The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue

by Frederick Forsyth

  I could not know in 1959 that fourteen years later I would also have to get out of Hamburg in a hurry. It seems to be part of our family history. I just contented myself with sightseeing and enjoyed my stay there.

  Then in 1960, I crashed the MG and was lucky to survive. It was one in the morning out on the flat Fenland landscape, driving home and of course too fast. A friend was beside me in the passenger seat, the roof was stowed, and we were enjoying the warm summer wind in our hair when we entered the bend.

  It was a right-hander and it turned out to be ninety degrees. I think the MG made eighty of those degrees before losing traction and skidding into the left-hand verge, which was actually a steep bank. The thump threw my mate out of the left-hand seat like a cork from a bottle. He was lucky. He landed on a mound of loose sand left behind by workmen, shaken but unhurt. In my case, the steering wheel rammed me back into the seat, and when the car rolled, eight times, several things happened.

  My left hand, being on top of the steering wheel, hit the road on the first roll and was crushed. The steel-framed windscreen was snapped off and came back into my mouth. The MG came to rest on its wheels with the driver slumped in the seat in a bit of a mess.

  By luck, the accident happened right outside the house of the village policeman. He woke, peered out and down from the top of the bank, saw the wreck, and called an ambulance, which came out from King’s Lynn Cottage Hospital.

  One of the paramedics found a severed ear in the road, held it up and asked: “Be this yours?” as if detached ears were to be found all over West Norfolk. My friend, still dizzy on his sand pile, says I replied quite calmly: “Yes, put it in a dish.” I then passed out into a coma for three days. The ambulance rushed me to emergency, where the first glance by the night-duty sister caused her to think I would not survive till morning. Then luck set in.

  The cottage hospital was not a major unit. It handled mainly domestic and agricultural accidents, plus births and winter chills. On that night, Matron was summoned from her bed and began to call in a few favors. The near body in emergency was stripped of clothing and X-rayed as a team of four was assembled.

  There was a triangular hole in my skull on the left side with bone fragment embedded inside. A junior surgeon on the staff managed to retrieve the triangle of bone and draw it back into the aperture, where it was supposed to be. Then he bandaged it and hoped it would knit back. It did.

  A Dr. Bannerjee worked on my arm. This was long before microsurgery. He put it back where it should have been, sutured the meat back into place, and hoped the blood vessels and nerves would find each other and reconnect. Miraculously they did. Apart from some puckering, the ear has worked perfectly well ever since.

  A Mr. Laing, a dental surgeon roused from his bed, worked on my mouth. All five of the top row front teeth had been smashed out and even the roots were in bits. He plucked out every last fragment and sewed the gums closed, leaving tendrils of thread hanging down like something from a horror movie. But the big problem was my left hand. It was pulp.

  It just happened that two years earlier, one of the finest orthopedic surgeons in England, after a long and prestigious career in the London teaching hospitals, had retired to his native Norfolk and settled in a village a few miles away. He had met Matron and suggested that, although he was fully retired, if she ever had a really bad one, she could call him. That night, she did. I believe he was called Mr. North. He, too, left his bed and came to the emergency ward.

  He would have been perfectly entitled, I was told afterward, to amputate at the wrist. Another surgeon told me later, after seeing the X-rays, that he would have done so. That would have been the unchallengeable decision—a clean, thirty-minute removal of what was left of my hand. The alternative was risky. The trauma was so bad that the young driver could easily die on the slab rather than take a six-hour operation. But he took the risk.

  Through the night, the anesthetist constantly checked the life signs, and the surgeon plucked out the tiny fragments and chips of bone and rebuilt the knuckles and metacarpals. He finished around sunrise. His patient was still breathing. Then he took a cup of tea and drove home.

  It was three days later that I finally drifted out of a coma. My head was a large ball of bandages, my mouth a gaping hole with no front teeth. My left hand was a globe of plaster of Paris hung up in the air. My haggard father and mother were sitting beside the bed, where they had been for two days. Matron was standing on the other side.

  The big worry was that brain damage might have reduced me to a vegetable. But it seems I answered a few simple questions logically, then drifted away for another two days.

  Fit young people have amazing powers of recuperation. I was out of commission for about three weeks. My black eyes subsided, the bone fragment in the side of my head resealed itself, and hair began to grow on it. The stitches came out of the gums and the ear reattached. Only the left hand was still a globe of plaster. Finally, Mr. North came back and the plaster was removed.

  My hand was still there, uninfected, moving slowly when bidden. Eventually, under the scars, the grip would return, but never quite strong enough to hold a golf club again. But a lot better than a stump. Mr. Laing came back to assure me that a dental plate would give me a better smile than the one before. Dr. Bannerjee was too shy to return to be thanked for his amazing work on my ear. Mr. North would accept nothing from my father save a redecoration of the nurses’ hostel, which was accomplished. I remain grateful to them all, though as I was then twenty-one, I doubt any can still be alive.

  While I lay in convalescence, I was moved from intensive care to the general ward and found myself next to a middle-aged man recovering from a minor operation, and we got talking as side-by-side patients do, and something very strange took place.

