Cobra in the Bath: Adventures in Less Travelled Lands

by Miles Morland

  How happy we were to ghost to a halt outside the Muriflat in Athens.Next day I asked the Athens Muribird to come to a garage with me. She spoke excellent Greek and explained that the brakes were poli kaki – very bad – but she was also able to tell them not to patch the tube but to replace it with another. They found one that fitted and an hour later I sped off with a smile on my face and the squeal of brakes when we came to a corner.

  Tolon proved to be a mini-version of Corfu. The two Murivillas were next to each other on a long beach on the outskirts of a tiny village consisting of a handful of houses and a couple of tavernas. There were, it is true, no Spiros, but I soon made friends with a number of the fishermen who frequented the tavernas and found myself being asked to Greek weddings and family parties. How good it was to see Diana. She and I put our mattresses on the roof of one of the villas, where we were undisturbed by anyone else. In the morning we would get up early before the punters were about, drink coffee and fresh orange juice on the roof, and gaze across at Aphrodite’s Breasts, a pair of hills on an island half a mile off Tolon beach.

  On the beach at Tolon

  But the season was winding down. Diana had come out for two months, and it was now time for her to head back to England. One evening after she had finished looking after the punters she and I took a walk down the starlit beach.

  ‘Diana?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Will you marry me?’

  ‘Oh darling, I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t know what I feel about Martin and I don’t know what I feel about you. If now was the only moment the answer would be yes. But how will it be when we get back to England? My parents are really keen on my marrying Martin.’

  Diana’s father was a judge, and I knew from our talks how big an influence he was on her life. I could imagine his reaction if Diana told him she was chucking the brilliant young barrister for a jobless Muriboy.

  We agreed that trying to decide while we were in Greece made no sense. She would get on with her life without feeling she had a commitment to me and be free to see Martin, while I would get on with mine on the same basis, and when I came back to England we would get together and see how things went.

  I drove Diana to Athens airport along with a group of departing punters. At the check-in desk we promised to write to each other; she gave me her special smile, which always seemed to start small and demure and finish up as a grin, and then, with one last shy wave, she disappeared into the departure lounge.

  Three weeks later the season was over, and it was time for the Muristaff to check out and return to England. However, I had received word from England that the VW was needed by Murison Small in Verbier in the Swiss Alps for the winter season. I was to drive it to Geneva and drop it off, for it to be picked up later by a winter Muriboy. In fact, I was told by head office, if I wanted to be a Muriboy for the winter season I would be welcome. I was tempted – the summer had been wonderful – but some semblance of sense inserted itself into my brain and I realised that a summer on the beach was one thing, but if I did a winter as well it could be habit-forming. Reluctantly I said no.

  The villas closed at the end of September, and the VW needed to be in Geneva by the end of November. I could see no reason to hurry back to the jobless reality of England so I decided to take my time. I would go back to Corfu. Two days later as I drove the VW off the ferry there I saw a knot of people waving at me. It was the Spiros. I was so pleased to see them and touched that even though I had no more blondes to pimp, four of them had come to meet me.

  The next couple of weeks passed in a blur of long lunches, longer political discussions and nights at clubs getting ready to close for the season. I met an American woman called Bridget who had been floating around Greece for the summer and was preparing to return to London and then go back to America. I offered her a lift to Geneva and said we could take the train to London from there. She accepted. I said goodbye to the Spiros with sadness; there was much hugging on the dock before we left on the ferry across to Italy.

  The drive to Geneva was bad. We left Florence an hour before the sluice gates in the Valdarno Dam above the city were opened to save it from breaking under the weight of water from days of torrential rain. Two hours after we left, central Florence suffered the worst flood in modern Italian history. It was under twenty feet of water, and two million paintings were submerged – as would we have been if we had overslept. We tried crossing the Alps but ran into an early snowstorm, which made the roads impassable until the next day, when we bought chains and tried again.

  The Volkswagen leaked, and the water froze as it dripped on to our thin summer clothes. Bridget rubbed my hands as I drove to stop them going numb. When we finally reached the French border post on the Col du Mont-Cenis we were waved through with cries of ‘Bon voyage’ from the border guards, who could not believe that anyone would be stupid enough to set out so unprepared. The French had done a better job of clearing the snow than the Italians, so soon I was able to take the chains off and speed on at 55 mph towards Albertville and Geneva. Even a puncture and an icy half-hour replacing one bald tyre with an even balder one did not dampen our spirits.

  A day later we were in Geneva. I said goodbye to my faithful minibus, leaving it in a car park to be collected later. Bridget and I caught a train from Geneva to Paris and on to Calais and London.

  My Greek summer was over.

  16

  My Brilliant Career

  I was now back in London. It was filled with people who had jobs and places to live. I had neither. It was tempting to call up Murison Small and ask them when the next flight to Geneva was. And then there was Diana. On my second day in London I called her. As soon as I heard her soft voice on the phone memories of the summer overwhelmed me. We agreed that I would take her out to dinner in two days’ time. That was good. What was not good was that first I was to have a drink with Mr and Mrs Bowman, her parents. They lived in a set of apartments in the Inner Temple.

