Cobra in the Bath: Adventures in Less Travelled Lands

by Miles Morland

  ‘Yes, Western Telegraph here.’

  ‘May I speak to Rhys Davies please?’

  ‘Ah, now, we’ve got two of those. There’s one in the print shop and there’s young Rhys who runs messages. It won’t be him you’re after.’

  ‘Er, no. Thank you. Sunday Express here. I’m looking for a Mr Rhys Davies on the newsdesk.’

  ‘Oh, poor boy, no. That’s terrible. He was a lovely boy. Liked a party.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Oh, you didn’t know then? Poor lad. We lost him six months ago. Had a heart attack and hardly fifty. But he did like his drink. Terrible business.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. Could you put me through to the newsdesk in any case?’

  I would then speak to whoever picked up the phone. It may have been the star reporter or the messenger boy. I had a 170 calls to make and this was no time to examine people’s credentials. I’d explain who I was and how I had been hoping to speak to Rhys but could they help me instead? Usually they were only too delighted to give me a detailed rundown of exactly what they thought would happen, and I would fill in the form accordingly. In some cases the newspaper where the stringer was meant to work had ceased to exist so there was no one to speak to.

  I had a week left to finish my poll and seventy forms were still uncompleted. I did not want to get caught doing them myself in the office so I took the forms home to my five-pound-a-week bedsit in Earl’s Court and filled half of them in sitting on my bed and half at the Troubadour coffee bar in the Old Brompton Road. I had no idea who was going to win in Carmarthen West or Maldon, but as this was just a make-work project, I could not see that it mattered.

  The Sunday Express was closed on Mondays so the following Tuesday I handed my sheaf of forms over to Alan. He gave them a brief look and me a quick ‘Thanks, Miles’ and stacked them on a table by his desk. I imagined it would be a short journey from there to the waste-paper basket.

  I left the paper two days later to return to Oxford before term started. That Sunday I bought the Sunday Express curious to see if Alan had mentioned my ‘poll’ in the ‘Crossbencher’ column that he had made famous. I turned first to that without checking the rest of the paper. No mention. Ah well. So it did go in the waste-paper basket. I then had a quick look at the front page and did a double-take. There, topping the lead story, in letters an inch high, was the headline TORIES TO WIN BY 26. It began, ‘The Sunday Express team of political analysts has been conducting an in-depth survey into voting trends throughout the country. Every marginal constituency has been assessed . . .’

  The poll created something of a sensation and was widely reported on the television news and comment programmes. Most of the other polls were pointing to a hung Parliament or a Labour victory. No one but the Sunday Express saw the Tories winning by that kind of margin. There was particular surprise at some of the analysts’ findings. Who had suspected that immigration was an issue in North Norfolk and that defence was on the minds of the good folk of Berwick? These of course were forms I had filled in at random at one in the morning in the Troubadour.

  A month later Harold Wilson and Labour won the election with a majority of five.

  I had loved my time on Fleet Street. It was a wonderful place to work. The people were witty, original and seldom took themselves or anything else too seriously. Every journalist knew extraordinary stories that never found their way into the papers, and being privy to those was exciting. But journalism was a cynical profession. Time after time the Express would print stories that were not strictly untrue but presented in such a way that they gave a false impression and usually ruined someone’s life in the process. Despite that when I got back from Greece I contacted various newspapers and asked if they had a job on their City pages, thinking these were likely to be less cynical than the general news pages.

  I had met Kenneth Fleet in El Vino’s in 1964. He was one of the great Fleet Street City editors of the era and did much to move British financial journalism away from sycophantic puff stories towards investigative reporting. He was starting a new column on the Telegraph called ‘Questor’. This was modelled on the ‘Lex’ column in the Financial Times, which reviewed four or five company stories every day and delighted in puncturing corporate reputations. Fleet remembered me and asked me to come in to see him. Despite the fact that my ignorance of matters financial was total, he offered me a job on the new column. I said I would think about it and get back to him; I was very honoured to be given such an opportunity.

