In My Wildest Dreams (43 page)

As we drove over those hot and flinty mountains, and came upon the prospect of the plain, spread out brown and baked before us, my friend at once spotted the two specks, far below, further away, at the crossroads. 'Women,' he forecast, like a hunter saying 'Bison'. 'They have had a lift on a truck going to the kibbutz to the west. Now they are waiting for someone to take them down to Eilat.'

His forecast was perfect and after coming down onto the flatter desert we eventually arrived alongside the dusty young ladies, standing veiled with flies and with their thumbs held hopefully out. They came with us to Eilat, on the Red Sea, where they stayed at the youth hostel and we stayed at the Queen of Sheba hotel. During the course of the next few days, influenced no doubt by the warmth of both the local friendship and sunshine, I suggested to the girls that if they should ever arrive in London then they might telephone me at the
Evening News.

At least two years went by and I was working in the garden of my flat-roofed house one Sunday when the telephone rang and my wife answered it. She appeared a little peevishly I thought, and said: 'It's Mimi.'

Mimi I did not know, but she had been given my number by one of the girls from Israel under that irritating system where every American's friend is everyone else's boon companion. She was visiting London and would just love to meet me. She had been given, against the strictest rules, my home number by an accommodating, if lax, telephone operator at the office.

She was very insistent and, after explaining that I could not rendezvous with her immediately since I was among the weeds, I agreed to have an innocuous tea the following afternoon.

We met at Lyon's Corner House, me and Mimi and forty-three of her teenage girlfriends. They were so flattering and so pleased to see me that I ended up showing them around London. In a long and noisy crocodile we trudged through the tourist spots, me in the van. Every now and then I would pause to answer some question about our architectural heritage, our history, what sort of trees grew in the parks, or whether we had ice cubes yet. There were some enquiries to which I did not know the answer so I made it up. When we were trooping along the Mall, a policeman at a crossing called out to me: 'Guide! Will you keep your party off the road, please.'

Naturally I was very fed up with the whole farrago. It was also extremely wearying. Eventually they demanded to go to Soho to see some sin and I agreed to lead them, with the proviso that it was to be the last call. I wanted to go home to my weeds.

Like some latter-day General Booth I marched this wholesome mob up and down Old Compton Street, Greek Street, Romilly Street and all those nefarious byways that appear to change places every time you visit them. There was no sin visible and I had to assemble my team and confess that in all the years I had been familiar with Soho I had never seen a gangster. Soho's reputation was just a fable. At that moment a man began stabbing another man to death outside a greengrocer's. The victim was stabbing the assilant back and a box of plums was knocked onto the pavement. The American girls crowded around, thrilled to bits, while the two men rolled and stabbed each other. Blood was all over the pavement and the shopkeeper was howling somewhat surrealistic ally: 'My plums! My plums!' Eventually the police and the ambulancemen appeared and the protagonists were cleared up and carried away. The forty-four American girls were fizzing with excitement. Mimi kissed me violently and gushed: 'Oh, thank you, Leslie. Thank you. London is just wonderful!'

The second fall from grace concerned a young lady of extreme beauty and madness called Hannah. I met her one day in the California Bar in Tel Aviv, an establishment run by one Abe Nathan who shortly after tried to bring about a one-man peace in the Middle East by flying to the Egyptians and asking them to be reasonable. I like to think it was Abe to whom they eventually listened. He has spent his life, since then, abandoning his former wine-women-and-song existence, in trying to bring peace and understanding to all parts of the world most of which obstinately refuses to listen. He sails in a boat and broadcasts sanity. Sanity, unfortunately, is something not many people recognise when they see it. But Abe tries.

In his bar, this hot afternoon, I met Hannah who told me in the same breath as her name that her life's ambition was to visit England. During the time I knew her she remained the most dedicated and most voluptuous Anglophile I have ever met. She was also, as I have mentioned, impetuous to the point of being crazy.

Two years or more after our meeting when I was, so to speak, between marriages, she suddenly appeared in London, at Aldgate Pump to be precise, and announced that she had come to live with me. This would have been complicated in the extreme, but I was just going to Norwich to take part in a programme at Anglia Television and it occurred to me that, just for old time's sake, she might like to accompany me.

