White Boots & Miniskirts (26 page)

The changes come thick and fast that autumn. Not long after the Spaghetti House Siege and the day of the wrecked barbie, Susan rings me at the office. ‘We’re going to Australia, Jacky. I’ll get a visa as Ron’s partner and Ron says it’ll be really easy for us to get work there. Ron’s fallen out with the
News of the World
, anyway. He says he’s had enough of Fleet Street.’

Boyfriends and lovers have come and gone over the last few years, but the imminent departure of two people I’ve come to regard as surrogate family is as much a shock to me as witnessing my dad’s frailty. Within a few weeks they are gone, following a series of farewell
lunches and dinners in Hampstead, our favourite Greek restaurant in Camden Town and a final, enormous goodbye lunch thrown by our friends running the Camden Head pub in Islington.

‘Ya’d better think about coming out to Australia,’ Ron tells me as we hug goodbye. ‘You’re going nowhere here.’ Typical Ron, straight and to the point. I
was
going nowhere and the days were now shortening. Gloom was everywhere. The UK in the ’70s had become synonymous with IRA car bombs. Suspect packages. Bomb scares where buildings were hastily evacuated. In central London, two people were killed by an IRA bomb at the Hilton Hotel that September. The following month a man was killed by an explosion at a bus stop in Green Park. A TV presenter and political activist, Ross McWhirter, was assassinated by the IRA outside his home in November. The bad news just went on and on. My mood, already quite flat, now plummets even further with the next piece of news: the end of an era on the newsdesk.

Jenny is expecting, a truly happy event for her and Roy. Their lives are changing. No longer will they be going off to concerts at weekends, buying expensive leather belts with ‘The Eagles Tour’ notched in silver at the back. It is time to be responsible parents. They’ve already bought a home and now Jen is giving up work. They’re even going to tie the knot. ‘I’m leaving in March,’ she tells me delightedly. I join in the jokey
congratulations and smiles. It should be good news. I’ll move up a grade. As the senior, I’ll do all the double time overtime on Friday nights, effectively a 20 per cent pay rise of about
£
10 a week. Instead, it plunges me into more confusion. I’ll miss Jenny. We’ve laughed so much together – is there any better way to bond with colleagues? And we’ve always looked out for each other, though we’re totally different people. I just can’t envisage being there with a new person, a stranger.

Only Clive, always cheerful and optimistic, lifts my spirits. Sometimes he’ll be sent away on a job for a few days and I manage to join him. That autumn, we go to Jersey, where he’s been sent on a follow-up to a terrible story about the ‘beast of Jersey’, a man who had terrorised women and children on the Channel island for years, raping and assaulting them while wearing a ghastly rubber mask and studded wristbands. Edward Paisnel had been finally caught in 1971 and imprisoned for 30 years. Yet, in true Fleet Street style, the story didn’t end there, mostly because he’d affected the lives of so many on the small island.

We have an uproarious few days in St Helier. Clive’s trail of interviewees runs cold quite quickly so we make the most of the time, enjoying the hotel and room service. Although Clive is sympathetic to my dilemma, he doesn’t have any solutions or ideas for me. ‘If you leave the Street, luv, we’ll never see each other,’ he warns me.

But I am far from being the only restless soul. Around
me, quite a few 20- or early 30-somethings feel like me, that the UK is a basket case and if you can get out for a better life, now is the time to do it, if you aren’t tied down by mortgages and family. We’ve all had a taste, by now, of what life can be like beyond the grey skies and scruffy pubs. The decade we’d lived through as 20-somethings had given us much freedom – and the cheaper travel explosion had turned many heads. Already, in the office, one or two older journos have retired to the sun in Spain. Some young freelancers are heading off to LA to try their hand at writing about the rich and famous for the tabloids. ‘We can file our copy from the beach,’ they tell everyone.

A few of the reporters on the desk are being lured to the USA by tabloids like the
National Enquirer
, who tempt them with an expenses-paid month’s trial at the paper’s Florida HQ. Journalists, by trade, were more itinerant then than now: there were more jobs, for a start, and foreign coverage on papers was more extensive in the pre-electronic era, so people could take chances as stringers if they fancied unfamiliar surroundings. But it wasn’t just Fleet Street that was affected by this get up and get out feeling. All over the country, people wanted out.

