Kitabı oku: «Grub Street Irregular: Scenes from Literary Life», sayfa 2

TWO Rogues’ Gallery

One of the disadvantages of having been to a rather humdrum public school is the occasional embarrassment of explaining where one went. Charles Sprawson is the only person I know who quizzes complete strangers on their schooldays, but every now and then a beaming Old Etonian of my own age will pop the question, hoping for the best and momentarily deceived by my fruity tones and superficial familiarity with his alma mater, gleaned from my researches into the life of Cyril Connolly, that most nostalgic and agonised of Old Etonians.

‘You won’t have heard of it,’ I reply, lowering my voice to a confidential whisper in case I am overheard and exposed to the world at large, ‘but I went to a place called Malvern.’

‘Marlborough?’ my questioner booms. ‘But that’s a splendid school. What house were you in? Did you happen to know …?’

‘No, Malvern,’ I say, making my voice as quiet but as clear as possible; at which a half-pitying, half-baffled look flits across his kindly features, and the conversation is swiftly hurried in a more wholesome direction.

Part of the problem with being an Old Malvernian is that one’s fellows are a fairly undistinguished crew. Like Malvern, Marlborough in the old days seems to have been a fairly brutal, philistine school, but at least its more literary pupils had the consolation of knowing that John Betjeman, Siegfried Sassoon and Louis MacNeice had also suffered and survived. Malvern, by comparison, offered cold comfort. During my time at the school, the Old Malvernian most admired by the Governors, and held up as a model for us all, was an angry-looking cove called Sir Godfrey Huggins, who boasted bulging blue eyes, scarlet cheeks and a bristling grey moustache. (I have taken some liberties with the colour scheme, since the photograph of Huggins which hung in the place of honour in one of the school corridors was, of course, in black and white.) Huggins had risen to become the Prime Minister of Rhodesia, and when in due course he was made a peer, he assumed the title of Lord Malvern, in gratitude to his alma mater. One of the trains that ran between Paddington and Malvern, and points beyond, was named after him, and bore on either side of its boiler a curved metal plaque to that effect. A photograph of the train’s engine, some five feet wide, had been presented to the school in a handsome wooden frame and nailed up alongside that of the former Prime Minister, rubbing shoulders with former headmasters in gowns and mortar boards, and cricketing elevens dating back to the 1860s.

Altogether more interesting, but less widely advertised within the grounds of the school, were James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s paranoid master-spy, and Aleister Crowley, the bald, pop-eyed black magician who liked to be acclaimed ‘the wickedest man in the world’ or ‘the Great Beast’, and spent much of his time frolicking with naked handmaidens and sacrificing goats in a deserted monastery in Sicily. C.S. Lewis was a balding sage of a more reputable variety, but although he was an old Oxford friend of Mr Sayer, the Senior English Master, he had blotted his copybook by ridiculing Malvern (referred to as ‘Wyvern’) in his autobiography, Summoned by Joy.

Curiously, for such a philistine and sports-mad school, minor literary men loom larger than games players among the old boys of interest. Raymond Mortimer, a most unlikely Malvernian, hated the place and moved on as quickly as possible to Balliol, Bloomsbury and the Sunday Times; John Moore, an affable old countryman who looked as though he should have worn a tweed fisherman’s hat, smoked a pipe and spoke with an Archers accent, was much admired in my childhood for his novels set in a country town based on nearby Tewkesbury, and was involved in setting up the Cheltenham Literary Festival; Sir John Wheeler Bennett was well known in his day as an urbane and well-connected historian, diplomat and, no doubt, secret service agent; Humphry Berkeley, a former Tory MP, wrote The Life and Death of Rochester Sneath, which must be one the funniest books ever published, with the bonus of drawings by Nicolas Bentley. Younger Old Malvernians, or so I’m told, include Jeremy Paxman, James Delingpole, Giles Foden and the historian Dominic Sandbrook.

