In My Wildest Dreams (20 page)

It was evening in late spring when I first walked up the truncated road called Voluntary Place, Wanstead. Wedged between the houses was a corrugated building, a large shed, every wall of which was trembling as if the whole flimsy structure was in the grip of a spasm. You could hear the ponderous thumping of machinery from halfway down the street and the pungent and beautiful smell of printing ink drifted on the late air. Even after years I never ceased to thrill to that oily smell, although in most places now it has drifted away for ever.

The place was more like an engineering shop than a newspaper office. There was a trapdoor set in a bigger door and, as I stood uncertainly outside, it opened and a man in oily overalls, his thin face streaked black, emerged, sat on an upturned box and muttered: 'Bugger me.'

However, he appeared to have pulled himself together after a while and I approached him timidly. Yes, he confirmed, this was the place. 'I wouldn't go in that 'ell 'ole, if I was you, mate,' he mentioned. 'Anyone wot takes up this life is off their bleedin' rocker.'

I thanked him for the warning and, turning up my overcoat collar to give at least the impression that I was a newshound, I climbed through the small entrance.

It was like Alice stepping through her tiny door into an amazing world. The main floor space was occupied by the huge and pounding printing press. It seemed to be struggling like a captured elephant to be free. Men stood around it regarding its tantrums with anxiety. One was holding a pathetically diminutive oil can. 'Don't come through here, son,' he warned, not taking his eyes from the monster. 'This sod's likely to go through the roof any minute.'

I retreated outside and the blackened man, still sitting and wiping his face with a rag, merely said: "ad enough already 'ave you.'

I enquired about taking another route to the executive offices. This provoked a croaky explosion of laughter. 'Executive offices!' he howled. He looked frantically around as if he wanted to spot someone he could tell. There was no one, only a dog which came into the yard to pee. 'Those bloody pits!' he chortled. 'Executive offices! That's a good one, I must say. That's a good one!'

Only a little discouraged I went around the yard at the side. Among piles of scrap metal and waste paper stood a grubby caravan from which issued an insipid light. Through the open door I could see two young men sitting at a table. One was reading aloud from a piece of paper while the other checked a printed proof. I asked them the way and when they had told me, determined not to be overawed by the splendour and excitement, I said knowledgeably: 'Checking the galleys, are you?' They stared at me in disbelief. Eventually one, a tall, thin fair-haired youth with rimless glasses, answered: 'No, it's our bloody football pools, mate.'

I discovered an alternative door and entered into another yellow-lit mayhem. Further machines grunted and wheezed, each one it seemed watched by an attendant who looked ready to flee at any moment. The air was thick with fumes. Through the centre the only calm figure in the scene wandered about the chaos, wearing a pin-striped suit and smoking a pipe. This was clearly someone in charge. Tugging my collar about my neck I took a long breath and advanced on him.

'Ah,' he puffed unhurriedly when I had introduced myself. 'Just the chap we need.'

My God, I thought. Luck at last.

'If you want to be a newspaperman, you could start right away,' he said. Another globe of smoke went to join the general fumes.

Even over the thumping machines I could hear my heart. 'Now, sir?' I said. 'Yes, please. Of course. Anything.' Perhaps it was a murder, a train crash, a missing film star. 'What do I have to do?'

'Fold them,' he replied laconically.

The machine folding the
Wickford Times,
one of the umpteen small journals published by the company, had broken down. Each of the three thousand copies had to be folded by hand. I was instructed to take off my coat, then a piece of metal was pressed into my hand and I was positioned alongside two other perspiring individuals who were taking the pages from the press and folding them by running the metal along the intended crease. Thus began my career in journalism.

One of the other folders was a young, amusing and owlish fellow called Evans who became a great friend. The other was the fusspot chief, and only reporter of the
Wickford Times,
who was anxious to ensure that every crease was straight. It must have been a hundred degrees in that sweatshop. We folded and perspired. Someone brought us each a pint of cider which we drank greedily. When we had finished in the early hours of the morning, they gave us another pint. Reg Evans and I walked out into the dark cooling air and were spectacularly sick in the gutter of Voluntary Place.