On the train she told me her story. She had taken part in a film and won a beauty contest in Israel and with the money she gained she had set out by sea to Greece and then overland to see the England she had loved so long from afar. Her English was limited (Hebrew being her natural language) but she graphically recounted her adventures across Europe and how she had arrived, with passport but no work permit or other documents, at Dover. It was raining and she was cold. She began to cry. A sympathetic, if predatory, dock policeman put his cloak about her and took her home with him. There she stayed for a week. Now she was with me again, overjoyed to be in England and eager to become famous.

We went to the dining car to have tea and there she produced a wad of her latest glamour photographs. She was deeply in love with herself. The pictures were by no means obscene but might have been considered a trifle over-exposed. She had a great pack of them and she was very proud. Sitting opposite was a young man reading an evangelistic newspaper with good-news headlines: 'God's Word Proved'! and Jesus Lives Today'! I had been keeping an anxious eye on his proximity and I was not worried for nothing. Suddenly Hannah began distributing her naked photographs like a dealer in a poker school. One, and then another, slid beneath the religious young man's paper and I heard him gasp, then moan.

Hannah would have never understood anything complicated so while attempting to gather up her pictures I said: 'Stop. He is religious. He is . . . a . . .' Inspiration came. 'He is a rabbi.'

The young man, puce-faced, pushed the offending photographs back at us, folded his gospel news and scrambled from behind the table. When he had reached the aisle he turned and glared at me. 'And I'm
not
a rabbi either!' he squeaked.

Hannah was quite without restraint. A sort of madness came over her at, for me, the most inopportune moments. Another arrived early that evening. I was sitting in the interview chair at Anglia Television talking about my latest novel. The programme was going out live in the evening magazine. Suddenly I saw the interviewer's eyeballs begin to curl. To my left and slightly behind me there was an ominous crash. Still attempting to talk rationally I saw from the edge of my eye that the lovely Hannah was being pinned to the floor of the studio by four technicians who were patently enjoying every moment of it. One was sitting across her stomach, one had her legs and the third her arms. The fourth, most important, had his fortunately large hands across her mouth.

Somehow we got through the allotted four minutes of the interview; I do not know how. Afterwards they switched to some film item and we managed to manhandle her struggling from the studio. She recovered quickly. 'I am beautiful,' she announced to the massed technicians. 'It is
me
who must be on the television.'

There was one further incident before our mercifully short reunion came to an end (she was eventually deported, having entered the country illegally, I imagine to the relief of a good many frightened men in London and elsewhere). We sat at dinner in the County Hotel, Norwich. In the middle of the table was a large bowl of salad. The dining room was full. Along came a waiter and Hannah, typically, asked him if he knew where she came from. After several attempts he gave up and she proudly said: 'I am Hannah from Israel.'

'Oh, Palestine,' he said, realisation dawning. 'Out there myself just after the war. Shot quite a lot of your people.'

He passed on. But I could see she was boiling to do something outrageous. 'Steady, steady,' I warned. 'He was only joking.' Then she did it. Seizing the salad bowl, she shouted: 'What is this market!' and flung it violently at the ceiling. I closed my eyes and, conscious of being struck by falling cucumber slices, when I opened them I saw that our salad had been distributed about the room. A woman was sitting shocked, with a lettuce leaf on her head while her husband scraped a squashy half tomato from the bridge of his spectacles. There were lumps of lettuce, spring onions, cucumber, and sloppy slices of tomato everywhere. The bowl itself had struck a child a resounding blow and the boy was holding it up and asking wonderingly: 'Where did it come from?' 'From
whence
did it come?' corrected his mother insistently. An onion had been added to another diner's soup and the crunch of radishes sounded below the feet of waiters. People began to wipe themselves down and a waitress collected the bits of salad and put them back in the bowl which she then pointedly replaced on our table. Eventually I looked up into the smoky and disgruntled eyes of the manager. 'Sorry,' I mumbled. 'It was an accident.'

