In My Wildest Dreams (40 page)

'Yesterday, sir.'

'Yesterday!' Further glances darted in the direction of the judge. 'In what circumstances did you see this "French letter"?'

'What . . . what do you mean, sir?'

'Where? Where did you see this "French letter"
yesterday?'

'At work, sir. I works in a "French letter" factory.' Most of the time at the Press bureau was less entertaining. I sought refuge from the boredom by arranging my day so that I spent periods sitting in the sun on the Thames Embankment, watching the boats go by, and also by writing my first novel. This was called
My Name Is Mudd
and was about a story-prone chap whose name was Mudd and who worked on a local newspaper.

When it was finished i sent it to various publishers with tea-mug rings. No one accepted it and it is today interred somewhere in the laden tea chests that sit quiet and square in my loft. My agent, Desmond Elliott, has told me that if the book ever emerges he will have nothing to do with it. I am happy to let it rest unseen and unread there. If nothing else, it is probably the only novel ever written at Scotland Yard.

The danger of sitting watching the boats drift by on the Thames was that sometimes something sensational would break and I would not be in the bureau to hear it. On occasions I managed to avoid this sackable embarrassment by getting someone to cover for me, but more often it was by luck. Luck, which is always necessary for success but can be cultivated, had a hand once more in changing my life. Occasionally, at the Yard, I was nearer to the scene of some occurrence than any reporter starting out from Fleet Street, a mile away. Because of this I was sent rushing out one morning to Barclays Bank in Sloane Street where an armed robbery had taken place. This was in the days when armed robberies were the exception rather than the rule.

Hurrying from the Embankment green door, I found a taxi drawn up, as if it had been waiting for me and, within two or three minutes I was at the bank, arriving at the same time as the CID men. No one prevented me, so I walked in and joined the circle of detectives taking down statements from the shocked and robbed cashiers. My notebook in my hand, I recorded the intimate dramas, walked out and telephoned the story to the office. It made front page headlines and was the easiest job I ever did as a journalist.

Emboldened by this, I asked the news editor if perhaps I had not served enough time in exile at the Yard and might be brought back into the general fold. Sam Jackett showed no inclination to agree, so I thought the time had come to force the change or resign, which would have been a great shame after all the dreams I had dreamed about working for this great newspaper.

I went to see Reginald Willis and he brought out the cricket bat. 'Leonard Hutton,' he began, 'used this bat at the Oval in 1938 . . .' This, of course, was not news to me. Those who had been puzzled by the same subterfuge, when comparing notes, had come to the conclusion that the bat was not the original at all; in fact that several differing bats were used in the act.

Once the record-breaking score had been disposed of the editor asked me what I wanted and I told him. He sat at his desk and picked up a letter. He sniffed as he read it and said: 'Wouldn't like to go to a nice refugee camp for a couple of weeks, would you?'

A refugee camp! Refugee camps were in Austria and Germany or, better still, in the Middle East. Refugee camps were abroad!

'Yes, sir,' I answered, trying to keep my voice steady. 'I'll go. Where is it?'

'South London,' he recited. 'Crystal Palace. You go there on Monday.'

As it turned out the Crystal Palace refugee camp was a notable public relations exercise that provoked much attention and afforded me my first appearance on television. I am fairly sure that
I
was only sent there to get me out of the way, perhaps as a cushion before I was given the sack, but for me it proved a profitable experience.

It was organised as part of the United Nations World Refugee Year. At that time, there were still camps spread throughout Europe and the Middle East housing hundreds of thousands of war victims. To focus attention on their plight the Refugee Year was established and this 'camp' in suburban Crystal Palace, dreamed up by a public relations company, was part of the campaign. The notion was that a group of Fleet Street journalists would be literally dumped on an enclosed piece of wasteland, given a pile of odd wood, some basic tools and told to build themselves a house. Each 'refugee' was then permitted a shilling a day for food. We arrived on a chilly September morning with the London Transport buses standing outside our 'camp' like red wraiths in the mist. Some of the reporters arrived, took a few notes, especially of the living conditions, and went straight back to their offices. 'There's not a lot you can make on expenses, is there,' said one as he climbed back into his car.

A dozen of us stayed, plus three or four people connected with an East End church and led by a lively Cornish shipwright-turned-minister called John Pellow. There was only one woman, Diana Norman, the pretty wife of Barry Norman, the television presenter. She collected our shillings and went out into the outside world to purchase vegetables for our nightly cauldron of stew. She also did our sewing and organised the household tasks. By the end of the week there was not a man there who was not hopelessly in love with her. She handled the situation especially well and returned to her husband quite unperturbed by these devotions.

