In My Wildest Dreams (42 page)

We stopped eventually at a small but fine baronial hotel. Freemantle, who looks for stars on hotels with much the same diligence as an astronomer seeks them in the firmament, mentioned that while it was not a patch on the Georges Cinq in Paris, it did appear to be comfortable in a primitive sort of way.

That night there was an unbelieving hush over the land. At the World Cup Finals in South America, Scotland had played lowly Peru – and lost. We wandered to the village bar which was prostrate with men full of drink and grief. Freemantle muttered: 'I think this is our sort of place.'

One shining day we set out to walk the five miles along a threadlike cliff path to a remote settlement at the nose of the Loch Broom Peninsula:

I was frankly astonished that Freemantle had not only agreed to accompany me on my projected arduous journey . . . but had insisted on making the arrangements for provisioning the adventure. This, I thought at the time, was much the same as Beau Brummell offering to go in place of Stanley to find Livingstone in Africa.

The lunch pack turned out to be a gourmet feast. After we had trudged a difficult and dangerous mile on the tight path with a sobering drop to the sea below, Freemantle sat down and said he was dizzy. He was amazed that we had only travelled a mile in an hour. There were four more miles (and hours) to go and then we had to get back.

'Let's have the lunch and go home,' he suggested intrepidly. So we did.

If I had initially been discouraged in Fleet Street by the lack of travel and adventure in the assignments I was afforded, then within a couple of years the situation had been completely reversed. Half of my working life then was spent either out of town, as it was called, or out of the country. While Maureen was bringing up our daughter and our son on the flat-roofed estate to which we had now moved (and which became the
Tropic of Ruislip
of my later novel), I was in Jerusalem, Paris, Sydney, Tokyo or Salisbury, the one that was in what was Rhodesia.

One of my early trips was to Paris where the young heir to the Peugeot car fortune had been kidnapped. In those days, the late nineteen-fifties, kidnapping and abduction were crimes which had only previously been connected with Chicago. Since then the habit has, of course, spread widely. My lack of French was a handicap but I managed pretty well with the help of the staff of our sister paper, the
Daily Mail,
at their office in the Rue de Sender. I went down to St Cloud golf course, from which the lad had been spirited, and came to the conclusion that some of his acquaintances had perpetrated the crime, that they had kidnapped him for fun. This theory was somewhat borne out when the hostage was finally recovered and the culprits arrested. They were rich kids looking for amusement.

To work in a fabled foreign city was wonderful. Carefully I watched she other reporters so that, with their experience (not to mention their French), they did not steal a march on me. I followed up clues and viewed even the most sinless-faced nuns as suspects. One day I was sitting in a cafe and I spotted a journalist from a daily newspaper at a neighbouring table. Suddenly he half rose, then completely rose, having spotted something among the boulevard crowds. I heard him whistle softly and go out of the door. I was not going to be beaten like that. If he was the first to spot some clue, some lead, then I wanted to be second. At a cautious distance I followed him, threading through the people until I saw him going into a cinema. By the time I had reached the foyer he had paid at the box office and was walking through the curtain. Hurriedly I bought my ticket and went into the darkness. He was standing in the shadows surveying the people in the rows of seats. Then he saw me. He seemed more pleased than anything. 'Ah,' he said. 'It's you.' He selected a seat and motioned me to sit in the next one. The film was just starting on the screen.
Tarzan's Secret Treasure,
he whispered. 'Always wanted to see this.'

At the top of the Rue de Sentier was a bistro where the oldest prostitute in Paris used to hold court, regaling the journalists who assembled there with her memories of earlier and, she claimed, much naughtier days. Particularly exotic were her descriptions of the methods used at the end of the nineteenth century to take pornographic photographs. These T-shaped flashes were used in those times and, although these were safe enough at a distance, the capturing of erotic close-ups was riven with risks. Sometimes if the man holding the naked flash drew too near to the parts of the anatomy being immortalised and the explosion occurred, the participants frequently found themselves running around the room trying to extinguish fires in their pubic hair. A tantalising picture.

