Going Up (7 page)

Since the Beaver was not known to be dogmatically hostile to the Festival of Britain, Brocky deputed me to visit the dusty site. One of the press people described how the roof on the half-finished Festival Hall had been prefabricated in several large, hooped pieces. I could come and see if I was interested. Of course I was. ‘No inside access yet, unfortunately.’ He led me to a 70-foot wooden ladder attached, halfway up the building, to a girder, to which another ladder of the same length was tied, at a reverse angle. ‘Once you’re halfway up, all you have to do is swing yourself round and onto the other ladder and on you go.’ I invited him to lead the way. ‘Lean away from the ladder,’ he called down to me, ‘otherwise you bump your knees and block yourself.’ However shakily, what had to be done was done. At length, I swung myself over the parapet of the roof, took a deep breath, and showed interest in the metal tracks along which the sections of the roof were due to be rolled.

While we smoked our Woodbines, my guide told me the then new joke about the worker who went out of the gate every day with a wheelbarrow with waste paper in it. The security man checked it for stolen goods (there was no shortage of pilfering on any building site) but never found anything. After several weeks, the guard said, ‘I know you’re nicking something and I promise not to do anything about it, but what the hell is it?’ The worker said, ‘Wheelbarrows.’

With a long look at London’s flat, often still flattened, horizons, I climbed
over the parapet and onto the first of the two pliable ladders. Back at the office, I wrote up the details of the revolutionary roof. Bernard Drew stabbed my work onto the spike without hesitation.

The sad-countenanced John Prebble was the Beaver’s house intellectual. In his mid-thirties, he smoked a straight pipe, lit with proletarian Swan Vesta matches, wore serious glasses and did not mix with the artisans. Having served in the Royal Artillery during the war, he owed his job, to some degree, to the fact that, like the Beaver, he had been raised in Canada. Prebble had his own small office. Its tight window opened only onto the newsroom, whence I could see him frowning over sources from which to cull material that would pass muster with the Beaver. Even a junior reporter could recognise a man who had hoped to have better things to do than try to wrest readers from Kathleen Winsor. I did not know at the time that Prebble was an ex-Communist. It amused the Beaver to employ left-wingers such as Michael Foot and, in due time, Alan Taylor, whom he could massage, with praise and money, into becoming right-handed, as it were. Prebble left Fleet Street after writing a 1956 bestseller, about the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879, and found a new allegiance in Scottish nationalism.

The other feature writer with an office (and a page) of his own was Logan Gourlay, a tall, narrow, dandified and equally unsmiling Scot who covered show business and reviewed movies. With an elastic expense account, he could afford not to acknowledge the engine room crew even when we shared the lift with him. Not long after I joined the paper, he was found guilty of padding his expenses and dismissed. He later edited a book entitled
The Beaverbrook I Knew
.

Although His Lordship never came up to the office from Cherkley Court, his manor in the Surrey countryside, the proprietor kept a long-sighted eye on his publications. Fear (and vain hope) of a ‘call from the country’ procured adherence to his foibles. One of the loftiest of his courtiers, George Malcolm Thomson, was said to have told another journalist that, when
alone with Max, he felt like Napoleon’s Marshal Ney. To which the other replied (or said he had): ‘Surely you mean Marshal Yea.’

It was mandatory to deny the existence of the Beaver’s blacklist. All the same, I soon learned, as if by osmosis, never to speak well of Lord Louis Mountbatten. In the Beaver’s inferno, ‘Dickie’ had an irredeemable place in the deepest circle of the damned: too vain to take expert military advice, Mountbatten had been responsible for sending a large contingent of ill-supported, under-trained Canadian commandos to their doom in the 1942 raid on Dieppe. To compound the scandal, he had, as the last Viceroy, given away India. Even the Beaver did not go so far below the belt as to publish what was loudly whispered in grand circles: that Mountbatten’s wife, Edwina, had a more than diplomatic affair with Pandit Nehru, and that her husband was more than somewhat complaisant.

The proprietor’s anathema extended to anyone who advocated joining the prototype of the European Union. Britain’s affiliation with the benighted continent would clash with the policy of Imperial Preference, the Beaver’s economic panacea. His opposition to the incipient Franco-German
entente
was embodied in the Crusader
couchant
, with lance and shield, in a niche at the top right-hand corner of our front page. To defer to the Beaver’s prejudices came as easily as the imitation of Ciceronian irony or Ovid’s metrical cynicism. Any party line, I realised, was liable to be as infectious as the common cold. Anyone could become an apparatchik, if duly salaried. There was secret comedy in honouring any creed that offered status and conferred privileges.

