hillside to the base of Fort Miradou, while a couple of streets away the Place de la Mairie provided a pleasant refuge under the shade of its plane trees, where townspeople strolled and gossiped in the evenings.

In one major respect, however, Collioure has changed beyond recognition. Some time ago, when I was discussing the town with an old family friend, widow of a retired Colliourench fisherman, she described the new Musée de Collioure in the Faubourg. It contains many pleasing relics of former local life: fishing gear, old photographs, household implements, and so forth. ‘But one aspect it can never show,’ Hélène Camps observed emphatically, ‘is the incessant and extraordinary noise we all knew in those days’ – whether inside or outside the town. For many years all coastal road traffic to Spain passed through the heart of Collioure. Eventually this came to be diverted inland through a massive road tunnel constructed beyond the railway line.

In 1954 Patrick wrote this lively description for the American magazine Homes and Gardens:[fn4]

Where the foothills of the Pyrenees plunge directly to the sea, the smooth-rounded Mediterranean sea that has bitten away the land in black cliffs there, the road winds and winds interminably: hair-pin bends writhe down to the gaunt bridges that stand over naked, dried up river-beds, and from each ravine the road twists upwards through cuttings in the red-black rock to the narrow back of the hill – up, and down again. It is a nightmare for a nervous driver in a hurry, for the lorries from Port Vendres, the buses and the cars tear furiously round the corners – blind corners – screaming brutally with their tyres, klaxons, horns. They all disregard the most elementary precautions (no Latin soul should ever drive a car) and a stranger might well demand whoever had established the theory that the French drive on the right side of the road.

But in the autumn, when the tide of summer cars has slackened, and before the schooners from the south have begun to bring up the oranges that load the lorries in the port, then one can walk safely on the road, follow its turning through the hills and look with tranquillity on the sea below or up to the mountains on the right hand.

This is the time of the vendanges. The hills, terraced with inconceivable labour to the height of the fertile land, are covered everywhere with vines, and the vines are ready.

Although families native to Collioure still live in and around the town, many houses and flats now sadly belong to absentee owners, a proportion of whom I understand do not even appear for some eleven months of the year. In contrast, Collioure in the Forties and Fifties was overwhelmingly home to Colliourench fishermen and their families. Most were closely interrelated through marriage, with links in many cases extending back for centuries. An unfortunate consequence of this was a never-ending spate of raucous conversations conducted throughout the day and much of the night, not only within the houses, whose windows for much of the year were opened wide to the mild air, but also between relatives or neighbours living on opposite sides of the narrow streets. My mother, who might have felt herself back in the Devonshire fishing village of her childhood, was able to tolerate this with fair equanimity. For the edgy and introspective Patrick, however, the hurly-burly proved a constant trial of his temper. His ears were jarred by hoarsely jocose cries of fishermen, high-pitched exchanges between wives and daughters, and maddening screams from their children. ‘Everyone evidently assumed everyone else was deaf,’ he once remarked to me.

Rare objections to the cacophony achieved little more than to exacerbate it:

Last night the Puits [the restaurant on the ground floor] made such a din: Mme R[imbaud]. told me Franco it was who threw the bottle last year: Pilar told her today. P[ilar] & F[ranco] keep cailloux [pebbles] on their window-sill.

This entry in my mother’s diary alludes to an outraged assault on late-night revellers in the restaurant on the ground floor. A year later, to her evident satisfaction, there was a repeat attack: ‘Last night someone threw a bottle outside the Puits: it made a fine noise.’ These incidents provoked inconclusive police and private investigations, all conducted at stentorian level on the spot, the fallout from which their friend Odette once told me had not entirely subsided half a century later.

As though this were not trial enough, Patrick understood barely a word of these vociferous exchanges, since almost everyone’s first or even sole language was Catalan. The occasional bilingual exchange was as often as not equally hard to understand. As my mother recorded:

The woman opposite went bankrupt, & left to live at Elne. There she took up with a man & they came back to live at her house here. His wife found out where they were, & on Sunday came & tried to get at them. They barred their door & she sat on a chair in the Street for six hours. A filthy scene (woman screeching French – man Catalan) by the arch 3 days ago must have been them, I think. The woman was dragging a 4–6 year old child with her.[fn5]

If the human cacophony momentarily waned in the early hours, it was only to be replaced by horrid war cries uttered by the martial cats of Collioure, who waged internecine conflict around gutters, doorways, and up and down stairs – there being generally no doors at street level to communal entrances. Even my parents’ tough little Welsh hunt terrier Buddug could barely hold her own against these feline hosts of Midian. She was enabled to sally forth at will through an entrance cut in the door to the flat. One fine spring day my mother reported: ‘Cats (toms) infest stairs, & Budd rages. She came in with v. bloody nose this morning.’ Their morals were as depraved as their conduct was aggressive. On 9 September 1951 my mother adopted a kitten from the rue, whom she named Pussit Tassit, entering her arrival at the appropriate date in her childhood Christopher Robin Birthday Book. The following May, Patrick ‘saw our cat being covered in the street by a large black tom while half a dozen others sat quietly watching’.

My mother’s diary entries regularly attest to the strain imposed by the unrelenting cacophony:

‘Our rue gets more & more noisy’; ‘Oh God I am so sick with hearing vicious slaps & more vicious screaming at Martine. Patrick tried to read a T.S.E[liot]. poem [Burnt Norton] aloud yesterday but was drowned by the noise in the rue. Both boiled this morning as cats howling kept us from sleeping’; ‘V. bad night: noises’; ‘Street noises formidable’; ‘Neither of us can sleep: too much noise.’

When their neighbour Madame Rimbaud fell ill and was visited by the doctor, his ministrations were accompanied by well-intentioned ‘Shoutings of choruses of women down there all day’.

Despite the disadvantages of their cramped quarters and noisy surroundings, my parents remained at first broadly satisfied with their new home, and swiftly became profound lovers of Collioure and its inhabitants. Their isolated and unproductive life in Snowdonia had long strained Patrick’s nerves to desperation, and there could be no doubting the truth of his parting aphorism: ‘it is better to be poor in a warm country.’[fn6]

In fact the weather at Collioure was far from being balmy throughout the entirety of the year. Winters could prove bitterly cold, and one snowstorm was so heavy that roofs collapsed beneath the weight. In January 1954 my mother recorded: ‘Snow thick from Al Ras to Massane; cold & it rained all night’, and shortly afterwards: ‘Rain in the night, & today the Dugommier hillside specked with snow. They say 15° [Fahrenheit] below zero at Font Romeu.’ I remember seeing in the town at that time photographs of what I recall as enormous waves frozen in mid-air as the sea hurled itself against the town walls. Life in the tiny flat above the rue Arago could be harsh indeed: ‘Ice on comportes in the rue; glacial wind. Mirus [stove] full blast hardly keeps us warm’; ‘Still 23° without, washing frozen into boards … Frightful cold: P. works au coin du feu.’

In spring the ‘maddening, howling tramontane’ battered the region for frustrating weeks, while in the autumn ‘Wind (from Spain) & clouds prevented plage. C’est le vent d’Espagne – il fait humide – c’est pas sain.’

