Maureen could claim the extraordinary record of having a fatherin-law who was born eight years after the Battle of Waterloo. The fifth Marquess lived from 1822 to 1904. The sixth – Don – was born in 1903, when his father was eighty.
One of my most vivid memories of this remarkable sojourn in Paris was of the first dinner I had had at the Ritz – where I first met pretty Maureen – and gnarled Dickie – and beautiful Anoushka.
Chapter Three
The year I was born and the day I was born, at 08.00 hours on the 30th of June, the largest meteorite ever to strike the earth, indeed the greatest cosmic impact of at least the last 2,000 years, landed in Siberia. To quote Dr David Whitehouse, the BBC Online Science Editor:
The impact had a force of 20 million tonnes of TNT, equivalent to 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. It is estimated that 60 million trees were felled over an area of 2,200 square kilometres …
… The first expedition to reach the site was led by Russian scientist L. A. Kullick in 1938. His team was amazed to find so much devastation but no obvious crater.
So began the mystery of Tunguska. What was the object that caused such destruction and why did it leave no crater?
When I read this piece to Gwen Hartfield, my housekeeper, she said: ‘It does bring you down to earth with a bump, doesn’t it?’
Naturally I disclaim all responsibility, and I have never been to the site. I rely on hearsay.
I rely on hearsay for everything that has happened in the world before I was born, and the world, as I know it, will end on the day I die. When I become part of ‘the dull, the indiscriminate dust’ there is nothing to prove to me that anything will still go on, any more than that anything existed before I opened my eyes and blinked up at my doting parents. Nothing can prove to me that the world and all it appears to contain has an objective reality. I know it has a subjective reality but no more. ‘There, sir, I refute it thus,’ Dr Johnson said, when in an argument with Boswell over Bishop Berkeley’s theory of the essential non-existence of matter, as he kicked vigorously at a stone. But what did Dr Johnson refute or disprove – if he ever lived, that is? Only that his foot felt the weight of the stone as it rolled away from him. I burn my finger and I feel the pain. I feel nothing of the horrible pains of a thousand martyrs who have been – it is said – burned at the stake for their beliefs, or disbeliefs. Even among my nearest and dearest there is no transference – can be no transference – of experience. One can feel empathy for someone suffering, but one cannot feel the suffering. We are all alone – desperately alone. What are we in this world? A conjunction of subjective impressions making up something that is accepted as reality?
I have long been convinced of the illusory nature of all human experience; but where does it lead me? – To Plato and his parable of the cave? Or is it just back to Cogito, ergo sum?
I have always been secretive about my age, therefore there have never been any great celebrations on my reaching any of the evermore-lonely eminences of life. Such secrecy, of course, runs totally counter to modern practice. Every newspaper demands it. ‘39-yearold, old Etonian, ex-Guardsman, former trombonist John Smith- Brown was yesterday charged with …’. Every official form, however trivial, has a space for ‘date of birth’. Any casual acquaintance will suddenly come out with ‘how old are you?’
Reticence over age is very much a family failing, and I can’t explain why. I remember when I was twenty being embarrassed that I was so old and preferring not to mention it. I never knew my mother’s age or my father’s age until just before they died.
But my aunt the violinist carried things a bit far. Taken with acute appendicitis at the age of seventy, she was asked how old she was by the doctor accompanying her in the ambulance to the hospital. ‘ Sixty,’ she replied, and ever afterwards her official age was economical of the truth by ten years. Since she had not contributed to a state pension and in those days it was not obligatory, the deception did not deprive her of a pension, for she would have received none anyway.
When she died, aged eighty-five, she left instructions that her age was not to be put on her coffin or on her tombstone.
For a person such as myself, who has achieved a certain notoriety, it is of course much more difficult to keep one’s privacy on this matter; but on the whole I have had a certain amount of fun in deceiving people. In Who’s Who I don’t give my birth date, and in four other similar publications around the world I have given different dates, all of them wrong. So what? Does it matter? Who profits but the idly curious?
In The Black Moon, when Aunt Agatha lies dying at the age of ninety-eight, her last conscious sensation is of her kitten’s fur as it rubs its head against her hand. I wonder what mine will be. I remember my first conscious sensation is of my grandfather jokingly putting his specs on my nose and my crying in indignation because the world I looked out on was all prisms. I can’t date that precisely but he died when I was two.
My uncle Jack, the one who died at eighty-four, was a newspaper editor who married a lady called Emily Towler. They had a son, who died, and then seven daughters, all good-looking and all of abounding health and vigour. They were called Emmie, Edna, Marjorie, Winifred, Kathleen, Millicent and Dorothea. Em, their mother, put on weight and then more weight and still more weight. She never went out, being embarrassed by her size, but was very extravagant, ordering things through the post, and constantly ran my uncle into debt. I remember going to see her once as a very small boy and being compelled, as it seemed to me, to crawl up a feather bed to kiss her. It must have been almost true, for when the family moved houses it was found she was too stout to get into a taxi, and she had to go in the furniture van.
Thus do music-hall jokes impinge on real life.
