When their neighbour Madame Rimbaud fell ill and was visited by the doctor, his ministrations were accompanied by well-intentioned ‘Shoutings of choruses of women down there all day’.
Despite the disadvantages of their cramped quarters and noisy surroundings, my parents remained at first broadly satisfied with their new home, and swiftly became profound lovers of Collioure and its inhabitants. Their isolated and unproductive life in Snowdonia had long strained Patrick’s nerves to desperation, and there could be no doubting the truth of his parting aphorism: ‘it is better to be poor in a warm country.’[fn6]
In fact the weather at Collioure was far from being balmy throughout the entirety of the year. Winters could prove bitterly cold, and one snowstorm was so heavy that roofs collapsed beneath the weight. In January 1954 my mother recorded: ‘Snow thick from Al Ras to Massane; cold & it rained all night’, and shortly afterwards: ‘Rain in the night, & today the Dugommier hillside specked with snow. They say 15° [Fahrenheit] below zero at Font Romeu.’ I remember seeing in the town at that time photographs of what I recall as enormous waves frozen in mid-air as the sea hurled itself against the town walls. Life in the tiny flat above the rue Arago could be harsh indeed: ‘Ice on comportes in the rue; glacial wind. Mirus [stove] full blast hardly keeps us warm’; ‘Still 23° without, washing frozen into boards … Frightful cold: P. works au coin du feu.’
In spring the ‘maddening, howling tramontane’ battered the region for frustrating weeks, while in the autumn ‘Wind (from Spain) & clouds prevented plage. C’est le vent d’Espagne – il fait humide – c’est pas sain.’
Port d’Avall and Château St Elme under snow in 1954[fn7]
Of course much of the year was generally hot, but even then freak weather could strike Collioure’s microclimate, arising from its situation between the mountains and the sea. July 1953 saw a ‘fantastic hail storm … River vast red flow.’ Much of this belongs to the past, owing to climate change, but is important to recall when reliving my parents’ early days in Collioure.
A hostile critic has conjectured that Patrick’s move to Collioure was undertaken ‘perhaps, in order to be a long way from the family he had abandoned’.[3] In reality, seven years had passed since he finally left his first wife Elizabeth for my mother. Moreover, he continued in close touch with his young son Richard, the only other member of his immediate family, whom he had no intention of abandoning, while he maintained intermittent correspondence with his brothers, sisters and stepmother throughout the long years that lay ahead.
It is true that relations with his son had been troubled, although nothing approaching the extent alleged by subsequent critics. Richard O’Brian was, by his own admission, somewhat indolent as a child, and made unsatisfactory progress at the Devonshire preparatory school to which his father and my mother had sent him for two and a half years at great financial sacrifice to themselves. At the end of the summer term of 1947 Patrick was obliged to withdraw him, and set about teaching him at the house where he and my mother were living in North Wales. Although the boy’s education improved considerably in consequence, in some respects the experience was an unhappy one. Patrick’s own wretched childhood had left him constitutionally ill-equipped (for much of his adult life, at any rate) to deal with small children, a failing on occasion so pronounced as to be all but comical. Walking above Collioure in November 1951, he fled down a sidetrack on ‘seeing some beastly little boys’ – one of several similarly alarming encounters. He imposed what might now appear excessively rigorous discipline on his son during lessons. Although Richard regularly stayed with his mother in London during the ‘school holidays’, during his time in Wales he had missed her and his beloved boxer Sian acutely. Patrick and my mother were fond of dogs, but it was impossible to introduce Sian into the sheep-farming community of Cwm Croesor.
This regime continued for two years, during which time excruciating attacks of writer’s block made Patrick more and more testy and uncompromising in his efforts to educate the boy. It is likely that Patrick’s frustration with Richard’s lack of satisfactory progress was exacerbated by his own inability to achieve anything constructive in his writing. On the other hand, outside lessons he became in marked contrast a strikingly adventurous and imaginative parent. My mother’s unwavering affection, too, went far to ameliorate Richard’s life. Eventually, the ill-conceived scheme came to an end, with the departure of Patrick and my mother for Collioure in September 1949. That July Richard’s mother Elizabeth married her longstanding lover John Le Mee-Power, which enabled her to make a successful application to the courts to recover custody of her son.
Patrick was deeply concerned to secure the best education possible for Richard. In 1945 he had registered him for entry to Wellington College, a public school with a strong military tradition, with a view to his eventually obtaining a career in the Army. Unfortunately this was my father’s old school, which I in turn entered in January 1949. When my father was informed by Elizabeth that the O’Brians planned to send Richard there, he managed to persuade the Master of the undesirability of his attending the same school as me. The fact that my mother was at the time denied all contact with me presumably influenced the College’s concurrence with my father’s objection, which would now seem harsh and arbitrary. It is possible that some future unhappiness might have been avoided, had Richard and I been permitted to become friends from an early age.
The sincerity of Patrick’s concern to advance Richard’s education and future career cannot be doubted. The annual fees for Wellington were £160–£175 a year, which together with travel and additional expenses required a total expenditure of about £200 per annum. Yet his and my mother’s combined income for 1950–51 amounted to £341 6s 9d.[fn8] Nor was the proposed sacrifice any fanciful project, since they had earlier paid about £170 a year for Richard’s preparatory school fees and expenses.[4]
Eventually Richard came to believe that his father had contributed nothing material towards his education. In a press interview conducted over half a century later, he declared: ‘My father never offered to help … [I] had been sent to a boarding school in Devon by [my] mother … [My] mother found the fees increasingly difficult to pay.’[5]
Although Richard is unlikely to have been concerned at the time by the question of who paid his school fees, in retrospect his mother’s poverty-stricken circumstances (by her own account, she earned ‘between £3. 10. 0. and £4. 0.0. a week’, from invisible mending conducted in their home) might have made it plain that it could not have been she. Nor, given her upright character, does it appear likely that she would have made any attempt to deceive her son over the issue. Again, the fact that it was to Patrick and my mother that Richard looked for provision of all extras, ranging from school uniform and games kit to pocket money and railway travel, must have made it plain at the time who was meeting the bills.
Richard’s memory could well have deceived him after half a century. Unfortunately, it is necessary to demonstrate that it did do so, in order to counter accusations levelled at Patrick by others.
Denied entry to Wellington, in the autumn of 1949 Richard was enrolled at Cardinal Vaughan School in Holland Park. A place was found for him by Father de Zulueta, aristocratic priest of the Roman Catholic church in Chelsea, where Richard and his mother lived. My mother’s accounts show that she and Patrick spent substantial sums on Richard each year, although this did not include school fees, the institution being funded by the London County Council. Occasional financial assistance was probably also contributed by my grandfather, who was then living in Upper Cheyne Row around the corner from Richard and his mother. My mother’s brother Howard, known to the family as ‘Binkie’, recalled: ‘My Father told me that Patrick’s