There were six of us, all students, going to Holland, all from Durham, except Margaret from Oxford. I did not really know any of them, as they were all at other colleges, except for David Foster, who was from Carlisle, a friend of Margaret’s and mine. I think he was the person who told us about the trip, which was being organised by someone at Cuthbert’s, who happened to be a friend of some student in Holland who knew about sailing. Allegedly. We were all very vague about where we were going and what would happen, and most of all about the art of sailing.
We got the boat train to the Hook of Holland and met up with the Dutch student and his girlfriend, all eight of us staying the night at his house. Then we set off next day to Friesland, in the north-west of the country, an area of lakes and canals and waterways, famous in Holland for winter sports but in the summer for sailing. And also for Friesian cows, the black-and-white ones, but I don’t remember seeing any of them . . .
Our Dutch friend took us to a yacht haven, which was very pretty and lively, full of young people messing around in boats. He had booked four little sailing dinghies for us. I never knew the names or type, just little boats with two sails, a big one in the middle and a small one at the front, about eighteen feet long. We had to sign various forms, pay a deposit, and confirm that we could sail. We had never sailed before, had no idea what to do, but our Dutch friend said not to worry, just sign, and he would tell us what to do as we went along.
He came on board after we had pushed off, explained about the sails, the ropes and the thing you steer with, then he hopped back on to his boat where his girlfriend was waiting – and left us to it. We managed somehow to follow him, as he led our little armada. There were some arguments between me and Margaret about which ropes to pull, which sail to alter, who was in charge, but it was all so attractive and wonderful. What a way to start the next stage in our romantic life.
For five nights we stayed in tiny yacht harbours, securely mooring our boats, then going into the town for a drink, mixing with all the yachties, buying some food to take back on board and making our own meals on our little boats, ever so sweet. There was no cabin as such on our boat. At night we had to erect an awning under which we slept in our sleeping bags.
Then during the day we pottered up and down various lakes, along canals, through reeds and waterways, not quite sure where we were heading. It was all one continuous wonderful waterland.
And at night, well, that was not quite as wonderfully wonderful as we had hoped and expected. Margaret found it hard to get the hang of the contraption, wondering all the time if she had done it properly, while I looked away, or went for a walk on the harbour, returning when I thought everything was in place. It all seemed so cold and artificial and contrived and not at all romantic. Added to which, at night, a wind always seemed to get up, the boat started rocking and we felt a bit seasick.
Not having done it before, neither of us really knew what it was all about, how you went about it, what was meant to happen, how it was meant to feel. Would the earth move – would you enter into a state of bliss, leave your conscious self, as so many novelists had led us to believe? The only thing that did move was the bloody boat.
After waiting all these years, I was far too quick, that was my excuse, all over before she had hardly got out of her sleeping bag. I felt guilty and ashamed and embarrassed, ruining everything. Next morning, we didn’t discuss it. She didn’t talk about how she felt, how disappointed she must have been, and nor did I. What should we do next time to make it better? What were we doing wrong? You felt that such a natural act should happen, well, naturally, humans had been doing it for centuries, though of course the awful pink metallic tin ruined any notion of natural naturalness. You didn’t discuss such things, did you, not even with the person you had just slept with. It was as if it had never happened. An unmentionable.
I only hoped that back on dry land, when Margaret returned to Oxford and moved into the flat she had lined up with Theo, or when I got my own flat, or room, if I ever did, in some town, place still unknown, that then we would be able to do it in comfort and seclusion, in our own bed, in our own time.
On the sixth day we were sailing quite well, getting the hang of it, if not the hang of anything else, and were tacking up a broader canal than the ones we had been on so far. The canal was full of much bigger boats, rather than other sailing dinghies like ours, huge professional barges, working barges, heading full speed for the open sea, I presumed, or for the Rhine. I could see one monster barge behind us, blaring his foghorn. We had been told when setting off that sail must always give way to steam, if the steam was working steam, such as barges transporting stuff, plying their trade, as opposed to people like us, messing around.
I told Margaret to tack to the left, to get out of the way, and she decided tacking right would be quicker and safer. While we argued and tussled over the ropes and the rudder, shouting at each other, the monster barge behind, which could not stop because it was going so quickly, smashed right into us.
It was a strange sensation. Our little boat was lifted right up in the air, breaking in two. Margaret fell into the water on one side. I fell the other side. Miraculously, neither of us was really hurt, just bashed and thrown into the water.
The barge man had clearly put his brakes on, or whatever they do, but could not stop at once, so glided for another 100 yards. Boatmen leaned over and shouted and gesticulated, waved poles and arms and things at us. Eventually they got both of us out of the water with grappling hooks and hauled us up on board. Then they used a winch to lift the remains of our boat up out of the water and on to the deck. We were given hot drinks, food and dry clothes. They looked after us very well, dropping us, and what was left of our boat, at the next yacht harbour. In my mind, it was a place called Sneek on a lake called Sneekermeer.
