XXI
In my final three years at the Evening News I was involved in a bewildering diversity of assignments. I travelled with the Queen to Australia and to Germany; I arrived in Rhodesia on the day the truculent Ian Smith declared UDI and began a revolution; I drove around half the United States; I taught some Japanese in the Shega Kogan mountains to sing 'Old Uncle Tom Cobbly and All' (not an easy achievement for people who cannot pronounce the letter 'L'); I fell into freezing Holy Loch while manoeuvring for a better view of the first Polaris nuclear submarine to arrive in Britain, and I played Prime Minister Harold Wilson at bar billiards. Any regular reader of the newspaper might have been forgiven for wondering who this busy bee was. In one edition I had a front page story on the consecration of Coventry Cathedral, an article on the prospects for the Old Trafford Test Match (as told to me by Sir Leonard Hutton), a book review and a column on pop music which firmly forecast that the Beatles would flop spectacularly in America.
On the other hand I had no ambitions in newspapers for all my wants had been, almost miraculously, realised. There was never a moment when I desired either to work for another, perhaps grander, newspaper or to change my function within my own office. I never yearned to be an editor or even an assistant or associate editor. There were those who coveted that power and lay in waiting, eating their egg-and-chips lunches at their desks, fearing that some opportunity for glory might arrive when they were absent from the office. Neither, however, was I making much money. When I eventually left the paper I was, I suppose, its leading writer and I was making forty-two pounds ten shillings a week before deductions. Even in 1965 this was not a large salary. My second wife, Diana, was making more managing a ladies' health club. There were, of course, always expenses.
Fleet Street stories concerning expenses are legion, usually beginning with the legend of the reporter running towards the Strand who, on passing his news editor going the other way, shouted to him that he could not stop as he was in a taxi.
On the News we had an amiable and gifted reporter called Cyril who had a long history of crises involving his expenses sheets. Once he was sent on a flood story and entered the purchase of a pair of Wellington boots on his charges. Sam Jackett, the news editor, cynically told Cyril that before he would sanction the item he wanted to see the boots. 'I had to go out and buy a pair,' grumbled Cyril.
He had assembled a fictitious family, members of which appeared in many of the stories he covered as eyewitnesses of various happenings, always ready with a quote, later to be entered on the expenses sheet as: 'Entertaining Mr Robinson, Re: smash and grab. Holborn – three shillings and sixpence'. Members of the family Robinson (they were known in the office as the Swizz Family Robinson) materialised in all manner of situations. Mrs Mary Robinson would be interviewed on the poor quality of school meals in Dagenham, Essex; then James Robinson would appear as witness to a gas explosion in Twickenham, Middlesex ('Went off like a bomb, it did'). Little Billy Robinson, for the consideration of an icecream, would give his views on Santa Claus, while teenage Mary, a distant cousin, would press for more youth facilities at Hemel Hempstead. Old greybeard Jasper Robinson was always good for a quote about the price of tobacco after each succeeding Budget, while their West Indian kinsman Jeremiah had a pungent word or two to say about race relations in Brixton. An Anglo-Indian, Jellubee Robinson was interviewed about his memories of the Raj. The whole family facade almost came tumbling down, however, when Cyril had recorded Mr Steven Robinson's graphic reconstruction of a bank robbery at Marble Arch. This was worth several Scotches because Mr Robinson had to be calmed before he could give his account and the items duly appeared on the expenses sheet. At about the same time as Cyril was computing the charges, however, he received a telephone call from Scotland Yard requesting Mr Steven Robinson's address since they lacked an essential witness to the robbery. He was obviously their man. Fortunately Cyril always gave his fabled family nebulous addresses. In this case the address was Edgware Road, London, a thoroughfare that runs from Marble Arch to Edgware, a distance of several miles. 'He didn't give me the number of the house,' said Cyril lamely.
