The Almighty has withdrawn his hitherto effusive regard for me and struck me down. My flight out here last Sunday was peaceful and uneventful. I read Nevil Shute’s new book On the Beach, a grisly description of a group of people left alive in Australia when the rest of the world has been annihilated by H-bombs. They are waiting for the spreading radioactivity to spread to them and wipe them out which, eventually, it does. It’s written with his usual fluency and is a good idea, but all the characters are so sickeningly decent and ‘ordinary’ and such good sorts that personally I longed for the slowly approaching ‘fall-out’ to get a move on. He is suffering from a sort of spiritual diabetes in which everything turns to sugar.
Marlene met me at the airport and we drove to Clifton’s. He was in bed with a cold. We dined quietly and went to bed early after I had rehearsed Marlene in some cockney speeches for Witness for the Prosecution. It is not easy to teach Cockney to a German glamour-puss who can’t pronounce her Rs but she did astonishingly well. On Monday I lay in the sun and bathed in the pool, and in the evening, just as I was dressing to go out to dine quietly with Leonard Spigelgass, I bent down to get some socks out of a drawer and was seized with a blazing pain across the small of my back. At first I thought I had slipped something but I suspected, and I was right, that it was my old friend ‘lumbago’…
