The Co-Op's Got Bananas

by Hunter Davies

  I told her she should at least try to make the most of Oxford, try new things, take part more, then give it up if it turns out boring and the people awful, but give things a go. Which is what I had done. Being two years older, I did like to think I was wise to the world, well, Durham’s little world.

  One of the things Margaret eventually decided to get into was acting. She was given the lead part in a student production of The Caucasian Chalk Circle. She played Grusha, the heroine, and Dennis Potter was the judge. The director was Ken Trodd. I went now and again to rehearsals, and could see how good Margaret was, and how they all thought so. But Dennis was the real star, a legend in his circles. He had a coterie of posh public school girls, all supposedly left wing, members of the Oxford Labour Party, who hung on his every word, especially if he started telling stories about living in a hovel, had dripping for breakfast, kept coal in the bath, had worked down the pit from the age of ten. Or similar stories. I suppose in a way Margaret held the same fascination for these sorts of girls as well, with her father in his boilersuit going to his factory on his bike. So different from the dear parents they had. But, unlike Dennis, she did not go on about it.

  Margaret gave up acting after one play. It was well reviewed but one production was quite enough, thank you, so she said. Later she became the film critic of Isis, which was useful. When I went down to see her, she usually had free tickets for the latest French films at the Scala cinema. Somewhere to go together in the evenings.

  Teaching practice succeeded in convincing me that I had to make a proper stab at getting into journalism, something I did feel at home with, so I was desperate to hear if I was going to be interviewed by either Kemsley Newspapers or the Westminster Press. Eventually the call came – and I had secured interviews with both of them at their head offices in London. I managed to arrange both of them on the same day, so needed only one trip to the capital, taking the train this time, not hitchhiking, in case I was late, or dirty or smelly.

  The Westminster Press office was in Fleet Street, so that was exciting, being at the heart of the newspaper empire, but the office was a bit dusty and ramshackle. I walked down Fleet Street and was amazed by the Daily Express’s glass black palace, the home of the newspaper I had read all my childhood. The Telegraph building was imposing in another way, rather ancient and grand and looked like a posh hotel. Fleet Street seemed so romantic and historic, the home of national print for hundreds of years. I looked up at the famous names on the buildings, titles I had delivered as a boy, and through the windows of the pubs which looked more like gentlemen’s clubs, with men in pinstriped suits and roses in their lapels, not like the State Management pubs in Carlisle. I wondered if I would ever work there.

  Kemsley’s HQ was several streets away, at 200 Gray’s Inn Road, not near anywhere famous I had heard of, or any other national newspapers, but its building was large and imposing with uniformed doormen. I passed the entrance to Gray’s Inn itself, which seemed very like Oxford, but I assumed it was private, so I never ventured through the gate.

  Westminster Press was a large group, scattered right around the country, but all its papers were small, like the Durham Advertiser, while Kemsley had fewer but bigger, all with large circulations, the dominant papers in their city or region, such as Newcastle (with the Chronicle and the Journal), Manchester (the Evening Chronicle), Sheffield (the Telegraph), Aberdeen (the Press and Journal) and in Wales they had the Western Mail. There were others I have forgotten, but all important papers.

  Unlike the Westminster Press, Kemsley also had national papers, so that was a huge attraction, notably three Sunday papers – the Sunday Times, the Empire News and the Sunday Graphic. Lord Kemsley (1883–1968), formerly Sir Gomer Berry, was part of a newspaper and business dynasty that had made its money in South Wales, going on to control a large part of the national press. Kemsley’s brother was Lord Camrose. They had co-owned the Telegraph at one time, till Kemsley took the Sunday Times and Camrose the Telegraph. Their Berry descendants and relations are still powers in the media to this day.

  I presented myself at Kemsley House and was interviewed by a red-faced, pockmarked, tough Scotsman called Jimmy Fraser. When I heard his accent I immediately dragged in my Scottish background. His Westminster counterpart, whose name I have now forgotten, appeared wishy-washy, as if he did not know what he was looking for, almost as limp and useless as the appointments people at Durham, who I considered were all impotent idiots.

