The Bootle Boy

by Les Hinton

  This story continued with a chronology of what had happened to Ruth Ellis the morning she was executed for shooting her lover, David Blakely outside the Magdala public house in South Hill Park, Hampstead, London. ‘If you read this before nine o’clock this morning, the last dreadful and obscene preparations for hanging Ruth Ellis will be moving up to their fierce and sickening climax … If you read this at nine o’clock, then — short of a miracle — you and I and every man and woman in the land with a head to think and a heart to feel will, in full responsibility, blot this woman out.’

  After reading the Daily Mirror that morning, I never wanted to be responsible for anyone’s execution, and also thought it would be good to work for newspapers. The author of that Ruth Ellis piece was Cassandra, the pen name of William Connor. The Cassandra column was a daily event and I always read it. The Mirror sold more than 4 million copies then, and its readers were working-class people like us. Connor wasn’t a fancy writer using big words and complicated sentences, but he was funny and angry and weaved wonderful images with simple language. Two years after Ruth Ellis was hanged, Connor witnessed a British hydrogen bomb test on Christmas Island in the Pacific and summed it up in a stark sentence: ‘It was a dress rehearsal for the death of the world.’

  I kept that Ruth Ellis newspaper for years. In 2005, 45 years after writing my first newspaper story, the Magdala became my local pub. The Mirror story was hanging in a frame, and on the tiled wall outside there was still the bullet hole from the errant first shot Ellis aimed at her lover.

  I also saw when I was young how newspapers not only covered a big story, but could shape attitudes about it among millions of readers, especially at the time of a big sporting event, when the British come closest — apart from during a war — to expressing genuine nationalist fervour.

  My first lesson in this Fleet Street technique — and the globe girding magic of communication — came in May 1955 when the boxer Don Cockell, a former blacksmith from south London, challenged the American world heavyweight champion, Rocky Marciano. In those days, heavyweight title fights were huge events and British newspapers were running excited stories about the coming combat. These reports were partial in every way towards the brave boy from Balham who had crossed the Atlantic to take on Marciano — ‘The Rock’ — who had knocked out Joe Louis himself, although Louis had been 37 by the time this happened.

  Even Dad became a boxing fan. He didn’t care about sport, except when he was checking his football pools coupon, but got us out of bed in Münster to listen on our Telefunken radio to the live broadcast as Cockell fought Marciano in San Francisco. It was a famous massacre; Cockell was far outclassed, and took a mighty beating for nine rounds before the referee ended the match. It was a brutal fight, and Marciano was a roughhouse boxer, but the British newspapers for the following few days provided an unforgettable example of how Fleet Street could create a sporting hero from the ashes of total defeat.

  Cockell had gone into the ring an underdog and taken the beating most people expected. But Fleet Street whipped itself into a glorious fury over Rocky Marciano, and made my dad and millions of others furious, too.

  The verdict was the same in every newspaper I read, and Dad brought them all home after the Cockell fight: Marciano was a merciless, savage, cheating brute. In the Daily Mirror, Peter Wilson, a writer in the same league as Cassandra, said Marciano was ‘like a gorilla, except a gorilla does not eat meat, and Marciano is the most carnivorous fighter I have ever seen … We still conduct boxing as a stylised sport under a formal set of rules. Here it is legalised cobblestone brawling.’ The Mirror always described Wilson as ‘The Man They Can’t Gag’, which made him seem intrepid even though he looked like a suburban banker in his by-line photo. But he was a powerful writer who would deploy wonderful hyperbole to touch the millions of people reading the Mirror. Cockell’s courage, Wilson said, had given rise to a ‘kind of primeval mass sympathy and acclamation’, which made it sound as if he were writing about the Crucifixion.

  Don Cockell, brave as he had been in the ring, never had a prayer of beating Marciano, but Fleet Street had the power and imagination to transform a painfully one-sided fistfight into an epic injustice. Cockell arrived home bruised and battered but heroic, a lion-hearted loser.

