In My Wildest Dreams

by Leslie Thomas

  'It's by the hour,' she sniffed. 'London prices – five pounds an hour.'

  'Ah'll need three or four hours,' he whispered richly. 'It'll take me a couple o' hours to get you shackled up.'

  One day he noticed that one of the Scotland Yard reporters from a rival newspaper was looking ill. He knew the man's wife had left him, he was fending for himself and patently drinking too much. Owen's wife suggested that they should make a steak and kidney pie for the bereft fellow and Owen agreed enthusiastically. She was a splendid cook and produced her best. The problem was how to give it to the undernourished man, without causing offence, without making him feel he was the object of charity. They evolved a story of having had an argument about the merits of English pies and French pies. The pie was then divided into separate parcels and Owen took them to the Yard. 'We know you're a man of taste,' he said, putting a friendly arm around the lonely reporter. 'And we want you to settle the matter. We want you to take these slices of pie home, heat them, and eat them. Then tell us what you think.' Then, to ensure that all the sustenance was consumed, he added: 'And make sure you eat every bit. Otherwise you won't have given them a proper trial.' Away went the Yardman with the two parcels, promising to report next day. The verdict was disappointing. 'Horrible,' he announced. 'Don't know which was the worse, the English or the French. Even the dog wouldn't touch the stuff.'

  Alfred Draper, an old friend from local newspaper days, once found himself taking the mother of a condemned murderer on her last visit to her son at Wandsworth Prison. The youth was to be hanged the next day. Uncomfortably Alf waited in the car for her return. Her report was phlegmatic. 'He's quite cheerful,' she said. 'But, of course, he's not looking forward to the morning. I just told him to keep his chin up.'

  The studious Cyril Aynsley of the Daily Express was with a group of reporters undertaking a death watch outside the home of George Bernard Shaw at Ayot St Lawrence. The white-bearded seer was certainly dying but was taking some days about it. They camped out in some discomfort, each one aware that the nearest public telephone was a mile away, downhill, and that the fittest runner would get the news to his paper, and the world, first. Each of them was armed with his own magnetic disc so removing the piece from the mouthpiece was rendered pointless.

  If Shaw died during the time when the daily newspapers were printing then there would have been a cavalry charge down the hill; if he departed during the publishing time of the evening newspapers then the rush would be only slightly less. The news agency men would have to be on their toes all the time.

  Each day, during his off-watch period, Cyril would walk down to the telephone and make a check call to his news editor. During one of these conversations he was told that Time magazine required a piece about G.B.S.'s death and wanted him to write it. Cyril agreed. He was walking back towards the house when he saw a rush of evening and news agency men heading towards him and he knew mat the great man had gone. Being out of his time, he was in no great hurry and continued to walk up the hill. A car stopped. In it was Nancy, Lady Astor. 'How is he?' she enquired, guessing he was a newsman.

  'He's dead, so I believe,' replied Cyril solemnly.

  'I see. Which newspaper do you represent?'

  Knowing she despised the Daily Express he compromised and answered 'Time', since he was also now committed to that journal. Lady Astor apparently thought he said: 'The Times', and invited him to get into the car.

  Thus Cyril found himself to be the first outsider to view Shaw's body. 'What were his last words?' he carefully enquired of the nurse.

  She seemed doubtful. For a man of so many words Shaw had apparently said very little worthwhile, or so the nurse judged. 'He just opened his eyes and said: "You know, nurse, all my life I've done everything I have wanted to do. And now I can't do the thing I want to do most. I want to die."' The nurse shrugged: Cyril's pencil was trembling. 'And then he died,' she said.

  The man who showed me the greatest friendship, encouragement and regard was Vincent Mulchrone, a shining writer. He was a big broad man with silvery hair, a north-country voice and an Irish background. Over a distance of fifteen hundred words he was unbeatable, whether it was a magnificent occasion or some small odd story that caught his imagination. A record company once had the nice idea of producing a long-player of stirring orchestral music and providing, as an extra, a conductor's baton so that you could lock the door and conduct away to your heart's content. Vincent wrote a piece about this innovation in the Daily Mail which began: 'In all the years we three have been conducting, Beecham and Barbarolli have had one undeniable advantage over me. They have had orchestras.'

