In Memory of Winston Graham
The "Flat Rocks/ Lech Carrygy" Memorial Seat

"All through the time I was in the Coastguard Service I had come particularly to appreciate being alone. I remembered the strange stimulating isolation of those few months in 1940 when, awaiting call-up, I had written the first chapters of Ross Poldark. In the final few weeks before being demobilized - since there was little now we could constructively do - I had shamelessly carried my books up to the coastguard station and spent the time writing. When the station was closed I looked for somewhere else. On the opposite side of the beach was a wooden bungalow, nearly always uninhabited except for a few weeks in high summer. It belonged to a Mr. Harry Tremewan. I went to see him and hired it.

I have had a lot of happiness in my life, but those next few months rank high among the high spots. Each day about ten I left our house, with a few books under my arm and a haversack on my back containing perhaps potatoes, boiled ham, a tomato, lettuce, a few slices of bread and some butter, and walked through the village and out onto the sandy beach sometimes with the tide miles out, sometimes with it thundering and hissing at my feet, sometimes having to wade through sputtering surf up to my knees and at the other side climb the Flat Rocks and go into the bungalow where, collecting dust even from yesterday, would be the pile of reference books and old papers that had already accumulated. Sitting in my deckchair in the immense silences, I would pick up the book in which I had been writing yesterday and continue with the story. It was a remarkable experience. What I was writing was not a planned thing, it was organic, with the characters working out their own destiny.

Sitting there in the grey old empty bungalow, I felt like a man driving a coach and four, roughly knowing the direction in which the coach would travel, but being pulled along by forces only just under his control. It was physically and mentally both exhausting and exhilarating. Every now and then after a long passage the coach, as it were, would lurch to a stop with a half dozen possible roads opening ahead and no signposts. A day or two of agonizing indecision; then the road would be chosen and we would be off again.

Occasionally during the day I would go out and stroll around the bungalow and watch the gulls and translucent tides, feel the wind on my face: it was a mile or so from the old coastguard station but with a different, gentler view. At about five I would pack the haversack, take up the written work, and begin the walk back in the glimmering twilight with the sea far out and the waves glinting like mirages on the wet sand. I was going back each evening to the real world, waiting to welcome me home; but it is doubtful which to me was just then the more real. All I knew was that I was writing something out of my very guts, and that I was content."

* Winston Mawdsley Graham OBE Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature lies in St. Margarets Church, Buxted, Sussex.*
(Extract from Winston Graham's autobiography - "Memoirs of a Private Man")

Memorial Seat Ceremony 30th June 2006 Click to enlarge	Memorial Seat Inscription Click to enlarge
"Lech Carrygy" Click to enlarge	"Lech Carrygy" Click to enlarge

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