… When they got out of the train at Tercanbury, Philip felt sick with apprehension and during the drive in to the town sat pale and silent. `It was united by long tradition to the Cathedral its headmaster was an honorary Canon and a past headmaster was the Archdeacon. `The neighbouring clergy sent their sons there,’ Maugham explains, Philip/Maugham’s progress takes the story to the nearby town of Tercanbury/Canterbury, to the King’s School. `In winter the natives… walked down the empty street with a hurried gait, screwing themselves up in order to expose as little surface as possible to the bitterness of the east wind, but now they dawdled they stood about in groups in the space between the Duke of Kent and the Bear and Key.’ The description of the town in the later `Cakes and Ale’ is a little kinder: The account goes on that `he disliked the fisher folk who were rough, uncouth and went to chapel.’ Blackstable after all was a `low-church parish.’ (`Of Human Bondage,’ Marshall Cavendish 1988 edition, 30-31). Maugham’s alter-ego, Phillip `had led always the solitary life of an only child and his loneliness at the vicarage was no greater than it had been when his mother had lived.’ But there is also the role of circumstances. Some of this is simple admitted to be a matter of character. Whitstable was rechristened the somewhat ominous sounding `Blackstable.’ In the autobiographical `Of Human Bondage’ (1915), the vicar, and his wife and house, are described in largely scathing, gloomy ways.

But his commemoration of this place he had come to in his work was largely unflattering. The rectory in which he lived was demolished in the 1960s to make way for new houses. In 1884 he moved to Whitstable, on the northern coast of Kent to live with his uncle, the vicar there, Henry Maugham.

The death of his father two years later compounded the tragedy. By all accounts, her demise had a life long impact on him. Born in the British Embassy in Paris, where his father was the embassy lawyer, his mother tragically died of tuberculosis in 1882.

In the 1930s, William Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was reportedly the world’s highest paid writer, feted in Hollywood, Europe and able to sell vast quantities of his work in the UK.

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