In My Wildest Dreams (41 page)

The sheet was one left over from the war, the sort that firemen used to hold out so that people could jump to safety. Harry and George and little Bill and Mr Thompson from the office were eagerly mobilised and under the command of the warehouse foreman they hurried with the sheet to the pavement below the burning building.

'There 'e was, up there,' recorded the foreman.

'Smoke pouring out,' I put in. 1 was in a hurry.

'You're right, it was,' he agreed looking at me suspiciously as if I had already heard the story. 'Pouring, it was. Out.'

'What did you do?'

'We 'eld out the sheet, like we did in the blitz, and I shouted for 'im to jump.'

'And he did?' I urged. 'He jumped?'

'Yes sir, 'e did,' nodded the foreman sagely. Jumped. Went straight through the bleedin' sheet and broke 'is leg on the pavement.'

Londoners of that breed were quite wonderful. I once went to interview a couple who had been married seventy-five years. They had lived in the same low little house since the masts of sailing ships in the Thames docks could be seen over the opposite rooftops. They had produced a large family and they lovingly described each of their offspring until it came to the eldest (who was dead anyway) and then fell to a bitter dispute about this first-born's age. The wife hit the old man across the shins with her walking stick because he told me that the girl would have been seventy-six that year. The old lady was deeply embarrassed by the reminder of an ancient indiscretion.

James Green, who joined the
Evening News
when the
Star
(affectionately known to Londoners as the La-de-da) sadly folded along with the wonderful
News Chronicle,
was once sent to interview a centenarian in the East End. A young woman let him into the house and then departed, leaving Jimmy with the cobwebby dear who was perched like a bird in her chair. She was stone deaf and all Jimmy's shouting evoked nothing. Eventually she howled back at him, 'Wait till Dad comes in, will you!'

Dad? God, how old was Dad? Eventually there was a banging at the door and Jimmy answered it. There stood an incredibly feeble and folded man, so bent his head was almost at floor level. He tottered in. This was Dad, at ninety-six. We used to cry laughing when Jimmy repeated this story because he would go through the actions of trying to interview the old chap at floor level, actually lying down and shouting into the ancient fellow's face. Dad could not understand why the young man was there at all until eventually it dawned on him that his wife's hundredth birthday was something of significance. Not, however, to him. "Er?' he bellowed at Jimmy's face on the floorboards. "Er? Silly old cow. Time she was dead!'

Similarly, I was once told how the Old Comrades' Association of a famous London regiment had purchased a flat in Ealing as an investment and had installed a ninety-year-old sergeant there, on the reasonable view that he would only be occupying it for a limited period. The veteran, however, resolutely refused to fade away and remained as a tenant until he was beyond his hundredth birthday. One day the welfare officer called on him and was astonished to find that he had gone out. He waited and eventually saw the sergeant tottering blithely along the street. The sergeant had thought, as it was a nice day, he would take himself out for a walk. The welfare man enquired if he had enjoyed the experience and his reply was so worthwhile that I included it in my novel,
Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective.
'Oh yes, indeed,' said the veteran who had fought in Zululand. 'But everything's changed so much. All these blackies about. Last time I saw a black man that close he was on the end of my lance.'

In journalism, as in the life with which it is concerned, you not only need luck you need the luck to
know
when you are lucky. As my time went on in Fleet Street, and I began to be assigned to bigger and more far-flung stories, I sometimes thought that sitting on my shoulder was a small, wryly grinning god who nudged me in many fortuitous directions.

My first foreign assignment took me by surprise. I had gone into the office one morning arrayed in the designs of Burton, Dolcis, Tootal and Rael Brook, via the Metropolitan Line, when I was dramatically met by the editor in his exciting red braces.

'Thomas,' he said, pointing out of the window in a generally southerly direction. 'Go to Monte Carlo!'

Sir Winston Churchill, the elder hero, had fallen down the stairs of the Hotel de Paris and broken his leg, a serious matter for one now frail.