  Diana greeted me at the door. We hugged and kissed. She giggled nervously and led me into a room which was more like a library than a sitting room. Her parents were sitting in armchairs. They looked at me as I came in. Eventually Mr Bowman got to his feet and extended a hand.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Morgan. I’ve heard about you.’

  ‘Daddy, it’s Morland. Not Morgan,’ whispered Diana.

  ‘Good evening, sir,’ I said in as grown-up a way as I could muster. Mr Bowman was not a large man, but he had a terrifying intensity about him. ‘And I’ve heard a lot about you, sir, from Diana. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you.’

  I was so eager to please that if I had had a tail I would have wagged it.

  ‘Yes. I expect you drink?’

  I looked around to see what they were drinking. Not a glass to be seen.

  ‘Thank you so much, sir. Yes, maybe a small gin and tonic?’

  ‘Gin and tonic?’ said Mr Bowman as if I had just asked for heroin. He stalked over to a table in the corner on which there were three bottles. He picked them up one by one, each time stopping to scrutinise the label as if he had never seen it before.

  ‘No gin,’ he announced. ‘Sherry?’

  ‘Yes, please. Wonderful, wonderful. I love sherry.’

  He gave me a withering look.

  ‘So. Diana tells us you left Oxford six months ago and have been –’ he paused and looked at Diana ‘– driving a bus since then. Very unusual. And now what?’

  ‘Yes, yes, sir. I wasn’t really driving a bus. I’ve been working very hard on a book. And I’m thinking of becoming a barrister.’

  ‘Book, eh? Huh. And now you’re to be a barrister? When do you start your law course? You’ve already lost six months since you left university and chose to go and be a bus driver.’

  I considered lying but knew the judge would find me out. Thank God I was not up in front of him in court.

  ‘I, um, sort of quite soon, sir.’

  ‘Really? And, if I may ask, young man, where
are you doing your course?’

  ‘Ah, yes. Well, sir, there are so many good courses I want to make sure I do the best one. So I’ve been looking into them. Maybe you could give me some advice.’

  ‘Bah, they’re all the same. There’s no earthly point in wasting time trying to choose between them. They’re crammers. Just get on with it. It’s you who have to do the work, you know. Don’t think the course is going to do it for you.’

  In the course of the next half-hour I was stripped bare by Mr Bowman’s questions. Whatever it is that people do to put others at their ease, Mr Bowman was doing the opposite.

  At last, my cheeks sore from the rictus grin I had kept on my face, a look which must have convinced Mr Bowman that I was even more stupid than my sycophantic conversation had already led him to believe, Diana said in a bright voice, ‘Well, Daddy, this is such fun, but I think we need to go. Miles is taking me out to dinner.’

  As we left Mr Bowman gave me another of his withering looks.

  ‘Goodnight, Mr Morgan. May I suggest you do not delay starting your course any further? There are many excellent, excellent and hard-working young men, not much older than you, who are already qualified as barristers. You will be hard put to catch up with them. Goodnight, Mr Morgan.’

  Never have I been happier to leave a room.

  As we walked to my car, Diana slipped her arm through mine. ‘There, that wasn’t so bad, was it? I know Daddy can be a bit of a bear, but I’m sure he really liked you.’

  I was speechless.

  We went to the Bistro Vino in South Kensington, where one of the waiters was a friend from Oxford and I knew I could get an affordable dinner. I was hoping that the rough wine and the smoky atmosphere would take us back to Greece, but it didn’t. Conversation was cordial but the magic was not there. Diana had broken off her engagement with the brilliant young barrister when she came back from Greece – this I knew from a letter I had received in Corfu – but I suspected she had been under heavy attack from Mr Bowman.

  We avoided discussing the future apart from my assuring her that I would soon be starting law classes.

  ‘I thought you’d decided against that,’ she said in a quiet voice.

  ‘Well, I had, but maybe it would be a good thing to do after all. Your dad may be right.’

  I dropped her home at eleven. God knows what Mr Bowman would have done if I had kept her out later than that. We agreed to go to the cinema the next night and to have dinner afterwards. I was hoping that once we became used to each other’s company again the old flame would ignite. The next night we met at the cinema. Later we walked to a little Italian restaurant. Diana was quiet. She looked tense.

  ‘Oh, Miles. It was terrible last night.’

  ‘Darling, what? Tell me.’

  ‘Daddy. He was waiting for me when I got home.’

  ‘Well, what did he say?’

  ‘Oh, Miles. He said I was making an imperial idiot of myself. Those were his exact words. An imperial idiot.’

  ‘Oh. I see.’

  ‘No, I don’t expect you do. What did I think I was doing throwing myself away on this feckless fool who didn’t even have a job or the prospect of one and breaking my engagement with Martin, one of the most promising young legal brains of his generation? Feckless fool, I’m afraid that was what he said.’

