1989

by Peter Millar

  There were two of them, both called Jim. There had to be two, because each worked a seven-day shift, followed by seven days off, with an overlapping staff, each of whom also had an opposite number whom they never saw. Jim Forrester was a large, grey-bearded, bespectacled, scholarly gourmet from Edinburgh. Jim Flannery was a rangy, ginger-bearded, woolly-hat-wearing, Sinophile from Australia. Both Jims were drawn to things Asian. Scottish Jim’s interest tended towards the Indian subcontinent, Ozzie Jim’s towards Peking (as it still was) and Hong Kong. This was reflected in the overnight shift’s culinary traditions, although in supposed deference to one another (in reality because it was a good excuse) both traditions were honoured each week: Friday night was therefore the Dark Prince’s Curry Club, while Saturday night saw the Hong Kong and Oriental Dining Experience.

  Some hours after the last of the hectic day shift had departed we would push together the big rectangular desks at each of which between four and six sub-editors would work during the day, extra long sheets of teleprinter paper would be pulled from spare rolls in the store cupboards and ripped to length to form, when aligned together, a makeshift tablecloth. Two of us, the most junior and one other would be sent out to a takeaway to bring back an assortment of Asian delights.

  For the Indian night we varied our custom, depending on opening hours of establishments in Covent Garden or The Strand but the Chinese always came from the Lido restaurant on Soho’s Gerrard Street. This was partly because this cavernous establishment on four floors served some of the most exotic and authentic Cantonese cuisine to be had in London, and at a reasonable price. But also because it stayed open until four a.m. which meant our dining was less likely to be interrupted by such inconveniences as world emergencies. At four a.m. GMT pretty much everywhere on the planet has either wound down or not yet wound up.

  The trip to Lido was also something of an adventure, not least because the Soho pavement outside was by three a.m. regularly lined with Mercedes and even Bentleys, all of them zealously watched over by improbably bulky Asiatic strongmen who had watched Goldfinger one time too many and modelled themselves on Oddjob. Lido back then infamously also boasted on its top floor (inaccessible to us gwailo natives) one of Soho’s most high-rolling mah-jong gambling dens. When the restaurant was subsequently burnt down there were never-substantiated rumours that it was not just due to a kitchen fire.

  Back in the office, bottles of beer or wine would emerge from private lockers, and we would settle in for several hours of relaxed dining, drinking and telling of tall stories by the old hands. To those outsiders who knew, and who could blag entrance by means of personal acquaintance, a return from exotic parts, or a good bit of Fleet Street gossip, the late night weekend dining parties at 85 Fleet Street were the hottest tip in the town for a drink after the eleven p.m. pub closing time.

  It was on a long midweek night, however, when we had no more culinary aspirations than a packed sandwich or a sausage roll from the late trolley, that I learned another essential trick of the journalistic trade. If you can’t use your eyes, use your brain. And your imagination.

  At around one thirty a.m. on a quiet Tuesday or a Wednesday, a brief report came up on the English language service of AFP, the French news agency. It concerned a shooting at a fiesta in a Corsican village, apparently involving suspect Corsican separatists. Two bystanders were injured. Police returned fire and gave chase, unsuccessfully, losing the men in the forest. That was it. Nothing more. Just the bare bones of a minor incident in a relatively lawless part of southern Europe. We would put it out, just like that, more or less. It might make one of the solitary paragraph snippets in the NIB (News in Brief) section that the Daily Telegraph ran to give the impression it had a global remit. Or might not.

  Dave Goddard had other ideas. Dave was another West Countryman, with an accent that shouted his origins. Crucially he had also worked for tabloid newspapers as well as in the more cerebral – he would and occasionally did say ‘sterile’ – world of the wire services (us). ‘Here you go, young Peter,’ he said. ‘See if you can turn that into something the Daily Mail foreign pages will snap up.’ I stared at him in blank amazement.

  ‘There’s nothing there,’ I said. ‘Just a few lines.’

  ‘Just a few lines now, but wait until you’ve worked your magic.’

  ‘Eh?’ was the best I could manage, gazing at the torn piece of printer paper in my hands and wondering where the magic wand was supposed to come from.

