Free Memoirs of a Private Man by Winston Graham

full of second thoughts, and more serious, trying to go deeper and, on the whole, failing. Peter Bull was wholly right not to put it on. In the end I rewrote it as a novel and called it Strangers Meeting . It was the worst novel I ever wrote.
    I returned to Cornwall feeling distinctly fed up. Sitting opposite me in the train was a woman I knew slightly from Perranporth called Ethel Jaggar. For six years she had been running a small private hotel, but was finding the strain too much for her. Her husband, a mining engineer in Nigeria, had recently been appointed to what was an improved and stable position and wanted her to sell the place and join him. She wanted badly to do this but, with war looming, property was a drag on the market. She was hopelessly stuck with it.
    Treberran, as it was called, was the best house in the village. It had been built thirteen years before for a Dr T. F. G. Dexter, a well-known philologist whose family had made money out of soap, and he put up this large and handsome house for himself and his wife, with living-in accommodation for a man and wife as servants. When he died the Jaggars bought it, built further bedrooms on and enlarged the dining room and kitchens and ran it during the summer months as a guest house. When I got home I told Jean, my fiancée, and she arranged to go and see it. It was Sunday the 11th of November and I, who had over the years become involved in Toc H, was attending an evening service in the church. Near the end Jean knelt down beside me and said: ‘It’s lovely . I know the house, of course, from when the Dexters were there, but they’ve enlarged it marvellously.’
    â€˜Did they say how much they wanted?’
    She breathed a figure that was a monstrous sum for those days, and one that we did not think we could ever raise. But when we saw the house, together with my mother, we thought the opportunity too splendid not to strive for.
    Indeed we were so hypnotized by the quality of the place that we never thought to bargain as to the price, but set about raising the money. Obtaining a large mortgage from a bank was in those days only slightly less difficult than tunnelling under the foundations and breaking into the safe, but somehow we persuaded them to put up two-thirds, and by hook, though not by crook, we raised the rest, my mother standing guarantor for much of it.
    The period of the late Thirties – from about 1933 to 1939 – was a ghastly time in which to grow up. I was asked the other day how later depressions compared with that of the Thirties. I couldn’t answer. I simply didn’t remember.
    Of course the depression of the Thirties was acute and grim and horrible. Unemployment rotted the cities. The shadow of the means test – whereby the unemployed were forced to sell their few disposable possessions before they could continue to claim the dole – stalked everywhere. I remember two contemporaries of mine who worked in the Manchester Town Hall coming in for a substantial legacy. When this got about, the council sacked them, informing them that in the present economic climate their jobs must be given to two men in greater need.
    I was outrageously lucky to be cushioned against this menace. But the other menace to which we were all subjected was infinitely more lethal in every way than a world depression – though that depression was partly responsible for what was to come – being quite overshadowed. By Adolf Hitler.
    A lot of wishful thinkers tried in those days to argue that German rearmament was simply a matter of national pride, that a desire to occupy the Rhineland was evidence of a proper wish to be reunited with their own people, that all the other Germans of Central Europe suffering under a foreign yoke should also be properly united with their own kin. Anschluss was all they wanted. Then it would be ‘ peace in our time’.
    I remember one sunny Sunday morning in October 1933 going down to the