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This is the author's autobiography in
three volumes. They cover the period from her birth in Simla in 1908
until she met her husband when in her thirties. She was working on
the fourth volume at the time of her death at the age of 95.
The story of her childhood begins at
Simla. At the age of ten she is sent to boarding school in england
where she stays until she has finished her education almost ten years
later. On completion of her schooling the family moves back to
India. On retirement from the Indian Civil Service, her father
serves the ruler of one of the princely states in Rajastan. On her
father's final retirement, the family sails for Northern China where
her father met her mother who was working as a missionary teacher at
the time and where most of her mother's relatives lived.
It was while she was staying at
Hyderabad, that the author met Somerset Maugham. She was
disappointed to find him an unfriendly old gentleman. After Somerset
Maugham had stumped off to bed she told his secretary that she has
purposely avoided mentioning his books as she imagined that the great
man must be sick to death of people saying “Oh Mr Maugham, I simply
adored this or that book or story” To which his secretary replied:
'You are quite wrong. It's the only thing he likes to talk about'.
The next morning she got on with him
very much better and she admitted that she had just written a very
light-hearted novel, but that she was afraid that she would never
make a writer. He asked why. She said that it was because she wrote
much too slowly and would stick for hours on end over a sentence that
she couldn't get right and had been advised by friends that she
should leave it, press on, and come back and fix it later. She said
that she had to get it right before she could go on and sometimes got
held up for hours on end. For every word that she wrote, she might
have rubbed out twenty. Somerset Maugham said that this was the one
thing she had said that made him think that she would become a
writer. He said that he did that, and so did Colette, who he
apparently admired.
She asked him if it was true that the
plots for all his stories ones he had overheard or had been told by
people who had been involved in them in some way or another, and that
they were all based on fact. He replied that of course they were and
said “Why should I cudgel my brains to invent stories when people
keep giving me excellent real-life ones on a plate? If they ever
stop handing me interesting stories I may have to start inventing
them. But not until then!”
This confirms for me what I had always
suspected which is that Somerset Maugham's stories are so realistic
that they could be based on fact. I suspect that it was his
secretary, who was more communicative than Maugham and did not stomp
off to bed early, who obtained the stories, and Maugham merely had to
put them into words.
Although the writer's family always
seemed to be short of money, they always seemed to be staying at the
best places, for example, the Raffles at Singapore and the Taj at
Bombay. They also managed to get invitations from to various
Government Houses, for example, in Calcutta, through her father's
connections with the various governors. It was that shortage of cash
that led the family to spend summers in Kashmir on the Dal Lake at
Srinagar rather than in the more fashionable but more expensive hill
stations like Simla as in the past and it was the beauty of Kashmir
in Spring and Autumn that she was particularly taken with.
After China, and a holiday in pre-war
Japan, the family return to India where the father died. The author
and her mother returned to England to be with relatives leaving
behind in India the younger sister who had married. The mother found
it difficult to adjust to widowhood in England and returned to India
to keep house for the elder brother leaving the author behind in
England to embark on a career of being a commercial artist. It was
at this time that the author turned to pulp fiction in the evenings
for want of anything better to do. She used to merely ask the
librarian to select a handful of novels to last a week. The quality
of this literature led the author to the conclusion that she could
write just as well herself. She decided to give it a go and set
about writing a whodunnit. Her first effort was accepted by the
publisher who paid her what was a tidy sum in those days. She said
that she had not realised that she was selling all her rights because
she had not read the fine print in the contract.
From that beginning, she went on to
produce a prodigious quantity of work including the three volume
autobiography, children's' books, full length novels, and whodunits
set in every part of the world.
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