A Life in the Day

by Hunter Davies

  I am sure it was Margaret’s example which spurred me on – but when I asked for her help or opinion, which I did all the time, she always refused. I would say please read this bit of dialogue, it’s really good, or this scene, you’ll love it. She would never read anything I had written, not till it was all finished, then she would give her honest and brutal reaction.

  I had the same problem when I began to move on from simply doing 500-word interviews for Atticus. I felt I had mastered that length, could bash them out without too much worry, but when I came to do longer interviews, such as John Masefield, the Poet Laureate, which was more like 3,000, I used to panic. I was never sure where to begin, how to shape it, what to leave out. It was like running a mile race when all you have ever trained for is the 100 yards.

  Then there is the other problem, which is the one all beginners have, then and now – who do you send it to? As an outsider, you imagine there is a magic circle which somehow you have to enter, or need help to enter. When you do become a published writer, the most common letter you get is from people wanting advice. Even people who have distinguished themselves in their own field, such as judges and surgeons, still imagine that someone who has had a few books published can help them get their book published. Popular and successful writers, such as George Bernard Shaw and J. B. Priestley, in the end resorted to duplicated replies, refusing to read other people’s manuscripts.

  When I finished my TV script, I sent it to the BBC. Seemed the obvious thing to do. Just popped it in the post to BBC, London W1 or whatever. I failed to get the name of anyone, or the title of a suitable department. It came back after three months with a duplicated rejection.

  I then started on a stage play. Again, I find it hard to believe I did this. Today, I have no interest in the theatre and probably have not been to a play for over fifty years, but plays were in the air, we had seen lots in the sixties, there seemed to be so many exciting new playwrights.

  I based it on an incident and characters we knew, a bloke who had two families. In each case the mothers of his children went out to work, while he did nothing at all, all day long, except take out his various children and play, often in the same playground.

  I sent it off to the literary agency Curtis Brown. By this time I had learned that you needed to contact an agent first and I had been told they were the biggest in town. To my amazement, their theatre man wrote back agreeing to handle it. A few weeks later, he had sold it to a West End theatre director, Allan Davis.

  I then started working with him in his Mayfair flat, as he showed me how to shape the scenes, shape the plot. He talked airily of opening in Brighton, before the West End, and which stars he would get, and how Hugh Beaumont, known as Binkie, a famous producer with whom he had worked, would put the money up.

  On 18 January 1962, Beaumont wrote personally to Allan – turning down my play, The Herring Gulls. I still have a copy of the letter. In it he did say a few nice things – some very amusing dialogue, potential talent – but that a lot of the play was incoherent and I needed more experience. He signed it Yours Binkie, so I knew his nickname was not a newspaper myth.

  But encouraged by my first attempt, I started another play, based on my father dying. Allan Davis turned it down as did the theatre man at Curtis Brown, John Barber, who had been so encouraging with my first play. In fact he wrote me a most awful letter, saying how disappointed he was. After all the time and energy he had spent with me on my first play, he said I had learned nothing, had been wilful, not working hard enough on the characters and the narrative.

  I was totally devastated by this reply. Yet again I have kept the letter. I still have it filed in Volume One of My Life, a row of folders in which I have kept all the scraps and documents from my early life. At the top of the letter, in pencil, Margaret has written ‘Oozeefinkeeis? How very unnecessarily unpleasantly put.’

  So that was it. My life as a playwright had come to a dead end.

  Margaret’s attempt at another novel, however, was immediately accepted. It was called Dames’ Delight and was about her time at Oxford, not the usual dreamy spires stuff, but how a northern working-class girl goes there and finds it all nonsense. She too sent it to Curtis Brown where the boss, Graham Watson, sold it to Jonathan Cape.

  However, excitement at having a first novel published by such a distinguished publishing house was ruined when she ran into libel trouble. The mother of one of her friends recognised herself in a proof copy sent to her and complained. Tom Maschler, the boss of Cape, called Margaret into his office and said it was all her fault. She was almost in tears. She was only twenty-five, with no experience of publishing or libel. It seemed so unfair that she got blamed. I always felt her editor should have checked and changed certain things before it got to the proof stage. She had to pay for reprinting costs and legal fees which came to more than the £250 advance she had received for the book.

  After various changes were made, all of which I considered piddling, Dames’ Delight eventually came out in February 1964. It sold well, got good reviews, but you can’t buy this book in any shop today as it has never been reprinted. Not because of the trouble associated with it – but because almost immediately Margaret decided she hated it. She had got published, at last, but felt she had got off on the wrong foot. It was not really the sort of novel she liked or wanted to write. In later years, when publishers regularly asked to reprint it, she always said no.

  I have just looked at a copy, one I hid in my room before she destroyed them all, and I see her heroine, the girl who goes to Oxford from the North on a scholarship, was called Morag Graham. I had completely forgotten that. If asked her heroine’s name, I would not have been able to answer.

  Graham is of course a very common surname in Carlisle and the Borders while Morag was my first choice of a girl’s name, which she had rubbished at the time, refusing to consider it.