A resident psychiatrist might have found his time spent there worthwhile because, although we were within sight of Londoners and their homes and buses, we became absolutely insular. We lived and did our work within our compound, growing closer with each day, sitting around our campfire and its cauldron at night – and beginning to resent any interference from the outside world. It was as close to being on a desert island as I have experienced in half a lifetime of visiting and writing about islands.

Our mutually felt regard for Diana was such that we became incredibly over-protective. She slept among us in our hut. No one embarrassed her and if they had I swear the others would have fallen upon him like dogs. Once a visitor to the camp, one of the breed we already resented, smiled a little too much at her and we stood in a rough group and growled at him.

We had constructed the hut, under the Reverend Fellow's shipbuilding guidance, entirely of doors. In the pile of wood which was lying there when we arrived (some contractor's contribution to charity) were twenty or thirty old doors. After putting up the framework of the hut we built the walls of doors, most of them still having handles. It was a curious sight, like a line of adjacent bathing huts or latrines. In the night, if you needed to get out, it was sometimes necessary to try several handles before discovering the right one.

As the only evening newspaperman there, I was permitted each morning to go to the nearest telephone box to call my office and dictate my experiences. The daily paper men performed the same duty in the evening. Two magazine people said they did not need to go outside the compound and did not want to do so anyway. The only time I went any further than the telephone (before scurrying back 'home') was to drive one of the church volunteers in a van to the East End to draw his dole money.

What many people might have classified as a no-hope idea turned into a resounding public relations triumph, and did nothing to harm the reputations of the participants. The
Evening News
gave my dispatches as much prominence as if they had been filed from some far foreign corner and there were photographs of me looking hungrily through the barbed wire. Genuine refugees were brought in and told us of their experiences. They seemed puzzled that we should voluntarily live like that. Then the television cameras arrived. David Holmes, later a well-known political commentator for the BBC and one of our group, used to pace up and down inside the wire rehearsing his nightly pieces for radio. Everyone began to take interest. Crowds formed outside the wire to look at these curious people as spectators might do at the zoo. A team from the television programme
Tonight
came to interview us and I appeared on the film. When the intruders were gone, however, when the autumn night dropped on Crystal Palace and Sydenham, and we gathered around our stew and our fire, that was the time we enjoyed most. Everyone had stories and everyone could tell them. Baden Powell would have approved. At the end of the ten days we left our camp and each other a little sadly and returned to our families and our homes and the everyday stories of Fleet Street. It was a silly idea that had gone right.

There was often as much drama within the office of the
Evening News
as there was outside. Pestilence and politics, wars and weather, sport and speeches occupied the pages, but while these were being written and transported to print, things also happened to those whose job it was to tell the world of them. I was now firmly established on the reporting staff – although the news editor still did not care for my style. One day he handed me a book to fillet. It was called
Thunder of the Guns –
A History of the Battleship Era.
As he handed it over he murmured knowledgeably: 'Famous ship that, HMS
Era
. . .'

When it became legal to brew your own beer I went to the obliging Watneys Brewery to learn the secrets of the craft. Returning with what I was confident were the knowledge and the ingredients, I brewed the latter in the canteen kitchen and left them to gurgle. I had scarcely finished writing the story of how easy it was to make your own ale when there was a rattling explosion and I rushed upstairs to see the canteen manager covered in wet hops and two windows shattered.

Mistakes were far from unknown. An article encouraging readers to take to the open air and walk across several miles of wonderful English countryside also directed them over an army firing range and minefield. After the War Office had pointed out the error, vans had to be sent out to block all approach roads and stop the hikers with the words:
'Evening News
Walk Cancelled. Danger Keep Out'. There were eight editions a day, a prodigious technical achievement, and sheer speed caused some things to be overlooked. It was difficult, however, since feature articles were normally subject to a slower gestation, to understand how the Children's Corner managed to tell the tale of 'A dear little fairy called Chinkleburyfuckpot'.

The sub-editor who handled the crossword was subject to forays to Auntie's, a public house whose door was temptingly adjacent, and knew that his days on the paper were numbered. He had resorted to a variety of ruses to sneak from desk to drink, one of which involved a fictitious person who was always calling (at opening time) and demanding to see the journalist concerned with a 'Personal Message from God'. When this excuse for being absent ran thin he dreamed up others but it was apparent that sooner rather than later the heavy hand of dismissal would drop on his shoulder. Standing at bay in the saloon bar he grinningly revealed to me his plan of revenge to be carried out at the moment of sacking. He had formulated an obscene crossword to be substituted at the last moment for the real thing. I cannot remember much about it now except that one of the clues was: 'A wrinkled old retainer'. The answer, he told me with a slicing smile, was 'Scrotum'.