  ‘Gosh. Wow. Well I mean your dad doesn’t even know me. That’s a bit hard. I mean I am going to get a job.’

  ‘I know, darling, but you can see his point.’

  I could.

  We saw each other another two times, but they were uncomfortable meetings. Diana was unhappy and defensive. Her father was a big figure in her life, and although she did not pass on any more of his comments we both knew that the romance of the summer that had meant so much to both of us was sadly no more than that, a romance of the summer. After that we did not meet again, but I would often think of her and her butterfly grace and her demure smile and sipping coffee on the roof in Tolon as the sun rose over Aphrodite’s Breasts.

  Then there was the job. At one time I had been toying with the idea of becoming a journalist and had indeed spent the whole of the 1964 summer vacation from Oxford working as one. At that time the most powerful and professional newspaper empire was the Express Group controlled by Lord Beaverbrook, a right-wing Canadian who had been close to Winston Churchill and saw himself as the king-maker in British politics.

  I managed to get a job working for three months on the newsdesk of the Sunday Express, a paper completely unlike the sad relic it has become today. In 1964 it had a circulation of five million and was twelve years into the thirty-two-year editorship of the legendary and irascible John Junor, a man who suffered fools not at all and a newspaper genius with an eye for spotting talent. I was bewitched by Fleet Street. Beaverbrook loved to hire left-wing journalists at high salaries and nudge them into writing for his right-wing newspapers. A political columnist on the Sunday Express was the brilliant Alan Watkins, a lifetime left-winger and a particularly acute observer of the absurdities and hypocrisies of British politics. Alan used to take me along to El Vino’s, a Fleet Street drinking den where women were not allowed to stand at the bar and political journalists met to tell each other stories. I hovered at Alan’s elbow, intoxicated by the excitement of listening to the great men whose columns I had been reading for years.

  I was tutored by Brian Vine in submitting my expenses. Brian went on to become managing editor of the Daily Mail, although his most famous period was as New York correspondent for the Daily Express, a job from which he is reputed to have been recalled when the management in London heard that he was keeping a string of racehorses on his expense account. Brian saw me submitting a claim for the reimbursement of some Tube and bus expenses.

  ‘Dear boy, at the Express we never submit Tube and bus expenses,’ Brian told me, scanning my form through his monocle.

  ‘Oh, sorry, but I don’t want to be out of pocket. I’m pretty broke.’ I was trying to live on the fifteen pounds a week that the Express was paying me, of which I had eleven pounds and ten shillings left after they deducted tax.

  ‘Out of pocket? We are never out of pocket. You’re on a national newspaper now. Give a taxi driver a couple of bob and ask him for some blank receipts. Then you can fill them in yourself. Dear boy, you can get around on a bicycle for all I care but on the Express we always charge for a taxi. Unless you want to charge for a limousine.’

  The deputy news editor was Dudley Smith. When he was not doing that he was Member of Parliament for Brentford and Chiswick. An election was due in October 1964 so Dudley took leave of absence from the paper to campaign. I was asked to sit in his seat while he was away and cover as many of his duties as I could. The most frightening of these was to read all the newspapers – there were nine dailies at that time – by 9 a.m. every morning and to cut out the best version of each story and present these in a folder to John Junor, the editor, by 10 a.m.

  Everyone lived in terror of Junor but he was always charming to me. My innocence about the ways of Fleet Street may have appeased him. I would tiptoe into his huge corner office on the third floor of the black-glass Express building and put the daily folder in front of him. He would usually be on the phone. As I tried to escape he would wave a hand and motion me to sit down. Then, when he had finished his conversation, he would look at me over his glasses and say, ‘Och, well, laddie, what’s happening today? What does the mighty Times think is important, eh?’

  One day Alan Watkins asked me into the office which he shared with another political reporter.

  ‘Now look, Miles, there’s an election coming up in six weeks’ time. All the other papers have pollsters doing work for them, Gallup, National Opinion Polls, people like that, so they can tell their readers who’s going to win. We’ve got nothing. So we’re going to do our own Sunday Express poll, and I’d like you to take care of it. I’d like you to get in touch with our stringers in the 250 most marginal constituencies, the ones which could p
ossibly change hands, and find out who’s going to win the election in that constituency and what the most important issues are.’

  I assumed this was a make-work project to keep me busy and give me something interesting to do before I went back to Oxford in early September. Nevertheless I had a form printed up, which I sent to the Sunday Express stringers in the relevant constituencies. Alan had given me a list of constituencies and I got the stringers’ details from the news editor’s secretary. In your judgement, I asked the local stringers, who will win the election in your constituency? And, I asked, what are the most important local issues? I named several, such as inflation, cost of living, immigration and housing.

  The forms were duly posted with a return envelope marked with my name. All national newspapers employ stringers, usually reporters for local newspapers who get a small retainer from the national in return for being available to send them a report if there is a local incident worthy of national coverage. They can go for years without being contacted. After ten days eighty of my two hundred and fifty forms had been returned. I set about calling the non-repliers.

  ‘Hello, is that the Western Telegraph?’