But the one who intrigued me most was a shady-sounding Irishman called Derek Verschoyle, who like me was not only a Malvernian but had then gone on to Trinity College, Dublin: he had also had dealings with André Deutsch, and had been a friend of Alan Ross. I first heard of Verschoyle nearly thirty years after I had left school, when I began to contribute to the London Magazine, and what Alan Ross told me about him tickled my interest in long-forgotten publishers and minor literary men. Like all the best anecdotalists, Alan liked to tell the same stories, suitably embellished, over and over again; and Verschoyle was one of the figures who regularly resurfaced. I don’t think Alan knew much about his background, but I later learned that the Verschoyles were of Dutch origin, and had settled in Ireland in the seventeenth century. Hamilton Verschoyle had given up the Bar for the Church, eventually becoming the Bishop of Kilmore, and had been admired by Queen Victoria who, spotting him riding in Rotten Row, declared him to be the best-looking man she had ever seen; his son, Frederick, spent most of his life in the west of Ireland, dreaming of his undergraduate years at Cambridge and recalling how he had once played cricket for the Gentlemen of Kent.

One of three children, Derek Verschoyle was born in 1911. His father, an engineer, wrote scientific books and was the inventor of a hand-operated lathe known as the Verschoyle Patent Mandrel, and the family divided its time between London and Tanrago House in Co. Sligo. Derek Verschoyle’s fifth and final wife, Moira, remembered meeting him on a family holiday in Kilkee, on the west coast of Ireland. ‘I had noticed him before,’ she wrote in a memoir, So Long to Wait, ‘because I always noticed colours that were pretty and that looked satisfying when put together, and he was always dressed in lovely mixtures – pale green shirts and dark green trousers, or two shades of blue, and I had seen him once in a primrose shirt that looked simply beautiful with his red curly hair.’ She noticed too that he was ‘very, very neat and tidy and wore a tie, and his shirt had a proper collar like a man’s with a pin in it. He had a nice square face with freckles and he smiled at me, but I didn’t think he could be much fun to play with if he was always going to be so tidy.’ Years later she would have ample opportunities to discover whether or not he was fun to play with, but in the meantime his mother told her that ‘He has been delicate, and he needs a little rough treatment.’

No doubt rough treatment was in plentiful supply when he was sent to Arnold House prep school in north Wales, where he ended his days as head boy. Evelyn Waugh was then briefly employed at the school, and outraged the more conventional masters by turning up for work in baggy plus-fours, an ancient tweed jacket and a rollneck sweater. Verschoyle later claimed that Waugh taught him to play the organ, despite having no knowledge of the instrument himself, and some say that the head boy provided a model for the precocious and worldly Peter Best-Chetwynde in Decline and Fall: in later years he employed Waugh as a reviewer for the Spectator, and lent him his flat in St James’s Place in the summer of 1943. After leaving the model for Llanabba Castle, Verschoyle went on to Malvern: he reached the Classical VI, became a house prefect and a lance-corporal in the Corps and, according to the Old Boys’ Register, was ‘prox. acc. of the English Essay Prize’ before leaving for Trinity College, Dublin in 1929.

Not long after leaving Trinity he resurfaced as the theatre critic of the Spectator. A year later, in 1933, he was made the magazine’s literary editor. According to Diana Athill, who had it from her father, he kept a .22 rifle in the office in Gower Street, and would occasionally fling open his window and, his feet propped up on the desk, take potshots at stray cats lurking in the garden or on the black-bricked wall beyond; but however unpopular he may have been with Bloomsbury cats, his convivial, heavy-drinking ways recommended him to his colleagues. He became particularly friendly with Peter Fleming, who was also on the staff, and beginning to make his name as a glamorous and fashionable travel writer, and with Graham Greene. With Fleming he co-edited Spectator’s Gallery, an anthology of essays, stories and poems from the magazine, published by Jonathan Cape in 1933, and through him he got to know the publisher and man of letters Rupert Hart-Davis. When, some years ago, I wrote to Hart-Davis to ask what he remembered of Verschoyle, he replied that he could recall absolutely nothing about him even though he had been the best man at Verschoyle’s second wedding; he told his son Duff that Verschoyle had been ‘an absolute shit’, but Duff’s biography of Peter Fleming includes a pre-war photograph of a white-clad bounder waiting his turn to bat for a team that included Fleming, Edmund Blunden and Rupert Hart-Davis, then an energetic editor at Cape.

Like Fleming before him, Verschoyle employed Graham Greene as a fiction reviewer, and then as a film critic. Greene, who eventually succeeded Verschoyle as the Spectator’s literary editor, commissioned him to write the essay on Malvern in The Old School, a collection of essays he edited for Cape in 1934 in which Auden, Greene, Stephen Spender, Harold Nicolson, Antonia White, L.P. Hartley, William Plomer, Elizabeth Bowen and others looked back on their schooldays with varying degrees of affection, ridicule, amusement and disdain; maddeningly, Verschoyle’s contribution sheds no light on the school itself or his time there, and although I have read it several times, I have no idea what – if anything – he was trying to say: it is even less revealing than the photograph in the Fleming biography, which gives one little impression of what he looked like.