The two largest men in the office were also the most widespread drinkers. One, a great fellow with a red beard, found himself one evening to his bemusement in Richmond upon Thames. Some impulse led him to leap over a wall and he fell feet first into the shallows of the river. At the same moment he crapped himself. The joint experience sobered him sufficiently to evolve a plan for getting back to London. He rid himself of his trousers by simply allowing them to float away. Then he put on his raincoat and wrapped it around his large stomach and with bare, red and hairy legs sat on the District Line train to London pretending he was a Scotsman with a kilt beneath his coat. To complete the disguise he muttered Highland songs.

Trains appeared to play an important part in the misadventures of those who found it impolite to refuse several final drinks. Ernie Behar, a huge jovial fellow, was famous for his adventures on the railway. Getting into the train in London one evening, intending to alight somewhere in Kent, he fell to sleep and aroused only when the train arrived at Dover. He had another drink or so and then reboarded to be taken to his destination but dozed off again and returned to London. After several further attempts he fell deeply to dreams and awoke in cold darkness. 'There was rain beating down outside, so I thought,' he told us in the office on his eventual return. 'It was three o'clock in the perishing morning. I put my head out of the window and got soaked.' The carriage was in the washing sheds.

On another evening, having been on holiday in Germany, in the Black Forest, he celebrated his return to work, missed his normal train and eventually awoke at the not inappropriately entitled Effingham Junction. The steep banks alongside this station are ranked with pine trees and Ernie believed for some time that he was back in the Black Forest. A porter came along shouting, 'All change! All change, here!' Ernie caught his arm. 'You speak good English, my son,' he told him admiringly.

When he related this in the office (we would crowd around his desk to hear the latest misadventure and some said he ought to write a book) he said philosophically: 'Well, I didn't know what I was doing there, but there was a very decent pub outside the station so I went in and had a few. Not a thing did I remember after that until I woke up sitting in a yard. There were beer barrels piled up everywhere. Do you know, I thought I was in Heaven.'

He is in Heaven now but his stories remain. His interest in railways was not always fanciful for he was a member of the Fleet Street Railway Circle. One evening he went to a film show at the British Transport Commission headquarters in Mayfair and having partaken, as he used to admit, of a little sherbet he wandered through the streets afterwards, amiable and minding his own business. Then he heard a woman's cries. Gallantly he plodded around alleys and corners trying to trace the source of the distress and eventually mounted some concrete steps from a loading bay at the back of a massive grey building. 'I opened the door,' he told us. 'And there . . . what do you think? Rows of women behind bars. All screaming!' He had, as it happened, gone into Savile Row Police Station by a back door and had arrived just as the nightly round-up of street girls had been completed. He was ejected through the same door, he said, by a large and violent policewoman.

The classic Ernie Behar stories, however, concern his disorganised journeys to Boulogne as leader of a Fleet Street outing which took place several times a year. It is difficult to appreciate that much-travelled journalists looked forward so eagerly to the modest trip across the Channel, but there was no doubt they did. The club had its own emblazoned tie bearing its motto: 'Encore des Moules', and invitations strictly stipulated that there was to be no drinking before Denmark Hill, about five miles south of London.

It was in France, however, that real adventures took place. On the first trip the sound citizens of Boulogne turned out in some numbers to greet the English journalists, with the town band and beaming Maire as well. The travellers, however, had been heavily compensating for seasickness and descended in a terrible tumble down the gangplank on to the quay. Their efforts to stand when the band played the national anthems was a singular and unhappy sight.

Each day I would leave my house in the shrubbed suburbs wearing my Burton suit, my Dolcis shoes, my Tootal tie and my Rael Brook shirt and travel by Metropolitan Line to chronicle the history of the world.

I was present on some occasions of great note but it is not always those which lodge deeply in the memory. More often it was the diminutive dramas, some funny, others so tragic that the reporter, coming in from the outside, could only stand by with a lump in his throat. It was impossible for me to become uncaring although I had a sneaking regard for those who could apparently bury all feeling, and sometimes all decency, in the cause of getting a story. Some were detached to the point of cruelty. My first view of national newspapermen was at the Harrow & Wealdstone train crash in 1952 when I was a local reporter. Sipping from a cup given to him by a lady from the Women's Voluntary Service, one of them remarked: 'I suppose you could say this is the first rail crash since tea came off the radon.' There were 112 dead.

I often wondered what motivated such men – loyalty to their newspaper or some driving ego that compelled them to come up with the desperately coveted scoop at whatever cost. There were reporters who were good companions, who gave to charity and who lived lawful private lives with their families, but who would filch a photograph from a dead man's mantelshelf or promise heaven and earth to a confused and weeping widow in return for some poignant quote. If she refused they frequently made it up. There was no room for pity; the story was all. One day I saw two huge journalists bodily drag a woman who had been a key witness at an inquest (she was suspecting of causing it) over gravestones so that they could keep her away from rival reporters. These men would loiter for days in great discomfort, hide, lie, steal, connive and bribe, all for the sake of a story. One carried a black tie in the glove compartment of his car in case he ever found it necessary to interpolate himself into a funeral.

