In My Wildest Dreams

by Leslie Thomas

  I was, however, still broke. Maureen and I had ambitions and we were quite brave. We bought a chalet-roofed house, and had a car and a mass of hire-purchase commitments. When I went to an insurance office in the City in connection with my mortgage, a dusty, middle-aged gentleman glanced at the papers and said: 'I see you are earning thirteen pounds a week. That's a lot of money for a young man, I don't earn that and I'm gone fifty.'

  It may, indeed, have been a lot to him but it was not enough. We gradually dropped more into debt. When the bank balance showed us to be fifty pounds in the red I thought the abyss had opened. I sold the car but that was only temporary relief. At the end of one week it looked as though we would have to sell something to pay for the groceries. From somewhere I had obtained a thick old book, the size, shape and colour of the Bible. It was called Haydn's Dictionary of Dates and it was dated 1911. Thinking it might be worth enough money to pay the next week's bills, I tramped with this tome down Charing Cross Road, going into numerous second-hand bookshops and asking an optimistic fiver. The best offer I had was thirty shillings. So, dejectedly, I took it home again.

  On the underground, on my homeward journey, I picked up a copy of the Evening Mews which someone had left behind on the seat. Contained in it was the first of a new series of articles called 'The World's Strangest Stories'. It was not a very original idea, each article retelling some fairly familiar mystery or oddity. The first article was about Borley Rectory and its ghosts. As I read it I thought: I could have written this. The series was meant to continue for a week but it proved so popular that it was extended for a month, then for three months, and eventually ran for two years or more. It also saved my financial life.

  When I reached home, Maureen's face fell when she saw I had not sold the book. But to us it was to prove a treasure chest. Each page was crammed with one-paragraph references to all manner of notable occurrences throughout the world – storms, earthquakes, explosions, assassinations, frauds, discoveries, sieges, wars, freaks and frauds. Picking out some obscure item about a revolution in Rio de Janeiro I went to the Guildhall Library, looked up the aged files of The Times, then to the Newspaper Library at Hendon for more information and finally into the British Museum for books on the history of Brazil. Then I sat down and wrote the piece and posted it off. It was published the following week and they sent me a cheque for twenty guineas. After that I wrote one of the 'World's Strangest Stories' every two weeks. It was financial salvation and another turning point.

  There came a time, after I had written a number of these articles, when the Evening News announced a prize of a thousand pounds in a competition for the best 'World's Strangest Story'. There were to be ten other prizes. Something in the back of my memory kept nagging me about an oddity which I had heard connected with an early colony at Roanoke Island, Virginia, which had vanished without trace and about some clues written on stones and found two centuries later. My intention was to go to the Newspaper Library to dig out any references I could find. The deadline for the competition was nearing. A Saturday arrived when I could have gone to the Library. I also wanted to play football.

  Football won and I arrived at the clubhouse of the team for which I played at Ruislip, Middlesex, at just after two in the afternoon. The captain of the club was a young man called Tony Williamson who became a director of Queen's Park Rangers Football Club. I turned up two or three minutes late and began to change. Tony came over and said: 'I'm sorry, but you're not playing. You're late. We've put somebody else in the team.'

  Heartily disgruntled I walked out and, now having the afternoon free, went to Hendon to the Newspaper Library. I spent two hours going through the files and when I got home that evening I wrote my entry for the competition. It came fourth. I won a hundred pounds, went to the presentation lunch at the Savoy (where I met my first real author, H.E. Bates) and, eventually, my heart's desire – a job as a reporter on the London Evening News.

  XVII

  There was still something left of Philip Gibbs's Street of Adventure in the offices of the Evening News. There were small untidy rooms where specialist writers sat in front of glowing coal fires, there was a spiral iron staircase from the features department down to the compositors on the floor below. Reginald Willis, the editor, would sometimes return from lunch, red in the face, and looking for somebody's blood. He had a trumpeting voice which forewarned of his mood and as he approached there would be a comedy rush for the escape stairs, a clattering of sub-editors, reporters, writers and heads of departments, down the iron curl, a sound reminiscent of the escaping feet in The Goon Show.

