In My Wildest Dreams

by Leslie Thomas

  It was my regular routine to do the rounds of the various organisations in the crowded borough. One of these was to the Conservative Club where a dear old boozer was the political agent. In that generally dingy area the party was very much in the minority. Labour members of the council outnumbered Tories by eight to one (which did not stop the Socialists electing a Tory mayor, in recognition of long service to the town, something that would be a little short of a miracle today).

  One morning, making my customary call at the Conservative Club, I found the agent, a retired army officer, as usual affably at the bar. I asked if the forthcoming council elections had meant much additional work. He choked on his Scotch and, ashen-faced, asked me the date, then the time. When I told him he emitted a spectral howl and staggered towards his office, slamming the door. Noon that day was the deadline for the handing in of nomination papers for the forthcoming elections. It was now eleven-thirty and he had forgotten to send them. Nor were they signed and seconded.

  Somehow a scrawl of somewhat instant signatures appeared on the hastily filled-out papers and there was a dash to the town hall. The town clerk looked at the clock and shrugged. It was three minutes past noon. The nominations were invalid. The next council had a vastly increased Labour majority and the Tory agent decided to retire.

  One of the Labour councillors was a personable young man called Reginald Freeson who rose to the higher levels of the party and who became, despite an attempted left-wing intrusion, Member of Parliament for Brent, of which Willesden forms part. Reg Freeson was a journalist who at one time worked for a series of children's comic papers. Once, years later at some sort of party, where The Times man introduced himself sonorously: 'Martin-Thompson-Billings, The Times,'' and I said: 'Leslie Thomas, Evening News,' slightly less impressively, Reg Freeson added unselfconsciously: 'Reginald Freeson, Mickey Mouse Weekly.'

  Social events, lunches, annual dinners and receptions in Willesden were usually my concern since most of the other reporters had homes to go to. I welcomed this because I was fed and watered rather better than my pocket would allow (I also went to the cinema free). One of the regular festivities was the social evening of the Anglo-German Friendship Club where Teutonic ladies and gentlemen and Willesden residents tried to forget the enmities of war, which had been over only six years. At these gatherings the waiters were uniformed members of the Royal Artillery Association who not long previously had been firing shells in the direction of the selfsame Germans they were now serving. I asked one of the former gunners how he felt about this: 'They're a very good crowd, the Krauts,' he said after thinking about it. 'During the war I must have killed quite a few of them but I'm sorry now.'

  After Mrs Dyer had hit me on the head with the saucepan we decided that, with no further hard feelings, we should part company. I took my belongings a mile or so further into the centre of Willesden to the house of another widow, Mrs Bailey, where I had a room directly overlooking the cemetery.

  Mrs Bailey was a splintery old dear whose concern was 'to feed you up for your wedding'. This agricultural ambition she attempted to achieve by shovelling fried and other food onto my plate in great quantities at all hours of the day and with what she considered to be apt commentary. 'Here's your belly lining!' she would proclaim, bringing in smoking porridge at seven in the morning. She was not a good cook. Her piles of chips often resembled a burnt-out log cabin and I saw many a baleful-eyed egg looking out of the charred wreckage. 'You won't notice it under this gunge,' she would enthuse, sloshing out the HP sauce. 'That'll keep you stoked up for the winter,' and 'Let this lot gurgle down inside you,' were other culinary phrases.

  She was also magically untidy. Clothes, utensils and furniture were piled everywhere, only being moved to be piled elsewhere. It was really only a two-roomed flat with the bathroom also doubling as the kitchen. A small gas-cooking range was placed on top of the toilet cistern. 'It saves a lot of time,' was her unhappy joke, and there was a wooden board which could be placed on top of the bath to provide a surface for kitchen work and to support mountains of undone washing-up and dirty laundry. Both the crockery and the clothes were washed in the bath, sometimes together.

