I said yes, of course, I would be interested, but promised I would keep quiet about what he had said. I told Margaret as soon as I could. She wasn’t at all impressed. She couldn’t understand my pleasure in being asked and willingness to go off and live in Jo’burg – as I was already beginning to call the main town. She personally would never want to live there.
Back in Manchester, I was on the calls again, boring news stories, press conferences, hanging around the Manchester University Students’ Union, while I waited for word from Mr Fraser. Nothing came. I couldn’t badger him as he had made it clear it was still at the discussion stage and I would be informed, if it ever came to pass, and if ever I was in the running.
Meanwhile, I was given a features series to do called ‘Teenagers Talking’, which ran in the Chron for a whole week, every day, from Monday 6 April 1959. The idea was to investigate and reveal this new phenomenon of teenagers, their life, thoughts and culture, which the adult world had still not quite come to grips with or understood. Who were they? In Manchester, so the paper estimated, there were 30,000 teenagers, mainly just hanging around. What did they think, what did they believe in, where did they hang out?
I was given free rein and several weeks to go out and report – and could write as much as I liked, go where I wanted, see how it went. Mac, the older journalist I sat next to, thought it was a nonsense, calling it an ‘investigation’ was phoney, where was the story, what was new about it? This passion for stuff about youth was getting out of hand. A cry which has been heard for decades ever since.
At the same time, knowing how keen I was to do it, he warned me not to interview any teenagers I might know personally.
I couldn’t understand this piece of advice. Obviously it would be handy and quick to use people you already knew. As I wasn’t from Manchester, I didn’t actually know any teenagers, so it wasn’t an issue, but it took me a few years to understand his main point, which on the whole is correct.
It is always liable to rebound on you if you write about people you know, such as relations and friends. If you want to interview a nurse, find a nurse you have no connection with. Human interest, real-life interviews can so quickly escape your control, once you have written them. They get altered, cut, the wrong things get highlighted, vital stuff missed out. The person gets upset, does not understand the process, their own friends are either jealous of the attention or critical, hurt by quotes that the person has supposedly given. The same principle applies even more to television. The object in TV is often to set you up from the beginning, force you into the roles and stereotypes they have already decided upon.
Mac gave me another piece of advice, during my early months, which I ignored then and have ignored ever since. I had been sent to a flower show, and spent a lot of time working on how to get into the story sideways, looking for an offbeat introduction, a funny angle or amusing quote, and was probably straining too hard to find one. He said readers just wanted to know the list of winners, no point trying to be a clever bugger. I argued that if you could make the story interesting and unexpected, then more people would read it, even if they then gave up when they found it was just a list. Surely this applied to all stories. I think he told me to shut up and get on with it.
I never heard any more about South Africa, but the predictions and fears turned out to be justified. Just a year later, in 1960, came the Sharpeville Massacre, during which sixty-nine people were killed. I was never posted to South Africa. Or anywhere else abroad.
I did get called in one day by Bob Walker, the news editor. He said I was being moved to a new position. I thought for a moment it might be somewhere exciting, if not as scary as either Cyprus or Jo’burg. The answer was Wigan.
I was being sent to work in our branch office there, one of the Chron’s many offices round the region where they produced each day four pages or so of local news for the different editions.
The local Evening Chron office normally consisted of just one journalist, sitting in a little room above the shop, usually on a high street, plus some sort of business person, who acted as the local advertising and circulation manager, and a woman on the front counter where you could drop in your classified adverts.
I was not going to live in Wigan, but travel out on the train every day to help our Wigan editor. It felt like an awful demotion, after the highs of being a foreign correspondent and feature writer, with my face and name in the paper. I was now back at the beginning. Even worse, I was out in the sticks, having to learn about local stuff that I had never been expected to cover when based at HQ in Kemsley House. Such as court reports.
I had given up my shorthand lessons quite quickly, convinced it was a skill I would never need. Now I was being sent to the magistrates’ court in Wigan, and in nearby Eccles, so I had somehow to get down what was happening and make sense of it. I had never heard of the local streets and shops and institutions where apparently heinous crimes were being committed every day.
In each place, there were old sweats, regular court reporters who had worked there for years, either as freelances or for a court agency, supplying all the Manchester papers, and London, should anything unusual or with human interest value arise in their particular magistrates’ court. They were all helpful, willing to tell me how they did their work, what to look out for. None seemed jealous that I might be taking their court reporting jobs from them. Some chance.
I couldn’t understand how they stood it, every day of their working lives, sitting on the same seat in the same place, taking down notes, then phoning in stories, often no more than a paragraph long.
It was interesting for me, of course, seeing the law in action, watching lawyers working, the court officials, listening to the police reading out their statements as if they were speak-your-weight machines. I did learn something. But, oh, the boredom.
The worst part was knowing nobody, especially at lunchtime, as they all had their own roles and routines, so I would wander off looking for a cheap caff or a pub. The floors of the pubs seemed awash with spilled beer. The sandwiches were always soggy, especially the tinned salmon variety. I don’t think they poured any liquid out of the can before emptying the contents on the sliced white bread. The regular Chron reporter, in theory my boss, never seemed to leave the office, typing all day long, only pausing to tell me which courts I should go to, meetings I should attend. At least he was nothing like Mr Mellor, shouting out instructions. So that was a pleasant change.
