Unreasonable Behavior

by Don McCullin

  ‘Well, it might be,’ he replied.

  I arrived at the Sunday Times and went straight to see the editor’s secretary, Joan Thomas, and said, ‘I believe Andrew wants to see me.’ I was asked to hang around for some minutes until he was ready. Then it was, ‘Hello, Don, will you sit down please.’

  Neil said something about it being time to roll up my sleeves, which I thought was a slightly unfortunate choice of words, but I responded politely. I mentioned ideas that I had put up which made good journalistic sense but which had been vetoed. It was a conversation going nowhere because I picked up right away that Neil was not really interested in having a discussion. He wanted me out. He wanted me out because I was an irritation, an embarrassment, someone like Sir Walter Raleigh, who had been left over from the previous century, and had to be executed to tidy things up.

  He just wanted to manoeuvre the dialogue so things would come out the way he planned. I knew this for sure when he asked a junior executive on the magazine to join our icy deliberations. Had he really wanted a ‘roll up your sleeves’ talk about what I could do for the magazine he would have called in Mike Rand, who was the best art director in the country, who had handled my pictures for twenty years, and who was just twenty paces down the corridor.

  This three-handed game was played for a while, with me saying I thought the magazine needed revitalising, and Neil rejoining with—Oh, we’re not doing that, it’s no longer that sort of magazine, and that’s not what we want any more.

  We were not getting anywhere. I said, ‘Well, I don’t want to be dragged into your office every six months and bollocked for not doing well.’

  Neil then worked up the bottle to tell me what he had intended all along. ‘I want to say one thing about you. I don’t like people who take the money and criticise the newspaper. So I think you should leave.’

  He looked across at the junior executive and back came the echo—‘Yes, I think Don should leave.’

  I stood up. ‘That’s fair enough with me,’ I said, and I turned my back on him and walked out of the room. I went straight to Mike Rand and said, ‘Well, that’s it.’

  I walked out for good from the paper I had served for eighteen years.

  39. HEART OF DARKNESS

  I went out into a chilly and uncertain world, a middle-aged out-of-work photo-journalist without prospects.

  There was a kind of shock wave going through Fleet Street—and not only Fleet Street, but the whole of the magazine world. It was the unofficial announcement of the end of photo-journalism. These were the monetarist-sharp Eighties and they didn’t want any more shocking pictures of war, horror and famine. They wanted style. They wanted to go for consumer images. No marketing operation wanted its products advertised alongside a dying child in Ethiopia or Beirut. Now they didn’t have to worry any more. The newspapers were on their side.

  Domestic marketing could hardly be the driving force of what I understood by journalism. Nor after all my wars and journeys did I want to be back at Square One, snapping garden parties and celebrities, to be phoned up by a picture editor at any time of the day or night to be told—‘Don, could you go from A to B and photograph C’—and be off like one of those messenger boys who ride motorbikes around town.

  Bleak times lay ahead. I tried to meet them with a semblance of the surface confidence which had carried me through dangerous times before. Inside I was a man losing his identity. My whole training had been to look out, to scan the horizon for new stories to tell. Suddenly I was forced to look inwards. In there lurked old darkness, and a new guilt from my marriage break-up.

  I tried a television version of Homecoming, but my still black and white pictures, which had such force on a page, did not transfer well to a small screen demanding movement. My thoughts—at this moment of flux—wouldn’t coalesce into commentary. Besides, this Homecoming path was one I had trodden before. It is never wise, in a mechanical way, to retrace old ground. I felt like that clockwork toy on General Aoun’s desk—wound up to do my act.

  At first, and for some while, life with Laraine was an idyll. But though we did astonishing things together, I wasn’t achieving much. I was lurking around the flat in Notting Hill, waiting for the breadwinner to come home. I went adrift once those Sunday Times days were over. I had no commitment. I was lonely. Two households mopped up a lot of redundancy money. I was hard up, and though Laraine’s generosity stretched beyond all imagining, there’s nothing worse for a man like me than someone else paying the bills. I am old-fashioned. I don’t feel comfortable in the receiving role. I made a point of paying in restaurants, though without regular income it was a lifestyle I found impossible to sustain.

