In My Wildest Dreams

by Leslie Thomas

  The year following the unfortunate Australian experience I was again sent abroad with the Queen. This time the visit was to Germany, the first tour by a British monarch since the beginning of the century. When Her Majesty met a grand and elderly duchess, a survivor of old German royalty to which, of course, our royal family are related, she murmured: 'It has been a long time.'

  Of course I had my own misadventures. On the opening day of the tour I lost my car and had to get a hurried lift into Bonn on the back of a lorry before going to the royal press reception in a castle above the Rhine. It was very hot and there had been some cement on the back of the truck which blew in clouds over my clothes as we travelled. Since I was so late there was no time to shower and change, so I had to attend the function as I stood. Up to the castle I went and into a huge chamber crowded with the world's correspondents, all shining and clean, hundreds of them. Trying to brush myself down, I joined the long line of people being presented to Her Majesty, and to the Duke of Edinburgh. There was no doubt that I appeared most threadbare and there was still a lot of cement dust hanging about me. Each time I tried to brush it off it went up in clouds and people started sneezing. When I reached the Queen she looked at me quizzically before holding out her hand. The Duke was more forthright. 'Which newspaper do you represent?' he asked.

  'The Evening News, sir,' I replied reluctantly, thinking he might be considering mentioning my appearance to the editor.

  'The News, hey?' he said. 'You look as if you're from the Farmers Weekly.'

  Covering a tour in Germany was far more exacting than in Australia where the time difference gave a comfortable amount of leeway to an evening newspaper correspondent. In Germany there was no such latitude and to keep in step with the busy progress of the tour, to write the stories and to telephone them, caused many problems to both myself and to Anne Sharpley of the Evening Standard. Once, with only minutes to go before filing time, we had to leap ashore from a vessel sailing down the Rhine, scamper up to a village and telephone our impressions, me from a grocer's shop and Anne from the establishment of an undertaker. In those days, before direct dialling, it was often a laborious and frustrating business getting through to London. I dictated my copy and emerged into the German village street to find Anne fuming. After a monumental amount of trouble she had finally been connected to the wrong number. Instead of Fleet Street 3000 she had Finchley 3000. 'Is that the Evening Standard?' she had enquired suspiciously.

  'No,' said a lady with an operatic accent. 'This is Mrs Nissenbaum.'

  When Prince Charles was proclaimed Prince of Wales, I was sent to Anglesey to witness the first time he set foot in his principality. The young boy and his sister were to step ashore on an unscheduled visit from the royal yacht anchored in the harbour. I travelled to Holyhead by train on the previous evening and arrived in deep fog. Never having been there before I had no idea where anything was located. The taxi driver shook his head ponderously when I gave him the name of the hotel. 'Never get there tonight, boy,' he said, thickly Welsh. 'Not in this fog. It's miles.'

  'But I have to get there,' I insisted. 'I'll pay double fare. How about that?'

  Thoughtfully he said he would try and we set out on a terrifying journey along what, by the bumps and manoeuvrings, seemed like little more than a track. It was impossible to see more than a yard ahead of the vehicle and at one point the driver stopped and suggested dramatically that I should turn down my window and listen. I did. 'That's the sea you can hear,' he said morosely. 'Two hundred feet down. Sheer drop.'

  After what seemed like hours we came across a shepherd, his dog and a single sheep. The two men conversed animatedly in Welsh, after which the driver turned to me. 'You won't mind a bit of company, will you?' he said casually. Without waiting for an answer the shepherd opened the door and pushed the sheep in. It was smelly as hell and steaming wet. The dog climbed in beside the driver as though he had spent all his life in taxis and the shepherd got in with the sheep and me. I felt I ought to protest, or at least argue, but I got the impression I would have been the one to get out, not the sheep.

  'Sick ewe,' said the shepherd, holding the animal by the ear. It sat down placidly but emitted a large smell. After about ten minutes the car stopped and with many a parting benediction the other three passengers got out. Thoroughly disgruntled I sat in the back, unspeaking, until at last we arrived at a rosy light shining through the fog. It was the hotel.

  I paid the driver his double fare, although I was inclined in the circumstances to dispute it, and went into the hotel. When I awoke in the morning I heard a distinct loudspeaker making announcements. Opening the curtains I found that the fog had cleared. The hotel was almost opposite the station where I had arrived the previous night.

  On the following day, when the royal party had come ashore, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh went to Beaumaris for lunch, passing through the place with the longest name in Britain, Llanfairpwllgwgngyl-lgogerychwyrndrobwillilantysillogogogoch.

  I had purchased a local guide book, but when it came to telephoning my story I discovered that I had left it in a bar. In the middle of dictating the piece I could not, of course, remember how to spell Llanfairpwllgwgngyllgogerychwyrndrobwillilanty-sillogogogoch. There was a young woman standing outside the box, waiting to use the phone, and with delight I spotted that she had the name embroidered around her skirt. After explaining my dilemma I persuaded her to stand with her skirt spread out while I repeated the letters from it. As I dictated so she obligingly revolved.