There was a Press Council ruling on 'intrusion into private grief but the hard men were unimpressed. They even made up a derisory ditty about it which was sung in the bar of many a village inn invaded by the newsmen staking out a good story.

For all my eagerness to shine as a reporter I found these sardonic methods both repugnant and frightening. Only twice did I try them myself and on both occasions 1 was deeply ashamed. The first was a story about a teenage girl who had fallen, it appeared accidentally, under a London Underground train. She had miraculously survived and was in St Thomas's Hospital. In normal circumstances there would have been no opportunity for a reporter to reach that girl's bedside, an enquiry to the hospital secretary would have elicited nothing more than a terse statement about her condition. Through a series of misunderstandings, however, I found myself inside the hospital and being led to her bedside. The sister accompanying me apparently thought that I was a relative and I did not disillusion her. After all, the first-hand story of someone who had survived such a violent adventure seemed worth it. I was led into a ward and then to a private room. At once I knew I had done the wrong thing. The poor girl was black with bruises and covered with lacerations. She could scarcely speak. At that moment I knew I should have turned around and left but instead I still said: 'Tell me what happened?'

She apparently thought I was a plain-clothes policeman. Her whole terribly injured face trembled and she leaned forward beggingly, holding my sleeve and weeping. She was so bruised she could hardly utter the words. 'I'll never do it again,' she sobbed. 'Never. I promise.'

I patted her hand and, speechless, went out of the ward and down the stairs. I sat on a seat on the embankment for half an hour and wondered what sort of person I was. Then I telephoned in the story, in three lines.

Not infrequently a reporter would be on the scene of a crime or an accident as quickly as, sometimes even before, the emergency services, due to a tip-off from someone eavesdropping on the police radio wavelength.

It was illegal to pass on information gained in this way and there were a number of prosecutions. The tipsters continued to transmit their intelligence, however, and one, who was an insurance assessor and used the early warning to be at the scene of a fire sometimes in advance of the brigade, also had a sideline in providing information to newspapers. It was after one of these calls to the newsdesk that I was dispatched to Chelsea Flour Mills where there had been a sudden death. I was there within minutes and walked into a scene I shall never forget. A worker had fallen into a huge revolving vat of flour and was literally drowned before anyone could help him. I arrived just as the terrible white body was being taken from the vat with the man's workmates standing crying with horror. One of them was frenziedly trying to revive him by emptying the flour from his mouth. I do not think I have ever seen such a dreadful scene nor have I ever felt more of an intruder.

Fortunately there were compensating moments of warmth and humour. There was the morning I was sent to a street in north London where there had been a massive battle between two rival gangs of robbers and the police. Each gang had shopped the other to Scotland Yard and the climax came when all three interested parties turned up at a rendezvous. There was a tremendous fight involving fifty combatants wielding pick-axe handles, knuckle-dusters and truncheons (this being in a gentler age when neither villains nor the law resorted to firearms). When I reached the battlefield, at the junction of two rows of terraced houses in Tottenham, the main fighting was over but the place was littered with weapons and men holding their heads. Three cars had collided spectacularly and there were lakes of blood. A cat had sat on a sunny wall and, unperturbed, watched the entire affray. Approaching the pet's owner, an elderly Cockney lady, I asked her what she had seen. 'Well,' she hesitated. 'I was polishing me passage and I 'eard all this noise so I looked out of me front door and saw all these bobbies and all these other men.'

'What were they doing?' I urged.

'Boxing,' she replied thoughtfully. 'They was all boxing.'

Another call took me to Upper Thames Street, among the river warehouses, where a building had caught fire and there had been some adventurous escapes. When I arrived, the firemen were rolling up their hoses but one told me that the foreman of a warehouse had an interesting tale to relate. I sought him out. It was quickly apparent that here was a thwarted man of action condemned to live a quiet life among bales and boxes. 'In the war,' he said, determined to start at the beginning. 'We was heavily bombed in this area as you might know.'

I said I did. 'Well, we 'ad a good team in this warehouse. Me and Harry, and old Sam who's dead now, and George over there, and little Bill and Mr Thompson from the office. All air raid wardens we was. Best team on the docks. Night after night when the Jerries was bombing . . .'

Aware of the narrowing time to the next edition I prodded him for his more recent experiences and eventually he drew breath and said: 'So when we saw this building on fire we knew
exactly
what to do. There was this bloke standing on the third-floor window sill, smoke pouring out, and I shouted to 'im to 'old on while we got our sheet.'