In my efforts to live up to the Peter De Vries maxim, I took various “mainstream” jobs, from being a freelance researcher for the “Insight” team at Harold Evans’s Sunday Times (then at its zenith), to working at the newly formed London Weekend Television, to being a correspondent for the Daily Express and a part-time editorial or “leader”-writer for the old Evening Standard. This makes me one of the last of those who can say that they worked for “Beaverbrook Newspapers”: the famous old racket, half-magic and half-criminal, that was preserved forever in Evelyn Waugh’s portrayal of The Daily Beast. Writing my own introduction to the Penguin edition of Scoop, I said of Waugh’s Fleet Street masterpiece that it perfectly evoked both the fugitive glamour of the business—that pseudo-deco black-glass palace on Fleet Street from which one might take a taxi at short notice to the airport, clutching a brick of traveler’s checks, with an exotic visa in one’s old blue-gold hardback British passport (“The Street of Adventure”)—as well as its irredeemable squalor (“The Street of Shame”). Here is how Waugh introduces a group of veteran British hacks met in some dismal overseas bar:
Shumble, Whelper and Pigge knew Corker; they had loitered of old on many a doorstep and forced an entry into many a stricken home…
I once had a drink with an Express veteran, his face richly veined and seamed with grog-blossom, in the old Punch Tavern opposite the offices, while he explained to me the etiquette of stricken-home violation. The bereaved generally liked to offer a cup of tea, he said, out of immemorial working-class courtesy. Thus, when extracting the maximum of tragedy from the relatives of a recent victim—be it of crime or fire or plane crash—it was always important to take along a colleague. “He offers to help them out in the kitchen while they put the kettle on, and that gives you a nice time to slip into the front room and collar the family photos from off the mantelpiece.” Lest I seem to pretend to have been shocked by this, I freely admit that the unofficial motto of our foreign correspondent’s desk was, when setting off to some scene of mass graves and riven societies, “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?” In Martin Amis’s novel of Fleet Street, Yellow Dog, you might think that the contempt shown by the reporters for both their subjects and their readers is overdone, but you would be wrong.[25]
In many ways journalism was the ideal profession for someone like myself who was drawn to the Janus-faced mode of life. Did I say “profession”? There is something about the craft and practice (better words for it) that is naturally two-faced. One has to pretend to be at least formally polite to the politicians one interviews; one has to be civil and smiling and curious when sitting with criminal lunatic “freedom fighters” and crazed, aphasic dictators.
I can give an example of this from the formative days of my own career in the media racket. In the early 1970s, in what had once been called “the jewel of Africa,” there was a state-sponsored pogrom against Ugandans of Asian descent, who were first dispossessed and then deported. The man responsible was the almost pornographically wicked figure Idi Amin (later to become an exiled guest in Saudi Arabia as a heroic son of Islam). His bigotry and greed were two aspects of the same rampant disorder: he wanted the assets of the Asian business community as his political spoil, and he also wanted to be the man who “Africanized” his unhappy country by ethnic cleansing. Most of the Asians had British passports, though it had never been thought that they would employ them for the crassly tactless purpose of (say) coming to live in the United Kingdom. When they did exercise this small legal privilege, there was quite a strong racist reaction to their arrival. One of those who was most demagogic on the point was Sir Oswald Mosley, an ageing figure to whom there still clung the authentic stench of the 1930s, when he had been the black-shirted leader of the British Union of Fascists. Since the end of the Second World War, he had chosen to live in Paris. As it happened, my very amateur network of intelligence and information brought me the news that the old would-be dictator was in London and staying at the Ritz. I decided to see if he would come on the television show for which I was then a researcher and cub reporter.
The first part was easy: I established that he was indeed at the Ritz and that he was willing to be interviewed. The second bit was slightly more difficult: Was I not having to be civil to a man who had had Josef Goebbels as the best man at his wedding to Lady Diana Mitford, with Adolf Hitler (who gave the happy couple a framed portrait of himself as a nuptial gift) in attendance as guest of honor? I decided that the problem could be resolved in the following way: the opportunity was too good to miss but there the formalities ended. I would send him a car, and would greet him in the lobby, but would not extend my hand when he arrived. I rehearsed the moment many times, waking and sleeping, until the limousine drew up and the now-silvered and bull-like figure of the old bastard began to emerge. Somehow I found I was putting out my own hand first and saying: “Sir Oswald, how very good of you to come.” In what seemed a volitionless state, I then conducted him to the hospitality suite and poured him a drink.
