He stood before me looking very uncomfortable and out of place. I thought perhaps he was going to ask for a job.
"My name," he said, "is Forester. C. S. Forester."
I nearly fell out of my chair. "Are you joking?" I said.
"No," he said, smiling. "That's me."
And it was. It was the great writer himself, the inventor of Captain Hornblower and the best teller of tales about the sea since Joseph Conrad. I asked him to take a seat.
"Look," he said. "I'm too old for the war. I live over here now. The only thing I can do to help is to write things about Britain for the American papers and magazines. We need all the help America can give us. A magazine called the Saturday Evening Post will publish any story I write. I have a contract with them. And I have come to you because I think you might have a good story to tell. I mean about flying."
"No more than thousands of others," I said. "There are lots of pilots who have shot down many more planes than me."
"That's not the point," Forester said. "You are now in America, and because you have, as they say over here, 'been in combat', you are a rare bird on this side of the Atlantic. Don't forget they have only just entered the war."
"What do you want me to do?" I asked.
"Come and have lun
ch with me," he said. "And while we're eating, you can tell me all about it. Tell me your most exciting adventure and I'll write it up for the Saturday Evening Post. Every little bit helps."
I was thrilled. I had never met a famous writer before. I examined him closely as he sat in my office. What astonished me was that he looked so ordinary. There was nothing in the least unusual about him. His face, his conversation, his eyes behind the spectacles, even his clothes were all exceedingly normal. And yet here was a writer of stories who was famous the world over. His books had been read by millions of people. I expected sparks to be shooting out of his head, or at the very least, he should have been wearing a long green cloak and a floppy hat with a wide brim.
But no. And it was then I began to realize for the first time that there are two distinct sides to a writer of fiction. First, there is the side he displays to the public, that of an ordinary person like anyone else, a person who does ordinary things and speaks an ordinary language. Second, there is the secret side which comes out in him only after he has closed the door of his workroom and is completely alone. It is then that he slips into another world altogether, a world where his imagination takes over and he finds himself actually living in the places he is writing about at that moment. I myself, if you want to know, fall into a kind of trance and everything around me disappears. I see only the point of my pencil moving over the paper, and quite often two hours go by as though they were a couple of seconds.
"Come along," C S. Forester said to me. "Let's go to lunch. You don't seem to have anything else to do."
As I walked out of the Embassy side by side with the great man, I was churning with excitement. I had read all the Hornblowers and just about everything else he had written. I had, and still have, a great love for books about the sea. I had read all of Conrad and all of that other splendid sea-writer, Captain Marryat (Mr Midshipman Easy, From Powder Monkey to Admiral, etc.), and now here I was about to have lunch with somebody who, to my mind, was also pretty terrific.
He took me to a small expensive French restaurant somewhere near the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. He ordered a sumptuous lunch, then he produced a notebook and a pencil (ballpoint pens had not been invented in 1942) and laid them on the tablecloth. "Now," he said, "tell me about the most exciting or frightening or dangerous thing that happened to you when you were flying fighter planes."
I tried to get going. I started telling him about the time I was shot down in the Western Desert and the plane had burst into flames.
The waitress brought two plates of smoked salmon.
While we tried to eat it, I was trying to talk and Forester was trying to take notes.
The main course was roast duck with vegetables and potatoes and a thick rich gravy. This was a dish that required one's full attention as well as two hands. My narrative began to flounder. Forester kept putting down the pencil and picking up the fork, and vice versa. Things weren't going well. And apart from that, I have never been much good at telling stories aloud.
"Look," I said. "If you like, I'll try to write down on paper what happened and send it to you. Then you can rewrite it properly yourself in your own time. Wouldn't that be easier? I could do it tonight."
That, though I didn't know it at the time, was the moment that changed my life.
"A splendid idea," Forester said. "Then I can put this silly notebook away and we can enjoy our lunch. Would you really mind doing that for me?"
"I don't mind a bit," I said. "But you mustn't expect it to be any good. I'll just put down the facts."
"Don't worry," he said, "So long as the facts are there, I can write the story. But please," he added, "let me have plenty of detail. That's what counts in our business, tiny little details, like you had a broken shoelace on your left shoe, or a fly settled on the rim of your glass at lunch, or the man you were talking to had a broken front tooth. Try to think back and remember everything."
"I'll do my best," I said.
He gave me an address where I could send the story, and then we forgot all about it and finished our lunch at leisure. But Mr Forester was not a great talker. He certainly couldn't talk as well as he wrote, and although he was kind and gentle, no sparks ever flew out of his head and I might just as well have been talking to an intelligent stockbroker or lawyer.
That night, in the small house I lived in alone in a suburb of Washington, I sat down and wrote my story. I started at about seven o'clock and finished at midnight. I remember I had a glass of Portuguese brandy to keep me going. For the first time in my life, I became totally absorbed in what I was doing. I floated back in time and once again I was in the sizzling hot desert of Libya, with white sand underfoot, climbing up into the cockpit of the old Gladiator, strapping myself in, adjusting my helmet, starting the motor and taxiing out for take-off. It was astonishing how everything came back to me with absolute clarity. Writing it down on paper was not difficult. The story seemed to be telling itself, and the hand that held the pencil moved rapidly back and forth across each page. Just for fun, when it was finished, I gave it a title. I called it "A Piece of Cake".
The next day, somebody in the Embassy typed it out for me and I sent it off to Mr Forester. Then I forgot all about it.
Exactly two weeks later, I received a reply from the great man. It said: