In My Wildest Dreams

by Leslie Thomas

  I discovered an alternative door and entered into another yellow-lit mayhem. Further machines grunted and wheezed, each one it seemed watched by an attendant who looked ready to flee at any moment. The air was thick with fumes. Through the centre the only calm figure in the scene wandered about the chaos, wearing a pin-striped suit and smoking a pipe. This was clearly someone in charge. Tugging my collar about my neck I took a long breath and advanced on him.

  'Ah,' he puffed unhurriedly when I had introduced myself. 'Just the chap we need.'

  My God, I thought. Luck at last.

  'If you want to be a newspaperman, you could start right away,' he said. Another globe of smoke went to join the general fumes.

  Even over the thumping machines I could hear my heart. 'Now, sir?' I said. 'Yes, please. Of course. Anything.' Perhaps it was a murder, a train crash, a missing film star. 'What do I have to do?'

  'Fold them,' he replied laconically.

  The machine folding the Wickford Times, one of the umpteen small journals published by the company, had broken down. Each of the three thousand copies had to be folded by hand. I was instructed to take off my coat, then a piece of metal was pressed into my hand and I was positioned alongside two other perspiring individuals who were taking the pages from the press and folding them by running the metal along the intended crease. Thus began my career in journalism.

  One of the other folders was a young, amusing and owlish fellow called Evans who became a great friend. The other was the fusspot chief, and only reporter of the Wickford Times, who was anxious to ensure that every crease was straight. It must have been a hundred degrees in that sweatshop. We folded and perspired. Someone brought us each a pint of cider which we drank greedily. When we had finished in the early hours of the morning, they gave us another pint. Reg Evans and I walked out into the dark cooling air and were spectacularly sick in the gutter of Voluntary Place.

  It was three o'clock by the time I got back to the hostel. Every muscle and bone in my body groaned and I was coated with grease. But I rolled aching into bed with a joyous feeling. I was a newspaperman.

  Among its former employees, now spread throughout the writing trade in every part of the world, the stories of the press at Voluntary Place are still told with the relish that time gives to hardship. Its location was not inappropriate, since we were pressed into volunteering for all manner of tasks and conditions, which today would send even the least dedicated union man howling for a strike. I, for one, worked for several weeks without wages.

  It transpired that the organisation, which published something like twenty-five newspapers ranging from Southend in Essex, to Brentford in Middlesex – the two outer extremes of the London region – all on a shoestring, did not believe in encouraging young trainees overmuch by giving them money. On my second visit to the press I was taken to see the editor, a Mr Cyril, a tall balding person with staring blue eyes and shining skin. His ears were transparent. Each of the brothers who controlled this Heath Robinson empire was known by his Christian name. The one with the pipe who had set me folding was Mr Leonard. There was also a thin, nervy, beleaguered man, called Mr Harold, although this was his surname, and he was not related to the owners. He ran the entire empire from a partitioned office the size of a lavatory. He had a cynical humour and a terrible fatalism. One Friday, which was the quiet day of the week, I found him head in hands at the oilclothed bench which served as his desk. 'Look at bloody that,' he demanded. 'Look at it!' Amazed that he should inform me, the most junior of the staff, of his troubles, I stared at the proffered front page of the Chingford Times, which had hit the streets that day. 'Council Abandon Annual Ball' howled the headline and underneath, 'Two few tickets sold.'

  'You would think somebody in this fucking place,' he sobbed. 'Would know the difference between TWO and TOO, wouldn't you?'

  He could afford to be nice to nobody but he is recalled with laughter and affection by the veterans of those times. One of these, Maurice Romilly, a distinguished parliamentary correspondent, attempted a few years ago to mark this fondness by organising a dinner with Mr Harold at the head of the table and all who knew and suffered under and with him ranged down the sides. My enthusiasm for this project, and the willing support of many others, was not, however, reciprocated by the intended chief participant. The papers had folded and, predictably, this lifelong servant had been discarded shabbily. When Romilly telephoned him about the proposed event he said: 'Son, I don't want anything to do with any sod who had anything to do with those papers.' Then he put the phone down.

  Each of the newspapers had its own district office, some less opulent than others. The one at Willesden, in north-west London, I was eventually to discover, had naked clay beneath the linoleum in the reporters' room. They were all printed on the fairly elderly machinery at Voluntary Place, where the journalists were expected to travel once a week to put their own paper to bed, to read proofs and to assemble the makeup. These operations were accomplished in a single cubicle jammed between that of Mr Harold and that of another senior sub-editor, a handsome man called Rashbrook, plus the caravan I had first visited, and a room in a neighbouring garage. The garage had been acquired with an eye to installing another rotary printing press there. When purchased this took six months to assemble. On the first night it ran the house next door fell down, and its operations were suspended.

  It is difficult to believe such a conglomerate existed. To publish all those journals, spread through the Home Counties, was some feat in itself. With a sparse staff, sparser facilities and faltering machinery it was nothing less than miraculous.

  My first day as a reporter was a Saturday. I had rather hoped that I would be dispatched to write some action-loaded prose about the football match at Clapton Orient or at least at Walthamstow Avenue. Instead I was given the doleful assignment of visiting undertakers in Leytonstone to note who had recently died, and to visit their homes to discover whether they had ever achieved anything in their lives which might merit a few lines in the paper.

  Reporters these days doubtless do not have to undertake such lugubrious assignments, certainly not as a speculative thing. Unhappily, I set out drooping with a long black Barnardo overcoat which on future visits to the homes of deceased caused me to be mistaken for the undertaker's assistant ('Come to measure up, have you?') or more cheerfully the insurance man ('Have you got it in cash?') and on one occasion as a long-lost relative.

  There had been no mention about the money I was to earn and indeed nothing was said for weeks. I worked myself into the ground, tramping the streets in the wake of the mortician, having nightmares, and drawing only expenses, which were limited to bus fares between corpses. On that first Saturday I approached my first undertakers' with much misgiving, finally raising enough courage to enter to a bell that chimed like a knell. The smell, and I can smell it now, was pungent; French polish, flowers with a whiff of formaldyhyde. There was a coffin on a trestle just inside the door and a little man who was bending over it shut it as he might have shut a book he was reading.

  His immediate breeziness once I had told him who I represented overcame the proximity of death. 'Oh yes, my lad. Got one or two good ones for you,' he assured. 'Let's get the book. Should be a good tussle down at Orient this afternoon, don't you think?'

  He produced his book and read out some names and former addresses. When he got to one name he nodded at the coffin. 'He's in there at the moment,' he mentioned as if the man might later be available for an interview. I looked about for somewhere to rest my new notebook and he again nodded to the coffin. I laid it on the sweet-polished lid and took down the list of the dead.

  Then I had to go out and face the difficult part, to enquire if there was anything of interest about the loved one who had passed on. My first call, at a terrace house in a Walthamstow back street, has remained forever in my mind. Timidly I knocked and was breathing a sigh of relief at the absence of a response when the door was pulled open with some difficulty and standing there was a little g
irl, four or five years old, wearing a grubby nightdress. We stood staring at each other. I could think of nothing to say. Eventually I managed to enquire if there was anyone else at home and she summoned her brother, who was at the most seven. He was in pyjamas with jam all down the front. He saved me further embarrassment. "Ave you come to see our mum?' he enquired. He opened the door and let me into the small front room where their mother was lying in an open casket. I almost fainted. They were in the house by themselves. It taught me, at the opening moment of my career as a reporter and indeed a writer, that knock on any door and behind that door is a story. If you can bring yourself to write it.

  This funeral procession continued for some weeks. My eyes became hollow from being awake at night and from the miles I tramped in search of interesting anecdotes about the dead. There came a point when I was exchanging backchat with morticians. It started to get me down. I went to see Mr Cyril in his cubicle and he noted how black-eyed and despondent I was. When I told him the reason he clucked in sympathy and asked how much I was earning. 'Nothing, sir,' I replied. 'Just bus fares.'

