A Life in the Day

by Hunter Davies

  I was upset when Bob came back from meeting him and wrote only a paragraph or so about him in the column. I had planned to rush to the features department and sell them the idea of a major interview, with a lot of space and illustrations, as I later managed with John Masefield.

  I was even more furious when Bob let slip in the office that he had bought a Lowry painting – direct from the artist, not through a gallery or agent. I could of course not have afforded such a thing at the time, though I am sure Bob got a bargain. Today of course, Lowry paintings sell for millions, he is widely acclaimed and revered and has The Lowry art centre in Salford named after him.

  Bob had gone to a local suburban grammar school, which he always said was the best grammar school in the land, with the finest headmaster, and then on to Oxford. I think he had always imagined he would go on to be a literary figure, a writer of some sort, but for years he had found himself interviewing second-rate film stars for the Sunday Graphic. At least on the Sunday Times, he had climbed a notch or two in status, as I had.

  Bob introduced one new feature in Atticus which was our man Mayhew, who went out and met ordinary people, such as a dustman, a postman, a milkman. It was me who went out, stopped people in the street, and wrote down exactly what they said.

  Bob got the name Mayhew from Henry Mayhew, whom I had never heard of till then, who was a nineteenth-century social historian and journalist (one of the founders of Punch in 1841) who produced a well-known book called London Labour and the London Poor, filled with first-hand, unadorned interviews and life stories. I was most impressed when I read it, and went on to discover his other journalism, thinking I could do that, I like interviewing ordinary people.

  I produced hundreds, sometimes thousands of words for my Mayhew interviews with ordinary London people, asking them questions about their lives, till they got fed up. I was always on the lookout for an unusual turn of phrase, a cliché used wrongly, a malapropism, a quirky observation on life. I handed them over to Bob who boiled them down. He never took liberties, or added clever remarks, just reproduced it straight, linking all the best quotes together.

  There was no name on the Atticus column – neither Bob’s name nor of course mine either, as the mere assistant. That was the column’s style. In fact the style of the whole paper. That’s the other thing that struck me, looking back at those sixties copies of the paper – there were so very few by-lines.

  About the only place the name of the journalist regularly appeared was on the review pages where Cyril Connolly on books, Dilys Powell on films and Harold Hobson on the theatre were the big stars. They were supposedly the reason people read the Sunday Times, which I could never believe, as I mostly considered them boring, pompous, humourless. Over on the Observer, our deadly rival Kenneth Tynan was so much more readable and amusing and of course cruel. The Sunday Times did not do cruel.

  Even though my name did not appear, if I did a half-decent or vaguely amusing interview, almost everyone I knew or met next day had read it. They would not know it was me, unless I told them, but they had noticed the story. This was because there were only two Sunday papers, the Times and the Observer. Everyone I knew read both of them, as they were still quite thin with few sections, so didn’t take up your whole day.

  When Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger talks about collecting the Sunday papers – those were the two he meant. As far as the arty or the intelligentsia were concerned, there were no others.

  I went with Margaret to see Look Back in Anger, which was still running at the Royal Court, on free tickets. One of the perks of being a diarist on a national paper, then and now, is being on the list for press tickets for the new London shows.

  I thought the play was terrific, loved the dialogue and the rants, and never worried at the time about the lack of a proper plot. It did seem so fresh and different from all those ancient Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan plays I had seen in Carlisle with my mother or performed by amateur reps in Manchester. We also went to see Joan Littlewood’s Oh, What a Lovely War! at the Theatre Royal Stratford East and that again seemed a revolution, so spontaneous and mad, but wonderful. I was also astounded by The Ginger Man by J. P. Donleavy. In all these cases it was the lack of traditional framework and plot that struck me. I remember thinking you don’t have to write so-called well-made, polished, crafted plays any more – they can be all over the shop, if they have the energy and humour. I wondered if I could have a go one day. I had begun to think I had a good ear for dialogue, even if the only dialogue I had ever written down was 500 words from a dustman talking to Mayhew.