  By the time, years later, of the investiture of Prince Charles at Caernarfon Castle I had left Fleet Street but the Evening News commissioned me to write about the event for them as they also did at the wedding of Princess Anne. At the investiture the press were put up on the battlements of the castle, like so many gargoyles. This afforded an unequalled view of the ceremony below but posed problems for those of us who had to compose the story as it was taking place and somehow get our copy to an assistant who would telephone it to London. A system was devised by some official who may have been a relative of Heath Robinson. The written pages, clearly marked, were to be put in envelopes and placed in a bucket which was then lowered on a rope and pulley arrangement over the battlements to the back of the castle. There a Boy Scout runner would collect it and carry it to the man waiting by the telephone. The block and tackle worked all right and the Boy Scout was dutifully at his post. Unfortunately, when he was carrying my first few profound paragraphs – my introduction to the whole dramatic scene – he was detained by a policeman and told he could not be allowed to cross the road. At this the child burst into tears and ran home to his mother. My deathless sentences were never delivered nor were they ever found. At the Evening Mews office they had to write the introduction from what they could see on television.

  XXII

  One evening in August 1961, a fifteen-year-old girl went to visit a travelling fairground in Birmingham and failed to return home. Her body was later found in some disused allotments. She had been strangled with her own tights.

  A tragic, but not altogether unfamiliar story. The cuttings from that morning's papers were placed on my desk with the features editor's suggestion that it might be worth a background article. After reading the material, I rang the police in Birmingham, but I do not believe I ever wrote the feature because I recall that something more important came up and I was diverted to that story. The murdered girl was named Jacqueline Thomas and it was not until ten years later that I realised she was my brother's daughter, one of the little girls I had taken to see Santa Claus in Birmingham in 1949 before I sailed for Singapore with the army.

  Considering the matter now, it seems perhaps odd that I should have missed the clues. After all, the girl had the same surname as me. Thomas, however, is the sixth most common name in this country. After all those years I had forgotten the Christian names of my nieces. In addition I firmly believed that my brother was dead (my Uncle Chris had told me so years before) and in the newspaper stories
the victim's father was quoted and there was mention of several brothers. My brother never had sons. The district of Birmingham where the family lived was also entirely different.

  In the early nineteen-seventies I went to Birmingham as part of a promotion campaign for a book. At a cocktail party a reporter from the Birmingham. Post asked if I had any connections in the city. I told him that I once had a brother who had lived there but who was now dead and, I said, his family had moved elsewhere. I described my journey to Birmingham many years before (leaving out, of course, the reason for it – seeing my brother in the mental hospital) and related the visit to Father Christmas in army uniform with a civilian overcoat. An item appeared in the newspaper's gossip column and a few days later I had a letter from my long-lost niece, Angela, the eldest girl. It said very little and I wrote asking what had happened to the family. Her reply shocked me.

  Far from having died years before, my brother Harold had been alive until the previous year. He had never left the hospital but had worked for many years in the gardens. Angela, his daughter, had herself been employed in the hospital as a maid, and had got to know Harold, without realising he was her own father. She had taken racing bets to a bookmaker for him and had talked to him while he worked in the hospital greenhouses.

  Her mother was also dead. 'She never got over the death of our Jackie,' wrote my niece, adding: 'Who was murdered.'

  I had to sit down. Murdered? I began to remember. The following day I went to Birmingham and met my niece, by now in her late twenties and married. She told me the story. Her sister had gone to the fairground and vanished. Eventually the police called at the family's house and said to her mother: 'We've found your Jackie.' Believing that her daughter had just wandered away, the vastly relieved woman got into the patrol car thinking she was going to the police station to pick up the missing girl. Instead they took her to the mortuary and showed her the body.

  The police and many other people know who committed the crime (and so do I) but the murderer had an alibi and was never arrested. He went free and on one occasion coolly stopped his car and asked the victim's sister, Angela, if she would like a lift. Years later he committed another crime and this time was charged and went to prison for life. This means that he is free today. If he had been convicted of the killing of Jackie, the penalty, in those days, was death.

  Returning to London I went to the offices of the Daily Mail and read through the cuttings of the case. There it all was. The misleading items that had not aroused my suspicions. The man quoted as the girl's father was, in fact, a man with whom my sister-in-law had gone to live (in a different district) once she knew that her husband would never leave the mental hospital. This man had sons, which would account for the mention of the victim's brothers. Why my uncle had told me so categorically that Harold was dead I do not know. He must have thought so himself. Anyway he was wrong. After seeing my niece I wrote to her several times and she replied. (I also received a letter from one of her sisters demanding to know why I had done nothing 'to help our mum when Jackie died'.) Then, just as it happened long ago, the letters ceased and I have not heard from her since.

  Throughout my time on the Evening News, with all its travelling and its daily excitements, I was always trying to write something else. The manuscript of my first novel had been thrown from the window in disgust after the final publisher had rejected it. Never being one to abandon something which might one day come in useful, I retrieved it and wiped away the mud (it was, you may recall, called My Name Is Mudd) and put it away.

