The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (23 page)

John Winston told me everything he knew. He showed me the original dark-blue
notebook written by Dr John Cartwright in Bombay in 1934, and I copied it out
word for word.

"Henry always carried it with him," John Winston said. "In the
end, he knew the whole thing by heart."

He showed me the accounts books of ORPHANAGES S.A. with Henry's winnings
recorded in them day by day over twenty years, and a truly staggering sight
they were.

When he had finished, I said to him, "There's a big gap in this story,
Mr
Winston. You've told me almost nothing about Henry's
travels and about his adventures in the casinos of the world."

"That's Max's story," John Winston said. "Max knows all about
that because he was with him. But he says he wants to have a shot at writing it
himself. He's already started."

"Then why not let Max write the whole thing?" I asked.

"He doesn't want to," John Winston said. "He only wants to write
about Henry and Max. It should be a fantastic story if he ever gets it
finished. But he is old now, like me, and I doubt he will manage it."

"One last question," I said. "You keep calling him Henry Sugar.
And yet you tell me that wasn't his name. Don't you want me to say who he
really was when I do the story?"

"No," John Winston said. "Max and I promised never to reveal it.
Oh, it'll probably leak out sooner or later. After all, he was from a fairly
well-known English family. But I'd appreciate it if you don't try to find out.
Just call him plain
Mr
Henry Sugar."

And that is what I have done.

How
I became a writer

A fiction writer is a person who invents stories.

But how does one start out on a job like this? How does one become a full-time
professional fiction writer?

Charles Dickens found it easy. At the age of twenty-four, he simply sat down
and wrote
Pickwick Papers,
which
became an immediate best-seller. But Dickens was a genius, and geniuses are
different from the rest of us.

In this century (it was not always so in the last one), just about every single
writer who has finally become successful in the world of fiction has started
out in some other job -- a schoolteacher, perhaps, or a doctor or a journalist
or a lawyer.
(Alice in Wonderland
was
written by a mathematician, and
The Wind
in the Willows
by a civil servant.) The first attempts at writing have
therefore always had to be done in spare time, usually at night.

The reason for this is obvious. When you are adult, it is necessary to earn a
living. To earn a living, you must get a job. You must if possible get a job
that guarantees you so much money a week. But however much you may want to take
up fiction writing as a
career,
it would be pointless
to go along to a publisher and say. "I want a job as a fiction
writer." If you did that, he would tell you to buzz off and write the book
first. And even if you brought a finished book to him and he liked it well
enough to publish it, he still wouldn't give you a job. He would give you an
advance of perhaps five hundred pounds, which he would get back again later by
deducting it from your royalties. (A royalty, by the way, is the money that a
writer gets from the publisher for each copy of his book that is sold. The
average royalty a writer gets is ten per cent of the price of the book itself in
the book shop. Thus, for a book selling at four pounds, the writer would get
forty pence. For a paperback selling at fifty pence, he would get five pence.)

It is very common for a hopeful fiction writer to spend two years of his spare
time writing a book which no publisher will publish. For that he gets nothing
at all except a sense of frustration.

If he is fortunate enough to have a book accepted by a publisher, the odds are
that as a first novel it will in the end sell only about three thousand copies.
That will earn him maybe a thousand pounds. Most novels take at least one year
to write, and one thousand pounds a year is not enough to live on these days.
So you can see why a budding fiction writer invariably has to start out in
another job first of all. If he doesn't, he will almost certainly starve.

Here are some of the qualities you should possess or should try to acquire if
you wish to become a fiction writer:

1
You
should have a lively imagination.

2
You
should be able to write well. By that I
mean you should be able to make a scene come alive in the reader's mind. Not
everybody has this ability. It is a gift, and you either have it or you don't.

3
You
must have stamina. In other words, you
must be able to stick to what you are doing and never give up, for hour after
hour, day after day, week after week and month after month.

4
You
must be a perfectionist. That means you
must never be satisfied with what you have written until you have rewritten it
again and again, making it as good as you possibly can.

5
You
must have strong self-discipline. You are
working alone. No one is employing you. No one is around to give you the sack
if you don't turn up for work, or to tick you off if you start slacking.

6
It
helps a lot if you have a keen sense of
humour
. This is not essential when writing for grown-ups,
but for children, it's vital.

7
You
must have a degree of humility. The writer
who thinks that his work is
marvellous
is heading for
trouble.

Let me tell you how I myself slid in through the back door and found myself in
the world of fiction.

At the age of eight, in 1924, I was sent away to boarding-school in a town
called Weston-super-Mare, on the south-west coast of England. Those were days
of horror, of fierce discipline, of no talking in the dormitories, no running
in the corridors, no untidiness of any sort, no this or that or the other, just
rules and still more rules that had to be obeyed. And the fear of the dreaded
cane hung over us like the fear of death all the time.

"The headmaster wants to see you in his study."
Words
of doom.
They sent shivers over the skin of your stomach. But off you
went, aged perhaps nine years old, down the long bleak corridors and through an
archway that took you into the headmaster's private area where only horrible
things happened and the smell of pipe tobacco hung in the air like incense. You
stood outside the awful black door, not daring even to knock. You took deep
breaths. If only your mother were here, you told yourself, she would not let
this happen. She wasn't here. You were alone. You lifted a hand and knocked
softly, once.