Verschoyle is said to have published a book of poems in 1931, but I can find no record of it in the British Library Catalogue. Like many of the best literary editors – and all the best publishers – Verschoyle was no writer himself: his literary ambitions may have included editing and introducing The English Novelists: A Survey of the Novel by Twenty Contemporary Novelists, published by Chatto in 1936 and including Greene, Louis MacNeice, V.S. Pritchett, Edwin Muir, H.E. Bates, Peter Quennell and Elizabeth Bowen among its contributors, but that was about as far as it went. According to Alan Ross, he was ‘an impresario rather than a journalist by nature’: he was forever pondering the plays, poems and memoirs he planned to write, but ‘the gin bottle used to come out at an early hour, so I imagine Derek belonged to the company of those who took the wish for the deed’. But if he failed to advance his own career as a writer during his time at the Spectator, he may well have made contacts that would prove useful to him as a spy or double agent: the magazine’s editor, Wilson Harris, was an old-fashioned Tory, but those writing for the Spectator included Graham Greene, Goronwy Rees, later to be implicated in the flight to Soviet Russia of his friends Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt, whom Verschoyle enlisted as the art critic.

Shortly before war broke out, Verschoyle married the willowy, elegant Anne Scott-James, who went on to become a well-known journalist, the mother of Max Hastings, and the wife of Osbert Lancaster. He had taken a cottage in Aldworth, the village in the Chilterns in which Richard Ingrams now lives, and used to invite her down for weekends. ‘In that summer of 1939 there was a fair amount of false emotion in the air,’ she wrote in her autobiography: Verschoyle left almost immediately to join the RAF, working in Intelligence, and ‘later, when we were divorced, it was as though it had never happened’. When I asked her to elaborate, she said she would rather not: ‘although Derek caused me a lot of anxiety one way and another’, she bore him no ill will after all these years; marrying him had been a ‘big mistake’, but she hadn’t had the nerve to back out of it. He had, she went on, ‘made a lot of mischief in his time’, but when, years later, they met occasionally, ‘all his spark had gone, and it was quite heavy going’.

I have no idea what Verschoyle’s war record amounted to, though he is said to have risen to the rank of wing commander; he was also enlisted by MI6, along with Graham Greene and Malcolm Muggeridge. In Coastwise Lights, the second volume of his autobiography, Alan Ross suggests that Verschoyle was somehow involved with a Partisan unit in Rome as the Allies fought their way up the spine of Italy. As such he was forever requesting his superiors in London to send out large sums of money to fund a particularly useful and well-informed secret agent. The information supplied by this mysterious agent was so valuable that it was decided to send out a senior officer to investigate: the senior officer chosen was Verschoyle’s old colleague and drinking companion Goronwy Rees, who soon realised that the secret agent didn’t exist, and that all the information being fed back to London was guesswork on the part of Verschoyle. Alan, who was a good friend of both men, reckoned it was a case of putting a thief to catch a thief, and that once the matter had been sorted out they felt free to spend their time carousing. Bald and with a ‘pinkish complexion’, Verschoyle was, Alan recalled, ‘dapper in appearance, though slightly moist and shifty about the eyes’, and ‘an entertaining fantasist with as little concern for the truth as his friend and contemporary Goronwy Rees’.

The war over, Verschoyle stayed on in Rome, and was the First Secretary to the British Embassy from 1947 to 1950. Theodora FitzGibbon, a colourful chronicler of post-war bohemian life in Chelsea, met him at the time, and remembered in her memoir Love Lies at a Loss how he invariably brought with him a bottle of wine or gin provided by Saccone & Speed, the wine merchants who in those days supplied British embassies with their every need. He was, she recalled, ‘very mondaine and charming, with an unusual face of regular features, a very attractive face and smile. His manners were impeccable, putting people at ease immediately.’ He spoke without seeming to open his mouth, and ‘talked in a lightly muffled voice on a variety of subjects – sometimes, as I was to find out later, Irish-fashion; that is, he tended to please rather than be factually correct. His walk was quick, but with a gliding motion; one almost felt he could disappear at will. His manner too was sometimes guarded, to cause one to think that his life held many secrets.’ He was always very secretive about his work, but one day he asked her if she would do a ‘job’ for him: she was to go to a particular café, carrying with her a walking stick as a means of identification. She went along to the café every day for a week, walking stick in hand, but no one ever approached her or contacted her in any way. At the end of the week she reported back to Verschoyle, who nodded in an appreciative way, told her she had done very good work, and paid her as agreed.

