A Life in the Day

by Hunter Davies

  After about five years doing the Father’s Day column every week, Jake started complaining. At his comprehensive, there were several teachers who read Punch and they had started making jocular remarks in passing in the corridor to him, commenting on something I had said he had done. He got furious. He did not know what I had written, and what I had written was probably not quite true anyway. But he certainly did not want attention drawn to himself. Least of all by teachers. He said he didn’t want his name in the column any more.

  If I had given my children soppy names from the beginning, I could have kept them at the same age forever, just as Just William was the same age forever. They would not have been identified or ever complained. But by making them real, they grew up, changed attitudes, and went through different stages.

  I didn’t want to give up the column, as I loved doing it so much, and it was doing well, so to keep Jake happy, for a while I changed his name to Jimmy. Till he forgot about it. Didn’t really fool anyone.

  With Margaret, I decided from the beginning not to use her real name. Instead I referred to her as the Old Trout, which was silly and yucky, demeaning and sexist, so corny, so amateurish. I don’t know why I did it. It was what I had disliked in other people’s columns. When I started referring to her as the Old Trout, I did tell Margaret. She sighed, but had no objections. Eventually letters from readers started coming in complaining about me calling her the Old Trout. She did enjoy that.

  She did criticise the column now and again when I made what I thought were funny remarks but she thought were hurtful. Just a joke, I replied, a tease, surely they can see that. Oh, you always think that, she replied.

  I have noticed over the years that you can’t tell the real character of a columnist or a writer from his or her words. I had a friend on the Sunday Times called Philip Oakes, who was also a poet and novelist. In real life, he was always vitriolic, rubbishing everyone, moaning and groaning, with intense hatreds and jealousies of others, but when he put pen to paper, in a review for example, none of this came out. He was measured and kind. Auberon Waugh was the opposite. He could be a pig on paper, really hurtful, but in real life, in all the times I met him or had meals with him, he was the gentlest, nicest, kindest, and most charming of men.

  I can understand what happens to some people when they pick up the pen. You are trying to draw attention to yourself, amuse or annoy people, have a go at the icons of the day, so you can get carried away. You often come out with remarks and ridicule you don’t actually believe in, or care either way, just for the effects. Usually it is a sign of youth – wanting to make a mark.

  I eventually got invited to join the Punch table. This was an honour in itself. The Punch office, just off Fleet Street, had their own dining room and a huge, ancient wooden table, going back to its beginnings in the 1840s. Over the decades, distinguished writers and contributors, such as Thackeray, had carved their initials on the table. In his case, WMT. When Alan invited someone to be a member of the Punch Table, you not only got a free slap-up meal with loads of wine once a month on a Friday, but you got to carve your initials on the table. So I got to carve HD. Wasn’t going to make it EHD, was I, and give away my real first name.

  There were usually about twenty people at the lunches, most of them regular staff and columnists, but there were always two or three eminent outside guests, invited by Alan.

  The two funniest people I have met in my lifetime, listened to with admiration and guffaws and amazement, were Peter Cook and Alan Coren. They were so inventive, so clever, so funny. When they were on a roll, letting their imagination spin, creating a verbal fantasy, making up stories and scenes which appeared to be all over the place but always had an ending, you wondered how one small brain could be so fertile. Peter did comic voices as well, which Alan did not do. Alan was more literary, more intellectual. I was in awe of both of them, wished I could be as verbally amusing. Peter’s life was tragic in the end, wasting his talents by drinking. Alan, deep down, so I always believed, really wanted to be a novelist, or possibly a TV personality. He never quite managed either – but as a humorist, a columnist and an editor, he was exceptional. Alan died in 2007, due to cancer. Were he alive today, I know he would be immensely proud of his two children who have become media stars in their own fields – Giles Coren and Victoria Coren Mitchell.

  My Father’s Day column acquired a fairly large following in staff rooms, junior common rooms, sixth forms. I would get invited all the time to address college unions, but rarely went.

  Three collections of the columns appeared in book form. Even more surprising, they became a TV series. When the rights were bought, I thought it was dopey; no one could turn silly little articles into a TV series. So I refused to do the scripts. Instead they got one of the star TV writers of the time, Peter Spence, who had just had a big success with writing To the Manor Born.

  By a strange coincidence, the actor who played the part of me in the series, which ran for two years, was John Alderton. He was the actor whom Tony Palmer and I had chosen to be the lead in our film of The Rise and Fall of Jake Sullivan. Which never got made. In the TV series of Father’s Day, one of John Alderton’s own children acted the part of one of his daughters.

  The series ran in Punch for ten years, by which time the magazine was coming towards its end, its sales and influence diminishing. It finally closed in 2002. It had been for so long a great publication, a national institution with a great history and the most incredible archive of cartoons, illustrations and articles.

  One of the reasons I finally gave up was that I was beginning to run out of copy. By using their real names and real lives, I had done myself out of a job, which I might have kept going forever if I had kept them ageless. One by one they grew up and eventually left home. You can’t really write about your children if you haven’t got children around you any more.

