The Diaries of a Fleet Street Fox

by Lilly Miles

  19. Awake at 9 a.m., ignore husband, breakfast in sunglasses. Husband turns up and says sorry. On way out bump into Nance, who is packing car with babies and had row with husband in corridor at 4 a.m., which the manager had to break up. I tell how husband is in doghouse due to whole pyjama-bar debacle. At this point both meet a fresh-faced and happily smiling Porter and bride, whose nuptial bliss is spiked by the tales of marital disharmony. We reassure bride marriage is great, it’s just being married to a man which ruins it. Porter rolls eyes.

  20. Fifi rings from nearby hotel. Hacks were asked on way to breakfast if they knew the tramp asleep face down on floor in reception. Did their best to look innocent. Valentine later strolls in and distributes hugs, but stinks like he’s been weed on by a herd of cows. Explains staggered back to hotel across fields, fell over a lot, then could not figure out how to open door to room, so slept on nearest soft surface, which happened to be lobby carpet.

  21. Gavin the Gas Fitter stalks Bridget for several days, demanding date. She ignores him. He keeps ringing and eventually, employing the canny trick of withholding his number and catching her when she is hungover, gets her to answer, ‘Ooh, I’m just really busy, no, I’m not ignoring you at all, yes I’ll ring you straight back.’ That was three days ago. Eventually, after is pointed out she is acting like worst kind of bloke and asked how she would like it, Bridget texts Gavin to say not interested. He is most hurt and replies, ‘You should have been honest.’

  22. Think Nance has taken husband back. Mine still drunk. Not really seen him since.>

  Instead of simply seeing this email as an account of debauched rowdy fun, I noticed for the first time that I’d spent the whole day arguing with Twatface, who had in turn spent it behaving as rudely as he could. And while everyone gets boozed at a wedding, his attitude to the free bar suddenly seemed close to alcoholic.

  I had thought he changed from loving husband to monstrous bastard overnight when we split. It seemed so sudden and unexpected; I was stunned. But in reality the process was such a slow and steady one that days like this simply didn’t register as anything out of the ordinary. His benders, my worries, our problems became the norm and I got used to them. Just as I also became accustomed to overlooking his frequent absences ‘to make a phone call’ or the way he was rude to my friends or embarrassed me. And in my turn I became the kind of wife who didn’t want to dance with him any more, and spent the day bending his ear about whatever he was doing wrong. When the end came it wasn’t out of the blue, but I had my head stuck so far in the sand that the only way he could get my attention was to give me a kick up the bum. And by that point it was too late to do anything but fight.

  He asked to see me yesterday, to talk things over yet again. I asked sarcastically if Fatty was away, and he said she was in Spain. I said we could talk, but not about any of the legal stuff. He wanted to go to a bar, but I insisted on a coffee shop in the hope that he might be sober. I was waiting for him when he arrived; he kissed me on the cheek and said I looked amazing. We sat there for an hour and he asked four times if we could go to a pub, while I ranted at him that he had no moral fibre, backbone, idea, clue, parenting skills or anything else worth mentioning.

  He said he hadn’t thought over what had happened between us; that no one would talk to him about this stuff; and that he always used to rely on me to give him advice, and now he couldn’t. I calmed down a bit and stopped haranguing him. I said, more calmly, that he should find someone to talk to, a psychiatrist, anyone, just sort himself out so this didn’t happen again with the next woman. That he couldn’t spend his life avoiding things, and that if he just faced them head-on a little more often – and I faced them head-on a little less – then maybe we’d both be better off. Then he said that he missed me. He kept saying sorry.

  Last night, late, he texted me: ‘I’m so, so sorry. I fear I’ll end up like Valentine Lush one day, face down on a manky carpet. I’ve mistreated you so badly, and all you’ve been in return is strong, loving, tough, fair. I’m not the man you deserve. I can’t be the first to say this, but you can and will find better. I’m so sorry I screwed up and wasted your time like this. I’m an idiot, chump, fool, git.’

