Enchanted Evening (31 page)

But after that, it wasn't a sacrifice on my part at all, for Mrs King looked after me like a devoted nanny. The breakfasts that went with the bed-and-breakfast rent had always been good. But now they were excellent, and Mrs King insisted on doing all my washing and ironing for free, as well as keeping my room like a new pin instead of the pigsty it had resembled before. My besetting sin had been untidiness, and she lectured me on this in vain. I remember hearing her complain on this head to my friend Fudge Cosgrave, who had called in with a packet of prospective work: ‘
Ooh
, that Miss Kaye! I've never had any of my young ones as untidy as she is. The worst time was when I found her frying pan in her bed!' (Fudge was always quoting that one at me, but I don't believe it for a moment. I
couldn't
have been that bad!)

It was also during my Limerston Street days that I took my first flight in an aeroplane, a small two-seater affair belonging to Tommy Richardson, a much admired childhood friend who has already figured in my account of an exhilarating school holiday spent with Aunt Lizzie in Bedford.
1
Having often thought how wonderful it would be to fly around those white, spectacular and apparently solid ‘cloud capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces' that on warm summer evenings stand heaped above the horizon, I jumped at the offer.

Well, they are a swizzle of course. As I ought to have realized. We went up on a marvellous evening when all the clouds were standing still against an immensity of blue. But the moment you tried to explore them, you found yourself in thick mist in which you couldn't see anything. Very disappointing.

Tommy had changed very little from the inventive gang-leader of our schooldays, and when the Second World War broke out he joined the Air Force, and died in a bomber that crashed over Germany. ‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old…' Dear Tommy!

Chapter 21

It was Limerston Street that changed the whole direction of my life from art to writing. I could cope with the days, because I was kept busy working alongside the rest of the Chelsea Illustrators. But the evenings were long and very lonely, and in order not to sit and think of Tacklow and all that I had lost with his death, I joined a ‘Tuppenny Library' at the end of the street.

Those libraries were wonderful institutions for the lonely and for those who did not wish to think, or remember. You paid a small deposit to register, and after that you paid tuppence,
1
which entitled you to take out as many books as you wanted, provided you returned them all within a week – or was it ten days? If you were late returning them there was a small fine.

The books that were stocked by the Tuppenny Libraries included love stories by the score, scads of whodunnits, of which those by Agatha Christie and E. M. Eberhardt were by far the best, and an almost weekly ‘thriller' by a writer who turned them out like a sausage machine and called himself Edgar Wallace. That was about the level, and I would generally manage to get through one of them in a day. Nevertheless, it took a long time for my tuppence to drop, and I can remember the evening in which it happened as though it was literally yesterday.

I had just sold (for another fiver) a design for the cover of a sales catalogue in three colour-blocks, which included a good many figures and had given me a lot of trouble, and I had stopped at the little library on my way back to my bed-sit, handed over two pennies and (there was a weekend coming up) asked the girl behind the counter for six books, any books. I left the choice to her and, having collected them, plodded back up Limerston Street towards my gas fire and a cup of tea. It was raining, and I have seldom been more depressed, because I owed that five pounds, and didn't like being behind with the rent. My art was not proving good enough to keep me afloat, and I was beginning to lose faith in it.

I made myself a cup of tea, changed into pyjamas and a dressing-gown and settled down in front of that hissing gas-fire to read one of the six books. I ought to be able to remember its title and who wrote it, but I don't. I only remember getting as far as about Chapter Three, when at long last the latest of my tuppences dropped with a resounding clang.

It could not be possible, I told myself, to write worse than the author of this bit of drivel. No one could! And yet I was willing to bet that the author had been paid a good deal more money for perpetrating this slush than I had been for that catalogue cover! So, why not try writing one myself? Well, why not? Inspired, I fetched the block of the airmail-weight paper I used for writing to Bets and Mother and various friends in India, and roughed out the plot of a thriller-cum-romance, which I called
Six Bars and Seven,
and which very nearly wrote itself.