I was in Wigan during Whit week in May, which was very colourful, with all the local children parading around in their best frocks and outfits. I can also remember wakes week, when the whole town seemed to close. Each of the Lancashire towns had a different wakes week, which dated back to the early Industrial Revolution, when all the factories closed and the workers had their annual holiday, going to the pubs or more likely to Blackpool. Such events have disappeared, and the cultural life and traditions that went with them, once the factories closed forever and manufacturing moved on.
I did try to find Wigan Pier, thinking I might get an offbeat story, the place made famous by George Orwell in his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier. But I failed to locate it. I had not realised it was a very old Lancashire joke, not known in Cumberland, which was to pretend Wigan was some marvellous, idyllic seaside resort. There was originally a wooden staithe, where coal was landed on the canal, but it was never a pier. George Formby used to joke that he had just been to Wigan Pier – ‘And the tide was in’. (The area has now been redeveloped and the old nickname has become a marketing tool, with visitors invited to join the ‘Wigan Pier Experience’.)
In my mind, I seemed to have been stuck at Wigan for months and months, all on my own. I can see myself sitting slumped on the empty train going out to Wigan first thing in the morning from Manchester, as everyone was going the other way. I was alone in my Daisy Bank flat when I got home in the evening. I did try to review as many amateur plays as possible, for the extra income, unless I was visiting Margaret or she wa
s coming through to see me.
She had a bit of excitement of her own. She had written a piece for Isis called ‘A Woman’s Very Own’, in which she described how she much preferred reading any of the women’s magazines, such as Woman and Woman’s Own, rather than boring, dreary publications like the Manchester Guardian and the New Statesman, which all her friends and tutors were reading.
As a result of this, she got a letter from someone called James Drawbell, who was apparently the boss of the magazine empire which included Woman’s Own. He invited her to London to have lunch with him and talk about possibly working on women’s magazines when she graduated. She decided to go for the lunch, thinking it would be amusing to meet him, hear what he had in mind.
When she got to the restaurant, Jimmy Drawbell had another man with him, who was the actual editor of Woman’s Own. After a lavish lunch, they all jumped into a cab and went to the Guards Club, where they had more drinks. Nothing untoward took place in the cab, or was suggested, for I did ask, except she was invited to come and see them again when she left Oxford in another year and they would give her a job. Doing what, she asked? One of the things they dangled before her was interviewing Pietro Annigoni, then a famous and fashionable artist who had painted the Queen. Back in Oxford, she wrote and declined their offer. She said her interests did not lie in that direction.
I thought, of course, it was totally unfair – being offered a job on the strength of one silly little article, just because she was at Oxford writing for Isis.
Stuck in Daisy Bank Road on my own, one of the things I started trying to do was ‘write’. I don’t know why I decided to have a go at what we all now call creative writing, as opposed to simply writing. I had always been mocking about anything that smacked of purple prose, so I usually did it secretly, telling no one. While at Durham, I did write a sensitive piece about a lovers’ quarrel – i.e. about me and Margaret – for the student literary magazine, New Durham. They accepted it, and printed it, but I didn’t put my name on it – embarrassed, perhaps, that someone who fancied himself as a humorous writer was trying to be serious.
I also wrote eighteen pages of a play, though I had no memory of doing so. It has just fallen out of my Evening Chronicle cuttings book, which I had not opened since 1959. It appears to be a searing domestic drama, clearly about my father’s illness and death, and the effect on his family. I still haven’t read it all. I don’t like that sort of heart-wringing, weepy, family realism. I may be obsessed by my own life and entrails, but even I can’t bear to read that sort of juvenile rubbish.
But I did get one so-called creative article published: ‘Like Swans Asleep’ appeared in the Manchester Guardian. It was about being in Cyprus, sitting looking at the sea and the ships and thinking of that poem by James Elroy Flecker (1884–1915) which we had all learned at school: ‘I have seen the old ships sail like swans asleep.’ It is set in Cyprus and mentions Famagusta, which I visited while I was there. I did not reveal in the piece what I was doing in Cyprus, the reason why I was there. I hope I cleared it with the Chron. It was an awfully sensitive and moving piece of fine writing. Well, my mother thought so.
Looking back through my 1959 diary, I see I was based in Wigan for only about a month, from May to June. It is just in my mind I was there forever. As you get older, the past does tend to grow bigger. The further away, the clearer it all becomes.
And my total time in Manchester was in all only nine months. Manchester is still vivid and visible in my mind, yet it all happened almost sixty years ago. Remembering what I did last year, that is a struggle. Or ten years ago, that’s equally jumbled and faded. I have a new routine for when I am recalling something. When I hear myself beginning ‘I bought this/did this/went there, oh, I think it must be, hold on, must be five years ago . . .’, I stop myself, mid-flow, and change it to ten years. Five years seems to be about right when I launch into the memory, but I then double it, knowing I now always underestimate the passing of recent times.