  I had another column, about the same time, which also ran for almost ten years. Very few people read it at the time – and probably won’t even remember it now. It was in Stamp News.

  When my Sunday-morning football career was coming to an end, on getting towards fifty, I could still play football but no longer recover from playing football. I was knackered or injured all the time. I started looking around for another weekend activity, to use up my energy and act as a distraction. So I became a born-again stamp collector. Didn’t need a lot of energy, but it did get me out of the house.

  Once I started, haunting all the stamp fairs and stalls, I began writing in Stamp News. They used to boast it was the world’s only humour column about stamps. Not a great deal of competition. It came out as a book with my friend and neighbour, Wally Fawkes (cartoonist, clarinet player and creator of Fluke in the Daily Mail), doing the cover drawing.

  For a couple of years I was a football columnist on the Independent and also had a personal column in the Independent on Sunday. The editor at the time was Ian Jack, an old friend of mine from our Sunday Times days.

  He arrived at our house very early one Sunday morning, before the Independent on Sunday had arrived, and stood there nervous and hesitant. I invited him in, gave him a cup of coffee. He said he was sorry I was not in the paper.

  ‘Oh really,’ I replied. ‘Not seen the paper yet.’

  These things happen in newspapers, so I wasn’t too worried by what he had just said. If papers suddenly lose adverts and lose pages, or something big happens, columns can get chucked out.

  ‘In fact I am afraid you won’t be appearing in the paper again . . .’

  I had been sacked. Obviously my column was not quite good enough, but I never quite found out the specific reason why it had happened then, though Ian did mumble something about the women on the staff complaining there were too many male columnists. Ian seemed more upset than I was, having to sack an old friend. I thanked him for coming to tell me personally, and being so civilised, and we remained friends.

  I also got the sack from the Evening Standard. I had been doing a column there for about
two years. They had a different columnist every evening, one of whom was Beryl Bainbridge. I think she did Wednesday and I did Tuesday. She often rang me saying what shall I write about, you know how to do these columns, I am a novelist, you are a proper journalist, I don’t know what to write, help me please.

  So I would talk to her, find out what she had been doing that week, and suggest a topic. Not that she always used it, but it did get her thinking.

  Then blow me, I got the sack. And Beryl didn’t.

  I never got to the bottom of that sacking either. I thought perhaps it was to do with the fact that two weeks running I wrote about comprehensives. I was meant to keep off anything political.

  The strangest sacking I ever experienced happened when we were in the Lake District. We were up there for the summer when I got a call from the Mail on Sunday. It was Jocelyn Targett, the editor of the section where I was writing about TV. He was the one who had hired me, rung me out of the blue in 1993 and asked me to be the paper’s TV critic. I said I didn’t watch TV, just the football. He said perfect, that’s what I want, a fresh view.

  I did not actually have to sit down and watch TV. I got posted, several weeks in advance, videos of upcoming programmes, or I could ask for programmes to be sent to me. I could therefore watch at my leisure and convenience, and only go for those I felt I would write something amusing about. So it was easy and fun to do. For about a year it seemed to have gone well.

  That week I happened to say in the column that I had been watching EastEnders – for the first time ever. The editor in chief of the Mail, David English, was so annoyed by this, appalled that his TV critic should never have seen EastEnders, that he ordered Jocelyn to sack me.

  Jocelyn had recently sacked someone else. It had turned very awkward and embarrassing because this person had found out he was going to be sacked before Jocelyn had actually told him. He stormed into Jocelyn’s office, complained about the awful way he had been treated, others knowing he was going to be fired.

  Jocelyn had vowed to himself, there and then, that if he ever had to sack anyone again, he would make sure no one else knew until he had told the person concerned, face to face. When he rang me, wanting to see me, face to face, he did not know of course that I was in the Lake District. He was a bit taken aback, paused for a bit, then said don’t worry, I will come and see you tomorrow.

  I said oh don’t come all this way, surely you can tell me on the phone, whatever it is you want to say. He said no, he had to see me, it was urgent.

  I began to think, hmm, must be something exciting, if he is prepared to come 300 miles to tell me. Perhaps I am going to be offered a really fab job.

  Next day he arrived in his chauffeur-driven Jaguar, which was steaming as the driver went the wrong way and got stuck in all the tourist hot spots. Jocelyn stepped out. I introduced Margaret to him. He said he did not want to speak in front of her, so could we go somewhere. We walked down to the lake, he said he was sacking me, got back in the car and was driven the 300 miles back to London.

  I was totally stunned. At the time, he gave me no reason. It was only some time later I heard about the background, about never having seen EastEnders, and the big boss demanding I got the sack.

  When you are being sacked, I always feel it is bad form to ask why. It makes you appear pitiful and pleading, as if asking for mercy. By not asking, or complaining, you don’t get into arguments, which you can’t win. The reason for getting rid of you is not always logical anyway, especially in journalism. Your face or your tone does not fit. They have someone better or cheaper in mind. Just accept it. You are not going to be able to change the decision. Better to feel sorry for the person having to sack you – and then think their turn will come. And when it happens to them, they probably won’t have other sources, other outlets, as I had, poor sods, they’ll learn.

