A Year to Remember Read online

  The rain during our visit to Mousehole fell continuously, but a fishing port does not lose its charm when it is raining. Fishing smacks are just as busy in bad weather. Mousehole was supported by its pilchard trade with Italy. I had not eaten pilchards until the war, when they came up in rations, in tins flooded in tomato sauce; the men found them ‘tasty’. After the war they vanished from the market. At our hotel they were served fresh for breakfast and were excellent.

  Our plan to spend three weeks in Mousehole was disturbed by Marda’s sudden recall to London for rehearsals. Gwen and I decided to motor home by slow stages. It was then that the chauffeur’s need to return to Easton Court became insistent. There was no point in making a succession of short trips; one saw nothing that way, he argued. One was always packing and unpacking. Far better to operate from a central base: making daily excursions to various beauty spots. What better base could we have than Easton Court?

  If one person in a party has a definite objective, he usually gets his way. Gwen and I did not care very much what we did. She needed to be back by a certain date and that was all. I had no obligations. I could take my time. What not Easton Court? I was the readier to fall in with a plan that saved me constant packing and unpacking, because I had just been inveigled into a writing project that would keep me busy for three weeks. The project was not in itself an important one, but in retrospect it can be seen as the start of the greatest of all changes in publishing, the paperback.

  Sir Allen Lane started Penguins in 1936, but the idea of a small paper-bound book that would fit the pocket came from Sir Ernest Benn. His idea was not for a reprint but for a new story. I was one of the authors approached. The fee offered was £200 on account of a small royalty. £200 was to me a useful amount of money, and I had available a serial story that had come out in the Daily Mirror twenty months before. I had not thought it good enough to publish in hard cover and present to the critics and the public as a serious contribution to the Alec Waugh Oeuvre, if such a thing existed, but it could, I felt, be cut and doctored into a reasonably presentable thirty thousand word novella.

  The story was called ‘Leap Before You Look’. It opened with a young couple, very much in love but with the young man postponing marriage until his career can be adequately launched. The girl in pique marries another man. It was a typical magazine short story, told with magazine adroitness. The reader became interested in the couple, was anxious to know what happened to them, and was ready to follow their fortunes through a series of improbably melodramatic situations that included a revolution in a West Indian republic. It was a readable piece of merchandise, and when Farrar and Rinehart in the summer of 1930 decided to issue a series of dollar books and asked their authors if they had not some neglected manuscript that they could include as they needed to get the books upon the market quickly, I gave them Leap Before You Look. The series failed before my book was published, but as the book had been set up in type they decided to issue it as an ordinary $2.50 novel. It came out in 1933. It was not extensively reviewed. It did not sell very many copies, but I am not aware that it did me any harm, and I had some fun with the five hundred dollars that it earned me.

  The book has had in fact a curious subterranean existence. In 1935 when Cassell’s issued a series of hardback novels at 3s. 6d., it was included in it, and in the early days of paperbacks, before and during the second war, it was twice included in minor collections of popular fiction. As late as 1950 an offer was made for it by one of the better London houses. But this I refused. If too many copies of it were in circulation, there was a danger of my being judged by it rather than by one of the novels into which I have put more of myself: the moral of the episode is, I suppose, that if you can really interest a reader in characters and a situation in the early pages you will make him read on until the end. Many excellent novels do not grip the reader’s interest until the hundredth page.

  Benn’s 9d. novels were a failure. They were extensively publicised, with whole page advertisements and a large lunch (which I was unable to attend) for the launching of the first six volumes. But the public did not respond. I fancy because the books were not good enough. The thirty thousand-word novella is an admirable medium. It can be read in a couple of sittings, its impact is concentrated. But there are very few good novellas in the English language. Maugham’s stories are a lot shorter. It is a length for which there is no obvious market, and few writers will set to work on something that there is little hope of selling, so that an English writer who has an idea that could make a novella would prefer to enlarge it to novel length and make a reasonable sum of money. I suspect that most of the contributors to the series did as I did and hashed up something that lay idle in a desk. The only contribution that seemed to me a genuinely chosen subject was G. B. Stern’s Long Lost Father.

