The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (26 page)

In Greece, the R.A.F. had a total of about eighteen Hurricanes. The Germans had
at least one thousand
aeroplanes
to operate with. We
had a hard time. We were driven from our aerodrome outside Athens (
Elevis
), and flew for a while from a small secret landing
strip further west (
Menidi
). The Germans soon found
that one and bashed it to bits, so with the few planes we had
left,
we flew off to a tiny field (Argos) right down in the
south of Greece, where we hid our Hurricanes under the olive trees when we
weren't flying.

But this couldn't last long. Soon, we had only five Hurricanes left, and not many
pilots still alive. Those five planes were flown to the island of Crete. The
Germans captured Crete. Some of us escaped. I was one of the lucky ones. I
finished up back in Egypt. The squadron was re-formed and re-equipped with
Hurricanes. We were sent off to Haifa, which was then in Palestine (now
Israel), where we fought the Germans again and the Vichy French in Lebanon and
Syria.

At that point, my old head injuries caught up with me. Severe headaches
compelled me to stop flying. I was invalided back to England and sailed on a
troopship from Suez to Durban to
Capetown
to Lagos to
Liverpool, chased by German submarines in the Atlantic and bombed by long-range
Focke-Wulf
aircraft every day for the last week of
the voyage.

I had been away from home for four years. My mother, bombed out of her own
house in Kent during the Battle of Britain and now living in a small thatched
cottage in Buckinghamshire, was happy to see me. So were my four sisters and my
brother. I was given a month's leave. Then suddenly I was told I was being sent
to Washington D.C. in the United States of America as Assistant Air Attaché.
This was January 1942, and one month earlier the Japanese had bombed the
American fleet in Pearl Harbor. So the United States was now in the war as
well.

I was twenty-six years old when I arrived in Washington, and I still had no
thoughts of becoming a writer.

During the morning of my third day, I was sitting in my new office at the
British Embassy and wondering what on earth I was meant to be doing, when there
was a knock on my door. "Come in."

A very small man with thick steel-rimmed spectacles shuffled shyly into the
room. "Forgive me for bothering you," he said.

"You aren't bothering me at all," I answered. "I'm not doing a
thing."

He stood before me looking very uncomfortable and out of place. I thought
perhaps he was going to ask for a job.

"My name," he said, "is Forester. C. S. Forester."

I nearly fell out of my chair. "Are you joking?" I said.

"No," he said, smiling. "That's me."

And it was. It was the great writer himself, the inventor of Captain
Hornblower
and the best teller of tales about the sea since
Joseph Conrad. I asked him to take a seat.

"Look," he said. "I'm too old for the war. I live over here now.
The only thing I can do to help is to write things about Britain for the
American papers and magazines. We need all the help America can give us. A
magazine called the
Saturday Evening Post
will publish any story I write. I have a contract with them. And I have
come to you because I think you might have a good story to tell. I mean about
flying."

"No more than thousands of others," I said. "There are lots of
pilots who have shot down many more planes than me."

"That's not the point," Forester said. "You are now in America,
and because you have, as they say over here, 'been in combat', you are a rare
bird on this side of the Atlantic. Don't forget they have only just entered the
war."

"What do you want me to do?" I asked.

"Come and have lunch with me," he said. "And while we're eating,
you can tell me all about it. Tell me
your
most
exciting adventure and I'll write it up for the
Saturday Evening Post
. Every little bit helps."

I was thrilled. I had never met a famous writer before. I examined him closely
as he sat in my office. What astonished me was that he looked so ordinary.
There was nothing in the least unusual about him. His face, his conversation,
his eyes behind the spectacles, even his clothes were all exceedingly normal.
And yet here was a writer of stories who was famous the world over. His books
had been read by millions of people. I expected sparks to be shooting out of
his head, or at the very least, he should have been wearing a long green cloak
and a floppy hat with a wide brim.

But no.
And it was then I began to realize for the
first time that there are two distinct sides to a writer of fiction. First,
there is the side he displays to the public, that of an ordinary person like
anyone else, a person who does ordinary things and speaks an ordinary language.
Second, there is the secret side which comes out in him only after he has
closed the door of his workroom and is completely alone. It is then that he
slips into another world altogether, a world where his imagination takes over
and he finds himself actually
living
in
the places he is writing about at that moment. I myself, if you want to know,
fall into a kind of trance and everything around me disappears. I see only the
point of my pencil moving over the paper, and quite often two hours go by as
though they were a couple of seconds.

"Come along," C S. Forester said to me. "Let's go to lunch. You
don't seem to have anything else to do."

As I walked out of the Embassy side by side with the great man, I was churning
with excitement. I had read all the
Hornblowers
and
just about everything else he had written. I had, and still have, a great love
for books about the sea. I had read all of Conrad and all of that other
splendid sea-writer, Captain
Marryat
(
Mr
Midshipman Easy, From Powder Monkey to
Admiral,
etc.), and now here I was about to have lunch with somebody who,
to my mind, was also pretty terrific.

He took me to a small expensive French restaurant somewhere near the Mayflower
Hotel in Washington. He ordered a sumptuous lunch, then he produced a notebook
and a pencil (ballpoint pens had not been invented in 1942) and laid them on
the tablecloth. "Now," he said, "tell me about the most exciting
or frightening or dangerous thing that happened to you when you were flying
fighter planes."

I tried to get going. I started telling him about the time I was shot down in
the Western Desert and the plane had burst into flames.

The waitress brought two plates of smoked salmon.

While we tried to eat it, I was trying to talk and Forester was trying to take
notes.