  ‘Dear, oh dear, oh dear,’ muttered Goddard good-humouredly, shaking his head in a ‘young folk these days’ sort of way. ‘Use what’s there, lad, build on it.’

  ‘But there’s nothing there.’

  ‘What do you mean there’s nothing there, there’s masses. How many English village fetes end up with gunfights and car chases?’

  ‘Er, not many,’ I ventured.

  He smiled: ‘Right. So what have you got?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘A human interest story. A good one. Well, good-ish. Have a go.’

  I didn’t know where to start and my face said so.

  ‘Try this,’ said Dave and he grabbed a typewriter, scanned my piece of agency copy for a second and produced something like this: ‘A party in a sleepy Corsican village exploded in gunfire and bloody mayhem as two revellers were caught in crossfire in a shoot-out between militant separatists and armed local police.’

  I looked at it for a minute and thought, ye-ess, I see what you mean, but, ‘How do you know it was a “sleepy” village.’ Reuters fact-training had got to me.

  He gave me a pitying glance. ‘It’s the Med. If they’re not whooping it up, they’re having a kip. Ever been down the south of France.’ I had to smile. I had.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Now let’s get cracking.’

  It was like pulling teeth – or maybe fitting them – but over the next hour under Dave’s amused but professional and unrelenting supervision I had turned a five-line bulletin into a ‘two-page’ (about 450 words, Reuter pages are short) news story.

  ‘People screamed and ran for cover …’ Dave put into my mouth. ‘How do you know that?’ ‘There’s blokes firing guns for Christ’s sake!’ ‘… as bullets ricocheted off the whitewashed walls …’ ‘But it doesn’t say anything about …!!’ ‘Do you think they all hit their targets? No, OK so they hit something else first, that’s a ricochet.’ ‘But what about the whitewashed …’ ‘It’s Corsica, everything’s bloody whitewashed!’

  ‘Ambulances rushed to the scene to tend the wounded amid scenes of chaos …’ ‘Wait a minute there’s nothing here about ambulances!’ ‘You think they didn’t call one?’ ‘No, but …’ ‘Tsk, tsk!’ ‘… the gunmen fled at high speed in their getaway car pursued by the wail of police sirens …’ ‘There’s nothing here about, oh I see.’ I was beginning to. ‘They had a car, right? You don’t suppose they drove off at a leisurely pace?’ ‘No. And I suppose the police would have …’ ‘Used their sirens? Too bloody right they would.’

  When we were finished, I was exhausted. Exhausted and incredulous. And exhilarated. All at once. Dave was beaming. ‘Well done, lad, we’ll make a decent newsman out of you yet.’

  Something inside me still niggled, told me this was dishonest, but then I looked at it and read it again, and the original, and thought, no, it’s not. It’s a story. ‘It’s not just about telling people the news,’ Dave told me another night, ‘it’s about making the buggers read it. Making them care.’ And he was right. And the story? It made the Daily Mail. Not big, but it made it. And the Telegraph too.

  I had lost my virginity. I was a proper journalist at last.

  The completion of my Reuters training involved a year in Brussels, an experience I have not gone into in detail here because as the office junior much of my time was spent playing pinball and drinking beer in a succession of mock Irish and English bars that adhered like plastic leeches to the periphery of the European Commission’s Berlaymont building.

  The highlight of
the average day in the office was watching as one by one the sun-sensitive external Venetian blinds on the concave wall of the Berlaymont facing us rattled down slowly a blade at a time. Clack. Clackety. Clack. The greatest intellectual challenge was striving to figure out what a Green Pound was, and understanding the thick Irish accent in which the commission spokesman gave his daily midday briefings in obligatory French. The journalistic highlights were an endless series of commutes to the European Parliament in Strasbourg or Luxembourg to write stories nobody ever published on debates nobody cared about. Wry amusement came from studying the strange pond life symbiosis between British tabloid journalists and government ministers, such as when portly Labour Agriculture, Fisheries and Food minister John Silkin would emerge from a meeting and declare, ‘Gentlemen, fish have come up but the chips are not down!’ Brilliant, John, love, just brill!

