Patrick O’Brian

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.