  I had also thought about a career in television. Two years earlier I had captained the Lincoln team on University Challenge. While at Granada, which made the show, I got to know the man who was producing University Challenge, and he took a liking to me, introducing me to the woman who ran the Scripts Department at Granada. Despite its mundane name this was responsible for programme development and thus critical to the company’s future. She and I hit it off instantly. She was very bright and very funny, and offered me a job at Granada. This was tempting. In those days television was glamorous. Again I said I would think about it.

  The job on the Telegraph paid £850 a year and the job with Granada £925. I thought I ought to look around and see if I could find something that paid a little more as I did not want to rely on handouts from Tom and Ma and I would find it hard to get by on less than £1,000, so in December I made the trip to Oxford to see the Oxford University Appointments Board. ‘Mr Morland, most of our jobs went six months ago to people who graduated in June, as you did. What is it you say you have been doing since then?’

  ‘Foreign research. I have been abroad researching a book project but I have decided to put that to one side and concentrate on getting a job.’

  The adviser pulled out various files and went through them shaking his head. ‘That’s been filled. No, one of ours took that. They’re no longer looking.’ After fifteen minutes he had three suggestions. There was still an opening at Unilever as a graduate trainee, probably in Nigeria; there was a job in insurance as an average adjuster; and there was a firm called John Govett, which managed investment trusts in the City, which needed an investment analyst.

  Nigeria, which had just got its independence and was busy getting rid of the British, did not appeal. Insurance sounded boring, and I had no idea what an average adjuster was, so that left John Govett. They sounded boring too, and I did not know what an investment analyst was either, but on the file was a letter from someone I knew, Duncan Fitzwilliams, who a year earlier had joined Foreign and Colonial, John Govett’s neighbours in London Wall and a similar firm, saying how much he enjoyed his work and recommending the job at John Govett.

  I went to see them. It was a small firm employing about fifteen people. The interview process was not an arduous one; the firm had five partners of whom I saw three. I stressed the fact that I knew nothing about the financial world and had no idea what the difference between a stock and a bond was.

  ‘Don’t worry, Morland; you’ll be amazed how quickly you’ll pick it up,’ I was told by Derek Baer, one of the partners. ‘None of us knew anything either when we started. Now, I see on your curriculum vitae that you rowed in the Boat Race. What was that like?’

  It was clearly my rowing blue rather than my potential financial acumen that intrigued them. They offered me the job at £1,100 a year and I took it.

  17

  Gassed in Washington, Married in London

  I have always wished I had had a proper training in the financial world instead of being left to pick it up on the job at John Govett. Despite a lifetime of dealing with investments, I still find myself bluffing my way around a balance sheet. I soon went from John Govett to Schroders, then one of the great London merchant banks, where I was assigned to the American desk, responsible for managing their US investments, which I found far more interesting than the parochial world of British investing. Schroders assumed I had had some training at John Govett, so the bluffing continued.

  The American investment world was huge and fasci
nating. It had brilliant companies like Kodak, Xerox, IBM and Polaroid, far more exciting than the dinosaurs of British industry. I changed jobs again and joined the London office of one of the oldest of the big New York investment banks, Kuhn, Loeb.* They sent me to New York for six months’ acclimatisation at their head office.

  In 1970 the USA was in turmoil. Thousands of young people were being drafted every month to fight in the Vietnam War. Demonstrations against the war were brutally suppressed by the police, while the draft, which became increasingly difficult to evade, meant that few families in the US did not have a member involved in the war. Despite or maybe because of the turmoil, New York was an exciting place to be. This was the era of flower power and love-ins. One weekend in May 1970 I caught a train to Washington from New York with a group of young friends from KL to join a demonstration against Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, a country on whose seven million people the US dropped 2.7 million tons of bombs compared with the 2.0 million tons dropped by the Allies in all of World War II. A million of us massed in front of the White House, sang songs, some of which I knew from the Aldermaston marches, and listened to speeches from ‘Hanoi Jane’ Fonda and Dr Benjamin Spock, the baby doctor. Then we sat down at a major crossroads and stopped the traffic. The police, instead of beating us up, as we had been expecting, treated us with humour and tolerance as they dragged us off.