Not being accustomed to winging my way much further than Reigate, I was unprepared for this amazing change of direction, although my passport was in my desk since I was intending to take it one lunchtime to get a Spanish visa in preparation for a holiday in Majorca. Swiftly I found myself with a circus of journalists on the first possible flight to Nice. We arrived at three in the afternoon, in time for me to scratch together some sort of story for that evening's final edition.

Foreign Fred, a ubiquitous and cheerful non-journalist who ran the foreign desk brilliantly when higher executives were in the saloon bar or the lavatory, had booked me into the Hotel de Paris, where Churchill had fallen upon his accident. Never had I been in such a place; high curling ceilings and floating cherubs, gilt and gold, and blinds that descended not only majestically but automatically as the sun climbed in to the Mediterranean sky. My room cost ten pounds a day, which I thought was astronomical. I stayed in the same hostelry only days before writing this (as part of the first cricket team ever to perform in Monaco) and the ten pounds now scarcely buys a double gin and tonic.

On the evening of that first visit, I decided that since I had come without luggage, I would need to wash out my shirt, my underpants and my socks in preparation for an early start the next day. On later foreign assignments the reporter was permitted to spend up to twenty pounds on suitable clothing, but this had been an emergency.

After going out with the rest of Fleet Street to eat and drink I returned to the hotel and somewhat fuzzily began to wash the garments in the bathroom basin. There was a high window and it was a deeply warm night so I decided that they would dry nicely in a few hours. Looking out I had a splendid spread of lights before me, glittering along the coast. Nearer to hand was a piece of convenient rope hanging vertically in the night breeze. To this I tied, by the arms, my shirt and then tied on my pants and socks. In the morning they were flying high on the flagmast with the unfurled banner of the Principality of Monaco.

A porter, who seemed to find nothing amusing or even untoward in the situation, retrieved my belongings but I decided that if I was to remain for a few days (which I intended to do even if Churchill was flown home), then I would need some extra clothes. Everything in the shops seemed outrageous in price until I came to a place in the backstreets which sold workingmen's clothes, and here I purchased a cheap blue shirt and a pair of denim trousers.

The French authorities were to fly the great man home to London, and since the airport was at Nice, I quit the expensive hotel and made for the resort intending to find some cheaper accommodation once I was footing my own bill. Time was tight and I arrived at the airport to find the press obediently clustered on the observation balcony waiting for the ambulance to bring Churchill from the hospital to the plane. I wandered down to the lower floors and out into the sunshine where I saw some airport employees in their blue dungarees standing around a forked-lift truck, one of the sort used to load baggage into aircraft holds. I forwarded an interesting banknote in the direction of a lively looking fellow who confirmed my suspicion that one of the world's most illustrous men was to be hoisted into an airliner like a suitcase.

Security was non-existent. In those happier days it was scarcely considered necessary. The ambulance arrived and went out onto the tarmac where the medical attendants unloaded the great old man, his leg thick with plaster below the blanket. To my intense delight I saw that he was stoically puffing a cigar, which he condescended to dispose of (by dropping it over the side of the stretcher) before he was manoeuvred onto the mechanical lifting truck. As he was transferred to the plane he grumbled loudly, 'Steady, steady. That's a leg.'

James Cameron, the veteran journalist, tells the story of how, after an illness, he was invited to convalesce at Lord Beaverbrook's house on the Cote d'Azur and sat at a dinner table opposite Churchill, then in his dotage, who slept through most of the meal but finally awoke sufficiently to call croakily up the table to Beaverbrook: 'Max, in 1942 I sent you on a mission of major importance to Moscow, didn't I?'

Beaverbrook replied: 'That's correct, Winston.'

Churchill, before going back to sleep, grunted: 'Did you ever go?'

On the morning of Sir Winston's death I went to Bladon in Oxfordshire, the small village where he was to be buried. Council workmen were feverishly re-tarring the road outside the churchyard, having undoubtedly been dragged from their beds by a suddenly panic-stricken county engineer. There was an infants' school where almost every child was familiar with the famous figure. Their parents worked on the Blenheim estate. The lady teacher decided that, on that morning, they should each draw a picture of Sir Winston as they remembered him. In most he was shown shooting pheasants.