My sojourn in the odd refugee camp at Crystal Palace, with the London buses on the road outside, had resulted in an arranged trip, also by the World Refugee Year organisers, to the Middle East to visit some real camps for dispossessed people. We flew from the small Blackbushe Airport in a rattling Viking which took two days for the flight to Beirut. Luck was with me again because as the plane chugged over the Mediterranean coast of France we had an amazing view of a terrible disaster (other people's disasters are luck to journalists). The dam at Fréjus had burst and the water had swept into the sea taking people and houses with it. The bite out of the barrage was clearly visible in the mocking sunshine that now lit the landscape below, and the bright blue sea was stained a cocoa-brown for miles. In the bay French and American warships were helping with the rescue operations.

I had spent two weeks the previous summer in a village along that coast, so I was easily able to pick out places. We chugged on to Naples and landed there for the night. Early the next morning, in time for the first edition of the
Evening News,
I telephoned an eyewitness report of the tragedy which was occupying the world headlines. After what I considered to be some graphic aerial description, a bored-sounding sub-editor came on the phone and yawned: 'Did you manage to get any interviews?'

It was always difficult for those at large in the big moving world and those in the confined office to reconcile their outlooks. My days as a sub-editor were not so far behind that I did not appreciate the attitude. Vivid prose and exciting happenings frequently seem pretty poor meat in the murk of some early morning office. There were other desk-bound men who appeared to take a real delight in cutting my stories just before the carefully climaxed punchline so I took to devising alternative punchlines and distributing them throughout the story so that the cut could be made at any almost point. It was usually made
between
them.

The tour of the Middle East took us from Lebanon to Jordan and into Israel through the Mendelbaum Gate in Jerusalem. The first part was undertaken in a United Nations Dakota which made our ramshackle Viking look like Concorde. There were metal seats and no seat belts. On the side was reassuringly stencilled, 'Refurbished 1946'.

It was a good time to go to the Holy Land, for Christmas was nearing and I wrote a series of articles about the unhappy region from which so much hope was always expected. In Nazareth I stayed at a hotel where the foyer was thick with posters and pictures of Kew Gardens. The manager said it was his heart's desire to go to Kew. I also sat through a nativity play in Christ's own town. Not one of the children taking part was a Christian. They were all Arab Moslems attending the Nazareth Anglican School. Like all visitors to Jerusalem I wasted much time looking for the 'green hill far away' where Our Lord was crucified. There is no hill, not according to the official and accepted view. In fact the ugly Church of the Crucifixion lies at the foot of the Via Dolorosa, the Way of Tears, where Jesus carried His cross. We were solicited by the usual gabbling guides who tried to persuade us that the crucifixion, the tomb and the resurrection were all neatly packaged within the confines of the church. Much more convincing, but unacceptable to the variety of churches who squabble in that sacred city, to me at any rate, was the Garden of the Tomb, a simple and quiet place of olive trees and wine presses, with a sepulchre carved into the rock. Beyond the garden
is
a hill which, although not green,
is fashioned
in the shape of a skull, the Golgotha of the Bible, and is historically accepted as having been a place of criminal punishment. It overlooks the Jerusalem bus station.

Not long after this first visit to Israel, the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was spirited from his hideaway in Argentina and flown to Jerusalem to face charges of crimes against humanity. I attended the trial. The accusation, although seemingly large for one man, was not too much for Mr Eichmann. He was an entirely despicable figure, standing in his bullet-proof glass case as the evidence was piled up against him. Even when sentenced to death he stood like a man applying for a job.

The Israeli authorities had thoughtfully provided him with a blue suit for his public appearances and he sat, evil-faced, in this throughout the weeks of the trial. The Nazi ego had not died. When one particularly horrifying piece of material, filmed in a concentration camp, was being shown, it was decided to clear the courtroom. They brought Eichmann from the cells in his prison clothes and sat him in his glass booth while the terrible indictment contained in the film was presented to him. He figured in the action depicted on the screen but remained unperturbed. What concerned him most were his prison clothes, especially when photographers crept close to him and began to take pictures. 'Why are they taking photographs?' he asked crossly. 'And I am not wearing my suit.'

Fortunately, because of the time difference, there was no necessity for me to attend the hearings after the lunch adjournment each day. Any copy I filed would have reached London too late for the final edition. Any time I did not have to be in the courtroom was welcome. Some of the evidence was outrageous and Eichmann's attitude was of studied indifference. One part of his testimony went something like this:

I had visited a place where they were going to shoot some Jews and when they were shooting them I was standing dose and the blood from them spurted onto my uniform. I remember the place well because there was a fine railway station there, built in the reign of the Emperor Franz Josef, and my mother had always taught me to appreciate the good things of those times. After lunch we went back to where they had killed the Jews. By this time they were buried, but the grave was too shallow or there were too many bodies because the blood was coming from the earth like a spring
. . .

