A Life in the Day

by Hunter Davies

  I did once interview the inventor of the Mini, Alec Issigonis. He came from a Greek background but was a British citizen, educated at Battersea Poly, where he failed his maths exams three times, but managed to get a job as a motor engineer. What I remember about him was his pockmarked face. I wondered if he had had terrible spots as a teenager, as I had.

  His Mini was a little miracle. The wheels were only ten inches high which made them look like toys. It had front-wheel drive and loads of other amazing innovations I did not understand, never having any real interest in cars. I suppose the most surprising thing was the enormous amount of space. You could not believe, looking from the outside, it was so spacious inside. Everything was pared to the bone, such as having a sort of pull wire instead of a door handle, which usually broke after too many tugs. You slid the windows open by hand.

  I had one of the early models, so I discovered from the garage, which explained why it was hard to start on damp mornings, an initial teething problem not yet solved. I had to open the bonnet and dry everything in sight, then try to start it again.

  But the Mini went on to become the most popular British car of all time, selling over 5 million. It’s still highly prized and popular today in its modern equivalent. When I eventually started going abroad in the middle and late sixties, on hols or jobs, I always felt quite proud when seeing a Mini in the street, pleased that it had become so popular and fashionable, just as much as it had proved a huge success at home. It was probably a residue feeling from the fifties, when we felt a bit inferior to the Europeans, such as the French and the Italians, who seemed so much better and more artistic on design and fashion when it came to cars and clothes.

  My Mini cost me £500, dirt cheap now, but seemed quite a lot at the time, a third of my year’s salary. I got a car loan, interest free, through the Sunday Times, who were very generous at the time with helping staff. The colour of my Mini was blue. Or was it green? Or it could have been grey? The first time I happened to refer to its colour we had the most awful argument. Margaret shouted at me for being so stupid, so unobservant. Which happened quite a lot. Oh, the usual stuff: forgetting things when I did the shopping, asking the same thing three times, unable to remember birthdays and telephone numbers.

  ‘Remind me again . . .’ I would say.

  ‘Certainly not,’ she would reply. ‘I have told you umpteen times. Just think.’

  ‘Oh, come on, tell me, I’m in a hurry, I’ll be your best friend . . .’

  Not knowing the colour of my own car, which did seem rather dopey, turned out not to be my fault. It was after then that I discovered I was colour blind.

  We were getting on by then extremely well with Mr Elton, our landlord in the Vale of Health. He approved of our puritan lifestyle, our regular hours, no singing, dancing, noisy guests, no playing loud music or getting drunk.

  There was though one unfortunate domestic incident. Margaret foolishly agreed that a friend from Oxford could come and stay with us for a few days – who then asked if she could bring her boyfriend. I agreed as well. I had taken so much hospitality myself over the years, sleeping on people’s sofas and floors when I first came to London, and when visiting Margaret at Oxford. It seemed only fair now that we were in the fortunate position of having our own lovely flat to help others.

  We came home one day, both of us exhausted from work, to find the boyfriend trying to strangle the girl, blood everywhere. They had had some sort of fight. They apologised, were all remorseful, but it proved so hard to get rid of them.

  Mr Elton, as a treat after our first year, invited us out for an evening. We went first to Overtons, a famous fish restaurant, and then to the Victoria Palace to watch the Crazy Gang. It was a music hall show, the sort I had been sent to review in Manchester at the Hulme Hippodrome, with jugglers, comedians, singers, ventriloquists. Mr Elton particularly loved a girl who did bird noises, nodding his head, saying how hard it was, bird noises were very difficult to do.

  ‘But she does them awfully well, every night.’

  You what? How did he know?

  It then transpired that two days earlier, he had gone on his own to Overtons, tried the exact same menu he had ordered for us, and then to see the Crazy Gang. He had wanted to check everything out, to his satisfaction, that it would be suitable for us. We felt like a couple of maiden aunts being sheltered from the realities of West End life.