I was assigned to cover his funeral, at least the first part of it. Every reporter had a set place from which he would not dare to stray. Mine was at a lancet window in the Houses of Parliament, overlooking the yard where the funeral cortege was forming. My view was unsatisfactory, oblique and restricted. Near the window was a door and, pushing this, I discovered a lavatory. It had a window with a far better outlook so I stood on the seat and described the solemn event from there.

Churchill's London house was later put up for sale and a friendly estate agent allowed me to look around it. In one corner was a sad little lift, like a child's playpen, by which the mighty man had been transported in the days of his final infirmity. I was told that while half the world was waiting outside the front door as he lay dying, waiting for each bulletin relayed by his frail physician Lord Moran (it was half-expected that Churchill himself might appear and announce that Lord Moran had passed away), the great leader was in fact lying in the house next door – the adjoining servants' quarters. He had been finally transferred there so that the medical team and their equipment could be more easily accommodated and accessible. On that day, in the empty house just before its sale, I found a table covered with wine glasses speckled with sun and dust. Afterwards I was asked why I had not purloined one as a souvenir. For some reason it never occurred to me.

That first foreign assignment in Monte Carlo had an immediate and most astonishing sequel. My elder son Mark, who had been born the previous December, was to be christened on a Sunday in the parish church at Willesden where his mother and I had been married. I returned from Monaco on the Saturday evening and went, feeling rather ill, to the church the next morning. The service had scarcely begun when I began experiencing sharp stomach pains. Trembling, I went out into the churchyard and sat on a seat. In no time I was in an ambulance and being carried to Hillingdon Hospital where I was prodded and examined and finally given a sedative.

While I was drowsy a notorious spy, having tried to kill himself on an airliner over London, was wheeled into the hospital – the most adjacent to the airport – and conveniently placed in the small room directly opposite mine.

His name was Dr Soblen. He had been spying for Russia in the United States, and when he realised that he was about to be apprehended, he fled to Israel. He was Jewish and he imagined, faintly I should think, that the Israelis would provide him with asylum. This super-optimism was misplaced and he was soon aboard an El Al plane and heading back to retribution. When the aircraft was over London he cut his wrists.

My first suspicion of something unusual was when I saw a strangely uniformed guard (an Israeli policeman) emerge from the room opposite. Still dopey, I enquired of a nurse, a wonderfully gossipy West Indian, what was happening and she told me all she knew.

It was late at night. I was still in pain but now I was sniffing a story it had noticeably receded. A late-visiting doctor kindly told me how the other new patient was progressing. There was nothing to do but to wait until the next morning, a Monday, when the
Evening News
would again be on the streets. When I awoke there was a travelling newspaper seller going about the ward with the daily editions, each headlining the sensational story of the spy from the sky. Half of Fleet Street was chaffing outside the hospital gates, trying to pick up any scrap of news and with no hope of getting in. Only
I
was inside.

I had watched the comings and goings of the medical staff and the security people and every time the door opened I saw the big doomed man propped up in bed, already looking dead. Just as I was wondering where the nearest phone was located and just in time for the midday edition, a nice lady wheeled a trolley telephone into my room and asked me if I would like to call anyone, a relative perhaps. Thanking her fervently I plugged in the phone and deftly dialled Fleet Street 6000.

My world scoop began, melodramatically: 'The man in the opposite hospital bed to mine is a spy and he is dying . . .'

Reporters clamoured outside the gates, and some managed to get in by bringing me fruit and flowers before asking the latest on the Soblen story. I found myself giving press conferences. John Freeman, the distinguished journalist, who ought to have known better, decided in his column that I had purposely had myself smuggled into the hospital, under the pretext of being ill, in order to spy on the spy.

As for the sad Soblen, he was undoubtedly doomed. He hurriedly speeded up the event, in the end, by taking a poisoned pill concealed in a peach and brought to the hospital by a friend.