  'I expect you walk most of the way,' he mentioned. I thought it was goodbye to bus fares too.

  'Well,' he said. 'I think we ought to start paying you. Let's say a pound a week, for a start. And perhaps we ought to move you to Woodford. You can do a few dancing displays and flower shows, that sort of thing. And people don't die quite so much there. It's a much better area altogether.'

  Among the characters who made up the staffs of the various journals in the group was a man who was the most accomplished romantic liar I have ever encountered. He was short, youngish, and pugnacious, a distress to many, including his wife. He was our chief reporter, someone who lived by stories. When there were not enough true stories to go around he simply made them up.

  One Wednesday the newspaper on which he worked showed no sign of finding a report strong enough to make the front page headline, and in those latitudes it did not have to be particularly sensational for that. He went thoughtfully to the pub at lunchtime and returned with a thrilling yarn about an old man he had met who carried with him a suitcase full of banknotes. This man had returned after many years in Australia to find his long lost love, the girl to whom he had been engaged fifty years before. Our chief reporter, whom we shall call Phibbs, had even obtained a photograph of the girl from the hoary traveller. 'I've told him to stay in the pub,' Phibbs announced. 'We've got to get a photographer around there and quick.' The cameraman was dispatched but returned saying that the pub was shut and there was no sign of an old man with a case full of banknotes. Undeterred, Phibbs wrote the story and even quoted some local ancients who felt sure they remembered him from back in misty time. Across the front page the romantic legend was spread – with the faded picture of the long lost love the traveller had come to find.

  Naturally the national newspapers became interested in this human drama and sent out reporters and photographers to find the returned suitor. No one ever traced him. Someone alleged that the girl in the picture looked very much like a photograph of his father's great-aunt which had appeared in our periodical many years before. Was he sure there had been no mistake? Phibbs dismissed the doubt. He was mystified but not daunted. The following week's issue was led with the headline: 'Millionaire Lover Vanishes'.

  He also organised a running-backwards race which had the contenders trotting rear first up the main street of the borough. As they came in this curious fashion, Tom Merrin, now of the Daily Mirror, observed them with a sinking heart. 'I knew they were something to do with Phibbs, who was nowhere to be found,' he recalled. 'They came backwards through the office door and began claiming prizes.'

  Some trusting soul at the local greyhound stadium commissioned Phibbs to organise a gala night which Phibbs promised would include the personal appearance of a famous and voluptuous film actress. Two hours before the event, with bands preparing to parade, flowers and champagne all ready, Phibbs still had no idea from whence his star was to come. Then the unexpected piece of luck, for which he had been waiting confidently, arrived with the casual mention by a local policeman that he had a pretty foreign girl, a friend of his daughter, staying at his house. In no time the young beauty, who spoke little English, found herself being feted at the dog track, carted around on an open float to the cheers of the punters who were in no doubt they were viewing a Scandinavian film actress. The young lady, having enjoyed it immensely, merely wondered why it had happened.

  These fantasies sometimes affected the personal lives of Phibbs's colleagues. One Sunday afternoon while he was walking with his wife and baby (who had recently – according to Phibbs – survived as a kidnap victim), I happened to be playing soccer and they paused to watch. At half-time Phibbs, who apart from being in the American Airborne Forces and MI5 simultaneously, had played soccer for several first division teams and cricket for Yorkshire, approached and said it was obvious to him that I had star quality. I believed every word and was overcome with delight when he promised he would arrange a trial for me with Clapton Orient, now Leyton Orient, the local professional side. I dubbined my boots, had my kit washed, and could hardly sleep while I waited. Nothing happened and after a week I jogged his memory. 'Tuesday,' he said without hesitation. 'It's all fixed. Be at the ground by four for a trial.'