  The first time I got my name in the paper, on a piece I had written, was in May 1963 when I interviewed John Masefield, the Poet Laureate. It had taken ages to arrange, with letters and notes going back months, before I finally persuaded him to let me visit him in his pretty cottage in Berkshire. Masefield was born in 1878, so was eighty-five when I saw him in 1963. He reminisced about meeting Thomas Hardy and Ramsay MacDonald, who had made him Poet Laureate in 1930, names which came naturally to his lips but to me seemed fictional, or existed only in school textbooks.

  He had a cat called McGinty. ‘A cat,’ so he told me, ‘of no distinction but much pretension.’ He described how, before he got that cat, he used to fill his mouth with raisins, go out into his garden and let birds eat out of his mouth. Once he had acquired a cat, no birds would come near him in the garden.

  If I had been into my stride as an interviewer, more experienced, rather than being slightly in awe and nervous about doing my first proper interview for the paper, as opposed to the Atticus column, I would immediately have pounced on this story. I am sure I could have talked him into having his photo taken, with his mouth open, feeding the birds, with the cat kept well away. He did seem an agreeable old chap, if a bit doddery. It would have made a great picture. It did go through my head, but seemed too cheeky and pushy to ask him to do it.

  Bob Robinson edited Atticus for just two years, with me as his assistant, then was moved sideways, to write a personal column. I don’t know whether he was pushed or not. Nobody ever seemed to get the sack in those days, not from the Sunday Times. The paper was so rich, so overstaffed, that if for some reason someone was relieved of his position or his column, he just carried on, on full pay, writing odd features, but nobody much caring whether he produced copy or not.

  The national dailies were much the same. I often went to El Vino’s in Fleet Street with Bob, who liked me to accompany him, as his sort of sidekick or batman, and I got to know a few of the main feature writers on the Mail and the Express. They seemed to do very little except play silly games in the office, then go to El Vino’s and drink the rest of the day away. The Daily Mirror feature writers, ridiculously under-employed, would have oysters and champagne at their local pub each day at noon. The expenses were enormous, the abuses appalling.

  There was always a lot of infighting and complaining about the print unions in Fleet Street, with the journalists and management accusing the unions of ruining our fine, noble industry, using Mickey Mouse practices, such as fiddling work sheets and wages for people who did not exist, then threatening to go on strike at the last moment, just before the presses started rolling, knowing management would have to give in to their demands. Both sides were in fact taking the mickey, abusing the privileges they had acquired over the generations for themselves.

  Bob was always good to me, treating me when we went to these expensive Fleet Street watering holes, as I was still on a fairly low salary, unlike him. One day he also invited me – and Margaret – to his house for a meal.

  He lived in a handsome Georgian house in Cheyne Row which he and his actress wife Josee had rented at first, I think from a relation of Richard Ingrams’, and then they had somehow managed to buy it, at a very good price. Journalists, even reasonably paid ones, did not normally live in quite such period splendour.

  One of the other guests at this dinner was Robin Day, the television broadcaster. For some reason he took an ac
tive dislike to me, turning and picking on me, calling me Bob’s boy, Bob’s lackey, mocking my northern accent and provincial university. I did not realise this was his style, to attack people for no reason, just to amuse himself. I was shocked into sullen silence, wondering what I had done to offend him.

  Margaret of course had immediately got his measure, and when he talked to her, she let him get away with nothing, fighting back, giving as good as she got.

  After the dinner, Margaret sent a thank-you letter in her best handwriting. In it, she must have made some semi-jocular remarks about the evening, which upset Josee. In reply she wrote: ‘I expect my guests to write back prettily, whether they have enjoyed my hospitality or not, and if not, not to accept any more invitations.’ We never got any more.