According to the spy writer Nigel West, Verschoyle’s activities as a secret agent took a more dramatic and sinister turn in 1947, when he was involved in an MI6 plan to blow up ships carrying concentration camp survivors to Palestine. Ernest Bevin, as Foreign Secretary, was determined to reduce the flow of Jewish refugees for fear of aggravating Arab sensibilities, and Count Frederick van der Heuvel, the head of MI6’s Rome station, was ordered to set the plan in motion. The man in immediate charge of the operation was Colonel Harold Perkins (‘Perks’), a legendary figure who had worked in the Polish section of SOE during the war, and would, the following year, work closely with David Smiley in an abortive scheme to land anti-Communist Albanians in their homeland as part of an attempt to subvert the regime of Enver Hoxha: all of them were rounded up and shot within hours of their landing after Kim Philby, then working for the Foreign Office in Washington, had tipped off the Russians, who had in turn alerted the Albanian authorities. Among those enlisted by Perks to prevent the Jewish refugees from reaching Palestine was, West claims, Derek Verschoyle. Posing as Adriatic cigarette smugglers, he and another MI6 operative were told to attach limpet mines to the hulls of the rusting and overloaded ships bound for Haifa from Trieste. The whole wretched story eventually inspired Leon Uris’s bestselling novel Exodus: and, in retrospect at least, Verschoyle seemed an improbable figure to find in a frogman’s uniform.

In the early fifties Theodora FitzGibbon and her husband Constantine set up house in Hertfordshire, where they gave weekend house parties famed for their drunkenness and riotous living. Michael Wharton, a regular visitor, described these massive debauches in A Dubious Codicil, the second volume of his funny, melancholic memoirs, and other participants included John Davenport, Nigel Dennis and, in due course, Derek Verschoyle. Every now and then Theodora FitzGibbon would cook a meal to soak up the booze, and so delicious were they that Verschoyle urged her to write a cookery book: he had just set up in business as a publisher, so she need look no further. After leaving the diplomatic service, he had gone to work for Michael Joseph as a literary adviser, and had persuaded the Duchess of Windsor to be published by the firm; he had also commissioned Alan Ross’s travel book about Sardinia, The Bandit on the Billiard Table, and when he decided to set up on his own this was one of the books he took with him, together with Theodora FitzGibbon’s proposed cookery book.

‘Derek’s ideas tended to run ahead of his capacity to deal with them,’ Alan Ross later observed, and Derek Verschoyle Ltd was no exception to the rule. Verschoyle’s partner in the firm, albeit of the sleeping variety, was Graham Eyres-Monsell, a rich and well-connected homosexual whose sister Joan was married to Patrick Leigh Fermor; and their offices were in an elegant, rickety Georgian house in Park Place, a cul-de-sac off St James’s Street. Although the firm lasted for little more than a year, and although most of the titles under contract were eventually published by other companies, the list of authors was extremely distinguished, and included Patrick Leigh Fermor, Alan Ross, Lawrence Durrell, Roy Fuller, James Hanley, Bea Howe, G.S. Fraser, Vernon Bartlett and Christopher Sykes. The firm’s colophon was a bristly boar’s head which looked as though it was about to be served up at a medieval banquet. The staff, many of them part-time, included Francis Wyndham, who joined the firm in April 1953 and remained with it until its collapse at the end of the following year, working as a reader and blurb-writer; John Willett, later to become an authority on East Germany and the works of Bertolt Brecht, who toiled in the attic; and Mamaine Paget, one of the Paget twins, famous beauties of their day, and much admired by Cyril Connolly and his friends. She came in for mornings only: she had been in love with both George Orwell and Arthur Koestler, who had recently left her for his last wife, and she died of asthma while working for the firm. The office manager was Verschoyle’s wife, Moira. Beautiful and given to wearing stylish dresses pinched at the waist with a black patent leather belt, she had previously been married to Humphrey Slater, a seedy and heavy-drinking inhabitant of bohemia who had once edited Polemic, a short-lived but much admired literary magazine. The Verschoyles’ married life was a tempestuous affair, and he would occasionally reel into the office swathed in bandages or sporting a black eye. ‘You’ve been in the wars, I see,’ Mamaine would remark, and he would mutter something about having been hit by a door.

