Memoirs of a Private Man (24 page)

This digression is to make the point that, had the first four
Poldarks
not been republished by Bodley Head in an attractive new format, they would have been out of print for years before Collins eventually decided to do them in Fontana, and much less likely to catch the eye of Robert Clark and other film-makers.

As I have said, the late George Hardinge, an editor at Collins, was a great admirer of the
Poldark
novels, and his prophecy that in paperback they would be ‘ a licence to print money' was proved to be true.

In this climate, Robert Clark took an option on the books and set in motion a plan for a huge and expensive film covering all the first four books, intending to make of them a sort of Cornish
Gone With The Wind
. Kenneth Harper was to be the producer and Vincent Tilsley the scriptwriter.

Jean and I went down and met them in Cornwall, and we had an exciting five days looking for locations. The March weather was horrible, drizzle and mist every day, but I was able to show them many of the scenes that the film would expect to include.

I took them to Port Isaac and Roscarrock and Port Quin and to Trevellas Porth. At Trevellas the mist was thick and ghostly. We slithered our way down in two big cars almost to the edge of the sea. It was not a pretty road, having been used for more than twenty years for test trials on the London to Land's End motor rally: hairpin bends and surfaces of loose stone and rock. The old mineshafts loomed in the mist, the sea muttered on the rocks, a solitary gull told us of its bereavement. Vincent said he would like to go off on his own for a bit. He was obviously inspired, and we waited for him there in the damp, clammy mist, not speaking ourselves, listening perhaps for the tramp of long-dead miners, for the hiss and suck of the long-silent engines; for the clang of the long-fallen changing bell. Nothing had altered here except time and weather, turning it all to rubble and to waste.

The following day we went to St Day, the very centre of the old copper-mining belt, to Redruth and Camborne, stopped at South Crofty, where a mine still worked and was in profit, and then to St Ives and Penzance. In the few days we saw much, and then we all returned to London.

Vincent Tilsley wrote a very good script, but inevitably the story had to be hideously slashed. And even more would have had to come out, for his script as written would have run for at least five hours.

However I need not have been concerned (if concerned is the word). Unknown to us, a financial battle was developing in London with EMI trying to take over Associated British Pictures. After months of conflict they won, and, it being the invariable custom of incoming moguls to axe any projects initiated by outgoing moguls,
Poldark
was axed.

At about this time I was approached by Donald Wilson, one of the BBC's foremost producers, with a proposition of his own. He had been the moving force which had finally got
The Forsyte Saga
to the TV screen, and he was looking for some other project to follow it up. He did not want a historical subject, he wanted it to be about modern life, and thought its setting should be Bristol.

In 1497 Giovanni and his son Sebastian Cabot had sailed from that port under letters patent from Henry VII, and had discovered Nova Scotia. The family of Cabot had been in and around Bristol for most of their lives but had left no apparent heirs. Donald Wilson's idea was to suppose that in the twentieth-century a family called Cabot was still living in Bristol. A good writer, he thought, could produce a long saga about this family bringing in whichever occupations and industries and cultures he fancied to use from the Bristol of today.

It was a clever idea, and I was not untempted. But it would be a very big project, and I had done nothing like it before. As usual lacking confidence, I tried to get out of it. I had never written a script, I said (which was only true of TV). It would involve the creation of an enormous range of characters, and I was not sure I could do this.

Donald said: ‘Why not go there and scout round for a few days, see if anything appeals to you? I can lay it on.'

So after humming and ha-ing a bit more I agreed to go.

It was February. Bristol in summer has a very pleasant climate. Sometimes in the winter it is like Alaska. For the first three days I was there it was like Alaska.

I arrived at Temple Meads to be greeted by Brandon Acton-Bond, the head of BBC Bristol. A first slight shock. Accustomed to the chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces of the film industry, I blinked twice at the careworn Hillman Minx and at Brandon's shabby overcoat.

