of the early tragedies of any war is communication. At the front in the dying months of cable, a correspondent hands his story in to US Army Signals with blind faith and from then on it’s up to them and the cable company, right through to Fleet Street.
Meanwhile the US Army apparently had too much on its plate to deal with us adequately. For a short period, all our messages were lost. This was the time for suicide or murder, knowing what we had risked to get those stories.
Along with most of the other foreign desks, ExTel despaired and gave up, telling me to make my way home to London. It was an escape clause: one such instruction was enough.
We were miserable enough anyway, with our missing copy which never left the battlefield. By then we were ready to catch any flight to anywhere that wasn’t Korea. To ensure my final story got through, I had wangled a lift back to the Japanese mainland and handed the fragile news in to the Eastern Telegraph office in Kobe. At least I knew that story would be in London within a couple of hours.
In return the cable office handed me a mass of anguished messages from ExTel in London, warning me that few of my stories were getting through. The US Signals proved so chaotic that despite assurances from their PIO most copy had been mishandled, due possibly to incompetence or, more likely, unpleasant interference by the Chinese army. Correspondence had been lost for days—then sent full-rate.
Behind our backs, in a frozen Korea which we had left so triumphantly to return to Tokyo, the enemy had recaptured the capitals of Pyongyang and Seoul, and despite all this, or perhaps because of it, the Tokyo press corps continued to file and add to the piles of unsent messages, though it was no longer a big story. Both sides were closing down. The world was almost as weary of Korea as we were.
My recall was surrounded by Louis Heron of The Times, Tommy Thompson of the Telegraph and most of the fraught press corps. Front-line correspondents were moving back to their normal Far East stations, or going south to look at the increasingly threatening situation in French Indo-China which seemed favourite for the next upheaval.
In Tokyo, Gordon Walker, my friend with the Christian Science Monitor and an old Japan hand, drove me to Haneda Airport with Randolph Churchill and gave us our Japanese-style farewell presentos. Then we boarded, flew towards Mount Fuji and home. It was a happy relief to surrender to the deep, deep comfort of a BOAC Argonaut.
Randolph, easily diverted by conviviality, had not been a spectacular success as a correspondent—though he wrote well enough when he wanted to. He had been flown out by the Daily Telegraph to replace poor Christopher Buckley, killed by a mine within an hour of reaching Korea. Unlike Randolph’s father Winston, who had success as a correspondent in the South African war, he had little experience of the nuts-and-bolts legwork in the field of cabling and deadlines, nor, I suspected, was he much interested.
I had on occasion stepped in at the last moment when he was over-tired or emotional, to complete and file the Daily Telegraph piece for the unexploded Randolph. That may have been why I found this choleric character usually friendly.
He was also something of a celebrity, particularly among Americans. This was a new experience for me—“celebrity” was a different status which could prove a hindrance for other working press men who were not being asked for their autographs. Randolph, however, never objected to holding the stage.
“I can never win,” he told me. “If I achieve anything they all say it’s only because of Father, and when I do something badly they say, ‘What a tragedy for the old man.’”
He was said to drink a couple of bottles of whisky a day, though I never ran into that. He had lost six attempts to enter Parliament, though he held an uncontested wartime seat in 1940-45. A biographer wrote, “Aside from his heroically dismal manners, gambling, arrogance, vicious temper, indiscretions and aggression, he was generous, patriotic, extravagant and amazingly courageous.” Michael Foot, a political opponent, said, “I belong to the most exclusive club in London: ‘The Friends of Randolph Churchill’.”
He and I planned to take a few days off during this return journey—from battle fatigue, you understand. First we went ashore in Hong Kong, where I bought an export Humber Hawk for eventual delivery at home, thus avoiding a waiting list of several years in the UK market, such were the idiocies of international financial controls.
Here we ran into the Churchill groupies again, chasing the son of the most famous man in the world. It was my first experience of autograph hunters and fans, for which we did not have much time. In Korea it had been a full-time job, and the target was merely to stay alive. Little did I know how life would change.
In Bangkok nobody knew who I was, of course, except that I was travelling with the noisy Englishman who was drinking. We were invited to dinner with the ambassador, which was not noisy at all, but I had the opportunity of observing Randolph on the social rampage. There’s no doubt that, much as I liked him, after a few drinks he could become a responsibility. Excellent and amusing company, he was always in a state of suspended eruption. Other guests had to speak carefully in case he exploded. The nearest to a compliment you could get was to say that he was as rude to ambassadors as he was to waiters; he made no nice social distinction.
One evening Randolph and I filled in an hour of happy irresponsibility pedicab-racing like gladiators through some deserted streets. It sounds most improbable today, when Bangkok shows us only fumes and endless jams.
This was the time when we called in the brilliant Noël Coward; his “Mad dogs and Englishmen” started all the uncertainty. We could never be quite sure about these sharp lyrics: What did they do in Bangkok at 12 o’clock? Did they “foam at the mouth and run” or possibly, as in Hong Kong, “fire off a noonday gun”? I’ve seen that gun. We celebrated “the inmate who’s in late”, and gave up. It was a relief to be singing about a war, instead of trying not to be killed by one…
Bangkok was a very suitable place to relax and watch some blue movies in a palatial House of Pleasure, appreciating the skill of a Thai cameraman which was delicate, even in gross situations.
I returned to London by way of New Delhi and Istanbul, and went on to cover the riots and revolution in Cairo and the Canal Zone. Randolph resumed editing his father’s biography. It was business as usual.
My dictionary merely said, “An oppressive hot southerly or south-easterly wind, blowing in Egypt in the spring”. That didn’t sound too bad, yet it did have curious effects. For days the sun shone through low, hot sand clouds and the world was a hideous bright yellow, as though seen through a pair of cheap sunglasses. Gritty sand got into food, air and bed, tempers frayed, nerves stretched—it was the suicide season and it was not passing unnoticed for I had spent eight months in the Canal Zone, and noticed my occasional twitch and mutter.
“Shouldn’t worry about it, old chap,” I told the shaving mirror one morning, after listening to some aimless chatter. “A lot of people talk to themselves.”
As a foreign correspondent I was used to waking up in a different bed or a different country, but eight months in Egypt was a sentence devoutly to be avoided. We were all growing restless. “I’d prescribe a short swan journey,” said James, soothingly. He was our conducting officer, appointed by the War Office to look after correspondents. “Try Cyprus—it’s our only escape hatch.” It seemed a wise weekend move.
A brisk transport captain offered me a berth on a troopship: “You’ll be in Famagusta in twenty-four hours. You can have three days of wine and women and be back by Monday.” He gave me what the army somewhat disdainfully called “an indulgence passage”.
I threw a toothbrush into
