In My Wildest Dreams

by Leslie Thomas

  I patted her hand and, speechless, went out of the ward and down the stairs. I sat on a seat on the embankment for half an hour and wondered what sort of person I was. Then I telephoned in the story, in three lines.

  Not infrequently a reporter would be on the scene of a crime or an accident as quickly as, sometimes even before, the emergency services, due to a tip-off from someone eavesdropping on the police radio wavelength.

  It was illegal to pass on information gained in this way and there were a number of prosecutions. The tipsters continued to transmit their intelligence, however, and one, who was an insurance assessor and used the early warning to be at the scene of a fire sometimes in advance of the brigade, also had a sideline in providing information to newspapers. It was after one of these calls to the newsdesk that I was dispatched to Chelsea Flour Mills where there had been a sudden death. I was there within minutes and walked into a scene I shall never forget. A worker had fallen into a huge revolving vat of flour and was literally drowned before anyone could help him. I arrived just as the terrible white body was being taken from the vat with the man's workmates standing crying with horror. One of them was frenziedly trying to revive him by emptying the flour from his mouth. I do not think I have ever seen such a dreadful scene nor have I ever felt more of an intruder.

  Fortunately there were compensating moments of warmth and humour. There was the morning I was sent to a street in north London where there had been a massive battle between two rival gangs of robbers and the police. Each gang had shopped the other to Scotland Yard and the climax came when all three interested parties turned up at a rendezvous. There was a tremendous fight involving fifty combatants wielding pick-axe handles, knuckle-dusters and truncheons (this being in a gentler age when neither villains nor the law resorted to firearms). When I reached the battlefield, at the junction of two rows of terraced houses in Tottenham, the main fighting was over but the place was littered with weapons and men holding their heads. Three cars had collided spectacularly and there were lakes of blood. A cat had sat on a sunny wall and, unperturbed, watched the entire affray. Approaching the pet's owner, an elderly Cockney lady, I asked her what she had seen. 'Well,' she hesitated. 'I was polishing me passage and I 'eard all this noise so I looked out of me front door and saw all these bobbies and all these other men.'

  'What were they doing?' I urged.

  'Boxing,' she replied thoughtfully. 'They was all boxing.'

  Another call took me to Upper Thames Street, among the river warehouses, where a building had caught fire and there had been some adventurous escapes. When I arrived, the firemen were rolling up their hoses but one told me that the foreman of a warehouse had an interesting tale to relate. I sought him out. It was quickly apparent that here was a thwarted man of action condemned to live a quiet life among bales and boxes. 'In the war,' he said, determined to start at the beginning. 'We was heavily bombed in this area as you might know.'

  I said I did. 'Well, we 'ad a good team in this warehouse. Me and Harry, and old Sam who's dead now, and George over there, and little Bill and Mr Thompson from the office. All air raid wardens we was. Best team on the docks. Night after night when the Jerries was bombing . . .'

  Aware of the narrowing time to the next edition I prodded him for his more recent experiences and eventually he drew breath and said: 'So when we saw this building on fire we knew exactly what to do. There was this bloke standing on the third-floor window sill, smoke pouring out, and I shouted to 'im to 'old on while we got our sheet.'

  The sheet was one left over from the war, the sort that firemen used to hold out so that people could jump to safety. Harry and George and little Bill and Mr Thompson from the office were eagerly mobilised and under the command of the warehouse foreman they hurried with the sheet to the pavement below the burning building.

  'There 'e was, up there,' recorded the foreman.

  'Smoke pouring out,' I put in. 1 was in a hurry.

  'You're right, it was,' he agreed looking at me suspiciously as if I had already heard the story. 'Pouring, it was. Out.'

  'What did you do?'

  'We 'eld out the sheet, like we did in the blitz, and I shouted for 'im to jump.'

  'And he did?' I urged. 'He jumped?'

  'Yes sir, 'e did,' nodded the foreman sagely. Jumped. Went straight through the bleedin' sheet and broke 'is leg on the pavement.'