It was three o'clock by the time I got back to the hostel. Every muscle and bone in my body groaned and I was coated with grease. But I rolled aching into bed with a joyous feeling. I was a newspaperman.

Among its former employees, now spread throughout the writing trade in every part of the world, the stories of the press at Voluntary Place are still told with the relish that time gives to hardship. Its location was not inappropriate, since we were pressed into volunteering for all manner of tasks and conditions, which today would send even the least dedicated union man howling for a strike. I, for one, worked for several weeks without wages.

It transpired that the organisation, which published something like twenty-five newspapers ranging from Southend in Essex, to Brentford in Middlesex – the two outer extremes of the London region – all on a shoestring, did not believe in encouraging young trainees overmuch by giving them money. On my second visit to the press I was taken to see the editor, a Mr Cyril, a tall balding person with staring blue eyes and shining skin. His ears were transparent. Each of the brothers who controlled this Heath Robinson empire was known by his Christian name. The one with the pipe who had set me folding was Mr Leonard. There was also a thin, nervy, beleaguered man, called Mr Harold, although this was his surname, and he was not related to the owners. He ran the entire empire from a partitioned office the size of a lavatory. He had a cynical humour and a terrible fatalism. One Friday, which was the quiet day of the week, I found him head in hands at the oilclothed bench which served as his desk. 'Look at bloody that,' he demanded. 'Look at it!' Amazed that he should inform me, the most junior of the staff, of his troubles, I stared at the proffered front page of the
Chingford Times,
which had hit the streets that day. 'Council Abandon Annual Ball' howled the headline and underneath, 'Two few tickets sold.'

'You would think somebody in this fucking place,' he sobbed. 'Would know the difference between TWO and TOO, wouldn't you?'

He could afford to be nice to nobody but he is recalled with laughter and affection by the veterans of those times. One of these, Maurice Romilly, a distinguished parliamentary correspondent, attempted a few years ago to mark this fondness by organising a dinner with Mr Harold at the head of the table and all who knew and suffered under and with him ranged down the sides. My enthusiasm for this project, and the willing support of many others, was not, however, reciprocated by the intended chief participant. The papers had folded and, predictably, this lifelong servant had been discarded shabbily. When Romilly telephoned him about the proposed event he said: 'Son, I don't want anything to do with any sod who had anything to do with those papers.' Then he put the phone down.

Each of the newspapers had its own district office, some less opulent than others. The one at Willesden, in north-west London, I was eventually to discover, had naked clay beneath the linoleum in the reporters' room. They were all printed on the fairly elderly machinery at Voluntary Place, where the journalists were expected to travel once a week to put their own paper to bed, to read proofs and to assemble the makeup. These operations were accomplished in a single cubicle jammed between that of Mr Harold and that of another senior sub-editor, a handsome man called Rashbrook, plus the caravan I had first visited, and a room in a neighbouring garage. The garage had been acquired with an eye to installing another rotary printing press there. When purchased this took six months to assemble. On the first night it ran the house next door fell down, and its operations were suspended.

It is difficult to believe such a conglomerate existed. To publish all those journals, spread through the Home Counties, was some feat in itself. With a sparse staff, sparser facilities and faltering machinery it was nothing less than miraculous.

My first day as a reporter was a Saturday. I had rather hoped that I would be dispatched to write some action-loaded prose about the football match at Clapton Orient or at least at Walthamstow Avenue. Instead I was given the doleful assignment of visiting undertakers in Leytonstone to note who had recently died, and to visit their homes to discover whether they had ever achieved anything in their lives which might merit a few lines in the paper.

Reporters these days doubtless do not have to undertake such lugubrious assignments, certainly not as a speculative thing. Unhappily, I set out drooping with a long black Barnardo overcoat which on future visits to the homes of deceased caused me to be mistaken for the undertaker's assistant ('Come to measure up, have you?') or more cheerfully the insurance man ('Have you got it in cash?') and on one occasion as a long-lost relative.

