The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (27 page)

My little Gremlin book caused something else quite extraordinary to happen to
me in those wartime Washington days. Eleanor Roosevelt read it to her
grandchildren in the White House and was apparently much taken with it. I was
invited to dinner with her and the President. I went, shaking with excitement.
We had a splendid time and I was invited again. Then
Mrs
Roosevelt began asking me for week-ends to Hyde Park, the President's country
house. Up there, believe it or not, I spent a good deal of time alone with
Franklin Roosevelt during his relaxing hours. I would sit with him while he
mixed the martinis before Sunday lunch, and he would say things like,
"I've just had an interesting cable from
Mr
Churchill." Then he would tell me what it said, something perhaps about
new plans for the bombing of Germany or the sinking of U-Boats, and I would do
my best to appear calm and chatty, though actually I was trembling at the
realization that the most powerful man in the world was telling me these mighty
secrets. Sometimes he drove me around the estate in his car, an old Ford I
think it was, that had been specially adapted for his
paralysed
legs. It had no pedals. All the controls were worked by his hands. His
secret-service men would lift him out of his wheel-chair into the driver's
seat, then he would wave them away and off we would go, driving at terrific
speeds along the narrow roads.

One Sunday during lunch at Hyde Park, Franklin Roosevelt told a story that
shook the assembled guests. There were about fourteen of us sitting on both
sides of the long dining-room table, including Princess Martha of Norway and
several members of the Cabinet. We were eating a rather insipid white fish
covered with a thick grey sauce. Suddenly the President pointed a finger at me
and said, "We have an Englishman here. Let me tell you what happened to
another Englishman, a representative of the King, who was in Washington in the
year 1827." He gave the man's name, but I've forgotten it. Then he went
on, "While he was over here, this fellow died, and the British for some
reason insisted that his body be sent home to England for burial. Now the only
way to do that in those days was to pickle it in alcohol. So the body was put
into a barrel of rum. The barrel was lashed to the mast of a schooner and the
ship sailed for home. After about four weeks at sea, the captain of the schooner
noticed a most frightful stench coming from the barrel. And in the end, the
smell became so appalling they had to cut the barrel loose and roll it
overboard. But do you know why it stank so badly?" the President asked,
beaming at the guests with that famous wide smile of his. "I will tell you
exactly why. Some of the sailors had drilled a hole in the bottom of the barrel
and had inserted a bung. Then every night they had been helping themselves to
the rum. And when they had drunk it all, that's when the trouble started."
Franklin Roosevelt let out a great roar of laughter. Several females at the
table turned very pale and I saw them pushing their plates of boiled white fish
gently away.

All the stories I wrote in those early days were fiction, except for that first
one I did with C S. Forester.
NONfiction
, which means
writing about things that have actually taken place, doesn't interest me. I
enjoy least of all writing about my own experiences. And that explains why this
story is so lacking in detail. I could quite easily have described what it was
like to be in a dog-fight with German fighters fifteen thousand feet above the
Parthenon in Athens, or the thrill of chasing a Junkers 88 in and out the
mountain peaks in Northern Greece, but I don't want to do it. For me, the
pleasure of writing comes with inventing stories.

Apart from the Forester story.
I think I have only
written one other non-fiction piece in my life, and I did this only because the
subject was so enthralling I couldn't resist it. The story is called 'The
Mildenhall
Treasure', and it's in this book.

So there you are. That's how I became a writer. Had I not been lucky enough to
meet
Mr
Forester, it would probably never have
happened.

Now, more than thirty years later.
I'm still slogging
away. To me, the most important and difficult thing about writing fiction is to
find the plot. Good original plots are very hard to come by. You never know
when a lovely idea is going to flit suddenly into your mind, but by golly, when
it does come along, you grab it with both hands and hang on to it tight. The
trick is to write it down at once, otherwise you'll forget it. A good plot is
like a dream. If you don't write down your dream on paper the moment you wake
up, the chances are you'll forget it and it'll be gone for ever.

So when an idea for a story comes popping into my mind, I rush for a pencil, a
crayon, a lipstick, anything that will write, and scribble a few words that
will later remind me of the idea. Often, one word is enough. I was once driving
alone on a country road and an idea came for a story about someone getting
stuck in an elevator between two floors in an empty house. I had nothing to
write with in the car. So I stopped and got out. The back of the car was
covered with dust. With one finger I wrote in the dust the single word
ELEVATOR. That was enough. As soon as I got home, I went straight to my
work-room and wrote the idea down in an old red-covered school exercise-book
which is simply
labelled
"Short Stories".