  Londoners of that breed were quite wonderful. I once went to interview a couple who had been married seventy-five years. They had lived in the same low little house since the masts of sailing ships in the Thames docks could be seen over the opposite rooftops. They had produced a large family and they lovingly described each of their offspring until it came to the eldest (who was dead anyway) and then fell to a bitter dispute about this first-born's age. The wife hit the old man across the shins with her walking stick because he told me that the girl would have been seventy-six that year. The old lady was deeply embarrassed by the reminder of an ancient indiscretion.

  James Green, who joined the Evening News when the Star (affectionately known to Londoners as the La-de-da) sadly folded along with the wonderful News Chronicle, was once sent to interview a centenarian in the East End. A young woman let him into the house and then departed, leaving Jimmy with the cobwebby dear who was perched like a bird in her chair. She was stone deaf and all Jimmy's shouting evoked nothing. Eventually she howled back at him, 'Wait till Dad comes in, will you!'

  Dad? God, how old was Dad? Eventually there was a banging at the door and Jimmy answered it. There stood an incredibly feeble and folded man, so bent his head was almost at floor level. He tottered in. This was Dad, at ninety-six. We used to cry laughing when Jimmy repeated this story because he would go through the actions of trying to interview the old chap at floor level, actually lying down and shouting into the ancient fellow's face. Dad could not understand why the young man was there at all until eventually it dawned on him that his wife's hundredth birthday was something of significance. Not, however, to him. "Er?' he bellowed at Jimmy's face on the floorboards. "Er? Silly old cow. Time she was dead!'

  Similarly, I was once told how the Old Comrades' Association of a famous London regiment had purchased a flat in Ealing as an investment and had installed a ninety-year-old sergeant there, on the reasonable view that he would only be occupying it for a limited period. The veteran, however, resolutely refused to fade away and remained as a tenant until he was beyond his hundredth birthday. One day the welfare officer called on him and was astonished to find that he had gone out. He waited and eventually saw the sergeant tottering blithely along the street. The sergeant had thought, as it was a nice day, he would take himself out for a walk. The welfare man enquired if he had enjoyed the experience and his reply was so worthwhile that I included it in my novel, Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective. 'Oh yes, indeed,' said the veteran who had fought in Zululand. 'But everything's changed so much. All these blackies about. Last time I saw a black man that close he was on the end of my lance.'

  In journalism, as in the life with which it is concerned, you not only need luck you need the luck to know when you are lucky. As my time went on in Fleet Street, and I began to be assigned to bigger and more far-flung stories, I sometimes thought that sitting on my shoulder was a small, wryly grinning god who nudged me in many fortuitous directions.

  My first foreign assignment took me by surprise. I had gone into the office one morning arrayed in the designs of Burton, Dolcis, Tootal and Rael Brook, via the Metropolitan Line, when I was dramatically met by the editor in his exciting red braces.

  'Thomas,' he said, pointing out of the window in a generally southerly direction. 'Go to Monte Carlo!'

  Sir Winston Churchill, the elder hero, had fallen down the stairs of the Hotel de Paris and broken his leg, a serious matter for one now frail.

  Not being accustomed to winging my way much further than Reigate, I was unprepared for this amazing change of direction, although my passport was in my desk since I was intendin
g to take it one lunchtime to get a Spanish visa in preparation for a holiday in Majorca. Swiftly I found myself with a circus of journalists on the first possible flight to Nice. We arrived at three in the afternoon, in time for me to scratch together some sort of story for that evening's final edition.

  Foreign Fred, a ubiquitous and cheerful non-journalist who ran the foreign desk brilliantly when higher executives were in the saloon bar or the lavatory, had booked me into the Hotel de Paris, where Churchill had fallen upon his accident. Never had I been in such a place; high curling ceilings and floating cherubs, gilt and gold, and blinds that descended not only majestically but automatically as the sun climbed in to the Mediterranean sky. My room cost ten pounds a day, which I thought was astronomical. I stayed in the same hostelry only days before writing this (as part of the first cricket team ever to perform in Monaco) and the ten pounds now scarcely buys a double gin and tonic.