  His kindness to me, once I had become part of the world-touring circus of Fleet Street, was overwhelming. He used to call me Kid. Every day he drank champagne in the back bar of the Harrow, almost outside the door of the Mail, or wherever he happened to be. He was a superb teller of tales whether spoken or written. He died far too young and I cried when he did.

  In my own office there were also memorable men. Leslie Ayre was the gentlest of people, a small soft man like a tailor, with a spotted bow tie. He wrote about radio and later television until these functions were taken over by James Green on his arrival from the Star. After that Leslie was glad and free to concentrate on his most profound love – music. He was often thoughtfully sad and seemed pleased if you stopped him for a chat. His god was Tchaikovsky. Ah, Tchai,' he would smile, shaking his head. Ah, Tchai. . .' One day, short of a general writer, the features editor asked him to compose a weather story: Why were we having such a terrible summer? Why was it always raining? What could be done about it? 'This morning,' I remember he wrote, 'I tried an ancient rite. I hung a piece of seaweed outside my window. In no time it was soaking.'

  Colin Frame arrived after the demise of the Star, another grey-haired gentleman of quiet demeanour and a charming wit. He bought himself a boat and delighted to chuff it up and down the little River Wey in Surrey. If anyone in the office wished to hire it for a week he was amenable. One of these borrowers was Felix Barker, the mysteriously cloaked theatre critic, who unfortunately found on sailing to the first lock that it was closed and could not be opened because of extensive repairs which involved the draining of the entire river on the other side. So Felix and his family spent their entire week cruising somewhat monotonously up and down one half-mile stretch of river. Then Julian Holland, a bespectacled feature writer, who later distinguished himself at Broadcasting House, borrowed the boat. Just as Colin was leaving the office on the first evening that Julian was aboard, there came an anguished telephone call from the banks of the River Wey. 'How do you stop the engine?' Julian had leapt ashore while his wife frantically grappled with the boat they could not stop.

  In the Evening Mews Features Department, of which I became part although I continued to write and travel on news stories, was a budding and ebullient young man who, even today, twenty-five years later, has not lost either his enthusiasm or his wayward grin. Bill Hall wrote on films and was a private pyromaniac. He had an affinity for fireworks. Once travelling on a London bus and having ignited the fuse of a particularly violent banger, he pushed it into the used ticket container on the platform and rang the bell to get off at the approaching stop. Unfortunately the bus did not stop. Other people crowded the platform, waiting to alight, and Bill could see his own time bomb smoking almost below his nose. Such a rush of passengers wanted to get off at the following stop that he was pressed up against the used ticket box and the banger exploded, blackening his face and all but blowing off his eyebrows.

  From those lively days I have retained many acquaintances and real friendships. One of these is with David Eliades, now an executive of the Daily Express, whom I first knew in my Willesden local paper days. In his youth he wore petrol-blue suits, florid ties and was an expert on roller skates. Partnered by a sometimes incredible man called Robert Forrest Webb (explorer, sheep-keeper, motorcyclist, Japanese martial arts expert, antique dealer, artist, but above all raconteur), David wr
ote a funny and successful novel called And to My Nephew Albert. I Leave the Island What I Won off Fatty Hagan in a Poker Game. A later book, about English nannies in New York, became a Disney film and another called After Me the Deluge was the basis for a musical which was first produced in Italy and seems always to be playing somewhere in the world. Bob took himself and his wife off to the hills of Wales, but David is, at heart, an unrepentant Fleet Street man. He talks about news stories and how they were obtained, of exclusives and bungles and excitements in a way I have long and regrettably forgotten. He also takes notes of some oddities nearer home. He tells the story of a Daily Express executive going into the lavatory and, seeing a black man there, concluding that he was one of the journalists from former colonial territories whom Beaverbrook Newspapers sought to encourage and frequently brought to London for experience.

  'Been into the editor's conference yet?' enquired the executive of the black man, as they stood at the trough. The latter admitted he had not.