  If I’d known at the start that this was how it would end – when I walked into his newsroom all those years ago and wondered who the smiley chap was – and that it would bring me one day to a sorrowful little message like that, would I still have done it all? Yeah, probably.

  But I’d have done things differently, too. I’d have kicked him out a lot sooner, and I wouldn’t have thought twice about it.

  DAY ONE HUNDRED AND THREE

  THE ideal interview, from the journalist’s point of view, starts with flirtation, leads to seduction, and results in betrayal. In my case it’s more usual to flirt, fall over and fuck it up, which I suppose is why I don’t get asked to do the big chats very often.

  It goes wrong almost every time. I was asked to interview an author I much admired when he was on a book-signing tour years ago, passing through the town where the local paper I worked on at the time was based. My news editor came over and asked me to do it, because he knew I was a fan. Naturally, like anyone going to meet a hero, I was excited. I rehearsed some questions, and tried to think of things that made me sound clever and witty, while at the same time covering all the bases expected by a local newspaper interview, which had to include, ‘What do you think of our town?’ and ‘Do you back a bypass?’

  I got myself down to the bookshop, spoke to some of the fans in the queue, then was shown up to the manager’s poky office, where I met the great man and was disappointed to find he was a bit short, in both stature and manner. He sat one side of the manager’s desk and I the other; I chatted, flirted, smiled, complimented him, joked about his fans. After a few questions he seemed to warm up a bit, so I went for the big seduction, revealing I was his number-one fan. He was slightly nonplussed but remained polite. By the end I felt the whole thing had gone quite well, and had even managed to get his thoughts on our town – ‘Lovely place, lovely, where are we today, again?’

  I stood up to shake his hand across the desk. Then, as I tried to make a final witty comment which was so good I can’t remember it any more, I drew my hand back from his and swept the entire contents of the manager’s desk – pen tidy, stack of coins, piles of paperbacks, two cups of tepid tea and a plate of biscuits – on to the floor with an enormous crash. The author and I gazed speechlessly at the mess. The manager and the book agent, who had been sitting in, stared, too. Then all three turned to look at me in silence. I blushed hotly and knelt under their continuing gazes to pick all the bits up, put them back on the desk, wiped some tea off the wall with my sleeve, wittered brightly: ‘Well, thank you SO much!’ and backed out of the door as fast as my feet could carry me.

  Then there was the time I had to interview a Big Brother contestant after she left the show and was zipping all over London between photo-shoots. We were accompanied by a documentary crew, who filmed the two of us in the back of a black cab, me trying to ask her questions while we bounced over road humps and I tried not to think about the unblinking eye of the camera lens – which was making me so nervous I couldn’t think of anything sensible to ask. When the programme aired I featured briefly as ‘tabloids bought her story but only wanted to know if she’d really slept with that footballer’.

  My strained expression in the cab led to a text from a friend, who said: ‘You were looking at her with utter disdain on your face. It was like you loathed her. It was HYSTERICAL.’

  Now, on the rare occasion anyone is stupid enough to ask me to do a big interview, I explain kindly and gently that it’s just a silly idea. Flirtation and seduction aren’t really me.

  But then lots of things that are said in journalism don’t translate into real life. ‘Fancy a drink?’ is one. It usually means eight pints, some Jack Daniels, an Amaretto and a cab home if you can still remember your address. ‘I have a morally-sound reason for lurking in this person
’s rose bushes, officer,’ is another. And then there are terms that are used in the pages of newspapers but never anywhere else.

  Take fracas, for example. Ever seen one? No, because if you did you’d call it a fight. If you saw two they would be ‘fights’; in newspapers they become ‘running battles’. (Which I’ve always thought sounded like marathon runners slapping each other. I don’t know what the plural of fracas is. Fricassee?) How about a spat or a rumpus? Has anybody, in the history of mankind, ever really romped? Presumably it requires a lot of oxygen, because it only ever appears to happen in mid-air or open-air. And what the hell’s a tryst when it’s at home?