  Jimmy Fraser seemed decisive, and to carry some authority, and a week or so later I was invited for a second interview. I was sent a telegram calling me this time to Kemsley House, Manchester to see Mr Goulden, editor of the Evening Chronicle. He was small, thin, very pale-faced, emotionless, buttoned up in a suit too big for him. He didn’t appear anything like my image of a journalist – I had imagined they were all outgoing, interested in people, inquisitive, on the ball, quick. He was more like an accountant or undertaker.

  He explained he was interviewing me generally for the group training scheme, not for any particular job, or on any particular paper. I assumed he was merely a clerical figure, doing his job. So I gabbled madly away, to fill up the silence. He gave nothing away, seemed not interested in me. But at the end of our brief chat, he said that Mr Fraser would in due course be in touch with me, after they had finished interviewing all the applicants. Oh God, perhaps there were hundreds of them.

  I was back in Durham for the last term of my DipEd course, supposedly going to lectures and swotting for the exams. But mainly I was busy being Senior Man. Then I found myself devoting a lot of my time to work on a film.

  Several years previously, some postgraduate education students had got the money and backing to shoot a film about Durham, highlighting all its wonders, to be shown to sixth-formers round the country, thus encouraging them to think of coming to study at Durham. They had been able to buy proper cameras and equipment. The project had never been finished; the keen students who had made the film had left and no one else since had appeared interested. It was all complete, except for one vital missing element – sound.

  So the silent film had just lain there in some cupboard, till one of the lecturers discovered it, realised how much had been spent on it already, and asked if anyone knew how to finish it off. I volunteered – despite the fact that I had no knowledge or experience of filming, and had never even used or owned an ordinary camera.

  I managed to get the projector working, watched the film over and over, wrote a script, found a recording machine and microphone, and then looked for a suitable narrator. I talked Hugh, my first roommate, into performing my voice-over. Which he did very well. I then found an editing machine and matched it all up, with a bit of cutting. The department had all the gear, only no one had been either interested or able to work out how to use it.

  I have always suspected it was working on this film, saving the department’s embarrassment at having spent so much for nothing, that got me my Diploma in Education, rather than displaying any knowledge or aptitude for actual teaching. My education tutor, B.B. Hartsop, gave me a decent reference in April 1958 in which he wrote that I had ‘tackled my teaching problems with enthusiasm and vitality’ and that, by the end of my teaching practice, I was able ‘to teach my young pupils satisfactorily’. Not exactly a rave review, but he said I would make ‘a competent teacher to the junior forms of a grammar school or throughout a secondary modern school’.

  I still have that reference, and my diploma, all those years later. It gives me a warm feeling, even at this great age, to think if all else in life fails, I can surely get a teaching job, somewhere.

  It did go through my mind at the time that, as I had heard nothing about the journalism traineeships, I should perhaps investigate how you get into films. But figuring out how journalism worked had taken me long enough, so I decided not to bother looking into the film world. For the moment anyway.

  As the end of term approached, and the end of my final final year at Durham, I event
ually got my call-up papers. My mother managed to get to a phone box somehow and rang my college to leave a message with the dreaded news. John Lennon, as an art college student in Liverpool, around that same time, used to dread the same news. When he was lying in, after a late gig with the Quarrymen, his Aunt Mimi would shout up to him, ‘John, get up! Your call-up papers have come!’ But that was a joke. They never did come for him, being four years younger than me.

  I filled in the forms, which included giving the name of my GP in Carlisle. I was called to a board in Newcastle. My Carlisle GP had records of all the years I had suffered from awful asthma, which I had almost forgotten about, having been almost totally free of it for some time. When the national service doctor was reading through my history of asthma, and asked how I was now, I immediately remembered and said, oh yes, I still did get attacks. The upshot was that I was declared unfit to fight for Her Majesty.