  When I got my Mini, I started driving to work each day, as parking was easy in the side streets off Gray’s Inn Road. I had always hated the Tube, feeling claustrophobic, telling myself that one of my ambitions in life would be never to go on the Tube again.

  Over that Christmas period of 1962, the car disappeared. Minis were so easy to steal. You slid open a window, yanked the wire door handle, and you were in.

  It had been stolen from the side street behind the office where I had left it, filled with Christmas presents for the family. We were going to be driving up North the following week for Christmas. The car was found, just in time, before we left for Carlisle, but the presents had gone. It had been discovered abandoned near Windsor barracks. It was presumed some squaddie had nicked it, wanting a quick way home. Unless it was Prince Charles, after too many cherry brandies, tee hee.

  This was one of the funnier stories of l963 – Prince Charles, then aged fourteen, on a school trip, had been spotted in the bar of a Stornoway hotel knocking back the cherry brandies. We all felt a bit sorry for poor old Charles when he was sent to Gordonstoun, his father’s old school, for which he appeared totally unsuited; he would have been happier at Eton, which is where, allegedly, the Queen Mother wanted him to go.

  In October 2016, this rumour turned out to be true, when some of the Queen Mother’s unpublished letters became public. Writing in 1961 to her daughter, whom she addressed as ‘My Darling Lillibet’, she said she feared that Charles would feel ‘cut off and lonely’ at Gordonstoun.

  The cherry brandy incident in fact made Charles appear less soppy and drippy than we had all imagined, with his awful floppy hair and strangulated voice – and presumably Prince Philip thought much the same. But Charles had been caught doing what normal fourteen-year-old boys, and girls these days, do at that age. So we all warmed to him.

  I took the Mini one day when I went to interview Aldous Huxley, over on a rare visit from California. He was staying somewhere in Kensington and, after the interview, he said he had to go to his publisher in Bloomsbury. He was incredibly tall, going blind and a bit doddery. I said I would give him a lift; it would be on my way to Gray’s Inn Road. He came out and saw my car – and was horrified. This was the period in which all Americans had monster cars. I had to coax him to get into it.

  As we were driving down Piccadilly, we found ourselves between two giant London double-deckers. Huxley was nervously looking out of the window – but all he could see were the wheels of the buses towering over us.

  ‘Let me out of here!’ he yelled, convinced we were going to be squashed to death. He tried to pull open the door, fiddling with the mechanism, and the stupid piece of wire. Fortunately he could not find or understand the door-opening system, so he was forced to stay seated. Very soon, at the next lights, I was able to zoom away from the two scary double-decker monsters he was convinced were going to kill us.

  Coming home in my Mini, to the Vale of Health, in the winters of 1960 and 1961, was a nightmare. When the London smog descended it covered everything in its horrible, thick, yellow, mucous-y vapour. It made you choke, unable to breathe. It reduced visibility so much you could hardly see your hands in front of you. No wonder so many thousands had died every winter in London, and had done so for centuries, back to 1200, which is when records of London fog first begin. London’s position, on a river near an estuary, and all the overcrowding, had always made it vulnerable. The Industrial Revolution made it worse, and the image of the fog in London, permanently in a pea souper, was known throughout Europe.

  Perhaps the worst winter ever was in 1952, when all those
post-war cars added to the pollution. I was still living at home in Carlisle, on our lovely rural, sylvan council estate where there was no smog as we had no cars, and we felt very smug. I remember seeing the photographs of the London streets and we all thought poor things, having to live down there, in the Smoke. They don’t know who their neigbours are and now they can’t even see them. Poor petals.

  Between 4 and 8 December 1952, it was estimated that 100,000 Londoners were made ill and 12,000 died prematurely. Ten years later, when I had become a Londoner, older locals were still moaning on about the Great Smog of l952.

  Looking back, the total eradication of the smog, after the various Clean Air Acts, is one of the many miracles of my lifetime. Just shows what governments and authorities can do, once they put their minds to it.

  The arrival of Nick Tomalin as my boss on Atticus resulted in slightly more interesting people appearing in the column, most of them interviewed by me.