Port d’Avall and Château St Elme under snow in 1954[fn7]

Of course much of the year was generally hot, but even then freak weather could strike Collioure’s microclimate, arising from its situation between the mountains and the sea. July 1953 saw a ‘fantastic hail storm … River vast red flow.’ Much of this belongs to the past, owing to climate change, but is important to recall when reliving my parents’ early days in Collioure.

A hostile critic has conjectured that Patrick’s move to Collioure was undertaken ‘perhaps, in order to be a long way from the family he had abandoned’.[3] In reality, seven years had passed since he finally left his first wife Elizabeth for my mother. Moreover, he continued in close touch with his young son Richard, the only other member of his immediate family, whom he had no intention of abandoning, while he maintained intermittent correspondence with his brothers, sisters and stepmother throughout the long years that lay ahead.

It is true that relations with his son had been troubled, although nothing approaching the extent alleged by subsequent critics. Richard O’Brian was, by his own admission, somewhat indolent as a child, and made unsatisfactory progress at the Devonshire preparatory school to which his father and my mother had sent him for two and a half years at great financial sacrifice to themselves. At the end of the summer term of 1947 Patrick was obliged to withdraw him, and set about teaching him at the house where he and my mother were living in North Wales. Although the boy’s education improved considerably in consequence, in some respects the experience was an unhappy one. Patrick’s own wretched childhood had left him constitutionally ill-equipped (for much of his adult life, at any rate) to deal with small children, a failing on occasion so pronounced as to be all but comical. Walking above Collioure in November 1951, he fled down a sidetrack on ‘seeing some beastly little boys’ – one of several similarly alarming encounters. He imposed what might now appear excessively rigorous discipline on his son during lessons. Although Richard regularly stayed with his mother in London during the ‘school holidays’, during his time in Wales he had missed her and his beloved boxer Sian acutely. Patrick and my mother were fond of dogs, but it was impossible to introduce Sian into the sheep-farming community of Cwm Croesor.

This regime continued for two years, during which time excruciating attacks of writer’s block made Patrick more and more testy and uncompromising in his efforts to educate the boy. It is likely that Patrick’s frustration with Richard’s lack of satisfactory progress was exacerbated by his own inability to achieve anything constructive in his writing. On the other hand, outside lessons he became in marked contrast a strikingly adventurous and imaginative parent. My mother’s unwavering affection, too, went far to ameliorate Richard’s life. Eventually, the ill-conceived scheme came to an end, with the departure of Patrick and my mother for Collioure in September 1949. That July Richard’s mother Elizabeth married her longstanding lover John Le Mee-Power, which enabled her to make a successful application to the courts to recover custody of her son.

Patrick was deeply concerned to secure the best education possible for Richard. In 1945 he had registered him for entry to Wellington College, a public school with a strong military tradition, with a view to his eventually obtaining a career in the Army. Unfortunately this was my father’s old school, which I in turn entered in January 1949. When my father was informed by Elizabeth that the O’Brians planned to send Richard there, he managed to persuade the Master of the undesirability of his attending the same school as me. The fact that my mother was at the time denied all contact with me presumably influenced the College’s concurrence with my father’s objection, which would now seem harsh and arbitrary. It is possible that some future unhappiness might have been avoided, had Richard and I been permitted to become friends from an early age.

The sincerity of Patrick’s concern to advance Richard’s education and future career cannot be doubted. The annual fees for Wellington were £160–£175 a year, which together with travel and additional expenses required a total expenditure of about £200 per annum. Yet his and my mother’s combined income for 1950–51 amounted to £341 6s 9d.[fn8] Nor was the proposed sacrifice any fanciful project, since they had earlier paid about £170 a year for Richard’s preparatory school fees and expenses.[4]

Eventually Richard came to believe that his father had contributed nothing material towards his education. In a press interview conducted over half a century later, he declared: ‘My father never offered to help … [I] had been sent to a boarding school in Devon by [my] mother … [My] mother found the fees increasingly difficult to pay.’[5]

Although Richard is unlikely to have been concerned at the time by the question of who paid his school fees, in retrospect his mother’s poverty-stricken circumstances (by her own account, she earned ‘between £3. 10. 0. and £4. 0.0. a week’, from invisible mending conducted in their home) might have made it plain that it could not have been she. Nor, given her upright character, does it appear likely that she would have made any attempt to deceive her son over the issue. Again, the fact that it was to Patrick and my mother that Richard looked for provision of all extras, ranging from school uniform and games kit to pocket money and railway travel, must have made it plain at the time who was meeting the bills.

Richard’s memory could well have deceived him after half a century. Unfortunately, it is necessary to demonstrate that it did do so, in order to counter accusations levelled at Patrick by others.

Denied entry to Wellington, in the autumn of 1949 Richard was enrolled at Cardinal Vaughan School in Holland Park. A place was found for him by Father de Zulueta, aristocratic priest of the Roman Catholic church in Chelsea, where Richard and his mother lived. My mother’s accounts show that she and Patrick spent substantial sums on Richard each year, although this did not include school fees, the institution being funded by the London County Council. Occasional financial assistance was probably also contributed by my grandfather, who was then living in Upper Cheyne Row around the corner from Richard and his mother. My mother’s brother Howard, known to the family as ‘Binkie’, recalled: ‘My Father told me that Patrick’s son had been brought to him in a hungry state by that kind Father Zulu. I have no doubt but that Pa would have given him a hand out despite his aversion to Patrick.’

Some years ago I heard from an old schoolfriend of Richard’s. Bob Broeder remembered him well:

Richard stood out from the rest of us as he spoke in a refined accent while most of us spoke in what can only be described as a London accent. As boys do, we asked each other which schools we had come from. When it came to Richard, he told us that he had been educated [i.e. tutored] by his father. This made him stand out even more.

Miserable though it had in part been at the time, it seems that Richard had already come to value his father’s didactic course of instruction – as he undoubtedly did not long after this. He might, after all, have confined himself to naming the Devonshire preparatory school he had attended previously.

A letter sent by Richard to Collioure at this time recounts his progress. (Here as elsewhere I retain his delightfully idiosyncratic spelling, which adds to the charm of the correspondence.)

Dear Daddy and Mary, I am very sorry I did not reply to your letter. The only subject I find easy is Greek, but altogether I get on nicely, in Latin we are doing the Relative pronoun, in French we are learning the presents of some irregular and regular verbs, in history we are doing Tudor times, in arithemetic we are about to begin fractions, in algebra we have not started similtanious equations, in geometry we are learning Euclid 1 .13. I find home-work very boring, but I do it, so far I have had only three penances. Here is a bit of news for Mary, I have growen out of my good old boots, I can’t get them on though last two months I could, my mother says please can I have several pairs of socks and some pugams pyjamers. My Mother says I will be taking my Exam in the spring or else I might stay where I am. I like the idea of the feast and wished I was there, but we can’t buy wishing-carpets. I will try very hard for a silent dog whistle [for Buddug] when I have time but most propally I’ll end up some where else. Please could I have a little money? I am very glad you are in your new home, have you had a shower-bath, I think when I come over I will invent a sort of bellows which you start off and stop when you want. I have never heard of a Praying Montis. I do not like getting up early but I do. I hope you and Daddy and Buddug are well? With love from Richard.