In my final three years at the
Evening News
I was involved in a bewildering diversity of assignments. I travelled with the Queen to Australia and to Germany; I arrived in Rhodesia on the day the truculent Ian Smith declared UDI and began a revolution; I drove around half the United States; I taught some Japanese in the Shega Kogan mountains to sing 'Old Uncle Tom Cobbly and All' (not an easy achievement for people who cannot pronounce the letter 'L'); I fell into freezing Holy Loch while manoeuvring for a better view of the first Polaris nuclear submarine to arrive in Britain, and I played Prime Minister Harold Wilson at bar billiards. Any regular reader of the newspaper might have been forgiven for wondering who this busy bee was. In one edition I had a front page story on the consecration of Coventry Cathedral, an article on the prospects for the Old Trafford Test Match (as told to me by Sir Leonard Hutton), a book review and a column on pop music which firmly forecast that the Beatles would flop spectacularly in America.

On the other hand I had no ambitions in newspapers for all my wants had been, almost miraculously, realised. There was never a moment when I desired either to work for another, perhaps grander, newspaper or to change my function within my own office. I never yearned to be an editor or even an assistant or associate editor. There were those who coveted that power and lay in waiting, eating their egg-and-chips lunches at their desks, fearing that some opportunity for glory might arrive when they were absent from the office. Neither, however, was I making much money. When I eventually left the paper I was, I suppose, its leading writer and I was making forty-two pounds ten shillings a week before deductions. Even in 1965 this was not a large salary. My second wife, Diana, was making more managing a ladies' health club. There were, of course, always expenses.

Fleet Street stories concerning expenses are legion, usually beginning with the legend of the reporter running towards the Strand who, on passing his news editor going the other way, shouted to him that he could not stop as he was in a taxi.

On the
News
we had an amiable and gifted reporter called Cyril who had a long history of crises involving his expenses sheets. Once he was sent on a flood story and entered the purchase of a pair of Wellington boots on his charges. Sam Jackett, the news editor, cynically told Cyril that before he would sanction the item he wanted to see the boots. 'I had to go out and buy a pair,' grumbled Cyril.

He had assembled a fictitious family, members of which appeared in many of the stories he covered as eyewitnesses of various happenings, always ready with a quote, later to be entered on the expenses sheet as: 'Entertaining Mr Robinson, Re: smash and grab. Holborn – three shillings and sixpence'. Members of the family Robinson (they were known in the office as the Swizz Family Robinson) materialised in all manner of situations. Mrs Mary Robinson would be interviewed on the poor quality of school meals in Dagenham, Essex; then James Robinson would appear as witness to a gas explosion in Twickenham, Middlesex ('Went off like a bomb, it did'). Little Billy Robinson, for the consideration of an icecream, would give his views on Santa Claus, while teenage Mary, a distant cousin, would press for more youth facilities at Hemel Hempstead. Old greybeard Jasper Robinson was always good for a quote about the price of tobacco after each succeeding Budget, while their West Indian kinsman Jeremiah had a pungent word or two to say about race relations in Brixton. An Anglo-Indian, Jellubee Robinson was interviewed about his memories of the Raj. The whole family facade almost came tumbling down, however, when Cyril had recorded Mr Steven Robinson's graphic reconstruction of a bank robbery at Marble Arch. This was worth several Scotches because Mr Robinson had to be calmed before he could give his account and the items duly appeared on the expenses sheet. At about the same time as Cyril was computing the charges, however, he received a telephone call from Scotland Yard requesting Mr Steven Robinson's address since they lacked an essential witness to the robbery. He was obviously their man. Fortunately Cyril always gave his fabled family nebulous addresses. In this case the address was Edgware Road, London, a thoroughfare that runs from Marble Arch to Edgware, a distance of several miles. 'He didn't give me the number of the house,' said Cyril lamely.

On my forty-two pounds ten shillings a week, plus expenses, I went to some of the world's most exotic places and met the occasional important man. On an airliner going to Beirut I sat across the aisle from Harold Wilson, who had just become leader of the Labour Party. Over a certain mileage Fleet Street reporters travelled first class (although some used to cash the tickets in and fly economy, keeping the difference for their holidays) and we were the only two occupants of the elite compartment. We conversed a little, mostly about parliamentary journalists, and at Beirut we went our separate ways.

