performance calculator at a salary of five pounds a week, but when the autumn came the company was in difficulties and having to economise. They put me off till the New Year. My father retired on pension from the Post Office about that time and intended to spend most of the winter at Bordighera; I joined my parents there in the autumn and spent several months with them, exploring the countryside, learning a little Italian, and probably writing a little. I think I had given up writing poetry by that time, and I had not then started writing unpublishable novels. There is at least one unpublishable short story which dates from that autumn. I suppose most young authors go through the process of development that I went through. First I wrote poetry, probably because a poem is the shortest complete work that is possible, and being entirely emotional it requires little experience of life. Moreover, you don’t have to have a typewriter to write a poem. What I didn’t realise, of course, is that a piece of writing is like a camera; the smaller it is the more carefully it has to be made. In a novel a few awkward passages can get lost in the crowd, but in a short poem every word must play its part and be exactly right, and the temptation to use the wrong word for the sake of rhyme or rhythm is very great.
Probably the next stage is that the budding author acquires a typewriter. Those who are blessed with a flowing hand may be able to write a short story in longhand though it has to be typed in the end, for no editor will read a manuscript in these days. For myself, I have so cramped and stilted a handwriting that my hand is aching with fatigue after a hundred words, so I wrote nothing longer than that until I got a typewriter and learned to use it, when I found that I could go on as long as my brain would function. I had an old Blick to start with, which was a very elementary form of portable, not easy to use but better than handwriting. I think a good typewriter is as important to an author as brushes and palette to an artist, because when writing on a typewriter it is important to be able to forget the machine. It may not be quite a coincidence that my first publishable novel,
Marazan
, was the first that I wrote on a brand new typewriter bought out of my earnings as an engineer.
I started regular work with de Havillands in January 1923. The firm had already grown considerably, and they now had an order for eleven of a new type of transport for the London-Paris route. The D.H.34 was still a single engined biplane powered by one Napier Lion engine, but the trend of development towards the modern aircraft was beginning to appear. Two pilots were seated side by side in an open cockpit behind the engine and in front of the top wing; behind them the full gap fuselage accommodated a cabin for eight passengers and, I think, a toilet. This was a bigger aeroplane even than the D.H.18; I forget its fully loaded weight but it was probably about 8000 lbs. It stalled at the incredibly high speed of 61 m.p.h., so that its introduction caused something like a strike of the pilots of the operating companies, who held that an aeroplane with so high a landing speed could never be operated safely. Looking back thirty years, there may have been somereason on their side, for the machine had no brakes, wireless of the most elementary nature operating by morse code with a tapping key, no flaps, no blind-flying instruments; in consequence forced landings in fields along the route had to be borne in mind if bad weather should make it impossible to complete a flight. However, the pilots got to like it in the end and the machine served the airlines well for several years, till larger, multi-engined aircraft took its place.
That spring my parents returned from Italy and took a small country house fifty miles south-west of London, at Liss off the Portsmouth Road. In those days nobody knew much about the depreciation of money or realised that a reduced
Probably the next stage is that the budding author acquires a typewriter. Those who are blessed with a flowing hand may be able to write a short story in longhand though it has to be typed in the end, for no editor will read a manuscript in these days. For myself, I have so cramped and stilted a handwriting that my hand is aching with fatigue after a hundred words, so I wrote nothing longer than that until I got a typewriter and learned to use it, when I found that I could go on as long as my brain would function. I had an old Blick to start with, which was a very elementary form of portable, not easy to use but better than handwriting. I think a good typewriter is as important to an author as brushes and palette to an artist, because when writing on a typewriter it is important to be able to forget the machine. It may not be quite a coincidence that my first publishable novel,
Marazan
, was the first that I wrote on a brand new typewriter bought out of my earnings as an engineer.
I started regular work with de Havillands in January 1923. The firm had already grown considerably, and they now had an order for eleven of a new type of transport for the London-Paris route. The D.H.34 was still a single engined biplane powered by one Napier Lion engine, but the trend of development towards the modern aircraft was beginning to appear. Two pilots were seated side by side in an open cockpit behind the engine and in front of the top wing; behind them the full gap fuselage accommodated a cabin for eight passengers and, I think, a toilet. This was a bigger aeroplane even than the D.H.18; I forget its fully loaded weight but it was probably about 8000 lbs. It stalled at the incredibly high speed of 61 m.p.h., so that its introduction caused something like a strike of the pilots of the operating companies, who held that an aeroplane with so high a landing speed could never be operated safely. Looking back thirty years, there may have been somereason on their side, for the machine had no brakes, wireless of the most elementary nature operating by morse code with a tapping key, no flaps, no blind-flying instruments; in consequence forced landings in fields along the route had to be borne in mind if bad weather should make it impossible to complete a flight. However, the pilots got to like it in the end and the machine served the airlines well for several years, till larger, multi-engined aircraft took its place.
That spring my parents returned from Italy and took a small country house fifty miles south-west of London, at Liss off the Portsmouth Road. In those days nobody knew much about the depreciation of money or realised that a reduced
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