Geoffrey Household's years in Romania

After I watched for the third time Peter O’Toole in Rogue Male a friend told me that the author of the (very good) novel Rogue Male worked in the National Bank of Romania, a couple of hundred yards from where I live and came back to Romania to blow up the Ploiesti oil fields.

What an admirably uncareerist career (I probably shouldn't say that).

Geoffrey Household was born in Bristol, the son of Beatrice (Norton) Household and Horace W. Household, a lawyer, who became secretary of education for Gloucester. Household was educated at Clifton College, Bristol (1914-1919) and Magdalen College, Oxford, receiving his B.A. in English in 1922. Between the years 1922 and 1935, Household was engaged in commerce abroad, though he had dreamed of being a poet. In his autobiography, Against the Wind (1958), Household described himself at that age as "impulsive, extremely sensitive to feminine beauty and overfastidious." While in Bucharest he worked for four years as an assistant confidential secretary for Bank of Romania. In 1926 Household went to Spain, where he worked as a marketing manager for Elders and Fyffes, banana vendors for the United Fruit Company. During this period he learned to speak and write Spanish.After moving to the United States in 1929, Household wrote for children's encyclopedias and composed children's radio plays for Columbia Broadcasting System. From 1933 to 1939 he was a traveling salesman for John Kidd, a manufacturer of printing ink, in Europe, the Middle East, and South America. During World War II Household served in the Intelligence Corps, and was later decorated for his service. He led a unit in Greece, and in Romania, he was to assist in blowing up the Ploesti oil fields if threatened by the German army – Household had received demolition training from the Royal Engineers. After the collapse of the operation, Household went to Cairo. Much of the war he spent in the Middle East, learning that in the world of counterintelligence, nothing is assumed to be as it seems. Moreover, his  experiences provided him extremely valuable material for his future novels, which often take the reader to different parts of the world. Several of Household's of heroes have a bicultural background – as the Ecuadorian-English Claudio Howard-Wolferstan of Fellow Passenger (1955), the Argentinian-born English botanist of Dance of the Dwarfs (1968), and Adrian Gurney of Red Anger (1975), who is half Rumanian. 

Peter O’Toole considered Rogue Male his best film. He made it as a birthday present for his wife whose favourite novel it was and it did not get released in the cinemas so was shown instead on the BBC as a play. That's when I saw it in 1976. How startling to think that 1976 was closer to 1939 when the book came out than it is to 2019.

It is Alistair Sim's last film and one of his best and has an acting role for the playwright Harold Pinter.