I was ashamed at the anxiety I was causing my parents and my father, who was such a fair and balanced man, doing everything in his power to discuss my adolescent problems, but I found I was unable to communicate with him. Later, when we became the closest of friends, he explained the hurt I had caused them and reminded me that while perhaps I didn’t know what I was doing, neither did he. ‘When you were sixteen,’ he said, ‘it was the first time I had been father to a sixteen-year-old boy, and I had no experience to draw on.’
Although my Bristol life in the coffee bars and folk clubs was good and the conversation was of Jack Kerouac and Woody Guthrie, I strangely still had a hankering for my boyhood time in Wiveliscombe, playing French cricket in the back yard with my handicapped Aunt Eva, or sitting with my grandfather, turning over the pages of a book called The Great War in Pictures while he, to the fury of my grandmother, flicked the ash from his chainsmoked cigarettes straight onto the lino, or eating boiled pigs’ trotters with salt and vinegar in front of the fire on winter Saturday nights.
Sometimes my grandfather, a rather clumsy man, would take a sudden interest in cooking and he spent days bubbling vast cauldrons of tomato sauce. At other times he would gather snails from the privet hedge in the dank back garden and roast them on a shovel in the fire. I suppose he must have known how to clean them because we never suffered from any ill effects.
I missed fishing, and I missed my Auntie Joyce, who once saved me from bleeding to death when I, running and sliding down the highly polished passage that led from our kitchen to the front door, put my arm through the window in the door, gashing my upper arm wide open. She heard my cries of panic, picked me up, and in bare feet ran down the street and frantically hammered on the doctor’s door. She, like my Uncle Ken, was young compared to my mother and my other uncles and so on Sunday afternoon walks she would sing folk songs, with a slightly risque rearrangement of the words.
Some years later she was found dead in a snowdrift on a hill where once she had taken me tobogganing. It was her only exit from a private hell that, until too late, no one had been aware of.
Then there was my one and only thespian performance, when somehow, after the nightmare of the fancy dress party, I agreed to be Mowgli in the Scout and Cub group’s annual jamboree in the Town Hall. My mother sewed me a loincloth of rabbit skin and my father improvised me a dagger from one of my grandfather’s leather-cutting knives. Painted from head to toe in cocoa and water I stood on the stage and said, defiantly, ‘I am Mowgli.’ To this day I cannot remember if I completed the performance or ran backstage.
I missed my friends the Ranseys, not least Mrs Ransey, who, like my own mother, was one of nature’s intuitive cooks with a real, fundamental knowledge, love and respect for food.
Sometimes, on my Vespa 125, I whizzed down the A3 8 like a mad wasp, flat out at 45 miles an hour, to Wiveliscombe for the day, but it wasn’t the same. Then I thought it had changed; now I know that I had. I was staying out later and later listening to blues, folk songs, monologues and poetry readings. The rows at home, no longer squalls, were now developing storm status and one day, with just a small duffel bag, I set off for work as normal, and instead of taking the bus to College Green, my place of employment, I caught another to the A4 and hitchhiked to London. I survived, somehow, in late-night coffee bars, railway stations and parks for three days and three awful nights before I was arrested for loitering, or possibly vagrancy, at four o’clock one morning somewhere close to Bow Street Police Station. I was tired, hungry and, worse still, I had failed. Contact was made with my parents, who assured me my safe return was more important than anything and there would be no retribution. As bad as this was, it proved to be a watershed in our relationship.
I had decided I wanted to be a newspaper reporter and my parents, in a complete reversal of their crushingly modest ambitions for me, agreed I could have a go at it. I had no idea how you set about being a journalist but I had read a book called Headlines All My Life by a Fleet Street editor called Arthur Christiansen. He was, as Editor of the Daily Express, probably one of the greatest editors of this century. (He had also had a bit part in the film The Day the Earth Caught Fire.) I did not know that the accepted route into journalism was by joining a weekly newspaper as a copy boy. I, with a head full of Evelyn Waugh, Hemingway, James Thurber, Simon Raven, Somerset Maugham, Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Graves and Jack Kerouac, boldly wrote to the Editor of the Bristol Evening Post and asked for a job. Despite my parents’ new attitude, they warned me not to be disappointed after aiming so high. I knew from films and novels that reporters wore bow ties, trench coats and trilby hats, so scraping together all my available resources, selling my fishing tackle and even my Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley LPs, I went to the nearest gentlemen’s outfitters and bought the aforementioned clothes for my interview with the Editor of the Bristol Evening Post.
Can you imagine it? A seventeen-year-old with a shiny, acned face, dressed in such a way. I sat in the outer office while the secretary announced my presence. She returned after a few seconds and said, ‘When the green light flashes, knock and go in.’ A big, round-faced, smiling man with short cropped hair sat behind the desk, his fingers propped together forming a pyramid between his elbows and his chin. On his neat desk there was a Penguin edition of The Trial of Lady Chatterley. He wore a dark, well-cut suit, a white shirt and a bow tie. A bow tie! So they did wear bow ties. I was wearing a bow tie. He looked at me askance, not patronisingly, but he seemed to stare right through me. ‘Do sit down,’ he said. He rearranged his fingers to clutch the lapels of his jacket and leant back in his chair. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘I’ve brought you some essays I wrote at school,’ I said. ‘We don’t write essays on newspapers,’ he said, reaching to take them from my trembling hand. I told him about my school days. I told him of my dissatisfaction of being a filing clerk in the Architects’ Department. I told him about the books I had read and lied, successfully, about one or two I hadn’t. All of a sudden, the interview, or perhaps the confessional, was over.
He ushered me into the outer office and I realised for the first time how tall he was. There was no conclusion, and I stood, awkwardly, wondering how to leave. I suddenly decided to say, ‘Well, will you give me a job or not?’ He looked down at me, and his breath smelt strange. Later I was to know it was garlic. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘as a matter of fact I will. My secretary will take the necessary details and you will report to the News Editor a week on Monday at 8.30 a.m. His name is Farnsworth: he will probably eat you alive, but don’t worry.’ Before I could utter a word he disappeared into his office. It was going to turn out to be the single most important day of my life. Not that I would know that for another twenty-four years.
Now I shall tell you about my job at the Bristol Evening Post. This will be a short chapter because I wasn’t there very long! Joining the paper was a really exciting event. It was an unusual one because in those days the only way you could become a journalist was to do an apprenticeship on a weekly newspaper like the Somerset County Gazette. There you learnt to type, to do shorthand (it was compulsory) and you wrote the Births, Marriages and Deaths column or the Townsmen’s Guild column, or listed the results of the Agricultural Show, and you had to do that for about two or three years before you had a chance to get onto a daily newspaper. But I was a precocious little sod and without having done any of these I managed to get my job on the Bristol Evening Post which, curiously enough, was located in the centre of Bristol in Silver Street: I was brought up in Silver Street in Wiveliscombe, which I took to be a good omen. In the sixties the typesetting for all newspapers was done with lead and there was a massive sense of excitement as the editions came out, with the compositors working desperately against the clock to bring out each edition, the smell of ink and hot metal and a wonderful hum of huge drums with paper whirling round and all the vans queued up outside, loading up really fast. At that time Bristol had another daily evening newspaper called the Bristol Evening World and they were in serious