Fleet Street was fruitful with characters. Sometimes I used to think it was like the Barnardo boys of my former days, sticking together, regarding others as outsiders. There was among them a great kindness and comradeship. Even the flintiest foot-in-the-door reporter, the man whose first objective when out on a story was to remove the magnetic disc from the receiver of the only telephone for miles, thus keeping it exclusively for himself, had a fund of benevolence when it came to personal relationships within the Street.

Owen Summers, a smiling investigator on the
Daily Mail,
once stood to make a speech at the wedding of a many-times married colleague and began: 'Have you ever had that feeling that you've been somewhere before . . .' He once telephoned, out of mischief, a London call girl and intimated that he was a disfigured and, what is more, a sex fiend who wished to avail himself of her services.

'It's by the hour,' she sniffed. 'London prices – five pounds an hour.'

'Ah'll need three or four hours,' he whispered richly. 'It'll take me a couple o' hours to get you shackled up.'

One day he noticed that one of the Scotland Yard reporters from a rival newspaper was looking ill. He knew the man's wife had left him, he was fending for himself and patently drinking too much. Owen's wife suggested that they should make a steak and kidney pie for the bereft fellow and Owen agreed enthusiastically. She was a splendid cook and produced her best. The problem was how to give it to the undernourished man, without causing offence, without making him feel he was the object of charity. They evolved a story of having had an argument about the merits of English pies and French pies. The pie was then divided into separate parcels and Owen took them to the Yard. 'We know you're a man of taste,' he said, putting a friendly arm around the lonely reporter. 'And we want you to settle the matter. We want you to take these slices of pie home, heat them, and eat them. Then tell us what you think.' Then, to ensure that all the sustenance was consumed, he added: 'And make sure you eat every bit. Otherwise you won't have given them a proper trial.' Away went the Yardman with the two parcels, promising to report next day. The verdict was disappointing. 'Horrible,' he announced. 'Don't know which was the worse, the English or the French. Even the dog wouldn't touch the stuff.'

Alfred Draper, an old friend from local newspaper days, once found himself taking the mother of a condemned murderer on her last visit to her son at Wandsworth Prison. The youth was to be hanged the next day. Uncomfortably Alf waited in the car for her return. Her report was phlegmatic. 'He's quite cheerful,' she said. 'But, of course, he's not looking forward to the morning. I just told him to keep his chin up.'

The studious Cyril Aynsley of the
Daily Express
was with a group of reporters undertaking a death watch outside the home of George Bernard Shaw at Ayot St Lawrence. The white-bearded seer was certainly dying but was taking some days about it. They camped out in some discomfort, each one aware that the nearest public telephone was a mile away, downhill, and that the fittest runner would get the news to his paper, and the world, first. Each of them was armed with his own magnetic disc so removing the piece from the mouthpiece was rendered pointless.

If Shaw died during the time when the daily newspapers were printing then there would have been a cavalry charge down the hill; if he departed during the publishing time of the evening newspapers then the rush would be only slightly less. The news agency men would have to be on their toes all the time.

Each day, during his off-watch period, Cyril would walk down to the telephone and make a check call to his news editor. During one of these conversations he was told that
Time
magazine required a piece about G.B.S.'s death and wanted him to write it. Cyril agreed. He was walking back towards the house when he saw a rush of evening and news agency men heading towards him and he knew mat the great man had gone. Being out of his time, he was in no great hurry and continued to walk up the hill. A car stopped. In it was Nancy, Lady Astor. 'How is he?' she enquired, guessing he was a newsman.

'He's dead, so I believe,' replied Cyril solemnly.

'I see. Which newspaper do you represent?'

Knowing she despised the
Daily Express
he compromised and answered
'Time',
since he was also now committed to that journal. Lady Astor apparently thought he said:
'The Times',
and invited him to get into the car.

Thus Cyril found himself to be the first outsider to view Shaw's body. 'What were his last words?' he carefully enquired of the nurse.

She seemed doubtful. For a man of so many words Shaw had apparently said very little worthwhile, or so the nurse judged. 'He just opened his eyes and said: "You know, nurse, all my life I've done everything I have wanted to do. And now I can't do the thing I want to do most. I want to die."' The nurse shrugged: Cyril's pencil was trembling. 'And then he died,' she said.

