A Life in the Day

by Hunter Davies

  I don’t know how I talked Margaret into it. Probably the same way I talked myself into it. Going abroad would be fun, an adventure, if we don’t do it now, we never will, so let’s go.

  Health reasons, that was one of the things I told people. Which was true. I was knackered. For five weeks, in the early stage of the book, and while I was still writing the Atticus column, I had collapsed with jaundice. I lay in bed downstairs in the little back bedroom, where Jake was born. I moaned and groaned, turned yellow, lost pounds. Except strangely enough, I did not lose my taste for alcohol, which was what everyone said would happen when you have jaundice. I drank all the way through – and maintained that was why I recovered fairly quickly and started to put on weight again.

  I was visited one day when I was still in bed by Michael Bateman, a local journalist friend I had made at Durham, who had told me about the graduate training schemes, one of which he had joined from Oxford. It was thanks to him I had applied to Kemsley. He was now in London, as a freelance journalist, and I was getting him work on the Sunday Times.

  He arrived one day with a large bunch of something for me – which, when he took it from behind his back, was revealed to be a cabbage. I laughed so much I thought I was going to be sick. He was rather hurt. It was not a joke, or silly. It was a genuine, carefully thought-out present – some unusual form of cabbage with health-giving qualities for invalids. He had become a total foodie by then, not just cooking stuff, but investigating and researching all forms of food. I had never met a foodie before. Food is what you eat, at meal time, that’s it. Michael was not just obsessed by everything to do with food, where it came from, how it was grown or made, but had a fantasy of making a journalistic career out of writing about it. Not recipes. People have done recipes for centuries. But food as a subject, like politics or sport.

  Caitlin and Jake were just four and two by this time – which was another rationale for going abroad. They were not yet at primary school, so perfect time to expose them to different cultures, before they started full-time school. When we came back, they would have missed very little, because Margaret would teach them while we were abroad. That was the plan, as I outlined it to Margaret.

  Another reason for going off for a year was realising a fantasy, one which so many people have, especially in writing and journalism. I had heard so many people on the Sunday Times and in Fleet Street generally chuntering on with the same sort of lines: ‘Oh if only I could make a killing on a book, or even get a half-decent advance, I will be off, no question, catch me hanging around horrible old Gray’s Inn Road or rainy London any more. I will be off writing in the sun, oh yes, no question . . .’

  With both of us now being writers, we could in theory go off and live anywhere in the world. Even in those days, without computers and the internet, everyone knew that writers could go anywhere, and still work, still be employed, still send their stuff in.

  We had in fact never had this fantasy of going off to the sun, not the way so many of our contemporaries had it. We had been so busy for the last eight years, enjoying so much what we were doing, and just wanted it to go on. But during the awful winter of 1967, it had come into our heads that when I finished the Beatles book, we were now among the few fortunate people who need not be here, so yes, we could be on a tropical beach. See what it was like.

  Then there was the attraction of doing it – in order to have done it, to have got it over. Coming back, we would have had the experience, and still be young, with most of our life still ahead of us. Didn’t that sound attractive? Why wait for years, putting it off, till we might be too old. Then wouldn’t it be awful, if we didn’t like it when we did try it, having waited so long.

  So, let’s do it now, get it over with.

  Those were all the reasons I trotted out, to myself, to Margaret and to anyone who asked. All true, all real. But I have to admit in all honesty, gritting my teeth, that what really sparked it off, to go off for a year, at that particular time, at that particular stage in our lives, was the financial element.

  It was my accountant, at least the one I had at the time and later left for other reasons, who first suggested it. Many British writers and actors had been doing it for some time, going to live abroad for tax reasons, such as Noël Coward. More recently Desmond Morris, after the success of one particular book, had gone off to live in Malta. In fact I did a whole Atticus column one week about all the tax exiles in Switzerland. No one really criticised them, only when they pretended they had not gone for any financial reasons. Most people accepted that they would probably have done the same, in their position.

  We did not want to emigrate, leave the UK, as we liked it here. All our relations were here, we loved our house, the area. And I did not want to set up a company abroad, which some people had suggested. I did not want people I didn’t know handling my money. Brian Epstein had done this: losing £1 million in some dodgy bank in the Bahamas. He was too ashamed to admit it to the Beatles. His image in their eyes, so he thought, was that of an awfully smart businessman.

  Our accountant explained that you need not set up a company, nor go abroad for more than a year and a day. That would be enough. He had taken advice, gone to counsel. As long as you had a good reason to go abroad. Which I had, as the paper’s roaming features writer.

  The biggest argument, which was one I never admitted at the time, was tax. Looking back, it now seems unbelievable. Tax, at the top rate, was 98 per cent. I still can hardy credit that figure, but that was what you paid on unearned income over a certain level. It crippled anyone who happened to have a good run, making it all meaningless.

  We were already on a good run, and paying the top rates, long before the Beatles money. Most of our books had had only modest advances, but over the last two years we had had this remarkable period in which we had a film each, which greatly increased our paperback sales.