  On the evening of that first visit, I decided that since I had come without luggage, I would need to wash out my shirt, my underpants and my socks in preparation for an early start the next day. On later foreign assignments the reporter was permitted to spend up to twenty pounds on suitable clothing, but this had been an emergency.

  After going out with the rest of Fleet Street to eat and drink I returned to the hotel and somewhat fuzzily began to wash the garments in the bathroom basin. There was a high window and it was a deeply warm night so I decided that they would dry nicely in a few hours. Looking out I had a splendid spread of lights before me, glittering along the coast. Nearer to hand was a piece of convenient rope hanging vertically in the night breeze. To this I tied, by the arms, my shirt and then tied on my pants and socks. In the morning they were flying high on the flagmast with the unfurled banner of the Principality of Monaco.

  A porter, who seemed to find nothing amusing or even untoward in the situation, retrieved my belongings but I decided that if I was to remain for a few days (which I intended to do even if Churchill was flown home), then I would need some extra clothes. Everything in the shops seemed outrageous in price until I came to a place in the backstreets which sold workingmen's clothes, and here I purchased a cheap blue shirt and a pair of denim trousers.

  The French authorities were to fly the great man home to London, and since the airport was at Nice, I quit the expensive hotel and made for the resort intending to find some cheaper accommodation once I was footing my own bill. Time was tight and I arrived at the airport to find the press obediently clustered on the observation balcony waiting for the ambulance to bring Churchill from the hospital to the plane. I wandered down to the lower floors and out into the sunshine where I saw some airport employees in their blue dungarees standing around a forked-lift truck, one of the sort used to load baggage into aircraft holds. I forwarded an interesting banknote in the direction of a lively looking fellow who confirmed my suspicion that one of the world's most illustrous men was to be hoisted into an airliner like a suitcase.

  Security was non-existent. In those happier days it was scarcely considered necessary. The ambulance arrived and went out onto the tarmac where the medical attendants unloaded the great old man, his leg thick with plaster below the blanket. To my intense delight I saw that he was stoically puffing a cigar, which he condescended to dispose of (by dropping it over the side of the stretcher) before he was manoeuvred onto the mechanical lifting truck. As he was transferred to the plane he grumbled loudly, 'Steady, steady. That's a leg.'

  James Cameron, the veteran journalist, tells the story of how, after an illness, he was invited to convalesce at Lord Beaverbrook's house on the Cote d'Azur and sat at a dinner table opposite Churchill, then in his dotage, who slept through most of the meal but finally awoke sufficiently to call croakily up the table to Beaverbrook: 'Max, in 1942 I sent you on a mission of major importance to Moscow, didn't I?'

  Beaverbrook replied: 'That's correct, Winston.'

  Churchill, before going back to sleep, grunted: 'Did you ever go?'

  On the morning of Sir Winston's death I went to Bladon in Oxfordshire, the small village where he was to be buried. Council workmen were feverishly re-tarring the road outside the churchyard, having undoubtedly been dragged from their beds by a suddenly panic-stricken county engineer. There was an infants' school where almost every child was familiar with the famous figure. Their parents worked on the Blenheim estate. The lady teacher decided that, on that morning, they should each draw a picture of Sir Winston as they remembered him. In most he was shown shooting pheasants.

  I was assigned to cover his funeral, at least the first part of it. Every reporter had a set place from which he would not dare to stray. Mine was at a lancet window in the Houses of Parliament, overlooking the yard where the funeral cortege was forming. My view was unsatisfactory, oblique and restricted. Near the window was a door and, pushing this, I discovered a lavatory. It had a window with a far better outlook so I stood on the seat and described the solemn event from there.