  Willis was an extraordinary man. He invariably wore a blue pin-striped suit and his black hair was brushed fiercely back from his often scarlet brow. He had a lyrical rural accent, part Yorkshire, part Somerset, and when he appeared on the editorial floor there was usually some action in the offing, especially if he had discarded his coat and was twanging his red braces. He believed fervently that we were producing a newspaper for London, not for Fleet Street, and his belief was borne out at that time by sales approaching a million and a half, unequalled by any evening newspaper in history. 'The London story is the important story!' was his clarion cry. The doings of the world were minor compared to Glapham or Hampstead Heath. One day there was a report of a house on fire in the Finchley region. 'Good! Good!' he exclaimed. 'Big readership area! Is it burning well? Any casualties? Any rescues? Which road is it in?' He was told. 'Good address! Live there myself.' He did too. The burning house was his.

  When I went to see him for my first, job-hoping, interview he produced a cricket bat. 'Leonard Hutton used that to make his 365 at the Oval in 1938,' he said sonorously. 'World record that was.' He fondled the bat. Everyone who went into that office was shown that bat, especially if they were seeking a pay rise, or were bent on making a complaint. By the time the discussion on Hutton's world record had been accomplished, plus other cricketing matters, the visitor had frequently forgotten the details of his carefully rehearsed plea.

  At my interview Willis said: 'Why do you want to be on the staff of the Evening News?'

  'I've never wanted to do anything else,' I asserted truthfully.

  'That's a good enough reason,' he approved. 'I'll pay you twenty a week.' He studied me challengingly. It was not as much as I had hoped. 'Pounds,' he added. 'Not guineas.' There was another interval while I nodded agreement. He patted me cheerfully. 'At least it's not shillings,' he said.

  Thus I found myself entering on the following Monday morning at nine o'clock what had for so long been my dream world. The news desk of a famous paper. Reporters were ranged down each side of a long table under the scrutiny of the news editor, Sam Jackett, a legendary crime reporter who wore suits like a rich detective. He was a tall, silver-haired man, of impressive carriage, who said things like: 'Walk down any London street and you will pass at least two unconvicted murderers.' From the outset he did not like me, and when the news editor does not like you only the difficult and unrewarding jobs come your way; and frequently the hardest-to-get stories are the ones that appear smallest on the page. Eager as I was to range at least London, if not the world, finding and writing sensations, he resolutely kept me shackled to the desk making enquiries on the telephone. Many of the other reporters also nursed this complaint. We thought it was the sign of an uncertain chief, needing to have his forces close at hand. There was a joke that some weeks previously a reporter had actually been sent to Trafalgar Square and had not been sure of where it was.

  On the other hand, on that initial morning, my opening story for the paper came because I was sitting with the telephone in front of me. A London bus had swerved in the City and crashed into a small shop. I was told to telephone the shop and find out what had happened. The phone rang two or three times and then was picked up by a man who said, yes, he was the manager. Had the bus caused much damage? Yes, it had demolished the whole shop. In fact the bonnet of the driver's cab was at that moment wedged into the shop. No, there were no serious ca
sualties, as far as he knew, although it was difficult for him to say because he, at that moment, was trapped under the bus. The telephone had rung right in front of his nose so he thought he might as well pick it up since he had nothing better to do. The counter had collapsed on top of him and the bus was wedged over that. He thought he might have broken a leg, but he was not sure. They had told him they would have him out in half an hour.

  To interview a man trapped under a bus might seem to be a good start, but Sam Jackett's regard for me did not flourish. I think that his resentment stemmed from the fact that my appointment had not been made by him, as was usual. He also considered, rightly, that I was not an experienced reporter.

  After two or three weeks of investigating trivia by telephone and raising his ire by suggesting that perhaps a bus ride to the scene of the story might not be unrewarding, he called me to his desk. 'I don't think you've settled down very well,' he said darkly. 'The editor says I can get rid of you if I like. On the other hand I can send you down to Scotland Yard. Start down there on Monday.'