The ‘Exam’ in question was the Common Entrance for admission to public schools. The attempt to enter Richard for Wellington having been blocked, Patrick now sought to have him admitted to St Paul’s, a prestigious London public school. This would have enabled him to attend as a day boy, thus avoiding the heavy expense of boarding. Richard prepared for the examination in the summer of 1950, which in the event poor academic progress appears to have prevented his sitting. There is incidentally a suggestion that my mother attempted to persuade her father to break the modest financial trust he had settled on her, in order that she might devote the capital to Richard’s education. A passage in Patrick’s autobiographical novel Richard Temple may well allude to such a plea: ‘On the same reasoning he [Mrs Temple’s father, Canon Harler] had refused to let her touch the capital of her little trust-fund to send Richard to a better school: besides, he had never approved of her marriage and would lend its results no countenance.’[6]

Grim personal experience of the terrible financial crash of 1929 had left my grandfather with a visceral aversion to dispersion of capital.

Richard’s initial experience at Cardinal Vaughan had been less than happy. As his friend Bob Broeder further recalls:

As time went on he was the subject of verbal bullying and was given a nickname – ‘Sheep’s Brains’ … Things came to a head one day, when a large lad (who later went on to play rugby for the Wasps) confronted Richard & threatened him with violence. By this time I had had enough and although smaller than this lad I told him in no uncertain terms to pack it in. Psychology worked and he never troubled Richard again, the other boys saw what had happened and they in their turn left Richard alone.

Before long he had settled down well, at least with his fellow pupils. Writing to Collioure, he cheerfully declared: ‘Dear Daddy … I hope I pass the common entrance to St Pauls, though I am quite happy where I am.’ He and Bob Broeder had become fast friends. The latter retains a vivid memory of Richard’s cramped little home:

As time went by I was invited to his home to meet his mother. They lived in a flat on the first floor at 237, Kings Road Chelsea. Adjacent to the first floor landing was the kitchen/dining area then up some more stairs to the living room – quite large and very cold in Winter, despite a small fire.

I found his mother Elizabeth a small, charming and very well spoken lady with whom I had a good rapport. Little mention was ever made about his father, except that he lived in the south of France. At that age you accept things readily and don’t question.

Subsequently, Bob found conditions at Richard’s home materially improved:

One day I arrived at Richard’s home and went into the living-room with him, discovered it was no longer cold but nicely warm. He pointed to a brand new stove that had been installed in the fireplace and which gave out a marvellous warmth …

One Christmas I was invited to Christmas dinner. Elizabeth had prepared a wonderful feast. There was a complete roasted goose with all the trimmings – it was an unforgettable occasion. Elizabeth was a kind and generous lady who worked hard as a seamstress. I often saw her patiently repairing nylon stockings for customers. Such luxury items were hard to come by and then very expensive. She also worked at the Chelsea Arts Club in the evening.

Richard was now thirteen, when a combination of factors served to place his relationship with his father on an altogether happier basis. No longer confined in isolated contiguity with his at times testy parent, he was also outgrowing tiresome childish failings which all too easily provoked Patrick’s simmering wrath. The permanent rift which was one day to develop between them lay far in the future, and as will be seen did not in any case originate with Patrick. It looks as though Richard’s eventual decision to abandon relations with his father led him (as may too often occur in such unhappy cases) to reinterpret or confuse his memories of the past. Looking back from 2000, he recalled of this period:

Later, my father moved to France and I was delighted to return to my mother. Over the years I continued to visit my father and Mary but our relationship didn’t develop much further. He was not an easy person to get near. He was not affectionate; there were no quick hugs or pats on the shoulder. Nor was there much fun about him. Everything was a little bit heavy. He could also be very, very sarcastic. There was one incident that I remember clearly. He was extremely good at sharpening knives. ‘That looks interesting,’ I thought, so I had a go. His comment was: ‘I’ve seen angle-irons sharper than that.’ He could have thought of something pleasant to say.

I can confirm that Patrick was instinctively averse to ‘quick hugs or pats on the shoulder’, which he had rarely experienced in his own childhood. But so in my experience were many fathers at that time, and this, like much else in Richard’s subsequent assessment, suggests judgements formed in a radically different era. While the clumsy attempt at humour (which I suspect the knife-sharpening exchange to have been) may or may not have upset the boy at the time, there exists abundant evidence that Richard’s memory in later life could deceive him in material respects.

In the 1950s Patrick appears to have been unaware of any suggestion of coldness in their relationship. Pondering the matter, he jotted in a notebook:

The dialogue between a man and his son an inner dialogue. The well-known lack of communication is no more than a lack of contact on the surface – words, formal communication – and in fact the generations are linked to a sometimes intolerably intimate degree – secret glances instantly and wholly understood, disapproval felt, affectations detected hopelessly because hereditary …

This passage is further interesting, suggesting as it does Patrick’s sincere, if at times excessive, concern to eradicate failings in his son which he ascribed to his own boyhood experience.

Richard, like many of us on occasion, was undoubtedly capable of unconsciously ‘editing’ his early childhood memories long years after the event. An illuminating example is provided by an episode he recounted in a press interview, in which he attacked his father’s memory. ‘When I was five he sent me a present – a bottle of malt and cod liver oil, something no five-year-old would want. That was the year that [Richard’s sister] Jane died.’[7]

This reads as though it were a direct memory of a long-distant event. In reality, he first learned of it from a letter discovered by his mother Elizabeth in ‘an old box’, which she sent to Richard’s daughter Joanna. Elizabeth’s letter is undated, but since Joanna was born in 1969 it is unlikely to have been written before the 1980s. The trove of material discovered in the old box included the letter in question (also undated), which conveyed birthday wishes and what Patrick described as ‘a rather revolting sort of birthday present – to wit, some malt and cod-liver oil. But reflect that it is good for you, and see if you can enjoy it.’ To this Patrick appended some amusing verses and accompanying sketches, after the style of Hilaire Belloc.

Elizabeth, whose memory must in this case be preferred to that of her then infant son, wrote that he was at the time not five as he later asserted, but ‘about 3 years old’ – i.e. two years before his sister Jane died. In view of Richard’s age, the letter plainly represented a jeu d’esprit, intended for the mother’s amusement rather than that of the small unlettered infant. Furthermore, given that we know nothing of the context, it seems not unlikely that Richard really was ill (his birthday was at the beginning of February), and the announcement that the medicine was a birthday present reflected nothing more than a private joke to be shared with his mother. Indeed, the letter concludes with a mock-sinister verse about a scorpion, on which Patrick commented: ‘I’m afraid that last one won’t appeal to you very much, but your mother might like it.’[fn9]

Letters from Richard’s Chelsea home delighted my parents after their arrival in Collioure in 1949, including as they did many artless touches of boyhood enthusiasm. ‘I have been four day’s in bed with tonsilitis,’ he reported: ‘that means I will have my tonsils out, maybe I will grow wiser on account of my tonsils being cut out.’ He was beginning to evince encouraging interest in literature, and used the pocket money they sent him to buy such sterling boys’ fare as the works of Rider Haggard, Alexandre Dumas and R.M. Ballantyne. There were regular reports on Sian the boxer’s welfare and her occasional ‘weddings’, which resulted in numerous offspring. He attended his first communion at Chelsea’s Catholic church: ‘Father de Zulueta is giving me a Bible as my own [Authorized Version] is anti-catholic, however I shall keep it.’