Chapter Four
One day during the first year of the war, when I was still waiting for call-up, I went to Truro by train and sat opposite a young RAF officer who told me he was convalescing after a crash. He had a substantial, barely healed scar from temple to lower cheek.
‘We were only on a diversionary op over Abbeville,’ he said, ‘and some lucky fool with an ack-ack gun blew half my wing off. Thought I could get home but then the gas started leaking. Ditched near the Isle of Wight, and nobody saw me for a hell of a time. Must admit it was raining.’
While convalescing he had been visiting his parents near Padstow, but he couldn’t wait to be operational again.
‘It’s a different life. A good crate is a joy to handle. You’re in a new dimension. Grounded you’re like a beetle. Up aloft you’re a bird.’
‘Do you like actual air combat?’
‘When it’s over, yes. And the prospect of it. Yes, I suppose I do. With luck it’s fighting one to one, and that’s a challenge.’
A very tall bony good-looking young man with a high-strung disquiet about him that made a great impression on me. And a depth and darkness that lay behind the frivolity of his air force language. He was not at all nervous, but one guessed that strong nerves contributed to his latent urgent vitality.
At that time a hazy picture of the character who was to become Ross Poldark had already formed, and I was writing about him while his appearance and character still grew.
Some friend told me once that there was an element of Heathcliff in Ross Poldark. A Cornishman, Peter Pool, more perceptively, I think, saw an affinity with Captain Hornblower, at least in his capacity for self-criticism. It’s impossible for me to take a detached view of Ross’s origin and character. All I know is that the young airman, his general appearance and my perception of his character, provided the basis for what followed.
In the early years of my time in Cornwall I became very friendly with a young chemist called Ridley Polgreen, who died at the grievously early age of thirty-two. When I began to write the first of the Cornish novels, I thought to write about a man called Ross Polgreen – which itself is a rare name in the county; but after a few chapters the name Polgreen seemed a little too floral, a little too gentle. I wanted something a bit mor
e formidable, darker. Darker, that was it. And so the name came into being. There never was a Poldark before. Since then various institutions have borrowed the name. There is unfortunately no copyright in titles. Though I suppose use of the name is a form of flattery.
During the filming of Poldark Ross’s scar was the subject of an occasional joke. One morning everyone arrived on the set, which happened to be out of doors, with a scar on the cheek exactly like Ross’s, cast and technicians alike. Shooting began twenty minutes late that morning.
I wish I could be as explicit as that in considering the creation of Demelza. Obviously there have been borrowings, chiefly from my wife. I took her sturdy common sense and judgement, her courage, her earthy ability to go at once to the root of a problem and point the answer; her intense interest and pleasure in small things; and particularly I have used her gamine sense of humour. As for the rest, most of it seemed to come from within. A romantic man’s perception of an ideal woman? That was maybe how it began, but I have had no more than parental control over how she has developed.
Sometimes a name is a great help. While the first book was still in its preliminary stages I was driving across Bodmin Moor, and not far from Roche saw a small signpost marked DEMELZA. Until then she had no name; after that she could have had no other.
Warleggan, taken from another village on the moors, was also a help in formulating the characteristics of that clan. Incidentally it was reported to me that one evening in Pratt’s Club the doyens of two distinguished Cornish families were heard to be arguing as to which family had provided the model for the Warleggans. Each claimed it. Which is a little surprising considering the character of the family portrayed.
In fact, elements from both families were incorporated, but my interest was chiefly centred on the Lemon family, which dominated Truro at the end of the eighteenth century. F. L. Harris, the historian, said he always thought of the Warleggans as ‘ Bad Lemons’.
Jud Paynter’s character I took from three men I knew: Dick Hill, Fred Sampson, and George Murray. From Hill I got the appearance and the drunkenness, from Sampson the apocalyptic indignation and sense of injustice, from Murray the mispronunciations. The latter two were coastguards, and Sampson I have already referred to.
Dick Hill lived with his sister Florrie in a cottage in Tywarnhayle Road. Florrie was the perfect model for Prudie. Lank black hair, powerful voice, ponderous figure, I used to see Dick Hill cycling to the pub every evening and wondered, as the distance from his cottage to the pub was not three hundred yards, why he bothered to cycle there – until I saw him returning home one night and realized he used his cycle to lean on.
Florrie Hill took part in one of the one-act plays I wrote for amateur production at that time, and, in so doing, betrayed some of the extravagances which may have stemmed from the part she played or was hitherto unexpressed from within her own nature.
One day, when the second series of Poldark was being filmed, I was sitting on a deckchair watching the scene – this was in Boconnoc, near Lostwithiel. I was approached by a local man, probably in his sixties, bald-headed, two-toothed, battered hat, which he kept taking on and off, corduroy trousers, tattered jacket, and he sat down beside me and started talking. It was Job, I believe, who said, ‘A spirit passed before my face and the hair of my flesh stood up.’ My hair wanted to stand up. Here was Jud, conceived by me thirty years ago but now incarnate, sitting beside me in a stable yard in the thin May sunlight. Most of his declamation, which was nonstop, was speaking of events from which he had emerged triumphant. His most-used phrase was not ‘Tedn right, tedn proper’ – stemming first from Fred Sampson – but ‘How ’bout that, then? How ’bout that?’
