He was (as any suitable contemporary will confirm) a charming and accomplished host whose villa on the Cote d'Azur 5 was an accepted rende* vous of the great and he was (as I will confirm) a hospitable, contented, and most amiable man - until January 3, 1925. More important to this story, my uncle Octavian, was then (in 1925) a rich man in the lavish pride of manhood 4. That is not really important, though it was important to me at the time, on the threshold of the dazzling adult world.
I hope that no one will be led astray by the fiction that rich people lead dull, boring and frustrated lives compelled to listen to unintelligible chamber music every other night, to sit trough interminable operas which they do not understa:^.: to bow unwillingly to rcy-l"v and to force down their gullets such diet - full thirty years ago.Ī full thirty years ago, I myself was fifteen.
There are still some rich people in the world and there were very many more, in the enjoyable world of thirty years ago. Monsarrat died before completing what he considered his major work.- "The Master Mariner", a projected three-volume novel of seafaring life from Napoleonic times to the present, the first part appeared in 1978 and the second (unfinished) after his death. The latter novel became a huge best-seller, also made into a successful film. Corvette" (1942) and then in "The Cruel Sea " (1951). He afterwards put his experiences aboard ship to brilliant account, first in "H.M. From 1940 to 1946 he served with the Royal Navy, chiefly on the dangerous Atlantic convoy runs. His first book, "Think of Tomorrow", appeared in 1934, but he had not fully established his reputation when World War II broke out. Monsarrat took a bachelor's degree in law at Trinity College, Cambridge, and then spent two years in a solicitor's office. NIKOLAS MONSARRAT, in full NIKOLAS JOHN TURNEY MONSARRAT (born March 22, 1910, Liverpool, England - died August 8, 1979, London) is a popular English novelist whose best-known work, "The Cruel Sea ", vividly captured life aboard a small ship in wartime.