On my forty-two pounds ten shillings a week, plus expenses, I went to some of the world's most exotic places and met the occasional important man. On an airliner going to Beirut I sat across the aisle from Harold Wilson, who had just become leader of the Labour Party. Over a certain mileage Fleet Street reporters travelled first class (although some used to cash the tickets in and fly economy, keeping the difference for their holidays) and we were the only two occupants of the elite compartment. We conversed a little, mostly about parliamentary journalists, and at Beirut we went our separate ways.
Several years later, when he was Prime Minister, Mr Wilson went on holiday with his wife Mary to their cottage in the Isles of Scilly, and all Fleet Street went with them. It was a planned operation, the reasonable idea of getting all the interviews, all the photographs and all the filming done in one weekend and then leaving the Wilsons to enjoy their vacation. Through someone who knew the family well, I found myself one evening playing bar billiards with the premier at the St Mary's fishermen's club. "Arold', as he was universally known in the islands, was well liked and the fishermen treated him as a familiar. He was, naturally, quite adept at bar billiards and reacted to the friendly plaudits of the Penders, the Penhaligons and the Hicks boys. He was about to make a crucial shot and was lining up cue and ball ready to fire the latter at the assembly of wooden toadstools which are the target of the game. Since I was his opponent I thought it astute enough, as he was about to make his stroke, to remind him of our previous meeting, several years before on the plane to Beirut. Hardly pausing in his cue action he muttered from the corner of his mouth: 'It was 1961. December tenth.' He then knocked all the toadstools down with a single stroke. I was deeply impressed.
The following day it was announced that the Prime Minister was to give a press conference on one of the uninhabited islands. Appropriately, a touch of the master's hand here, the isle called Samson was chosen, and we all chugged out there on a convoy of boats. Once landed, Harold sat like a patriarch on a rock and expounded his views on the world situation. St Mary's, the main island, was misty across the water and I wondered what would happen if the ever expected Third World War was to break out while the British leader was thus marooned on an uninhabited speck in the Atlantic Ocean. I asked the premier what his views were on this and, for once, he was put out of his stride. 'Well,' he said, giving the pipe a fierce puff. 'We do have a telephone link of course from the mainland to the house on St Mary's. If I were needed urgently the RAF would send a plane for me.'
'But you're not on St Mary's,' I pressed. 'It's taken twenty-five minutes to get here by boat.'
'Peter Thompson, the boatman,' answered Wilson, a little tersely but not to be beaten, 'is a very good lad. He could be over here in no time to pick me up.'
Not 'no time', but twenty-five minutes, I thought. In that space the world could be ashes. I interviewed Peter Thompson and wrote a story about him – Peter the Boatman, the Last Link in the Hot Line. This, I thought, was pretty worthwhile stuff. It never appeared in my newspaper or any other, however. A hurried government 'D' notice was slapped on the matter even before I had finished dictating it into the telephone. The following year Mr Wilson was equipped with the most powerful walkie-talkie radio ever devised. There was an item on the television news where he was talking to his foreign secretary, Mr George Brown, who was holidaying in far-off Ireland.
One Sunday in the winter of 1963 the whole of Britain was covered with snow and I was sledging down a hill near my house on the Hertfordshire housing estate. It was a run rarely attainable in this country, thick, hard-pressed snow, with a glossy frozen surface. The hill was steep and there was a leap over a small, solid stream at its foot, before the moment of hard braking in an area where some new houses were being built. It was one of those afternoons that you remember all your life. Lois, my young daughter and Mark, my son, with th
e children and the fathers of the neighbourhood, shared the thrilling toboggan run. The air was like steel and an outrageous vermilion sunset spilled across the sky over Watford. The following day I was going to Australia and at that moment I did not really want to go. It was my turn for a solo run on the sledge and, flat out on my belly (and wearing no headgear), I began the descent and was soon accelerating down the steep white slope. To the stream I came and the toboggan took off like a salmon, clearing the gap easily. Then I forgot to brake, I careered over the broken surface towards the housing site, tried to swerve to avoid a hard-looking pile of bricks and crashed spectacularly through the door of a shaky wooden lavatory erected for the convenience of workmen. The toboggan hit the bucket and my head followed it. The entire little building collapsed on top of me. By the time rescuers had arrived and pulled away the timbers I was nearly dead through laughing. Everybody was holding their ribs. My children sat in the snow and wiped their eyes. At that moment I decided not to go to Australia.
