In My Wildest Dreams (38 page)

The fencing off of large areas of the city, which had been cleared of rubble but still remained void, resulted in colonies of wild flowers appearing, foxgloves, dog roses and honeysuckle, which had not been seen in those streets for years. I wrote one of my ten-shilling stories about that. Countryside birds appeared; there were rumours of foxes. Owls nested. I became an urban naturalist. Other stories I found by visiting City churches, by getting to know people at small museums and by simply walking by the Thames or through the streets and keeping my eyes open.

One of these quiet enquiries resulted, in fact, in a story which went sensationally around the world. On the large blitzed area opposite the office – where the dead murderer had been found – some archaeologists had been exploring the ground below what had once been the cellars of London offices. I had wandered over to watch them but they had been reticent about their work and promised that if they actually found anything of interest they would let me know. There came a quiet Sunday afternoon when, looking out from the window of Exchange Telegraph, I saw children digging enthusiastically at the site – and carrying away pots and dishes. One boy of about twelve was trotting away with a stone arm!

The archaeologist concerned was a Professor Grimes and I telephoned him and told him what was going on. At first he did not believe me, then he gurgled at the end of the phone and howled: 'For God's sake stop them! Get the police! Anybody! I am coming there right away . . . oh dear . . . oh dear . . .'

The site turned out to be the Temple of Mithras, the most complete Roman shrine ever found in London. Within hours the whole area was roped off. Armies of archaeologists descended with their spades and even the contractors, who were about to lay the foundations of a new office block on the site, held up work until the entire temple and its contents could be removed. It is now displayed alongside that building. I often wondered whether the boy managed to keep his Roman arm.

The forty pounds a month which the Exchange Telegraph Company calculated to be my worth (and they were probably accurate) enabled me to wed. My wife, Maureen, after eighteen months of marriage, produced a round and laughing baby daughter on the same day as I passed my driving test. The examiner congratulated me on both achievements – although I was careful not to tell him about my fatherhood until after the test in case he thought I was trying to influence him. Elated that I had passed, I replied extravagantly that had the baby been a boy I would have called it after him. He grimaced and confided that he had never told any of his colleagues his real Christian name, but he would reveal it to me. It was Halibut.

We were broke, not an unusual affliction with young marrieds although we tended to take risks. We had a flat, soon to be followed by a house, a car, and nothing could deter us from holidays abroad.

We rented an apartment in the Italian resort of San Remo and one evening I went to the butcher's shop to purchase some steak. In giving me the change for a thousand-lira note the dastardly tradesman carefully passed on an Albanian coin, a lek, worth in those days about sixpence. An hour later when I discovered the fraud I went furiously back to the shop. It was not the amount – it scarcely could have been – it was the deliberate execution of the trick. The butcher denied he had ever seen me, or my lek, and a tremendous row ensued during the course of which I called him a 'ladro' – a thief (my knowledge of Italian was small but
Ali Baba and the Forty Lardroni
was showing at the cinema). This was apparently the worst insult I could have thrown. Enraged, the large butcher (are there any
small
butchers?) came around his counter with a meat cleaver. Customers tried to restrain him but he broke away and chased me around the shop in the best Abbott and Costello tradition. Death or not, there was no chance of me leaving. I ran and I dodged. A fresh set of customers pinned the puce-faced avenger against the wall and shouted for me to run. At that moment I saw a uniformed figure on the pavement outside. I rushed out and pulled him in. There was a lot of shouting and the butcher was still struggling. I demanded to know why the policeman was not taking any action. He was just staring. 'Policeman?' he said spreading his hands. 'Signor – me postman!'

As a practical father I was not very adept. Once I offered to rock the baby to sleep in front of the living room fire. I sang her a song from distant days, the only one my father ever knew to sing to me. He had, not surprisingly, made it up himself:

Mummy's gone down the shops,
To buy some bread and cheese . . .

Possibly it was not the ideal lullaby and although baby remained obstinately awake I went off to sleep, finally tipping forward and depositing my surprised and offended daughter on the hearthrug. We took her to Cornwall in the winter and to East Anglia in the spring. Returning to London on the latter occasion I saw a signpost 'Borley' and on impulse I turned the car in that direction. Borley Rectory had been called the Most Haunted House in England.