  So who was going to take over from Bob, once he had been relieved of Atticus? I did not honestly and truthfully expect to get the job, though I felt well capable of it, after two years as the assistant. I knew how to do the boring bits, such as organising photographs, supervising the design and layout.

  One of my jobs, as the assistant, was to go up on the stone on a Friday afternoon and stand there while the compositors made up the pages. If there was a line too long, or a headline did not fit, I would make a quick decision – and tell the printer what to do. Journalists could not of course touch the actual metal. The printers would be all out.

  I realised that at twenty-six I was still a bit young to be in charge of such a well-known, long-established column, which had had so many famous editors. And of course Robin Day had got me on the raw. I was convinced I would always be discriminated against as a northerner from a provincial university.

  Denis Hamilton, as editor of the paper, always had his ear to the ground, knowing who the rising stars were. It was he who really created the Insight column, hiring three journalists in 1963 whom none of us on the paper had heard of – Clive Irving, assisted by Jeremy Wallington and Ron Hall – to start a brand-new section which led to a totally different investigative team.

  To be the new head of Atticus he appointed someone called Nicholas Tomalin, someone I had vaguely heard of, as he was currently the star writer on a trendy magazine called About Town. He was five years older than me, had gone to a public school and Cambridge, where he had been president of the Union and editor of Granta.

  When I met him for the first time, I was struck by how handsome and well-dressed he was, in the latest American preppy-style clothes with button down collar shirts, which none of us were yet wearing. And he was sophisticated, amusing, clearly well connected, seemed to be best friends with all his Cambridge contemporaries who had gone on to do exciting things.

  Oh God, I thought, I have had it now. Not only will he not like me, or get on with me, or want me, but he will insist on hiring his own assistant, which is the nature of most such sudden changes when an outsider comes in, be it journalism, politics, business, football management. It would prove what I had feared, that my background would be held against me.

  3

  MARGARET’S FIRST NOVEL FAILS

  When Margaret had been a little girl she had wanted to be a missionary. She was for a time very religious, thanks mainly to her mother. Then as a young teenager she wanted to be an MP, putting the world to rights. Both of those ambitions had long faded. Instead, almost the moment we were back from our honeymoon in 1960 and established ourselves in the Vale of Health, she started writing a novel.

  Before going up to Oxford, she had gone for three months as an au pair in Bordeaux. Her Oxford tutor-to-be had said she should improve her French, if she wanted to read History. She was told that the French family she was fixed to stay with was middle class, educated, with the husband a teacher, but it turned out they were dirt poor, living in an attic. The father had been a teacher but because he was a communist, he had lost his job and just sat at home smoking. His wife took in laundry to feed their many children, all of whom Margaret had to look after. They did have well-off relations, so they often had weekends in style in a grand and pretty country house.

  The contrast between the two lives, getting sucked into two layers of French culture, had a profound effect on Margaret. But then almost anything, anywhere, after a lifetime on a Carlisle council estate in the 1950s, would have been a bit of a social and cultural shock.

  She wrote to me every week from Bordeaux, long, graphic, amusing, colourful letters, which I still have, unless the rats have got into the garage and eaten them.

  As a break from trying to furnish and equip our new flat, cooking for her dear husband when he came home from his awfully tiring day at work down the pit, I mean Gray’s Inn Road, Margaret started writing a novel. She didn’t tell me about it at first. She did it on the kitchen table while the flat was empty. It was called Green Dust for Dreams, which I immediately said was a poncey title. Did we say poncey in 1960? Pretentious, I probably said, which I said about anything smacking of purple prose, one of my hatreds in life.

  It took her about three months of solid writing, working every day, all handwritten in ink. Someone then told her that no agent or publisher would accept any manuscript in longhand. So she painfully typed it all out, using two fingers on my new portable manual typewriter which I had recently bought for myself. I am at rubbish at typing, still am, but having done it for so long, since I was editor of Palatinate, the student paper, I am at least quick if slipshod, making endless mistakes and literals. Margaret, with her two fingers, never having used a typewriter before, took forever. It was agony for her. She also did it in single spacing, another mistake, in order to save paper.