  Bored with stopping the traffic, we decided to storm the White House. All around it yellow school buses had been parked nose to tail to form a barrier. Platoons of National Guardsmen were on the lawn of the White House chatting and eating sandwiches. With cries of ‘No more war, no more war’ we ran at the empty buses and began climbing up and over them. On the lawn the National Guardsmen put on their gas masks and prepared to fire CS gas canisters. Pfooff, pfooff, pfooff – soon the air was dense with tear gas. I had never been gassed before and never since.

  Tear gas is astonishingly effective. Your eyes tear up immediately (hence the name) and you are forced to shut them; you cough uncontrollably; your nose blocks and your skin stings. We clambered blindly off the buses and ran as far away as we could. People with water were wetting handkerchiefs and holding them over their faces. Some people were peeing on handkerchiefs and using them. I just ran.

  That evening thousands of us streamed back to Union Station to catch trains back to New York. I had somehow been reunited with my gang despite the fact we had been scattered by the gas. It had been a very hot day for May with shade temperatures into the nineties and we were looking forward to the air-conditioned coolness of the trains. When we were allowed to board a train we found that the temperature inside was so hot it was close to unbearable. A conductor came by and we asked him what was wrong with the air conditioning.

  ‘Son,’ he said, ‘Penn Central don’t like passengers, and they particularly don’t like you kids, and they sure as hell don’t like their trains being used for your demonstrations. This train has been sat out in the heat all day. I’m told they put the heating on and the driver has instructions not to use the air conditioning. I’m sorry, but there ain’t nothing I can do.’

  The conductor was in a thick blue serge suit and close to melting. There must have been over a hundred people in our carriage, none of us over thirty, and unlike the conductor we had no need to keep our clothes on. We stripped down to our underwear, opened six-packs of beer, sang anti-war songs and danced our sweaty and near-naked way to New York. A month later, on 21 June, in the biggest collapse in corporate history, Penn Central filed for bankruptcy.

  One afternoon I was sitting in the research department of Kuhn, Loeb flicking idly through telexes from the London office when someone shouted that I had a call. I picked up the nearest phone.

  ‘Hello,’ said a bright American female voice. ‘It’s been difficult tracking you down. No one knows who you are. Is this Miles?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hello again, I’m Debby. We haven’t met, but my friend Stephan tells me that you’re a nice guy and you’ve just arrived in New York and you don’t know anyone. He said I should invite you to dinner. How does Thursday look?’

  My Thursday was as empty as my Wednesday and my Friday, and so three days later I found myself ringing the bell of a handsome brownstone in the East 70s. Debby was a bewitching woman, the daughter of a Wall Street banking titan. She was married to a successful English investment banker famous for his easy-going charm. However, they had been together for several years and for Debby the charm was wearing thin. She was having an affair with Stephan, who worked at Kuhn, Loeb. Stephan was an elegant aristocratic German who did a bit of investment banking in the morning and spent the afternoon making love to the wives of Wall Street bankers while their husbands were doing deals.

  One afternoon Stephan had said to Debby, ‘Oh, by the way, there is this nice young English boy who has come to work at KL. It’s a bit sad but he knows nobody in New York. You should ask him to dinner.’ And so she did. When Debby called I had asked if Stephan was going to be there. ‘No, sweetie,’ she said. ‘He’s not exactly welcome in the house with my husband.’

  There were sixteen people there. As we had drinks I was overawed by my fellow guests’ sheer glossiness and elegance. Then I noticed a woman with long brown hair who was standing on the edge of a group not saying anything. I made my way over to her and introduced myself. ‘Yes, Debby told me about you. You’re the brilliant English investment banker who’s just joined Kuhn, Loeb.’ Tony Thorne, my boss-to-be in London, would have been surprised to hear his new junior equity salesman described that way. She was called Guislaine. I was delighted to find I was sitting next to her at dinner.