We left the smashed boat on the harbour side and spread our belongings among the other boats. David Foster, our Carlisle friend, was in a boat on his own, so we both joined him, which made it cramped, especially sleeping at night, and was obviously the end of any of our sexual activity. Such as it had been. Wasn’t much fun for him either. He had bought a supply of a local Dutch drink called Chocomel, which we all loved, but we had no money left to buy any. As we sailed slowly back to our starting point, we watched with envy every time David opened another bottle of the delicious chocolate-flavoured milk.
We got to the yacht harbour where we had hired our boat. The boatman gave a welcoming smile at first, then became furious when he saw we were missing one boat. We tried to explain its condition, and where it was now lying in a crumpled heap on a quayside. He said the cost would be at least £120 – which was an enormous amount, about £1,500 in today’s money. We did not have any money, not more than a few shillings, either with us or at home. It had all gone on the holiday. Then he calmed down and said we were very lucky; we would not have to pay that full amount. On the forms we had signed we had taken out insurance. All we would have to pay would be thirty shillings, which we managed to find.
We finished the sailing holiday days earlier than we had planned because of the accident, so it meant we ended up back in The Hague at the house of our Dutch friend’s parents unexpectedly, two days early. But they were absolutely marvellous. His mother took all eight of us in at once, gave us all beds, and fed us. She made us the most delicious pancakes, as many as we could eat, cheerfully keeping on making them till we were sated. She gave us all breakfast the next morning – which turned out to be more pancakes. I didn’t mind as they were so wonderful.
I remember thinking that if I ever got married, had a house, children, I hoped I would be as hospitable and generous to total strangers as she had been. She had never met us before and was never likely to see us again. We just happened to be vague friends of her son’s, whom he didn’t really know either.
The other thought I came back with from that trip was that, dear God, there had to be a better form of contraception than that awful diaphragm. It had taken all the pleasure ou
t of our first experience of sex, making it a deliberate, premeditated, contrived and controlled event rather than a moment of sudden, mad, wild passion.
Fortunately for later generations, things changed quite quickly. Around 1960, the coil arrived, inserted inside permanently, so no need for all that calculated, cold-blooded faffing. This was followed, of course, by the pill, the wonderful and simple birth control pill, which changed everything, life and death, morals and behaviour, for everybody, forever. Now we also have emergency contraception, in the shape of the morning-after pill. Who would have imagined that all you might need one day was to take a simple little pill the morning after?
I did get something out of that awful sailing accident. Afterwards, while at home in Carlisle, waiting to hear from Kemsley, I read a piece in my mother’s Sunday Post asking for summer holiday stories – either good ones or bad ones that had gone wrong. I sent off my account of our sailing holiday, giving my Carlisle address but saying I was Johnstone-born. My story eventually appeared, top of the page, in the Sunday Post on 5 October 1958. I received two guineas. So that more than covered the thirty shillings I had had to pay on the boat’s insurance.
It also set me off on a course that has never stopped. Ever since, I seem to have managed so often to get copy out of almost every experience, however apparently trivial or fleeting, bad or good, passing or lasting, boring or ordinary.
In Carlisle, during the summer of 1958, still waiting to hear from Kemsley, there was great excitement in the city about the imminent arrival of the Queen, to celebrate Carlisle’s 800th anniversary. Its first charter had been granted in 1158 by Henry II and there had been lots of octocentenary events going on in the city all year.
My small contribution was editing a magazine called Octopie, a one-off student production, a bit like a rag magazine, on behalf of all the students in Carlisle. It was another of my attempts to build up my portfolio to impress prospective editors who might hire me, and also gain experience.
There was no university in the city at that time, though there had always been proposals and suggestions that we should have one. But there were quite a lot of students whose hometown was Carlisle, plus there was an art college and a tech college – probably around about 200 student types altogether. I asked around for contributions, jokes and stories and cartoons, and we got some good ones, particularly illustrations by students at the art college and also a short story in Cumbrian dialect by Mary Hale, who had been head girl at the high school and was now at London University. My own contribution consisted mainly of parodies.
I produced a mock-up of the Cumberland News, the paper that had turned me down, calling it the Cumberland Spews, copying the layout and contents of its front page, writing pretend court reports and news stories. I also put together a cod classified ads page, aping the sort of notices that used to appear locally in 1958. In those days there was always a large number of jobs available for agricultural workers and farm lads. Most of them began with the words ‘Strong Lad Wanted’. Or ‘Experienced Lad Wanted’. My versions read ‘Strong Lad Wanted for Strong Lass’ and ‘Experienced Lad Wanted for Experienced Lass’. And then I would give the genuine-sounding farm where they should apply. The ads were laid out like the real thing, so you didn’t realise at first they were a joke. Another counterfeit ad read ‘Cowman wanted at Candlemas – bring own candle and cow’. Well, it amused me at the time.
I also included cod letters to the Octopie magazine from famous people of the day, pretending we had invited them to Carlisle for its celebrations. There was one from Mr Khrushchev in Moscow that said he was sorry he could not land a Sputnik on the Old Town Hall, but he looked forward to having a drink in our State Management pubs and meeting Robert Burns.
