Free Memoirs of a Private Man by Winston Graham Page B

conviction of doom.
    My first meeting with my future wife had been when I was eighteen and she was fourteen. It was soon after our arrival in Cornwall and we were in church, she with her parents, I with mine. I think they spoke first, we being the newcomers. The meeting made no special impression on me; apparently it did on her. I just remember a stocky little girl with straight blonde hair, bobbed, under a school hat. We met again as families do in a small village. I saw her here and there over the next few years during school holidays; then slowly we became firm friends. This friendship was greatly fostered by her mother, who seemed to like me as much as her daughter did. Happily, unlike some mothers-in-law, she never changed her mind.
    I spent the Christmas of 1936 in London; I can’t now remember why; but on January the 3rd 1937 I was home again and decided to go to a dance at the Droskyn Castle Hotel (then the foremost hotel in the district, now long since fallen from its high estate to become flats).
    It was quite a smart dance and the hotel was gayly lit. I remember coming into the ballroom and seeing Jean Williamson sitting with some friends at a table across the floor. She had changed greatly from our first meeting. I looked at her carefully and then said to myself: ‘She’s the girl I’m going to marry.’
    It was not so much a moment of enlightenment as one of recognition of what I should have known before. It was recognition that my life would be unacceptably arid without her. I can’t remember whether she was the best-looking girl in the room, but I vividly remember that she had so much more character than anyone else there, male or female. Again, this was not so much distinguished by any special behaviour on her part – it just lit her up.
    Later in the evening when I was dancing with her I said: ‘ I can’t afford to marry yet, but when I can, will you marry me?’
    Her smiling bright eyes met mine for a few seconds, then she said:
    â€˜ I think I just might.’

Chapter Five
    Jean Williamson’s father had been in the navy all his life. He had been a gunnery officer on board the Royal Oak at the Battle of Jutland, and among his other medals was that of the Order of St John, awarded by the Russians; though this must have been given him for some earlier adventure. Gunfire damaged his eardrums, and when I first met him he was already deaf.
    At the end of the First World War he was sent as a gunnery expert to superintend the dismantling and blowing up of all the explosives at Nobel’s Dynamite Works, which had been situated on the Cornish cliffs about two miles outside the tiny village of Perranporth. Thinking his task might run for a couple of years at least, he bought a pleasant, largeish square-built house on the hill above the village and brought his wife and two children from Devonport to live there. But after six months he was transferred to Portland. As his next appointment was also likely to be temporary, his wife and family remained at Perranporth, and that is where his children grew up.
    It must have been an unspoiled Cornish village then – some years before even we arrived. Jean remembered the mine opening on the cliffs a quarter of a mile out of the village, and the difficulty they had in hauling the huge cylinder for the engine up the steep hill, with eight horses straining at the traces and the wheels of the wagon inches deep in sticky mud. They failed to get it up the cliff road and so had to go up St George’s Hill – almost as bad – and round the corner into Tywarnhayle Road and then to the cliff and the mine.
    Unknown to any of the happy Williamson family at this time, the Geddes Axe was pending, whereby the navy was savagely truncated in a post-war retrenchment, and Commander Williamson, at the age of just fifty, found himself redundant. The navy had been his life from the age of eighteen, and without it he had no life at all. He