My friend Frederick Forsyth was the most patriotic man I've ever met

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2 days ago

A preposterous inversion of the natural order of things caused me to meet Freddie Forsyth more than 30 years ago. He wrote me a fan letter. Had I been a fan-letter writing type, I ought by then to have sent him several – notably about The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File, two of the best thrillers of the 20th century that I had relished as a teenager in the 1970s. Yet it was he who wrote to me about an article of mine in The Spectator: I can't remember exactly what it was about, but I think it was an assault on the Major administration that was lurching towards the debacle of Black Wednesday in the autumn of 1992.
That was Freddie all over. Although one of the world's greatest thriller writers, he was at heart always a journalist, and loved the society of hacks. For years he wrote a column for a national newspaper, and was brilliant at it; and he was brilliant precisely because he teemed with ideas, and expressed them with supreme articulacy. Freddie always had plenty to say because there was so much that motivated him, and annoyed him. He was one of the most patriotic men I ever knew. He believed intensely in our country, abhorred its apparent decline, and wanted to hold to account those he believed were responsible for it. Those feelings imbued almost every piece of journalism he wrote.
We corresponded – letters in those days, in the age before email, his under the commanding header 'From The Desk of Frederick Forsyth' – for some months before we met. The letters and the writing paper seemed so fluent and so grand that I became even more in awe of Freddie than I had already been, and I viewed our eventual meeting with both excitement and apprehension. The summer after the fan letter, on a roasting hot day, he and his wife, Sandy, came over to our old farmhouse and sat in the garden and ate a long and boozy lunch.
In those days they lived not far away, in their own much more upholstered farmhouse in rural Hertfordshire, and we started to see quite a lot of each other. It was not merely that he and I had a shared world view, and our wives got on famously: the Forsyths were the best imaginable company.
Freddie had no side whatsoever, and his modesty was as conspicuous as his massive achievements. He was almost embarrassed when I asked him whether he would autograph my copies of his novels. Yet he inevitably exuded glamour however hard he tried not to. This was not least down to Sandy, who had been Elizabeth Taylor's assistant. One met all sorts of remarkable people when asked over to their house for Sunday lunches, all of which managed to last until dinner time.
Celebrated actors were thick on the ground there – Nigel Hawthorne, Robert Powell and Barry Humphries were all close friends, as was Sally Burton, widow of the great actor Richard. I recall a long and revelatory conversation at the Forsyths' table with George Carman, the leading QC and libel lawyer, that was a definite education for me as a journalist. Two things were certain about a visit to the Forsyths: that you would come away having been spectacularly fed and watered, and richly entertained by the company.
Yet Freddie, with his easy charm and complete lack of self-obsession, had had his setbacks. He was always devoid of self-pity, but told me ruefully about how he had been fleeced out of a fortune by Roger 'the Ferret' Levett, the notorious fraudster to whom he had entrusted his considerable earnings from his literary successes. The plan had been that Freddie would give up writing; but the Ferret ensured he had to carry on. I always felt, though the pain the Ferret had caused him was undeniably genuine, that in some way he was glad of the necessity to keep writing.
That, again, was the old hack in him: once you have written for a living it is simply impossible to stop. Such was the demand for his work that he soon ensured his and Sandy's lives would not be damaged by the crime inflicted on them. With the calmness and determination typical of the heroes and anti-heroes of his fiction, he simply restored order. To his friends, the way he handled the outrage done to him was just another reason to admire him.
And in time we realised there was even more to Freddie than met the eye. One of the most memorable episodes in our friendship was when I persuaded him to come up to Cambridge, about a decade ago, to speak to the University Intelligence Seminar about his association with MI6 in the mid-1960s, at the height of the Cold War. Freddie was on a journalistic assignment to Prague; and allowed himself to become, to put it mildly, extremely friendly with a beautiful Czechoslovak woman working for the country's secret service. It didn't seem that Freddie got much out of her, though he ignored the finest journalistic tradition, and did not make his excuses and leave. The audience of immensely serious intelligence experts loved every second.
Freddie's last years were overshadowed by Sandy's deteriorating health; although almost a decade his junior, she spent several years in a care home before her death last autumn, by which he was stricken. It was a genuine love match between the two of them, and although Freddie visited her regularly he was manifestly distressed by their forced separation.
They had by then moved from Hertfordshire to Buckinghamshire; and he got into the habit of going to his village pub at lunchtimes; his favourite lunch was a drink and a pork pie. At Sandy's funeral he was heroically brave, and chatted animatedly to his friends in the pub after the service; we all knew what a blow he had suffered, but he appeared to be bearing it stoically.
The rapid decline in his health was alarming, and it is almost as though after Sandy's death he lost the will to live. I only heard on Saturday that he was seriously ill; he could not, I was told, see anybody. Nonetheless his death was an inordinate shock. He was a great friend: but more than that, he was a great man and a landmark of our culture.
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