Nikolai Tolstoy - Patrick O’Brian

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 dis contented, 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.’