  Technically, breaking up with Twatface led to a street fracas and a bit of a rumpus. I’m reasonably certain that I have romped a couple of times, although I’m not sure if the back of a Citroën really counts as open-air. I have never slated anyone, seen a tot, tragic or otherwise, nor described anyone as a sex fiend in everyday conversation. ‘What happened with that guy you were dating?’ ‘Oh, he was a sex fiend.’ See? Never happens.

  ‘No one talks like that,’ I declaimed loudly from one of the triangular stools at the bar in the Bell on Fleet Street. ‘It’s a strange, archaic branch of language that survives only in tabloid newspapers. Like Gaelic in some tiny village that won’t join the twenty-first century because they’re still busy ignoring the twentieth.’

  Porter, who was leaning across the bar next to me, snorted over the top of his eighth pint and tried to focus, blinking slowly. ‘Ha, like bizarre collective nouns. Like, like a parliament of owls, or a murder of crows. Why do we have them? They’re ridiculous.’

  Bridget wheeled in from outside, where she’d been having a smoke. ‘Most of them are bollocks anyway,’ she slurred, one claw reaching out for her warm wine. ‘Shurely it should be a hoot of owls?’

  ‘What would a collective noun for journalists be?’ I asked, turning to survey the pub where the finest of Fleet Street had gathered. ‘A gossip? A meddle? A slander?’

  ‘Nah,’ said Bridge, burping. ‘Should be a scandal of journalists.’

  Before we knew it we had collective nouns for everyone. A cretin of Elliots. A cackle of Bridgets. A bluster of Bishes, a prickle of Porters. A knobbing of Princesses. (Porter came up with that one, with a leer.) A vomit of WAGS, a bell-end of footballers, a smear of politicians.

  But a scandal of journalists is something that I think should stick. The reason we were all in the pub and quite drunk, even though it was only two in the afternoon, was a funeral. It was for Thomas Tudor, a legend in the street, who had worked on almost every paper over forty years or more, as well as at the BBC, where he had honed his baritone into the kind of beautiful speaking voice which could have made whole armies put down their guns and, had he been ungentlemanly enough to try it, any woman drop her drawers.

  Having been around the block a few times and being into his sixties, he would man the news desk some nights, and when young reporters rang in from some godforsaken spot on the road, desperate for a hotel, a wash or human contact, his was the most welcome voice in the world. It was like listening to warm treacle, and it helped, too, that he had a big white beard and looked like Father Christmas. Maybe the door had been slammed in your face, maybe you’d been threatened or arrested or told there was no room at the inn, but a couple of minutes on the phone to Tom while he said, ‘Oh, poor you,’ made it all seem better.

  Unfortunately Tom was no longer with us, and his memorial had brought out the staff of six newspapers or more. There was us lot, a squad from the Daily Glimmer, a smattering of retired male hacks who’d moved out of the city to the districts years ago to avoid creditors or alcoholism, some radio twats in corduroy, and various former staff members who’d gone on to other papers. Executives, hacks, snappers, trainees – the full glut of what was left of British journalism – had turned out to remember one of their own. It wasn’t just a Fleet Street piss-up; we all genuinely cared for Tom and he was our friend. His family were with us in the pub. But the fact remained that our turnout was also partly a duty, to give a brother the send-off he deserved. We were like vultures putting a mangy wing around one another in comfort, an unusual trade union of professional carrion-eaters gathered to mark the passing of a comrade.

  Black jackets dusted off, we’d all packed into St Bride’s, the journalists’ church just off Fleet Street, for the service. I don’t know how much of hell froze over that morning, but it must have been a sizable chunk, judging by the shamefaced loitering as long as possible on the pavement outside, the shuffling of feet, the shiver down the spine as each of us crossed the threshold. Journalists hate the thought that they might be caught out by anyone – that’s our job, after all – and going to church is a bit like stepping into The Editor’s office. It happens rarely, and usually only after something bad which we might get the blame for. Religion for its own sake is something most of us neither understand nor need. Not unless the beer runs out.

