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– GRUMBLING AT LARGE – and ends’. His original goal was to rent a cottage on the edge of the moors, aiming to make twenty five shillings a week by his pen. But Brief Diversions prompted him to take his new wife Pat, already pregnant with their first daughter, to London ‘with some vague introductions and capital of about forty seven pounds’ and launch himself as a freelance. After all, he had sold his first piece to a London periodical as long ago as 1910. He would never live in the north again – but he never forgot his roots, and his ashes are buried at Hubberholme in Wharfedale, Yorkshire. Living by his pen, he took to 1920s London: ‘English life in brick, chimney pots, old squares, smoke and mist.’ Financially, he became successful enough to inhabit London’s more prosperous quarters – Kensington, the leafy heights of Hampstead and Highgate, and the exclusive enclave of Albany, Piccadilly. But he ended up in a country house in Alveston, Warwickshire, far from ‘the intolerable strain of contemporary metropolitan living, the growing defeat of human zest and sympathy by the mere mechanics of existence.’ Looking back on how his writing career began, he realised that it all started with essays. ‘I was rather clever, I now realise, at avoiding journalism and not becoming an employee.’ Essays were still a flourishing market, despite being already ‘almost an anachronism’. Periodicals such as Lilliput, the Spectator, the Saturday Review, the Daily News and the London Mercury were his outlets. ‘I prefer a wide audience,’ he said in his son xiv
page 17
– Introduction – Tom’s film. ‘I aim for simplicity, not complicity. Something I could read aloud in a beer parlour.’ He had a clear idea of his own readability, but never suggested that essay-writing was a facile exercise. Starting work always involved sitting down at one’s desk and ‘lifting the elephant off the typewriter’. But in his early years in London he faced a real struggle when his young wife, pregnant with their second daughter, became seriously ill. In an essay called ‘Dark Hours’, he wrote of the night horrors of chronic insomnia, ‘a glimpse of Hell’ which afflicted him between 1924 and 1926. Sylvia, the miracle baby, was two months premature, the smallest ever to have survived in Guy’s Hospital maternity wing. But then it was revealed that Pat had advanced cancer of the bladder. She was in no state to cope with two babies, and ­Priestley had to employ a cook-housekeeper. At the same time, he heard that Jonathan, his father – instinctive Socialist, born teacher, fell-walker, cricketer, amateur actor, pillar of chapel – was ill and frail at fifty-six, and proved to have stomach cancer. Priestley, burdened with medical bills, was ‘half out of my mind with overwork and worry’. Pat died, aged twenty-nine, in 1925, leaving Barbara (almost three) and Sylvia (19 months) and Priestley at thirty-one a widower who had lost his boyhood friends and his father. His output became prodigious: his first novel, Adam in Moonshine (1927), an apprentice work, which critics called ‘an essayist’s novel’, was followed by a xv

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– GRUMBLING AT LARGE –

and ends’. His original goal was to rent a cottage on the edge of the moors, aiming to make twenty five shillings a week by his pen. But Brief Diversions prompted him to take his new wife Pat, already pregnant with their first daughter, to London ‘with some vague introductions and capital of about forty seven pounds’ and launch himself as a freelance. After all, he had sold his first piece to a London periodical as long ago as 1910. He would never live in the north again – but he never forgot his roots, and his ashes are buried at Hubberholme in Wharfedale, Yorkshire.

Living by his pen, he took to 1920s London: ‘English life in brick, chimney pots, old squares, smoke and mist.’ Financially, he became successful enough to inhabit London’s more prosperous quarters – Kensington, the leafy heights of Hampstead and Highgate, and the exclusive enclave of Albany, Piccadilly. But he ended up in a country house in Alveston, Warwickshire, far from ‘the intolerable strain of contemporary metropolitan living, the growing defeat of human zest and sympathy by the mere mechanics of existence.’

Looking back on how his writing career began, he realised that it all started with essays. ‘I was rather clever, I now realise, at avoiding journalism and not becoming an employee.’ Essays were still a flourishing market, despite being already ‘almost an anachronism’. Periodicals such as Lilliput, the Spectator, the Saturday Review, the Daily News and the London Mercury were his outlets. ‘I prefer a wide audience,’ he said in his son xiv

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