  Churchill's London house was later put up for sale and a friendly estate agent allowed me to look around it. In one corner was a sad little lift, like a child's playpen, by which the mighty man had been transported in the days of his final infirmity. I was told that while half the world was waiting outside the front door as he lay dying, waiting for each bulletin relayed by his frail physician Lord Moran (it was half-expected that Churchill himself might appear and announce that Lord Moran had passed away), the great leader was in fact lying in the house next door – the adjoining servants' quarters. He had been finally transferred there so that the medical team and their equipment could be more easily accommodated and accessible. On that day, in the empty house just before its sale, I found a table covered with wine glasses speckled with sun and dust. Afterwards I was asked why I had not purloined one as a souvenir. For some reason it never occurred to me.

  That first foreign assignment in Monte Carlo had an immediate and most astonishing sequel. My elder son Mark, who had been born the previous December, was to be christened on a Sunday in the parish church at Willesden where his mother and I had been married. I returned from Monaco on the Saturday evening and went, feeling rather ill, to the church the next morning. The service had scarcely begun when I began experiencing sharp stomach pains. Trembling, I went out into the churchyard and sat on a seat. In no time I was in an ambulance and being carried to Hillingdon Hospital where I was prodded and examined and finally given a sedative.

  While I was drowsy a notorious spy, having tried to kill himself on an airliner over London, was wheeled into the hospital – the most adjacent to the airport – and conveniently placed in the small room directly opposite mine.

  His name was Dr Soblen. He had been spying for Russia in the United States, and when he realised that he was about to be apprehended, he fled to Israel. He was Jewish and he imagined, faintly I should think, that the Israelis would provide him with asylum. This super-optimism was misplaced and he was soon aboard an El Al plane and heading back to retribution. When the aircraft was over London he cut his wrists.

  My first suspicion of something unusual was when I saw a strangely uniformed guard (an Israeli policeman) emerge from the room opposite. Still dopey, I enquired of a nurse, a wonderfully gossipy West Indian, what was happening and she told me all she knew.

  It was late at night. I was still in pain but now I was sniffing a story it had noticeably receded. A late-visiting doctor kindly told me how the other new patient was progressing. There was nothing to do but to wait until the next morning, a Monday, when the Evening News would again be on the streets. When I awoke there was a travelling newspaper seller going about the ward with the daily editions, each headlining the sensational story of the spy from the sky. Half of Fleet Street was chaffing outside the hospital gates, trying to pick up any scrap of news and with no hope of getting in. Only I was inside.

  I had watched the comings and goings of the medical staff and the security people and every time the door opened I saw the big doomed man propp
ed up in bed, already looking dead. Just as I was wondering where the nearest phone was located and just in time for the midday edition, a nice lady wheeled a trolley telephone into my room and asked me if I would like to call anyone, a relative perhaps. Thanking her fervently I plugged in the phone and deftly dialled Fleet Street 6000.

  My world scoop began, melodramatically: 'The man in the opposite hospital bed to mine is a spy and he is dying . . .'

  Reporters clamoured outside the gates, and some managed to get in by bringing me fruit and flowers before asking the latest on the Soblen story. I found myself giving press conferences. John Freeman, the distinguished journalist, who ought to have known better, decided in his column that I had purposely had myself smuggled into the hospital, under the pretext of being ill, in order to spy on the spy.

  As for the sad Soblen, he was undoubtedly doomed. He hurriedly speeded up the event, in the end, by taking a poisoned pill concealed in a peach and brought to the hospital by a friend.

  XIX

  Fleet Street was fruitful with characters. Sometimes I used to think it was like the Barnardo boys of my former days, sticking together, regarding others as outsiders. There was among them a great kindness and comradeship. Even the flintiest foot-in-the-door reporter, the man whose first objective when out on a story was to remove the magnetic disc from the receiver of the only telephone for miles, thus keeping it exclusively for himself, had a fund of benevolence when it came to personal relationships within the Street.

  Owen Summers, a smiling investigator on the Daily Mail, once stood to make a speech at the wedding of a many-times married colleague and began: 'Have you ever had that feeling that you've been somewhere before . . .' He once telephoned, out of mischief, a London call girl and intimated that he was a disfigured and, what is more, a sex fiend who wished to avail himself of her services.