My St John’s College contemporary the historian John Erickson was the first to remark how, during Stalin’s Terror, those rounded up and accused of capital crimes appeared before ‘grinning judges’. Both the victims and those who condemned them to a slow or a quick death knew the whole thing to be an inescapable and bloody farce. To play the ambitious clerk required neither sincerity nor belief. Like Castiglione’s courtier, a journalist
can remain free within his servility by knowing – but never, ever saying – how absurd it is, and how furtively delicious, to conform to the wishes of a tyrant who has favours to offer.

Brocky was gallant enough to act quite as if he needed a green bagcarrier. He often took me to the pubs where trades union leaders sighed with mild and bitter regret at Clem Attlee’s lack of socialist steam. Like
ITMA
’s Colonel Chinstrap, when offered another tongue-loosening glass, they never minded if they did. Brocky maintained that the key moment in British post-war history came when the National Union of Mineworkers refused the offer of a seat, or seats, on the newly nationalised Coal Board. By declining directorial responsibility, the NUM left the power where, in truth, they preferred it to be: in the hands of the middle-class managers whom they chose to denounce rather than to supplant.

As the days went by, I was entrusted with less minor errands and inquiries. It was surprising to discover how easily people were flattered when approached by a cozening apprentice and how willing, often eager, to disclose petty secrets. My initiation into the means by which our foreign news coverage seemed to be ubiquitous came when one of the subs approached me, one Saturday morning, with a flimsy print-out, on pink paper, from the
Agence France-Presse
. ‘Doing anything, Fred?’

‘No. Rather not.’

‘Write this up for me then, old son, would you, as if you were in Peking?’

As soon as I sat down at a vacant Royal Sovereign, I was looking out over the Forbidden City. In almost no time my Chinese meal was ready to go to the subs’ table. The capacity for fluent imposture supplied one of the reasons for the central role of the Classics in English establishment life. Like satire and snobbery, parody and docility are never incompatible: the satirist is often a toady with two sets of teeth: one snarls at the privileged, the other smiles when offered preferment. Sir David Frost and Sir Jonathan Miller came to prove the point.

Outstanding in the Beaver’s spectrum of hates was the annual British Industries Fair. This apparently benign and patriotic enterprise incurred his displeasure because exhibiting industrialists were encouraged, by the Labour government, to make deals with Europe rather than with the Empire. Brocky sent me down to Olympia to see what I could root out in the way of a story. If it was to make the paper, it would have to show that the BIF was doing a disservice to This Country.

The press officers at Olympia were busy handing out cyclostyled cheer that trumpeted record agreements to supply British products to all sorts of foreign markets. That sort of happy news was not what I was there to unearth. Then an aggrieved salesman told me that undercover agents from German industrialists, although officially proscribed, were on the prowl, like the spy in
L’Attaque
, with offers to undercut British prices. As a result, orders were being taken away from Our People by the resurgent Hun.

Fuelled with pay-dirt, I hurried back to the office, sat down at a spare typewriter and beavered away at a mostly monosyllabic exposé of Teutonic subterfuge. As he scanned my draft, I saw Bernard Drew’s brow lose its suspicious crevices. He looked up at me and said, ‘You couldn’t bulk it out a bit, could you, Fred?’ Of course I could. When my piece made the Scottish edition of the paper that Saturday, under the byline ‘By
Sunday Express
Reporters’, the Bernards, Drew and Harris, came across to show me the page hot off the stone. The
novillero
had made his first kill.

The word came down from Stanley Head that I should file my expenses. I asked Brocky what might count as legitimate apart from my bus fare to Olympia. ‘Bus? I told you to take a taxi. And those salesmen you talked to, you did buy them a few rounds of drinks, I hope, didn’t you? Go and do some clever arithmetic. Only, Fred, remember: no round numbers.’

After the paper had gone to bed, generous solidarity led the old hands to escort me to the Hole in the Wall for a celebratory drink. As our platoon of Expressmen came in, a solitary hack at the bar called out, ‘Here come
the Beaverbrook lackeys.’ William Barclay, the Scotsman who wrote the ‘Crossbencher’ column (in which His Lordship’s likes and dislikes among politicians were praised and pilloried), responded, ‘Dirrty old
News of the
Worruld
!’