He drove me to the hotel and we had dinner. He was a man of fifty-odd, dark, thin, pleasantly intellectual. We got on well. Before he left he told me of the sandsuckers which, like other shipping in those days, came directly into the centre of Bristol, and whose duty it was to keep the channel from silting up.

‘I'll show you them tomorrow,' he said, ‘and you can meet some of the captains and crews. But first we'll go round the docks.'

Next morning it was grey with a bitter east wind. I shivered at the thought of the ordeal to come. My overcoat had felt like paper last night. Eventually I decided to keep my thick pyjamas on under everything else. I went downstairs feeling a little constricted but protected against the worst.

Brandon drew up in his Hillman. ‘You looked pretty cold last night,' he said, ‘so I've brought you an extra overcoat.'

We went round the docks. Only my nose suffered in the east wind. We went aboard a sandsucker and I met the captain and crew. This part was really interesting. (A member of the Cabot family working as mate on a sandsucker?)

At lunch I was able to shed the two coats, but the restaurant still seemed oppressive. After lunch Brandon took me to the Theatre Royal to see the Old Vic Company. Leaving one coat in the car but lugging my own along, I took a cramped seat in the third row. By the end of the act I was melting away like a wax candle.

‘Excuse me,' I said and went off hurriedly to the lavatory, where I all but had to strip, dragged off my pyjamas, tore back into the rest of my clothes and was just in my seat in time for curtain up with the pockets of my overcoat fairly bulging.

The rest of my stay was surprisingly stimulating. I went back to the sandsuckers twice more, saw another play, went round the Wills factory, saw where the Bristol car was made, etc., and all the time ideas were tugging at me.

The girls in the cigarette factory were great fun. I went back a second time. They were jolly, uninhibited, very frank, didn't seem to mind my company at all. One of them told me that until last Christmas she had always believed that Jesus Christ was the first man and that Adam and Eve came after.

I went home, talked it over with Jean. I consulted the few notes I had made. After all, it would be fun to create another, modern saga, after writing
Poldark
. I rang Donald Wilson and said I would have a shot at it.

He said: ‘Good, good, I'm delighted. Could you let us have a synopsis of the story.'

I said: ‘Sorry, I've never written a synopsis in my life, and it's too late to start now.'

Embarrassed pause. ‘Well, before I commission this I have to show something to my superiors.'

I said: ‘Things only grow as I write. But look: I'll be happy to write you six chapters – that may be about 100 pages of type – happy to do that. Will that suit?'

He agreed at once.

I can't recall how long this took me. The characters were formulating themselves quite quickly, so it may have been less than six weeks. I sent a copy of the chapters to Donald and a second copy to Brandon.

A couple of weeks elapsed and then Donald came on the telephone to me to say how delighted he was with the piece, and Brandon, he said, was equally excited.

Unfortunately between the time he first approached me and when I delivered there had been a turnaround in the higher echelons of the BBC. Donald Baverstock had taken over as head of drama and had decreed that serials were ‘ out'. The new fashion was for a ‘series', in which the author creates a group of characters and writes each week a separate story for them. Of course there could be continuing interest from one instalment to the next, but each one should have a separate beginning, middle and end.

I said: ‘That's a form of short story. All right for them as likes them. But I don't write short stories.'

We argued, amicable to the end, but I refused to budge.
He said: ‘Please think it over for a week or two.'
‘I will,' I promised, and I did.
The outcome was still, regretfully, ‘no'.

It is the only time in my life that I started something and then aborted it.

Inevitably it was not all lost. The character of Angell, based on a solicitor at the Savile Club and whom I had had in mind for some time before, moved over to a novel I wrote later using his name. The character of Deborah I used in the novel
The Walking Stick
.

In the meantime things had been moving elsewhere. Robert Clark, deprived of his position at Associated British Pictures, had bought London Films, which had continued to exist since the death of Korda solely for the purpose of exploiting the many famous films the great Hungarian had made in his lifetime. Clark had other ideas, and he bought another option on the
Poldarks
and tried to set it up in the television world.