Excitement mounted as across the river preparations began for the 1951 Festival of Britain in Battersea Park, which Richard roundly condemned as an expensive white elephant. He received letters from his father and my mother almost every week, money being punctiliously despatched whenever required, and at whatever sacrifice to the impoverished O’Brians. As a growing boy, he regularly required new clothing. On one occasion they provided him with a complete cricket outfit, which he was aware ‘was very expensive’. Gratifyingly, ‘when I put all the clothes on I looked like a proffessional cricketer’. Patrick took a keen interest in Richard’s sporting activity, and the latter responded with detailed accounts of matches: ‘Thank you for the lovely parcle of buscuits and advise on cricket.’ He was looking forward to coming out to France, but ‘was rather horrified at the thought of the journey.’ Furthermore, ‘I am afraid I have forgotten all my French as we say almost the same thing every lesson, “come and stand here”, “do you come here?” I think the master askes most silly questions.’ When my mother told him she was teaching Odette Bernardi to speak English, Richard rejoiced at the prospect of being able to speak to her.

In July 1949 the judge presiding over the custody hearing had ruled that Patrick ‘be at liberty to take the said child out of the jurisdiction of this Court to France for half of the Summer Holidays, the Respondent [Patrick] undertaking to return the said child within the jurisdiction at the end of the said period’.[8] Richard accordingly spent part of his 1950 summer holiday at Collioure, which he hugely enjoyed. The next term he submitted an eight-page essay ‘on the most exicting part of the holidays’, with an account of a bullfight in the little arena beside the Collioure railway station. A healthy and active boy, he revelled in swimming from the plage St Vincent, exploring the neighbouring countryside, and walking with his father and stepmother in the Pyrenees. Nor was life lonely, as it had been to such an exacting extent in North Wales. Patrick and my mother had made close friends in the town since their arrival. Among their friends, Richard saw much of Odette and François Bernardi, as also the voluble and amusing painter Willy Mucha, and his attractive and equally garrulous (when permitted) wife Rolande.

That autumn Richard fastened on the career he wanted, writing eagerly to his father:

I am very happy at school. Please could you arrange for me to go into the Royal Navy, please? Please could you arrange for me to go into the Submarine Service? Could you write to the Admilaltary now, and find out what exams I must pass so I can be in at the age of 16. I am very keen for this to happen.

Patrick, whose own lack of formal education had prevented his gaining entrance to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, responded with enthusiasm. No career for his son could please him more, and Richard threw himself into the project with mingled energy and apprehension:

At school we are going to have the exams, which are horrors, on Thursday. The masters make it sound so easy and pleasant but I am dreading the results and the terrible report. Thank you so much about the Navy but I am afraid of the exams. I know that it is right for me to go into the R.N., and I will work very hard for it.

Patrick himself had never passed (quite likely never sat) a single examination during his drastically curtailed schooldays, and remained throughout his life markedly sympathetic toward children encountering problems with their school work. As it happened, on this occasion Richard’s results were good, and he evinced particular aptitude for geometry. A plea to have virtually all his clothes replaced (‘All the boys at school are well dressed and I am about the shabbiest one there’) immediately elicited a cheque for the substantial sum of £10/5/-, with a pair of goggles for swimming thoughtfully thrown in for good measure. His enthusiasm for mechanical toys also pleased Patrick, who loved dismantling and reassembling clocks and other intricate machinery.

Father and son further shared a common delight in the natural world. In March 1951 Patrick sent Richard a copy of Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter, and the boy was already looking forward to his next holiday in Collioure:

When I come over I shall bring the Union Jack tent, air-pistol, flute and one or two books, and (if I can get one) a little pet snake, the pet shop in lower Sloane Street may have a few young vipers.

Thank you so very for Tarka and the electrical book … Can one tame young hoopoos? I would like one. Do we often have sharks in the bay as Daddy told me he saw one?

In March 1951, Richard’s mother, with whom my mother regularly exchanged correspondence concerning Richard’s needs, wrote to report that her son was unhappy at home, and enquired whether he might be allowed to live permanently with them at Collioure.[fn10] Poor Elizabeth had been ill for much of the winter, and was finding it an increasing strain combining her arduous work with looking after the lively boy in her little upstairs flat. My mother replied that they would be delighted to have him. However, Patrick, as always concerned for his son’s best interest, asked their old wartime friend Walter Greenway to take Richard out to tea, and discover how matters really stood. In due course my mother noted: ‘Walter wrote that Richard seems very happy & settled at Cardinal Vaughan’s school & he himself says he would not like to leave it & come here altogether.’

It turned out that Richard, who frequently struggled to keep up with school work, tended to grow restless and unhappy as the term drew to its close. At the same time, he looked forward to coming over ‘for the summer hols’.

My mother undoubtedly loved Richard as though he were her own son, and her affection can only have been accentuated by an unhappy exchange of correspondence in the early summer of 1951. In view of her desertion, and continued ‘living in sin’ with Patrick until their marriage in 1945, a court had granted my father custody of my sister Natasha and myself. He himself had remarried in 1943, and as a promising barrister with a substantial private income was in a position to provide a suitable home for us.

My mother in the early 1950s

I was to be sixteen in June 1951, and in April my mother wrote to the London solicitor who had handled her divorce proceedings, ‘to ask if in fact Nikolai can choose to know me if he likes after his 16th birthday’. After some delay the solicitor confirmed that there was no reason why she should not at least enquire. Accordingly, she wrote both to her parents, who remained in close contact with my sister and me, and also directly to me. I received the letter at Wellington College, accompanied by a birthday present of a handsome book: William Sanderson, A Compleat History of the Lives and Reigns of Mary Queen of Scotland, And of Her Son and Successor, James The Sixth, King of Scotland (London, 1656). My mother must somehow have learned of my devotion to the House of Stuart, following my enraptured introduction to Scott’s Waverley novels by the enlightened headmaster of my preparatory school.

Needless to say, I was delighted with the present, but bemused to know how to respond. Before I could do so, however, my father arrived at the College in a state of grim agitation. He was at pains to impress on me how appallingly my mother had behaved, not the least of her crimes being an insidious attempt to make contact with me by entering Richard for Wellington. He accordingly urged me not to reply. When I enquired what I should do with her present, he smiled and suggested I keep it. Although I felt instinctively that there was something not quite right about this, I complied, and still have the book.

