Paul Scott (novelist) - Military Service

Military Service

Scott was conscripted into the British Army as a private early in 1940 and assigned to the Intelligence Corps. He met and married his wife Penny (born Nancy Edith Avery in 1914) in Torquay in 1941. She also became a novelist.

In 1943, two-thirds of the way through the Second World War, Scott was posted as an officer cadet to India, where he was commissioned. He ended the war as a Captain in the Indian Army Service Corps, helping organize the logistical support of the Fourteenth Army’s reconquest of Burma, which had fallen to the Japanese in 1942. Despite being initially appalled by the attitudes of the British, by the heat and dust, by the disease and poverty and by the sheer numbers of people, he, as many others, fell deeply in love with India.

After demobilisation in 1946, Scott was employed as an accountant for the two small publishing houses Falcon Press and Grey Walls Press. His two daughters, Carol and Sally, were born in 1947 and 1948. In 1950, Scott moved to the literary agent Pearn, Pollinger & Higham (later to be split into Pollinger Limited and David Higham Associates) and subsequently became a director. Whilst there, he was responsible for representing Arthur C Clarke, Morris West, M. M. Kaye, Elizabeth David, Mervyn Peake, and Muriel Spark, amongst others.