  At the same time I was being polished up beyond recognition. I had been happy as that shadowy figure jumping on to aeroplanes with army gear, kitbags, helmets and boots, and wading through mud. I was that man of action. I wanted to be that man. Now I was being groomed into something else. I was persuaded to buy a dinner jacket. We were at a party, and someone said you could get one at Hackett, but whatever you do, don’t buy the dead man’s shoes. Because Hackett’s is a posh second-hand shop, where rich old girls take their old men’s gear when they pop off.

  So I was walking round in a dead man’s dinner suit. I don’t know why it’s different from wearing, as I did in Vietnam, a dead soldier’s flak jacket, but it is. When I went to those expensive dos at night, it was another person in that dinner jacket. Not old Don McCullin. I was just airing it for this dead man. Keeping his image alive.

  My real self sneaked off somewhere else. I found a new peace exploring landscape. I found it healing; the blunt side of the knife. You can run your hands down it, and they are not injured. You can touch it, and there is no blood. I found another peace in exploring distant places—travelling with my friend Mark Shand, going off to live with primitive tribes, sleeping rough and wading through rivers, losing the rubbish from my mind. I found greater peace working in our house in Somerset with Laraine. We eventually had a small elf of a son whom I totally adored. We called him Claude.

  Laraine Ashton and Claude, 1987

  But all this took money, and I needed work. With supreme irony I found the readiest projects from the enemy that had driven me out of journalism—advertising itself. The pay was quite startling. I could earn in one day more than I earned in two months running across battlefields for the Sunday Times.

  They wanted me there because, bizarrely, while reality was fleeing from newspapers, it was creeping back into ads. They called it pseudo-realism. It was the surface style, not the essence they were after. They ordered a touch of realism just as they ordered a touch of nostalgia; just as post-modernist architecture uses a touch of classical porch.

  I gave my best with this advertising work, as I did with journalism, and sometimes—especially when I did public service advertising—I felt it was worthwhile. But sometimes I found I was obliged to set up, with actors, for the purpose of artistic effect, the kind of scene I’d waded through in blood in real life. It was not what I was about.

  Essentially I was still a newspaper animal, confronted with a lot of work I didn’t particularly like. I had what I considered the most beautiful house in the world but I would leave it to take pictures I often found ludicrous. If you ask me deep down what spiritual satisfaction existed in the work, I would have to say almost entirely none. For that I fled to landscape in Somerset, and to foreign parts.

  Don, Mentawai Islands, Indonesia, 1980s, photograph by Mark Shand

  All this had little to do with the real reason for the shadow on my mind that kept me in a state of furious agitation, hardly sleeping or even eating. That came from something different, something utterly dreadful. Something that told me fate had really turned her face on me. I am not a dead man now. I am an insomniac, not sleeping, not eating. I feel wild. I am angry, actually. I am angry. Because my last two years must go down in my small history, in all the dreadf
ul years, as the worst of all.

  It began on a lovely July day in 1987. I was working in my dark room in Somerset, when the phone rang. I had a premonition. I mean, a telephone is just a telephone yet it can destroy you with one ring. As I left the dark room to pick up the phone, I thought, Shit, I’ve got to go out into the light.

  I don’t like going out into the light when I’m in the dark room. I like the consistency of the dark. It keeps me safe. The dark room is a very good place to be. It’s a womb. I feel I have everything there that I need. My mind, my emotions, my passions, my chemicals, my papers. My negatives. And my direction. In the dark room I am totally together.

  I emerged into a lovely day to answer the phone. It was my daughter Jessica.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you. Mum’s leg has gone funny. It’s sort of paralysed. It happened in the garden at home yesterday. Something has gone badly wrong with her. She can’t walk and she’s gone to see the doctor.’