I have had this book ever since I started trying to write seriously. There are
ninety-eight pages in the book. I've counted them. And just about every one of
those pages is filled up on both sides with these so-called story ideas. Many
are no good. But just about every story and every children's book I have ever
written has started out as a three- or four-line note in this little, much-worn
red-covered volume. For example:

This became
Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory.

Sometimes, these little scribbles will stay unused in the notebook for five or
even ten years. But the promising ones are always used in the end. And if they
show nothing else, they do, I think, demonstrate from what slender threads a
children's book or a short story must ultimately be woven. The story builds and
expands while you are writing it. All the best stuff comes at the desk. But you
can't even start to write that story unless you have the beginnings of a plot.
Without my little notebook, I would be quite helpless.

My
first story – 1942

I do not remember much of it; not beforehand anyway; not until it happened.

There was the landing at
Fouka
, where the Blenheim
boys were helpful and gave us tea while we were being
refuelled
.
I remember the quietness of the Blenheim boys, how they came into the mess-tent
to get some tea and sat down to drink it without saying anything; how they got
up and went out when they had finished drinking and still they did not say
anything. And I knew that each one was holding himself together because the
going was not very good right then. They
were having
to go out too often, and there were no replacements coming along.

We thanked them for the tea and went out to see if they had finished
refuelling
our Gladiators. I remember that there was a wind
blowing which made the wind-sock stand out straight, like a signpost, and the
sand was blowing up around our legs and making a rustling noise as it swished
against the tents, and the tents flapped in the wind so that they were like
canvas men clapping their hands.

"Bomber boys unhappy," Peter said.

"Not unhappy," I answered.

"Well, they're browned off."

"No. They've had it, that's all. But they'll keep going. You can see
they're trying to keep going."

Our two old Gladiators were standing beside each other in the sand and the
airmen in their khaki shirts and shorts seemed still to be busy with
refuelling
. I was wearing a thin white cotton flying suit
and Peter had on a blue one. It wasn't necessary to fly with anything warmer.

Peter said, "How far away is it?"

"Twenty-one miles beyond
Charing
Cross," I
answered, "on the right side of the road."
Charing
Cross was where the desert road branched north to
Mersah
Matruh
. The Italian army was outside
Mersah
, and they were doing pretty well. It was about the
only time, so far as I know, that the Italians have done pretty well. Their
morale goes up and down like a sensitive altimeter, and right then it was at
forty thousand because the Axis was on top of the world. We hung around waiting
for the
refuelling
to finish.

Peter said, "It's a piece of cake."

"Yes. It ought to be easy."

We separated and I climbed into my cockpit. I have always remembered the face
of the airman who helped me to strap in. He was
oldish
,
about forty, and bald except for a neat patch of golden hair at the back of his
head. His face was all wrinkles, his eyes were like my grandmother's eyes, and
he looked as though he had spent his life helping to strap in pilots who never
came back. He stood on the wing pulling my straps and said, "Be careful.
There isn't any sense not being careful."

"Piece of cake," I said.

"Like hell."

"Really.
It isn't anything at all. It's a piece
of cake."

I don't remember much about the next bit; I only remember about later on. I
suppose we took off from
Fouka
and flew west towards
Mersah
, and I suppose we flew at about eight hundred feet.
I suppose we saw the sea to starboard, and I suppose -- no, I am certain --
that it was blue and that it was beautiful, especially where it rolled up on to
the sand and made a long thick white line east and west as far as you could
see. I suppose we flew over
Charing
Cross and flew on
for twenty-one miles to where they had said it would be, but I do not know. I
know only that there was trouble, lots and lots of trouble, and I know that we
had turned and were coming back when the trouble got worse. The biggest trouble
of all was that I was too low to bale out, and it is from that point on that my
memory comes back to me. I remember the dipping of the nose of the aircraft and
I remember looking down the nose of the machine at the ground and seeing a
little clump of camel-thorn growing there all by itself. I remember seeing some
rooks lying in the sand beside the camel-thorn, and the camel-thorn and the
sand and the rocks leapt out of the ground and came to me. I remember that very
clearly.

Then there was a small gap of not-remembering. It might have been one second or
it might have been thirty; I do not know. I have an idea that it was very
short, a second perhaps, and next I heard a
crumph
on the right as the starboard wing tank caught fire, then another
crumph
on the left as the port tank did the
same. To me that was not
significant,
and for a while
I sat still, feeling comfortable, but a little drowsy. I couldn't see with my
eyes, but that was not significant either. There was nothing to worry about.
Nothing at all.
Not until I felt the hotness around my legs.
At first it was only
a warmness
and that was all right
too, but all at once it was a hotness, a very stinging scorching hotness up and
down the sides of each leg.