Books had been written about its ghosts – a sly nun, a coach and horses, an unexplained cold spot. There had been scientific investigations into its fierce poltergeist and Harry Price, the long-time secretary of the Society for Psychic Research, made it his life's work. Some even believed he had kept the story going. The house had been burned down in the late nineteen-thirties but the place still looked haunted.

It was a fine, open, sunlit day when we reached Borley on the Essex-Suffolk border, but over the village there were chill and slinking shadows. We arrived at the Rectory, or what remained of it, just in time to see a bulldozer push a first load of earth into the cavities that had been its cellars. A man came over and obligingly muttered to me: 'Now perhaps we'll bury the damned ghost for ever.'

Returning home I sat down and wrote an article called: 'Can They Bury the Borley Ghost?' which I took along to the offices of my favourite paper the
News Chronicle
on my way to work the next day. They published it on the Saturday and paid me ten guineas. It was the first time anything I had written had appeared in a national newspaper.

Still fretting after being a full-time reporter, I continued to dispatch letters to editors informing them how lucky they were that I was available and they resiliently continued to ignore them. I had to be satisfied with occasional pieces I could write outside my normal duties (Exchange Telegraph did not seem to mind and the work appeared under my own name. Nor did they see fit to use my writing in their own operations). There was an article on cricket which
Reveille,
of all magazines, published, then came a piece about the Isles of Scilly, then little known, which was accepted to my great joy by the
Evening Mews.
Maureen and I had been to the islands on our honeymoon, returning in a bucking aeroplane (a de Haviland Rapide, the only aircraft ever to suffer woodworm in the airframe) loaded with fresh flowers from the Scilly Isles fields.

The
Evening News
was my heart's desire. From my boy's days at Kingston I had always read it and I knew the names of its writers like a litany: E.M. Wellings on cricket, Leslie Ayre on Radio and Television, Bill Bourne on the theatre, Harold Abrahams – of
Chariots of Fire
fame – on athletics, and the Courts Day by Day by a mysterious and wry man called J.A.J. It was a large paper in every sense of the word, it spread generously, a wide-sheeted journal, not one of your miserly tabloids (although, before its demise, it became one). It was the biggest-selling evening newspaper in the world.

Encouraged by the publication of the article about the Scilly Isles ('Eden Beyond Land's End') I submitted a succession of short stories, all of which were rejected. Then, one morning, I received a fifteen-guinea cheque with a slip which merely noted: 'Short Story'. No one had told me it had been accepted. The
Evening News
was famous for its short stories and I was in good company. It was published on a Saturday, it was called 'A Good Boy Griffith' and was adapted from a joke I had heard. It was also my first published piece of fiction.

All of this, however, was getting me no nearer Fleet Street. Physically, there was a definite move in the right direction because Exchange Telegraph moved from its cobwebbed premises in Cannon Street to a new building at East Harding Street, just behind Gough Square, one of the Georgian alleys behind Fleet Street. Gough Square is famous for the house of Dr Samuel Johnson and there is an arrow on the wall saying: 'To Dr Johnson's House'. Early one morning, emerging from the office after an all-night shift, I found a poor man lying on the pavement having had some sort of seizure. I opened his shirt collar and looked anxiously around for aid. A dawn charlady was coming up the street. 'Ooooh, dear me,' she said, looking down at the man's ashen face. "Eee don't 'arf look poorly.'

After concurring with the diagnosis I asked her to get a doctor. To my amazement, instead of going into the building to telephone she trotted off down the pavement. At that moment a policeman arrived and took over. I peered through the alley where the charlady had gone and saw her knocking briskly at the door of Dr Johnson's house. After a while she came back disconsolate. 'There's nobody in,' she grumbled. 'Either that or he's still in bed asleep.'

My only lasting claim to fame at the Exchange Telegraph Company was the result of my final year there. The regional television and radio news and magazine programmes which are transmitted throughout the country today, including
Nationwide
and
Tonight,
had their infant roots at a desk in the agency building and I was the man behind the desk.