  'Come tomorrow,' invited the executive breezily as he zipped up. 'Good experience for you. Open your eyes to a few things.'

  The invitation was graciously accepted but several of those present at the conference wondered at the presence of a man who had hitherto only been known as a lavatory cleaner.

  Brian Freemantle (after being a colleague at the Evening News he eventually became foreign editor of the Daily Mail) went to Vietnam several times (on the final swift and controversial occasion to snatch away some abandoned orphans) and then quit to work on his own excellent books. Brian, or Bruin as he is known, is the sort of person who makes you happy when you see him. He believes that he is urbane, even suave, and a wide enough vote might well prove him right. He has high taste from which no one, even someone of greater taste, can dislodge him; the sort of man who would order a bottle of Chateau Lafite '63 with a hamburger, confident that its power, its courage, its mellowness and its touch of blown hills and southern sunshine will not spoil the taste of the chips.

  Both these friends are good companions and I have encouraged, perhaps inveigled, each of them (once) to share my enjoyment of travelling in the varied land of Britain.

  David suffered bravely on the little bouncing boat called The Good Shepherd on a stormy voyage to this country's most isolated inhabited place, Fair Isle, south of Shetland. For four hours, soaking wet and festooned with fish scales he clung to a tarpaulin, mumbling his way feebly through: 'Eternal Father Strong to Save'. Once ashore on the magic island his spirit lifted and he took great risks to take pictures for the first edition of my travel book Some Lovely Islands. Once he was hanging over an astounding cliff, photographing puffins, and I was hanging onto his feet when his boot came off. I managed to haul him up by the other.

  His photography was eventually pin-pointed by an American critic of the book as 'pleasantly amateur'. He took an artistic picture from below a cow which resulted in what appeared to be a set of pornographic bagpipes. One day we ran ourselves breathless trying to reach a crashed plane in time to rescue the pilot. We arrived thirty-eight years late. It was a German fighter left over from the war. We consoled ourselves by observing that the metal was unrusted and it looked as if it might well be a brand-new crash.

  Fair Isle is, of course, a place of migratory birds. There are no trees. To see an Arctic woodpecker in a frenzy, attempting to make an impression on a concrete post, is a pitiful experience. Each night the birdwatchers were expected to assemble in the fire-lit common room of the observatory and report their finds of the day. David and I had hilarious moments making up the names of unlikely and frequently obscene birds, like the bent-billed, puzzled-face, brown duck, which could fly as fast as the other ducks but could not brake as quickly. Sometimes we laughed so much we were told reproachfully we could be heard on the far side of the island and we were frightening the fulmars. When eventually I returned to Fair Isle with a BBC Television team to make a documentary of my book, the entire unit – writer, producer, camera and sound men – was told that it was our turn to wash up at the bird observatory and we could not continue about our work until we did. So we did.

  The journey upon which I was accompanied by Bruin Freemantle was also north, to the Wester Ross coast of Scotland, when I was writing another travelogue called The Hidden Places of Britain:

  I had chosen to make the journey to the remoteness of Ross and Cromarty with another writer, my long-time friend Brian Freemantle, a novelist of much talent whose mode of life, however, makes him singularly unsuited for anywhere that does not have – at least – a choice of luxury hotels; the sort of man who treats a label on a bottle of wine in a Scots ale bar to a disgruntled knitting of the eyebrows. He has, in addition, a fastidiousness about his clothes and personal appearance which scarcely fits him for adventure in the wild open air . . .

  We stopped eventually at a small but fine baronial hotel. Freemantle, who looks for stars on hotels with much the same diligence as an astronomer seeks them in the firmament, mentioned that while it was not a patch on the Georges Cinq in Paris, it did appear to be comfortable in a primitive sort of way.

  That night there was an unbelieving hush over the land. At the World Cup Finals in South America, Scotland had played lowly Peru – and lost. We wandered to the village bar which was prostrate with men full of drink and grief. Freemantle muttered: 'I think this is our sort of place.'

