Timothysalmon's Blog

I came to writing professionally – “no man but a blockhead,” said Samuel Johnson, “ever wrote except for money” – only in my forties.

I was a wartime baby. I came into this world at Hereford General Hospital, because my soldier father happened to be stationed nearby. We moved around a lot as children, though always in the country, and we always had a bit of a smallholding, more than a garden, less than a farm.  So there were always animals around and things growing. I loved that, being able to be out of doors and active, chopping, sawing, digging, riding.

We went away to school, I and my two brothers, from an early age. I don’t know whether it did us any harm. It taught me to put up with hardship: I actually enjoy sleeping on the ground and not having to wash, even at pensionable age! And it introduced me to Latin and Greek, the ancient variety, something which I am sure has inspired my interest in languages and the funny foreign places that use them. I have learnt several: French and Greek fluently, with the help of French and Greek wives; pretty good Italian; and I am working on Turkish, Russian and Romanian. Each different language, I always say, reaches parts inaccessible to the others; and that is half the fun of it, unearthing these peculiar aspects of yourself.

We did not have foreign holidays. People did not in those days, though I did have the chance, and quite by chance, to go to Greece when I was sixteen. That was in 1958, when Greece was a truly other place, living then according to the rhythms of a quite other life: a different age. I went because I was a classicist but my first sight of things modern-Greek – in Corfu, it was: the wine in wicker-covered jars, the old women with baskets stitched over with calico for luggage, the hens tied by the talons and parked nose down on the wooden decks of the ancient packet – seduced me at once and filled me with the desire to travel.

I was not an infant prodigy. I did not start writing stories at ten. I do not think I was really aware of literature until my late teens. Although I specialised in classics at school, I did not see the texts we pored over, translating and analysing, as literature and I did not enjoy the little English we did. It was oddly enough “discovering” Zola during a bed-ridden bout of Asian ‘flu when I was sixteen that opened my eyes to literature and the pleasures of serious writing and serious attention to language. Perhaps it had something to do with having to go to the dictionary a hundred times a page, for I had not taken much interest in French either until that point. I determined to learn to speak the language properly and began to learn Italian as well, with the help of a teacher who himself had an unusual background: married to a Lebanese, an expert on Vatican history and  an Observer special correspondent for the Middle East to boot. He was sympathetic and approachable; I went to his house for lessons and was received as an equal, not a boy in a class. I owe him a lot and to my regret lost touch with him long ago without ever expressing my indebtedness.

I did not like school very much and was made to feel a bit of a misfit and trouble-maker. Sympathetic teachers were rare.  We should tell the teachers who helped us most; having been a teacher myself I know how rarely it happens and how moving and rewarding it is to be told. It happened to me once. A car pulled up beside me in the street and the driver leaned over: “Don’t you recognise me?” I did not. It was someone I had taught more than twenty years earlier. We sat and talked. He said: “I’m so glad I saw you. I’ve always wanted to tell you that you changed my life.” I cried!

My first scribblings were prompted by unrequited yearning for various inaccessible girls. I remember composing under a dripping railway bridge during a muddy afternoon of school cadet force exercises: some awful pastiche of T S Eliot! I had a friend who went on to read English at Cambridge who had been studying Eliot and had all the proper lit crit talk and thoroughly overawed me, so I was much too timid to show anyone what I had tried to write. Then I left school and went to study Italian at the University of Florence where I met a French girl and fell in love. From Florence I hitch-hiked to Greece. I was just eighteen. This really was life, I decided, and very nearly passed up my place at Oxford.

I am glad I didn’t, but after Oxford I went back to Greece, taught English in Crete, married the French girl and started trying to write. I  did not know whether I wanted to be Camus or Blaise Cendrars, Henry Miller or Samuel Beckett. But I did know I wanted to carry on living this vaguely Bohemian east Mediterranean dolce vita, so I went to London University to get a proper teaching qualification. That took me to Libya, where our first child died: end of Bohemian wandering.

I worked as an  English teacher in London for a few years,  with little time for writing as I had to read hard to keep ahead of my A-level students and educate myself in the classical canon of English literature. We had two more children, the son I have referred to and a daughter, who is an artist (family solidarity!). I taught in good academic schools and tough inner city ones where the reward  is surviving the day without damage to yourself or your charges and the knowledge that you are probably the only sympathetic adult in the lives of some children.

Luckily, I was rescued from my socialist conscience by an advert for a job teaching in Athens. To my disappointment I did not get it first time round. I was third on the list, apparently, but divine providence intervened and the first two candidates withdrew, for reasons unknown, and my life changed radically. That was in the 1970’s. I discovered the then still trackless mountains of Greece and acquired a Greek wife, who said she was sick of hearing me moan about teaching: get on with writing and I’ll pay the bills!

And so I began to publish my first articles and produced a walker’s guide to the Greek mountains. We began to spend time in London in order to be close to my children and one day, in the British Museum circular reading room, as then was, the founder of the Rough Guides tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I would like to do a guide to France. Most definitely, I said. The project kept me going for nearly fifteen years, with a brilliant and eccentric partner  called Kate Baillie, who became a dear friend, alas untimely killed by cancer at the age of forty-six.

Guidebook-writing is a strange business. In a way it is not really writing at all; you need the skills of a book-keeper rather than a writer, meticulous, accurate. It is like taking inventories or keeping a ledger. We did get some compliments for our imaginative use of language in a review in Country Life, which gratified us, as we both aspired to being more than ledger-keepers.

For me the greatest pleasure was being forced to explore and learn systematically about a country that I loved: the kind of thing you always plan to do but without such a spur never actually get round to doing. We both believed – and I still do – that for a while at least our Paris guide was the most distinctive and original general guide to the city on the market: for a city with so many guidebooks written about it, I think that was quite an achievement! We had to believe it, because you never get any plaudits from your publisher and who remembers the names of guidebook writers anyway? People know it as the something-or-other guide to Paris; they do not remember the names of the authors. In a way, it is as if it is not your book. That is hard when you have put so much work into it.

Although it is now  more than ten years since we had anything to do with those guides, I think they are still essentially the books that Kate and I wrote. Is there anywhere any acknowledgement  that we were  the authors, the shapers of these books?

You  have to be thick-skinned if you are going to write or at least acquire a thick skin as quickly as you can. Very few writers – unsalaried ones, I mean – make a decent living. You have to stand by and watch while people, even friends sometimes, far less talented than yourself  make money and win accolades! And your own precious creations languish unpublished; you cannot even find an agent who will take you on, let alone a publisher. You are easily wounded and pathetically pleased when you receive a rare compliment!

The only responsible advice an old dog should give to a young one is: don’t do it! Unless you can’t help yourself…