A child of Qwertyuiop

Employed by Reuter’s in the early 1930s, the author’s father introduced him at six years old to a typewriter. The empty office that weekend was soon filled with ‘the noise of a he-man at work’. The damage done Patrick Skene Catling in that moment of parental lapse led to ‘a twisted psyche’, moods that ranged from ‘nervous aspiration to arrogance to resentment and despair’, not to mention ‘the valley of the shadow of debt’. In other words a writer was born.

No book can expect a compliment more heartfelt than ‘I enjoyed myself.’ This may be because, with a trace of reflected vanity, I see my own image in the mirror of Catling’s memoir. I too wrote for news- papers, married a star, travelled the world, dug a dozen novels out of my system, earned a precarious keep in the unjoined-up trade of ‘letters’, and reviewed for The Spectator. But, a few years older, he got in first. He has trumped my life at every turn — by travelling more variously, living with more noted women, dropping names as ripe as plums (Satchmo, Billie Holiday, Mitchum, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu) but happily describing them in thumb- nail sketches more than worthy of H. L. Mencken’s paper, the Baltimore Sun — an ideal of an institution which Catling gave his youth to serving both successively and successfully as newshound, foreign correspondent and roving writer. In its pages Queen Narriman is ‘a superannuated movie starlet who had been eating too many marshmallows, her face a beige silk cushion’.

As a reporter Catling’s parish was the world and its wars. In the 1940s he is an RCAF observer ferrying planes from the Bahamas to world-wide war-zones, when the drunken Duke of Windsor (‘an awful shit and a fool’) grotesquely teaches him, to his lifelong gratitude, the fatuity of warfare.