  This Fleet Street power to excite the nation endured well into the twenty-first century but it was far stronger in the 1950s; at the time of the Cockell–Marciano fight only one in three households had television, with choice limited to two channels. It was more than 10 years before early satellite allowed live international broadcasting. All that most people saw of this fight was a few moments on the cinema newsreel. But 21 million national newspapers were sold each day in a country with 14 million homes. Newspapers were still the dominant messengers, and descriptive writers like Wilson and Cassandra became household names because they could bring great events alive. Writing for newspapers was the most exciting job I could imagine — unless, of course, I could become a film star.

  CHAPTER 5

  Guglielmo’s happy voice

  My excitement about a new life in Australia lost its edge when I thought I might go blind. In the ship taking us to Adelaide, a veil of brown had suddenly clouded my vision. Since I was a small child, I had been virtually blind in my right eye, and now this blurring curtain had descended over my left.

  The young eye-surgeon’s face was pressed so close to mine I could feel his breath. My left eye ached from the white light shining into it through a large magnifying glass. When Dr Peter Stobie had finished his examination, I was too blinded to see him deliver the news.

  ‘You have a detached retina.’

  I had no idea what these words meant, but the doctor’s voice was grave.

  ‘We must operate right away.’

  I learned quickly that the retina layers the back of the eye, and without it you cannot see. It is a medical emergency when a retina detaches, and within two hours I was a patient at the Royal Adelaide Hospital. For the next five weeks I would be blindfolded, confined to bed, and required to keep my head in the same position at all times — elevated and leaning slightly to the left.

  Through an opening he would cut through the bottom of my eye, Dr Stobie would attempt to re-attach my errant retina by performing a diathermy, a process involving heat and electricity that was a common remedy at the time, but abandoned long ago.

  My eyes had always been trouble. After catching measles at the age of three months, I developed a disorder known as strabismus — crossed eyes. Years of operations and eye patches failed to cure this condition, and by the age of 10 I was essentially what doctors describe as monocular; my right eye was almost useless. With my good eye alone to lead me through life, its unemployed partner had drifted lazily off to the right. While one eye took perfect aim at a person’s face, the other gazed sightlessly over their left shoulder. People I spoke to would look back thinking I was addressing someone else.

  Being unable to make eye contact with people is a handicap one has to suffer in order to understand. Through the years, it was a source of pain, and other people’s amusement. I would be called ‘Cyclops’ and the ‘man with one eye on the world’. ‘Here’s not looking at you, kid’ was common. Even my loving mother was entertained: ‘You’ve got one eye and a ball of fat.’

  It was a handicap with many drawbacks. At parties, my friends could catch the eye of a girl they liked. When I tried, it would be the girl’s neighbour, the one less interesting to me, who reacted. When reading on trains, women sitting opposite would fiercely tug down their skirts, certain I was sneaking an uninvited look. On the other hand, when I was admiring their legs, they never knew. Approaching strangers as a young reporter, I would sometimes resort to closing my blind eye. This must have looked odd, but at least guaranteed I could make immediate contact without having first to explain my deformity.

  I considered wearing a black eye-patch, which, as well as having
a practical benefit, was certain to supply mystery and allure. I imagined enjoying the fascination of beautiful women as they learned the story of my lost eye. I could tell them how I defended my family against a maddened attacker in the dangerous backstreets of Tripoli; or fought off a gang armed with flick-knives surrounding me and my girl in Singapore’s seedy Bugis Street, as the famous transvestites parading there cheered on my bravery. I had a long list of other colourful story ideas, but decided there was a high risk that no one would believe a word of them. I forgot the eye patch and settled for the dull truth. My story of catching measles as a baby never once brought a glitter to a pretty girl’s eye.

  But my eye problems were never more alarming than when I was 15, lying in an echoing ward in the Royal Adelaide Hospital, where I had been blinded in order to see.