  The advance I personally got for the Beatles book, of £2,000 (as one third of the £3,000 went to the Beatles), had initially made little difference to our lives. Then suddenly, at final proof stage, before it was published, there had been an auction in the USA for the American rights, handled by Curtis Brown. All the main US publishers made offers and it went to McGraw-Hill for $150,000. I wanted to keep this quiet. It was so obscene, so mad, but it leaked out in the USA.

  It meant that now for a short period we were likely to make more money than we would obviously ever make again in our whole lives. The accountant pointed out that it was therefore only prudent and sensible to protect what we had, in order to provide for the leaner years which were bound to be ahead. It seemed clear we could never possibly be as fortunate in the future.

  We should of course, if we had been smart and really mercenary, gone abroad two years earlier when the good run had started. We had already paid a lot of tax, with more to be paid that tax year, but if we spent the next year abroad, legally and correctly and properly, going to live and work in another country, we would make tax savings on any monies that came in during that particular year. Though of course the exact amount was not quite certain.

  We had not had a Year Abroad on our bucket list when we first married in 1960. That was topped by a bed, a bureau, a car and then a house and children. All of which we had done. This chance, to go abroad, had been unexpected. So why not? What an adventure!

  We thought of California, but decided it was too far away. If our parents were ill, it would take a long time to rush back. Europe sounded more sensible. We thought of the South of France, but decided our French was not up to it, despite Margaret’s spell as an au pair in Bordeaux. And I did fail my French O-level. Not my fault. That dopey teacher at the Creighton School for Boys. It wasn’t till I was at the Grammar school that I successfully re-sat it. But I was still rubbish.

  In the end we chose Gozo, the little sister island of Malta, for reasons I cannot quite remember and were not totally clear even at the time. They spoke English, which was one reason. The hospitals were supposed to be good, another attr
action. Jake at that age was endlessly doing stupid things, falling and cutting himself, so we felt we must be near decent medical help.

  A friend of a friend who worked at the BBC, hearing we were thinking of going abroad for a year, arrived and showed us a little Super 8 video of a house on a beach he had to rent in Gozo. It looked charming. We and the children could go straight into the sea every morning before breakfast. So we signed the rental agreement. And off we went, renting out our London house for a year to a New Zealand dentist.

  I staggered onto the plane, helped by the attendants. I had recovered from the jaundice but had now caught pneumonia. All those books and projects in the last couple of years, while still doing the day job, had taken their toll and weakened my puny body. In 1968 I was only 10 stone and still getting lost in 32-inch waist trousers. Yet another good reason to go off to the sun. Obviously. (Today I am 12 stone and last week I bought new shorts with a 38-inch waist. Oh Lord.)

  When we arrived in Gozo, it was to find that we couldn’t get the house on the beach we had been promised. The present occupant would not leave. Our BBC friend offered us another one, which he also owned, saying it was just as nice. Except it turned out to be inland. It was miles from a beach and would mean we would have to drive there every time. I hate driving and Margaret refused to learn.

  We never really took to Gozo, perhaps put off by that disappointment of not getting the house we had fantasised about. We did like Comino, an even smaller island nearby, which had a nice hotel and quiet beaches.

  But Gozo’s social life was interesting, when we eventually discovered it. There was an extensive expat gay community, British bachelors of a certain age, mostly very discreet, well bred, who had left their constrained lives in England, and their families, to be themselves in the sun. They were all excellent foodies and gave good parties. One or two of them, though, fled the island before they had paid all their lobster bills, which gave the Brits and gays a bad name.

  While we were there, the Archbishop of Gozo decreed that men and women could not dance together in bars. I assume this was to restrict males and females getting too intimate in public. But he did not ban men dancing with men. Which of course was great news for all our bachelor friends.

  We became friends with a young Englishman called Trevor Nunn who suddenly arrived next door to our house. He was on holiday with a girlfriend. After a few days, and a few drinks, he swore us to secrecy about the fact that he had just been appointed artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company at the incredibly young age of twenty-eight. It would not be announced till he returned to England.

  Jonathan Aitken, later a Tory MP, came to stay with us. This was in order to write a piece for the London Evening Standard about us, two so-called Young Meteors, escaping to the sun. Our children were continually trying to get into the shower with Jonathan, in order to see him naked. It was an open-air shower, with no door, just a screen.

  Over drinks one evening I tried to get him to confess that he had had an affair with Antonia Fraser. This had been talked about in London before we had left. Naturally, he refused to be drawn, being such a well-bred gentleman.

  I stupidly confirmed to him, showing off, that the US advance for the Beatles book was officially $150,000. But I stressed that was the total USA sum, not what I would personally get. The Beatles got a third and there were lots of agents. In the piece, that was not made clear. In fact the headline said I would earn £150,000, which was a figure that haunted me for years.

  In his article, he quoted Margaret as saying that ‘at least the Beatles book has got Hunter over his inferiority complex’. Margaret had no memory of saying that to him, nor did I hear her say it, but it sounds like her. And it was partly true. While she was at Oxford, and in my early years on the Sunday Times, I had felt slightly paranoid, intellectually and socially.