I never saw him again. I sometimes wonder if he ever really existed. Assuming he was real, it came as a reassuring shock to me to discover that the Cornish strain of eccentricity still runs true and that I had not unduly exaggerated it.
Those who have read Poldark’s Cornwall will remember the occasion a few years after the end of the war when a trim blackbearded young man in shabby clothes called at Treberran and asked me if I owned the Stamps Land in Perrancombe. I said I did. He explained that he was starting a small mine entirely on his own at Mithian and that parts of the waterwheel and the heads and lifters would be useful to him. Could he buy them? Although reluctant to part with this picturesque ruin, I told him he could have them without cost to himself except the transport. He was pleased at this, and we chatted for a few minutes. He was upset at the way Cornwall was getting spoiled, and felt it was largely the result of up-country folk coming into Cornwall and developing it for their own profit. He also expressed a grudge against up-country writers who wrote about the county and made money out of it all. Interested in this, I asked him if he had any particular writers in mind? He replied: ‘ Well, this chap Winston Graham, for instance.’
A quicker-witted man would no doubt have led him on; instead I blurted out my guilt at once. He did not see this as amusing, but neither was he at all embarrassed. After a few seconds of thoughtful staring he explained accusatively that he lived at Mingoose, and that since the early Poldark novels were published he had been much troubled by people coming around looking for Mingoose House, where in the novels the Treneglos family lives. ‘They come round my place Sat’day af’noons, Sunday mornings, looking for Mingoose House. There isn’t no Mingoose House. There isn’t no such place. Tis a proper nuisance!’
I did not tell him that, even if it had now vanished, there had been a Mingoose House. It is marked plainly on William Tunnicliffe’s map of Cornwall of 1791, and the house is shown to be in the possession of one John Harris, Esq.
Instead, I apologized for being who I was, and he came to take a more favourable view of me. Had I ever been down a one-man mine? No, I said. ‘Then come Sunday af’noon, I’ll show ’ ee.’ Which he did. It was clearly part of an old mine which he had redeveloped. The ladders were shaky and so in the end was I. Later we went back to his cottage for tea, and he played me hymn tunes on the organ he had built himself into the wall of the cottage.
In the Poldark novels he was Ben Carter, son of Jim and Jinny, who was in love with Clowance.
I wish it were as easy to pinpoint other characters I lifted from life. In a canvas as wide as the twelve Poldark novels, the number of characters is enormous and their variation, one from another, is enormous; but, looking back, there are relatively few cases in which I have drawn from a living original. It’s as if, in the course of my life, I have encountered thousands of people and they have descended into a sort of cauldron of the subconscious, and some part of one or another has been selected or has surfaced to the conscious at the suitable time to be made into fictional flesh. I don’t ever remember looking around in search of new personalities; they have always been available. But of course you must have an understanding of a character, you don’t just feel with, you have to feel in. Empathy, not sympathy, even though what you find there is dislikeable.
Stories are another matter and are the subject of weeks, sometimes months, of agonizing indecision. That aunt of whom I have already written once said to me: ‘Oh, how I envy you. Stories come from you like plums falling from a laden plum tree.’ If she but knew.
Names are often difficult. I have already written of how I came by the names of Poldark and Demelza. And Warleggan, from a village on Bodmin Moor, was a name which felt immediately right.
The area round which Nampara is centred is St Ann’s, Perranporth, and partly of Crantock, chiefly West Pentire. It is meant as a composite picture, not to put onto an Ordnance Survey map. Various maps have been drawn by enthusiastic readers, and some of these have been brilliantly accurate. But while approving of them, I have never endorsed them without a disclaimer of responsibility. On the other hand, where actual towns exist, such as Truro, Falmouth, Redruth, I have tried to make them as accurate as research can achieve.
Digressing slightly, I often think that a good novelist is never altogether a free man and never quite a w
hole one. The stuff of his life is the stuff of his writing, and vice versa, and he can’t escape. That is why, if things are going badly with his work, it is a constant nagging worry, however much he may appear to be enjoying himself. Conversely, when things are going well, it offers a constant warm retreat of the mind against boredom, annoyance and discomfort.
It could be said that an author is the most harmless form of schizophrenic. He lives for a substantial part of his time in a world of his own creation, even fantasy, but never – one hopes – loses track with reality. When he is the participator he is also, willy-nilly, the observer. While being attached, he is also detached. In one of his diaries Arnold Bennett confesses that when he went to see his mother when she was dying, parallel with his absolutely genuine grief some part of him was taking in the texture of the blankets, the smell of the oil lamp, the drip of liquid on the edge of the medicine bottle, the fly buzzing against the windowpane. In different mood Goethe admits that in the middle of one of his numerous love affairs he found himself tapping out the hexameters of his latest poem on the backbone of his new girlfriend.