In My Wildest Dreams

by Leslie Thomas

  I roused to see him standing speechless, gesturing about the shadowy room to his American friends. Humphrey grumbled as I pushed him off my chest. 'Hello . . . Thomas . . .' mumbled the editor. 'Er . . . what's happening in the world?'

  'Everything, sir,' I gasped, sizing up the situation. 'Absolutely everything.' Like a prophet I pointed to the ceiling, above which both he and I knew was the naked roof of the building. 'Don't go up to the main newsroom, sir. It's bedlam.'

  He blinked and then understood. Relief crumpled his annoyance. He hung gladly onto the subterfuge. 'Oh . . . oh . . . really, well no . . . perhaps we'd better not.'

  'Oh,' said the American lady, clutching her husband, 'we wouldn't want to get in the way, would we, honey?'

  'No, surely not,' he agreed.

  'They've sent me down for a rest, sir,' I reported to Mr Burn. 'We're taking it in turns to get some sleep. It's been quite a night.'

  As they left, the visitors turned their heads upwards as if they might catch some sound of the frantic night-work going on above. The editor gave me a half-and-half look and looked upwards also to where he and I knew only the London stars were shining. 'Better get your head down again, Thomas,' he nodded. 'Sorry we disturbed you. And . . . look after the cat.'

  On the following day, a Sunday, I was playing in a football match against our deadly rivals, in all spheres, Reuters, and I managed to score a crucial goal. On the Monday I was called into the editor's office and fully expected to emerge with my career, such as it was, in ruins. 'Having a rest, were you?' Philip Burn enquired mildly. 'Getting ready for the big match?'

  'Yes, sir, that was it,' I replied gratefully. 'I would not have been asleep otherwise, sir. Not me.'

  'No, I'm sure not.' His oblong tooth gleamed. 'If you ever fail in journalism, Thomas, you ought to have a shot at being something like an actor.'

  The enclosed and routine work of a news agency subeditor was some distance from the romantic Fleet Street about which I had dreamed. Bereft of the necessity for tailoring the stories to fit the page, having no call for presentation and where only the sketchiest of headlines was required, it was, in truth, merely a matter of dull processing. Sometimes I amused myself with the headlines and some of them appeared intact, with the stories when they eventually saw publication. Exchange Telegraph was, however, set in solid ways and I was censured for a headline which I appended to a report about a civil defence exercise which involved a simulated atom-bomb explosion on a Hampshire village. The words: 'Big Wallop Near Little Wallop' seemed both apt and reasonable to me, but others disapproved.

  Several times I went to see the editor to ask about a reporter's job but he always forestalled me; before I had uttered a sentence he would perform his mime, lifting one finger representing a reporter, and then one arm denoting a sub-editor.

  So I returned to cutting and paragraphing with occasional forays to a wooden telephone booth in one corner where it was a sub-editor's duty to sit and take down in shorthand interminable and often boring political and economic intelligence from overseas correspondents. We had on the desk a dear and gentlemanly old chap called Sidney, approaching retirement, who was stone deaf. He insisted, however, on taking his fair share of these overseas calls. One of the foreign correspondents was also deaf and to hear the pair of them trying to outshout each other over a continent was a treat that brought the entire newsroom to a standstill.

  On rare and happy occasions I managed to get involved in the writing and reporting side of a story. Sometimes I even found them for myself. One spring evening, taking a walk over the almost deserted London Bridge during my meal break, I observed that a ship had become firmly jammed under one of the arches. The vessel had somehow taken a wrong turning and the incoming tide had put it in this embarrassing position. As the tide rose so the wood splintered. The Spanish captain was on the bridge wringing his hands and sobbing orders. I poked my head over and asked him what had happened. He pleaded with me to go and get someone. It was difficult to know whether to call out the fire brigade or the lifeboat but I solved the crisis by stopping a wandering policeman and taking him to what he described as the rummest traffic accident as ever he had set eyes upon. After getting some emotional quotes from the captain I hurried back to the office and wrote the story which was joyfully reported and much photographed in the next morning's papers.

