Nikolai Tolstoy - Patrick O’Brian - A Very Private Life

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

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

With regard to making ends meet:

The food that you can afford when you are very poor needs a great deal of care and preparation to be anything but sickeningly dull. With very great care it can be surprisingly good – garlic, herbs (especially thyme and parsley) flour and a little oil rightly used can give plain potatoes soul and substance. [fn5] Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

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

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

Regular daily routine was essential for preservation of morale:

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

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

Sink: down in the grey sea

slowly down. The layers

silent, of depression. Down.

Through them.

No irritation, anger left

no hint of red

all grey dull and silence welling

up past your ears.

You sink your head

Down. Breathing slow

Down. Eyes unfocussed

One tear creeps down the bent

ash dying face.

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

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

Do not suppose their motions pantomime

Because the thing they dig is dark, unseen

The mattock and the shovel swing in time

A near approach will show you what they mean.

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

A Dream: I died, & arrived on a shore that struck me as being like Lundy, from across a big grey sea. I worried about P coming, & he arrived soon after. [fn6] Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом. Was filled with immense feeling of relief because of two things: permanence in this existence, & continuence of free will // I am not aware of ever having felt unhappiness from the impermanence of this life, nor of regretting the loss of free will in the usual pre-conceived notion of Heaven. Have worked backwards & am now fully aware of both, though much comforted by the exceedingly vivid dream. The dream had no sequence of events, but was like a state of being. (That life there would go on for ever). (In the manner of owning a house instead of renting it).

Lundy is the island in the Bristol Channel where my mother spent many happy holidays when living as a girl in North Devon. What I am sure she did not know, is that it was regarded by the pagan Celts as a location of the Otherworld, where the souls of the dead are received. [fn7] Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.

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

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

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

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