By the time I went to bed I had the whole thing worked out, and immediately after breakfast next morning I made for the nearest Woolworths, where I bought several ruled students' writing pads, half a dozen pencils, a few rubbers and a pencil sharpener. (Total outlay in those days around one shilling and fourpence, I reckon. Those pads used to sell at tuppence each and the sharpener was one penny.) From then on the book went slowly, because I still had work to do for the Chelsea Illustrators – and for myself – in order to pay the rent and keep eating. I couldn't just stop working at the studio and spend my time scribbling away at my story. But I used every spare bit of time I could snatch to get on with
Six Bars
.

Cull and Curly Brinton had invited me to spend my summer holidays at Croft House ‘if I had nothing better to do'. I grabbed this wonderful offer, and spent day after sunny day lying in a hammock under the mulberry tree on the lawn, scribbling away at my book. I don't think it would ever have been finished but for the Brintons' kindness and, eventually, the help of Roger, and of Cull's chauffeur, Beddoes. I knew nothing whatever about cars, let alone their engines, and out of sheer ignorance had left a few blank lines in one section of my
Six Bars
, meaning to ask some motorist to fill it in for me. It was only when the first draft was finished and about to be typed by a kindly acquaintance who was studying at a secretarial school and had offered to type the MS for nothing, ‘to keep in practice', that I found I had produced an impossible situation …

I had sent my Scotland Yard hero to an out-of-the-way inn in moorland country where, on arrival, he is startled to recognize the three villains of the piece (whom he has not seen for years and who have never seen him!), who are staying at the inn. Instantly deciding to stay there himself in order to find out what they are up to, he tries to book a room there, only to be told by the landlord that there are none vacant. Except for those already occupied, all the rest are closed for repainting, or some such excuse. Determined to stay, he pretends his car has broken down, so that he will
have
to stay. But he is spotted as a menace by the villains, who find the bit of his engine that he has surreptitiously removed in order to immobilize the car.

Knowing nothing about cars, I had been sure that this was something the experts could sort out with one hand tied behind their backs. In fact, I had produced an impossible situation. The villains are not mechanical experts, but they have arrived at the inn in a chauffeur-driven car, and their chauffeur, who
is
, examines the supposedly stalled car and cannot make out how it got there in the first place. But there
must
be something to give away the fact that the stalling of the car is deliberate. Well,
you
try it!

I took that infuriating problem to a flossy great shop that sold only the most expensive cars, and which I think is probably still there, in Piccadilly opposite the Ritz. No one knew a thing about me: I was just a scruffy art student who said she had written a book and would have to rewrite almost the whole thing again if this silly situation could not be solved. But those darling chaps took off their coats, spat on their hands, and took
endless
trouble to solve it for me. Hours of trouble. No good. ‘Terribly sorry, but it can't be done!'

I tried all sorts of mechanically-minded car friends, and every time they were sure that they could come up with something. And every time they couldn't. I was faced with having to rewrite most of that ruddy book when Roger – an Engineer Commander in the Navy – came up with the solution I used. It had to be done on a car called an Alvis. Fortunately Bill Brinton, one of the Brinton cousins, happened to own an Alvis, and I was staying with the Brintons. Bill was
very
snooty about Roger's solution. Said it couldn't possibly work, and that if it was done to
his
car, he'd spot it at once: no one but an idiot, etc., etc …

Well, I had already explained the whole thing to Beddoes, and as Bill was staying to lunch, I asked Beddoes to try it out on Bill's Alvis and see what happened. It worked like a charm! Bill got crosser and crosser when he couldn't get his car to start, and only when he stormed indoors to ring for a taxi and a couple of mechanics did we tell him what we'd done. And he was
furious
. Fortunately, everyone else thought it was hilarious, and the crosser he got the more they laughed. Poor Bill! It took me ages to live that down as far as he was concerned. But the trick – although terribly far-fetched, as Roger had pointed out – did work, so I didn't have to rewrite that book after all.