My diary entry for Thursday 11 June 1959, written in large letters, reads ‘FAREWELL!’ I have also added ‘5’, presumably indicating the time, and ‘entrees at 9’, whatever they might have been. Could I have been treating some of my chums from the Evening Chronicle offices, such as Barry and Beryl and Mac, to a drink and possibly a nibble? What a spendthrift. Or show-off.
The editor of the paper, Mr Goulden, had called me in just two days previously to inform me I was being moved at once from Wigan. This time I was going to London.
28
LONDON LIFE
I think it was the smell of London that hit me. Not a nasty smell, just a hot, sticky, semi-tropical cockney smell. Of course, cockneys don’t have a smell, but cockney-land did seem a place apart, with its own aromas and sounds and sensations. It was midsummer, the middle of June 1959, and it was very hot, far hotter than in the North, which you never believe, living in the North, but alas it is true.
They all seemed to be archetypal cockneys, or at least local Londoners, cheerful, chirpy, quick, witty, the sort I had seen in British post-war movies. They made me seem slow and lumpen and very northern. In 1959 there were few recent migrants, from Asia or Europe, and the ones from the West Indies, who had been encouraged by our government to come here with the offer of work, kept to themselves, or were kept to themselves. Most of them had settled quietly in the Brixton area.
I had no idea where Brixton was, or where any of the different parts of London were in relation to each other. I did know some of the names, like Mayfair and Park Lane and the main railway stations, but that knowledge came from playing Monopoly, not from real life. They might well have been fantasy places for all I knew.
The tube was frightening, and of course the relationship between the stations on the map bore no resemblance to their situation above ground. Buses were even scarier, with people jumping on and off all the time, pushing and shoving, all knowing precisely where they were going.
In Manchester I had got a map and wanted to live anywhere near the office. This time I had slightly grander ambitions – a flat of my own, self-contained, with my own front door, where Margaret could stay without any of the faff of sneaking her in, hiding her, pretending she wasn’t there.
Suddenly landing in London at twenty-three, out of the blue, seemed to be part of a pattern in my life. I’d gone to the Creighton School at eleven at the last moment, unexpectedly moved to the grammar at sixteen and got into Durham at eighteen in a way that felt as if it had nothing to do with me. How have I come to be here, and where am I anyway?
At Euston I clutched the address of Squire Barraclough, someone I had never met, just a name. He was my only contact in the whole of London. He worked on the London desk of Thomson née Kemsley Newspapers and I had occasionally spoken to him about stories on the phone. His name, of course, was unforgettable – a better by-line than mine. But I knew nothing about him, his age, circumstances, where and how he lived or with whom. When I happened to tell him on the phone a few days earlier that I was being moved to Thomson House, and had nowhere to stay, he said, no problem, I could spend the night on his sofa.
Hs address was in Archway, in a side street of Victorian terrace houses, near Archway’s suicide bridge. He shared a small ground-floor flat with another Thomson journalist. The one night turned into ten days, which was a bit embarrassing. The sofa was in their living room, so I had to put away my things, such as they were, behind the sofa every morning. I tried to get up early and leave before they did and come home late, so as to inconvenience them as little as possible. I didn’t eat with them, except on Sunday when we all walked over to Highgate and had a pub lunch. Highgate looked attractive and affluent, but totally out of my range. They seemed so knowledgeable about pubs and areas, and buses and tube stations. The barmaid knew them. They understood it when cockney persons affected mock fury or rudeness. I wondered if I would ever master any of it.
I felt under such pressure to find somewhere of my own to live. Margaret could not stay on
that sofa, so my need was urgent, yet I was working every day. They moan about renting in London today, what hell it is to find any place to live, but I am sure there has never been a good or easy time. Only the rents change.
I discovered that it was vital to get the first edition of the London Evening Standard. Like the Chron, they had lots of editions all day long, the first one being full of dull stories about people out in the Home Counties. In those days, there were three London evening papers. At every tube station and busy corner you could hear the different vendors shouting out the different titles. The Evening News was a broadsheet, strong in the suburbs, while the Star was a tabloid with banner headlines. The Standard was also a tabloid, but considered more up-market, strong on the City and the West End, with good literary pages. That was the paper, so I was told, that had most of the central London flat adverts. But if you didn’t get the first edition, they would all be gone.
So I got the first edition on the way to work all week and started ringing surreptitiously on the office phone, trying to book viewing appointments, but of course I could not physically see them till the evening. Straight after work, armed with my tube map and an A–Z, I rushed to see flats, full of excitement at first, then despondent when most of them had been taken by the time I got there.
I eventually narrowed down my search to north London. I could see Highgate looked nice, and I heard Hampstead was even better, and Hampstead Heath was said to be amazing. Northerners, over the centuries, when they have come to London, usually arrive at either Euston or King’s Cross, which is why they start looking roughly around those areas. So northerners end up in north London. Going over the river is seen as passport country.
The Co-Op's Got Bananas Page 31
