It’s
been a while since I updated my (very occasional) personal online diary –
Leaning On The Gate. I think this is because the initial excitement and awe of
living in one of England’s most beautiful counties, Devon, and the sheer joy of
being in the heart of farming countryside has now mellowed into the familiarity
of ‘everyday life’ so I don’t feel so compelled to keep a record of ‘what goes
on’, outside of some of the Big Events (like the arrival of our two new
donkeys!)
That
is not to say, however, that I take this wonderful rural life for granted. Far
from it!
I still, every so often, get a feeling of 'we'll have to go home tomorrow' - you know that feeling you get when you are enjoying a wonderful vacation but are aware that it will need to end soon? I've come to the conclusion that I have this feeling because we're only temporary custodians of 'Windfall Farm' (not its real name). The old part of the house was built circa 1769 so it has seen several generations and many different people living here. Some of them are still here! (See my journal entry for November about our ghosts!). So this house isn't 'ours', my family and I are merely the present residents. Although I have warned that I fully intend to stick around as a Venerable Spirit myself when the time comes. (A good while yet, I hope!)
The window on the right is my bedroom window
the stone-built part of the house was built circa 1769
Every
morning when I get up I stare out of both my bedroom windows in turn – front and
back duel aspect. The front window views over the front garden, which needs a
bit of autumn debris tidying up, the stable yard (hidden by the dogwoods an
holly tree) and Donkey Field, which is our neighbour’s field but is being kept
mown by Barney and 'DumpyDonk'.
Barney
DumpyDonk (real name Pedro)
The
back window overlooks the orchard and our little aspect of the Taw Valley.
For
the past too many weeks this view has been obliterated by louring grey cloud (the
Devon word is ‘Dimpsey’) and pouring rain. I know the rain’s bad when I can’t
see through it to the bottom of the orchard and the rounded hills and woodlands
beyond have vanished. What’s the saying? ‘If
you can’t see the hill it’s raining. If you can see the hill it’s about to
rain.”
'Our' bit of the Taw Valley
and the farm opposite us
November
sees the Valley in all its autumn finery. Today the sky is blue and there’s a
watery sunshine. The trees and hedgerows are a glory of colour: reds, golds,
browns – I never realised until moving here just how many shades of green there
are.
We
have many resident birds which visit the bird feeders ‘out the back’ house
sparrows, tree sparrows, chaffinches, nuthatches, blue tits, great tits,
long-tailed tits, robins, woodpeckers, yellowhammers, dunnocks, jays, magpies,
willow tits, wrens, blackbirds, thrushes, goldfinch, greenfinch, siskin, bullfinches…
The
sparrows also congregate out the front. The honeysuckle that grows next to and
over the top of the front door hosts an entire tenement colony of sparrows - we call it Sparrowville. Some evenings the squabbling between the families is like a TV episode of
Eastenders!
An
injured wood pigeon also visits. He’s hit overhead wires at some point because
his chest feathers are damaged. There’s no way that we can catch him to inspect
any further damage, but he comes down for a good feed so nature has to take her
course.
Growing up Franc...
Franc at a week old with Mum, Saffie
Franc
(Taw River Dracarys) will be a two-year-old next April, but already he is
enormous – not far off sixteen-hands. It’s hard to believe that my son-in-law,
Adam, actually picked him up on the day he was born! Franc’s mum, Saffie is now
twenty (going on two as far as she is concerned!) is again healthily in foal,
due in May. We’re hoping for a filly, a little Francesca!
We
still have two geese, Booboo and Colin, and a few ducks, but daughter Kathy has
switched from breeding Call Ducks to Pekin Hens (similar to Bantams but
prettier with their feathered feet and puffed up bustles!) They are wonderful
mums (and ‘Arri is a wonderful dad – he poddles around walking like Charlie
Chaplin!) The little chicks are so sweet! The rain hasn’t been kind to them,
though, as we’ve lost a few babies. With broods of nine to thirteen chicks the
hens can’t get all their children under their wings and sometimes the rain
comes too quickly and heavily for them to hurry back to the warm dryness of the
hen house.
'Arri and one of his Ladies
Colin
Rats
are a problem of farms (and towns actually!) The blighters have killed a couple
of the chicks and the mother hens. No matter how secure you make the henhouse
these horrible creatures get in. Our orchard looks like Colditz at the moment.
I drew the line at discovering a rat making its home behind the fridge in the
scullery though! It got dispatched PDQ I can tell you! Yuk!
As
for my writing… well, you see the trouble is there’s always something to do
outside, or the colours and light across the valley changes, or the farmer is
rounding up the sheep and I just have to sit at my desk and watch…
I’ll
get the next book finished soon… or as they say here in the West Country “Dreckly”
which is a word which means… well... ‘whenever’…
"As officers fell, they were replaced by
sergeants. Within an hour the sergeants were dead, and junior corporals found
themselves in command."
