![]() ![]() ![]() Although he did not begin to publish successfully until he was in his 50s, as he began to struggle as a teacher, he had been writing for far longer. ![]() However, Dick's enormous success as a writer cannot be put down to luck. He had an optimistic temperament, as well as an upper-class knack of understatement, coming from a world in which what he called "luck" – meaning having a cousin who offers to pay all remaining school fees and a friend who offers to pay off the mortgage – played a significant role. He served with that regiment in Italy with distinction during the second world war, was wounded and invalided out. Even when older and lamer, he had the upright posture of a Grenadier Guard. He was delightfully old-fashioned, without being in the least an old fogey, and had disarmingly good manners – products of his comfortable gentry background in the West Country, where his family ran several paper mills, and education at Marlborough college in Wiltshire. In his third career, the only numbers that mattered were his prodigious output – more than 100 titles – and his enormous sales figures, somewhere around 15m copies worldwide.ĭick was every inch a country gentleman, and no amount of sophisticated London publishing events changed that. He was moved from teaching juniors to infants because he could not manage long division. ![]() His second, as a teacher, was also hampered by his relationship with numbers. ![]()
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