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sloping grass gasping, and in the confusion of my swimming head it felt as if the grassy floor I had reached was slowly tilting until I was in danger of sliding off over the edge into the sea. There was no one within a mile, and the sun had just set.
    I don’t remember how long it took to get home, but it was the end of cliff-climbing for me. For years after I had a nightmare of picking my way along a narrow path with cliffs looming above me and the sea licking below, and the pathway gradually narrowing until it petered out.
    In the Poldark novels Sobey’s Ladder has been attributed to a man called Kellow.

Chapter Four
    After the publication of my third novel, on one of my visits to London I met a man called Brian Hall. He was a junior partner in the firm of Gordon Harbord, a successful theatrical agency. At a party at their offices where I was excited to meet a number of British actors of the day (does anyone ever remember Isobel Elsom?), Brian Hall told me he was shortly going to Paris, and invited me to go with him. After an anxious counting of my shekels, I agreed. We travelled overnight from Southampton to Le Havre and stayed at a pleasant enough small hotel. Brian had told me that he would be pretty busy every day so I would have to fend for myself. This suited me.
    I thought of this first visit a couple of years ago when I was talking to an elderly doctor at the Savile Club, and he told me of his own first visit to Paris many years before, when he was twenty-one.
    â€˜It was my first time abroad, y’know. The first time on my own. So, as I had heard so much about the Paris brothels, their luxury, their charm, I decided to try one. So I made enquiries and then went along to a house and rang the bell. I don’t mind telling you I was a bit het up. Well, the door opened and Madame stood on the threshold. She smiled at me and welcomed me in. Ever been to a Paris brothel, Graham? Well, it was quite impressive, I tell you. Big room she showed me into – crimson velvet curtains, gold chairs, etc. But standing in this room were a row of girls, various shapes and sizes, in different states of undress. They stood there and looked at me and I looked at them. In a row, like chorus girls about to go on stage. Some not bad-looking either. But a few of ’ em were so oddly rigged out that I thought they looked rather silly. They appealed to my sense of humour, d’you know. I smiled and stifled a laugh. They smiled back and one or two tittered in response. Maybe I was a bit strung up but I began to laugh more openly. There was more tittering from the girls, and then in no time we were all laughing together!
    â€˜ Madame touched my hand. She said: “ Monsieur, I think I have something more suitable for you.”
    â€˜ So she took my arm and guided me out of this room and down a passage and opened a door at the other end and gently let me through. It was pretty dark and it took a minute or so to see where I was. D’you know where I was? D’you know where she’d shown me? As the door shut behind me I saw I was standing in the backyard among the dustbins!’
    Though long before my marriage, my own intentions in going with Brian Hall to Paris were surprisingly innocent and not at all like the doctor’s. I wanted to see the sights and was not specially interested in the seamier side of the city. But the very first day I met a girl who was staying at the hotel; we shared the same sightseeing bus, and from then on ignored the ordinary tourist trips and went everywhere together. We went to restaurants, bistros, up the Eiffel Tower, along the Seine, to Montmartre and Montparnasse, and to the ballet where the language difficulty did not arise.
    This, of course, was long before it was fashionable – indeed the done thing – to travel the world in one’s youth. Her name had an agreeably Elizabethan ring, Catherine Parr. She was travelling entirely alone and had so far been to