Children tend to be remarkably adaptable to circumstances. I myself was generally unhappy at home. Probably as a consequence of the loss of his own mother at the age of three, followed by terrifying childhood experiences during and after the Russian Revolution, and finally my mother’s desertion, my poor father had become a solitary, parsimonious, and generally morose figure, while my Russian stepmother was a relentless scold, who made no secret of the fact that she resented my presence in the house. Although set in a delightful situation beside the Thames at Wraysbury near Windsor, our home appeared to me a gloomy prison visited by few: so much so, that each holiday I compiled a calendar, whose function was to record and strike out on a half-daily basis the approach of the longed-for return to my friends at school. Yet, despite this dismal condition, I accepted all that my father urged on me, and remained persuaded throughout my schooldays that my mother was a very wicked woman. Shortly after the episode described above, she received letters from my father and her mother, impressing on her the undesirability of approaching me when I was already experiencing emotional problems at home and school. It is not hard to picture her anguish. Fortunately, she had Patrick to sustain her. ‘Dear P.’, as she wrote appreciatively that night in her diary.

Small wonder, then, that my mother poured so much affection onto her young stepson. While he continued devoted to his own mother, he had long become correspondingly fond of his stepmother, and swiftly grew enraptured with life at Collioure. His nostalgia for the town was such, that on the occasion of one return to London he requested a phial of sand from the beach, which on its arrival he much prized: ‘The sand has turned moist as the air is damp. If you send me any more curios I can start a penny-peep-show-museum.’

At this time Patrick and my mother were living on a more and more heavily taxed income amounting to £48 a quarter from the trust established on my mother by her father, supplemented by modest literary and other irregular earnings. My mother in addition occasionally taught English to Colliourenchs and their children, translated and typed letters, and engaged in other modestly remunerative activities. From this meagre income they had to meet continual requests from the growing Richard and his mother for new clothes, school extras and private entertainment. This they invariably did to the best of their ability, and the fact that his requests feature with such blithe regularity in his correspondence confirms that they neither reproached nor stinted him.

Any unforeseen expenditure was in danger of sinking their precarious little boat. On 1 September 1951, my mother was ‘Rudely awakened this morning by cheque of £32 instead of expected seventy. We have £13 a month until March … Richard never wrote: P. wrote again to him today. Dreadful letter from Mrs. Power suddenly demanding “maintenance”.’ This was Richard’s mother, who had finally married her lover John Le Mee-Power in May 1949. On what grounds she believed she could now make a claim on Patrick was unclear, but nonetheless alarming. Some weeks later, however, my mother heard again from the unhappy Elizabeth: ‘Letter from … Mrs. Power: poor thing, husband gone two years ago, not enough money.’[fn11] Power had proved to be a drunken, irresponsible bully. Elizabeth’s demand proved to be a momentary cry of despair, since by this time she appears to have accepted that my parents lacked any means of providing more financial help than that which they already lavished on Richard.

Now that Richard was fast becoming a young man, Patrick could share pleasures with him, imbuing them with that infectious enthusiasm which was one of his most endearing characteristics. Overall, the relationship had reached a happy modus vivendi. Patrick, my mother and Richard had grown into a compact little family, corresponding regularly and affectionately, and meeting from time to time for extended holidays and London treats. My mother’s parents, Howard and Frieda Wicksteed, as ever concerned for Richard’s welfare, regularly intervened to plug her recurrent financial holes. Fortunately, they lived in Upper Cheyne Row, a short walk around the corner from his mother in King’s Road. There Elizabeth eked out an existence marred by poverty and illness, while he continued devoted to her and she to him. Even the once bitter feud between Elizabeth and Patrick appears to have subsided into a mutually acceptable truce, with letters passing between the two households concerning Richard’s welfare, and my mother during visits to her parents calling to collect him from Elizabeth’s little upstairs flat round the corner. Other exchanges included Patrick’s arranging for her to be given their Hoover. How happy might it have been had these amicable relations continued! The only lasting sadness was that which constantly assailed my mother: deprivation of opportunity even to correspond with her own son and daughter Natasha. And whatever distressed my mother deeply troubled her devoted Patrick.

As this account has established, it is a regrettable but undeniable fact that Patrick was by nature and upbringing ill-suited to engage with young children, whose waywardness, unreflecting lack of tact and blithe innocence of the ways of the world tended all too readily to affront and alarm his fragile composure. However, once they attained an age which he regarded as providing a measure of rationality and intelligence, his attitude shifted remarkably. In one of his novels he describes how: ‘When Madeleine was a little girl she was a plain creature, and timid. Her form was the undistinguished, pudgy, shapeless form of most children.’ As an adolescent, however, she swiftly blossoms into a beautiful, intelligent, self-possessed young lady.[9] It is clear that he recognized this evolutionary transformation from caterpillar to butterfly in the case of his son. Furthermore, as I have shown in the first volume of this biography, it is worthwhile to stress that it was only when teaching Richard that his patience was tried: outside the ‘classroom’ Patrick became charm and enthusiasm personified.

Following the move to France, Patrick’s equanimity was restored by the generally promising path of his literary work. Shortly before their departure from Cwm Croesor, he had assembled a collection of short stories. Although in 1947 he had published A Book of Voyages, an anthology of seafaring episodes, this slim collection was to comprise the sum total of his original published literary projects since 1939, when the first of its tales was written. Although reflecting his sparse creative output over the preceding decade, the stories are beautifully written and highly imaginative, and were received enthusiastically by his literary agent, Spencer Curtis Brown. He passed them in turn to Fred Warburg, of the publishers Secker & Warburg, who on the eve of Patrick’s departure for France expressed similar appreciation:

We have now read and admired the remarkable stories of Patrick O’Brien [sic], at present entitled COUNTRY CONTENTMENTS, and should certainly like to publish the book … We do not like the title proposed by O’Brien and tentatively suggest THE LAST POOL as a possibility.

Patrick had adopted the title Country Contentments from his copy of a delightful work of that name, a guide to rural activities by the seventeenth-century writer Gervase Markham, which Patrick had sought to put into practice in Wales.[10] There seems little doubt, however, that Warburg’s choice was preferable (several stories in the collection are markedly discontented, being positively gloomy and even macabre), and The Last Pool (the title of the first story in the book) is what the title became. Curtis Brown stood firm in Patrick’s interest, insisting inter alia that he retain US rights for the book. Warburg gave way graciously on the issue, and the contract was signed on 27 September 1949. In it Patrick further committed himself ‘to write a book on Southern France and to proceed to France within the next two months in order to collect material for such a book’. For this ‘the publisher undertakes to pay to the Author forthwith the sum of £75 (seventy-five pounds) towards the expenses of the Author’s visit to France’. In fact, Patrick had by this time already crossed the Channel.

In addition the publisher obtained an option on Patrick’s next book, and when the two of them had lunched together on 24 August of that year Warburg learned that it was to be ‘a full length novel with a Welsh background’. Next day Warburg wrote to Spencer Curtis Brown, thanking him ‘for putting this most unusual book [The Last Pool] our way and very much hope it will have the success it deserves’. At the same time he (surely wisely) rejected Patrick’s tentative suggestion for the alternative title Dark Speech upon the Harp.

