In the second of our summers together (the really good one) I think we must have seen as many as twenty-five plays without getting to the final act of any of them. One – I suppose it must have been a Pinter – we walked out of before a single character had even said anything. On top of that we consigned to the flames or the waves one Gunter Grass, two John Fowles, a Nabokov, a John Berger, three Doris Lessings, a Gore Vidal, two John Barths, and the whole of Jorge Luis Borges. I remember that I even tossed in a Norman Mailer but Camilla dived in – she was a stupendous diver – and rescued him. I think she detected my unclean unliterary motive. I knew that she had a soft spot for Norman Mailer and that for him she might leave me. We were very much in love that summer. We had a ball.

I didn’t worry too much about Norman Mailer. There didn’t seem any realistic danger of his turning up here with a rucksack, so far from the jazz and the booze and the hot bitches and the hellish stench of home. It was already stretching probability that I should be here, and I was not, more’s the pity, Norman Mailer, I did not have his rival distractions, and I had come for a purpose.

Of course the village has had its share of literary celebrity. Even leaving aside Lance Tourney, Camilla and myself, and the dozens who are at this very moment scribbling down their dreams in low-rent fishermen’s cottages all around the harbour, this spot is consecrated by one who came and courted here, and roamed and wrote awhile, and returned famously, full of remorse and rhyme. Many of those who visit today, whose mornings I interrupt and spoil up on the cliffs, are on a sort of pilgrimage and have come to inspect the church and walk the valley, to see the stiff escarpments, to stride the purple strand, to lose themselves in the flounce flinging mists. Don’t think that you detect any irony; you won’t hear a word against such pilgrims from me. After all, Camilla made her living out of them. And I welcome tourists for the very reason that the National Trust fears them: there is a good chance they will eventually wear away the countryside.