It had become obvious that Exchange Telegraph could not compete on a foreign news basis with Reuters and was frequently a poor second in the home news area to the powerful Press Association. First one service and eventually the other were abandoned and Extel – as it is now called – reconstituted itself on the foundation of its always successful racing and financial services. Before the fall there was an attempt to bring new life into the old machine. The BBC was to establish a local news programme to follow its six o'clock bulletin. It was to be called
Town and Around
and we were invited to provide news items for it.

It was not quite as simple as that, for the Press Association was also bidding for the contract and there was to be a six months' trial run on the part of both services. I had been on one of my periodic missions to the editor, asking for a reporter's job. This time Philip Burn did not raise the single finger followed by the whole arm, but announced: 'I've got something that is new, revolutionary, and I want you to handle it. It could change the fortunes of this company, Thomas. A lot depends on it.' He looked at me strongly, his tooth serious. 'We'll give you an extra pound a week,' he said.

Not only did I get the pound, I got a desk, a telephone, a typewriter, eventually an assistant, and a shared secretary. On the first day we operated the service there were one hundred and fifty news items on the tape, none of which were used because it was only a dummy run. The dummy run lasted for weeks. Sometimes if I wanted to go secretly to a mid-week afternoon football match I would leave a pile of news items to be fed into the teleprinter at timed intervals, go to the match, and get back in time to go home. No one looking at the tape would ever have known I was away.

At the end of the trial period the BBC gave us the contract and the board of Exchange Telegraph were so exhilarated that I discovered a further pound in my pay packet. The real rewards, however, were less tangible then. Mollie Lee, who was the editor of
Woman's Hour,
was looking for someone to speak for three minutes about reading newspapers and Maurice Ennals, who produced
Town and Around
at the Broadcasting House end, suggested that I might like to try my hand at broadcasting. A long interval had elapsed since my singing debut on Radio Malaya but now I managed to record my own script, receiving two pounds for it. It was also the beginning of a new facet in my life which, at a tangent, was to have great importance later for it was Mollie Lee who had the idea which changed my whole existence.

I was, however, still broke. Maureen and I had ambitions and we were quite brave. We bought a chalet-roofed house, and had a car and a mass of hire-purchase commitments. When I went to an insurance office in the City in connection with my mortgage, a dusty, middle-aged gentleman glanced at the papers and said: 'I see you are earning
thirteen
pounds a week. That's a lot of money for a young man, I don't earn that and I'm gone fifty.'

It may, indeed, have been a lot to him but it was not enough. We gradually dropped more into debt. When the bank balance showed us to be fifty pounds in the red I thought the abyss had opened. I sold the car but that was only temporary relief. At the end of one week it looked as though we would have to sell something to pay for the groceries. From somewhere I had obtained a thick old book, the size, shape and colour of the Bible. It was called
Haydn's Dictionary of Dates
and it was dated 1911. Thinking it might be worth enough money to pay the next week's bills, I tramped with this tome down Charing Cross Road, going into numerous second-hand bookshops and asking an optimistic fiver. The best offer I had was thirty shillings. So, dejectedly, I took it home again.

On the underground, on my homeward journey, I picked up a copy of the
Evening Mews
which someone had left behind on the seat. Contained in it was the first of a new series of articles called 'The World's Strangest Stories'. It was not a very original idea, each article retelling some fairly familiar mystery or oddity. The first article was about Borley Rectory and its ghosts. As I read it I thought: I could have written this. The series was meant to continue for a week but it proved so popular that it was extended for a month, then for three months, and eventually ran for two years or more. It also saved my financial life.

When I reached home, Maureen's face fell when she saw I had not sold the book. But to us it was to prove a treasure chest. Each page was crammed with one-paragraph references to all manner of notable occurrences throughout the world – storms, earthquakes, explosions, assassinations, frauds, discoveries, sieges, wars, freaks and frauds. Picking out some obscure item about a revolution in Rio de Janeiro I went to the Guildhall Library, looked up the aged files of
The Times,
then to the Newspaper Library at Hendon for more information and finally into the British Museum for books on the history of Brazil. Then I sat down and wrote the piece and posted it off. It was published the following week and they sent me a cheque for twenty guineas. After that I wrote one of the 'World's Strangest Stories' every two weeks. It was financial salvation and another turning point.