The man who showed me the greatest friendship, encouragement and regard was Vincent Mulchrone, a shining writer. He was a big broad man with silvery hair, a north-country voice and an Irish background. Over a distance of fifteen hundred words he was unbeatable, whether it was a magnificent occasion or some small odd story that caught his imagination. A record company once had the nice idea of producing a long-player of stirring orchestral music and providing, as an extra, a conductor's baton so that you could lock the door and conduct away to your heart's content. Vincent wrote a piece about this innovation in the
Daily Mail
which began: 'In all the years we three have been conducting, Beecham and Barbarolli have had one undeniable advantage over me. They have had orchestras.'

His kindness to me, once I had become part of the world-touring circus of Fleet Street, was overwhelming. He used to call me Kid. Every day he drank champagne in the back bar of the Harrow, almost outside the door of the
Mail,
or wherever he happened to be. He was a superb teller of tales whether spoken or written. He died far too young and I cried when he did.

In my own office there were also memorable men. Leslie Ayre was the gentlest of people, a small soft man like a tailor, with a spotted bow tie. He wrote about radio and later television until these functions were taken over by James Green on his arrival from the
Star.
After that Leslie was glad and free to concentrate on his most profound love – music. He was often thoughtfully sad and seemed pleased if you stopped him for a chat. His god was Tchaikovsky. Ah, Tchai,' he would smile, shaking his head. Ah, Tchai. . .' One day, short of a general writer, the features editor asked him to compose a weather story: Why were we having such a terrible summer? Why was it always raining? What could be done about it? 'This morning,' I remember he wrote, 'I tried an ancient rite. I hung a piece of seaweed outside my window. In no time it was soaking.'

Colin Frame arrived after the demise of the
Star,
another grey-haired gentleman of quiet demeanour and a charming wit. He bought himself a boat and delighted to chuff it up and down the little River Wey in Surrey. If anyone in the office wished to hire it for a week he was amenable. One of these borrowers was Felix Barker, the mysteriously cloaked theatre critic, who unfortunately found on sailing to the first lock that it was closed and could not be opened because of extensive repairs which involved the draining of the entire river on the other side. So Felix and his family spent their entire week cruising somewhat monotonously up and down one half-mile stretch of river. Then Julian Holland, a bespectacled feature writer, who later distinguished himself at Broadcasting House, borrowed the boat. Just as Colin was leaving the office on the first evening that Julian was aboard, there came an anguished telephone call from the banks of the River Wey. 'How do you stop the engine?' Julian had leapt ashore while his wife frantically grappled with the boat they could not stop.

In the
Evening Mews
Features Department, of which I became part although I continued to write and travel on news stories, was a budding and ebullient young man who, even today, twenty-five years later, has not lost either his enthusiasm or his wayward grin. Bill Hall wrote on films and was a private pyromaniac. He had an affinity for fireworks. Once travelling on a London bus and having ignited the fuse of a particularly violent banger, he pushed it into the used ticket container on the platform and rang the bell to get off at the approaching stop. Unfortunately the bus did not stop. Other people crowded the platform, waiting to alight, and Bill could see his own time bomb smoking almost below his nose. Such a rush of passengers wanted to get off at the following stop that he was pressed up against the used ticket box and the banger exploded, blackening his face and all but blowing off his eyebrows.

From those lively days I have retained many acquaintances and real friendships. One of these is with David Eliades, now an executive of the
Daily Express,
whom I first knew in my Willesden local paper days. In his youth he wore petrol-blue suits, florid ties and was an expert on roller skates. Partnered by a sometimes incredible man called Robert Forrest Webb (explorer, sheep-keeper, motorcyclist, Japanese martial arts expert, antique dealer, artist, but above all raconteur), David wrote a funny and successful novel called
And to My Nephew Albert. I Leave the Island What I Won off Fatty Hagan in a Poker Game.
A later book, about English nannies in New York, became a Disney film and another called
After Me the Deluge
was the basis for a musical which was first produced in Italy and seems always to be playing somewhere in the world. Bob took himself and his wife off to the hills of Wales, but David is, at heart, an unrepentant Fleet Street man. He talks about news stories and how they were obtained, of exclusives and bungles and excitements in a way I have long and regrettably forgotten. He also takes notes of some oddities nearer home. He tells the story of a
Daily Express
executive going into the lavatory and, seeing a black man there, concluding that he was one of the journalists from former colonial territories whom Beaverbrook Newspapers sought to encourage and frequently brought to London for experience.

