What Was I Thinking: A Memoir (14 page)

BOSNIA AND MURUROA CONVINCED
me that working as an
international
correspondent was the way to go. Both experiences were incredibly stimulating and satisfying. Also, no one else in New Zealand — and no one radio station — was doing exactly this. Other networks used local people. My plan was to base myself in New Zealand and travel to where the story was. Derek loved the idea that he would have someone in an area that National Radio or ZB didn’t. And very often we did have that: I was where major news organisations didn’t have people.

It fed into the idea of the Radio Pacific family — not only would people take our pills, rub in our potions and sleep on our
magnets, but they could sit at home and visit our danger spots with me as their guide.

Other people went to news-gathering centres; I wanted to be in news-happening centres — in the trench next to the person with the gun. It was more than just reporting the news, it was getting inside it. Bosnia had shown me that the key was to travel with no infrastructure to slow me down. With no resources, I had to push harder and take more risks. I didn’t have an advance team setting up interviews and booking my accommodation. I couldn’t possibly get accreditation in many areas, let alone actually achieve anything that wouldn’t be achieved better by the battalions of journalists already in the most obvious places.

Admittedly, it was challenging organising this from home on the outskirts of Masterton using the services of the local AA travel agency.

I spent a lot of time in Singapore, which was an efficient place to use as a hub. I could rent hotel rooms there for half a day. The beauty of them was that they were in the airport so you didn’t have to go through Customs. You could collect your baggage and go straight to your room, do stuff and get on another plane without actually going to Singapore. Sometimes I arrived without an onward flight to New Zealand booked so I could ricochet off somewhere else if another story came up.

Singapore is good for getting to Asia, obviously, but also Europe and even Africa. If I was going to Africa, I tried to get on an Egypt Air flight from Singapore, because if you timed it right, they weren’t able to take you on from Cairo straight away and they put you up at a much nicer hotel than I could afford myself. Sometimes they had to put you up for two nights and provide transfers and accommodation. It was fantastic.

As much as I loved the travel, I loved coming back to Homebush, where we had moved from Carterton. It was a wonderful place, especially for the girls. We had an idyllic five
acres at the end of a no-exit street and a small mansion — the original homestead, which is why home and area share the same name. I just loved it, even when I sat basking in the sun and the quiet was interrupted only by the creaking sound of another piece of spouting falling off.

Much of my money had gone on cars, like my Rolls-Royce. With a Rolls, by far the cheapest aspect of ownership is the initial purchase. They are so hokey they almost don’t qualify as showy. What I like about them, and a lot of other showy cars, is that they are for dreamers. Dreamers design them, dreamers manufacture them and dreamers buy them. Only recently, since BMW have started making them, have Rolls-Royces become viable as vehicles. Before that, when you went out in one you practically had to have someone following behind with a decent Japanese car so you could be confident of completing your journey. I breathed a sigh of relief every time I got mine back in the garage.

There were lots of little differences between Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. The Bentley was for people who liked to drive. If you were going to drive yourself you had a Bentley, if you were going to have a chauffeur you had a Rolls-Royce. I liked the fact that someone had decided it should have a full picnic table in the back, and a place for champagne. How wonderful to be able to hear nothing but the electric clock — you bought the advertising line, even though it was never true. All you could really hear was the wind howling by because the doors had been so badly assembled.

I got my first Rolls when we were running Homebush as a homestay and had a Japanese person staying. It was a beautiful Silver Shadow 2. My guest wanted to play golf and I organised to take him to the course in the Rolls, which spent most of its time under a tarp in the shed alongside the Massey Ferguson tractor, the ute and the fire engine.

When I got it started I always let it run for half an hour to make
sure it was going to be okay. At this time it was playing up very badly. I dropped my visitor off at the golf course in Masterton and when I pulled up in the car park to get the golf clubs out, not intending to turn the car off, the engine stopped.

He didn’t notice anything.

‘What a wonderful car,’ he said as he walked away.

It wouldn’t start. By the time he had finished and come back to the car park, the mechanics I found to come and fix it had only just left. I had been there the whole time dealing with my very expensive problem.

‘You’re already here,’ said the Japanese man. ‘I finished a bit early.’

‘Yes, I came early, just in case,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard it’s quite a fast course.’

Homebush sucked the financial lifeblood from me for several years — all my own fault. I built a little airport out the back, with a helipad. I had a real fire engine and a windsock. I put a lake in and roamed around the place on a Massey Ferguson lawnmower.

The contrast with where I had been for work was usually very stark. I was conscious that I was now safe, yet breathing the same oxygen as people I had just seen getting killed next to me. In the laundry basket were clothes with other people’s blood on them, waiting to go in the wash.

One Sunday in 1997, when I hadn’t been home very long, I was chopping some wood. While I was away Rachael had taken the opportunity to have some trees cut down that she knew I would not have wanted cut down. It was a pleasant day, and I was enjoying being back with my family, gritting my teeth bitterly and chopping these giants of the forest up into fireplace-sized logs.