  Scotland Yard, or more accurately the Yard Press Bureau, might sound to the outsider an exciting assignment but that would be far from the truth. It was a single malodorous room reached by a green door in the granite walls of the great turreted building on the Thames Embankment. On the Friday afternoon, before starting my vigil there on the Monday, I was sent down to acclimatise myself and to meet my fellow denizens from other newspapers, always providing that the pubs were closed.

  I pushed open the heavy green door and stepped into a room of great squalor. There was a large central table ragged with newspapers. On the floor were further sprawling newspapers, some yellowing with age. Along one side of the room was a rank of telephone boxes above which, lined like targets in a shooting gallery, were dozens of empty beer bottles. There was an armchair of the style and condition that tramps in cartoons are often depicted as occupying, and the analogy is not too far adrift. Once, when I was doing an article about down-and-outs living below Charing Cross railway arches, I took one into the conveniently situated Yard Press Bureau, just to get him out of the rain. He looked around, sniffed and then said: 'I'm not staying in this place,' before making for the green exit.

  On my initial visit, on that downcast Friday, I thought at first that the bureau was unoccupied but after detecting a groan, I investigated to find a tiny and hopelessly inebriated reporter, a man known as Tich, lying beneath some furniture in the corner. I thought the furniture had just been carelessly piled up like that but apparently it had fallen on him when he collapsed on his return from the saloon bar. After I had lifted some of the debris he opened tiny eyes set deep in his small mildewed face. He tugged a pork pie hat over his forehead and muttered: 'I'm going to tear this bloody place to shreds.'

  To have torn the gargantuan Scottish baronial granite building (or even anything less, at that moment) to shreds was fortunately beyond him. It was just as well, since the wanton destruction would have not only disrupted the operations of the Metropolitan Police but deprived a group of reporters of their daily club. It was these men's function, in the main, to merely sit in that room and wait for something to happen. When it did, a crime or a major disaster, the Press Bureau men were not, as a rule, required to do anything further than report it to their offices, whereupon the star reporters would fly out and get all the credit. These stars would sometimes come into the bureau, like upper-crust relatives and, after a brief nod in the direction of the inhabitants of the single room, would be led mysteriously and portentously to the inner sanctum where the Yard's press officers lived behind locked doors. If the bureau reporter was required to make an enquiry he would have to press a button, wait for the press official to appear and then conduct his conversation through a crack in the door. Sometimes the door was loudly unlocked and one of the men from our room would be permitted to enter. When this happened it was performed like a ritual, with much secrecy and glancing over shoulders for, although we were all crammed in the dingy room together, there was still a farrago of confidential information and private tips to be maintained. Someone would sidle into the inner room and, watched cagily by the others, emerge some minutes later perhaps looking smugly confident. I never had cause to be allowed into that inner room.

  The job, little more than that of a messenger boy, had given birth to a faded but attractive group of individuals. Most were past ambition and the position presented an opportunity for a decent living with little effort. Each morning one of the Yard press officers would appear from the inside door and tell us skeletal details of the various misdemeanours and misfortunes which had occurred throughout London in the hours of darkness. These were then transmitted to the newspaper offices from the line of scarred telephone boxes with their dusty coronet of beer bottles. After that there was nothing to do but read the papers and wait for something else to happen, whereupon the Yard man would emerge and tell us about it. Life in that room could be enclosed and cosy.

  It was unofficially organised, to the point of being mothered, by a small and decent man called Nelson Sullivan who worked for the Evening Standard. He collected money for tea, retirement presents and wreaths. His lifetime's moment of glory came one Saturday night when, working an extra shift for the Sunday Express, he kept a murderer talking on the telephone for half an hour while the police traced the call and moved in on the criminal.

  There was Cecil Catlin, a professor from the Star, a working-class evening newspaper which ran an annual ballroom-dancing championship about which he always talked with scorn. 'Everyone in the Star Dance Championship,' he would announce without prejudice, 'is a Jew. If you've got a foreskin they charge you corkage.'