  I think I was more excited by Margaret being published than she was herself. It had all seemed so easy and pleasurable, till it all went wrong and ended in tears. But all the same, I was greatly encouraged that she had done it, so I decided I would have a go at a novel. If Margaret could do it, perhaps I could? I knew her, had known her for ages, since she had been a schoolgirl. Had I not seen her sitting in the kitchen, her pen poised? I knew she had no connections to any magic circle; she had used no contacts to get published. ‘Ah kent his faither,’ which is what my mother used to say when people did well, or more likely, got above themselves. Meaning she knew their background.

  Margaret had used her student days for her novel, so I decided I would base my novel on my own teenage life, looking for the girl of my dreams. In my mind, I have exaggerated over the years about how long we had gone out, saying we went to school together, which was not totally true. I had known of Margaret, and spoken to her from an early age, but it wasn’t till I was nineteen and she seventeen, and still at school, that we really got together. And by that time, er, I had had quite a few girlfriends, all in the best possible taste of course – i.e. nothing happened.

  I knew I could not handle a proper plot, or do anything imaginative, but I had just read Catcher in the Rye and was impressed how Salinger did not really have a plot, not much happened, it was all in the character of the hero, Holden Caulfield.

  So I wrote my teenage novel in the first person, mainly for laughs, but with suitable doses of teenage sexual frustration and sentimentality and soppiness, moving on quickly whenever I got bored.

  I sent it to Curtis Brown again but instead of Graham Watson, who had handled Margaret’s novel, and turned out to be the boss man, I got a new young agent, Richard Simon. He wrote back saying it could not be published as it was, but if I was prepared to do some work, it might have a chance.

  He suggested that instead of just having the same girl in the book from the beginning, whom I idolised from afar, I should have lots of girlfriends, one after the other, keep it fast and furious. Which, in reality, was very much what happened. Till I eventually do mee
t up with the girl of my dreams.

  When Margaret had had that rather low-key response from Michael Sissons, she immediately gave up. Richard’s initial response to my first attempt had been similar, but I was immediately encouraged by his suggestions and at once set to work. For several weeks I slogged away at building up the minor girlfriends, under his direction. When I had finished to his satisfaction, Richard sold it to Charles Pick of Heinemann.

  Mr Pick, who seemed a bit pompous and stiff for someone who presumably liked my racy teenage saga, took me out to lunch in Mayfair, near their office in Queen Street, and told me how excited they were and about all their great plans for the book lunch.

  They had devised an amusing gimmick for the book cover – which was to have a pair of three-dimensional plastic lips stuck on the cover. Quite a technological and printing achievement for 1965. The lips would appear to kiss you, as you walked round the bookshop. Everyone loved it – until people started inspecting the actual book. When customers pulled the book off the shelf to buy it, the plastic lips came off. They would then demand a proper copy. Hundreds of copies were sent back. By the time of the paperback version, the lips were abandoned. But the reviews were good and there was soon talk of several film companies being interested.

  Meanwhile Margaret had started on her second novel, determined this time not to send it to Cape. It was a novel called Georgy Girl and was totally fictional, not like her first novel. Several of the women in it were vaguely inspired by some of the good friends she had made while teaching at Barnsbury School, at least the concept of female chums. She even managed to persuade her new publisher, Secker and Warburg, to let one of her friends, the art teacher, Mary Driscoll, to design the cover for the book. Publishers are always being asked by authors to employ their friends or relatives to design a cover – and they always say no.

  Georgy Girl turned out to be the most amazing success – and Tom Maschler, so we were told later, was furious, suspecting that Margaret knew she had a better book in her and had deliberately kept it from him.

  Before publication, film offers were coming in, though the people who bought it, getting in first, were a small company, who then did a deal with a bigger company, so it seemed to take ages before there was any real progress.

  If 1960 was a big year for us, getting married and me joining the Sunday Times, 1965 was running it close. Georgy Girl was published, Margaret’s second novel, and so was my first novel, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush.

  We had our own house and family by now. A shame about Mrs Hall, but she did go off for long spells to stay with her daughter in the USA. And now, with the prospect of some monies to come, we might eventually be able to buy her out.

  It always seems to me, looking back, that what we now describe as the sixties did not come in till 1965. That was when I was really aware that changes in attitudes, culture, styles, and clothes were really happening, at least in London. And I was there. I have a photograph of me with sideboards, granny sun specs and the grandfather buttoned T-shirt vest to prove it. But then so did many thousands of others.

  In the world at large in 1965, which I didn’t really worry about all that much, there was martial law in Rhodesia, with more problems to come. At home, the Labour Government under Wilson was about to instruct local authorities to introduce comprehensive education, which was something I thought an excellent idea. In football, which I was interested in, Sir Stanley Matthews, the first footballer to be knighted while still playing, had his last game in the First Division, aged fifty. The Kray Brothers were arrested, Ronnie Biggs, the Great Train Robber, escaped from Wandsworth prison and then there were the Moors Murders. So loads of fodder for the popular papers in 1965.

  Kenneth Tynan said fuck on live TV, which had them all in a tizzy, but I couldn’t see what the fuss was about. Not that I swore. Never did, nor did Margaret. In fact it is only in the last few years that I’ve taken up swearing – and it’s really good fun. Everyone now does it, from Downing Street to Buckingham Palace. I say fuckinhell all the time, appalling, I know.