I took the whole thing back to Limerston Street and had it typed by that angel of a girl, and sent it off to the publishers of the bit of total tripe that had decided me to try my hand at writing instead of art. And they took it!

If they hadn't I would never – hand-on-heart,
never
– have tried another publisher. I would have put it on the fire or into a trash-can and said, ‘Back to the drawing-board, Mollie!' and that would have been that. Because I cannot say too often that apart from one brief episode when I can't have been more than ten years old, when Bargie and I decided to write a book about a haunted house that was going to make our fortunes, I do not remember having any serious leanings towards authorship. On the other hand, I felt pretty confident – until I tried it – that I could make a living as an illustrator. The switch was purely accidental. A single trashy novel, coming on the heels of a whole string of ‘Tuppenny Library' novels, had convinced me that anyone who was even vaguely educated ought to be able to write one of them. And I was right.
Six Bars at Seven
was not only accepted, but paid for. More than fifty pounds, no less! I couldn't
believe
it. It was too good to be true. And was, of course. I'd neglected to read the small print, and only discovered much later that I had sold it outright.

But Fate was obviously pushing me towards a writing career, for at about the same time I noticed, while working away at the studio, a roll of typed paper lying on the floor beside Temmy's easel, and asked her what it was. She said it was the MS of the latest
Grey Rabbit
book, and I asked if I could read it and was told to go ahead. It didn't take long to read, and I remember handing it back and saying it was pretty good rubbish and I would have thought any chump could have written that kind of stuff. ‘Oh you
do
, do you?' observed Temmy with a distinct trace of acid. ‘Well, you go ahead and do it! Try it yourself; and if it's any good, I'll illustrate it for you! That's a promise.'

So once again I visited my local Woolworths, expended a few pence on a writing block and a small, flat notebook (one penny) and wrote a children's book about rabbits and field mice and similar country creatures, which I called
Potter Pinner Meadow
– a name that rose in my mind of its own accord, and that I honestly thought I had invented. But one day, at least a quarter of a century later, when being driven along a lane not far from Pembury in Kent, I saw it on the worn wooden notice-board of a farm and realized that I must have seen it during the days when Helen and I used to explore the country lanes around Pembury. Since then I have never been absolutely certain that something I have written, and been pleased with, is really original, or something I once read, or heard someone say. It worries me at times.

Potter Pinner Meadow
got itself written in some rather peculiar places. I had to attend a surgery to be tested to see if too much sugar, if any, was being absorbed into my blood. I don't remember why this had to be done, but I was warned that I'd be there for several hours. This was because I was fed a large mug of – I think – glucose, after which I sat around for an hour, had a blood test taken, and drank another mug of glucose. And so on, for several hours. The verdict was OK; I
wasn't
absorbing sugar. But in intervals, I filled the time by writing
Potter Pinner
. In fact I very nearly finished it there, though not quite. The last few pages were written during an interval, standing up at the back of the Mercury Theatre where the Ballet Club were putting on a programme.

The story finished, I copied it out neatly in long-hand into the penny notebook, illustrated the cover with a little painting of a clump of primroses, the title and my name in poster colours, and took it round to Collins, who in those days hung out at No. 48 Pall Mall. And here luck took over. Billy Collins used to retire to his home at weekends, taking with him a selection of children's books to read to his own children. If they liked a book it would probably be published. If not, not.

Well, that Friday, I learned later, he was attending some cocktail party or other on his way home, and didn't want to lug along a lot of manuscripts. He called in to ask if they recommended any particular offering, and seeing my notebook on the secretary's table, said: ‘What's that?' ‘Oh, just some idiot who doesn't know that all MS have to be typed and double-spaced,' returned the secretary, picking up the notebook and dropping it into her waste-paper basket. W. Collins (realizing it would fit very easily into his pocket) retrieved it from the basket, pocketed it, and eventually read it to his young; who, bless their little cotton socks, liked it. A secretary rang the Chelsea Illustrators on Monday morning, and that afternoon Temmy and I set off to 48 Pall Mall. And that's how the
Potter Pinner
books saw the light of day.