  For me the significance of this commission to contribute to the series was that it decided me to write the book at Easton Court after Gwen Frangçon Davies had returned to London. By staying there two weeks I came to appreciate the charms of that part of Devonshire, and also the charms of the hotel itself. Working quietly upon the story – it was mainly a job of scissors and paste – I failed to appreciate the significance of the political news that was filling the columns of the Newspapers. There had been so many scares about the country’s tottering economy, so many cries of ‘Wolf, Wolf’, that I suspected, as nearly all the papers were owned by the Tories, that these alarmist reports were part of a Tory attack upon the Labour government.

  I was more interested in the publication of my father’s autobiography, and in the gloom that was harassing Chapman and Hall’s activities. They had found that already the sales for 1931 were down by three thousand pounds. On the other hand the auguries for One Man’s Road were good. Hugh Walpole and J. B. Priestly liked it, and it was due for a Book Society recommendation. It was to be published in the same week as Ernest Rhys’ autobiography Everyman Remembers. The two books were certain to be reviewed together. My father did not consider this a disadvantage. He and Rhys were old friends; there could be no question of jealousy between them. And the two books were so different that they would provide the reviewer with useful comparisons. Rhys’ book was very largely about the people whom he had met. It was anecdotal. My father’s was a personal, subjective narrative. My father expected that Everyman Remembers would sell better than The Road. I do not know whether it did, but the sales of The Road were highly satisfactory. Chapman and Hall’s traveller said that he did not expect to subscribe more than 300 copies, but actually the subscription order was 403 and my father’s diary contains weekly references to repeat orders. In its first week 164 copies were sold. In the next week 170. In the fourth 82. The reviews, with the exception of The Times Literary Supplement, were excellent. Many old friends wrote to express their delight with it. It was the kind of book that invited correspondence. Contemporaries wrote to exchange points of view. It made a happy September for my father. So was it a happy month for Evelyn who was back now from his idyll in the South of France with the first ten thousand words of a new novel. It was then called Accession and my father found it excellent. It was to appear a year later as Black Mischief.

  * Polly Adler in the 20s and 30s was New York’s most famous ‘madame’. She told her own story in A House Is Not A Home.

  XI

  The best account of the financial crisis that I have read is Harold Nicolson’s in his life of King George V. Harold Nicolson was Sir Oswald Mosley’s associate in the launching of the New Party, and his diaries of 1931 provide a day to day record of what was happening behind the scenes. The crisis was precipitated in the middle of June by the failure of the Credit Anstalt of Vienna. In the same month the Committee of Finance and Industry presented its report of which Philip Snowdon, the Chancellor of the Exchequer stated in the House of Commons that the economies recommended were so fierce that the house must be united. Punch on August the 5th had a cartoon called ‘The Half Nelson Touch’, showing the report of the Economical Commit
tee presented as a snake, with Snowdon looking at it through the wrong end of the telescope. The caption ran, ‘It all depends on how you look at these things; as I see it, it seems quite insignificant’.

  By the middle of August it had become plain that the Bank of England could not support the pound without loans from New York and Paris, whose bankers were refusing to make loans until Britain could present a balanced budget; this would involve a heavy cut in government expenditure: in particular a cutting of the unemployment benefit – ‘the dole’ – which was an essential part of the Labour programme. It was unlikely that the Trades Union Congress would agree to that. The Prime Minister, Ramsay Macdonald, cut short his holiday in Scotland and returned to London. So did Baldwin, who was in Aix-les-Bains. There was a succession of consultations between the party leaders. It was clear that the crisis had become a national issue, with all the parties agreeing on a policy. Punch had a cartoon of Macdonald preparing to cut down the tree of national extravagance and Baldwin and Sir Herbert Samuel, the leader of the Liberal Party, saying, ‘Look here if you really mean to use that axe, we’ll bury the hatchet’.