Douglas Reeman, “H.M.S. SARACEN”
My guest today, Armistice Day, is Kimberley Jordan Reeman. Together, we would like to remember the fallen through her husband, author and naval officer, Douglas Reeman who is sadly no longer with us. Over to Kim:
Douglas told me this story.
In December of 1915, in rain and blizzards, British, French, Indian,
Australian and New Zealand forces, with Newfoundlanders in the rearguard, began
to abandon hopeless positions along the Gallipoli peninsula and withdraw, prior
to evacuation. The campaign against the Ottoman armies under Turkish and German
command had been a military and humanitarian disaster, and tens of thousands of
men, Allies and Ottoman, had died of wounds, disease and exposure. Just after
Christmas, 1915, a small, exhausted group of Royal Engineers fell back under
cover of darkness, having rigged time fuses and self-firing rifles in their
trenches to deceive the Turks as they retreated. They were led to safety by a
young non-commissioned officer who, eventually, was questioned by a
lieutenant-colonel.
“Where’s the rest of this battalion?”
The young man said, “This is
the battalion, sir.”
“Where the hell’s your commanding officer?”
“I’m the only officer still alive, sir.”
The young man was Charles Percival Reeman, who would give three sons to
the next war. His eldest never returned. His second son committed suicide in a
post-war world where he could find no peace. With his youngest son, Douglas, he
shared this story, and his memories of Gallipoli and the Western Front.
Douglas wrote H.M.S. Saracen
for his father, read it to him as each chapter was finished, and Percy gave it
his tacit approval. Many years later Douglas would draw on those memories again
when planning a new Royal Marines novel. I recalled something else his father
had told him, and said, “You have to call this book The Horizon.”
He knew what I meant. ‘The horizon’ was the lip of the trench, too often
the last thing a man saw before he went over the top into the hail of
machine-gun fire.
It was very nearly the last book Douglas wrote.
I should have recognized the signs. He brought his father’s memories to
the work, and his own, and the almost unbearable horror of the facts as he researched
began to affect him profoundly. He had always had nightmares: they became
worse. I woke one night and he was standing at the window, eyes open, staring
at the darkness. He was asleep. He worked intensively through the summer, and
there was another source of stress as well, illegal tree-felling close to our
property by rogue developers without planning permission. He began to have
headaches.
I should have known.
But I didn’t know, and maybe to escape the intensity of what life had
become I thought about visiting my family in Toronto over the Labour Day
weekend. Everything seemed fine: Douglas was in favour, although I would be
going alone because he was too busy with work.
The voice in my head said, as clearly as if speaking aloud: Don’t leave Douglas.
I didn’t go to Toronto.
Monday, September 5th, 1994.
One of those golden days, rich
sunlight and blue sky. About 11 a.m. he answered the door to some one selling
tea towels: he came back quietly and sat on the sofa, and said, “Terrible
headache.”
Then he asked for a glass of milk. He choked on it. I said, “Douglas,
give me your hands. Both hands. Squeeze my hands as hard as you can.” He had no
grip in the left hand. I ran into his study: I should have dialled 999, but
instinctively I reached out to the one man who could save him, and he answered
the phone himself.
“Douglas is having a stroke,” I said.
“I’ll come at once,” he said, and the line went dead.
He was our family physician, Dr. Maurice FitzGerald, and he and Douglas
had been friends for forty years. A big, Tigger-like Irishman whose
irrepressible zest for life had led his long-suffering wife Geraldine on many
adventures with Maurice, including a helicopter flight to an oil rig after a
casual invitation from an oil baron at some social function; and a party at
which most of the guests were medical professionals, and Douglas was jokingly
introduced as Dr. O’Reeman.
I don’t know how he got here from Esher so quickly: he must have used
that green light his colleagues regarded with such affectionate contempt. And
there was no jocularity, only a gentle, “Ah, you nearly broke my machine,
Douglas,” after he had taken the blood pressure that confirmed what he
suspected. To me he said quietly, “It’s a cerebral haemorrhage. We have to get
him into the car.”
We got him into the car. Paralysis had already set in. The green light
went onto the roof, and Maurice drove as he did everything else, decisively and
well. I sat in the back, supporting Douglas.
“Keep him talking,” Maurice said. “Keep him awake.”
We got to the hospital. Maurice sprinted in. Came back with help. His
friend the cardiac surgeon was on duty. We stood at a respectful distance as
the team worked, Maurice watchful, intent, protective.
“They’re doing everything right,” he said, and then, “The next
twenty-four hours are critical.”