Patrick appears to have persuaded Secker that the prime motive of their journey was to gather material for the ‘book on Southern France’. Either way, the money came in extremely handy towards meeting the expense of their move. In the event, they arrived at Collioure shortly before the contract was completed. The removal cost £9.10/-, and since the rent of the flat in the rue Arago amounted to some £10 a year (which their genial landlord, M. Germa, seems to have collected erratically), for a while at least they should have been quite comfortably off. However, by next February they were alarmed by a statement from their bank in London, explaining that no more money could be forwarded, as they had attained the limit of £250 which it was at that time permitted to take abroad. Towards the end of May Patrick was still struggling to liberate Warburg’s £75 advance from an impassive bureaucracy. He noted grimly: ‘Wrote to C.J. Foreign Div. & Parry – The last two letters Mrs O’Brian wrote to you are still unanswered. This sort of treatment is really intolerable, and I must insist upon an immediate final.’

Unfortunately, it turned out that they did not qualify for remission of the advance.

At Warburg’s invitation, Patrick forwarded from my grandparents’ house in Chelsea (whose lease they had taken over from him at his departure in 1945) ‘some biographical scraps’ for inclusion on the dustjacket. Although Warburg thanked him for ‘the biographical material, which is excellent’, nearly eight months later he oddly repeated the request for ‘your biographical details, i.e. date and place of birth, education, appointments held and any other relevant information … speed is of the essence’. Since it was Patrick’s persistent habit to preserve copies of such material, it is hard to conceive of any reason why he should have failed to comply with the second request after being so prompt in fulfilling the first. It seems likely therefore that in the event Warburg decided against inclusion of a potted biography. As the sizeable dustjacket blurb implies that the tales arose out of the author’s own communing with the countryside which provides their setting, this may have appeared to suffice for a personal description.

The Last Pool was published on 17 August 1950. Its best stories contain some of Patrick’s finest writing, while all are entertaining. A Latin dedication ‘To Mary, my wife and Dearest Friend’ acknowledged her indispensable support and help. The book’s atmospheric green dustjacket design by Edward Bradbury, depicting three fine trout in the foreground, and shadowy images reflecting country sports circling dimly through refracted water, make it a handsome volume, now much sought by bibliophiles.

Reviews in the press were largely favourable: in some cases, enthusiastic. The novelist L.A.G. Strong perceptively described him as ‘A real new writer, with a voice of his own. He shows a real power to describe physical sensations.’ Patrick’s response to all this was guarded. In a letter to his editor Roger Senhouse written in the following February, he provided an assessment of critics which came from the heart: ‘I do grow passionate about criticism from fools, from people who have not really read what they criticise and from those whose aim is to show off; but I am really grateful for genuine criticism.’[fn12]

He welcomed Senhouse’s comments on his next book, but clearly had coverage of The Last Pool in mind, for he continued with some sharp reflections on ‘the damned silly review Dunsany produced in the Observer. Did you see any worthwhile reviews of The Last Pool? I only saw a long and offensively fulsome one in the Irish Times, and a short and stupid one in the Spectator, apart from the Observer.’

At first glance, Patrick’s testy dismissal of the Observer review appears perverse. Lord Dunsany, a well-connected Irish peer, literary figure and keen rider to hounds, was surely ideally placed to review such a book. What seems particularly to have riled Patrick was a well-intentioned laudatory comment, much canvassed since: ‘This charming book by an Irish sportsman is a genuine collection of tales of the Irish countryside.’ For a start, it might suggest that Dunsany had done little more than glance through the text. Although five of the thirteen tales have Irish settings, a careful reader would have noted that the three located in Wales evince a much more fundamental grounding in local toponymy, landscape and speech.

Still more upsetting appears to have been Dunsany’s gratuitous allusion to the author as ‘an Irish sportsman’. This was presumably inferred by Dunsany from Patrick’s surname,[fn13] together with the Irish setting of several of the stories. That an influential Irish writer publicly hailed him as a compatriot placed Patrick in an embarrassing quandary. As was explained in the first volume of this biography, his change of name was selected in order to banish an unbearable past – not to invent a new one. An obsessively private individual, the last thing he wanted was to find his personal life paraded before an inquisitive public. After all, Dunsany’s erroneous assumption could lead to his being derided as an imposter. What could he do? A correction (in the unlikely event of the newspaper’s publishing it) must inevitably invite enquiry into his actual background.

While this might be criticized as an absurdly paranoid reaction, it was to become unexpectedly justified when belated revelation of his change of name half a century later aroused bitter diatribes in the media beyond anything Patrick at his most vulnerable might have anticipated. He instinctively believed a substantial body of the literati to be an innately envious and consequently malevolent crew. Sadly, he lived to find this jaundiced view not altogether mistaken. It may surely be enquired, were he as concerned to lay claim to Irish ancestry as ill-natured critics have proclaimed, why he did not seize the opportunity to do so in The Last Pool, nor seek to profit from Lord Dunsany’s flattering allusion.[fn14]

When Patrick came under pressure by publishers on other occasions to provide autobiographical notices, he either evaded doing so altogether, or submitted some patently humorous fantasy. The dustjacket of his early novel Hussein (1938), for example, informed its readers:

Patrick Russ has seen much of life in his 26 years. When he was stoking a Portuguese tramp steamer, he came to Rabat and made the acquaintance of two professional story-tellers with whom he wandered up and down French Morocco for a couple of months. It was from them, conversing in mixtures of French and Berber Arabic that he got much of the material widely current throughout the Mohammedan world, which goes to form the story of Hussein.

It is presumably the rarity of this dustjacket which has thus far protected Patrick from being accused by humourless critics of intending these imaginative exploits to be taken au pied de la lettre.[11]

Although beautifully written, the stories in The Last Pool proved to be no more than a swansong to the otherwise alarmingly arid period from which he was at last emerging. I have described in the first volume of this biography how they were spasmodically compiled over the decade of 1939–49, during which time the interruption caused by wartime employment, followed by nearly four years of mounting writer’s block, eventually brought to fruition no more than this sparse collection. After their luncheon meeting in August 1949, Fredric Warburg noted: ‘I gathered that in this field he had, for the moment, written himself out.’ In fact, all he had had in mind for further writing was ‘a book on the French Catalans’.

It appears, however, that not long after their arrival at Collioure, Patrick began to find memories of life at Cwm Croesor flooding back. Now distanced from the life of hardship and frustration they had endured there, he began to picture it all anew in his mind’s eye. In a notebook he jotted down a plan for a novel set in the dark valley:

Do not forget the idea of having the man (or one of his friends) a sociologist nor overlook the possibility of presenting slabs of Welsh life in the manner either of direct reporting or now I come to think of it, what about having the farm situations seen from many angles – all the others 3rd person – no one being wholly true. From each slab one could regard the farm.

