I do not seem to have published any books in 1902 or 1903, though I was writing steadily all the time, and had a couple of serials running in a magazine, but I was collecting materials hard for the biggest piece of work I have ever accomplished. Those who take up Sicily, the New Winter Resort, a small octavo, and In Sicily, two immense quartos, will be surprised to hear that the smaller book contains a far greater amount of reading matter than the larger—half as much again, I should say—though the one costs five shillings net and the other three guineas. The Directors of the Rete Sicula, for whom I compiled the smaller book, stipulated that it was to be cheap in price and handy in form. This book is an encyclopædia of Sicily. It itemises every monument of any importance, every custom, every piece of scenery noted for its beauty, every railway station, and gives information about every name which comes prominently into the history or the mythology of the island. It also gives directions how every monument and beautiful piece of scenery is to be reached.
Nineteen hundred and two was the last summer which we spent at Cookham. My son was then at Woolwich, and we stayed at Cookham so that he could have his week-ends on the river. That winter and spring we again spent in Sicily and Italy. But that summer we spent at Tenby for the first time, because my son had now been gazetted to a Company of Artillery which was stationed at Pembroke Dock. Tenby I consider one of the most beautiful coast-places in the United Kingdom. It stands on a rock over the sea, and still retains a considerable portion of walls and towers built in the reign of the third Edward, and restored during the Spanish Armada scare in 1588. It has also a magnificent Gothic church, and one Gothic house. Its position is hard to beat, for its rock stands between two splendid stretches of sand, and when the wind blows on one side you are out of the wind on the other. On the north sands is a green bluff. If you walk inland it is easy to find deep woods, and if you walk across the golf-links (there is very good natural golf) you come on to noble downs with gorgeous precipices sheering down to the sea, and rich in the ruins of historic and prehistoric men—literally historic, for there is Geoffry of Monmouth’s castle of Manorbier, and far beyond, my ancestor Aylmer de Valence’s castle of Pembroke, which, like the castle of the Carews, rises out of the windings of the great haven of the West.
Such is Tenby, round which, under the name of Flanders, I built a romance in my novel, The Unholy Estate.
The golf-links served both Tenby and the naval and military officers at Pembroke Dock. Nearly every day I used to meet the Gunner and Infantry subalterns and captains disporting themselves on the links, and I was often over at Pembroke in the barracks. It was there that I picked up my knowledge of young soldiers, which I put into use in The Unholy Estate, The Tragedy of the Pyramids and The Curse of the Nile.
The winter we generally spent in Italy, except the winter and spring of 1906, when we were once more in Sicily, and went across from Sicily to visit Tunis and Carthage.
In 1904 I was busy putting the finishing touches on two books about Japan, More Queer Things about Japan, the book in which I collaborated with Norma Lorimer, and Playing the Game, which in the cheap editions has had its name changed to When We Were Lovers in Japan. This book has been running serially in Cassell’s Magazine. It never had half the popularity or circulation of A Japanese Marriage, though it had much more value as a study of Japan and the Japanese, for it deals with the transition of Japan from a weak Oriental nation to one of the great powers of the world, and gives an acid picture of the futility of the diplomats to whom Great Britain entrusts her interests.
In this same year, 1904, Methuen brought out Sicily, the New Winter Resort. In 1905 I turned my attention to Sicily once more, working up the serial which had appeared in Cassell’s Magazine into the volume which the publishers insisted on christening A Sicilian Marriage, to try and lend it some of the popularity of A Japanese Marriage, which it never acquired, and the world never discovered that it was an excellent popular guide-book to Palermo, Girgenti, Syracuse and Taormina.
In the same year I brought out Queer Things about Sicily, a companion volume to Queer Things about Japan, with Norma Lorimer.