  When I first arrived I immediately decided to make another move as soon as decently possible but I did not want to hurt my new landlady's feelings and I had to wait for a proper-looking opportunity/By the time that arrived, if it ever did, I had been so won over by her sweetness and eccentricity that I forgot to go. Her only son had gone off to France in 1939 with the British Expeditionary Force when he was about my age, and had been killed in the first trenches. She saw me as a sort of replacement.

  The cemetery, its crosses and posturing angels almost beneath my window, was a constant source of interest. Drinking a cup of tea, I could watch the funerals. Their variety was infinite; masses of mourners and forests of flowers for one occasion down to a solitary matchstick man I once saw head hung over the open grave, with the white billowing clergyman and the idling grave-diggers. One night a young drunk climbed the iron gates and went to sleep on his mother's tombstone; one day the chapel in the middle of the cemetery caught fire during a service and everybody hurried out into the open air, the undertaker's men rushing through the flames to rescue the coffin and its occupant.

  On the distant side of the cemetery was a park and I sometimes used to go over there on Friday, my day off, to kick a football around. There was rarely anyone else to join in and I would dribble the ball around the feet of trees and practice passing to non-existent teammates. Often I was observed by an ancient man who sat unattended in the park shelter, and one day he asked me if he could play. It was impossible for him to run for he hobbled on a stick, but the park shelter was not unlike a goal and he suggested that I should kick the ball towards him and he would be the goalkeeper. He could continue sitting. I concurred, mainly to do him a favour but after trying this out a few times I found that it was quite useful practice in placing the ball carefully either side of his hopefully stretching hands. He enjoyed it greatly and kept waving his stick (which he often used as an elongation of his arm to stop me from scoring) and shouting, 'Shoot! Go on, lad, shoot!'

  It was strange but good fun and I combined it with my serious practice by dribbling the ball around the tree roots and then kicking it at the goal with its seated custodian. The old man loved it and became more enthusiastic as time went on. Once I flattened him against the wooden boards at the back of the shelter by selfishly getting too excited and firing the ball in with some velocity. Even this did not deter him. Once I had picked him up and he had regained his breath he was keen to carry on with the game. One morning when I arrived with the ball he was sitting there grinning smugly in a green goalkeeper's jersey which he wore thereafter. God knows what the person who looked after him thought when he went out dressed like that and came back covered with sweat and odd bruises. Then, one day, he was not there and he never came to the park again. I never knew his name so I could not find out what had happened to him, but I suppose he had died. Not, I hope, through any overexertion at football. I really believed he looked forward to it and, as he once told me, it was a lot better that just staring at nothing.

  Going to the park with the ball and returning to my lodgings meant a detour around the cemetery. One day it began to rain coldly while I was kicking around among the trees and I decided to risk a short cut through the tombstones. I was wearing old trousers, a jersey and muddy boots and I was carrying the ball. Although it was raining thickly I felt I should not run but, at the most, trot.

  My route took me down the central path of the cemetery to where the chapel stood in the middle. As I was rounding the corner of the chapel I bounced the ball once, without thinking, and then turned the corner to be confronted by a funeral. At the same moment the ball struck my toe, bouncing away from me, alongside the procession of mourners, until it became horribly entangled in the legs of the men who were carrying the coffin. One of them trod on it, another sidestepped and the long box wobbled perilously
. The pallbearers then played a close-passing game, each one trying to flick the ball clear, only to see it strike the shoes of another. Eventually, one fellow, with a firm clearance, sent the ball skidding along the path – and into the prepared gravel Oh my God, I thought, what now? Some of the mourners were beginning to cry, glaring in my direction while I stood stupefied. The coffin wobbled once more. What could I do? Ask: 'Could I have my ball back, please?' One of the gravediggers solved the crisis by jumping into the hole and retrieving the ball. The final terrible, farcical moment came when my football suddenly shot out of the open ground like a shell discharged from a mortar and bounced away between the tombstones with me following. I never went into the cemetery again.

  My life's dream was still Fleet Street. Scarcely a week went by without my posting off another warning that the national newspaper world was missing a gem. In addition I was about to get married and I needed the money.

