The William Morris Institute is about to be visited by the Queen for the opening of a new wing, and I realise with hindsight that I’ve used a similar idea quite often since: the grand event that goes wrong, and deposits the protagonists into the humiliating gulf that so often in life opens between intention and achievement. My characters at the Institute could have written a story programme for me and saved me a lot of work. I’ve become a bit of a tin man myself.

*

One of the consequences of reaching the skyline of that first mountain, of course, was the sight of yet another mountain rising beyond – the second novel. It also brought me the Somerset Maugham Award, a travel grant set up by Maugham to encourage writers in the early stages of their careers. In those days it was worth £500, and you had to promise to stay out of the country for three months, ‘with the object of acquainting yourself with the manners and customs of foreign nations.’ Maugham probably saw the likely recipient as a young bachelor, and as spending his exile in some low-wage economy in the Far East where he could have a comfortable life and a few poignant sexual adventures of one sort or another without going beyond his budget. I was married, though, with two small children, and we spent our exile en famille in the United States, so for me it was an expensive benefaction to receive, and offered little opportunity for adventures.

We did find out a bit about local manners and customs, though. One of them was the engaging readiness with which the most ordinary people in the States, not just adventuresses after your winnings in the casino, came up to you on trains and even in the street and told you their life stories in the most intimate detail. ‘Hey, I love kids!’ said an elderly gentleman who happened to be passing somewhere in mid-town Manhattan, at the sight of ours. ‘I’ve just cut my only son out of my will.’ The children themselves made another discovery. Looking upwards at the world from their viewpoint so close to the floor they found an aspect of America that many visitors probably miss – the underside of luncheon counters, which are all decorated with a varicoloured impasto of dried chewing-gum as impressive in its way as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

The book also led to two of the Meetings with Famous Men that make the later stages of a writer’s memoirs so much less enjoyable to read about than Early Struggles. The first was with J. B. Priestley, by then in his seventies, but still perhaps the most successful British writer alive. He summoned me to his impressive country house near Stratford-on-Avon and announced that he wanted to turn my novel into a play. I was flattered, of course, and intrigued. He had recently had a considerable hit with the adaptation that he and Iris Murdoch had made of her novel A Severed Head. I was rather dubious, though, as we talked about it, whether he and I, or he alone, or even both of us in concert with Shakespeare and Chekhov, could achieve the same results with mine. The slightness of characters and plot, and the literary nature of so much of the humour, seemed to me ill-suited for drama. He was a strong-minded man, and he brushed my objections aside like so much fluff. He knew a great deal about the theatre, he said, and I knew nothing. Which I had to admit was true, and I reluctantly agreed to allow him to do a sample first act.