  He told me he was a tailor and very diffidently mentioned that he “used to read palms.” I had no confidence in that sort of thing, but was intrigued by the phrase “used to.” He explained that he had stopped after a nerve-jolting experience. He had agreed to do his fortune-telling hocus-pocus at a village fete.

  One of his visitors was a local pillar of the community: wealthy, happily married, healthy, worry-free. Yet in his palm was the unmistakable forecast of his imminent death. He (the narrator beside me) was so horrified, he invented a “fortune” for the man, who left his tent in high good humor.

  But the palmist was sufficiently distressed by what he had seen that he went to the vicar and told him. The priest was both horrified and offended, excoriating the palmist and ordering him never to do anything like that again. Two days later, the local notable went to the gun room of his large manor house, took a 12-bore shotgun, and blew his head off. The palmist beside me said he had never told a fortune since.

  Of course, it was like a red rag to a bull. I pestered him until he relented. He wanted my left hand, but that was still swathed in bandages. So he studied the less adequate right hand instead. Then he told me what he saw.

  I am still unconvinced about this sort of thing. A journalist ought to be a natural skeptic anyway. But I can only report what he said.

  He started with my background: birth, family, father’s occupation, schooling, the languages, the travels so far, the flying, the lust to see the world, in fact the lot. But I convinced myself he could have learned all this from the staff by cunning questioning. Then he embarked on the future from 1960 onward.

  He told me about successes and dangers, triumphs and failures, advances and reverses, wars and horrors, material success and wealth, marriages and sons. And more or less when and how and where I would leave this planet.

  And so far, over fifty-five years he has been almost completely accurate. Not unnaturally I am quite curious about the next and last ten years.

  Two years later, I took the final exam. I believe I came second in England for that year. I know little of the chap who came first, save that he was from the north of England and
chose to remain with his provincial newspaper. I had other ideas.

  I had just turned twenty-three; it was autumn 1961. I was heading for London and for Fleet Street, the capital of British journalism, and I still intended to become a foreign correspondent and see the world.

  FLEET STREET

  I had not the haziest idea which newspaper I wished to join when I took that train down from King’s Lynn to London in October 1961. I toyed with the idea of the Daily Express because my father had taken it when I was a boy, but I had no inside contacts and no introductions, so I just started at the top end of Fleet Street, near the Law Courts, and began walking. I entered and applied for a job at every press organ I came to.

  That was when I discovered Fleet Street was a fortress. It did not seem to want any extra reporters, and certainly not this one. Walking up to the front desk and asking to see the editor was entirely the wrong tactic. The very idea of penetrating the front hall without a confirmed appointment was out of the question.

  There were forms to fill out, but pretty clearly they were going to be “binned” as soon as I disappeared out the front door and back onto the street. I had reached the great black-and-chrome edifice of the Daily Express by the lunch hour. There was not much point in going on until the editorial staff returned from their liquid lunches. Journalism then had a reputation for heavy smoking and heavy drinking. I repaired for a sandwich and a pint of ale to the Cheshire Cheese pub. It was standing room only.

  When the crowd thinned out a bit, I took a stool at the bar and thought things over. I was still on the staff of the Eastern Daily Press; I still had my tiny flat. I had my return ticket in my pocket. Then the old luck held.

  He was sitting down at the bar in the now almost-empty room, middle-aged, clutching his pint mug, puffing away and staring at me but with a kindly expression.

  “You’re looking down in the dumps, lad,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Trying to get a job,” I said.

  “Any inside contacts?”

  “Nope.”

  He whistled. “Off the street? Not a chance. They don’t take walk-ins. Any interviews yet?”

  “Nope.”

  “Any experience?”

  “Three years, Eastern Daily Express.” I added, “Norfolk,” in case he did not know, but I had hit a million-to-one lucky shot.

  “I trained with the EDP,” he said. “Long time ago, which office? Norwich?”

  “King’s Lynn. Under Frank Keeler.”

  He nearly dropped his pint.

  “Frank? Is he still there? We were juniors together. Just after the war.”

  He held out his hand. We shook and exchanged names. He worked across the road, a veteran of the PA, heading for retirement. The Press Association was and remains the leading news agency in London. I had not thought of an agency, but so what? He led me across the street to the huge gray granite building housing the PA and a range of other companies. Without any ceremony, he walked into the office of the editor in chief.

  Mr. Jarvis leaned back in his swivel chair and surveyed the new offering his colleague had brought in. It was difficult to make eye contact, because the lenses of his glasses were as if cut from the bases of shot-glass whiskey tumblers. There were two eyes behind there somewhere and a very broad Lancashire accent. He gave me the same interrogation as his colleague from the pub.

  Age? Where from? National Service? Journalistic training? Any other useful qualifications? I mentioned four languages. He stared fixedly, then said:

  “Thee’s on wrong floor, lad.”

  He took his phone, dialed a number, and spoke to whoever answered.

  “Doon? I think I’ve got a live one. He’s not for me, I’ve got no vacancies. But he might be for you. Four languages. I’ll send him up.”