I can justify this if you like. (It occurs to me now that I could also have justified it then, since Mosley was the model for Sir Roderick Spode, the brutish and ridiculous leader of the “Black Shorts” movement in P.G. Wodehouse’s 1938 masterpiece The Code of the Woosters, and one doesn’t get many chances to meet such an original. But I was far too solemn for that in those days.) Instead, I justified myself tactically. From our ensuing chat I learned that he had never dreaded the Marxist hecklers of the Thirties who had hurled rocks and vegetation at him. The most disconcerting tactic of the Left, he informed me, had been to occupy the first few rows of seats in a town hall and then, as he began speaking, to open newspapers and bury their faces in the pages. It’s somehow very hard to whip up a crowd when the front-row seats are thus otherwise engaged. He carried on in this urbane and confessional manner until it was time to put him on the set and begin the serious business. As soon as the studio lights came up and the camera’s light began winking red, he seemed to shrug off his previous character and style and to become suddenly lean and hawklike as of yore. The whole timbre of his voice altered, and to the interviewer’s first question on Ugandan Asian immigration he returned a rasping, sneering answer that summoned all the old echoes of race and nation. Thus, green and untried as I was, I had the opportunity to notice in one hour what many members of the British upper class had been unable to bring themselves to see in the 1930s: there was one Mosley who acted in a fairly civilized and even amusing way in the drawing rooms and country houses, and another whose relish it was to go down to the slums of the East End and get all dirtied up with those who were so base and stupid as to think that their lives would improve if they were not afflicted with Jewish neighbors.
How I managed the conclusion of the thing I can’t now recall: perhaps I was proud and heroic enough to decline a handshake as Sir Oswald departed. Anyway, it taught me that the moral attitudes that one strikes are often devoid of any significance.[26]
This was all in “the Seventies.” When exactly did we begin to periodize by decades instead of, say, by reigns? Did people in the Thirties know that they were going to be historically collectivized in that way? There were no noughts or tens in the twentieth century, which went straight from Edwardian to the Great War. Hints of an idea of “the Twenties” had been contained in the concept of the Jazz Age. In the spring of 1968 I do remember a revolutionary speaker on the pavement outside the London School of Economics referring to a year that might one day be matched with 1848 and 1917, and we did have a sort of consciousness of living in “the Sixties” while they were still going on. But the Seventies were only the Seventies because they had to have a name. Nullity and anticlimax appeared to close in on all sides. And so did certain kinds of nastiness, often composed of, or distilled from, the worst of the Sixties. The television HQ to which I had invited Mosley was situated in a new high-rise on the South Bank of the Thames, with a commanding view of London. Looking out of one of its higher windows after lunch one day, I f
irst saw and then heard a huge explosion. It seemed to be located somewhere near St. Paul’s Cathedral. What I had just seen—and was to be seeing at street level within the hour—was the first Irish Republican Army car bomb to detonate on the British mainland. The “target” had been the Old Bailey: the country’s supreme court.
I had always been opposed to the partition of Ireland and a strong supporter of the civil rights movement against the Orange sectarian ministate that embodied the petrified, stagnant outcomes of that old and cruel division. My outfit, the International Socialists, had been involved at an early stage in the nonsectarian protests and marches and strikes that had challenged the Ulster “Six County” rump system. Many was the evening, especially after the “Bloody Sunday” massacre by British troops in Derry, and after Britain’s imposition of internment, better known as imprisonment without trial (but with some torture), that I had spent in Irish pubs and clubs, making speeches and organizing protests. As a journalist, also, I started visiting Belfast and Derry and Newry and had my first experience of seeing shots fired in anger, as well as nail bombs thrown and gasoline bombs too. As one brought up inside the protective womb of the Royal Navy and its bases, it felt very strange to me to see the British Army patrolling streets that were at least constitutionally “British,” but while wearing the visors and helmets of occupying space aliens. That was one distinct oddity. The other—in a city like Belfast where there had been almost no Commonwealth immigration—was that if one saw a black face it was almost invariably the face of a British soldier. (Some of the taunts from angry old ladies in Republican slum districts did not fail to make use of this striking contrast. “What’ll you do with it, then, soldier boy?” shrilled one banshee as a young squaddie from Barbados flourished a “rubber bullet”: a crowd-control device that resembled a Coke bottle sculpted in black. “Post it to your focken wife?” I never forgot the look of hurt on his face.)