Eventually, having done everything he could, he went home: he had
patients waiting. Eventually, when Douglas was stable, I left him. It was the
first time I had ever prayed in a hospital chapel: it would not be the last. I
went home. I don’t think I slept. At 8 the next morning the phone rang. I
snatched it up.
“It’s me,” the beloved voice said. “I’m out of bed. I’ve had a shave.” I
really did go to my knees then. He continued, “Did you know this place was run
by nuns?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, the head nun, the... Mother Superior...? She was just in here. She
knows Maurice.” Of course she knew Maurice; everybody knew Maurice, and Maurice
knew every one. “She said she thought I’d be home in a few days.”
Not a few days: but he recovered completely, although he remained on
blood pressure medication for the rest of his life, and was frail and exhausted
and depressed for many weeks as brain and body reacted to the trauma they had
suffered. He always believed I had saved his life, but it was Maurice who was
the real hero.
And Maurice, a few years later, shocked us all by doing what no one expects
of a doctor: he revealed his own mortality by dying in the operating theatre
during routine surgery. His colleagues, patients and friends were appalled, his
family shattered. Geraldine, a quiet woman somehow diminished in stature in the
absence of her towering husband, said in the chilly sitting-cum-waiting room
where the Irish harp stood in the corner, “It’s a very sad house without him.”
I know that sadness. The absence of the voice, the drifting sweetness of
pipe tobacco, the tapping of the typewriter keys in the study. But the books
live on: a great spectrum of experience, the lives of, as he described them,
‘ordinary people called on to do extraordinary things’. And among them, perhaps
appropriately imbued with the dark memories of its gestation, is The Horizon, a powerful evocation of
love and war and courage.
The divine fire that animates us as writers, that drives us to create,
flows from the source, from memory, from history, from bitter experience and
from love: the brain refines, the words take shape, the wordsmith tells the
story.
But for the writer the cost is high: the outpouring of energy, the
investment of time and intellect and passion, the commitment of nothing less
than your life to the stories that demand to be told.
Douglas
Reeman was born in Thames Ditton, Surrey, England in 1924. With the outbreak of
war, and despite belonging to an army family, he joined the Royal Navy without
hesitation at the age of sixteen. He saw service in the North Sea and Arctic,
and in the Atlantic and Mediterranean campaigns, beginning as a midshipman in
destroyers and transferring later to motor torpedo boats.
Following the war, he held a variety of jobs,
including delivering yachts, selling marine engines and walking the beat in
London’s East End as a uniformed constable and in the plain-clothes Criminal
Investigation Department. He returned to active service in the Korean War, and
remained a naval reservist while working as a children’s welfare officer for
the London County Council.
In
1958, having published two short stories, Douglas wrote the fictionalised
version of ‘his war’, more for personal satisfaction than out of any hope of
publication. A Prayer for the Ship was
published in 1958, and marked the beginning of a remarkable career.
Ten years later, having established himself as
one of the foremost modern sea story writers of his time, Douglas embarked on a
new and challenging phase: a series of novels featuring one man and spanning
the golden age of fighting sail. In June of 1968 To Glory We Steer was published under the pen name Alexander Kent,
a childhood friend and fellow naval officer who was killed early in the war,
and its solitary, sensitive, compassionate hero, Richard Bolitho, was
introduced to an ever-growing readership.
Today, the exploits of Richard and Adam
Bolitho feature in twenty-eight Alexander Kent novels, and the lives and deaths
of other men, equally heroic, in thirty-five Reeman novels.
Kimberley Jordan Reeman was born in Toronto, graduating from the University of Toronto with a Bachelor of Arts (hons.) in English literature in 1976. She worked in Canadian radio and publishing before marrying the author Douglas Reeman in 1985, and until his death in 2017 was his editor, muse and literary partner, while pursuing her own career as a novelist. She has always been a spinner of tales, telling stories before she could write, reading voraciously from childhood, and citing Shakespeare, Hardy, Winston Graham and the novels of Douglas Reeman and Alexander Kent as her most profound influences. From Graham, who became a friend, she learned to write conversation, to eavesdrop as the characters spoke; from the seafaring novels of Reeman and Kent, which she read years before meeting the author, she came to understand the experience of men at war. It is not necessary to look further than the history of Canada, and Toronto itself, for the genesis of Coronach: a vast country explored, settled, and governed by Scots, and a city, incorporated in 1834, whose first mayor was the gadfly journalist and political agitator William Lyon Mackenzie, a rebel in his own right, and the grandson of Highlanders who had fought in the `45. The Vietnam War, also, burned into the Canadian consciousness the issues of collateral damage and the morality of war; and from this emerged one character, a soldier with a conscience. In unravelling the complexity of his story,Coronachwas born.