  I did get the push from the Guardian once, but at least they explained why. I did a column every week for a year in their Saturday Weekend magazine about my various collections. It got a good display, I was so pleased with it, a whole page, with a nice photo of one of my treasures. My line editor was a friend of mine who lived locally and had gone to school with my sister’s children in Leighton Buzzard. We had got on so well.

  Alas, the editor of the mag, whom I had never met, said that’s it Hunt, your time is up, thank you and goodbye. The reason she gave made sense. She had to lose £100,000 from her budget and ten pages. One of her economies was to sack two of the better paid contributors, which were me and Stephen Fry. He had been doing a techy column, on new gadgets. It was a satisfying, soothing, explanation, whether the real truth or not. Didn’t suggest I was rubbish or the readers had gone off me.

  As I write, I have got three regular columns. Although of course I might have been sacked from all of them by the time I finish this book. Or even finished this sentence. Two have been going for twenty years and one for almost ten years, so I hope they will be civilised when the time comes to have cuts and send me on my way. Which happens all the time these days, in all walks of life. Not like the sixties, eh. We assumed then we had a job for life, whatever it was.

  It was in 1996 I started doing a football column called The Fan in the New Statesman. Since then, I have done it every week in the football season. These days the football season lasts almost the whole year, especially if there is a World Cup that year or a Euro. Despite having done it for over twenty years, I still meet people who are surprised. They assume that the NS is mainly a political mag, not aware of its arts and culture coverage.

  As with all my columns, it is personal, as much about me as the football itself. I like to think I have a theme each week, from haircuts to football history, but I muck around, till I get to whatever point I am trying to make. Often, when I read it in the mag on a Friday, I think, what is he on about?

  Spurs is still my team, but I also go to Arsenal. I have lots of friends and neighbours with Arsenal season tickets who usually have one spare. I also watch every game possible on TV, having subscriptions to every known football channel.

  I write the column on a Sunday, after the last game of the weekend, and send it in on Monday morning. It doesn’t appear in the shops or through letterboxes till Friday, which means I can’t really do anything too topical. By Friday, everything can have changed, my predictions looking really stupid.

  I have had four different NS editors, three of whom were not really interested in football, just thought it should be covered as a subject. The middle-class professionals and intellectuals love footer these days, far more than they ever did in the past. I am always surprised by how many QCs I find myself sitting beside at Arsenal.

  The present editor, Jason Cowley, as I write, is a football fan and has written a lot about the game which is useful and he sends me nice notes when he likes something, which none of the other editors did. On the other hand, he knows when I am talking bollocks.

  My Sunday Times column in the Money section has been running since 1998. It now gets a good postbag, with readers saying they read it every week. Funny how people get these things wrong. It appears only once every four weeks.

  I don’t do Twitter or have a blog or log in to see what readers are saying, but I know without knowing it that most people who write in reply to newspaper columns don’t read them properly. They jump on things out of context, imagine opinions and language you never used, or confuse you with someone writing in a totally different publication.

  Writing about money was a total departure for me, a subject I have always been interested in but about which I know very little, not in the technical sense, never having invested in shares. Twenty years ago I wrote a piece in the Evening Standard rubbishing pension funds, saying annuities were a con. I had just discovered that my large, self-funded pension pot with the Equitable Life would disappear totally when I died. My fault, not realising. Much better to invest in property, which is what I was advising my children to do, if they ever got any spare money.

  The then editor of
the Sunday Times, John Witherow, then asked if I could do some personal pieces for the Money section. I said I would only do it monthly, as I feared I would not find enough topics for a weekly column. It was called Me and My Money at first but one day, phoning it in, which shows you how long it has been running, a sub editor misheard and thought I had said Mean With Money. He made that the heading on the column that week. Which fitted it much better.

  My running theme is how mean I am, how I love bargains and cheap fruit from street stalls, even when I have to wipe the mould off. All true. But of course not the real truth. I am of course amazingly generous and spendthrift – when it comes to big sums or big treats for myself.

  During the twenty years, I have had five different editors of the Money section. Some of whom, I suspect, have not been fans of the column. They think everything in Money should be useful and helpful, written by experts. My column was often held over, if space was tight, which made me livid and mucked up my working life. I have every deadline for a year ahead written in bold in my diary and I like to think I am never late.

  The present editor, Becky Barrow, as I write, which you always have to say, is a total professional, a real journalist, and a real enthusiast. She will also suggest topics, which previous editors never did. As an old hack, I am more than willing to oblige.

  My third current column is also a monthly column. It appears in Cumbria Life, a very high-class, glossy, excellent county magazine. I began writing that in 2008. Again, it is personal, but of course it always in some way has to be connected with Cumbria.

  I am surprised the three columns have been running for so long, though I know at any moment I could be surplus to requirements. I also do around six travel pieces a year for the Mail on Sunday, and have done so for about twenty years. The travel editor, Frank Barrett, is an old friend of mine. It does pay have to friends.