Nevertheless I went, of course, to follow the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh across the world. It had been a matter of great delight to be picked for such an assignment, and it was almost as big a moment to be invited to Buckingham Palace for the pre-tour cocktail party where the accredited correspondents were to meet members of the royal household who were making the journey.
Everywhere in London there was deep snow. I set out from Fleet Street very early because I wanted to be at the Palace on time and, in that weather, I thought it would be difficult to get a taxi. As it happened one came along at once, creeping through the white landscape, and we arrived outside the Palace gates a good hour too early for the reception. 'You can't go in yet,' said the gate policeman solemnly. 'There's nobody at home.' There was nothing for it but to dismiss the cab and try to keep myself warm for an hour. I walked around in the cold for a while and my feet began to freeze. I went into Victoria Station but a Siberian wind blew through its spaces. Then I saw a workman's caff, a wonderfully steamed-up window, and the magic letters: 'Tea and Snacks'. Within, it was crammed and warm. Porters from the station and bus and lorry drivers were thick around the tables drinking tea from powerful cups and munching into doorstep slices of bread and beef dripping. I joined the queue to the counter. While I waited I eavesdropped on the special language: 'Two o' drip and one medium, please, love.' 'One 'arry Lauder with two babies 'eads.' This latter order was for boiled beef and carrots (an old Harry Lauder song) and two boiled potatoes. When my turn came I asked modestly for a cup of tea, please, love.
'Strong or medium?' enquired Love.
'Er . . . medium, please, love.'
'ONE MEDIUM!' bawled Love deafeningly. She returned to me. Her round face was rosy with sweat. 'Any drip?'
It was years since I had eaten bread and dripping. In Barnardo's in fact. 'Two of drip,' I answered.
'TWO O' DRIP WIV THAT MEDIUM!' she bellowed.
The tea was in a mug as thick as a washbasin, the two of drip shimmered like grey mud under the neon lights. I sat down and warmed my hands on the cup, in the approved manner, and ate the two of drip with great enjoyment.
Twenty minutes later I was having sherry with the Queen.
From the outset my visit to Australia in 1963 was adventurous. Intending to go to the Australia versus England Test at the Sydney cricket ground I had departed a week early but I never actually got to the match. When the plane reached Singapore, where I planned to spend one day, I was again taken violently ill, the symptoms the same as those which had erupted in the church at Mark's christening. On that occasion they had subsided. This time I knew it was serious.
Instead of sensibly calling a doctor to the hotel, I staggered out at two in the morning, hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take me to a hospital. When we got there I was confronted with a long line of sick and injured Chinese, Indians and Malays, holding bones, rubbing bumps and complaining in their various languages. I got on the end of the line. Several times I collapsed and some of the Chinese and Indians helped me to my feet again. A kind Malay man went to get a wheelchair and I sat in this, turning the wheels painfully as the queue gradually moved towards the distant doctor.
When eventually I reached the head of the line I was in severe pain. The doctor was a Chinese lady. 'Who is wrong?' she enquired. Thinking she had just told me her name I told her mine and we curiously shook hands. 'I'm dying,' I said. She looked doubtful. 'We all die,' she said. 'From the moment of birth.' Oriental wisdom may be all very fine, but I was in agony. She rolled up my sleeve, injected something into me and I knew nothing more until I woke up on a wooden bed with a coolie picking my pocket. Having been caught in the act, he very contritely offered to go and get a taxi for me and this he did. I went to the Raffles Hotel, where all those years before I had sung with the band, and asked for a glass of water. My promise made to myself on that long-ago occasion, that I would one day be able to buy a drink at the famous long bar, had to be postponed. A profound Sikh brought me the water on a silver tray. Then I went back to the airport, feeling now in less discomfort, and boarded the British Airways flight for Sydney. During the journey the pain returned viciously and the pilot radioed ahead for an ambulance to meet us on arrival. Even this had its moment of comedy. In those days any book even suspected of being mildly erotic was enthusiastically seized by the Australian Customs. I had with me a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover which I had borrowed from the bookshelf of a friend in Beirut during my overnight stop there. While I was borne away on a stretcher, clutching my stomach and moaning, a Customs man spotted the book and impounded it.