It was one afternoon in early December when I finally found my get out of jail card. It was around 4 pm, the skies outside already darkening and the prospect of another winter of discontent looming large when a
reverse-charge call came through to the news desk from the switchboard. We always accepted such calls, no matter where they came from, in case they meant good stories. ‘I have a Mr Sinclair in Sydney for you. Will you accept the charge?’ said the voice on the switch. Oh joy. Ron and Susan, in their new home by the beach. Well past 3 am there and they were full of the joys of it.

‘Oh, Jac, you’d love it here’ trilled Susan. ‘They’ve got these amazing cardboard boxes with wine in them. You just put them in the fridge, push the button and it comes out lovely and cold. And wine’s so cheap, it’s incredible.’ On and on they went, taking it in turns to tell me what a good time they were having. They’d found good jobs virtually on landing, Ron in radio for the ABC, the Aussie equivalent of the BBC, Susan doing typing shifts in the Radio Australia newsroom. They were renting a big roomy apartment for next to nothing. ‘The money’s so good, we’ve already started saving,’ Susan told me. ‘Last weekend we went to this amazing beach an hour’s drive from the city: there was no one else there. We had the entire beach to ourselves.’

Oh, God. Empty beaches, cheap wine on tap, generous employers – how lucky could you be? Then it was Ron’s turn to take the phone: he’d been drinking but he was still quite articulate. ‘If you can get your ass here, you’ll be laughing. They love Poms who’ve worked in Fleet Street. You’ll walk straight into a job. And if you need money, we’ll stump you for all the cash you need to get
yourself a place until you get on your feet. I mean it. Think about it, eh?’

I’ve already mentioned my innate opportunism. It was there at the start of my working life and it never failed to propel me forward over time. I knew, for a start, that this was no idle comment. Ron, for all his wild, irreverent ways, had already sensed my ennui with my lot in life. Like many Australians, he genuinely believed in his lucky country and thought the Poms were a hapless lot, stuck in a grimy place where positivity, sunshine, good food and a decent living were in somewhat short supply. Put simply, he wanted to help. It was a generous gesture, made in spontaneity, certainly. But the offer was on the table.

I spent the entire weekend after the call in my flat, thinking about it all. Or rather, doing sums, plotting how I could scrape together enough money for the airfare. I could leave in March, with Jenny. I had to give three months’ notice, anyway. We’d both say farewell together. That would give me plenty of time to save a bit. There was a pension fund I’d paid into. I could access that, which, combined with my outstanding holiday pay, would give me most of what I needed. It was definitely doable.

Once I’d found a job and a flat to share in Sydney, it’d take a bit of time to repay Ron. But I’d be in the sunshine, with two of my best friends. It was a fabulous offer. I immediately sent them a postcard to their new
address: ‘Want to come. Please ring the news desk again. I think I can get there after March. See you soon!’ Yet I kept quiet about my plans. I wanted to be sure before I started making it all come true…

That Christmas Eve, I hailed a taxi from Fleet Street to Dalston. I’d overnight with Molly and Ginger in my old bedroom and break my news to them over Christmas lunch. I was quite worried about their reaction. Would Ginger start browbeating me, doing his possessive number: ‘You can’t do this to us,’ ‘We’re your parents,’ that sort of thing?

Amazingly, they took it well. ‘I did my travel when I went to India,’ said Ginger proudly. ‘Now it’s your turn. And you’ll be back, anyway. You won’t stick it there for long.’ Gee thanks, Dad.

Molly was fine. She had long-lost relatives there. ‘You can look them up, Jac.’ I promised to do just that. One hurdle overcome.

I gave my notice in after New Year after several calls from Sydney during which we’d finalised all my plans. I’d go as a Brit tourist on a three-month visa and stay. ‘No problem,’ Ron assured me. ‘They never check anything.’

He was half-right. My somewhat casual approach to paperwork, even in the pre- computer era, did go on to cause me problems down the line. But I wasn’t about to let the details of immigration rules hold me up. I just wanted to get there.

‘Well, Miss Hyams, you can show the Australians what
England is made of,’ said Graham with a smile when I handed in my memo giving notice.

Brian, as ever, was completely sanguine. ‘You’ll be back, chummy,’ he told me.

