Memoirs of a Private Man by Winston Graham Read Free Book Online

course it suited her to have me living at home; and probably she felt if the worst came to the worst she could buy me a bookshop somewhere where I could marry and live out my life comfortably enough. And of course it suited me just as marvellously to live at home and not to be dependent on my earnings for the bare essentials.
    In the liverish eye of my relatives I was something of a drip. Since school, when I had appeared so ‘clever’, I had seemed to go to seed. I sharpened up to play tennis or go on the beach or tramp the cliffs or go to the cinema or in pursuit of a girl, but I did not seem interested in any gainful occupation. I got up very late in the mornings and stayed up very late at night. (Kinder to reverse the description of this routine, one being the outcome of the other.) Since, in the house my parents bought in Cornwall, we had no electricity, this meant reading or studying by ‘Aladdin’ lamps, or by one candle only in the bedroom, and not infrequently I would read till 3 a. m. My eyes did not have so much demanded of them again until the war, when as a coastguard I would illegally read – usually poetry – by the light of a torch.
    I can understand how very irritating it must have been to my father – an intensely practical man who, though with musical leanings, was wholly wedded to the business ethic – to have this tall, thin, frequently jolly, but frail, drooping, sometimes ungracious son, who had no real ambition – no ambition at least that was realizable – and spent most of the day with his nose in a book. And who, through indifferent health and his mother’s pampering, was such a disappointment.
    Many snide remarks came my way from outside, and my sisterin-law never missed an opportunity to point out to my mother, after my father died, what a useless member of society I was becoming.
    In his first two years in Cornwall my father recovered sufficiently to be able to take long walks, to play bridge, to write with his left hand and to do a little gardening. On his last birthday he wrote to his mother: ‘My dear Mother, Sixty! I can hardly believe it!’ I had had no real idea how old he was, but it so happened that he left the letter open on the writing table, and, going for an envelope, I inadvertently saw it. I had supposed him somewhere in his midfifties, and sixty – to an eighteen-year-old – seemed immensely aged.
    That same year, on a November afternoon, six years almost to the day after his first stroke, a lady at the door roused me from sleep – I had nodded off to sleep with my head on the page of the novel I was trying to write – to say that my father was ill in the garden. I hurried out, hoping it was just another fit, but it soon became clear that this was a second stroke – this time it had affected the whole of his left side. We got him to bed somehow. He could not speak or move at all, only his weakened right hand endlessly flexed and unflexed, as he had got into the habit of doing to try to strengthen it; that, and a fluttering of one eye.
    â€˜Can you hear me, Father?’ I would say, and he would wink. It was the only communication left. He died a week later, survived by his eighty-five-year-old mother in Blackburn. Life is not kind – nor is it in any way even-handed. At sixty I was at the peak of my career, though already burdened with a wife crippled in just the same way as my father had been. Happily ‘burden’ simply does not apply to her; but living with a handicap and living under threat is not conducive to high spirits. She was a miracle. Always optimistic, even when first paralysed, always cheerful, always loving.
    At that time, the time of my father’s death, and for a long while before and after it, I was appallingly shy of telling anyone I wanted to be a writer, fearing total ridicule – which such a statement would probably have received. The year before he died I had bitterly