  The trouble was that we’d met in the pub first for a heart-starter – well, waited there for everyone else to turn up – then staggered into the pews. The vicar, who was used to our sort, greeted us warmly to possibly the only church in the land where we are actually welcome. I’ve sat in churches for funerals I’ve had to cover, sometimes invited and sometimes masquerading as a mourner, making surreptitious notes, trying to ignore but internally writhing under the baleful glares of the genuinely grief-stricken. Even if the family ask you in, someone always mutters about ‘vultures’ and talks about Princess Di.

  Anyway, the vicar at St Bride’s is the only one I’ve ever met who looks down from his pulpit in the certain knowledge that most of his congregation can be categorized under the heading ‘utter bastards’, and doesn’t seem to mind.

  And this service was quite good fun. Journos who hadn’t seen each other for years waved across the aisle, clapped one another on the back over the pews, and blundered their way through the singing until they hit a chorus they knew and could pound it out with all their strength – ‘All things BRIGHT AND BEAUTIFUL . . .’ – while holding a church-wide sweepstake on which mobile would be the first to go off.

  As we filed out afterwards, the hacks all loitered in the entranceway, and Valentine Lush, who’d been ‘waiting’ in the pub slightly longer than the rest of us, scooped me up in his arms and twirled me round while copping a happy feel at the same time. ‘Val!’ I stage-whispered. ‘We’re still in the church! And that’s my ARSE!’

  ‘And a lovely one it is, too!’ he cackled, reeling off into the Bell with Sickly from the Sunday Scandal, a health reporter whose constitution has been so weakened by booze that he once had a ‘seizure’ which involved repeatedly ramming another reporter’s head into the hand-towel dispenser in the gentlemen’s toilets at the Old Bailey. He later claimed latent epilepsy was to blame, and apologized to his victim by taking him out for a drink.

  Tom would have loved his memorial. He would have been in the middle of his old muckers, telling tall stories from back in the day about how he had been the first to enter Port Stanley in the Falklands War, bugger what Max Hastings says on the subject, and how another time he had caught Prince Philip’s secret girlfriend, but was told to lay off because The Proprietor was angling for a knighthood and tea with the Queen.

  We reminisced about Tom’s career, including how he was once seen, in blazer and kerchief, grooming his beard in the backdraft of an aid plane’s engine while covering the Ethiopian famine. Another story was about how Tom was trapped in his hotel in Baghdad as the Americans were dropping bombs during the first Gulf War. He was filing copy over a satellite phone, a descriptive piece known as ‘colour’, dramatically telling how bombs were dropping and people were fleeing. But the Republican Guard didn’t want the news to get out, and tried to confiscate all the sat phones. Armed guards were going room to room. Tom barricaded the hotel-room door, locked himself on the balcony, and filed stream-of-consciousness copy throughout the bombardment.

  ‘Beautiful
words, and grammatically perfect, too,’ remembered one rheumy-eyed colleague. ‘Tear-jerking stuff and not a comma out of place.’

  By dinner-time Porter had thrown Guinness all over me by accident, Nancy had pulled a sports writer and snuck off down an alley for a snog, and I had persuaded the landlord to take the paper-towel dispenser out of the men’s loos for safety’s sake.

  At one point I found myself at the bar with one of Tom’s brothers, who shared his dulcet tones and avuncular style. He thanked me for coming, and said how much it meant to the family to see so many of us there. In my cups, I muttered something about how we were all bastards in most people’s eyes.

  I told him: ‘It was this lot, you know, these same misfits who would be thrown out of a pigsty for their manners, that stood by me and refused to gossip when everyone wanted to know about my husband cheating on me and my getting arrested for trying to kill this fat bird he was seeing. And d’you know, that’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me?’

  ‘I know what you’re saying,’ said the brother. ‘It somehow means more when bastards are nice.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I slurred, slipping off my stool on the way to the ladies. ‘It’s very moving, the solidarity of scum.’

  I barely registered his guffaw because, halfway to the loo, I walked straight into Twatface.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. ‘H-h-h-how are you?’

  ‘F’ckov,’ I burped, continuing on my way to the loos. He was still there when I came back, grinning nervously. Although I walked past him with my nose in the air, he followed me to the bar and explained he’d come with his boss, who’d once worked with Tom, and didn’t mean to make me feel bad.