My other colleagues, mainly those who were quite happy to live out their lives to a Fleet Street sunset, were also less than encouraging. Australia was regarded very differently in 1976: a place seemingly full of ‘colonials’ with funny accents, lacking culture or couth. Yet few people had actually been there. Nearly everyone had a relative who’d gone off there to be a Ten Pound Pom (the nickname given to British migrants who’d opted to emigrate in the ’60s, paying just
£
10 for their fare in return for two years in the former penal colony: if you left Australia before the two years were up, you paid your own fare back). A few had returned, deeply disillusioned.

‘My aunt says it’s a great place for doin’ your washing,’ said one pub wit.

‘So and so says there are too many flies and not much else,’ I was told.

One girl who’d worked there for a year and returned told me, ‘Don’t do it. It’s a very strange place and people don’t like you if you’re English.’

‘New Zealand?’ said another pub pundit. ‘It’s a bit of a small place for someone like you, isn’t it?’

Even Raelene wasn’t exactly encouraging about her mother country. ‘You’ll like it for a bit, I s’pose, but
you’ll get bored if you stay much longer,’ was her helpful comment.

Only Clive was enthusiastic about my forthcoming leap into the dark. Because he too was getting out, packing his bags. Amazingly, over Christmas he and his wife had made a similar decision to emigrate down under. Clive had recently fallen out of favour with his bosses for some unknown reason. They couldn’t sack him but office politics meant that he’d get the crap jobs, rather than the travelling, the interesting stories. Because he worked for a paper owned by Rupert Murdoch, he’d already met one or two Australian executives, one of whom had already offered him a job on a Murdoch Sydney newspaper. It would all take time to organise, but he too would be in Australia by the middle of the coming year.

Strangely enough, this news left me with mixed feelings. I enjoyed being with Clive: it was impossible to be anything but cheerful and happy in his company. But it was always very much an affair, a Fleet Street one at that. I hadn’t given too much thought to the Clive situation when I made my decision to decamp to the other side of the world. But still, I told myself, it would be reassuring to have yet another familiar face around.

I had absolutely no idea what to really expect when I landed in Australia. In the pre-electronic era, you only had photographs or movies to give you some idea of what it all looked like: mostly the images were of
sprawling yellow beaches or dusty, alien outback places. There was the occasional news story from Oz, mostly involving sport. And, of course, the famed Ronnie Biggs, train robber extraordinaire, had run off there in 1966 to live with his family until his escape to Brazil in 1970.

‘It’s a fine place to make a film about the end of the world,’ Ava Gardner had quipped to waiting reporters in Melbourne in 1959 when she arrived there to make a film called
On the Beach
– a movie about the last survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Judging by what I kept hearing in London, many still felt that way. Yet my enthusiasm remained undiminished. Ron’s generous act of friendship gave me a chance to break free, do something different. In the sunshine, to boot. That was good enough for me. In many ways, it was a roll of the dice. Yet as usual, I ignored the what-ifs. Too much of that could hold you back.

I threw a series of farewell bashes: a remarkably sober one at the Cheshire Cheese off Fleet Street and a big boozy one at the flat for my north London friends, such as hippie Alan and his caravan of good-looking men and women from all points in the globe and Laurie, he of the ashtray smashing, now sleekly successful in PR with a mad, live-in girlfriend he desperately wanted to ditch. Anne turned up with Oleg in tow and even my quiet flatmate Richard produced his equally shy girlfriend and admitted he was moving out. They were getting married.

Everyone was either very stoned or smashed: the
reverbations of ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ and the joyful sound of the British Afro-pop band Osibisa echoed all the way down Boundary Road. Neighbours hammered on the door, demanding peace and quiet. It finally came at around 3 am. Raelene – egged on by Jeff and Roger, two reporters from the office who’d been pushing me for an introduction to her for ages – ran upstairs to the Pit. She emerged, minutes later, clad in her
piece de resistance
: an all-in-one pink and blue ‘bunny’ suit, with a cute little white bushy tail, covering a flap at the back – which revealed her naked bum.

‘You guys wanna come upstairs?’ she enticed in her broadest Oz tones. Two nigh-on legless young hacks didn’t need any further encouragement: one waited outside the Pit while the other stepped inside briefly for Raelene’s Linda Lovelace offering, her gifts for the younger generation of Fleet Street’s finest.