  One of the major events of 1965 was the death Sir Winston Churchill. I was among the scores of reporters sent to cover his funeral procession on 30 January 1965. The funeral was a Saturday, so perfect timing for all the Sunday papers. Everyone on the Sunday Times was out that day, office staff, photographers, management, people who had not written a word for years found themselves positioned somewhere on the route.

  Churchill had died six days earlier, on the Monday. His coffin was displayed in Westminster Hall and 321,360 people filed passed it in three days. He was given a state funeral, the first for a politician in the twentieth century. Only politicians in the distant past, like the Duke of Wellington and Gladstone, had been honoured with a state funeral.

  I remember being quite thrilled and excited in 1945 as a child at primary school when Attlee had surprisingly kicked out Churchill and become Prime Minister, joining in with the runny-nosed kids chanting in our street: ‘Vote Vote Vote for Mr Attlee, kick old Churchill up the bum.’ But of course we revered Churchill all the same, and knew he had won the war for us. And he did come back once again as PM, as a very old man, in 1951.

  By the time of his death in 1965, aged ninety, he was hugely admired all over the world, especially in the USA, so his funeral was a massive event. There were 120 different countries represented at the funeral service, the cortege took ages parading round central London, including a river trip, before eventually heading out of the capital to his burial place near Blenheim Palace. The BBC had forty camera crews providing the coverage which was watched by a worldwide audience.

  It was an appalling day, wet and dull, miserable and cold, so uncomfortable for all the hundreds of thousands who had turned out to watch, but I had an enormous piece of luck. I managed to bag a really cushy location – sitting in the Savoy Hotel. I talked the newsdesk into letting me cover it from the Savoy press office, which I knew was at the back of the hotel and looked out over the river. Perfect position to observe the river procession. I often popped into the Savoy on stories, while interviewing famous people who were staying there. In those days, the Savoy and most of the big hotels had gaggles of young debby-type press girls who would issue to their chosen and friendly hacks a weekly list of well-known people who were staying in the hotel. I knew all the lovely press girls who kindly plied me with drinks and sandwiches. Most of my colleagues on the paper were stuck either in massive crowds in the streets, unable to see anything, or marooned on an overcrowded boat on the river, cowering in the cold and rain.

  I wrote a poignant piece which made the front page – in which I, alas, admitted to shedding a few tears. I don’t think it was just due to the huge emotional occasion, as it was for everyone who had lived through the Second World War. I think it was also the fault of the Savoy gels, continually filling up my glass.

  I was worth treating, so they thought. For by 1965 I had at long last been put in charge of the Atticus column. A small event in journalism, but a big event in my life.

  6

  ATTICUS

  Until it happened, I was convinced it never would. I had already started once again to look around for other papers, other jobs. At the Sunday Graphic, when we all knew it was closing, I was sure I would not be moved to the Sunday Times, and had applied for a job on the Sunday Express. I had a friend working there as news editor, John Robson, who had told me how good it was. I got an interview with John Junor, one of the best known editors of the time. He offered me a job on the Sunday Express at £28 a week. I seriously thought about it, but a few weeks later, the call came from the Sunday Times.

  By 1964 I was getting itchy feet again, convinced I was not making progress. Although Nick Tomalin had put my name in the column, I was doing most of the work and felt unappreciated.

  I had talked one day to Jack Lambert, who was the assistant literary editor to Leonard Russell. Jack seemed to do most of the work while Leonard – married to Dilys Powell – seemed to be at home most
of the day, supposedly reading proofs or manuscripts. Jack explained that I had to try to establish myself outside of the office – for that was when they would take notice of you inside the office. He had got himself a minor niche on the radio as a theatre critic, which didn’t seem much of an achievement to me. Having a book published, which I hoped to do soon, that would surely make them take notice on the paper.

  Nick Tomalin was taken off Atticus in the summer of 1964. It happened gradually and I never quite worked out the details. He started going off, officially this time, on various foreign stories, leaving me to run Atticus that week. I used some of his stories in Atticus, giving him a by-line in the middle of the column, but printing my name in bold at the end. But then the weeks went on – and he never came back to Atticus. It slowly transpired that he had become a roving foreign correspondent. After a few months, it was confirmed. I was the new Atticus. Sounds very piddling now, all these decades later, but at the time I could not sleep, driving Margaret mad, trying to work it out, read the signs, worried that I was just holding the fort while some exciting, better connected, better known person was being lined up to come in and take over.

  Having been officially appointed, I was then allowed to hire my own boy assistant, just as I had been the boy assistant to Bob Robinson and then Nick.

  We were already having occasional help from a young freelance Nick had found, just down from Oxford, Tim Heald. He was incredibly quick and confident for one so young and inexperienced. Before ringing someone, I would still sit for ages reading all their cuttings, writing out notes, preparing myself for fear they might be difficult and put the phone down. Tim would just pick up the phone and bash away, ever so smooth and convincing. He was even quicker than me at bashing out copy.