  One shining day we set out to walk the five miles along a threadlike cliff path to a remote settlement at the nose of the Loch Broom Peninsula:

  I was frankly astonished that Freemantle had not only agreed to accompany me on my projected arduous journey . . . but had insisted on making the arrangements for provisioning the adventure. This, I thought at the time, was much the same as Beau Brummell offering to go in place of Stanley to find Livingstone in Africa.

  The lunch pack turned out to be a gourmet feast. After we had trudged a difficult and dangerous mile on the tight path with a sobering drop to the sea below, Freemantle sat down and said he was dizzy. He was amazed that we had only travelled a mile in an hour. There were four more miles (and hours) to go and then we had to get back.

  'Let's have the lunch and go home,' he suggested intrepidly. So we did.

  XX

  If I had initially been discouraged in Fleet Street by the lack of travel and adventure in the assignments I was afforded, then within a couple of years the situation had been completely reversed. Half of my working life then was spent either out of town, as it was called, or out of the country. While Maureen was bringing up our daughter and our son on the flat-roofed estate to which we had now moved (and which became the Tropic of Ruislip of my later novel), I was in Jerusalem, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo or Salisbury, the one that was in what was Rhodesia.

  One of my early trips was to Paris where the young heir to the Peugeot car fortune had been kidnapped. In those days, the late nineteen-fifties, kidnapping and abduction were crimes which had only previously been connected with Chicago. Since then the habit has, of course, spread widely. My lack of French was a handicap but I managed pretty well with the help of the staff of our sister paper, the Daily Mail, at their office in the Rue de Sender. I went down to St Cloud golf course, from which the lad had been spirited, and came to the conclusion that some of his acquaintances had perpetrated the crime, that they had kidnapped him for fun. This theory was somewhat borne out when the hostage was finally recovered and the culprits arrested. They were rich kids looking for amusement.

  To work in a fabled foreign city was wonderful. Carefully I watched she other reporters so that, with their experience (not to mention their French), they did not steal a march on me. I followed up clues and viewed even the most sinless-faced nuns as suspects. One day I was sitting in a cafe and I spotted a journalist from a daily newspaper at a neighbouring table. Suddenly he half rose, then completely rose, having spotted something among the boulevard crowds. I heard him whistle softly and go out of the door. I was not going to be beaten like that. If he was the first to spot so
me clue, some lead, then I wanted to be second. At a cautious distance I followed him, threading through the people until I saw him going into a cinema. By the time I had reached the foyer he had paid at the box office and was walking through the curtain. Hurriedly I bought my ticket and went into the darkness. He was standing in the shadows surveying the people in the rows of seats. Then he saw me. He seemed more pleased than anything. 'Ah,' he said. 'It's you.' He selected a seat and motioned me to sit in the next one. The film was just starting on the screen. Tarzan's Secret Treasure, he whispered. 'Always wanted to see this.'

  At the top of the Rue de Sentier was a bistro where the oldest prostitute in Paris used to hold court, regaling the journalists who assembled there with her memories of earlier and, she claimed, much naughtier days. Particularly exotic were her descriptions of the methods used at the end of the nineteenth century to take pornographic photographs. These T-shaped flashes were used in those times and, although these were safe enough at a distance, the capturing of erotic close-ups was riven with risks. Sometimes if the man holding the naked flash drew too near to the parts of the anatomy being immortalised and the explosion occurred, the participants frequently found themselves running around the room trying to extinguish fires in their pubic hair. A tantalising picture.

  My sojourn in the odd refugee camp at Crystal Palace, with the London buses on the road outside, had resulted in an arranged trip, also by the World Refugee Year organisers, to the Middle East to visit some real camps for dispossessed people. We flew from the small Blackbushe Airport in a rattling Viking which took two days for the flight to Beirut. Luck was with me again because as the plane chugged over the Mediterranean coast of France we had an amazing view of a terrible disaster (other people's disasters are luck to journalists). The dam at Fréjus had burst and the water had swept into the sea taking people and houses with it. The bite out of the barrage was clearly visible in the mocking sunshine that now lit the landscape below, and the bright blue sea was stained a cocoa-brown for miles. In the bay French and American warships were helping with the rescue operations.