Waller, the Irishman, a vividly vigorous sixty-year-old, as soon as he saw it wanted to put the wreck to good use and, standing in water sometimes up to his shoulders, since wrecks always create pools around themselves, he rigged up a very long rope between the coastguard station and the wreck and erected an endless whip, whereby a thinner line with baited hooks upon it could be rotated out to sea at full tide and back again. It was a Heath Robinson contrivance, but after a few false starts it suddenly worked in abundance, and one night we found ourselves with two dozen mackerel and two huge skate. Food was so short that I telephoned my wife and, pregnant though she was, she walked the mile from our house and traversed the singlefile precipitous cliff path to the station. It was nine oâclock on a wild black winterâs night, and when I heard a rattle of stones I went out with the Ross rifle and challenged her.
A faint voice came through the windy darkness. â Itâs your wife !â
Unfortunately the large canvas bag she had brought wasnât big enough to take the skate lying down, so to speak, and when she came to cut it up next morning rigor mortis had set in, and she was confronted with a huge crescent-shaped fish covered with sharp abrasive scales. We ate it in due time. But presently news of Wallerâs enterprise reached headquarters and it was put a stop to.
After the war, when the little coastguard station was converted into a sophisticated, instrument-crammed building concerned to measure the height of waves (waves, it seems, diminish on their long journey from the Mexican Gulf, but they do not alter their relative size, one to another), the remains of the wreck were blown up so as not to disturb the pattern of the sea. But from 1940 onwards I stared at it and thought long about it: it seemed a wonderful relic of an age long past â although in fact it was then only forty years gone. Indeed one of the seven of us on watch, a man called Tom Mitchell â Farmer Tom, to distinguish him from all the other Mitchells in the village â had seen the vessel actually come in and the following day, as a boy of nine, had clambered over the ship. He was able to tell me all the details of the wreck, and I pondered over the lives of the people who had been drowned and those â the majority â who had been saved.
On one of my infrequent days off I took my wife to Falmouth and found a rather disreputable cafeârestaurant where the proprietor did not send round to take your orders but bargained fiercely with you as you came in as to which joint you should have some slices of, these being arrayed on the counter at his side. As sometimes happens with an author, two fairly disparate scenes come together to make a novel, and from these scenes â the shipwreck and the cafe â emerged The Forgotten Story .
It was published in the spring of 1945 while the war was still at a crucial stage. It seemed to me at the time that it was written too hastily and too casually and had been scribbled down in the spare moments of a broken and traumatic few years. I have never written a novel I thought less well of at the time. The previous book, The Merciless Ladies , most of it written before the war, had come out in 1944 and was now beginning to sell. I was sufficiently clearsighted to be aware that this was largely due to the times: shortage of newsprint, shortage of new novels, and a public which, deprived of many other outlets, was reading more than ever before. All the same I thought well of this book and feared that the publication of what seemed to me to be a relatively trivial novel like The Forgotten Story would do my growing reputation no good at all. As publication date drew near I became more and more anxious and worried, so that at the end if someone had offered me £50 to withdraw the book I should have done so.
In the event The Forgotten Story , simple though it was, drew a new
A faint voice came through the windy darkness. â Itâs your wife !â
Unfortunately the large canvas bag she had brought wasnât big enough to take the skate lying down, so to speak, and when she came to cut it up next morning rigor mortis had set in, and she was confronted with a huge crescent-shaped fish covered with sharp abrasive scales. We ate it in due time. But presently news of Wallerâs enterprise reached headquarters and it was put a stop to.
After the war, when the little coastguard station was converted into a sophisticated, instrument-crammed building concerned to measure the height of waves (waves, it seems, diminish on their long journey from the Mexican Gulf, but they do not alter their relative size, one to another), the remains of the wreck were blown up so as not to disturb the pattern of the sea. But from 1940 onwards I stared at it and thought long about it: it seemed a wonderful relic of an age long past â although in fact it was then only forty years gone. Indeed one of the seven of us on watch, a man called Tom Mitchell â Farmer Tom, to distinguish him from all the other Mitchells in the village â had seen the vessel actually come in and the following day, as a boy of nine, had clambered over the ship. He was able to tell me all the details of the wreck, and I pondered over the lives of the people who had been drowned and those â the majority â who had been saved.
On one of my infrequent days off I took my wife to Falmouth and found a rather disreputable cafeârestaurant where the proprietor did not send round to take your orders but bargained fiercely with you as you came in as to which joint you should have some slices of, these being arrayed on the counter at his side. As sometimes happens with an author, two fairly disparate scenes come together to make a novel, and from these scenes â the shipwreck and the cafe â emerged The Forgotten Story .
It was published in the spring of 1945 while the war was still at a crucial stage. It seemed to me at the time that it was written too hastily and too casually and had been scribbled down in the spare moments of a broken and traumatic few years. I have never written a novel I thought less well of at the time. The previous book, The Merciless Ladies , most of it written before the war, had come out in 1944 and was now beginning to sell. I was sufficiently clearsighted to be aware that this was largely due to the times: shortage of newsprint, shortage of new novels, and a public which, deprived of many other outlets, was reading more than ever before. All the same I thought well of this book and feared that the publication of what seemed to me to be a relatively trivial novel like The Forgotten Story would do my growing reputation no good at all. As publication date drew near I became more and more anxious and worried, so that at the end if someone had offered me £50 to withdraw the book I should have done so.
In the event The Forgotten Story , simple though it was, drew a new
Similar Books