I was shocked and liberated to find that the only morality in journalism was that the story came first. By the time I took the bus to north London to find out more about a man called Raven who, the Press Association reported, had taken his baby daughter and fled to Paris, I was Joseph Conrad’s Verloc, a secret purveyor of bombshells seated among leisurely citizens.

Raven and his family lived in Royalty Court, a block of 1930s flats regal only in name. A huddle of journalists and cameramen were loitering under the stiff canopy over the front door, hoping for a tearful statement from the abandoned wife. The Fleet Street code of conduct required that reporters ‘fill in’ any member of the fraternity who was late on the case. Even though I came from ‘the bloody
Sunday Express
’, I was suffered to fish in the common pool. There was little in it but tiddlers. My colleagues outside Royalty Court were content to spend their morning in paid patience. As soon as it was opening time, they took it in turns to go, in small groups, to the nearest pub.

As a pupil in Brocky’s school, it occurred to me that there had to be a back entrance to the Ravens’ second-floor flat. I walked round the block and found the narrow backstairs that allowed dustmen to collect and tote the tenants’ rubbish to their van. I went up cold concrete steps to the second floor and tried the appropriate door. I almost hoped that it would be locked. It was not. There I was in the small, empty kitchen of the beleaguered family. I looked at the used breakfast things, cosied teapot, United Dairies bottle (with a cardboard top, not gold foil, like our
Express
full-cream milk) and dented cornflake packet and I felt the triumph and shame of the debutant double-dealer. As I coughed and turned to go, a young
woman came in from the hallway and said, ‘What the hell’s going on? Who the hell are you?’

I said, ‘I’m awfully sorry. Raphael.
Sunday Express
. The door was open.’

‘Press? You’re not supposed to be in here, press.’

‘Are you the mother, possibly, Mrs Raven, of the– the–?’

‘What if I am?’

‘I wonder if you’d care to tell me your side of the story. Very sorry about what happened. It must be terrible for you.’

It was not difficult to adopt the tone and syntax of a Job’s comforter. The woman was so desperate that she seemed reluctant to have me leave. ‘What do you want me to tell you? He’s gone, Derek, and never said a word to anyone.’ More embarrassed than ruthless, I hardly knew what I did want to know.

‘Um, your little boy,’ I said, ‘what’s his name and how old is he exactly?’

‘Little girl.’

‘Of course.’

‘Jennifer. Two. Three in October.’ She told me how crowded her parents’ flat was for all of them, including the baby, and how her husband didn’t always get on with her mother.

I was touched and disappointed: nothing she was telling me, of domestic and financial strains, was likely to warrant buttressing my expenses. I lacked the heartlessness to ask whether her husband had another woman or enough money to stay in France. I said that perhaps he would be back soon. ‘Do you think?’ She sat, elbows on the table, chin on the heels of her hands. Our Readers might be shocked by the husband who took his child to The Continent, but by the next weekend, the bloodless kidnap would no longer be news. Forty years later, it furnished an episode in my novel and TV series
After the War
.

Clement Attlee’s Labour government was reaching the end of its lease. In February 1950, his thin voice called for a general election. Brocky and I took the train to Plymouth to attend a rally to be addressed by Winston
Churchill on behalf of his son. When recruited to Parliament in 1943, during a wartime by-election, Randolph had had a walkover. Now that the inter-party truce was over, the war hero and cuckold, whose wife, Pamela, had had a notoriously public affair with the millionaire American Averell Harriman, was opposed by Michael Foot, who had been editor of Beaverbrook’s
Evening Standard
when he was twenty-eight.

Unlike Randolph, Foot had no prestigious war record, but he had been born in the constituency. He was rejected from the army on medical grounds. Foot had, however, been one of the cross-party troika (with Frank Owen and Peter Howard) who – under the pseudonym ‘Cato’ – composed the bestselling 1940 pamphlet
Guilty Men
. Published by Victor Gollancz, it pilloried selected appeasers, almost all Tories, who were accused of selling the pass and leaving Britain too weak to confront Hitler in good time. The troika’s
nom de plume
was oddly chosen: in ancient Rome, both the famous Catos were bywords for intransigent conservatism. Quentin Hogg, the MP for Oxford University, who had been among Neville Chamberlain’s more durable friends, responded with a polemic entitled
The Left Was
Never Right
. Although it cited chapter and verse in exposing the unpatriotic delinquencies of pre-war Labour politicians and their opposition to rearmament, Hogg’s overheated book never achieved the classic status of Cato’s.