  The problem was, however, to get the Labour Party to agree. Meeting followed meeting. Baldwin returned to Aix-les-Bains. The T.U.C. refused to commit itself until its meeting early in September. The rain fell steadily. On the 21st first class cricket was only possible in three matches. On August the 24th the King on his own initiative came up from Scotland. As Harold Nicolson points out, he never went beyond his constitutional powers, but his part was a decisive one. Baldwin too, returned to London and the King saw both him and Samuel. Macdonald continued to argue with his cabinet. He could not get them to agree to the economies that would allow the budget to be balanced. He had no alternative, he said, to resignation. He went to Buckingham Palace to resign. But to the astonishment of his cabinet he returned with the announcement that the King had refused to accept his resignation, and that he had agreed himself without committing his colleagues, to lead a national government in company with Baldwin’s Conservatives and Samuel’s Liberals, for the length of the emergency.

  At first there was pandemonium in the Cabinet Room. Then when order was re-established, Herbert Morrison, one of the youngest members, was the first to speak. ‘Well, Prime Minister, it is very easy to get into such a combination! You will find it very difficult to get out of it and I, for one, am not coming with you’. Only J. H. Thomas and Philip Snowdon – and he with considerable reluctance – joined Macdonald. The mass of the party never forgave him. They felt that he had betrayed them, that the whole thing was a ‘banker’s ramp’.

  Not surprisingly, since the National Government handed over control to the Tories – and the Press was mainly owned by the Tories – the change over was; welcomed enthusiastically in Fleet Street. Punch had a cartoon of Ramsay Macdonald, Baldwin and Samuel pulling on a rope, under the eyes of Mr Punch, with the caption, ‘and a pull altogether or so Mr Punch hopes’. On September 2 the pound was presented on a tight rope marked ‘financial crisis’ with the caption, ‘the eyes of the world are upon me, and I’m not going to lose my balance’. Macdonald and the T.U.C. were shown in conflict as Roman warriors. There was an air of facile optimism. The clauses of the Economy Budget were announced. The basic rate of Income Tax was raised from 4s 6d to 5s. Ministerial salaries of over five thousand pounds were cut by twenty per cent; of over two thousand pounds by fifteen per cent; ten per cent on lower salaries. Judges’ and teachers’ salaries were down: the dole was cut, and there was a reduction in pay and pensions for defence services. Punch’s cartoon showed John Bull pushing a barrow piled with higher duties and more taxes, with the caption ‘well, here goes, the hard road to safety’.

  I do not remember that I or any of my friends were particularly agitated about all this. We were none of us salaried civil servants. Few of us had property. Our incomes were small and fluctuant. We lived from hand to mouth, from article to article. At the start of a year we could only guess at what we should earn; we would have lucky and unlucky breaks – as a golfer has; one day his putts drop, the next day they don’t. My father’s diary contains no references to the forming of the National Government, nor does my mother’s.

  By the middle of the third week in September, I had finished my adaptation of Leap Before You Look. There seemed no point in my staying on at Chagford any longer. I decided to return to London, pausing to visit my uncle George Raban, the Vicar of Bishop’s Hull, a small village two and half miles from Taunton. I had no plans beyond that. I might go down to the South of France. Mary was in Paris. I might pause on the way to see her. It might be a good idea to meet her in a different setting. The great advantage of being a freelance was that I had not to make plans in advance. All seemed for the best in the best of all possible worlds. And then out of the blue, an event occurred of whose significance I was unaware because it was deliberately played down in the British Press and I am a casual reader. On Thursday, September 17, the British North Atlantic fleet in Invergorden mutinied because of the pay cuts, and Wall Street and the Continent of Europe, where the incident was prominently reported, became convinced that Britain was on the verge of anarchy. All hands to the pumps if there were any pumps to man.

  Later, the Opposition was to say, ‘at Jutland in 1916 the British Navy beat the ex-Kaiser – at Invergorden in 1931, it beat Mr Montagu Norman and the Bank of England.’