The ‘sociologist’, professional observer of the workings of humanity, is clearly derived from Patrick himself, and indeed in the finished work he appears under palpably thin disguise as its protagonist Pugh, who arrives as a visitor in the valley. The name itself was possibly drawn from ‘old Pugh’, a servant who worked at the house at Kempsey where Patrick had lived as a boy in 1923–24. He had retained in his mind a vivid picture of life in Cwm Croesor, as also its inhabitants, with whom he and my mother maintained warm if intermittent contact for several years after their departure. In January 1952 Bessie Roberts, the neighbouring farmer’s wife, sent them a charming photograph of their two young sons Gwynfor and Alun (‘Taken at school in September / With there love and many thanks to “Antie Vron”’),[fn15] which my mother lovingly preserved.

Gwynfor and Alun Roberts

In September 1951 ‘Pierce sent £5 for the old bikes’ they had left behind to be sold, and four years after their settlement in France my mother was still singing Welsh songs. In addition to his memories, Patrick drew on the journal he had kept during the first nine months of their Welsh existence, on which he relied extensively for descriptive passages in his novel.

Long afterwards he provided this summary analysis of his work:

About forty years ago I did write a mildly experimental book called Testimonies in which all the main characters, having left this world, sat peacefully in the next, each independently delivering an account of his or her recent life to a simple, objective being whom readers of the fifties at once understood to be a kind of non-sectarian recording angel. The novel has just been reissued and to my astonishment many of those who read it today, or at least many reviewers, though very kind about the tale itself, are sadly puzzled by my angel. ‘Who is this investigator?’ they cry. ‘Who him? What is this guy doing around the joint?’

On another occasion he explained further:

I was writing hard, working on a novel called Testimonies, which I placed in Wales, though the situation it dealt with might just as well have arisen on the seacoast of Bohemia: I finished it very late one night and, in a state of near-prostration – how I wish I could, in a line or so, convey the strength of generalised emotion and delight at times like this, when one feels one is writing well. (I speak only for myself, of course.) The book was politely received in England, much more enthusiastically in the States where the intellectual journals praised it very highly indeed. It did not sell well, but New York magazines asked me for stories.[12]

The claim that ‘the situation it dealt with might just as well have arisen on the seacoast of Bohemia’ must be taken with a large grain of salt. The valley setting is described with wonderful vividness, reflecting the fact that it is indeed the Cwm Croesor, unchanged (save for some readily identifiable toponyms), of their four years’ exile. In addition, so far as I have been able to identify them, virtually every character reflects a real individual. Broadly speaking, it is the melodramatic plot alone that derives from Patrick’s imagination.

It is not my purpose to analyse the story. With my mother excluded from the story, Pugh is a combination of Patrick as he really was, and in some respects what he wished to be. Pugh is a university Fellow at Oxford, who is preparing a learned tome on The Bestiary before Isidore of Seville. This was the topic selected by Patrick for a book he hoped would establish his scholarly credentials, on which he had worked in the British Museum before the War. He had also nurtured an early ambition to go up to Oxford, and enjoy the prestige of gaining academic qualification.

Pugh’s antecedents confirm the self-portrait. A forebear had established himself as a draper in Liverpool, while ‘my father, a sociable man, living in a time of acute social distinctions, felt the Liverpool-Welsh side of his ancestry keenly.[fn16] He dropped all Welsh contacts and added his mother’s name, Aubrey, to ours. He had never cared for me to ask him about it.’[13] Patrick’s grandfather had been a successful furrier in London, while his father embarked on a medical career. It is needless to emphasize the change of name, nor (in another context) the selection of ‘Aubrey’ as a gentlemanly alternative. (Pugh further has a close friend named Maturin!) For ‘Liverpool-Welsh’ may be read ‘German’, the original nationality of the Russ family.

The tall red-haired farmer Emyr Vaughan is Patrick’s neighbour Harri Roberts, while his comely wife Bessie provided the model for Bronwen, tragic heroine of the novel.[fn17] Readers may wonder, but for myself I doubt that Patrick himself indulged in serious fantasies about Bessie Roberts. He admired and appreciated attractive women, but was too innately monogamous and devoted to my mother to harbour dangerously improper thoughts. Bessie was simply the model for the fictional Bronwen. Moreover it was a dramatic requirement that the heroine be living immediately below the brooding Pugh in his tiny cottage, while the Roberts farm was the only house adjacent to Fron Wen.

The taxi driver who brings Pugh to his cottage at the beginning was in real life Griffi Roberts, owner of the garage at Gareg, while the gwas (farm boy) John, Pugh’s informant on Welsh lore, was Edgar Williams, our good friend who still lives in Croesor. The originals of other characters are less readily identified today, but there can be little doubt that they reflect to various degrees others with whom Patrick came in contact.

The unmistakable extent to which Patrick drew on real people for his novel dismayed his friend Walter Greenway, who had stayed with him in Cwm Croesor. As Walter later told me, he feared it could cause offence in the valley. However, cordial Christmas greetings and other occasional communications continued to be exchanged annually between Collioure and Cwm Croesor,[fn18] and doubtless Patrick assumed with good reason that few if any people there were likely, or even able, to read a book published in English.

Three Bear Witness (his American publisher retained Patrick’s preferred title Testimonies) was written in 1950, and as my mother only began keeping a diary from January 1951 I do not know as much as I could wish about its composition. With the physical hardship and mental turmoil of life in Cwm Croesor distanced in time and space, Patrick could contemplate his former existence dispassionately, even with nostalgia. Observing the mountains above Collioure, he noted one day: ‘I love the absolute hardness and contrast of the mountain and just that pure sky: the Cnicht ridge had it often.’ At about the same time he jotted down this verse:

The raven of the Pyrenees

Cries harsh and folds his wings to fall.

On Moelwyn Mawr the watcher sees

The folded tumble, hears the call.[fn19]

The contract for The Last Pool provided for the publisher’s retention of an option on his next book, together with an opportunity to consider the proposed book about Southern France. Four months later, on 1 February 1951, Patrick signed the contract for Three Bear Witness. It was in many ways an experimental work, with the imaginative contrivance of the protagonists interrogated in turn for their versions of the same events by an unidentified ‘Recording Angel’. In later life he recalled that ‘I do remember that writing parts of it quite destroyed me’. He also felt it was the best book he had written, and remembered the night he finished it:

‘I was writing very hard that evening, and at three in the morning I went like so on my desk,’ he says, folding himself over his elbows in an exhausted swoon. ‘When I knew it was done I had the feeling of achievement and loss simultaneously’.[14]

Although Patrick, always ill at ease when conducting interviews, was on occasion prone to modify or embroider his memories, it does indeed seem likely that the book was written under considerable stress. Poverty at the little apartement at 39, rue Arago was extreme at the time, and there was no knowing whether anyone beyond my mother would appreciate a book that meant so much to him. In fact her initial reaction was one of disapproval: ‘P. finished T.B. which I did not like.’ However, I suspect this was due to alarm at the extent to which their kindly Welsh neighbours featured in largely recognizable guise throughout the tale. Or was she disturbed by its hero Pugh’s silent adoration of the attractive farmer’s wife next door?

