Time to Be in Earnest Read Online Free Page B

the genre. One,
Tragedy At Law
, is in my view among the most enjoyable classical detective stories. Charles Monteith said that Faber would now start looking for a replacement for Cyril Hare, and Elaine told him that she thought she had found one. She sent the manuscript to him next day and Charles accepted it. I think this success produced some unease among my daughters, who had read that any writer of real talent could paper his or her walls with rejection slips. They tactfully pointed this out, anxious to arm me against future disappointment. I retorted with some tartness that children with no faith in Mummy’s talent would not get new bicycles out of the proceeds. A couple of extremely good bicycles as well as other small treats constituted for me financial success.
    I have remained with Faber and Faber ever since, and remained also with Elaine until her death. After that her younger partner, Carol Heaton, took over and I am more than happy to be in her hands.
    I can remember the moment of that telephone call with great clarity. I was late home from work and returned as usual to an empty house. My husband was in Goodmayes Hospital, the children both away and my parents-in-law had retired to Suffolk. The telephone rang almost as soon as I unlocked the door. Elaine had been trying to get me earlier and had made one last attempt. Receiving the news that I was at last to be a published author was one of the most exciting moments of my life, far more exciting, in retrospect, than receiving the first six free copies of the novel. It would have been good to have someone with whom to share the news, but I don’t recall that this mattered at the time. It was sufficient to know that I was going to be a novelist. I knew that evening, as I pranced up and down the hall, that people do literally jump for joy.
    There was one disappointment. The book was due to be published in 1961, the following year, but I received a letter to say that Faber’s fiction list was too large and that my novel was being deferred for twelve months. At the time the wait seemed insupportable, but at least it gave me an added incentive to make a beginning on my second novel with quiet confidence that it would stand a chance of acceptance.

TUESDAY, 5TH AUGUST
    This morning I caught the 11:30 train from Liverpool Street to come to Southwold where this evening I was engaged to speak to the Southwold Archaeological and Natural History Society. The venue was a room on the pier. I was met at Darsham station by Steve, who normally drives me when I come to Southwold. I have been familiar with the East Coast since childhood. After the First World War my father purchased one of the large army bell tents and this would be erected on the cliff at Pake-field, just south of Lowestoft. Here under brown flapping canvas we would spend two weeks each summer, the five of us sleeping with our feet towards the pole like the spokes of a wheel. It was fun for us children but hardly a holiday for our mother. But then I can’t remember her having a proper holiday during all her married life.
    Suffolk is not the loveliest of English counties, its beauties less accessible, less dramatically beautiful than more famous parts of England, but I early grew to love the great skies, the sense of space, the bird-loud estuaries and the churches.
    I have used East Anglia as a setting for a number of my novels, the last example being
Devices and Desires
. The book had its genesis when I was exploring Suffolk with an elderly long-standing friend, Joyce Flack, who drove me in her ancient Mini. I stood for a few minutes alone on a deserted stretch of shingle and looked over the cold and dangerous North Sea. I remember that there were two wooden fishing boats scrunched into the shingle and some brown nets strung between poles, drying in the wind. Closing my eyes, I could hear nothing but the tinny rattle of the shingle drawn back by the waves and the low hissing of the wind, and I thought that I