  On return to London, with the threat of a move to the ever more important but deadly dull economics desk looming, journalism was fast losing its lustre. On the other hand, my private life was settling down. I had just moved into a shared house with Jackie, a girlfriend I had known from university, and the ‘m’ word, as yet unspoken, was hovering just over the horizon.

  It was at that point that somebody mentioned the ‘b’ word: Berlin. The idea struck me like a thunderbolt hitting a lightning conductor: a shock out of the blue and yet all of a sudden blindingly obvious. I’m not sure whose spectre haunted the city more in my mind: Liza Minnelli, Adolf Hitler, or Michael Caine. But I was sure of one thing. Berlin was exciting, and scary. All at once. And totally irresistible.

  Berlin was a name that in the early eighties still worked like an incantation. Not least because there were two of them. Or maybe three. Nobody born in the second half of the twentieth century did not have a mental vision of the Berlin that had vanished: the dark, foreboding capital of the thousand-year Reich, of monumental architecture draped in swastikas, red and white and black above a sea of stiff outstretched arms. Berlin was Mordor, the lair of the Dark Lord, the Heart of Darkness, the city where Liza Minnelli in that poster above my Paris bed had given sultry embodiment to the black magic of stockings, suspenders and jackboots; pre-war Berlin was Sodom and Gomorrah and like them had sunk in dust and ashes.

  In the 1970s we thought primarily of West Berlin, plucky little West Berlin, talisman of the Cold War, the brave city that had been cut off by the engulfing communist sea, that had stood besieged, isolated and alone against the Soviet juggernaut, risking starvation; the city British and American airmen had risked their lives to feed during the 1949 blockade when the Russians had tried to starve the Western part of the city into submission; the city where US President John F. Kennedy had proclaimed – in only slightly mangled German – that the proudest boast anyone could make was to be one of its citizens. A city that still sat there, ringed with a siege wall unlike any other in urban history, wealthy, glitzy, ever so slightly tacky, a capital that was no longer a capital, not even legally part of any country, a beacon of freedom. And a magnet for spies.

  Then there was the other side: East Berlin, the less than half a city that was the capital of less than half a country, where jackboots still strutted dilapidated streets, where citizens spied on one another and their own soldiers shot them if they tried to leave; a city of crumbling tenement blocks, cobbles and comical cars, where the red banners of the Nazis had been replaced by the red flags of communism and secret policemen lurked in every alleyway on the lookout for secret agents.

  I had read Len Deighton’s Funeral in Berlin, seen Michael Caine play Harry Palmer on the big screen and was as willing to believe they were as likely to smuggle live men in coffins across the innercity border as well as swapping American spy plane pilots for KGB colonels in tense exchanges on isolated bridges. There was no doubt about it, Berlin was magic. Black magic, maybe, but that only made it all the more appealing.

  * George retired from Reuters and passed away in the nineties, but his spirit lives on: he is remembered by former friends and colleagues who meet up from time to time to reminisce about the ‘Good Old Days’. In his honour these occasions are known as ‘short lunches’. They aren’t.

  3

  A Place of My Own

  There was more: I would have an office of my own. No boss sitting over me. My own little fiefdom.

  A fiefdom, of course, was precisely what it was intended to be: technically subservient to Reuters Bonn, the large office which covered the economic superpower that West Germany had become. It housed dozens of native staff who ran the German-language news and economics service. There was also an office in West Berlin, with two West German staff. But for reasons both political and historical the East Berlin office was staffed from London, by a Briton. The main reason for this was that Berlin had in theory remained under the control of the victorious World War II Allies. This meant that when Reuters, still emerging from its role in the British wartime propaganda set-up, opened a separate office in the Soviet sector in the 1950s, (in itself a controversial move as it implied recognition of the division of Germany that had already de facto occurred) no one ever suggested the correspondent should be anything other than one of the ‘Allies’. Despite Reuters’ claim that it had since become an ‘international’ agency, as far as the East Germans were concerned it was still British and that meant the correspondent had to be too.