  One Saturday, in the Willesden church where my marriage was shortly to take place, there was another wedding during which the bridegroom made a sudden dash from the altar and hopped over the boundary wall. It was not a case of cold feet. He was on the run from the army and the police were closing in. The ceremony was abandoned but the reception went on as planned and the couple afterwards met at a secret rendezvous and embarked on their honeymoon. A friendly local policeman tipped me off about this and I went to the church to investigate. There before me I found a reporter from the Sunday Express who asked me not to tell any of the other Fleet Street papers. He also hinted he had heard that Exchange Telegraph, the international news agency, was looking for a likely chap like me. He had a friend there and would put in a good word. A week later glory dawned. A letter from Philip Burn, the editor of Exchange Telegraph, arrived inviting me to go for an interview. I went and I got the job. It was not exactly Fleet Street, for the office was in Cannon Street in the City of London, but it was getting close.

  XVI

  In the early part of this century Philip Gibbs wrote The Street of Adventure, one of the few lasting novels to have been published about Fleet Street. In my local reporting days I read its archaic story many times, savouring the excitements of the high-collared correspondent dispatched to catch the first possible cross-Channel steamer by an early morning telegram delivered to his door; of reporters picking up their quill pens to record the latest trial at the Old Bailey; of writers returning to the office by hansom cab or on the open top of an omnibus; of gas lamps and coal fires burning late in the editorial room.

  When I joined the Exchange Telegraph Company I realised almost at once that I was about to become part of one of the few remaining remnants of this ancient world. The building which housed the news agency in Cannon Street was tall and narrow with a lift that wheezed and squeezed between its floors (the company's doctor had a lift which you operated by pulling on a rope). The newsroom on the fourth floor had, not long before, been illuminated by gas and the odour lingered. Along its length and reaching into the teleprinter room next door, at just-below ceiling level, was a miniature cable-car contraption running on rails, into which written and edited copy could be clipped as the appropriate clamp travelled by. It was somewhat like the apparatus once to be found in department stores which hurried invoices and other dockets from one part of the building to another. The Exchange Telegraph contraption clanked and clattered as it ran, curled around corners and disappeared through holes in the wall to materialise miraculously elsewhere.

  There was a legend that when the construction had been installed in the nineteen-twenties a maintenance engineer had arrived with it and had been taken onto the staff, but no one had ever been able to find him since. It was rumoured that he was bricked up in the basement. He was certainly never to be found when the railway broke down, which was frequently, and stories had to be run by relays of office lads in silver-buttoned uniforms from one part of the building to another.

  The lift was also prone to fits. One Christmas Eve the distinguished reporter Mr Alan Whicker, before his fame on television an employee of Exchange Telegraph, was trapped in the lift between floors in the select company of Humphrey the office cat. At that season no one could be located who could unstick the cage and pieces of food for both man and cat were pushed through the gratings by other members of the staff who were happily indulging in the office revelries. That was possibly the same Christmas that a rotund sub-editor called Harold Taylor left the office for home and returned half an hour later criss-crossed with sticking plaster and bearing the exclusive news that he had been involved in a train crash. No one believed him and he was put in a corner with a drink and told what a very good prank it was. After several more drinks he stopped trying to tell anybody and it was not until someone bothered to pick up an irritating telephone that we realised about the train crash. By that time Harold had progressed so far into a bottle of Scotch that no eyewitness details could be extracted from him.

  The very title the Exchange Telegraph Company had a Victorian resonance. Reporters complained that they were often mistaken for someone to do with the General Post Office. At the time 1 joined its staff in the early nineteen-fifties it was already a journalistic anachronism. It had an unwieldy corps of foreign correspondents, some harking back to the First World War. The Paris man, Andre Glarner, had been an Olympic cyclist and apparently it was thought in the office that he used his bicycle speed to reach the cable bureau before his rivals. On one occasion he filed an exclusive and sensational story with an embargo that it was not to be released for publication until he sent a coded signal which would read: 'Send More Expenses'. In the dust and disarray of the Exchange Telegraph newsroom the first dispatch was mislaid and the second message so much misunderstood that Monsieur Glarner was told sharply that he could have no further expenses that month since he had already used up his allowance.

