I never found economy the least irksome; on the contrary I took pleasure in it. My friends, I know, considered me parsimonious; it was a joke among them, which I found quite inoffensive, for there are two distinct kinds of meanness—those which come of loving money and of disliking it. Mine was the latter sort. My ambition was to eradicate money as much as I could from my life and to do so required planning. I acquired as few possessions as possible. I preferred to pay interest to my bank rather than be bothered by tradesmen’s bills. I decided what I wanted to do and then devised ways of doing it cheaply and tidily; money wasted meant more money to be earned. I disliked profusion; it recalled stories in the Daily Express about prizefighters and comedians dying in penury… they had spent £200 a week, entertaining and lending; they had worn a new pair of black silk socks every evening; no old pal ever left them empty-handed… ten-shilling tips to commissionaires… Bohemians.

I chose my career deliberately at the age of twenty-one. I had a naturally ingenious and constructive mind and the taste for writing. I was youthfully zealous of good fame. There seemed few ways, of which a writer need not be ashamed, by which he could make a decent living. To produce something, saleable in large quantities to the public, which had absolutely nothing of myself in it; to sell something for which the kind of people I liked and respected, would have a use; that was what I sought, and detective stories fulfilled the purpose. They were an art which admitted of classical canons of technique and taste. Their writing was painful—though much less painful than any other form would have been—because I have the unhappy combination of being both lazy and fastidious. It was immune, anyway, from the obnoxious comment to which lighter work is exposed. “How you must revel in writing your delicious books, Mr. So-and-So.” My friend Roger Simmonds, who was with me at the University and set up as a professional humorist at the same time as I wrote Vengeance at the Vatican, is constantly plagued by that kind of remark. Instead, women say to me, “How difficult it must be to think of all those complicated clues, Mr. Plant.” I agree. “It is, intolerably difficult.” “And do you do your writing here in London?” “No, I find I have to go away to work.” “Away from telephones and parties and things?” “Exactly.”

I had tried a dozen or more retreats in England and abroad—country inns, furnished cottages, seaside hotels out of the season—Fez was by far the best of them. It is a splendid, compact city and in early March, with flowers springing everywhere in the surrounding hills and in the untidy patios of the Arab houses, one of the most beautiful in the world. I liked the little hotel. It was cheap and rather chilly—an indispensable austerity. The food was digestible with, again, that element of sparseness which I find agreeable. It had an intermediate place between the semi-Egyptian splendours of the tourists’ palace on the hill, and the bustling commercial hotels of the new town, half an hour’s walk away. The clientele was exclusively French; the wives of civil servants and elderly couples of small means wintering in the sun. In the evening Spahi officers came to the bar to play bagatelle. I used to work on the verandah of my room, overlooking a ravine where Senegalese infantrymen were constantly washing their linen. My recreations were few and simple. Once a week after dinner I took the bus to the Moulay Abdullah; once a week I dined at the Consulate. The consul allowed me to come to him for a bath. I used to walk up, under the walls, swinging my sponge-bag, through the dusk. He, his wife and their governess were the only English people I met; the only people, indeed, with whom I did more than exchange bare civilities. Sometimes I visited the native cinema where old, silent films were shown in a babel of catcalls. On other evenings I took a dose of Dial and was asleep by half past nine. In these circumstances the book progressed well. I have since, on occasions, looked back at them with envy.

As an odd survival of the age of capitulations there was at that time a British Post Office at the Consulate, used mainly, the French believed, for treasonable purposes by disaffected Arabs. When there was anything for me the postman used to come down the hill on his bicycle to my hotel. He had a badge in his cap and on his arm a brassard with the royal escutcheon; he invariably honoured me with a stiff, military salute which increased my importance in the hotel at the expense of my reputation as an innocent and unofficial man of letters. It was this postman who brought the news of my father’s death in a letter from my Uncle Andrew, his brother.

My father, it appeared, had been knocked down by a motor-car more than a week ago and had died without regaining consciousness. I was his only child and, with the exception of my uncle, his only near relative. “All arrangements” had been made. The funeral was taking place that day. “In spite of your father’s opinions, in the absence of any formal instructions to the contrary,” my Uncle Andrew wrote, “your Aunt and I thought it best to have a religious ceremony of an unostentatious kind.”

“He might have telegraphed,” I thought; and then, later, “Why should he have?” There was no question of my having been able to see my father before he died; participation in a “religious ceremony of an unostentatious kind” was neither in my line nor my father’s; nor—to do him justice—in my Uncle Andrew’s. It would satisfy the Jellabys.

With regard to the Jellabys my father always avowed a ruthlessness which he was far from practising; he would in fact put himself to considerable inconvenience to accommodate them, but in principle he abhorred any suggestion of discretion or solicitude. It was his belief that no one but himself dealt properly with servants. Two attitudes drove him to equal fury: what he called the “pas-devant tomfoolery” of his childhood—the precept that scandal and the mention of exact sums of money should be hushed in their presence—or the more recent idea that their quarters should be prettily decorated and themselves given opportunity for cultural development. “Jellaby has been with me twenty years,” he would say, “and is fully cognisant of the facts of life. He and Mrs. Jellaby know my income to the nearest shilling and they know the full history of everyone who comes to this house. I pay them abominably and they supplement their wages by cooking the books. Servants prefer it that way. It preserves their independence and self-respect. The Jellabys eat continually, sleep with the windows shut, go to church every Sunday morning and to chapel in the evening, and entertain surreptitiously at my expense whenever I am out of the house. Jellaby’s a teetotaller; Mrs. Jellaby takes the port.” He rang the bell whenever he wanted anything fetched from upstairs and sat as long as he wanted over his wine. “Poor old Armstrong,” he used to say of a fellow Academician, “lives like a Hottentot. He keeps a lot of twittering women like waitresses in a railway station buffet. After the first glass of port they open the dining-room door and stick their heads in. After the second glass they do it again. Then instead of throwing something at them, Armstrong says, ‘I think they want to clear’ and we have to move out.” But he had a warm affection for the Jellabys, and I believe it was largely on Mrs. Jellaby’s account that he allowed himself to be put down for the Academy. They, in their turn, served him faithfully. It would have been a cruel betrayal to deny them a funeral service and I am sure my father had them in mind when he omitted any provision against it in his will. He was an exact man who would not have forgotten a point of that kind. On the other hand, he was a dogmatic atheist of the old-fashioned cast and would not have set anything down which might be construed as apostasy. He had left it to my Uncle Andrew’s tact. No doubt, too, it was part of my uncle’s tact to save me the embarrassment of being present.