  Eventually she got it completed, parcelled it up and sent it off to an agent, Michael Sissons. I can’t remember where we got his name from. Someone had said that he was young, just starting off, and might be looking for new authors.

  He sent a letter back, fairly quickly. He thought it did not quite work as a novel, and could probably not be published as it was, but he invited her to come and see him at his office and talk about it.

  Margaret immediately tore up his letter and binned the novel. I never even had a chance to read it all, but I can remember the physical look of it, about 300 close-packed pages with a purple ribbon tied round it. The type was so cramped it must have made it even harder to enjoy reading it.

  So that was it, she was no longer going to be a novelist. The world clearly did not want her. I said come on pet, it’s only one opinion, try somewhere else, but she was adamant. She was giving up trying to be a novelist.

  Years later I did meet Michael Sissons, who soon became a very successful literary agent. He did have a memory of Margaret sending him a manuscript – and always wondered why she never replied. At the time, he thought he had sent her one of his more encouraging letters. Normally, he tried never to let young or new novelists anywhere near his office. After that, he made his replies to unsolicited manuscripts a bit more positive, if he did happen to think a new writer showed talent. But it was too late for Margaret. She had given up.

  Instead, she decided to look for a job and became a teacher, at Barnsbury School for Girls in Islington, a girls’ secondary modern, not far from Pentonville prison. She was technically only a supply teacher, but she stayed for almost two years. In those days, you did not need a DipEd – which I had, and never used. It was sufficient to be any sort of graduate to be allowed in front of a class.

  Each morning she walked across the Heath, working her way down to Hampstead Heath railway station, and got on the Overground train to Barnsbury. It was a pleasant journey, as these things go, and at the school she made friends with two other young teachers, Di Regler and Mary Driscoll, drinking with them in a local pub at lunchtime. She kept in touch with both of them long after she had stopped teaching, but both of them, alas, died young from cancer. I often used to wonder, stupidly, if there had been something nasty in that pub. Or in that school.

  Margaret was an excellent teacher, brilliant on discipline – nobody took any liberties – enthusiastic and energetic
. Years later, women in the street would come up to her and recall her inspiring English lessons. Two of her old pupils ended up in EastEnders when it started on TV. She also had to teach current affairs, so on the train to Barnsbury she would buy the Daily Mirror, a much more socialist, educative paper in those days, which had a pull-out section on an important topic of the day, such as Vietnam, explaining what it was all about. Margaret would mug it all up, then repeat it to her pupils, as if she knew what she was talking about. Her knowledge of books, novels and plays was enormous. From about the age of sixteen, encouraged by her teachers at school, hoping she would try Oxbridge entrance, she had devoured everything suggested to her, averaging a book a day. But stuff like politics, economics or science, she had little interest in.

  With Margaret working, it meant we had two salaries, not huge, but average for our age in London. I was now on £1,600 at the Sunday Times. We got an increase every Christmas, when Denis Hamilton would write to us and say well done, your salary will be going up by £100. You were not supposed to reveal it to your colleagues, which I suspected was a management conspiracy to keep us in our place.

  After about a year in the flat, and us both now working, we had ticked off most of the major items on our lists, such as double bed, curtains, fridge, a cooker, and then, ever so posh, a Sheraton-style bureau.

  My old 1947 Riley motor car, bought at the time we got married for £100, had caused endless problems, failing to start, the rain letting in through the roof. I blamed Mike Thornhill, our so-called best man, for making me buy it.

  I then bought a brand-new car – a Morris Mini Minor. It had not long been launched, the first ones appearing at the end of 1959, so was still a novelty on the road. When I went back to Carlisle with it, and took my mother or Margaret’s parents for a ride to Silloth, people in the villages on the way came out to look at it. I felt quite important. Someone clearly from London, at the cutting edge, or whatever cliché we used in those days.