Literary legacy is coming home

Jul 9 2007 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

Ann Monsarrat with photographs of her husband Nicholas Monsarrat at their home in Malta _320

The novelist Nicholas Monsarrat never forgot his Liverpool hometown and now his widow Ann, helped by the Daily Post, will ensure he will be forever remembered here. Peter Elson reports from Malta

FOR all its deeply attractive qualities, entering the ancient house on the beguiling island of Gozo belonging to the journalist Ann Monsarrat immediately conveys a feeling that the end is nigh.

Not of just a first chapter, but a rich volume of life with its final page to be completed today, when she moves out of this buff-coloured stone house, so typical of the Maltese islands.

Everywhere is in a state of flux: paintings, objects and books – hundreds and hundreds of them – are in the process of being packed away.

A shroud of sadness lingers, as this is where Ann lived from the mid-1960s with her husband, the Liverpool-born and raised novelist Nicholas Monsarrat, until his death from cancer in 1979.

When she closes the front door for the last time today, she will be sealing the shared memories of their time together in a home with a view of the Mediterranean specifically chosen by the author of The Cruel Sea.

Even if you had never considered writing, immersion in this house would make you want to do so. This is the perfect author’s lair.

More than half a century after publication, The Cruel Sea still resonates as the definitive novel of the Battle of the Atlantic and Britain’s Second World War at sea.

As so often, a fictionalised account that encompasses the hopes and pains of those involved in such a long and traumatic event seem more real than factual records.

Yet The Cruel Sea was written in land-locked Johannesburg, based on Nicholas’s notes from his wartime Royal Naval service, not on Gozo, with its smell and taste of salt on the air.

Hidden behind a plain wall along a street in the little village of San Lawrenz, entering the turquiose door from the intriguingly-named street of Triq-il-Wileg, into the first of two courtyards transports visitors into a secret world of the writer.

Solid limestone walls, several feet thick around the ground floor rooms, support stone arches and vaulted ceilings to create a womb-like effect, appropriate for gestating stories of humankind.

One entire wall is covered with around 600 first editions of Nicholas’ published novels, short stories, anthologies and journalism. His monogrammed hip-flasks, beer mugs and his cigar case are piled up nearby.

Manuscripts and proofs abound. Files of letters track his story proposals, publishers and producers’ commissions, wrangling with his first two wives’ lawyers, dealings with the taxman and accountants.

“One envelope was labelled ‘secret’,” Ann tells me and I am obliged to ask what it contained. She pauses: “It was a list of all the women he claimed to have slept with.”

What did she think of that?. She chuckles throatily: “Not as many as I thought.”

Our man’s adult life is bookended by two portraits. The first, by Edward Halliday shows Nicholas aged about 19, in his Cambridge University scarf, with his sister and the artist’s wife having a picnic at Trearddur Bay, Anglesey in 1929.