The radio was on and I heard the first report of a car crash in Paris that might have involved Princess Diana. I went inside
and turned on CNN, which was a major source of stories for me. I used to watch what was happening, try to work out where the story would be in the three days it would take me to get anywhere and make that my destination.

‘I’m going to have to go to France,’ I said to Rachael after realising what was going on. I rang my AA travel person, Margaret. At home. On a Sunday.

‘You’ve got to get me on a flight, preferably straight to Charles de Gaulle, Paris. If not, then to London and I’ll find my own way after that.’ But by the time I had finished the call I had already calculated that I would be wasting my time going to Paris and I should go straight to London.

On the way, with my cell phone and a camera, I realised I could not possibly cover the accident and her death. There was no way I could get near any of that. I had to find another story. And it had to be a story I could sell, because the arrangement was that Radio Pacific covered my expenses but to actually make any money out of this work I had to sell stories to other broadcasters or newspapers.

So in London I slept with the people who were camping
outside
Westminster Abbey and carrying their flowers to Kensington Palace and talked to them all through the night, which, of course, was daytime back in New Zealand, about why they were there.

There was no point trying to cover the funeral. Other people had much better vantage points and were doing a much better job of that angle than I could possibly hope to. I would have been swamped in the global wall-to-wall coverage. Miraculously I got a brilliant photograph of the wreaths on the casket which I sold in London and got good money for.

But I still had to come up with something, and by now the ‘Let’s talk to these people who are standing here in the rain/brilliant sunshine/fog’ angle had been pretty much beaten to death. I decided it would be interesting to see how many people
were around who weren’t part of the event, who had opted out of participating in this piece of history.

I went down to the shopping area of Kensington, where all the shop and house windows were papered with pictures of Diana. The streets were deserted. I stood in the middle of the road and everything was still. If you were going to make an apocalyptic movie in London, this was the time to make it. The only humans in sight were snipers dressed in black stationed along the roofs of the buildings, obviously prepared for people to break in.

I found, in the end, six people who were walking the streets going about their normal business. In the background of these interviews, at one point, you could even hear Elton John singing his song at the service.

‘When you could just walk for five minutes and be part of this huge event, why are you here instead?’ was the question I put to them all. What was in the psyche of someone who was there and not part of it? One of them had opened his shop in case there was a rush. He didn’t even have his TV on. He just stood
in the doorway as the extraordinary sound from the service echoed around the empty streets.

‘Aren’t you tempted,’ I said, ‘to walk for five minutes and see her casket pass by or see the crowds or see the big screen?’

‘No.’

Another person was a vagrant.

‘Are you aware of what’s happening today?’ I asked and she was appalled that I might think she wouldn’t be. She was extraordinarily well informed about the event, but it wasn’t part of her world.

I never made a lot of money from these stories. There are agencies in London that you can use, who will take 20 per cent to send your work around the world. But it’s very difficult to organise, especially for a story with any currency. You needed an office to do that for you if you were out in the trenches. Usually I was in a place where it was very hard to get the information out except for my phone calls to Radio Pacific. I couldn’t transmit photographs. I could write the occasional feature as long as it wasn’t time dependent. However, by the time I had enough hours to do that I was usually too exhausted.

One of the most extraordinary things surrounding the death of Diana was that only a few days later Mother Teresa died. After the Princess of Wales’ funeral a lot of people were mourned out, but I was sure there would be something worth doing in India. I phoned Derek from London because he approved all the trips.

‘We should do this Mother Teresa thing because I think there’s a lovely thing there between these two people.’

‘It sounds expensive, Paul.’

‘Almost certainly, but I think we should do it. I think it’s good for our audience’.

Derek was tight-fisted but his love for radio used to override his reluctance to spend money. And to his credit, he never once said: ‘Wasn’t there a cheaper way to get there?’

I went to a travel agency in Regent Street in London.

‘I’ve got to get to India,’ I said. ‘Any airline other than Air India.’ I didn’t want to arrive with intestinal complications. There’d be plenty of time for that later.

‘I can’t.’

‘All right, Air India.’

The travel agent got me a flight to Mumbai and a transfer to Calcutta, but I had to wait for a couple of days, and that was frustrating because I knew how far behind I would be when I got there. I read all the background I could and managed to worry about everything. What if I couldn’t get near the casket? No one knew what it was going to be like there — whether the whole thing would be run by her order or if the government would take charge. It might be impossible. To take my mind off things I went down to Bristol to visit my gran, who I hadn’t seen for years. She was still in the squalid little terraced house that I used to go to when I was a little boy in my Jesus boots. My schoolboy photo still hung on the living room wall. I had to interrupt her conversation every time my cell phone rang because I was negotiating global travel to cover a major event. I was reminded again of how different everything could have been if I hadn’t had the idea of something better lodged in my mind from an early age.