Business life was equally tumultuous and unpredictable: according to Francis Wyndham, the bailiffs would arrive just as he was in the middle of typing a letter, hand over writs to him or to Moira, and whisk away the typewriters, office furniture and any other items of value, leaving any letters to be completed once the outstanding debts had been settled. Verschoyle was a generous employer who couldn’t bear to sack anyone, so the staff, such as it was, survived these turbulent comings and goings: these were the days of long publishing lunches, and Verschoyle enjoyed lengthy sessions at the Travellers or the Garrick with Patrick Kinross or Patrick Leigh Fermor, returning to the office rather red in the face but still in control. Francis Wyndham remembers him as a dandified, plummy-toned, manicured figure, given to wearing dubious Edwardian suits with tight trousers, waisted jackets with double vents at the back and fancy waistcoats; he found him cold, snobbish, conceited and keen on showing off, and was repelled by his pretensions and a whiff of crookedness. Alan Ross was more forgiving and more amused. ‘He was a considerate, genial, generous host, always delighted to purvey information of a kind not ordinarily come by. In this sense he was the reverse of a spy, but with similar instincts for elaborate fabrication,’ he wrote in Coastwise Lights.

Every now and then Verschoyle would invite Alan to lunch at the Garrick, but would sit there in silence, perhaps because ‘his general deviousness or marital problems were weighing heavily’. On other occasions, ‘possibly as a result of an excess of gin, he sometimes looked as if he might explode, his face getting pinker and pinker, his eyes smaller’. Roy Fuller, whose novels were recommended to the firm by Alan Ross, noted how ‘from Verschoyle’s reddish visage, somewhat watery eyes, one might have guessed he had no distaste for the bottle’; and after the collapse of the firm, his drinking reached epic proportions.

Like many small literary publishers of the time – John Lehmann or MacGibbon & Kee, for instance – Verschoyle did his best to pull off the admirable but impossibly hard double act of publishing worthwhile books he believed in while at the same time making a sufficient profit to remain in business. He failed, and had to sell out to André Deutsch, a similar practitioner who managed to keep afloat by a combination of parsimony, shrewdness, monomania and sound literary advice. Deutsch took over Verschoyle’s new offices in Carlisle Street, bang opposite the building that would later house Private Eye. In her publishing memoir, Stet, Diana Athill remembers Verschoyle as ‘a raffish figure, vaguely well-connected and vaguely literary’, and very much the kind of dubiously upper-class Englishman with whom, to her dismay, André tended to become involved. When they moved in, she remembers, the offices had been stripped bare: the only evidence of their previous occupants was an RAF dress uniform, hanging in a cupboard in an upstairs room. For some time afterwards, wine merchants’ and tailors’ bills continued to be delivered to Carlisle Street: more usefully, André inherited Ludwig Bemelmans’ bestselling children’s books about Madeline, Roy Fuller’s undervalued novels, Lawrence Durrell’s Pope Joan, Theodora FitzGibbon’s cookery books, which formed the basis for a list briefly edited for the firm by Elizabeth David, and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s The Violins of Saint-Jacques, published jointly with John Murray. Francis Wyndham moved too, and with Diana he was responsible for discovering V.S. Naipaul, and rediscovering Jean Rhys. When Deutsch moved on to Great Russell Street, where I went to work in the late Sixties, the Carlisle Street offices were taken over by Secker & Warburg.

Verschoyle’s later years make for melancholy reading. He spent some time in the early Sixties as the managing director of Grower Publications, and edited The Grower, a magazine for vegetable enthusiasts. Even more improbably, he went into partnership making prefabricated doors with the equally bibulous Goronwy Rees, his former colleague on the Spectator, then living in penury in Essex: the business was not a success. By now Verschoyle had left London for East Anglia. He and Moira moved into a large and handsome Georgian house near Framlingham and, with a hard-drinking ex-SOE man who lived in the same village, he set up the Deben Bookshop in Woodbridge; Collins the publishers then backed him when he established the Ancient House Bookshop in Ipswich, later the scene of a mysterious fire. He died in 1973.