  We chatted away happily, and I asked Guislaine where her exotic name came from. She told me she had a French father, Guy, and that the ‘s’ in Guislaine was silent. Her mother, she said, was Irish-Australian, a writer and singer and artist and, as I discovered later, an enchanter of men. Things took a backward step when I learned that Guislaine was married to someone called Bobby, the black sheep of a rich Long Island family, but improved when I learned that he was twice her age and she was his fourth wife. They had been separated for over two years.

  I asked her to dinner the next night. She accepted. I wanted to appear cool and not too Wall-Streety so I booked a table at Elaine’s in the East 80s, then just starting to gain a reputation as a literary haunt where you might meet Woody Allen rather than go to for the food. I picked her up in a taxi. I announced myself to the person at the desk and said, ‘Morland, for two.’ ‘Sir, no, we’ve got you at a table for eight.’ Just as I was about to remonstrate Guislaine chipped in: ‘Oh, sorry. I meant to tell you. I asked a few other people along as well. Hope you don’t mind.’ I did mind. I had been looking forward to an intimate diner à deux and suddenly I was going to be sharing Guislaine with six other people. ‘Thought it might be more fun for you,’ she said.

  We were at a large round table and I was not even sitting next to her but two away. Between us was Stephan with a tall blonde model, while the rest of the table were friends of Guislaine. Everyone was polite to me and asked questions about what I was doing and where I came from, but all I wanted to do was to talk quietly to Guislaine.

  Finally, as coffee was being served, I leaned forward and waved at Guislaine through the cigarette smoke and the Valpolicella bottles.

  ‘Yes?’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Will you marry me?’

  ‘What?’

  Stephan raised an elegant eyebrow and intervened: ‘No, Miles, no. Please. Not here. This is not cool.’

  ‘Will you marry me?’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I’m still married to someone else.’

  Before I could take in what was happening there was a pushing-back of chairs and a paying of bills and a putting-on of coats. Two minutes later there was a slamming of cab doors and I found myself alone on Upper Second Avenue.

  The next day Stephan took me out for a drink after work. We sat in Delmonico’s on Wall Street drinking his f
avourite bourbon, Wild Turkey, on the rocks with a twist of orange peel.

  I asked him what I should do about Guislaine.

  ‘Ah, Miles, you English boys. Always in such a rush. Don’t crowd them. The girls don’t like it. Let them come to you. There are lots of women in New York; you have the summer ahead of you. Take it easy. Guislaine is a lovely woman but don’t hurry.’

  He ordered another Wild Turkey.

  ‘And, Miles . . .’ He leaned forward.

  ‘Yes.’ I leaned forward too. I was about to learn Stephan’s secret.

  ‘No more of this silly marriage talk.’

  I persisted with Guislaine though not with the marriage talk. We spent weekends with friends in Southampton; we saw each other almost every night. I was due to go back to London in August, so I sent a telex to Tony Thorne, explaining that I had fallen in love and asking if I could stay in New York a bit longer. Of course, telexed Tony. A happy employee was a good employee. Would another two months be enough?

  I had never felt this way about a woman before. With Diana I had never been certain; with Guislaine I was. But then things began to go wrong between us. It was no one’s fault but soon we could not be together without twisting knives in wounds. We stopped seeing each other, and in November I returned to London. I heard from Stephan, who would visit the London office from time to time when he was ‘working on deals’, that Guislaine had a new boyfriend and that he had moved in with her. I wrote Guislaine a couple of chatty letters and received brief but friendly replies. The following June I was going to New York for a week to visit head office, so I called Guislaine a week before I left.

  ‘Hello, Guislaine? It’s Miles.’

  ‘Oh, Miles, hello. What a surprise. How are you?’

  ‘Just great. Look, I’m going to be in New York next week. I’ve heard from Stephan that you have a boyfriend and I hope that’s all good, but it would be lovely to see you. How about lunch?’

  ‘Yes. Why not? That would be nice.’