  So, I was free, not liable to be called up any more. I would have been among the last to do national service, which finally finished in 1960. But I could now start seriously planning, or seriously worrying, about how I was going to enter the world of work. Teaching, or otherwise.

  With the end of term approaching, I’d still not heard from Kemsley and I was getting desperate, so on 13 May 1958 I wrote to Mr Fraser, asking him if they had made up their minds yet about this year’s graduate intake. On 15 May, almost by return, I got a reply: ‘I am just on the point of leaving the office on business for a few days, but this is a very short note to say that you are definitely fixed with us, although I cannot say yet in which office. I shall be writing you a more detailed letter later.’

  I studied this note for ages, trying to read between the lines. No starting date, no contract, no wage, no actual job, no place, no newspaper named. It seemed to me they could easily get out of it, or change their minds. I read it all out to Margaret for her opinion, and she said it seemed to be definite – I was being taken on. Hurrah!

  It therefore gave me some pleasure to write to Westminster Press, from whom I had heard nothing, to say sorry, chum, I am fixed up with Kemsley. No need to make me an offer. That last sentence was, of course, in between the lines, not overt. No need to be rude to someone I might need a job from some day.

  I got a very decent letter back from them, from someone called Philip Duncan, saying he had a feeling this would happen and it was their fault for not having their selection board earlier. ‘I am bound to say I am sorry because we do not often find graduates who take as much trouble as you have done to fit themselves for newspaper work. There is no need to apologise. With best wishes for your career in journalism.’

  The big event at the end of the college year was the June Ball in Durham Castle – which I wanted Margaret to attend as my partner. I had known from the moment I met her, or didn’t meet her, that she hated dances, and hated even more the idea of having to wear a posh ball gown or fancy frock. But I nagged on, explaining that as Senior Man I had to be there, with my official partner, which of course was her, as we had now been going out for two years.

  I also got an invitation from the master, Len Slater, and his wife to have drinks with them in July in the master’s garden after Congregation in the cathedral, after receiving my diploma. The invite was addressed to me, my parents and Miss Foster. I must have told him I had a girlfriend – though he did not spell her name properly. She refused to come to that and I did not tell my parents. My father, increasingly feeble, could not have come to that either.

  But Margaret did agree to come to the June Ball – complaining all the time. She made herself a very posh, long ball gown, in red taffeta. She was handy and quick at making clothes, but not very well, getting bored quickly, taking short cuts for the hems, dashing off the stitching, which meant things often came to pieces while she was still wearing them. We had to have the first dance, as Senior Man of the college, which led to even more sighs, but after that she was allowed to sit down and chat to people. I still have the programme for that June Ball, which was held on Friday 27 June 1958. I see there were forty dances listed, from a quickstep, through a St Bernard’s waltz, slow foxtrot, Gay Gordons, Dashing White Sergeant, eightsome reel, strip the willow, charleston, tango, rumba and samba. It went on until the wee small hours when the dancing finished with ‘The Last Waltz’. It sounds more like 1938 than 1958, or even 1888. Hard to believe that rock’n’roll had arrived and couples all over the country were throwing their partners around and jiving wildly, while we were in our evening suits sedately doing the Gay Gordons. It was, of course, a formal ball at a traditional college, not one of the more casual ‘informals’, which we did have. All the same, in 1958 rock’n’roll was still seen by many as pretty subversive.

  Music was provided by Bob Potter and His Orchestra with cabaret by Cerberus. Supper was served in the Undercroft from 9 till 11.30pm; breakfast from 1.30 till 3.30am. I did not stay up for breakfast. By that time, Margaret and I were in bed in my room on the Norman Gallery. Which, of course, was illegal. But term was over, my student life was finished forever, that was it. She was so pleased to take off her taffeta frock and chuck it away – never wearing it again.