There had been no mention about the money I was to earn and indeed nothing was said for weeks. I worked myself into the ground, tramping the streets in the wake of the mortician, having nightmares, and drawing only expenses, which were limited to bus fares between corpses. On that first Saturday I approached my first undertakers' with much misgiving, finally raising enough courage to enter to a bell that chimed like a knell. The smell, and I can smell it now, was pungent; French polish, flowers with a whiff of formaldyhyde. There was a coffin on a trestle just inside the door and a little man who was bending over it shut it as he might have shut a book he was reading.

His immediate breeziness once I had told him who I represented overcame the proximity of death. 'Oh yes, my lad. Got one or two good ones for you,' he assured. 'Let's get the book. Should be a good tussle down at Orient this afternoon, don't you think?'

He produced his book and read out some names and former addresses. When he got to one name he nodded at the coffin. 'He's in there at the moment,' he mentioned as if the man might later be available for an interview. I looked about for somewhere to rest my new notebook and he again nodded to the coffin. I laid it on the sweet-polished lid and took down the list of the dead.

Then I had to go out and face the difficult part, to enquire if there was anything of interest about the loved one who had passed on. My first call, at a terrace house in a Walthamstow back street, has remained forever in my mind. Timidly I knocked and was breathing a sigh of relief at the absence of a response when the door was pulled open with some difficulty and standing there was a little girl, four or five years old, wearing a grubby nightdress. We stood staring at each other. I could think of nothing to say. Eventually I managed to enquire if there was anyone else at home and she summoned her brother, who was at the most seven. He was in pyjamas with jam all down the front. He saved me further embarrassment. "Ave you come to see our mum?' he enquired. He opened the door and let me into the small front room where their mother was lying in an open casket. I almost fainted. They were in the house by themselves. It taught me, at the opening moment of my career as a reporter and indeed a writer, that knock on any door and behind that door is a story. If you can bring yourself to write it.

This funeral procession continued for some weeks. My eyes became hollow from being awake at night and from the miles I tramped in search of interesting anecdotes about the dead. There came a point when I was exchanging backchat with morticians. It started to get me down. I went to see Mr Cyril in his cubicle and he noted how black-eyed and despondent I was. When I told him the reason he clucked in sympathy and asked how much I was earning. 'Nothing, sir,' I replied. 'Just bus fares.'

'I expect you walk most of the way,' he mentioned. I thought it was goodbye to bus fares too.

'Well,' he said. 'I think we ought to start paying you. Let's say a pound a week, for a start. And perhaps we ought to move you to Woodford. You can do a few dancing displays and flower shows, that sort of thing. And people don't die quite so much there. It's a much better area altogether.'

Among the characters who made up the staffs of the various journals in the group was a man who was the most accomplished romantic liar I have ever encountered. He was short, youngish, and pugnacious, a distress to many, including his wife. He was our chief reporter, someone who lived by stories. When there were not enough true stories to go around he simply made them up.

One Wednesday the newspaper on which he worked showed no sign of finding a report strong enough to make the front page headline, and in those latitudes it did not have to be particularly sensational for that. He went thoughtfully to the pub at lunchtime and returned with a thrilling yarn about an old man he had met who carried with him a suitcase full of banknotes. This man had returned after many years in Australia to find his long lost love, the girl to whom he had been engaged fifty years before. Our chief reporter, whom we shall call Phibbs, had even obtained a photograph of the girl from the hoary traveller. 'I've told him to stay in the pub,' Phibbs announced. 'We've got to get a photographer around there and quick.' The cameraman was dispatched but returned saying that the pub was shut and there was no sign of an old man with a case full of banknotes. Undeterred, Phibbs wrote the story and even quoted some local ancients who felt sure they remembered him from back in misty time. Across the front page the romantic legend was spread – with the faded picture of the long lost love the traveller had come to find.

Naturally the national newspapers became interested in this human drama and sent out reporters and photographers to find the returned suitor. No one ever traced him. Someone alleged that the girl in the picture looked very much like a photograph of his father's great-aunt which had appeared in our periodical many years before. Was he sure there had been no mistake? Phibbs dismissed the doubt. He was mystified but not daunted. The following week's issue was led with the headline: 'Millionaire Lover Vanishes'.