I was taking a stroll through the souk, drinking in the local color, when there was a sound like tearing calico, and two bodies, riddled with machine gun fire, fell through the awning of a fruit stall. Unbeknownst to me, the Druze tribesmen had come over the Chouf Mountains and launched what turned out to be the civil war against the government of President Chamoun.
I went back to the St. George’s Club, to find the British press corps lining the bar (where else?), so I gave them my first contribution to the media, an eyewitness account of what was going on outside. The grateful reptiles stood me several rounds of drinks as they filed their copy with long-shouted phone calls to London.
Unfortunately, I was so squiffy I went outside to the swimming pool, fell asleep, and awoke badly sunburned. Two days later, I took the free MEA flight back to Nicosia. And the cease-fire ended. The war resumed. The commanding officer was incensed to see me again, and with his impetus I found myself on the “rumble” (spare) seat of a Canberra jet bomber heading back to Luqa. From thence, a Hastings freighter took me home to Lyneham without its engines falling off.
I had been away three weeks, experiencing one midair near disaster, one civil war, and two uprisings. So from Lyneham, still in my blue pilot officer’s uniform, I hitchhiked back to my parents’ home in Kent. But before leaving for the Middle East, and after my decision to leave the service, I had applied for a job in journalism.
My father had consulted the editor of the Kentish Express as to how his son should best start. That fine man advised against a weekly like his own, but recommended what he called “the finest provincial daily in England.” He referred to the Eastern Daily Press, based in Norwich, Norfolk. I applied, secured an interview, and got a job as an apprentice, starting in May. There would be a three-month trial and, if extended, an indenture of three years.
Returning home from Malta, I stripped off my blue uniform for the last time. I was allowed to keep my stainless-steel watch, which kept perfect time until the mid-seventies. After a fortnight with Mum and Dad, I left for Norwich and a new career.
KING’S LYNN
After an initial three weeks at the newspaper’s head office in Norwich, I was posted out to the most westerly office within the circulation area, the market and port town of King’s Lynn. My trial appointment was confirmed and I spent my three-year indenture there.
The chief reporter was the veteran Frank Keeler, a terrific journalist who became my mentor. He was a stickler for accuracy, dunning into all cubs he ever mentored his personal philosophy: check, check, and check again. Then write. I still do.
On a minuscule salary, I could just afford a scruffy little bed-sitter above a pet-food store on Paradise Parade, the country’s most inappropriately named highway. In summer, the minced dog meat stank, but in winter the warmth rising from the caged pets below kept my heating bill down.
There was a lavatory but no bathroom, so for hygiene I had to go to the office, in the attic of which there was an old bath that I brought back into commission and used for three years. There was a kitchen comprising a single gas hob running off a bottle, and a cold-water tap. I learned to cook eggs just about every known way and not much else. I am still no use in the kitchen and it is the one room I try to avoid.
But at least, using my RAF savings, I had my first sports car, which was my pride and joy. It was an MG TC model, made in 1949, black with scarlet leather seating. Back in 1949, the technology for making paper-thin sheet steel was not known, or when I crashed it, it would have crumpled like a tissue and killed me. But it was built like a truck, which enabled me to survive the crash. But we’ll come to that.
The apprenticeship I was serving was devised by the National Council for the Training of Journalists. It involved three years of on-the-job training and night school to study typing, shorthand, libel law, constitution, and theory of journalism, which is a long way from the real thing. At the end, there would be a series of written examination papers and a diploma. Never in the past fifty years has anyone ever asked me for it.
King’s Lynn was and remains a bustling market town with rural Norfolk to its east and south, the flat and featureless Fens to the west, and the North Sea outside its ancient harbor and port. The port then played host to a constant stream of small freighters plying their trade between the Norfolk coast and the ports of Western Europe, particularly Germany.
Coverage of news concentrated on the town, its council, magistrate’s court, police station, chamber of commerce, and just about every activity concerning the townsfolk, with further supervisory coverage of the surrounding villages. As training for what came later, it was superb.