'Been into the editor's conference yet?' enquired the executive of the black man, as they stood at the trough. The latter admitted he had not.

'Come tomorrow,' invited the executive breezily as he zipped up. 'Good experience for you. Open your eyes to a few things.'

The invitation was graciously accepted but several of those present at the conference wondered at the presence of a man who had hitherto only been known as a lavatory cleaner.

Brian Freemantle (after being a colleague at the
Evening News
he eventually became foreign editor of the
Daily Mail)
went to Vietnam several times (on the final swift and controversial occasion to snatch away some abandoned orphans) and then quit to work on his own excellent books. Brian, or Bruin as he is known, is the sort of person who makes you happy when you see him. He believes that he is urbane, even suave, and a wide enough vote might well prove him right. He has high taste from which no one, even someone of greater taste, can dislodge him; the sort of man who would order a bottle of Chateau Lafite '63 with a hamburger, confident that its power, its courage, its mellowness and its touch of blown hills and southern sunshine will not spoil the taste of the chips.

Both these friends are good companions and I have encouraged, perhaps inveigled, each of them (once) to share my enjoyment of travelling in the varied land of Britain.

David suffered bravely on the little bouncing boat called
The Good Shepherd
on a stormy voyage to this country's most isolated inhabited place, Fair Isle, south of Shetland. For four hours, soaking wet and festooned with fish scales he clung to a tarpaulin, mumbling his way feebly through: 'Eternal Father Strong to Save'. Once ashore on the magic island his spirit lifted and he took great risks to take pictures for the first edition of my travel book
Some Lovely Islands.
Once he was hanging over an astounding cliff, photographing puffins, and I was hanging onto his feet when his boot came off. I managed to haul him up by the other.

His photography was eventually pin-pointed by an American critic of the book as 'pleasantly amateur'. He took an artistic picture from below a cow which resulted in what appeared to be a set of pornographic bagpipes. One day we ran ourselves breathless trying to reach a crashed plane in time to rescue the pilot. We arrived thirty-eight years late. It was a German fighter left over from the war. We consoled ourselves by observing that the metal was unrusted and it looked as if it might well be a brand-new crash.

Fair Isle is, of course, a place of migratory birds. There are no trees. To see an Arctic woodpecker in a frenzy, attempting to make an impression on a concrete post, is a pitiful experience. Each night the birdwatchers were expected to assemble in the fire-lit common room of the observatory and report their finds of the day. David and I had hilarious moments making up the names of unlikely and frequently obscene birds, like the bent-billed, puzzled-face, brown duck, which could fly as fast as the other ducks but could not brake as quickly. Sometimes we laughed so much we were told reproachfully we could be heard on the far side of the island and we were frightening the fulmars. When eventually I returned to Fair Isle with a BBC Television team to make a documentary of my book, the entire unit – writer, producer, camera and sound men – was told that it was our turn to wash up at the bird observatory and we could not continue about our work until we did. So we did.

The journey upon which I was accompanied by Bruin Freemantle was also north, to the Wester Ross coast of Scotland, when I was writing another travelogue called
The Hidden Places of Britain:

I had chosen to make the journey to the remoteness of Ross and Cromarty with another writer, my long-time friend Brian Freemantle, a novelist of much talent whose mode of life, however, makes him singularly unsuited for anywhere that does not have –
at least – a choice of luxury hotels; the sort of man who treats a label on a bottle of wine in a Scots ale bar to a disgruntled knitting of the eyebrows. He has, in addition, a fastidiousness about his clothes and personal appearance which scarcely fits him for adventure in the wild open air
. . .