  He referred to the assembly of men at the Press Bureau, especially during the post-lunch sleep-off when the pubs had emptied as 'these quidnuncs' and he frequently went off into poetic regrets for lost youth, love, lust and opportunity. His hobby was photography and one day, while drunk, he attended an auction of general goods intending to bid for a photographic enlarger. In his mazed state, however, he bid for the wrong lot and the following day half a ton of custard powder was delivered to his small house. It was summarily dumped in the garden. 'When it rains,' he said with a careful smugness, 'it ferments and it sends out yellow bubbles all over south London.'

  Another of the inmates was a tall man called Pinky who worked for the Press Association and looked quite like General de Gaulle. He remembered the time, before the war, when the Prince of Wales, later the abdicating King Edward the Eighth, attended the annual dinner of a regimental association in London and became inebriated. Pinky, entering the gentlemen's lavatory, found the heir to the throne lying flat on his back with the royal winkle still protruding from the royal trousers. 'I put it back with my fountain pen,' mentioned Pinky modestly. 'It was a gold fountain pen.'

  There was Stanley Gardiner, not the author of thrillers but the crime man of my old company Exchange Telegraph, seated with the eternal aplomb of Buddha at the end of the table, surveying the day's runners. The racing pages were digested before anything else, and there were startled shuttlings to and from a then illegal bookie's runner who used to position himself outside the neighbouring Cannon Row Police Station, either on the principle that the law would not notice what was happening right under its nose, or perhaps to collect the policemen's bets. Within the Yard Press Bureau there was also a serious poker school, although this was as illegal as anything uncovered in police raids on gaming dens in Soho. Pound notes were sometimes to be seen piled like lettuce on the table and the games went on until long after both reporters and policemen should have been home in their suburban beds. When Premium Bonds were first issued a club was started to which everyone in the Press Bureau contributed a pound a week. I was never aware of any distribution of prize money and neither did I ever get my investment money returned. When I enquired about this, having left the Yard by that time, I was told that I was several months in arrears with my payments.

  Life in that grimy room often
resembled a cheery sort of bunk-house fellowship. Routine was everything. The morning visit of the police official with his tidbits of information; a long perusal of the newspapers and the election of the day's horses before lunchtime opening; a couple of hours in the saloon bar (emblazoned in expense sheets as 'entertaining police contacts'), followed by a siesta before going home. Sometimes we would have visitors, the real crime reporters, who wandered in for a chat and some tea from Nelson Sullivan's huge teapot. One of these was a thin man with the smile of a gnome. His name was Arthur Tietgen and he was the crime correspondent of the Daily Mail. Once, at the Old Bailey, Arthur was attending the trial of a man accused of having sexual intercourse with an under-age girl. The accused was trembling in the dock while his counsel cross-examined the girl in the witness box.

  'In your evidence,' intoned the defending counsel, 'you mentioned a "French letter". Do you know what a "French letter" is?'

  The girl, not very bright, replied: 'Oh yes, sir. I know all right.' A glance went from the counsel towards the judge.

  'How old do you say you are, young lady?'

  'Sixteen in November, sir.'

  'So you're fifteen – and you know the function of a "French letter"? You are familiar with its use?'

  'I know what it's for, sir, yes.'

  'Hmmm . . . When did you last see a "French letter"?'

  'Yesterday, sir.'

  'Yesterday!' Further glances darted in the direction of the judge. 'In what circumstances did you see this "French letter"?'

  'What . . . what do you mean, sir?'

  'Where? Where did you see this "French letter" yesterday?'

  'At work, sir. I works in a "French letter" factory.' Most of the time at the Press bureau was less entertaining. I sought refuge from the boredom by arranging my day so that I spent periods sitting in the sun on the Thames Embankment, watching the boats go by, and also by writing my first novel. This was called My Name Is Mudd and was about a story-prone chap whose name was Mudd and who worked on a local newspaper.