  It was an unexpected lesson in life, becoming a refugee from the sighted world, learning what it was to have no eyes. It amplifies the senses that remain, but leaves the main canvas blank. I knew I was in a ward with 15 other patients because I had been told as much. But I could not see them, or the colours of the ward, or the owner of the soft woman’s voice that described it to me. I began to wonder how people existed in this new world, what it must be like to live with smells, tastes, and sounds, yet unable to attach them to an image. I had been able to see, so I had memories, and the ability to guess at and shape pictures in my head. But was it better for a blind man to have once been sighted, or more merciful to be blind from birth? What is beauty if you have never been able to behold a face, or a cathedral, or a bird on a branch? Was it better never to have seen these things than to have them snatched away?

  When I put my thoughts about blindness to Bob, whose bed was across the ward, I could tell he was hearing nothing original. Bob had been blind all his life. ‘Everything is clear enough to me,’ he said.

  I was an unhappy visitor to Bob’s world. I knew the surgery had come without guarantees, that my five prostrate weeks were key to the cure. But why was Bob teaching me Braille? ‘One dot equals A, two vertical dots B, two horizontal dots C,’ he would tell me. Had the hospital asked him to prepare me? Was I recovering, or rehearsing to be blind forever?

  I started thinking about what Bob had meant when he said everything was clear to him. I decided that the unseen hospital space could become whatever I wanted it to be; the faceless people could look however I wanted them to. The world would be at my command, and having invisible friends would provide infinite flexibility. Eyes, hair, height, shape, skin — each doctor, nurse, patient, hospital orderly could be designed in my mind to the last detail. They could be tall or short, thin or fat, redheads or blondes, pretty or ugly, and wear whatever I chose. It would be like dressing dolls.

  I engineered a vision for each voice. Bob sounded tall and big shouldered, with lank blond hair slightly matted across his forehead and bony cheeks, and skin like parchment. Guglielmo, the young Italian in the next bed who was to become my best friend in the ward, was short and wiry, with cropped black hair, blue eyes, and crooked teeth. The nurse who held my hand and told me I looked much more than 15 was petite and blue-eyed, and her hair a lovely crowd of chestnut curls. The booming senior sister whose arrival always hushed the ward was definitely short and stout, with white hair.

  I could change my mind about people who displeased me. A beautiful person could be condemned to ugliness. One nurse became Marilyn Monroe the moment we first talked. She had a low and throaty voice, so the image fit perfectly. I had a crush on her, which she didn’t reciprocate. When I tried to chat she never had time for me. My revenge was to make her plain — narrow-faced, small-mouthed, hook-nosed, and skinny.

  The best of my imagined designs never changed, but seemed more perfect as the weeks passed. It was dedicated to Sophie, whose soft voice had described the ward to me. This voice came to my bed sometimes and read me stories, and I fell in love with it. It belonged, I decided, to a woman with shining raven hair descending to the bottom of her long neck without reaching her shoulders. Her skin was smooth and clear and the colour of cream; her smile wide and white; her lips full, red, and mobile; her breasts just large enough to see as they began to cleave apart at the top of her uniform; her legs tapering at the bottom towards slim ankles.

  For five weeks, I lived with these conjured images, but there was one I did not need to manufacture, and I never forgot. Every third day, my eyes had to be uncovered and cleaned, and when this happened the same vision interrupted the darkness.

  I will never forget the first time. Rolled slowly on to my back, I had to look straight at the ceiling, to fix on a single spot, and on no account turn my eyes. As I lay there, two warm hands touched my face and peeled away the dressing. Reflexively, I shut my eyes against the strange, sharp light, squinting tightly until they could bear the brightness. My freed eyes finally fixed their open stare on the ceiling. And then they arrived, hovering above me: two beautiful saucers of blue. Big and deep and dazzling. Perfect kaleidoscopes of sapphire, flecked with sky blue; disembodied, flying objects suspended between a nurse’s starched cap and a surgical mask. The most magnificent eyes the world had ever seen now leaned very close, less than a foot away, searching deeply into mine. As a 15-year-old, it is a dream come true being looked at like that with eyes like those.