  Reuters were not exactly entrusting me with the front-line bureau it might have seemed. Berlin may once have been the potential flashpoint to spark a new world war, but the Wall had – as both sides tacitly acknowledged, without mentioning it overmuch to the Germans – stabilised the situation: a concrete agreement to differ. By 1981 the Berlin Wall was twenty years old and it seemed as if it would be there forever. It was easy to forget that in the first hours of its creation there had been what appeared to be a Mexican standoff: if the armed forces of the West intervened, what would happen? We will never know. It was a deadly game to see which superpower could outstare the other. The West blinked first.

  On August 13th, 1961, the authorities in the East, having seen their population gradually drain to the West through the open plughole that was West Berlin, had simply stopped the leak by doing what everyone had thought was impossible: building a wall. Not just through the heart of the city – and therefore also dividing the underground rail system and the river traffic – but all the way around West Berlin, mirroring the impassable border erected in 1952 between the two German states.

  The Wall had gone up overnight. Almost. At first little more than a barbed wire fence manned by armed soldiers it quickly became concrete. Literally. Bricks were laid rapidly to a height of two metres, at least a metre back on Soviet sector soil so the workers, watched over by armed troops, could work on it from both sides without standing in the West. Then they built a second wall behind it, to leave a ‘death strip’ in between. Over the next twenty years the Wall evolved into its final form: a largely anonymous cinder-block wall some three metres high in the East and a vertical concrete slab construction facing the West, also three metres high but topped with a ‘half-barrel’ rounded top that effectively denied purchase to anyone trying to climb it. From either side.

  The truth in 1981, however, was that the situation in Europe had stabilised in a balance between East and West that people weren’t exactly enamoured of, but at least had come to live with. The focus of the ongoing tension between the superpowers had moved. Primarily to the east, where the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had provided a new arena for Moscow and Washington to fight their proxy war. The Soviets had got bogged down supporting a puppet secular atheist communist government, and the Americans had retaliated by supplying arms to religious fundamentalist patriot resistance fighters. They called themselves mujahideen, those who were involved in jihad, or righteous struggle. Many of them went on to be even more famous under another name: the Taliban.

  The situation in Europe however, thanks to the conciliatory ‘Ostpolitik’ practised by West German chancello
r Willy Brandt and the 1975 Helsinki Accords on Security and Cooperation in Europe, could roughly have been described as ‘all quiet on the Western front’. That is not to say there were no tensions brewing. The two sides, ever watchful of each other’s supposed military superiority, were just beginning a new arms race, with the US deploying new medium-range missiles in Britain, Italy, the Netherlands and West Germany, and the Soviet Union doing the same in Czechoslovakia and East Germany. In the end, and sooner than anyone expected, that new arms race would have an effect on the Cold War, but not at all in the way either of the power blocs intended.

  In the meantime, East Berlin had become a bit of a backwater in news terms. It was seen primarily as a source of features which would be translated by the Bonn office and fed out to West German newspapers to tell their readers about the lives of their less fortunate former fellow citizens. Bonn, of course, would have preferred the correspondent to be a West German, but the East German authorities, who when it suited them could choose to play the old ‘four-power’ game they otherwise refuted, wouldn’t hear of it. There was clearly a feeling amongst the communist authorities that a Briton would stand out more, would be less likely to get under the skin of the country and thereby would cause less of a nuisance.

  And they might have had a point in my case, because there was one distinct problem when it came to me accepting the job. Well, two actually, though the first seemed – to me at least – clearly the most important: I didn’t speak German. Well, I did, but not properly. I had done it at A-level and got a grade A, but my steep learning curve in Paris street slang had made me realise how far even the best schoolboy command of a foreign language falls short of real working competency in the country. Since leaving school I had concentrated on my French and my Russian, working as hard as I could – given the even greater difficulty of spending long periods amongst native Russian speakers. My German, meanwhile, was limited to the sort of stuff they taught seventeen-year-olds in ‘conversation classes’ at school: I could order an ice cream and ask how to play Skat (though not understand the answer, it’s a card game whose rules I’ve never got the hang of) or say ‘Borussia Mönchengladbach are my favourite football team’, but that was it. The idea of reading newspapers, dealing with official press releases, asking questions at press conferences or talking to dissidents was terrifying to say the least.