“Nope.”
He whistled. “Off the street? Not a chance. They don’t take walk-ins. Any interviews yet?”
“Nope.”
“Any experience?”
“Three years, Eastern Daily Express.” I added, “Norfolk,” in case he did not know, but I had hit a million-to-one lucky shot.
“I trained with the EDP,” he said. “Long time ago, which office? Norwich?”
“King’s Lynn. Under Frank Keeler.”
He nearly dropped his pint.
“Frank? Is he still there? We were juniors together. Just after the war.”
He held out his hand. We shook and exchanged names. He worked across the road, a veteran of the PA, heading for retirement. The Press Association was and remains the leading news agency in London. I had not thought of an agency, but so what? He led me across the street to the huge gray granite building housing the PA and a range of other companies. Without any ceremony, he walked into the office of the editor in chief.
Mr. Jarvis leaned back in his swivel chair and surveyed the new offering his colleague had brought in. It was difficult to make eye contact, because the lenses of his glasses were as if cut from the bases of shot-glass whiskey tumblers. There were two eyes behind there somewhere and a very broad Lancashire accent. He gave me the same interrogation as his colleague from the pub.
Age? Where from? National Service? Journalistic training? Any other useful qualifications? I mentioned four languages. He stared fixedly, then said:
“Thee’s on wrong floor, lad.”
He took his phone, dialed a number, and spoke to whoever answered.
“Doon? I think I’ve got a live one. He’s not for me, I’ve got no vacancies. But he might be for you. Four languages. I’ll send him up.”
I was led to the lift, said good-bye and thank you to the man I had met only an hour earlier, and as instructed went up two floors. There was a man not much older than me waiting. He led me through swinging doors and down a corridor, knocked, and showed me in.
Doon Campbell was news editor of Reuters, a name so prestigious I had not even thought of it. Not just a few foreign correspondents but an entire agency dedicated to foreign news, reported from their myriad bureaus all over the world. He was actually a very kindly man, but his first, deliberate, impression was of a no-nonsense sergeant-major. Though he had lived and worked in London for many years, his accent might have come out of the Highlands of Scotland a week before. The interrogation was like facing a machine gun. Finally he asked:
“Foreign affairs. Do you study foreign affairs?”
I said I did as best I could from papers, radio, and TV. And that I knew France, Germany, and Spain, with visits to Malta, Cyprus, and Lebanon. He leaned forward, his face close to mine, and snapped, “Where is Bujumbura?”
A day earlier, I would not have had a clue. But on the train down from King’s Lynn, I had finished both the papers I had bought on the station and spotted a copy of a magazine folded into the cushions of the seat opposite, abandoned by a previous traveler. It was the American magazine Time.
I flicked through it, and in the center was a feature about the Belgian protectorates of Rwanda and Burundi, far away in central Africa. Luck again. I also leaned forward until we were almost nose to nose.
“Why, Mr. Campbell, it’s the capital of Burundi.” He leaned slowly back. So did I.
“Aye. Aye. So it is. All right, I’ll give you a three-month trial. When can you start?”
I knew I would get no Brownie points for walking out on the EDP without notice, so I told him I would need to work out my month and could join Reuters in December. He nodded dismissively, and that was that. I had landed a slot in the world’s best-regarded agency for foreign news by a series of flukes. I left King’s Lynn a month later and moved to a tiny flatlet in Shepherd Market, whence a Number 9 bus would bring me to Fleet Street in twenty minutes.
Reuters started me at the London editorial desk, charged with covering stories of interest only to foreign newspapers far away. In May, I got my break.
The deputy chief of the Paris bureau was diagnosed with a heart murmur and had to be flown home without delay. The British National Health Service was free and the French was not. A head poked around the door of the Home Reporters’ room and asked: “Anyone here speak French?”
I was led to the French-language service, whose chief was a real Frenchman called Maurice. My guide asked him, “Does this fellow really speak French?”
Maurice was bent over his typewriter, and without looking up, asked in French: “What do you reckon to the situation in Paris?”
It was back then in a state of crisis. It had just been revealed that President de Gaulle had for months been secretly negotiating with the Algerian resistance at Vichy and had fixed July 1, 1963, for a French pullout from the disastrous Algerian independence war and Algerian independence for the same day. The French extreme right and elements of the elite of the army had declared war on de Gaulle personally. France stood on the verge of coup d’état or revolution.
I let Maurice have a torrent of French, complete with a brace of slang expressions that a pretend speaker would never have known. Maurice had served with the Free French in the war, based at first in London with de Gaulle, then fighting his way across his own homeland as it was liberated under Marshal Juin. But he had married an English girl and settled in London. He stopped typing and looked up.