  She sounded very worried. When I called back she said. ‘Mum’s arm has gone funny now.’ I put down that phone after my daughter’s conversation and went into the dark room. And it died for me, the dark room, that day. I just switched on all the lights. I threw away all the chemicals. I made a cup of tea and walked ceaselessly round the house, trying hard not to put two and two together or think of all the brain injuries I had seen in all those wars.

  40. OF LOVE AND DEATH

  Christine had the support of a friend called Michael, who was an educated and charming man. He rang me to say, ‘I’m afraid things are very bad. We’ve seen a specialist in Harley Street. He’s told Christine he’s afraid it’s a brain tumour. She collapsed in the surgery. We took her straight to Barts.’

  I drove to London. Laraine took me to St Bartholomew’s hospital and waited outside. I saw my wife’s mass of blonde hair as she sat on the edge of the bed.

  I said, ‘I’m here.’

  ‘Michael’s coming too,’ she said. ‘Back from Cambridge.’

  We talked. She asked me to help her to the end of the ward. Suddenly I saw she was a cripple. Overnight this lovely young woman I married twenty-two years ago had become a cripple. She was dragging her leg, and her arm was stiff and useless. She was virtually paralysed all down one side. My beautiful Christine had become a hemiplegic.

  My feelings were so strong I had to leave the ward. I went back to Laraine sitting in the car. I felt utterly numb. I could hardly handle myself.

  I talked to the consultant. In these circumstances, you don’t take much in. It could be a progressive sort of thing or not, I gathered. It could have a poor prognosis. But there were astonishing cures. They had identified the tumour. When it was possible, they would operate to remove it, though it was a very large-scale operation. Much had to be done. Many tests were needed. Many investigations, many scans . . . It all took time. We should try to focus on normal life. I had been planning to take my son Alexander to Sumatra in September: should we, I asked, go now?

  ‘Nothing at all can be predicted,’ the consultant said, ‘nor at what precise time we can operate. My advice is always go ahead as planned.’

  I focused on this journey to stabilise the turbulence now overwhelming my brain. Alexander hadn’t been told, at Christine’s request, how bad things were.

  We left London, worried and tense. The last stage in the journey to the Mentawai Islands, off the west coast of Sumatra, was a sixty-mile sea crossing in what looked like a most unseaworthy local boat. People said don’t worry, they’re the best sailors in the world in these parts. It struck me that a lot of the best sailors in the world are at the bottom of the sea.

  Halfway across, at two in the morning, we hit a Force 10 electric storm. It started with lightning and got worse and worse. The seas were climbing and forming great canyons. Like the circumstances now of Christine and our family, they had grotesque and gothic scale. Looking behind, I saw, in lightning, a wall of sea about sixty feet high. Our forty-foot boat was dwarfed as we plunged into the yawning trough. There were women and children below decks and they were wailing as we tossed. I looked for the captain and found he had abandoned his post and taken shelter from his lack of courage and lack of knowledge. He was unconscious, or fast asleep, on deck. We rolled into him to revive him. As the storm went on through the night I began to believe I had brought my son here to die. I prayed, sincerely.

  We limped into the islands in the morning eight hours later than scheduled, more or less alive. My son, in the quiet aftermath, caught a fish the size of a settee. I told him how bad I felt, putting him through such dangers. He looked up and said, ‘I thought it was great.’

  There was a sort of grey glass between me and the sights we saw on our journey upriver. The hibiscus and the orchids, and the fishing tribesmen went by like a glazed moving film. I said one morning, ‘I wish we could telephone home.’

  Our Indonesian guide startled me by saying, ‘You can telephone. From Mentawai town. There is radio bounce. Radio bounce to Padang, Padang bounce to Jakarta, Jakarta to London.’

  We made the journey by dug-out canoe to the little port that had this radio communication. Three and a half hours later, to my astonishment, because much dealing and money had been involved, they said that London was on the line. I could see Alexander outside the booth. He looked scared. I heard Laraine’s voice.

  ‘How is she?’ I said straight off.

  ‘She’s fine. They’ve done the operation. And it’s going to be all right.’