Reporters on a national paper, let alone an agency, will never meet their readers. For those on a regional or local paper, they are right outside the door, and come in personally to complain about inaccuracies. So the standards have to be high, and they are. I recall one old buffer, puce with outrage, storming into the office to complain t
hat in the results of the cage-bird show at the Corn Exchange, his canary had been wrongly placed. And it really upset him.
In three pleasant but uneventful years, only two episodes remain in the memory. Because of my languages, especially German, Frank asked me to be the new “port reporter” and keep an eye on ships coming and going. On my first summer vacation, unable to afford a holiday, I managed to be taken on as a deckhand on a German freighter called the Alster. She plied between King’s Lynn and Hamburg. So I spent two weeks on her.
As soon as she docked in Germany, I was off to explore Hamburg, starting with the seamen’s zone known as Sankt Pauli. This included the famous Reeperbahn and its surrounding maze of streets and alleys that constituted the red-light district. My deckhand wages did not afford much more than a few beers, but some of these were taken in the old Zillertal, a beer hall famous for its foaming steins of ale and oompah-oompah brass bands. I went there because my father had told me about it.
In the spring of 1939, when I was still a baby, he and a friend from Ashford had treated themselves to a short vacation and picked Hamburg, where they arrived by ferry. They both went to the Zillertal, but on emerging heard a scuffle down a side alley. Peering into the gloom, they observed two Nazi thugs beating up an old Jew.
He and Joe Crotnall may have been just shopkeepers from a small market town who knew nothing of the reality of Germany under the Nazis, but it took them only twenty-four hours to take a dislike to the strutting young men with their armbands and the sign of the broken cross. Neither were Jewish, but they just waded in.
In his time in Chatham Dockyard School, my dad had been a useful middle-weight and his father had once been the boxing, wrestling, and bayonet-fighting champion of the Nore Command, which then contained 50,000 sailors. Anyway, he and Joe Crotnall (who told me the story ten years later) flattened the two assailants. Then, as a crowd gathered, it was time to get out of there. They ran for their car and sped out of Germany into Holland before getting into any more trouble.
I could not know in 1959 that fourteen years later I would also have to get out of Hamburg in a hurry. It seems to be part of our family history. I just contented myself with sightseeing and enjoyed my stay there.
Then in 1960, I crashed the MG and was lucky to survive. It was one in the morning out on the flat Fenland landscape, driving home and of course too fast. A friend was beside me in the passenger seat, the roof was stowed, and we were enjoying the warm summer wind in our hair when we entered the bend.
It was a right-hander and it turned out to be ninety degrees. I think the MG made eighty of those degrees before losing traction and skidding into the left-hand verge, which was actually a steep bank. The thump threw my mate out of the left-hand seat like a cork from a bottle. He was lucky. He landed on a mound of loose sand left behind by workmen, shaken but unhurt. In my case, the steering wheel rammed me back into the seat, and when the car rolled, eight times, several things happened.
My left hand, being on top of the steering wheel, hit the road on the first roll and was crushed. The steel-framed windscreen was snapped off and came back into my mouth. The MG came to rest on its wheels with the driver slumped in the seat in a bit of a mess.
By luck, the accident happened right outside the house of the village policeman. He woke, peered out and down from the top of the bank, saw the wreck, and called an ambulance, which came out from King’s Lynn Cottage Hospital.
One of the paramedics found a severed ear in the road, held it up and asked: “Be this yours?” as if detached ears were to be found all over West Norfolk. My friend, still dizzy on his sand pile, says I replied quite calmly: “Yes, put it in a dish.” I then passed out into a coma for three days. The ambulance rushed me to emergency, where the first glance by the night-duty sister caused her to think I would not survive till morning. Then luck set in.
The cottage hospital was not a major unit. It handled mainly domestic and agricultural accidents, plus births and winter chills. On that night, Matron was summoned from her bed and began to call in a few favors. The near body in emergency was stripped of clothing and X-rayed as a team of four was assembled.
There was a triangular hole in my skull on the left side with bone fragment embedded inside. A junior surgeon on the staff managed to retrieve the triangle of bone and draw it back into the aperture, where it was supposed to be. Then he bandaged it and hoped it would knit back. It did.