a personal assistant. But he did also say that he would put my salary up to £7 a week. That was a hike from £4 7s 6d up to £7 – absolutely massive! But then, as now, I was a shopaholic, a spendthrift and never able to hold onto money, ever! So what seemed to be almost a hundred per cent increase in salary did not result in there being any more pennies in my pocket on Monday morning than there were at the previous salary. Then, as now, I was obsessed with good shoes, silk ties, proper clothes (old fashioned they may be, old fashioned I am). In the sixties, in the week you wore a suit and on Saturday mornings a sports jacket – that was de rigueur. I always felt it was important to have a good tie, good shoes and a well-cut jacket. Even then, although I couldn’t afford it, I used to have my suits handmade. This was my mother’s fault because when she worked at a cloth factory, as I’ve already told you, she would bring home these bolts of cloth, these remnants that had a flaw in them, and she was able to get the finest West of England worsted and wool fabric for very little money. In Wiveliscombe there was a man called Mr Berry, who used to sit cross-legged on a wooden stage in the window of his house, hand-sewing suits, and even as a schoolboy I had handmade suits, because they were cheaper for my mother than anything at Weaver to Wearer, John Collier, Burton or something like that. So I had been cursed, and with my grandfather being a boot and shoe maker and repairer, I have this ridiculous fetish for handmade clothes and handmade shoes, and nothing will stop me from buying them.
However, I am now the Editor’s personal assistant. In reality I am the Editor’s servant. In board meetings, on directors’ days my job was to go to Avery’s the wine merchants, to the actual cellars, and collect the exquisite wines they wanted. I was to bring up the Beefeater gin, not Gordon’s, and the particular sherries they liked and be on hand to take notes at the whim or requirement of my Editor. This put me in a curious position, because I was only seventeen but people like Eric Price and Joe Gallagher and all the senior people reckoned I had the Editor’s ear and they would ply me with questions to find out what was going to be happening within the company or what was going to be Editor’s policy, of which I knew nothing at all. I used to say, ‘I don’t know, all I do is fetch and carry, I’m just a servant.’ They thought otherwise. So my position was bizarre. I was intellectually crucified by the brilliance of my Editor, who inter alia would ask me, ‘By the way, have you read Brideshead Revisited or Lady Chatterley’s Lover?’ I would say no, but promptly go out and buy those books or whichever he suggested. As a consequence I was able to educate myself quite well.
But equally importantly, Richard Hawkins was a gourmet: he lived for food. He would often have to have meetings with terribly famous people and I remember once having to go to London with him on what I thought was a business trip but it was to meet Peter O’Toole, who was a friend of Richard’s in those days. Although I can only say this is a rumoured story which I will go on with in a moment, I do remember when I met Peter O’Toole – and to this day he wouldn’t know who I was – whom I admire enormously but have not seen again from that day to this, in a pub in Chelsea or Kensington, he said, ‘Have you ever seen the head of a Guinness? It looks like the face of the man on the moon.’ He took a pen from his pocket and drew a face on the head of a pint of Guinness. Of course, Peter O’Toole at that time was very famous in Bristol at the Old Vic and he was also, by all accounts, a monstrous tearaway. I mean, he was Jack of all the lads! I do have an apocryphal story about him: I claim that I think, that I might possibly know, a probably totally untrue story – on the day that Peter O’Toole was appearing in Bristol Magistrates Court, alleged to have possibly been arrested for being drunk and disorderly, I happened to be in court. I didn’t think it was worth reporting so the story didn’t go any further. Just as well in view of the strict contractural obligations insisted on by the producers of his next film, Lawrence of Arabia.
Working for the Editor really was bizarre. I was attending lunches or going to the then amazingly prestigious Thornbury Castle or Hole in the Wall restaurant in Bath. You have to remember, dear reader, I am seventeen years old and it’s 1961 and the world is very, very different from today. My position was an uncomfortable one: I would scribble notes down while the Editor talked to an MP or someone and I was told to go and collect things from the car and fetch and carry. I was a fag, if you like, in the public school sense, to the head prefect. I remember my first meal at the Hole in the Wall as if it were yesterday. It was partridge stewed in white wine with cabbage and juniper berries. There was a bottle of splendid Gevrey-Chambertin and the pudding was called Chocolat St Emilion. It was mouthwatering, it was breathtaking, and it was nothing to do with the Saturday nights I spent out with my ten shillings! The fact was that we were so ignorant about cooking at that time. We never knew how to cook spaghetti. How did you get it into the saucepan? It was hard and came wrapped in blue waxed paper. We soaked it in water to make it soft, we broke it up in bits. It was a long time before I learnt that you just pushed it gently down into the boiling water so that it curled around the pan. That’s how little I knew about food at that time.
I went out probably two or three times a week with Hawkins – Mr Hawkins to me, of course, and Sir – to the White Tower in London and the Dorchester Hotel. At the age of seventeen I was eating beyond my means. Nothing has changed! Today I am eating beyond my means. It was an unholy relationship. I was too independent, too self-opinionated, too unformed, uninformed, unmoulded, but I knew that I was not somebody’s lackey. That isn’t where I was meant to be.
So, kicking my heels one night, I bought a ticket for the cinema and sat spellbound in front of the great Stanley Baker and Michael Caine movie Zulu. The following day, without a thought, with what must have been irritating self-confidence, I bounced into the recruiting office in Colston Avenue, Bristol, and volunteered myself for a short-service commission in Her Majesty’s Land Forces.
Had I got off at the correct station, I could have taken advantage of a ride in a three-ton truck to Catterick Camp, which the Army had thoughtfully provided to pick up the recruits. Unfortunately, after an awful ten-hour overnight journey from the West Country, just before my correct destination I fell asleep and, as a consequence, had to hitchhike with two heavy suitcases back from York to Richmond and then walk the last four miles to the camp itself. I reported to the guard room in a state of sweating and trembling anxiety, several hours late. The duty corporal noted my arrival in a ledger and courteously enough showed me to my room in the barracks. It had eight or ten tubular steel unmade beds, each with a plain wooden wardrobe and a bedside locker. Down the corridor there was a sort of common room, with Formica tables and chairs, a battered TV and a few dog-eared magazines and paperback novels. There was no one else there. It was Sunday, and I mooched around nervously for several hours, uncertain of what to do. Eventually a soldier turned up and took me to the store to collect some bedding, and then showed me to the cookhouse, where I devoured a mountainous plate of food, my first meal for almost twenty-four hours. When I returned to the dormitory, I found another five or six scruffy-looking lads who, with their duffel bags and suitcases dumped on the floor, were hesitantly introducing themselves to one another. I felt out of place in my suit. They were all wearing jeans and anoraks. None of us knew what to do; were we allowed out, should we stay in? Would someone tell us what to do? I elected to go to the guard room to clarify the situation. I reported back to the lads that we were free to go to the NAAFI and nothing would happen until we were woken the following morning, which was Monday.
The next morning dawned like Pearl Harbor. The day exploded into a frenzy of form-filling, kit-collecting, hair-cutting, medicals, quick-fire instructions which left us, at seven o’clock that night, exhausted and bewildered. No longer civilians, yet absolutely not soldiers, we were in some kind of institutionalised limbo. I had difficulty sleeping, worried that I would sleepwalk or talk in my sleep, worried that I would make a complete idiot of myself in front of my roommates. After a couple of days we had more or less got to know each other and settled into a frenzied routine of basic training. This involved endless marching, parades, weapons training, bulling kit, spit-and-polishing the toecaps of your boots, cross-country