  I came out of the booth and I could have embraced my son. I could have embraced the world. I said, ‘Alexander, she’s going to be all right. Your mother’s going to be all right!’ A smile spread on his face, and the tears sprang in his eyes. From there on we were like two smiling chimpanzees. We joked our way through everything, the rats, the sea storms, everything.

  We went straight to the hospital when we got back to London. The doctor intercepted me before we reached the ward.

  ‘You’ve got to prepare yourself for a shock.’ The blood left my head. ‘No. It’s not what you think,’ he said. ‘It’s just that she won’t look like the woman you saw here before.’

  It had been an eight-hour operation to remove her tumour.

  I went in, tentative and alarmed. I approached and could see first of all . . . something like a sock where her forehead was. Her hair had all gone.

  For a moment I saw a little hunched-up old man. Then I drew closer. She was dozing. When her eyes opened, I thought she still looked beautiful. We talked gently. Our son was there. I left.

  I did strange, distraught, unhelpful things after seeing Christine. I walked in a frantic sort of state round the wig department of Selfridges. I looked at the women in the shopping crowds. I looked at their hair. I got angry, thinking why are all these women here, with flowing hair, walking and laughing.

  As I was leaving the hospital the doctor had come up to me and said, ‘Can I talk to you, Mr McCullin?’

  Now there’s a funny thing about doctors. They won’t tell you what you need to know. They skirt round it. It’s a new thing with them—they don’t actually hit the nail on the head. They keep on hitting your fingers with the hammer instead of the nail.

  I said, ‘I’d very much like to talk. What is going on?’

  ‘It’s not good news. I’m sorry.’

  I went cold. ‘What are you trying to tell me?’

  ‘I’m not trying to tell you anything,’ he said. ‘Only that it’s not good news.’

  After a moment’s silence I said, ‘I’m totally confused. I don’t find that helpful. Please, doctor, what is going on?’

  ‘Well, we’ve removed the tumour,’ he said, ‘but I’m afraid there is a mischievous tumour somewhere else in the body and we can’t locate it. She’s had all the tests that anyone could have.’

  I found myself floundering helplessly in a situation that was too bewi
ldering to face.

  My confidence started dying with Christine. I realised you could shoot photographs until the cows came home but they have nothing to do with real humanity, real memories, real feelings. I started a sort of non-stop analysis of my life, who I was and what I had done. It went on for twenty-four hours a day in my head, as I did futile and hopeless things that weren’t any use to Christine. I didn’t know the danger I was to myself and to Laraine too. I had become unwittingly, unknowingly, a danger to our relationship. Like the women in Oxford Street, I resented her. I resented her privileged health. For a year and a half of Christine’s life-and-death struggle, Laraine had to struggle against my resentment and inchoate actions, until she became resentful herself at this treatment. It became our daily bread.

  I went to visit Christine in Bishop’s Stortford. She was on a blood-thinning drug, so she was always chilly, even in summer. She wore a wig. Her hair didn’t grow again.

  For a while it looked as if she was holding on, reviving even, carrying on, despite her disabilities, as normally as possible.

  But the day came when she had a fit. She was rushed to hospital. A scan found another tumour. I was with her and Michael when the consultant told her: ‘I’m afraid I have to tell you you’ve only a short time to live.’

  It was like a shattering blow. It pole-axed her. She collapsed in his surgery and vomited.

  I phoned my elder son Paul in Australia. The tacit agreement had been that the state of things shouldn’t blight the children’s lives so hard too soon. Now there was nothing for it.

  Before I could tell him my news, he confided his. ‘Dad, you must all come out here. I’m going to get married.’

  I had to tell him. ‘If you don’t come home right away, you might miss your last chance to see your mother.’

  He came thundering back. Months later Paul was still at his mother’s side. By now the condition had altered Christine’s gentle character. Her personality had changed, though she was still bravely doing her best to keep up an ordinary life. She told me once, ‘Whatever you do, don’t show your grief before the children.’