"Come in! Ah yes, it's Dahl. Well. Dahl, it's been reported to me that you
were talking during prep last night."

"Please sir, I broke my nib and I was only asking Jenkins if he had
another one to lend me."

"I will not tolerate talking in prep. You know that very well."

Already this giant of a man was crossing to the tall corner cupboard and
reaching up to the top of it where he kept his canes.

"Boys who break rules have to be punished."

"Sir. . . I. . . I had a bust nib. . . I. . ."

"That is no excuse. I am going to teach you that it does not pay to talk
during prep."

He took a cane down that was about three feet long with a little curved handle
at one end. It was thin and white and very whippy. "Bend over and touch
your toes. Over there by the window."

"But sir. . ."

"Don't argue with me, boy. Do as you're told."

I bent over. Then I waited. He always kept you waiting for about ten seconds,
and that was when your knees began to shake.

"Bend lower, boy! Touch your toes!"

I stared at the toecaps of my black shoes and I told myself that any moment now
this man was going to bash the cane into me so hard that the whole of my bottom
would change
colour
. The welts were always very long,
stretching right across both
buttocks,
blue-black with
brilliant scarlet edges, and when you ran your fingers over them ever so gently
afterwards, you could feel the corrugations.

Swish
!
. . .
Crack!

Then
came
the pain. It was unbelievable, unbearable,
excruciating. It was as though someone had laid a white-hot poker across your
backside and pressed hard.

The second stroke would be coming soon and it was as much as you could do to
stop putting your hands in the way to ward it off. It was the instinctive
reaction. But if you did that, it would break your fingers.

Swish
!. . .
Crack!

The second one landed right alongside the first and the white-hot poker was
pressing deeper and deeper into the skin.

Swish
!. . .
Crack!

The third stroke was where the pain always reached its peak. It could go no
further. There was no way it could get any worse. Any more strokes after that
simply
prolonged
the agony. You tried
not to cry out. Sometimes you couldn't help it. But whether you were able to
remain silent or not, it was impossible to stop the tears. They poured down
your cheeks in streams and dripped on to the carpet.

The important thing was never to flinch upwards or straighten up when you were
hit. If you did that, you got an extra one.

Slowly, deliberately, taking plenty of time, the headmaster delivered three
more strokes, making six in all.

"You may go." The voice came from
a cavern miles
away, and you straightened up slowly, agonizingly, and grabbed hold of your
burning buttocks with both hands and held them as tight as you could and hopped
out of the room on the very tips of your toes.

That cruel cane ruled our lives. We were caned for talking in the dormitory
after lights out, for talking in class, for bad work, for carving our initials
on the desk, for climbing over walls, for slovenly appearance, for flicking
paper-clips, for forgetting to change into house-shoes in the evenings, for not
hanging up our games clothes, and above all for giving the slightest offence to
any master. (They weren't called teachers in those days.) In other words, we
were caned for doing everything that it was natural for small boys to do.

So we watched out words. And we watched our steps.
My
goodness, how we watched our steps.
We became incredibly alert. Wherever
we went, we walked carefully, with ears pricked for danger, like wild animals
stepping softly through the woods.

Apart from the masters, there was another man in the school who frightened us
considerably. This was
Mr
Pople
.
Mr
Pople
was a paunchy,
crimson-faced individual who acted as school-porter, boiler superintendent and
general handyman. His power stemmed from the fact that he could (and he most
certainly did) report us to the headmaster upon the slightest provocation.
Mr
Pople's
moment of glory came
each morning at seven-thirty precisely, when he would stand at the end of the
long main corridor and "ring the bell". The bell was huge and made of
brass, with a thick wooden handle, and
Mr
Pople
would swing it back and forth at arm's length in a
special way of his own, so that it went
clangetty
-clang-clang,
clangetty
-clang-clang,
clangetty
-clang-clang.
At the sound of the bell,
all the boys in the school, one hundred and eighty of us, would move smartly to
our positions in the corridor. We lined up against the walls on both sides and
stood stiffly to attention, awaiting the headmaster's inspection.

But at least ten minutes would elapse before the headmaster arrived on the
scene, and during this time,
Mr
Pople
would conduct a ceremony so extraordinary that to this day I find it hard to
believe it ever took place. There were six lavatories in the school, numbered
on their doors from one to six.
Mr
Pople
, standing at the end of the long corridor, would have
in the palm of his hand six small brass discs, each with a number on it, one to
six. There was absolute silence as he allowed his eye to travel down the two
lines of stiffly-standing boys. Then he would bark out a name, "
Arkle
!"

Arkle
would fall out and step briskly down the
corridor to where
Mr
Pople
stood.
Mr
Pople
would hand
him a brass disc.
Arkle
would then march away towards
the lavatories, and to reach them he would have to walk the entire length of
the corridor, past all the stationary boys, and then turn left. As soon as he
was out of sight, he was allowed to look at his disc and see which lavatory
number he had been given.

"
Highton
!" barked
Mr
Pople
, and now
Highton
would fall out to receive his disc and march away.