  On Saturday, September the 19th a young American student in Edinburgh went to his bank to cash a large book of travellers cheques. He had come to the conclusion that he could not afford the extra year at the university that he would have liked. He had better draw out what money he had left, take a short holiday, and return to the United States. The cashier looked at the travellers cheques, then looked at the young man. ‘May I give you some advice,’ he said. ‘May I suggest that you cash these cheques on Monday morning. It will be a convenience for us both.’

  On Sunday the National Government which had assumed power in order to protect the pound decided to leave the Gold Standard. On the Monday morning, the American student’s travellers cheques were worth so much more that their owner felt he would be justified in staying an extra year in the university. The student’s name was James Michener. Seventeen years later his opera South Pacific was an international moneymagnet. How much did that bank teller’s advice affect his future? Who can tell? The course of his career might have been very different.

  For me, as I suppose for most Britons born before 1910, the announcement on that Monday morning was the biggest shock that we had known or were to know. Other shocks, such as the declarations of wars, the overthrowing of presidents and princes, the outburst of revolutions, were things that had been foreseen or were happening somewhere else. They had not given one the feeling that ‘the pillared firmament was rottenness and earth’s base built on stubble’.

  ‘Safe as the Rock of Gibraltar,’ ‘Safe as the Bank of England’, these had been the ‘two main pillars vaulted high’ that sustained our way of life. From one point of view it made no difference to me at all. I had no investments whose value had been cut in half; on the contrary the dollars that were due to me from New York would now have a greater purchasing power in England. It was not a personal, it was a national disaster. Sitting on the lawn of the hotel, in the bland autumn sunlight, I read first the headlines, then the first leader, then the various news items.

  The Times was urbanely reassuring. ‘There is,’ it said, ‘no cause for alarm in the decision which the Government has reached. On the contrary its action will inure to the benefit not only of this country but also of the whole world.’

  That night on the wireless Philip Snowdown spoke as a bitterly disappointed but still spirited man. The crisis had been intensified by false pessimism. There had been no united front, then there had been the unrest in the Navy. He adjured his fellow countrymen to keep their heads.

  Myself, I was impatient to get back to London, to find out what was really happening, to sit in the sand
parlour at the Savile and hear what the men who were behind the news were thinking. I regretted the two days I had to spend at Bishop’s Hull.

  On the third morning after England had left the Gold Standard, I found him in high spirits. ‘This is exactly what the country needs,’ he said. ‘We have been idle, living on the past. We must recognise that the world is changing. This is the challenge that we as a country needed.’ My Uncle George was dependent entirely on his stipend as a Parish priest and on the interest on his not very large investments. If the pound were to collapse in the way that the mark and franc had done, he would be in a bad position, but he was not worrying about himself. He saw the government’s failure as the spur the country needed. ‘That is what I am going to say on Sunday in my evening sermon. The Government is we ourselves. It is because we, as individuals have been living selfishly and imprudently, that we are in trouble.’ He paused, then he gave one of the little giggles that made people wonder if he was ‘all there’, ‘I must inspire my flock, Alec, inspire my flock.’

  Was England as a whole going to accept the fallibility of the Bank of England as a spur to effort? If it was, then indeed the devaluation of our currency might prove to be the spur we needed. It was from my Uncle George that I got the first clue to what the national temper was to be during the autumn that lay ahead.

  The two days I spent at Bishop’s Hull were a pleasant breathing space before the necessary making of decisions that awaited me in London. It was twenty years since I had been there. But up till my grandfather’s death in 1912, we went there every summer. My parents took a holiday abroad at the end of July, then they would divide two weeks between my father’s family at Midsomer Norton and my mother’s here at Bishop’s Hull. At Midsomer Norton there was a local family that organised boys’ cricket games. At Bishop’s Hull I used to watch Somerset play at Taunton. The two holidays complemented one another. I looked forward to each equally. There was only one feature of the holiday to which I did not look forward, that was the harvester bugs that in Bishop’s Hull used to attack my head, and raise welts in my hair. I wondered if they would be as voracious still. To my relief they were not. Perhaps the last week in September was too late for them. Perhaps they found my bald scalp unappetizing. At any rate I slept at peace.