  I was led to the lift, said good-bye and thank you to the man I had met only an hour earlier, and as instructed went up two floors. There was a man not much older than me waiting. He led me through swinging doors and down a corridor, knocked, and showed me in.

  Doon Campbell was news editor of Reuters, a name so prestigious I had not even thought of it. Not just a few foreign correspondents but an entire agency dedicated to foreign news, reported from their myriad bureaus all over the world. He was actually a very kindly man, but his first, deliberate, impression was of a no-nonsense sergeant-major. Though he had lived and worked in London for many years, his accent might have come out of the Highlands of Scotland a week before. The interrogation was like facing a machine gun. Finally he asked:

  “Foreign affairs. Do you study foreign affairs?”

  I said I did as best I could from papers, radio, and TV. And that I knew France, Germany, and Spain, with visits to Malta, Cyprus, and Lebanon. He leaned forward, his face close to mine, and snapped, “Where is Bujumbura?”

  A day earlier, I would not have had a clue. But on the train down from King’s Lynn, I had finished both the papers I had bought on the station and spotted a copy of a magazine folded into the cushions of the seat opposite, abandoned by a previous traveler. It was the American magazine Time.

  I flicked through it, and in the center was a feature about the Belgian protectorates of Rwanda and Burundi, far away in central Africa. Luck again. I also leaned forward until we were almost nose to nose.

  “Why, Mr. Campbell, it’s the capital of Burundi.” He leaned slowly back. So did I.

  “Aye. Aye. So it is. All right, I’ll give you a three-month trial. When can you start?”

  I knew I would get no Brownie points for walking out on the EDP without notice, so I told him I would need to work out my month and could join Reuters in December. He nodded dismissively, and that was that. I had landed a slot in the world’s best-regarded agency for foreign news by a series of flukes. I left King’s Lynn a month later and moved to a tiny flatlet in Shepherd Market, whence a Number 9 bus would bring me to Fleet Street in twenty minutes.

  Reuters started me at the London editorial desk, charged with covering stories of interest only to foreign newspapers far away. In May, I got my break.

  The deputy chief of the Paris bureau was diagnosed with a heart murmur and had to be flown home without delay. The British National Health Service was free and the French was not. A head poked around the door of the Home Reporters’ room and asked: “Anyone here speak French?”

  I was led to the French-language service, whose chief was a real Frenchman called Maurice. My guide asked him, “Does this fellow really speak French?”

  Maurice was bent over his typewriter, and without looking up, asked in French: “What do you reckon to the situation in Paris?”

  It was back then in a state of crisis. It had just been revealed that President de Gaulle had for months been secretly negotiating with the Algerian resistance at Vichy and had fixed July 1, 1963, for a French pullout from the disastrous Algerian independence war and Algerian independence for the same day. The French extreme right and elements of the elite of the army had declared war on de Gaulle personally. France stood on the verge of coup d’état or revolution.

  I let Maurice have a torrent of French, complete with a brace of slang expressions that a pretend speaker would never have known. Maurice had served with the Free French in the war, based at first in London with de Gaulle, then fighting his way across his own homeland as it was liberated under Marshal Juin. But he had married an English girl and settled in London. He stopped typing and looked up.

  “You’re French born, right?”

  “Non, monsieur, completely English.”

  He switched his gaze to the man beside me and dropped back into English.

  “Better get him over there. I’ve never heard a Rosbif talk like that.”

  My flatlet was on a weekly rent. Living in London, I had given up my car. My possessions were one valise and a haversack. I had no ties. I phoned my parents in Kent and was on the morning flight to
Paris. A new chapter was opening that would eventually, and totally unforeseeably, lead to a book called The Day of the Jackal.

  PARIS AFLAME

  The situation I had tried to analyze for Maurice in London was no exaggeration. The uprising against the authoritarian Charles de Gaulle was highly dangerous.

  For six years, the Algerians under the FLN had been fighting for independence, getting ever stronger and more dangerous. Successive French governments had poured men, arms, and wealth into the war, with accompanying cruelties on both sides that were pretty hair-raising. Many French soldiers had died, and the mood in France was split down the middle.

  In 1958, de Gaulle, who had retired in 1947, or so it was presumed, was recalled as prime minister, and the following year was elected president. In his campaign he had used the magic words: Algérie française, “Algeria is French.” So the army and the right wing worshipped him. A few weeks into office as premier, he realized the situation was hopeless. France was being bled white in a war it could not win. As president, he began secret negotiations to end it. When that news broke, it was like a nuclear explosion.

  In Algeria, vital sections of the army mutinied and marched into exile, taking their weapons with them. Five generals went with them. These were not the raw recruits, but the Foreign Legion and the Paras (Airborne), the cream of the cream. The numerical bulk, the military service inductees, wanted to come home, so they stayed loyal to Paris. But hundreds of French civilians, settled in Algeria, realizing they would be thrown out or at least dispossessed by a new Algerian government, threw in their lot with the rebels who called themselves the Secret Armed Organization, or OAS. Their aims: to assassinate de Gaulle, topple his regime, and install the hard right.