  I had always harboured a hidden dream that one day I might be a footballer and cricketer as well as a writer (just like Phibbs) and on the Tuesday I turned up at the stadium to find it deserted except for an old man sweeping the terraces. 'Help me sweep up and I'll give you a trial,' he promised after I'd told him why I was there. Although this sounded dubious I was ready to try anything. After half an hour of sweeping and picking up debris he went into the dressing room and appeared with a football. He placed himself between the goalposts and I kicked the football at him. When it was almost dark he picked up the ball and walked towards the dressing room. 'You'll never do,' he sniffed. 'Got no left foot, 'ave you.'

  It was Phibbs who announced to the junior reporters one day that he was concerned for the well-being of a number of foreign students and workers in the area. 'They don't seem to have a social life at all,' he complained, while we wondered what the catch was. 'I think we ought to give them a chance to meet some local people, have a get-together, and help them make friends.'

  Knowing him as we did, we dispersed with doubt-hung faces. Later, predictably and cheerfully, he announced that he had arranged a social evening and if we would just contribute as little as half-a-crown a head each then the whole enjoyable idea could go forward.

  To some of us this was a sizeable slice from our wages, but we glumly put the money into the hat and Phibbs took immediate charge of it. He revealed a sudden friend in the wines and spirits business on the far side of London, who would provide the drinks at half price. Phibbs would personally drive the consignment to the social.

  On the night of the 'Overseas Friends Evening', as it was heralded in our paper, a good number of French students, former German and Italian prisoners of war, and Indian restaurant waiters turned up. Unfortunately Phibbs did not. We waited with grim, growing certainty. The sandwiches hardened with our hearts. There was not a drink in the room. In the end the foreigners began to get a bit awkward and we had to send out for some crates of beer. The guests eventually went off into the Walthamstow night grumbling at British promises which had gone unfulfilled. One of the Germans told me that he had always thought that Englishmen kept their word. He had been under the impression that some sort of Bacchanalian feast was to be provided. All he had been offered was a curly cheese roll, a bottle of brown ale which he could not open and a couple of songs he did not know. There had also been a decided shortage of likeable women.

  Phibbs turned up the next day swathed in splints and bandages.

  'The bloody car,' he said throatily, looking from his dressings like a man peering from prison. 'Turned right over. Smashed every bottle. Nearly finished me, I can tell you.'

  The location of t
his tragedy was never firmly identified, except it was many miles distant. Even when a paragraph appeared in our paper headed: 'Reporter's Narrow Escape', the geographical information was vague. Phibbs said it was in the Middlesex area but confidential telephone enquiries to several police stations and hospitals in the region failed to establish the occurrence. Also, considering the scale of his wounds, Phibbs emerged from his bandages somewhat quickly. Several years later I saw him staggering along Fleet Street with identical injuries.

  Woodford was a leafy place compared to the gritty streets which I had been trudging. It had a wide green, a lilied pond with frogs below and a willow above, canopies of trees over its housetops, and open country stretching to Epping Forest. The local member of Parliament was the venerable Sir Winston Churchill and while I was there a powerful statue of the famous man was unveiled. The office of the Woodford Times was across the road from the green where I played cricket on a Saturday. There was a good homely cafe which provided thick-lipped cups of tea and doorsteps of bread and margarine, where the lady liked me and told me of her many hours on the operating table. It was spring and I took to the place with a smile.

  Also, coincidentally, the district included Woodford Bridge and the Dr Barnardo Home where I had, five years before, been separated from my brother. It was part of my duties to make an occasional call at the home in search of news and one day they whispered in my ear that Princess Margaret was to make a visit. I hurried away and wrote the story. Thus Barnardo's provided me with my first scoop and my first front page headline; an odd instance of after care.

  Unfortunately, the big day was a Thursday, when the Woodford Times was actually going to press. For the first time, but by no means the last, I had to imagine what would happen and compiled a graphic description of the bunting and the crowds, the pleased staff and the thrilled children, with details (gleaned from my friendly contact) of what the Princess was wearing with her smile. The whole thing was set and the paper was ready to be printed. Then Her Royal Highness failed to turn up.