Several years later, when he was Prime Minister, Mr Wilson went on holiday with his wife Mary to their cottage in the Isles of Scilly, and all Fleet Street went with them. It was a planned operation, the reasonable idea of getting all the interviews, all the photographs and all the filming done in one weekend and then leaving the Wilsons to enjoy their vacation. Through someone who knew the family well, I found myself one evening playing bar billiards with the premier at the St Mary's fishermen's club. "Arold', as he was universally known in the islands, was well liked and the fishermen treated him as a familiar. He was, naturally, quite adept at bar billiards and reacted to the friendly plaudits of the Penders, the Penhaligons and the Hicks boys. He was about to make a crucial shot and was lining up cue and ball ready to fire the latter at the assembly of wooden toadstools which are the target of the game. Since I was his opponent I thought it astute enough, as he was about to make his stroke, to remind him of our previous meeting, several years before on the plane to Beirut. Hardly pausing in his cue action he muttered from the corner of his mouth: 'It was 1961. December tenth.' He then knocked all the toadstools down with a single stroke. I was deeply impressed.

The following day it was announced that the Prime Minister was to give a press conference on one of the uninhabited islands. Appropriately, a touch of the master's hand here, the isle called Samson was chosen, and we all chugged out there on a convoy of boats. Once landed, Harold sat like a patriarch on a rock and expounded his views on the world situation. St Mary's, the main island, was misty across the water and I wondered what would happen if the ever expected Third World War was to break out while the British leader was thus marooned on an uninhabited speck in the Atlantic Ocean. I asked the premier what his views were on this and, for once, he was put out of his stride. 'Well,' he said, giving the pipe a fierce puff. 'We do have a telephone link of course from the mainland to the house on St Mary's. If I were needed urgently the RAF would send a plane for me.'

'But you're not on St Mary's,' I pressed. 'It's taken twenty-five minutes to get here by boat.'

'Peter Thompson, the boatman,' answered Wilson, a little tersely but not to be beaten, 'is a very good lad. He could be over here in no time to pick me up.'

Not 'no time', but twenty-five minutes, I thought. In that space the world could be ashes. I interviewed Peter Thompson and wrote a story about him – Peter the Boatman, the Last Link in the Hot Line. This, I thought, was pretty worthwhile stuff. It never appeared in my newspaper or any other, however. A hurried government 'D' notice was slapped on the matter even before I had finished dictating it into the telephone. The following year Mr Wilson was equipped with the most powerful walkie-talkie radio ever devised. There was an item on the television news where he was talking to his foreign secretary, Mr George Brown, who was holidaying in far-off Ireland.

One Sunday in the winter of 1963 the whole of Britain was covered with snow and I was sledging down a hill near my house on the Hertfordshire housing estate. It was a run rarely attainable in this country, thick, hard-pressed snow, with a glossy frozen surface. The hill was steep and there was a leap over a small, solid stream at its foot, before the moment of hard braking in an area where some new houses were being built. It was one of those afternoons that you remember all your life. Lois, my young daughter and Mark, my son, with the children and the fathers of the neighbourhood, shared the thrilling toboggan run. The air was like steel and an outrageous vermilion sunset spilled across the sky over Watford. The following day I was going to Australia and at that moment I did not really want to go. It was my turn for a solo run on the sledge and, flat out on my belly (and wearing no headgear), I began the descent and was soon accelerating down the steep white slope. To the stream I came and the toboggan took off like a salmon, clearing the gap easily. Then I forgot to brake, I careered over the broken surface towards the housing site, tried to swerve to avoid a hard-looking pile of bricks and crashed spectacularly through the door of a shaky wooden lavatory erected for the convenience of workmen. The toboggan hit the bucket and my head followed it. The entire little building collapsed on top of me. By the time rescuers had arrived and pulled away the timbers I was nearly dead through laughing. Everybody was holding their ribs. My children sat in the snow and wiped their eyes. At that moment I decided not to go to Australia.