  Then, one dull night, we had a report of a gory double murder in a west London suburb. One of the victims was said to be 'Lady Menzies'. There were no reporters in the office so I looked up Lady Menzies in the telephone directory and dialled the number. I wondered what I should say. 'Please can you tell me if Lady Menzies has been murdered?' seemed unnecessarily brutal. 'I wonder if you can tell me how Lady Menzies is?' was obviously erring the other way.

  In the event when my call was answered I merely said: 'Could I please speak to Lady Menzies?' The voice at the other end replied briskly: 'Yes, speaking.'

  My hair went slightly on end. It was not easy trying to explain that according to my information she was lying in a pool of blood in Ealing. Calmly she helped me out. There had been other enquirers. No, she was not murdered. She was perfectly well, thank you. It turned out that the killer's victim had been passing herself off with the title.

  The majority of my spare-time reporting was less thrilling. Each early morning the agency would put out a series of minor items called 'overnights' which evening newspapers used as fillers in the first racing editions and which might occasionally find their way into feature pages or magazine sections. Each item was worth an extra ten shillings in my pay packet. I used to spend my lunch hours walking around the City of London, much of which was still scarred with wartime bombed sites, looking for stories. I found a family of wild cats living among the shut-off ruins and then realised that there were whole tribes of the fierce and skinny animals hunting the wide spaces in the centre of London. It was following these cats that finally led the police to discover the body of a murderer, a young man who had killed a housewife and, himself condemned by some disease, went to a bombed site to die. He was hunted for weeks until the cats, who had gruesomely eaten most of him, led the authorities to the place. It was directly opposite our office. While the police and the newspapers had been looking for him he had been there all the time.

  The fencing off of large areas of the city, which had been cleared of rubble but still remained void, resulted in colonies of wild flowers appearing, foxgloves, dog roses and honeysuckle, which had not been seen in those streets for years. I wrote one of my ten-shilling stories about that. Countryside birds appeared; there were rumours of foxes. Owls nested. I became an urban naturalist. Other stories I found by visiting City churches, by getting to know people at small museums and by simply walking by the Thames or through the streets and keeping my eyes open.

  One of these quiet enquiries resulted, in fact, in a story which went sensationally around the world. On the large blitzed area opposite the office – where the dead murderer had been found – some archaeologists had been exploring the ground below what had once been the cellars of London offices. I had wandered over to watch them but they had been reticent about their work and promised that if they actually found anything of interest they would let me know. There came a quiet Sunday afternoon when, looking out from the window of Exchange Telegraph, I saw children digging enthusiastically at the site – and carrying away pots and dishes. One boy of about twelve was trotting away with a stone arm!

  The archaeologist concerned was a Professor Grimes and I telephoned him and told him what was going on. At first he did not believe me, then he gurgled at the end of the phone and howled: 'For God's sake stop them! Get the police! Anybody! I am coming there right away . . . oh dear . . . oh dear . . .'

  The site turned out to be the Temple of Mithras, the most complete Roman shrine ever found in London. Within hours the whole area was roped off. Armies of archaeologists descended with their spades and even the contractors, who were about to lay the foundations of a new offi
ce block on the site, held up work until the entire temple and its contents could be removed. It is now displayed alongside that building. I often wondered whether the boy managed to keep his Roman arm.

  The forty pounds a month which the Exchange Telegraph Company calculated to be my worth (and they were probably accurate) enabled me to wed. My wife, Maureen, after eighteen months of marriage, produced a round and laughing baby daughter on the same day as I passed my driving test. The examiner congratulated me on both achievements – although I was careful not to tell him about my fatherhood until after the test in case he thought I was trying to influence him. Elated that I had passed, I replied extravagantly that had the baby been a boy I would have called it after him. He grimaced and confided that he had never told any of his colleagues his real Christian name, but he would reveal it to me. It was Halibut.

  We were broke, not an unusual affliction with young marrieds although we tended to take risks. We had a flat, soon to be followed by a house, a car, and nothing could deter us from holidays abroad.