I had not been in Australia more than a couple of hours when I was on the operating table. They had taken me to the Scottish Hospital at Paddington, Sydney, five minutes from the cricket ground which had been the object of my early journey. I was put into a bed in a general ward. Across the room was a man who had survived a fight with a crocodile. His face was a cobweb of stitches and I was warned that I must not make him laugh. At that time I could not think of anything funny to say. They had given me a sedative but then came a sudden onrush of agony and I shot up in bed, holding my stomach. The crocodile fighter tried to call the nurse but his stitches prevented him opening his mouth properly. Eventually he whistled for her. I was given another injection and then carried off to the operating table.
It was appendicitis, probably activated by flying. The previous onset had come immediately after returning by plane from Monte Carlo. It was only by fortune that my appendix had not ruptured at 30,000 feet.
I was in hospital only five days – the five days of the Test Match, which I could plainly hear being played a few hundred yards away. The crowd would roar when a wicket fell or a boundary was scored but I still had to listen to the commentary by Brian Johnson in much the same way as I would have done if I had been at home in England. My friend, Ian Wooldridge, the notable sports columnist of the Daily Mail, came to see me, so did a stream of absolute strangers who had read of my misadventure in a Sydney daily newspaper. Several of them asked me about Lady Chatterky's Lover. My fame had spread through the hospital and I cheered considerably when a pretty young nurse arrived and enquired: 'Are you the Queen's reporter?'
I said I certainly was one of them. 'Can I rub some oil in your bum?' she asked.
After the five days in hospital I allowed myself a two-day convalescence at the beachside home of a kind but odd lady well-wisher. It was an unusual house. The furniture kept collapsing, water shot from holes in pipes. The chairs and tables on the terrace had gone rusty. There were many telephones, all of which had been cut off. Most of the lights would not work and while I was there a man arrived to take back a gigantic tank of tropical fish which, he alleged, had not been paid for. The tank was set in the wall between two rooms and he tried to manoeuvre it out while all the coloured fish, congregating in one corner, were staring at him in fear. In the end he gave up and left. The lady, who spent my entire visit walking about in a baby-doll nightie (she even went shopping in it), meant we
ll but apparently found life difficult to handle. Her husband had died and she had no money to spend on anything until his financial affairs were worked out. There were three expensive cars in the overgrown drive and she could not make up her mind which one to sell. It was a curious convalescence.
One week after my eventful arrival in Australia I caught up with the royal tour. I flew to Hobart and was there on the quay on a cool dove-like morning that might have been in Sussex, when the royal yacht sailed into the harbour and Her Majesty and the Duke of Edinburgh stepped ashore. There had been a last minute of drama because the men laying the red carpet had started unrolling it from the wrong end. When they reached the quayside it was too short to reach the gangway of the ship so they had to roll it up and start again.
In the following two weeks I was in Sydney, in Melbourne, in Brisbane, under a hot sun, and trying to keep up with the royal party's vigorous schedule. I was still far from fit (I had lost fifteen pounds in weight) and although I managed to keep going, the office in London was anxious and eventually a disappointed and despondent reporter was instructed to return home. I took my time going back through the Pacific and I spent a couple of days on the beach in Honolulu. On the morning I left for Los Angeles I failed to pay for my breakfast and the bill (almost three dollars) followed me around the world for months, years even. It haunted me, that breakfast, nudging my conscience at the most inconvenient times. In the end I paid it. It made no difference; the bills turned up regularly for years. When I returned to Honolulu two years ago I stayed at the same hotel and asked them to stop sending the bill because I had now paid it. They promised to do so. But when I returned home there was that breakfast again.
In My Wildest Dreams Page 40