  Over the years, over the cocoa late at night, sometimes almost ten o’clock, when the subject of me had come up, not sure how, Margaret – who never talked about herself – often said that I had always been pushy, cocky, always with both elbows out, full of confidence, showing off. I was always hurt by that. It was not my memory of myself. Oh goodness, do we ever know the truth about ourselves? Or how we are perceived, what other people really think of us?

  After six months in Gozo, we moved to Portugal. We had been moaning about Gozo on a beach one day to some Brits and they said try Portugal, you’ll love it.

  So we rented a converted sardine factory on the beach at Praia da Luz, near Lagos. There were no modern developments, no clubs or estates. We arrived in October 1968, the summer season was over, and so we had the beach to ourselves. We immediately fell in love with Portugal. The beaches were lovely, the food and wine wonderful, the culture seemed richer, deeper.

  We made a very good friend of an elderly literary lady who lived next door, Alison Hooper. She appeared very haughty, clipped, blue stocking, buttoned-up but, as is often the case with such fearsome-looking women, she was full of hidden passions and hatred, keeping us endlessly amused with awful gossip about her enemies – and friends. She introduced us to all her friends, both expat and Portuguese. In Gozo, we had not got to know any of the local Maltese.

  Mainly of course we mixed with the British expats, as we had in Gozo. This time there were a lot of colonial types who had fled from Africa. They considered Britain was the pits, hated Harold Wilson, the country had gone to the dogs, full of socialists, they would never go back. They had of course hardly ever lived in the UK. They were the sort of right-wing people we would have run a mile from in England, but thrown up against them in a foreign land, and keeping off politics, they were amusing and generous and sociable.

  Alison was a Cambridge graduate, one of the first women, and had had a fairly racy life. During the war she had worked on Lilliput when it had been a literary magazine. She had had lots of lovers in her time, some quite well known, especially during the war.

  I have talked to several women over the years who boasted about the good times they had during the war, getting drunk, sleeping around. It used to make me quite jealous, thinking that the young adults of the thirties and forties seemed to have had a freer, more liberated, more fun time than us in the fifties and sixties. Apart of course from the war.

  Alison had a gentleman friend, the Brigadier, who came to visit her every few weeks, parking his camper van in her drive. She moaned every time he was due, saying what a bore, but we noticed that at night the lights would go off in his camper van and go on in Alison’s bedroom. Could they be at it? Surely not. She must have been in her sixties and he seventy. Clearly impossible. So we thought, aged thirty.

  We invited him for drinks one evening, along with Alison, and he arrived in yellow corduroys. It was the first time I had encountered this fashion among upper-class county and ex-military gents. They are otherwise conservatively attired, but have a passion for ill-fitting, luridly coloured corduroys in bright green, flaming red, startling yellow, screaming purple. It is an affectation which goes on to this day.

  Alison had a dog called Homer – Homy Hooper – whom she shouted at all the time. I often think people have dogs to shout at them and not be shouted at back. She loved Margaret dearly, and me, but had no interest in our children, dismissing all young kids as ankle biters.

  She had had one well-received book published, a semi-autobiographical novel under a pseudonym, and several short stories. She wrote something every day, but without being published again, complaining about the present day publishing establishment, how lucky we were to get published so easily.

  When she popped in to see us, she always brought tasteful, artistic presents – hand-painted plates, bits of furniture, fruit and wine. Now that I too am old, I always make a point of bringing something whenever I am invited anywhere, especially by younger people, and I think back to Alison in the Algarve in 1968 and how kind and generous she was to us.

  She had a beautiful large antique desk, roll-top with lots of little cubbyholes and secret dra
wers, which Margaret always admired. When Alison died, about ten years later, Margaret discovered, to her surprise, that she had been left Alison’s desk. By this time we had no need in our house for further furniture and anyway could not face transporting it from Praia da Luz to London. So we arranged for it to be sold at an auction house in Lagos – and the proceeds to go to a local charity. A shame, really. I imagined Alison imagined Margaret writing on it for many decades to come.

  In the middle of one night, Paul McCartney arrived with his new girlfriend, Linda, whom we had never met. When we left London he had been engaged to Jane Asher and we thought they made a very good couple. They had with them a girl called Heather, aged about eight, who was Linda’s daughter by a previous relationship.

  That evening in London, Paul had suddenly thought it would be a good idea to take his new girlfriend and her daughter to see us, as he knew we had young children, having been to our house. All service flights to Faro had gone, so he told Neil, their roadie, to hire a private jet. Which was why they arrived in the middle of the night.

  We might well have not been in, or had even left Portugal, gone somewhere else. They had not rung, for we did not have a phone, nor had they written. Typical Paul. He would not have been fazed if we had not been there, seeing it as an adventure, take life as it comes, let it all hang out.

  When he arrived, out of the blue, at two in the morning, he had no money and an irate taxi driver who had driven them 80 kilometres from Faro airport. Paul had landed at Faro with a £50 note, but had given it to someone to change for escudos. Then he noticed a taxi driver, waved him across, and jumped into his taxi, forgetting to pick up his currency.

  They stayed for two weeks. At first we had assumed Linda was a groupie, a one-night stand, who appeared to be hanging on to him all the time, but as we got to know her, we realised she was a strong character, better for Paul than we had imagined.