  We rented an apartment in the Italian resort of San Remo and one evening I went to the butcher's shop to purchase some steak. In giving me the change for a thousand-lira note the dastardly tradesman carefully passed on an Albanian coin, a lek, worth in those days about sixpence. An hour later when I discovered the fraud I went furiously back to the shop. It was not the amount – it scarcely could have been – it was the deliberate execution of the trick. The butcher denied he had ever seen me, or my lek, and a tremendous row ensued during the course of which I called him a 'ladro' – a thief (my knowledge of Italian was small but Ali Baba and the Forty Lardroni was showing at the cinema). This was apparently the worst insult I could have thrown. Enraged, the large butcher (are there any small butchers?) came around his counter with a meat cleaver. Customers tried to restrain him but he broke away and chased me around the shop in the best Abbott and Costello tradition. Death or not, there was no chance of me leaving. I ran and I dodged. A fresh set of customers pinned the puce-faced avenger against the wall and shouted for me to run. At that moment I saw a uniformed figure on the pavement outside. I rushed out and pulled him in. There was a lot of shouting and the butcher was still struggling. I demanded to know why the policeman was not taking any action. He was just staring. 'Policeman?' he said spreading his hands. 'Signor – me postman!'

  As a practical father I was not very adept. Once I offered to rock the baby to sleep in front of the living room fire. I sang her a song from distant days, the only one my father ever knew to sing to me. He had, not surprisingly, made it up himself:

  Mummy's gone down the shops,

  To buy some bread and cheese . . .

  Possibly it was not the ideal lullaby and although baby remained obstinately awake I went off to sleep, finally tipping forward and depositing my surprised and offended daughter on the hearthrug. We took her to Cornwall in the winter and to East Anglia in the spring. Returning to London on the latter occasion I saw a signpost 'Borley' and on impulse I turned the car in that direction. Borley Rectory had been called the Most Haunted House in England.

  Books had been written about its ghosts – a sly nun, a coach and horses, an unexplained cold spot. There had been scientific investigations into its fierce poltergeist and Harry Price, the long-time secretary of the Society for Psychic Research, made it his life's work. Some even believed he had kept the story going. The house had been burned down in the late nineteen-thirties but the place still looked haunted.

  It was a fine, open, sunlit day when we reached Borley on the Essex-Suffolk border, but over the village there were chill and slinking shadows. We arrived at the Rectory, or what remained of it, just in time to see a bulldozer push a first load of earth into the cavities that had been its cellars. A man came over and obligingly muttered to me: 'Now perhaps we'll bury the damned ghost for ever.'

  Returning home I sat down and wrote an article called: 'Can They Bury the Borley Ghost?' which I took along to the offices of my favourite paper the News Chronicle on my way to work the next day. They published it on the Saturday and paid me ten guineas. It was the first time anything I had written had appeared in a national newspaper.

  Still fretting after being a full-time reporter, I continued to dispatch letters to editors informing them how lucky they were that I was available and they resiliently continued to ignore them. I had to be satisfied with occasional pieces I could write outside my normal duties (Exchange Telegraph did not seem to mind and the work appeared under my own name. Nor did they see fit to use my writing in their own operations). There was an article on cricket which Reveille, of all magazines, published, then came a piece about the Isles of Scilly, then little known, which was accepted to my great joy by the Evening Mews. Maureen and I had been to the islands on our honeymoon, returning in a bucking aeroplane (a de Haviland Rapide, the only aircraft ever to suffer woodworm in the airframe) loaded with fresh flowers from the Scilly Isles fields.

  The Evening News was my heart's desire. From my boy's days at Kingston I had always read it and I knew the names of its writers like a litany: E.M. Wellings on cricket, Leslie Ayre on Radio and Television, Bill Bourne on the theatre, Harold Abrahams – of Chariots of Fire fame – on athletics, and the Courts Day by Day by a mysterious and wry man called J.A.J. It was a large paper in every sense of the word, it spread generously, a wide-sheeted journal, not one of your miserly tabloids (although, before its demise, it became one). It was the biggest-selling evening newspaper in the world.