Arthur Miller declined, saying he had to stay behind with his wife. ‘She has a lot in front of her at the moment, I guess she always had, and I would be a sucker to leave her alone with guys like Liberace.’ Naturally, I would not make such sexist remarks today (his wife was Marilyn Monroe) and would also be more aware of Liberace’s preferences.
The arrival of the Queen, the focal point of all the events, was timed for 11 July 1958 – but she never came. The Duke of Edinburgh, who had turned up, on the way from Scotland, announced from the steps of the Old Town Hall that the Queen had been taken ill and had to go straight on to London. Loud groans could be heard throughout the streets of Carlisle from the thousands who had been waiting. The Queen did turn up, some weeks later, but I was not in Carlisle by then. I was elsewhere. My call had come.
On 29 July 1958, I got a letter from the news editor of the Manchester Evening Chronicle, Bob Walker, telling me to report to the paper at nine o’clock on Monday 1 September, to ‘take up my duties’. I had to present myself to his deputy, Harold Mellor, as he – Mr Walker – would unfortunately be away on holiday at that date, but in his letter he welcomed me to the staff and ‘wished me every success and happiness in my activities’.
My salary was going to be £14 a week. It seemed enormous, which it was. When I showed the letter to my dad lying on his sickbed, and told him my wages, he could not believe it either. It was a bigger salary than he had ever earned in his whole working life. It was, of course, some years since he had actually had a working life, but even so, I felt so incredibly fortunate.
23
HELLO MANCHESTER
When I arrived in Manchester, on 1 September 1958, as directed, it was just a few months after the Munich air disaster. Manchester was still very much a city in mourning, among the footballing community of course, but also in the world of journalism. I had read about it, seen all the headlines, all the photographs, all the famous players, as had the whole nation, but I had never taken in just how many journalists had died.
It happened on 6 February 1958 when British European Airways flight 609 crashed on its third attempt to take off from a slush-covered runway at Munich. On the plane was the Manchester United football team, the famous ‘Busby Babes’, returning from a European Cup match in Belgrade, against Red Star. The plane had stopped to refuel in Munich because a non-stop flight from Belgrade to Manchester was out of the aircraft’s range.
Manchester United were attempting to become the third club to win three successive English league titles and were currently six points behind league leaders Wolverhampton Wanderers with fourteen games to go. They had just defeated Red Star on aggregate and advanced into their second successive European Cup semi-final. The team had not been beaten in eleven matches.
Twenty-three people died, including players, crew and journalists. Among the fatalities, the best known was the young halfback Duncan Edwards, already a Manchester United and England star, despite his age. He was born the same year as me, 1936, and was only twenty-one when he died. He survived the actual crash, but died in hospital fifteen days later. The other well-known players who lost their lives, all names I had followed, included Roger Byrne, Eddie Colman and Tommy Taylor.
Eight journalists also died, among them the famous exfootballer Frank Swift, a boyhood hero of mine when he kept goal for England and Manchester City. He had become a sports journalist, and was reporting on the game for the News of the World. I had also heard of Henry Rose, for he worked for the Daily Express, which my parents took at home. But I didn’t really know the names of the six other journalists who perished, nor presumably did most of the population.
The Manchester Guardian, Daily Mail, Daily Herald and Daily Mirror all lost one of their star writers. Then there were two leading footballer writers from the two Manchester evening papers, neither of whom I had ever read, or even heard of, until just before I arrived. Both men were still being talked about, remembered and mourned. There was Tom Jackson of the Evening News and Alf Clarke of the Evening Chronicle, the paper I was about to join. He could well have been one of my colleagues. It might even have been me.
During my first week, I was totally overwhelmed by the sheer size of my workplace – the noise, the bustle, the people, the round-the-clock activi
ty. Kemsley House in Withy Grove was said to be the biggest newspaper office in Europe, possibly in the world, though there was rumoured to be one in Brazil that was said to print more newspapers.
Withy Grove printed and produced all the northern editions of the national papers in the Kemsley empire, which included the Sunday Times, Empire News, Sunday Graphic, Daily Sketch, Sporting Chronicle. It was also the home of the northern editions of the Daily Telegraph, Daily Mirror, Sunday Mirror. The printworks were in the basement, which was why the traffic in and out and all around the surrounding streets was constant and the incredible noise never stopped. In that building were said to work 4,000 people. Every week ten million newspapers were disgorged. I found it incredibly exciting, just to be a small part of all this tremendous commotion and creation, bustling and rushing, shouting and yelling, hooting and honking.
Today, northern editions of most of those national newspapers hardly exist. But in 1958, the northern offices – printing and editorial – were just as big and important, with all the same facilities, as their London HQ. Most of the Manchester media considered they were on a par with Fleet Street in every way, if not better, and their basic-wage rates reflected what their London counterparts were receiving. Many of the older and more senior editorial staff, on all these papers, had at one time worked in London, and had returned to their northern roots, not feeling it was in any way a backward step. Of course, the younger ones were still dreaming of one day working in Fleet Street – if just to boast they had been there, done that.
The Co-Op's Got Bananas Page 25