  Nothing untoward happened. I was Senior Man. I did have standards to maintain, oh yes, examples to set the younger, more infantile members of college, the sort who got drunk and threw things at medieval windows. So it was a chaste evening. Both of us were totally knackered anyway, as it was hours past our normal bedtime. That was something else we found we had in common. Going to bed at ten o’clock. Oh, the mad young.

  That summer we had fixed up to join some of my friends from Durham in Holland on a sailing holiday. Neither of us had ever sailed before, or even been in a boat. But we thought how wonderful, how exciting, this might be the perfect romantic situation in which to try something else we had never done.

  Thanks to Margaret’s Oxford friend Theo, whose parents were doctors, Margaret secured an appointment in London, in Weymouth Street, near Harley Street, with a woman called Dr Helena Wright, a birth control specialist, the sort of doctor, apparently, who fitted up the young daughters of progressive, middle-class, intellectual parents, probably from about the age of fourteen, judging by some of the stories we had heard.

  I hadn’t realised at the time just how eminent and well known Helena Wright was, in the UK and on the continent. She was born in 1887, had met Marie Stopes in 1918, and went on to open her own birth control clinic, lecture on contraception, sex education, sex therapy, and write lots of books. She had while younger been involved in various controversies and legal cases with the Catholic Church, as one might imagine. She did not die till 1982, aged ninety-four, but in 1958 when Margaret had her appointment with her she already seemed incredibly old. She was also rather brusque and no-nonsense.

  Now I look up her biog, I see that in her early life she was a missionary in China along with her husband, also a doctor – which is what both of Theo’s parents had also done in their younger days. Perhaps that was how and when they met Helena.

  Margaret never wanted to go over the full horror and intimate details of what happened in her one-to-one inspection by Helena Wright, how she had to be thoroughly examined, pushed and pressed, measured, mortified and embarrassed, till eventually she was provided with her very own, personalised diaphragm. It was like a large, round rubber cap, which a very small child might use for swimming, with a bendy, metal edge. You could fold it, then insert it, and it would spring back into the correct place – or so you hoped. It came in a round tin, painted a dinky pink, indicating, presumably, that it was for use by females.

  They were illegal in the USA, where anti-contraception laws were in place for many years. In the decades before the Second World War, Margaret Sanger, the American birth control activist, fought a long battle to legalise family planning.

  After the war, the diaphragm became the most popular form of contraception in the USA, with a third of married American women using this method. It was still difficult, in the USA and in th
e UK, for an unmarried young woman to be given a birth control device. I did not realise at the time, even in 1958, how avant-garde it all was, at least for people like Margaret, young and unmarried, and from her social class, to manage to get fitted up, ready for action.

  Why did I not take birth control into my hands? Fair question. A condom was what my father and his generation had used. I think I could not have been trusted, that was one reason. Margaret wanted to be in control of it herself. And, yes, I wasn’t really keen to get involved or investigate or discuss such things. Though I was certainly very keen for it to happen, and the quicker the better, in time for our Dutch holiday with our Dutch cap.

  Just before we set off, Margaret was contacted by Dr Helena Wright herself. The bill was ten shillings more than Margaret had actually paid. Dr Wright, rather bad-temperedly, instructed Margaret to send her a ten-shilling postal order, prompt.

  22

  WATER DRAMA

  We did have our romantic moments, even before we set off for Holland, but of course did not draw attention to them, or reveal anything in public. I should think not. None of that soppy stuff.

  But there was one occasion on which Margaret did excel herself in soppiness, which totally surprised and amazed and delighted me. This was on Valentine’s Day 1958 when she sent me a list of 101 reasons why she loved me, beautifully handwritten in ink on the front and the back of a homemade Valentine’s heart.

  After she had given me this list of 101 things, and I was reading some of them out, and smirking, she went mad and said she wanted them back, she was going to tear them up. She said it was all a joke, didn’t I realise? I said some were jokes, I got them, such as my eyes lighting you up, but some of them were true, surely. No, it was all an amusement. On no account had I ever to show them to anyone. And whatever happened, I had not to keep them. Which of course I did. Forever.