ACROSS THE SEAS

The reason this book is part travel, part memoir is because the hotels featured in this book were the inspiration for my other books on travel. Also the Savoy Hotel gave me my first book launch party. Writers usually have their heroes, or for want of a better word, someone who they admired and inspired them to write and in some cases, travel. For me, it was Somerset Maugham, Noel Coward, the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf and her wonderful work A Room of One’s Own, with the evocative atmosphere of a truly unique place to stay. Instead of describing these hotels in my memoir (Part Two), I decided to place them separately in Part One.

Staying at an old hotel is infinitely more interesting and enjoyable if you know something of the history of the establishment and more particularly, who stayed there. Even a novel set in the hotel is interesting: the thought that you might recognize a character in the hallway or someone who looked like them. Many novelists have written novels or short stories based in hotels, real or imaginary, such as E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View or Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and many by Agatha Christie; Scott Fitzgerald begins his novel Tender is the Night at the Hotel Eden Roc on Cap D’Antibes, in the south of France.

Hotels stand like grandfather clocks, ticking away the time from generation to generation. They have been featured in so many people’s lives. A wedding, a honeymoon, an unforgettable holiday, some more tragic, crimes and misdemeanors, all give a hotel unique history and patina. I am always curious if I find a grandfather clock in a hotel: what stories they could tell.

When visiting the Italian Lake District some years ago, I felt a prickling up and down my spine, when entering a hotel on Lake Como. My grandmother and a maiden aunt, long since dead, had been on a Grand Tour in Italy sometime in the 1920s and we knew that they had visited Lake Como. Crossing the lobby, a grand marble staircase facing me, I felt their presence strongly; it happened again in the gracious old dining room that evening, and the next morning, walking down the front steps. Unexplainable, but I felt their spirits there. It would be interesting to know from others if this has happened to them. I wished that I had the old suitcase back at home, belonging to them, because there were some old hotel labels still stuck on them from the hotels where they had stayed.

All the following hotels have history. The facts are given to you in their brochures; sometimes they offer the name of the original owner, or the architect, but not very often, especially on their websites. Nowadays they offer great photos and videos of their rooms and spas and restaurants instead, but not much history.

Noel Coward based one of his plays at the Beau Rivage Palace in Lausanne and he also wrote short stories and letters when he was staying there on innumerable visits. Dirk Bogarde lived very near the Colombe D’Or Hotel and Restaurant in St. Paul de Vence, it was one of his very favourite places. He loved living in the south of France and after the publication of his letters, a huge volume skillfully edited by John Coldstream, it is interesting to read about his life in those surroundings. He used to take many of his house guests to lunch at the Colombe D’Or and he writes about falling in love with Simone Signoret even before he met her beside the swimming pool one summer afternoon.

My first novel, The Best Actress, tells the story of Nicole, a British actress who loses the love of her life on the night she wins the Oscar, and the sequel, Blue Harbour Revisited, describes her later trip to visit Noel Coward’s house in Jamaica. This story is part of a third novel about Nicole On the Riviera when she returns to Cannes with a new project to discover where the romantic writers of the 20th Century lived and worked, including Graham Greene, Scott Fitzgerald, Cyril Connolly, Somerset Maugham and Katherine Mansfield.