Any man who could describe a scene like that, and put a railway station (not to mention lunch) in the middle, richly deserved everything that was to happen to him. He was hanged and his body taken out to sea on a plane, then dropped into the water. Amazingly many of the younger people in Israel could see no point in the trial. It was merely a show they said. How could punishment of one man avenge the deaths of six million? The older people, those with the death camps still shadows in their eyes, and their camp identity number tattooed for ever on their wrists, understandably felt differently.

Even such a long-running horror as the Eichmann trial, however, had its wry moments. Within the compound of the Beit Ha'am, where the court was sitting, was a restaurant for the use of the journalists, the translators and other people connected with the court. On the first day we sat down to lunch and
in walked Adolf Eichmann.
He busily began rearranging the trays on the self-service counter. It was not Eichmann of course, but it needed more than a second glance to realise this. The man was the restaurant manager. He went about blissfully unaware of his evil double and was bemused when people wanted to have their photographs taken with him. He thought it was because of the food.

The timing of the trial made unusual demands on the Jerusalem hotel trade. Not only was the city crowded with journalists and television people, but it was the Passover holiday and the independence celebrations when there was to be a big military parade and dancing in the streets. I was staying in a hotel where the owner had overstretched his resources so much that he had three people booked for each room available. The British journalists were told by the Israeli Government Press Office that they would have to move out into private lodgings. None of us liked the idea but there was nothing for it. I was taken to a block of council flats (you don't think of Jerusalem having
council
flats, do you?) and introduced to a couple who I am certain were as reluctant to accommodate me as I was to be there. Their son was in the army and they had a small spare room. I left my belongings and went out.

It was Independence Day and the rejoicing went on long into the starlit night. Several hours I spent in a night club (you don't think of Jerusalem having
night clubs,
do you?) in the company of the American writer Meyer Levene, who lived on the shores of the Sea of Gallilee, and Stephen Ward, who committed suicide during the Profumo, Christine Keeler, Mandy Rice-Davies sex scandal (he was an artist and was sketching for the
Daily Telegraph).
By the time the dancing in the streets had finished it was dawn and Meyer and his wife drove me to the hotel. By this time I had consumed a liberal amount of local wine and I had forgotten that I had been transferred to a council flat. When I did remember the Levenes had gone, and I had to walk in the warm grey dawn to my correct lodging.

When I reached the place I was confronted with six identical blocks of flats and, I knew, within each of those blocks every flat was identical. As I fingered the key I had been given I was aware that I had no idea where I lived. There followed a furtive and embarrassing sequence. I crept into the blocks one by one, hoping by some fluke to recognise
something.
The wine was not assisting matters. Like a felon up and down stairs I went, secretly trying the key in any door I thought might be likely. Eventually the key turned. Relieved, I went into the small hallway. Yes, that seemed right. I crept into a sitting room that, in the dawn light through the window, seemed to be vaguely familiar. Yes, there was a door at the end. The door to my room, surely. I opened it. Lying on the bed was a sleeping and beautiful girl, wearing nothing at all.

Just keeping panic at bay, I backed out towards the front door of the apartment. As I did so the biggest shadow I have ever seen loomed from a couch in the sitting room. The huge man sat up and leaned on his elbow, staring at me through the gloom.

'Shalom,' I muttered as I backed through the main door. 'Peace be with you.' Outside I tumbled down the stairs and hared out into the main road, not stopping running until I reached the foyer of the hotel. That is where I spent the rest of the night.

If it is true that the evil that men do lives after them, then they have, at least, the consolation of knowing that they are not available for retribution. During separate times in Israel I had two experiences that came home to roost many days after in England.

The first concerned two American girls who were standing in the Negev desert, under the boiling sun, at a bare crossroads with no habitation or inhabitant visible for many miles. Had Moses and his flock happened by it would have done nothing to disturb the scene. I was driving over the desert hills with a beserk Russian. He was a huge, emotional man with a Joe Stalin moustache and eyes like my dog's. When they played Russian songs at the End of the World, a hostelry on the Red Sea, he shed the largest tears I have ever seen from a man.