  Touch and smell matter a lot when you are a teenage boy trapped in bed at the mercy of invisible nurses who are as beautiful as you choose them to be.

  A bed-bath must normally be a humiliating experience; naked, rolled from side to side, swabbed head to toe by an unsmiling nurse, seeing from the scowl on her face that the task was high on the list of things she most hated. But Sophie of the raven hair and red lips administered my bed baths. Each day, she took a tender journey down my body, a warm flannel touching my face and neck and shoulders, progressing softly to the very tip of my toes. Sophie never took long enough at the task before drying me with a towel and combing my hair. But then, finally, she would lean across me, stroking and straightening my cover of sheets and blankets, so close I could smell her freshness and feel the brief breeze of her breath.

  My neighbour and new friend, Guglielmo was 25 years old and had arrived soon after me, temporarily blinded by using an oxy-acetylene torch without eye protection. He had immigrated to Australia from Italy, leaving his family behind. Guglielmo was loud, laughing, and funny, the bright heart of our ward of sufferers. He was a dreamer who talked non-stop and at high speed. His fractured English demanded total concentration.

  ‘Jeez, mate, slow down will you,’ Bob would say, ‘You sound like a chicken being bloody strangled.’

  But Guglielmo was never deterred, and his answer was always the same. ‘All right, tell me, how good you speak Italian?’

  He was engaged to be married, and each night his 17-year-old fiancée would sit beside his bed. This was the only time Guglielmo did not speak English. None of us understood what they said to each other, and they talked in whispers.

  Guglielmo and I would dream together about what we would do with our lives in Australia, and what would become of us.

  ‘Les, this is a beautiful country. It is good we both came here. In Italy my people are poor, but here I will be rich. I will have my own company and I will build houses. Many people will come here, like we have. They will need houses and I will get rich building them.’

  But first he would marry. ‘I will save money and marry Anna. You should see her, Les, she is beautiful, very beautiful. Then I will take her home to meet all my family in Italy. We will not go by ship but by jet plane. For my honeymoon, I will fly in a jet plane all the way back to Italy with my wife, Anna. I will work and save to do it. And Anna will have children and we will live in a big house.’

  And I would tell him what would happen to me, how I would become a newspaper reporter and travel the world, visiting every continent, meeting famous people — film stars and prime ministers — and that my name would be seen by millions of re
aders.

  When he left hospital, Guglielmo stood beside my bed. ‘Les, don’t forget me when you are a big important newspaper reporter and we are both rich. One day, when you are old enough, I will teach you to drink. We will go to the pub and I will buy you a schooner. You must drink it slowly. Maybe you will bring along one of these pretty nurses. They like you — really, they do. Oh, if only I was not engaged.’

  He took my hand and kissed it, then patted my chest. ‘Good luck, Les, good luck.’

  Guglielmo’s voice faded as he walked away, down the ward, joking with the other patients he was leaving behind, and teasing the giggling nurses in his flirty, broken English. Everyone shouted goodbye to Guglielmo, and when he was gone the ward was very quiet.

  As the day approached when my blindfold would come off, I became afraid. My only vision for weeks had been those brilliant blue flying saucers, the dazzling eyes of the nurse. Now the real world out there was waiting to shatter my imagination.

  The nurses were enjoying it. ‘You don’t have a clue what anyone looks like, do you?’ said beautiful Sophie of the breezy breath.

  ‘You don’t know what I look like either,’ said Bob, my braille teacher. ‘But I don’t suppose even I know what I look like.’

  I was convinced being blindfolded had changed my personality. Freed of the lifelong burden of being Les with the lazy eye, I had shed my shyness. It had been a liberation never having to see strangers discover I couldn’t look straight — those looks of blank confusion, that searching glance over the left shoulder. I was now an extrovert. I could talk with easy charm and sparkling humour. Older women — some as old as 20 — found my company irresistible, and would sit at my bedside laughing at my jokes. I had become bolder with a blindfold.