  Encouraged by the publication of the article about the Scilly Isles ('Eden Beyond Land's End') I submitted a succession of short stories, all of which were rejected. Then, one morning, I received a fifteen-guinea cheque with a slip which merely noted: 'Short Story'. No one had told me it had been accepted. The Evening News was famous for its short stories and I was in good company. It was published on a Saturday, it was called 'A Good Boy Griffith' and was adapted from a joke I had heard. It was also my first published piece of fiction.

  All of this, however, was getting me no nearer Fleet Street. Physically, there was a definite move in the right direction because Exchange Telegraph moved from its cobwebbed premises in Cannon Street to a new building at East Harding Street, just behind Gough Square, one of the Georgian alleys behind Fleet Street. Gough Square is famous for the house of Dr Samuel Johnson and there is an arrow on the wall saying: 'To Dr Johnson's House'. Early one morning, emerging from the office after an all-night shift, I found a poor man lying on the pavement having had some sort of seizure. I opened his shirt collar and looked anxiously around for aid. A dawn charlady was coming up the street. 'Ooooh, dear me,' she said, looking down at the man's ashen face. "Eee don't 'arf look poorly.'

  After concurring with the diagnosis I asked her to get a doctor. To my amazement, instead of going into the building to telephone she trotted off down the pavement. At that moment a policeman arrived and took over. I peered through the alley where the charlady had gone and saw her knocking briskly at the door of Dr Johnson's house. After a while she came back disconsolate. 'There's nobody in,' she grumbled. 'Either that or he's still in bed asleep.'

  My only lasting claim to fame at the Exchange Telegraph Company was the result of my final year there. The regional television and radio news and magazine programmes which are transmitted throughout the country today, including Nationwide and Tonight, had their infant roots at a desk in the agency building and I was the man behind the desk.

  It had become obvious that Exchange Telegraph could not compete on a foreign news basis with Reuters and was frequently a poor second in the home news area to the powerful Press Association. First one service and eventually the other were abandoned and Extel – as it is now called – reconstituted itself on the foundation of its always successful racing and financial services. Before the fall there was an attempt to bring new life into the old machine. The BBC was to establish a local news programme to follow its six o'clock bulletin. It was to be called Town and Around and we wer
e invited to provide news items for it.

  It was not quite as simple as that, for the Press Association was also bidding for the contract and there was to be a six months' trial run on the part of both services. I had been on one of my periodic missions to the editor, asking for a reporter's job. This time Philip Burn did not raise the single finger followed by the whole arm, but announced: 'I've got something that is new, revolutionary, and I want you to handle it. It could change the fortunes of this company, Thomas. A lot depends on it.' He looked at me strongly, his tooth serious. 'We'll give you an extra pound a week,' he said.

  Not only did I get the pound, I got a desk, a telephone, a typewriter, eventually an assistant, and a shared secretary. On the first day we operated the service there were one hundred and fifty news items on the tape, none of which were used because it was only a dummy run. The dummy run lasted for weeks. Sometimes if I wanted to go secretly to a mid-week afternoon football match I would leave a pile of news items to be fed into the teleprinter at timed intervals, go to the match, and get back in time to go home. No one looking at the tape would ever have known I was away.

  At the end of the trial period the BBC gave us the contract and the board of Exchange Telegraph were so exhilarated that I discovered a further pound in my pay packet. The real rewards, however, were less tangible then. Mollie Lee, who was the editor of Woman's Hour, was looking for someone to speak for three minutes about reading newspapers and Maurice Ennals, who produced Town and Around at the Broadcasting House end, suggested that I might like to try my hand at broadcasting. A long interval had elapsed since my singing debut on Radio Malaya but now I managed to record my own script, receiving two pounds for it. It was also the beginning of a new facet in my life which, at a tangent, was to have great importance later for it was Mollie Lee who had the idea which changed my whole existence.