The main course was roast duck with vegetables and potatoes and
a thick
rich gravy. This was a dish that required one's full
attention as well as two hands. My narrative began to flounder. Forester kept
putting down the pencil and picking up the fork, and vice versa. Things weren't
going well. And apart from that, I have never been much good at telling stories
aloud.

"Look," I said. "If you like, I'll try to write down on paper
what happened and send it to you. Then you can rewrite it properly yourself in
your own time. Wouldn't that be easier? I could do it tonight."

That, though I didn't know it at the time, was the moment that changed my life.

"A splendid idea," Forester said. "Then I can put this silly
notebook away and we can enjoy our lunch. Would you really mind doing that for
me?"

"I don't mind a bit," I said. "But you mustn't expect it to be
any good. I'll just put down the facts."

"Don't worry," he said, "So long as the facts are there, I can
write the story. But please," he added, "let me have plenty of
detail. That's what counts in our business, tiny little details, like you had a
broken shoelace on your left shoe, or a fly settled on the rim of your glass at
lunch, or the man you were talking to
had
a broken
front tooth. Try to think back and remember everything."

"I'll do my best," I said.

He gave me an address where I could send the story, and then we forgot all
about it and finished our lunch at leisure. But
Mr
Forester was not a great talker. He certainly couldn't talk as well as he
wrote, and although he was kind and gentle, no sparks ever flew out of his head
and I might just as well have been talking to an intelligent stockbroker or
lawyer.

That night, in the small house I lived in alone in a suburb of Washington, I
sat down and wrote my story. I started at about seven o'clock and finished at
midnight. I remember I had a glass of Portuguese brandy to keep me going. For
the first time in my life, I became totally absorbed in what I was doing. I
floated back in time and once again I was in the sizzling hot desert of Libya,
with white sand underfoot, climbing up into the cockpit of the old Gladiator,
strapping myself in, adjusting my helmet, starting the motor and taxiing out
for take-off. It was astonishing how everything came back to me with absolute
clarity. Writing it down on paper was not difficult. The story seemed to be
telling itself, and the hand that held the pencil moved rapidly back and forth
across each page. Just for fun, when it was finished, I gave it a title. I
called it "A Piece of Cake".

The next day, somebody in the Embassy typed it out for me and I sent it off to
Mr
Forester. Then I forgot all about it.

Exactly two weeks later, I received a reply from the great man. It said:

Dear RD, You were meant to give me notes,
not a finished story. I'm bowled over. Your piece is
marvellous
.
It is the work of a gifted writer. I didn't touch a word of it. 1 sent it at
once under your name to my agent, Harold Matson, asking him to offer it to the
Saturday
Evening Post
with my personal
recommendation. You will be happy to hear that the
Post
accepted it immediately and have paid one
thousand dollars.
Mr
Matson's commission is ten per
cent. I enclose his check for nine hundred dollars. It's all yours. As you will
see from
Mr
Matson's letter, which 1 also enclose,
the
Post
is asking if you will write
more stories for them. I do hope you will. Did you know you were a writer?
With my very best wishes and congratulations, C. S. Forester.

"A Piece of Cake" is
printed at the end of this book.

Well! I thought. My goodness me! Nine hundred dollars! And they're going to
print it! But surely it can't be as easy as all that? Oddly enough, it was.

The next story I wrote was fiction. I made it up. Don't ask me why. And
Mr
Matson sold that one, too. Out there in Washington in
the evenings over the next two years, I wrote eleven short stories. All were
sold to American magazines, and later they were published in a little book
called
Over to You.

Early on in this period, I also had a go at a story for children. It was called
"The Gremlins", and this I believe was the first time the word had
been used. In my story, Gremlins were tiny men who lived on R.A.F.
fighter-planes and bombers, and it was the Gremlins, not the enemy, who were
responsible for all the bullet-holes and burning engines and crashes that took
place during combat. The Gremlins had wives called
Fifinellas
,
and children called Widgets, and although the story itself was clearly the work
of an inexperienced writer, it was bought by Walt Disney who decided he was
going to make it into a full-length animated film. But first it was published
in
Cosmopolitan Magazine
with
Disney's
coloured
illustrations (December 1942), and
from then on, news of the Gremlins spread rapidly through the whole of the
R.A.F. and the United States Air Force, and they became something of a legend.

Because of the Gremlins, I was given three weeks' leave from my duties at the
Embassy in Washington and whisked out to Hollywood. There, I was put up at
Disney's expense in a luxurious Beverly Hills hotel and given a huge shiny car
to drive about in. Each day, I worked with the great Disney at his studios in
Burbank, roughing out the story-line for the forthcoming film. I had a ball. I
was still only twenty-six. I attended story-conferences in Disney's enormous
office where every word spoken, every suggestion made, was taken down by a
stenographer and typed out afterwards. I mooched around the rooms where the
gifted and obstreperous animators worked, the men who had already created Snow
White,
Dumbo
,
Bambi
and other
marvellous
films, and in those
days, so long as these crazy artists did their work, Disney didn't care when
they turned up at the studio or how they behaved.

When my time was up, I went back to Washington and left them to it.

My Gremlin story was published as a children's book in New York and London,
full of Disney's
colour
illustrations, and it was
called of course
The Gremlins.
Copies
are very scarce now and hard to come by. I myself have only one. The film,
also, was never finished. I have a feeling that Disney was not really very
comfortable with this particular fantasy. Out there in Hollywood, he was a long
way away from the
great war
in the air that was going
on in Europe. Furthermore, it was a story about the Royal Air Force and not about
his own countrymen, and that, I think, added to his sense of bewilderment. So
in the end, he lost interest and dropped the whole idea.