  Nick turned out not to be the superior, supercilious ogre I had feared. In agreeing to take on the job as editor of Atticus, he had secured from the management an unusual concession. New people, when they are wanted, in football or business, can usually dictate their own terms in their honeymoon period. For the first time ever, since Atticus first appeared in the paper, decades earlier, the column suddenly had a by-line.

  The title Atticus still appeared at the top, the name of the column, but at the end there was suddenly plopped in the name of the person responsible for it – in this case Nick Tomalin. So sensible, really. Not just to indulge the vanity of the journalist concerned – and by and large the journalistic vanity is enormous, the sight of his or her own by-line can send any journalist into raptures – but it meant when people wrote or rang with a story or a suggestion, they knew whom to address.

  I was immediately worried this would demote me even further in the eyes of my colleagues and contacts, such as they were. People would now assume Nick had written everything. Under Bob Robinson, when it was all anonymous, I could always boast I had written the best bits, even when I hadn’t.

  Nick sensed my agitation and fears and very graciously offered to put my name in somewhere, every week, inside the column, in small print. So if I had interviewed Aldous Huxley that week, in the middle of the interview there would suddenly appear the words ‘as Mr Huxley said to Hunter Davies’. The print was tiny, and the sudden appearance of an internal by-line clumsy and confusing, but I was well pleased.

  It soon began to happen that some weeks I had written the whole column, all the interviews, all the bits and pieces, the funny bits – yet Nick’s name would still be at the end, in bold letters. My name would appear just once in one interview, as if that was all I had done, in titchy eight-point Bodoni bold italics, floating about in one of the grey bits in the middle of the column.

  Nick was always tremendously grateful when this happened, when I had manned the fort, done everything, as he had been unavoidably detained elsewhere, sometimes for the whole week. At first he gave off hints that he was working on some future project for CD, as Hamilton the editor was usually known in the office. (Brian Glanville, on the sports pages, deliberately always pronounced this as Seedy, which I thought was unfair. I always admired Mr Hamilton, or Sir Charles Denis Hamilton as he became in 1976.)

  I began to realise that Nick always seemed to be ringing up midweek from Brighton, to say he had been detained. It slowly dawned on me he was having an affair. Until then, I had never known personally anyone having an affair. Having lived a sheltered life, and still very puritan in my general outlook, I was rather shocked. He was five years older, and always seemed much more a man of the modern, fashionable world than I did.

  I then picked up that it was a young female student, daughter of a then famous father, whose name I can’t really reveal even now as perhaps her subsequent husband still doesn’t know. I always assumed that Claire Tomalin, Nick’s brilliant, attractive, wonderful but long-suffering wife, suspected as much.

  So while Nick was spending all week shagging this stunning-looking young woman, for her photograph had appeared in the papers, I was stuck in Gray’s Inn Road not just writing all the column but organising pictures, layout, doing the subbing, headlines, dealing with the lawyers, then working on the stone to get the page to bed.

  The main frustration was that nobody knew. Apart from Nick himself. I could not boast around the office, as that would be tantamount to shopping Nick. Going behind your boss’s back to sneak on him is rarely a good move. I just hoped other people would eventually find out, that it would leak out around the office.

  On the other hand, I enjoyed being in charge of myself. I had a free hand to pick the interviews I fancied, use the bits I liked best. Journalists always complain when the stupid subs or an idiot editor cuts out what you think are your best lines. I managed, now and again, to introduce into the column one or two of the people I really wanted to interview, such as footballers and pop stars, though the managing editor, Pat Murphy, who supervised the column and passed the proofs, still wanted boring stuff about politics or the Athenaeum or the Garrick.

  We normally got a page to ourselves, for the Atticus column, and I tried to have three interviews, running to about 500–750 words each, with little fillers in between, jokes, anecdotes, and observations. Not all the interviews were done face to face, some took place on the phone.