With James Fenton (whom I had eventually succeeded in recruiting to the International Socialists) I made a few trips to Northern Ireland and collaborated on an article or two for the New Statesman. (One of these carried our joint byline: something that still gives me great pride in retrospect.) Our own polemics were of course staunchly nonsectarian, stressing the contribution of Irish Protestants like Wolfe Tone to the long tradition of republicanism, and laying emphasis on historic Irish socialists like James Connolly and Jim Larkin. In the squalid and cramped back streets around the Belfast shipyards, it seemed to us, no better illustration could be found of the need for working people to forget their confessional and national differences and unite in a brotherly fashion. But to say that such appeals failed to achieve locomotive force among the masses would be to understate the case to an almost heroic degree.
I eventually came to appreciate a feature of the situation that has since helped me to understand similar obduracy in Lebanon, Gaza, Cyprus, and several other spots. The local leaderships that are generated by the “troubles” in such places do not want there to be a solution. A solution would mean that they were no longer deferred to by visiting UN or American mediators, no longer invited to ritzy high-profile international conferences, no longer treated with deference by the mass media, and no longer able to make a second living by smuggling and protection-racketeering. The power of this parasitic class was what protracted the fighting in Northern Ireland for years and years after it had become obvious to all that nobody (except the racketeers) could “win.” And when it was over, far too many of the racketeers became profiteers of the “peace process” as well.
No, what got people going in Belfast in the early 1970s was not humanism and solidarity but rather violence, cruelty, conspiracy, bigotry, alcohol, and organized crime.[27] I did in fact make friends with a few Protestant workers in the Woodvale District who showed some interest in crossing the divide and having speech with their Catholic brethren, but they developed a depressing tendency to wind up in the trunks of bullet-sprayed cars, or sometimes—I think of Ernie Elliot—to be bullet-sprayed before being stuffed into the trunk. This was all brought home to me with singular force when James failed to turn up for a rendezvous that we had made in Andersonstown, a grit-strewn housing estate dominated by the emerging Provisional IRA. He had gone to the agreed pub and sat down to look at some documents about British Army roundups and internments in the area. This was a mistake, arguably a big one. Within minutes, a group had joined him and told him to put his hands on the table, under which a gun was pointing at his midsection. Taken to a filthy house and told to lie on the floor, he was kept for several hours while his captors failed to reach the various people in London who could have vouched that he was indeed a reporter and not a spy or a provocateur. But eventually they let him go, and he wrote quite an amusing account of his brush with terror. This was rendered much less risible a few days later, when in a villainous Belfast tavern I chanced to introduce him to a local reporter with known “republican” connections. “Did you say ‘Fenton’?” breathed this worthy gent. “Did you know they took a vote about what to do with you? It was just six-to-five against shooting you there and then.” That sort of vote was almost the only concept of democracy that some of the denizens of the city were ever able to form. (The woman who had “chaired” the meeting, a haggard crone by the name of Maire Drumm, was later shot in her hospital bed by some no less tender “Ulster Volunteer” Unionist riffraff who were prepared to cross the city’s divide just for the chance to enjoy such an atrocity.)
