Remembrance of times past

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33804, 29 March 1975, Page 10

Remembrance of times past

Facing the Sea. By Nigel Tangye. William Kimber. 223 pp. N.Z. price: $5.70.

This chatty and charming autobiography reveals the myriad activities Nigel Tangye has packed into 65 years of living. He has in turn, and sometimes concurrently, been a test pilot, hotelier, spy, poet and flying instructor; he has been husband and manager to a famous film star, has served in the Royal Navy, been a columnist and book reviewer for several top British newspapers, and worked in films with Alexander Korda. In between times he has written seven books dealing mainly with travel and flying. None of these things have been undertaken lightly or performed with anything but complete involvement. Nigel Tangye is modesty personified, but the picture comes through of a talented and versatile man of great initiative, and above all, moral strength. His determination is formidable; during his Royal Air Force career in the Second World War, he talked his way past protesting authority into the unpressurised, cockpit of a photo reconnaissance

squadron Spitfire, and flew on several missions before the combined physiological build-up of age (midthirties), and debilitation caused by the rarefied air caught up with him. Nigel Trevithick Tangye was born into a happy and affluent London family on April 24, 1909. He had two brothers, Colin and Derek, the latter being a writer well-knbwn for his books on cats and Cornwal'. The boys’ father was a barrister and the whole family was devoted to music. They spent their time equally between Glendorgal, their country borne, and their town house at Bramham Gardens, Earls Court.

After the First World War Tangye’s father served in the Rhine Army of Occupation in Cologne and the author began his affectionate familiarity with Europe during the family’s time there, “Garrison life to a schoolboy was a dream, a compendium of sport and pleasure, fun and excitement which I enjoyed so much at the time, but I was not at the age to appreciate its nuances.”

At 15 Nigel Tangye was accepted for the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth and towards the end of his four enjoyable years there, was made chief cadet captain of the senior college, the highest position possible for a cadet. It carried the attendant privileges of “two shillings and sixpence a week pay, a room to myself, and a cup of chocolate to go to bed with.”

Travel forms a large part of Tangye’s tale and he delights us with graphic descriptions of such things as the departure of the Penzance-London train from Paddington Station, his first flight — his "baptisme de fair” — in an Avro Bison above the blue Mediterranean, and of his romantic meeting with his second wife on the Istanbul-Paris Orient Express. Behind all these reminiscences is the backdrop of Glendorgal — the wellloved and gracious home "facing the sea” on the Cornish coast, that came into the family when Nigel Tangye’s grandfather, the son of a local miner, realised a boyhood ambition and bought it. After 25 years of running the house as a successful and very special hotel, the author and his wife Moira sold it, and now live very contentedly in the Lodge with their four children and four acres, 200 yards from Glendorgal enjoying “that stupendous view we know so well.”

Perhaps the most arresting sentence in the whole book is the last — “Times to remember, times to savour. And no regrets. None.”