  I liked ending each week with my main interview and photograph already lined up for the following week. If I managed that, it felt great coming in on a Tuesday morning, knowing I need not panic about having a whole blank page to fill.

  So it suited Nick, during the height of any of his affairs, that I was doing so much, and he so little. We got on very well, never a cross word. He was incredibly sociable and I was often invited to his house for drinks after work.

  I would go with him sometimes when he went to pick up his children from school in his VW camper van. He jumped out of the driving seat one day and shouted to me to take over, telling me just drive it back to his home in Gloucester Crescent. Two of his kids were in the vehicle at the time, who both started crying. I was petrified, never having driven such a large ungainly vehicle before. I couldn’t change the gears, or turn the steering wheel. He hadn’t asked me if I could drive or was insured, he just went off on a whim, having spotted someone in the street he wanted to talk to. Probably famous, or fashionable, or female.

  On his daily rounds, meeting people or talking to them on the phone, he was always inviting people he had just met, and hardly knew, such as, say, Peter Hall. He would gaily tell them to come to supper that evening. Often they said yes, if just out of politeness. He would get home and tell Claire, oh by the way, X Y and Z are coming for supper tonight. Claire would rush around making more food, setting more places. Then of course they often did not turn up. I would be suddenly invited, to make up the numbers, fill the gaps.

  He came home to our place once and I gave him a glass of dry sherry in the garden. He then took Margaret aside and said that unless the two of us – me and Margaret – were more sociable, had dinner parties, went to parties, moved around town, made contacts, invited well-known people to our home, I would never succeed as a journalist, not the sort who might eventually edit the Atticus column.

  Margaret told him to get lost. If that’s what I had to do to succeed, then she didn’t want me to be that sort of journalist. Anyway, it was all nonsense and pointless, that sort of hectic social life. There was no need to do any of that to get on. She personally had far better things to do with her time and her life than become a social butterfly.

  4

  BUYING A HOUSE

  One of the things we were doing was saving like mad, working our way through our ‘To Do’ list. Nick was miles ahead of me in most things, such as his family. He and Claire had five children, one of whom had died aged one month, and then a fifth child, a son, Tom, was born with spina bifida. I never knew how Claire coped with it all, and with Nick, plus running a huge house in what
was already a fashionable, attractive area in Camden Town.

  But after two years, our own modest list had begun to be whittled down. In fact only two major items on the list remained, one of them a fantasy, which I had made Margaret write down. That was to start a family.

  I forced her one Christmas Eve to make a list of names for the children we might have some day, possibly, maybe. I still have that list, for I put it in a Bible, my Lord Wharton Bible, the one I had won aged thirteen at Warwick Road Presbyterian Church in Carlisle for reciting reams of psalms, all of which I had forgotten. My names for a girl included Morag, as it was my favourite girl’s name and sounded so Scottish. Margaret said she hated it, which was typical. She never quite liked things, or didn’t care, or didn’t know, or was not bothered. So we compromised by only listing names which the other did not actively hate. Top of the girls’ names was Caitlin, followed by Kirsten, Joanna, Amanda, and Lucy. Boys’ names included Mark, Gavin, Simon, Nicholas, Callum, Piers, Adam, Justin, Saul, and Dominic.

  You think you are being unusual, individual and different, when you are looking for a name for your child, but looking back, we were picking on names which thousands of other young marrieds at that time in that place were also alighting on. Though we did not know it. They just seemed to be absorbed into your head by osmosis. So in the end, depending on the name you choose, for the rest of their lives, a person’s first name can so often give away the year they were born, where, and into what social class. So much for free will.

  But top of the list, toppermost of the pops, the Number One Goal, which was beginning to appear at long last realisable, was to buy a house.

  I suppose the most remarkable thing about our house saga is that from scratch, having no capital, with parents who had no money and had never owned their own houses, was that we worked out that if we saved up out of our wages, without any help whatsoever, we could get on the property ladder, buying an actual, real house, not a flat – in just over two years. Two years! That dates us far more than the Christian names of our children. In fact it now sounds like a story from the Dark Ages.