  Home news was covered by a group of reporters and local correspondents. There was one called East of Twickenham who was known as West of Zanzibar. Some were experienced but others worked with more enthusiasm or elan than expertise. The Court Correspondent wafted around in a velvet-collared coat and composed short dullish stories about the doings of the Royal Family. When a different angle, or perhaps something a little more colourful, was suggested he waved it away with the words: 'Her Majesty would not like that one little bit.' There were people who went to police courts and others to conferences. There was an excellent industrial correspondent and a nice religious affairs chap who later became a naval correspondent. The chief sub-editor was tiny and worried. He had to jump from the floor to put copy in the travelling clamps. His night-time counterpart was a slow and urbane ex-army officer, who was writing a history of the Sudan when things were not too pressing in the office. The editor, Philip Burn, was a Will Hay character with an explosion of white hair but only one tooth. He was said to have been playing chess in the Sugar Loaf pub across the street when the news of the Edward the Eighth abdication crisis broke. Like Drake, he decided to complete the game before attending to the matter.

  When I first went for my interview I told him that I hoped for a job as a reporter. 'I need good subeditors,' he said sonorously as if making an ecclesiastical pronouncement. 'I can get a reporter by lifting my finger and can't get a first-rate sub-editor by lifting my whole arm.' I was impressed and so apparently was he. He repeated: 'A reporter by lifting my finger . . . a sub not my lifting my whole arm.' He smiled more with one tooth than most people do with a mouthful. 'What do you think of that?' he said. 'Not at all a bad phrase, eh?'

  So I became a news agency sub-editor, a job far less exacting and exciting than its equivalent on a newspaper since no knowledge of typefaces or make-up was necessary. The copy had to be checked, rewritten or cut if necessary and passed on to be sent out on the teleprinter to newspapers and other clients. There was a special Club Tape which went to London Clubs upon which the Stock Exchange prices, other City news and the cricket and racing results were of paramount importance.

  Disappointed by my
failure to become a reporter, I consoled myself that at least it was half a step in the right direction and the office was a mere half a mile from the real Fleet Street. When I was working on the evening shift I would walk to Fleet Street during my break and sit, clutching a brown ale, in the corner of the newspaper bars, listening to men like gods talking about their journalistic adventures. If I saw a man running down the front steps of the Daily Express building or hailing a taxi outside the doors of the Daily Telegraph, I would catch my breath because I was sure he was off to Afghanistan or Hong Kong, whereas it was much more probably the bar at Auntie's or Waterloo station. The romance has never left me. I would think the same today.

  The Exchange Telegraph Company offered little chance of a junior sub-editor entering those realms of adventure. We worked in shifts around the clock and on every day of the year. On the all-night shift the duty sub-editor, who arrived at eleven-thirty, was in command of the entire operation. Things used to quieten down about one in the morning, as a rule, although there was usually some unsleeping local correspondent who could find a fire somewhere. On quiet nights I used to carry a mattress from a wartime air raid store in the basement, spread it out on the desk, and go happily to sleep until five o'clock when the tapes would start chattering again and the telephone would wake up. On these occasions I was frequently joined by Humphrey, the tabby and tough office cat, who would stretch out on the mattress alongside me or even make himself comfortable on my chest, breathing mice into my face.

  Mr Burn, the editor, lived out in the country and rarely visited London at night. One evening, however, entertaining some Americans, he took them to the theatre and later, with their encouragement, decided to show them how a great news agency worked on timelessly through the dark hours. He arrived in the newsroom with the telephone operator slumped at the switchboard and the one-man editorial staff snoring on a mattress surmounted by an equally sleepful tabby cat.