13 September my parents’ old friend and colleague from their wartime service with Political Warfare Executive, the American academic Jack Christopher, came to stay. Lodgings were found for him with the Azémas, while he spent each day with us. A tall, mild-mannered scholar, he was co-author of a recently published two-volume History of Civilization. I recall Patrick’s humorously condemning the work, on the grounds that it omitted to mention a battle between the O’Tooles and the Danes – a joke repeated from a passage in The Golden Ocean, which he had just completed. While Jack was a model of discretion and politeness, Patrick at times used his presence to ‘punish’ me in a manner he not seldom employed when irritated, deliberately excluding me from conversations, in the course of which he occasionally let fall none too subtle allusions to my deficiencies.
Recollection of this first visit still pains me. Indeed, I was for long inclined to accept almost the entirety of blame for the mutual ill-feeling which increasingly pervaded my stay, until many years later I came to read my mother’s diary account of my visit: ‘N. left on 19th: when it started going bad I do not remember. Only I do remember being in the middle of it & trying & trying to think of something to bring things back to pleasantness.’
As her normal reaction to any such awkwardness was to support Patrick, right or wrong, I am inclined to infer that she sensed the faults were not all on one side. Long afterwards, I was told by their friend Mary Burkett that Patrick angrily declared on my departure that he would never allow me in the house again! This was the only such occasion of which I am aware when my mother put her foot down, insisting she would continue to see me regardless.
Fortunately the unpleasantness blew over, and the letter I wrote back after my return reads as though all had been warmth and light. Over the decades to come, I confess that Patrick and I continued at times to find each other difficult, or even downright insufferable. But each in his own way was, I believe, conscious that blame lay not all on one side, and such unpleasant clashes were invariably overcome and dismissed – lessening considerably, too, as the years passed by. However, there is no escaping the certainty that, had I not been my mother’s son, I would never have been invited to Collioure again.
From tho yles that I haue spoken of before in the lond of Prestre Iohn, that ben vnder erthe as to vs that ben o this half, and of other yles that ben more furthere beyonde, whoso wil pursuen hem for to comen ayen right to the parties that he cam fro and so enviroune alle erthe; but what for the yles, what for the see, and for what strong rowynge, fewe folk assayen for to passen that passage, all be it that men myghte don it wel that myght ben of power to dresse him thereto, as I haue seyd you before. And therfore men returnen from tho yles aboueseyd be other yles costyng fro the lond of Prestre Iohn.
M.C. Seymour (ed.), Mandeville’s Travels (Oxford, 1967), p. 223
By 1954 Patrick’s inspiration appeared to be flagging. Many authors will recognize the symptoms, when we find him turning to revisiting old notes and uncompleted earlier ventures. Among the latter was a novel for boys, which he felt might prove worth reviving. On 15 December 1945, not long after their arrival in Wales, he wrote in his journal:
I have just re-read that Samarcand tale. It is better than I had supposed, and it is well worth finishing. Suffers from want of central plot. It is hardly more than a series of incidents, more or less probable, fortuitously connected. M. is typing the rehashed novel. I hope it may not prove a disappointment, but it was poor stuff to begin with.
This indicates that the manuscript was among those efforts which he wrote in a flurry of creativity just before war broke out. However, the debilitating attack of writer’s block which assailed him during their four years’ stay in Wales obstructed any further endeavour in that direction, and eventually he found himself unable to progress beyond chapter six.[1]
Under pressure, he tended to look back to those exhilarating pre-war days, when inspiration apparently flowed unhampered by doubts. In November 1952 my mother observed that Patrick was ‘thinking of Samarkand’. Once again, nothing came of it, and a further year passed by when ‘P. took out Samarcand & looked at it.’ This time he experienced a sudden flow of inspiration, and on 26 January 1954 ‘P. did 2000 words of S.’ He was sufficiently pleased with his progress to write next day to his literary agent Naomi Burton at Curtis Brown in New York, enquiring whether Harcourt Brace might take the completed work.
By the beginning of February 1954 the book was well under way, when Naomi responded to my mother with a ‘fine misunderstanding about me leaving P[atrick]., & she says send Samarcand to her’. This appeared encouraging, so far as it went, and Patrick raced ahead to the conclusion. Ten days later he came to bed at 1.30 in the morning, ‘having finished Samarcand. He could not sleep, & looks so poorly today. S. posted …’
They had sent their sole typescript of the text, and an agonizing wait culminated on 24 April with a letter from Naomi containing the dispiriting news that Harcourt Brace was not interested. The precious typescript itself did not return until 6 May, when they forwarded it to Spencer Curtis Brown in London. Their relief and excitement may be imagined when, on 17 June, they learned that the publishers Rupert Hart-Davis were ‘“very enthusiastic” about dear Samarcand & suggest £100 advance’. On 24 June a contract was signed for ‘a Juvenile work by the Proprietor at present entitled “THE ROAD TO SAMARCAND”’, with the advance payable in successive tranches of £50 on delivery and £50 on publication.
The money was welcome (though as ever slow to arrive), and high hopes were pinned on the novel’s success. However, when The Road to Samarcand was published in February 1955, the outcome proved disappointing. Reviews were sparse and varied. While the naval historian Oliver Warner gave it a cautious thumbs up in Time and Tide, the Times Literary Supplement’s anonymous reviewer tartly derided its conclusion – ‘as absurd politically as it is geographically’. The criticism may have been directed against the protagonists’ dramatic escape from Tibet in a Russian helicopter, discovered intact in a snowdrift. The story comprises many exciting adventures, of a character familiar to readers of early boys’ journals such as Boys’ Own Paper and Chums, wherein a daring English lad, customarily accompanied by an excitable Irishman and laconic Scot, survives a succession of hair’s-breadth perils at the hands of sinister foreigners. Patrick’s contribution to the latter is an evil Bolshevik agent named Dimitri Mihailovitch, who has his neck deservedly broken by the youthful hero’s uncle Sullivan. Evidently Patrick could not resist according this scoundrel my unfortunate father’s Christian name and patronymic!
The pre-war genesis of The Road to Samarcand represented a throwback to Patrick’s earlier success with children’s stories. However, while Caesar and Hussein were delightful original creations, it is hard not to concede that Samarcand represents something of a pastiche of the boys’ books that he loved during his lonely and imaginative childhood.[fn1]
Derrick, the boy hero of Samarcand, is an orphan assigned to the custody of his uncle Terry Sullivan, master of the schooner Wanderer plying the China Sea. Sullivan and his Scottish companion Ross are the protagonists of Patrick’s three immediately preceding published short stories, the third of which (‘No Pirates Nowadays’) is effectively prefatory to the events recounted in the novel.[fn2] The crew includes a comical Chinese cook Li Han, whose exotic English provides a lively source of humour. Together with the eccentric and resourceful archaeologist Professor Ayrton, the friends survive perilous adventures in China and Tibet, battling Chinese warlords and Bolshevik agents, eventually coming through against all odds and acquiring the customary treasure.
I suspect that Patrick’s voracious reading as a boy in Willesden Green or his Devonshire preparatory school included Under the Chinese Dragon: A Tale of Mongolia, published in 1912. The author,