  Then I wrote a television play which, to my joy and astonishment, the BBC decided to buy. It was called A Piece Of Ribbon, a sort of army detective story set in Malaya, very much the forerunner of The Virgin Soldiers. Luck came along again in time because in the cast was a Chinese actress Jacqui Chan who had been the girlfriend of Antony Armstrong-Jones. This young man was very much in the news as he had just become engaged to Princess Margaret. As the press homed in on Miss Chan, although she was commendably discreet, my play which she was rehearsing came in for a large amount of publicity.

  When it was transmitted the reviews and reactions were encouraging and I thought that the door was open. From now on all I had to do was to write scripts and the BBC would be pleased to present them. It did not, of course, happen like that. After months of rejections I was very despondent. I had continued to do short talks on Woman's Hour and other radio programmes and one day Mollie Lee, then editor of the woman's programme, said to me: 'I don't know why you don't write a book about your Barnardo days.'

  I backed away from that. 'It would be too much of an Oliver Twist,' I protested. 'I'm a bit old for an orphan.'

  'You must not think of it like that,' argued Mollie. 'It was a unique experience, after all, and the things you've told me about those days have been very funny. Why don't you write it in that way?'

  This advice coincided with the arrival in my life of the person who has done most to influence my writing. His name is Desmond Elliott and he was my agent. Throughout the book business Desmond, who was also a publisher (an odd combination of hats), is known as a bee. He is bright and insistent, he cheers people as a bee might do on a summer's day, but the buzz can and does turn difficult and threatening and there is no mistaking the change in tone. He is small and whimsical. He too spent some years in an orphanage, in Ireland where, he swears, they had parents' days. He now has a penthouse in St James's, London, and another on Park Avenue, New York. He has both style and stamina. He also has principles, not the least of which is loyalty. We have always been the greatest of friends and we frequently quarrel.

  We met through a chance remark made at a party given by a record company. One of the big theatrical agencies, with fingers in numerous pies, had decided to start a literary section. I went to their offices in Soho and there I met this ebullient small man in a sharp blue suit; fair-haired and grinning in a way which indicated he was the recipient of secrets, itching to tell the latest gossip or the newest true story from the world of books. He bounced around the desk, held out his hand and said: 'What are you going to write for me?'

  It turned out to be called This Time Next Week. Following Mollie Lee's words I had gone home and, after sitting in the back garden for half an hour to think it over, I sat down and typed the first ten pages. It began: 'One thing about living on a hill, there was always lots of sky to see and when you weren't busy you could study it. Sometimes the clouds would race along like lean, white lions; like heraldic lions on the shields of knights I used to think . . .' Today I am sure I would write it differently. But they were the most important words I ever set on paper.

  Constable commissioned the book on the evidence of those first pages. I was going to publish a book! When I left their office I almost floated down Orange Street. Working in the evenings, from nine to midnight (although many old Fleet Street hands insist that the book was written in the time I should have been dedicating to the Evening Mews), I finished This Time Next Week in six months. It was published in 1963 and had the best and most widespread reviews I shall ever have, even if I write until I'm a hundred. Even today, twenty-one years later, it continues as strongly as ever in hardback, in paperback, and in numerous other editions. It is and has been for many years required reading for people in the childcare departments of the social services, it is a set book for schools examinations (my own sons have been obliged to read it!) and there is a splendid teenage edition published by Blackies with sets of questions at the end. One of these suggests, as the subject for a short essay: 'Describe Leslie's relationship with girls.'

  All this time I was, of course, married. If I have failed to dwell long on this aspect of my life, it is because my important world was my professional world, selfish as that was. In addition there is, I think, an amnesia that mercifully webs over the details of a married life that is now a few years gone; perhaps the natural result of a divorce, the traumas, hurts and unhappiness it brings.

  We had gone to live on the hilltop of a sm
art young housing estate at Carpenders Park in Hertfordshire. It became Plummers Park in my novel Tropic of Ruislip and I think the description afforded to it in that book is as adequate as any:

  Plummers Park was thirty miles from Central London, in the latitude of Ruislip, in the country but not of it. The fields seemed almost touchable and yet remote. Wild roses bloomed and blew in seclusion just out of reach; rooks and flashing magpies in elm and rowan were merely distant birds in distant trees; the fox and the rabbit went unseen from the human windows. On Sundays the people had to drive out in their cars to witness a pig. The estate was

  the strangest crop ever to grow on that old Hertfordshire farming land. When it was built some trees were permitted to remain like unhappy captives spared because they are old. They remained in clusters, sometimes embedded in garden walls as selling points for house-buyers desiring fresh air, twigs, greenness, and autumn acorns for their children. It was rumoured that the builders had a mechanical squirrel which ran up trees to delight, deceive and decide prospective purchasers.

  The streets had, with commercial coyness, retained the sometimes embarrassing names of the various pastures and fields that now lay beneath concrete, crazy paving and statutory roses. Cowacre, Upmeadow, Rising Field, Sheep-Dip, The Sluice, and Bucket Way. Some of the new people said they found it embarrassing to give their address as Sows Hole Lane – provided for a policeman it always provoked suspicion – but others liked the rustic sound.