This article was published in the Cambridge Evening News on 6 April 1979.
TODAY by John Gaskell
ANYONE finding it expensive to live in Cambridge will have an ally in Tom Sharpe. Even the best-selling author found prices prohibitively expensive and last year decided to move out of his Highfield Avenue home.
“The land prices in Cambridge were getting to be out of this world and I couldn’t afford it,” he said yesterday when I found him in “not an amiable mood” on account of his broken-down car.
“I’m very keen on gardening and I found this place with a playing field to plant my roses in.”
The playing field is a 1½-acre plot which once resounded to the patter of feet belonging to children from St Ronan’s Primary School, now Tom’s West Country home in Bridport.
“It’s like Highfield Avenue in Dorset. It was built in 1938. We’ve got a school lavatory and an air raid shelter,” he says with some enthusiasm. The Dorset connection is via his grandfather, who used to live 14 miles from Tom’s new abode.
I wondered if the ex-CCAT lecturer had considered living in Ireland as a literary tax exile.
“Certainly not. I’m not interested in that sort of thing and anyway I’m not in that bracket. I just want to earn enough to carry on writing.”
There is always the possibility that a fat fee may come from a TV serialisation or film adaptation of one of his black comedies but so far it hasn’t materialised.
“They buy film options all the time but never make any films. Which gives me a small amount but nothing whacking.”
Sharpe fans can look forward to a new novel in July, “The Wilt Alternative.” A more modest buy will be available next month when Pan publish “The Great Pursuit” in paperback. This one is attracting attention from behind the Iron Curtain.
“The Russians are interested in publishing it as part of some sort of cultural exchange. When we met them one of the Russians told me how they didn’t have literary agents in Russia but after having met them in the West he had found that they weren’t as bad as Tom Sharpe portrayed them in ‘The Great Persecution.’”
“You never know what these people are up to. I think he was joking.”
Photo caption: Tom Sharpe: “I just want to earn enough to carry on writing.”