The Delderfield autobiography turned out to be a bit of surprise. It was published in 1954, before he had published any novels
He was however a playwright. This was an ambition he had conceived while still at school & pursued doggedly, with little success, for the best part of 20 years. He was however blessed with determination & a sense of self-belief
He achieved success in 1945 with a play called Worm’s Eye View, written in pencil in RAF notebooks during intervals of fire watching on the Air Ministry roof. It ran in the West End for over 5 years, & made it possible for him to become a full-time writer. The story finishes at this point
“I had, it seemed, voluntarily placed myself in that semi-desperate position where a goal has been reached & the new one is just out of sight over the horizon. It is a problem, I suppose, that faces everybody sooner or later … I solved mine the way most problems are solved – by hard graft”
This is not great literature & Delderfield was not a ‘Great Writer.’ What I find fascinating about this, & all those Victorian Memoirs & Letters I read is, as Victoria Glendinning remarked about bad fiction: “It provides nuggets of social history unobtainable elsewhere”
