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By Root 778 0

who led me into the sitting room, where we sat on either side of the much-needed fire. The cottage was just what I had imagined the home of the author of The Green Gauntlet would be like: low, timbered ceilings, mullioned windows, dim, old, chintz-covered, cozy furniture, dogs and cats everywhere, a grandfather clock ticking away, the sound of a kettle boiling in the kitchen. May Delderfield was a bulky woman wearing a purple cardigan that she appeared to have knitted herself, who spoke with a gentle North Country accent, entirely unaffected by her husband’s success. Ronnie, it appeared, was still working in his study but would be out promptly at four. The grandfather clock whirred and groaned, chimed four times, and on the fourth ring Delderfield appeared, rubbing his hands jovially, to greet me. He was a big man, close to six feet tall, and broad with it, with the build and the hands of a manual laborer. He had a bluff, honest countryman’s face, red cheeked and contented, and an engaging shyness, as if he still couldn’t believe his good fortune. Clad in a heavy sweater and corduroys, he sat down in an armchair and lit his pipe, while May bustled after tea. Delderfield apologized for keeping me waiting, but he always worked until four on the dot, he said. He believed it was important to treat writing like any other job and put in a good day’s work. He was particularly happy to see me here today, he went on, because it was something of a red-letter day. In what way? I asked. Delderfield beamed. At exactly three o’clock this afternoon, he said, he had finished his new novel. I congratulated him as May poured tea and passed around plates of biscuits and cake. I nerved myself to ask, If Delderfield had finished a new novel at three, what had he been doing from three to four? Ah, Delderfield said, just what he always did. As soon as he ripped the last page of the novel out of his typewriter, he put a fresh piece of paper in, typed page one, chapter one, and started a new novel. Time and tide, he said, in his soft countryman’s voice, waited on no man.

Dick, sending me off to England, had given me strict instructions that I was to win Delderfield over, heart and mind. Whatever he wanted, I should do. He was not to even think about Bob Gottlieb from now on. After dinner at my hotel, as we sat over our port and cigars, Ronnie, as I now called him, had asked if I would like to join him in the morning. Sure, I said, imagining a brisk walk over the downs, followed by an English country breakfast. But not at all. It turned out that Ronnie began every day with a swim in the sea, winter or summer, rain or shine. It was to that which he attributed his ruddy good health and his ability to write ten thousand words a day. Remembering Dick’s words, I agreed to join him and found myself at dawn clad in borrowed swim trunks, stepping gingerly into the same slate-gray sea that I had seen yesterday from the hotel. Viewed close-up, it was even more uninviting. Ronnie, who had driven down in his new Jaguar, the first fruit of his new success, accompanied by a black Labrador, took off his dressing gown, breathed deeply a few times (“Every deep breath is a penny in the bank of health!”), and strode slowly, majestically, and without hesitation into the water. The Labrador, I noticed, was too smart to follow him.

I knew there was no earthly way I could get into that water slowly—the only way was to plunge in as quickly as possible. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and ran as fast as I could on the slippery shingle—there was a thin coating of ice on the larger stones—then, as I felt the water come up to my knees, I dived headfirst. I thought for a moment that the water was so cold that I had been knocked out—and, indeed, it was cold, cold enough for me to remember that pilots who parachuted into the Channel during the Battle of Britain often died of hypothermia before they were picked up by rescue boats. The reason that I had been knocked out, however, was that the shingle at Sidmouth extends a good way out to sea. I had supposed that the water