Heading home across the cruel sea

Apr 23 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

The Monsarrats and marriage

NICHOLAS and Ann Monsarrat married in December, 1962, when he was 51 years old and she was 24. It was his third marriage and her first.

“The age difference never showed. We loved the same things and laughed at the same things. We had a great time,” she recalls, the pleasure of the relationship still showing in her eyes. “I was never attracted to younger men, but always been drawn to older people. It’s wanting to know about the things they knew.”

The couple met when Ann, a journalist on the Daily Mail, in London, was asked by her boss to make up numbers at a dinner party and bring extra cutlery.

Her boss wanted to pair Nicholas off with her daughter, but to her chagrin Ann made a bigger impression on the novelist and they left together.

“There was a dreadful pea-souper fog and we ended up in a nightclub. The band struck up Younger Than Springtime. You could say it all fell at my feet.”

Inevitably, her family was not terribly enthusiastic about her romantic entanglement with a twice-married much older novelist.

“My mother was upset, but she would be upset at anything. My father was a sensible man and saw that we were rather good together,” she chuckles.

“Yet when we married, as my father and I walked into the registry office, he whispered, ‘It’s never too late to call it off’.

“Amusingly, in spite of Nicholas being the son of a surgeon and seeing war action, he was very squeamish. He didn’t like the sight of blood and if he caught a fish I had to quickly take it off the hook to spare it pain.”