I remember we had been on our annual September visit to Venice, and when we returned I was told that London Films had made a deal with the BBC to produce the first four books. I could hardly believe it – or believe my luck. My admiration for the BBC's costume drama productions knew no bounds.
The Forsyte Saga
, the adaptations of Henry James, of Jane Austen, of George Eliot, of Anthony Trollope had conditioned me to such a high standard of excellence that I was wholly confident in their ability and their goodwill to put a faithful interpretation of my novels on the small screen. Surprisingly, apart from
Night Without Stars
, I had been pretty faithfully served by the producers and the directors of the cinema. In spite of all their appalling reputations for taking a novel and distorting it after their own fancies,
Take My Life, Fortune is a Woman
and later (though I was not to know this)
The Walking Stick
had all stuck closely to the story of the novel. How much happier, then, was I to feel that these books were going to be entrusted to our own BBC, whose reputation for integrity was so high, indeed impeccable.

In due course I met Maurice Barry, who was to be the producer of the whole sixteen episodes, and Simon Masters, the script editor, and Christopher Barry (no relation), who was to direct the first four episodes covering the first novel,
Ross Poldark
. We had a jolly lunch, discussing scripting, casting and locations. Jack Pulman was to write the first four episodes, and I could not have been happier about this, as he had adapted many of the classic novels screened, with great tact and with great skill. I was really in good hands.

A few weeks later – uninvited – I went down to join the unit which had gone to Cornwall to scout for locations. Chris d'Oyly John was the production manager, and it was clear that, although he did not know much about Cornwall, he much preferred his own investigations there to receiving unwelcome suggestions from the author, who happened to have lived in Cornwall for thirty years. (The only way to get his cooperation, I found, was to be fiendishly clever and put the idea of a location into his head in such a way that he believed he had thought of it himself.)

On the second day of our tour we stopped for a snack lunch at Portreath, and I paid for the group. Softened by this generosity – I discovered it was really the only way to his heart – Maurice Barry drew me aside and told me that ‘of course' there had had to be some alterations in the early scripts, that is alterations from the storyline in the novel. Knowing the film industry, and knowing how much more scrupulous the BBC was bound to be, I replied that I was used to the changes necessary to present a story in picture form, and we left it at that.

When I first sold an option to Robert Clark I had made it a condition of the sale that they should oversee and vet any production they had a hand in and would preserve the story and the characters without unnecessary distortion. Leslie Baker, the managing director, had gladly given me his personal assurance.

However, I had no qualms. It was further a condition of any sale that I should see the scripts and be able to comment on them. (Script
approval
is virtually never given, and it is unrealistic to ask for it.)

Partly for reasons of time, a different scriptwriter had been assigned for each of the four books, and Simon Masters, as script editor, was to oversee them and keep an eye on their continuity. The writer allotted for
Ross Poldark
was, as I have said, Jack Pulman.

What was my surprise, as bad novelists say, when the first two scripts arrived and I found the story totally distorted, Demelza's character changed, and my carefully studied Cornish dialect swept away, and in its place a sort of phoney Zummerset which only exists inside the close confines of television studios.

Indeed, not a line of my own dialogue was retained. It was as if the scriptwriter had read the book through a couple of times and then thrown it away and told the same sort of story in his own words.

I would make it clear that I was not some middle-aged novelist who had had no experience of the cinematic or dramatic world and considered his precious creations sacrosanct. I had had two full-length scripts made into feature films, and I had contributed substantial parts to half a dozen others. I had had six of my novels filmed, and I was completely aware that in any translation from novel to film there must be abbreviation and broad strokes. Above all, dialogue must be
understandable
, and dialect can only be used sparingly and with that stipulation in mind.

(Where dialect was used in these scripts it was no more understandable, and it was as Cornish as haggis.)