‘I am rather surprised that you should consider Derek for a biography, because he is forgotten now except for a very few old people like myself who knew him,’ Anne Scott-James replied after I had written for information about him. He deserves a brief life at best: he is one of those characters who flit through the footnotes of other people’s diaries, letters and biographies, adding colour and comicality to the proceedings; and he was the antithesis of the average Old Malvernian.

A few years ago I thought of writing a literary rogues’ gallery featuring bibulous, rather raffish characters like Verschoyle and based on the post-war years: Julian Maclaren-Ross and Patrick Hamilton, my particular heroes, weren’t minor enough, and had already been written about at length, but possible candidates might have included hardened literary journalists like Maurice Richardson, John Davenport and John Raymond, all of whom fell victim to the enemies of promise. At some stage in the proceedings I went to Bryanston Square to have a drink with Charles Pick, a shrewd old publisher who had started life in the 1930s as one of Victor Gollancz’s reps, moved on to Michael Joseph in its heyday, and ended his publishing career as the managing director of Heinemann. Charles had come across Verschoyle at Michael Joseph, thought him a snob and a poseur, and couldn’t quite understand why I wanted to waste my time on him.

Towards the end of our session, when the gin-and-tonics had begun to take their toll, and a certain exhaustion had set in, I asked Charles who was the worst rogue he’d met in publishing. ‘John Holroyd-Reece,’ he answered, without a moment’s pause. ‘Now there’s a man you ought to include in your rogues’ gallery. Far more interesting than Derek Verschoyle.’ I had never heard of John Holroyd-Reece, and although, over the next twenty minutes, Charles gave a detailed account of his career and his publishing crimes, I was too tired to take it in. I wish I had. A few years later I suggested to Penguin that I should write a biography of their founder, Allen Lane, and during my researches I discovered that Lane had been a friend of Holroyd-Reece, né Hermann Riess, and that part of the inspiration for Penguins had come from Albatross Verlag, a much-admired firm of English-language paperback reprint publishers, originally based in Germany, of which Holroyd-Reece was a founder member: Albatross titles were only available on the Continent, and their plain lettering covers, colour-coded jackets, bird motif and elegant typography were among the qualities shared by Albatross and Penguin.

A pallid, monocled figure clad in a black cloak, Holroyd-Reece had, I discovered, been expelled from Repton after being cited as a co-respondent in a divorce case, had been appointed Governor of Zable and Malloake in the Sudan after World War I, and had taken over the publication of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness after Jonathan Cape had been threatened with prosecution for obscene libel by Sir William Joynson-Hicks, a famously censorious Home Secretary. A rabid pursuer of other men’s wives, Holroyd-Reece sounded a perfect candidate for a rogues’ gallery. Charles Pick, who had done work for Albatross in the thirties, was one of the very few people around who had known him well: but he had recently died, and now it was too late. My biography of Allen Lane would have been that much better-informed if I’d paid more attention over the gin-and-tonics. As for the rogues, I’d have to look elsewhere.

Back in the mid-sixties, towards the end of my time as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin, I got to know through his daughter Deborah the Irish writer and man of letters Terence de Vere White, who had recently abandoned life as a Dublin solicitor for the literary editorship of the Irish Times. A sociable, eloquent and kindly character, with a leonine mane of thick grey hair, a distinguished cast of feature and a penchant for lovat three-piece suits fashioned from Donegal tweed, he enjoyed his sporadic forays into London literary life, numbering among his particular cronies Compton Mackenzie, John Betjeman and the publisher Martin Secker. When I told him, in a vague, hesitant way, that I was interested in a career in publishing, he hurried to pull some strings on my behalf. Letters were written to various luminaries of the book trade, all of whom I promised to visit when the summer vacation came round.

Like many undergraduates with publishing pretensions, I had very grand and romantic ideas of what the trade involved. When Leonard Cutts of Hodder & Stoughton, widely revered as the inventor of Teach Yourself Books, suggested that I might like to start work in the Hodder warehouse near Sevenoaks, I was duly outraged. My ardour was dashed by the prospect of trading in my new moss-coloured corduroy suit for a brown cotton overgarment, as worn by ironmongers and middle-aged grocers. I made no effort to conceal my disappointment, and another two years were to pass before I started at the foot of the publishing ladder.