A reprehensible temptation presented itself at once. In places like this, in contrast to the rather dreary precincts of the British urban and suburban and rural mainland, there was drama to be had, and for the asking. Every night and day there were bombs and gunshots and riots and roundups, and it didn’t take long to gain a little access to the bars and shebeens where these things were discussed with a certain knowingness. One could do this as a political activist or as a journalist or, as in my case, an amateur combination of both. I have to admit that I sometimes found this double life more than just figuratively intoxicating. I was sufficiently furious, after the British Army massacre of demonstrators on Bloody Sunday, that I once shocked Fenton very much by saying that, if an IRA man were to be on the run and needing no more than a bed for the night and not a word spoken, I myself might be ready to furnish the needful. Of course I knew to beware of this vicarious identification with the “authentic.” I had acquired some of that wariness in Cuba. But I hadn’t yet quite learned to stay clear of it consistently. And—to mention another expression that annoyed James so much that I often used it merely to tease him—these encounters on the dark side also supplied “good copy.” In the weirdly beautiful landscapes along the Irish border, most especially in Derry with its haunting evening light along the Waterside and the old walls, and in rainy Belfast with its nineteenth-century slums and yet its permanent view of the lovely surrounding hills, I saw my first “war” without even needing a passport to travel to it.
One is unlikely to forget the first time that one sees violent death, or feels it graze one’s own sleeve. The Europa Hotel in Belfast was for me the first of many journalistic resorts, from the Commodore in Beirut to Meikles in Rhodesia-Zimbabwe to the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo where one was to find “Mahogany Ridge”: the hack shorthand for the Scoop-like bar where so many war stories were told and written. Here was where one might go to meet surreptitious “sources,” to trade tales with rivals and exchange information with friends, to play poker with the employer’s money, to rub shoulders and scrape acquaintance with the fringe elements of the demimondes of terrorism and counterintelligence. One evening, when as it happens I was sincerely entertaining some local trade-union men to a nonsectarian supper, there came the crash of an explosion that was near enough to rattle the glasses. Hastening outside and into the warren of little streets across the road, one saw that a renowned local drink-shop named the Elbow Room was no more. Named as much for its position at the junction of two narrow streets as for the bending of the relevant
arm joint, it had taken the full force of a car bomb that had been parked in a confined space. The resulting blast had blown everything in and then, it seemed by some evil backdraft, sucked everything out again. The mess of beer and whisky and blood and glass was everywhere, as were some huddled objects that made me wince and flinch. I remember best a Belfast fireman, one of those seemingly seven-foot giants in whom the province specialized, coming out from the ruins with a small figure wrapped in a tarpaulin in his arms. He then sat down on what was left of the steps and began to weep. I had that terrible inward feeling that I have since had at bullfights and executions and war scenes, of wanting this to stop while simultaneously wishing it to go on, and wanting to look away while needing to look more closely. Deciding that the man must be cradling a murdered child, I was bizarrely taken aback to find that he was in fact sobbing over a hopelessly mangled dog. And a Belfast fireman must by then have been exposed to quite a lot…
My own case was much less dramatic but still very vivid to me. Coming back to the Europa one night from checking casualties at the Royal Victoria Hospital, I couldn’t find a taxi and decided to hoof it through some of the insurgent-run lanes of the Falls Road district. I hadn’t reckoned with the speed of nightfall and found myself alone in the gathering dark: a crepuscular gloom augmented by the local habit of shooting out all the streetlights. A very sudden bang convinced me that a nail bomb had been thrown at a British patrol, and I swiftly decided that the better part of valor was to drop into the gutter and make myself inconspicuous. Judging by the whistling and cracking of nearby volleys, this decision was shrewd enough as far as it went, and I remember thinking how awful it would be to end my career as the random victim of a ricochet. Instead, I nearly ended it as a bloody fool who tested the patience of the British Army. Rising too soon from my semirecumbent posture, I found myself slammed against the wall by a squad of soldiers with blackened faces, and asked various urgent questions that were larded with terse remarks about the many shortcomings of the Irish. Getting my breath back and managing a brief statement in my cut-glass Oxford tones, I was abruptly recognized as nonthreatening, brusquely advised to fuck off, and off I duly and promptly fucked. Graham Greene writes somewhere about John Buchan that his thrillers—The Thirty-Nine Steps being a salient example—achieve some of their effect by the imminence of death in otherwise normal situations, such as right beside the railings of Hyde Park. I wasn’t exactly in Hyde Park, but I was still in my own country and the telephone boxes were red and the police uniforms were blue, and the awareness that the distinction between “over here” and “over there,” or between “home” and “abroad” is often a false one has never left me.
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