Nevertheless I went, of course, to follow the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh across the world. It had been a matter of great delight to be picked for such an assignment, and it was almost as big a moment to be invited to Buckingham Palace for the pre-tour cocktail party where the accredited correspondents were to meet members of the royal household who were making the journey.

Everywhere in London there was deep snow. I set out from Fleet Street very early because I wanted to be at the Palace on time and, in that weather, I thought it would be difficult to get a taxi. As it happened one came along at once, creeping through the white landscape, and we arrived outside the Palace gates a good hour too early for the reception. 'You can't go in yet,' said the gate policeman solemnly. 'There's nobody at home.' There was nothing for it but to dismiss the cab and try to keep myself warm for an hour. I walked around in the cold for a while and my feet began to freeze. I went into Victoria Station but a Siberian wind blew through its spaces. Then I saw a workman's caff, a wonderfully steamed-up window, and the magic letters: 'Tea and Snacks'. Within, it was crammed and warm. Porters from the station and bus and lorry drivers were thick around the tables drinking tea from powerful cups and munching into doorstep slices of bread and beef dripping. I joined the queue to the counter. While I waited I eavesdropped on the special language: 'Two o' drip and one medium, please, love.' 'One 'arry Lauder with two babies 'eads.' This latter order was for boiled beef and carrots (an old Harry Lauder song) and two boiled potatoes. When my turn came I asked modestly for a cup of tea, please, love.

'Strong or medium?' enquired Love.

'Er . . . medium, please, love.'

'ONE MEDIUM!' bawled Love deafeningly. She returned to me. Her round face was rosy with sweat. 'Any drip?'

It was years since I had eaten bread and dripping. In Barnardo's in fact. 'Two of drip,' I answered.

'TWO O' DRIP WIV THAT MEDIUM!' she bellowed.

The tea was in a mug as thick as a washbasin, the two of drip shimmered like grey mud under the neon lights. I sat down and warmed my hands on the cup, in the approved manner, and ate the two of drip with great enjoyment.

Twenty minutes later I was having sherry with the Queen.

From the outset my visit to Australia in 1963 was adventurous. Intending to go to the Australia versus England Test at the Sydney cricket ground I had departed a week early but I never actually got to the match. When the plane reached Singapore, where I planned to spend one day, I was again taken violently ill, the symptoms the same as those which had erupted in the church at Mark's christening. On that occasion they had subsided. This time I knew it was serious.

Instead of sensibly calling a doctor to the hotel, I staggered out at two in the morning, hailed a taxi and asked the driver to take me to a hospital. When we got there I was confronted with a long line of sick and injured Chinese, Indians and Malays, holding bones, rubbing bumps and complaining in their various languages. I got on the end of the line. Several times I collapsed and some of the Chinese and Indians helped me to my feet again. A kind Malay man went to get a wheelchair and I sat in this, turning the wheels painfully as the queue gradually moved towards the distant doctor.

When eventually I reached the head of the line I was in severe pain. The doctor was a Chinese lady. 'Who is wrong?' she enquired. Thinking she had just told me her name I told her mine and we curiously shook hands. 'I'm dying,' I said. She looked doubtful. 'We all die,' she said. 'From the moment of birth.' Oriental wisdom may be all very fine, but I was in agony. She rolled up my sleeve, injected something into me and I knew nothing more until I woke up on a wooden bed with a coolie picking my pocket. Having been caught in the act, he very contritely offered to go and get a taxi for me and this he did. I went to the Raffles Hotel, where all those years before I had sung with the band, and asked for a glass of water. My promise made to myself on that long-ago occasion, that I would one day be able to buy a drink at the famous long bar, had to be postponed. A profound Sikh brought me the water on a silver tray. Then I went back to the airport, feeling now in less discomfort, and boarded the British Airways flight for Sydney. During the journey the pain returned viciously and the pilot radioed ahead for an ambulance to meet us on arrival. Even this had its moment of comedy. In those days any book even suspected of being mildly erotic was enthusiastically seized by the Australian Customs. I had with me a copy of
Lady Chatterley's Lover
which I had borrowed from the bookshelf of a friend in Beirut during my overnight stop there. While I was borne away on a stretcher, clutching my stomach and moaning, a Customs man spotted the book and impounded it.