At Secker & Warburg, on the other hand, his editor Roger Senhouse expressed approval. He added some reservations – what he conceived to be excessive use of Welsh words and placenames, a need to locate the ‘Recording Angel’ in time or space, ‘the whole conception of the physical side of Pugh’s infatuation needs careful revision’, and so forth. Since it does not appear that the manuscript or proof of the book has survived, we have only glimpses of its original state, and the alterations Patrick was persuaded to accept. As the contract was signed on 1 February 1951, and Senhouse’s fairly drastic ‘improvements’ were forwarded via Curtis Brown a fortnight later, the book must have made its mark as it stood. By March, however, Patrick was expressing extreme annoyance with Senhouse. When in August they learned that he had been in their neighbourhood, my mother wrote: ‘We are relieved to have been away from Collioure & to have missed him. You can tell by his letters he is a pansey.’[fn20]

Although no one at his publisher’s could guess the extent to which Pugh represented a self-portrait, Patrick resented Senhouse’s verdict:

Character of Pugh. Naturally I don’t want to make him a romantic hero, but there is surely no reason why even a middle-aged scholar should be so unsympathetic. He gives himself away: his hypochondria, his lack of affection, his timidity … and ineptitude (as opposed to mere helplessness and vagueness). All this is really sordid, and as a result I have found something repellent about the idea of his being madly in love.

The criticism is not altogether unfair, and naturally could not take into account Patrick’s unconscious motive, which was I believe in part to purge himself of characteristics of which he continued deeply ashamed. Pugh is endowed with much of the ‘difficult’ side of Patrick’s character, while being denied almost any of his compensating virtues: his mischievous humour, exemplary patience, pertinacity, resilience, courage, unselfishness and generosity. The underlying confessional function of the book meant that a more balanced portrayal of the real-life Pugh might not have acted as confession at all. The same process may be detected in Patrick’s other largely autobiographical novels, The Catalans and Richard Temple. In the latter case, the protagonist provides an extensive confession of his earlier degraded (‘silly’) existence. Significantly, this confession is vouchsafed during a protracted spell of imprisonment and torture, inflicted in order to extract ‘the truth’, and concludes with Temple’s liberation (by the French Resistance). Although it does not appear that Patrick was ever formally admitted to the Catholic Church, he occasionally implied that he was a communicant, and it is not difficult to imagine how the confessional would have appealed to his deep-rooted feelings of shame and guilt.

On one point to which he attached importance, Patrick felt compelled to give way. His title Testimonies was objected to by his English publisher on grounds that ‘it sounds far more like a treatise on codicils, or last words and testaments’. Next: ‘Senhouse wrote: they (or he alone) want to change the title from Testimonies to Bronwen Vaughan. I am against it, but I don’t want to offend them just at this point, so I left it up to him if they feel very strongly about it.’

Finally, the publishers settled on Three Bear Witness.

In her diary my mother reports that Patrick continued to find Senhouse patronizing, petty-minded and obstructive. In March 1951, ‘P. sent C[urtis].B[rown]. a card this morning, worried for Manuscript, & this afternoon had a letter from C.B. with loathesome comments from Senhouse & “a femal[e] reader” on Testimonies.’

Another irritating obstruction, likewise apparently ascribable to Senhouse, was a perverse disregarding of Patrick’s request for inclusion of the dedication: À mes amis de Collioure. This was no empty gesture, and in due course he presented complimentary copies to friends and neighbours. He even managed to sell one to a more prosperous acquaintance.

By the end of the year Patrick declared he could no longer work with Senhouse, and Spencer Curtis Brown wrote to Fred Warburg:

The confidential part of this letter is that apparently Patrick O’Brien really does not get on at all well with Roger Senhouse, so that if you want to keep him on your list, as I hope you will do, it might be a good plan if you could take over most of the correspondence with him. I have never found him in any way a difficult author, and I don’t believe that you would do so.

Warburg had been away in New York during the early part of the year, and now promptly complied with Spencer’s suggestion. In due course Patrick was to wreak characteristic punishment on his troublesome editor. Nearly forty years later, in The Letter of Marque (London, 1988, p. 27), Stephen Maturin learns of the fate of ‘poor Senhouse’, who ascended into the sky in a hot-air balloon whose excessive supply of gas ensured that he ‘was never seen again’.

On 3 January 1952 Warburg sent Patrick strong praise for the book, which he had at last found time to read:

I think you have written an extremely promising first novel and indeed even better than that, for in many ways the novel shows a maturity of outlook and a power of construction which augurs well for the future. I cannot somehow take too much interest in your male hero, although he is clearly and distinctly drawn …

On this issue Warburg was broadly at one with Senhouse. After explaining his reasons, he continued:

But these minor criticisms pale before the accomplishment in other directions, above all the splendid rendering of the Welsh Hills and vales, villages and villagers, and the eternal life of the farms and the treatment of animals, and the surely magnificent description you give of the sheep shearing which stands out in my mind with a clarity and vividness which prove how well you have done it.

One issue on which Patrick expressed a forceful view was the design of the dustjacket. At Collioure his good friend Willy Mucha had agreed to provide an abstract illustration, an offer which Patrick was anxious to see implemented. As he pointed out to Senhouse, Mucha was an artist of considerable reputation: ‘Matisse, Dufy, Braque and Léger think highly of him. (They have given him pictures that I envy enormously).’ The suggestion was however declined by Secker, as also by Harcourt Brace in America, and the collaboration of novelist and painter had to await publication of the more appropriate vehicle of The Catalans.

Finally, there remained the delicate issue of the author’s customary biographical notice. Both the promptness with which he had despatched one for The Last Pool (subsequently mislaid by the publisher), and the accuracy of its information, suggest that it was he who provided that which appears on the back sleeve of Three Bear Witness:

Patrick O’Brian was born in 1914, and started writing early. He produced four books before the war, and also worked for many years, in Oxford, Paris and Italy, on a book on Bestiaries. Most of this valuable material was, however, lost in the war.

During the war he drove an ambulance in London during the blitz, and later joined the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign Office.

He and his wife lived at one time in a remote Welsh valley, where Mr. O’Brian fished, shot and hunted whenever possible. He is at present living on the Mediterranean coast of France.

It will be noted that this broadly accurate autobiographical notice contains no allusion to Ireland, still less any claim to Irish nationality or origin. A close paraphrase of this potted biography features on the dustjacket of the American edition of Patrick’s later work Lying in the Sun, which was entitled The Walker and other stories in the USA. However, there it begins with the additional words ‘Patrick O’Brian was born in the West of Ireland and educated in England.’ It looks as though this item was added by a copywriter at Harcourt Brace – especially as Patrick omitted the notice altogether in the English edition.

The extent to which well-intentioned publishers occasionally made up for Patrick’s dislike of supplying personal data is illustrated by a comment made by my mother in 1952: ‘Irish Writing came with N.L.T.P.T.R.A.;[fn21] very surprised to find biographical notes after I’d refused them because P. doesn’t like it.’ Fortunately, this issue remained for the present a minor irritation. Two overriding concerns exercised Patrick and my mother throughout this critical period in their lives. How was he to relaunch his literary career? And, still more pressingly, how might the impoverished couple survive financially?