by Paul Henry
There were lots of little differences between Rolls-Royces and Bentleys. The Bentley was for people who liked to drive. If you were going to drive yourself you had a Bentley, if you were going to have a chauffeur you had a Rolls-Royce. I liked the fact that someone had decided it should have a full picnic table in the back, and a place for champagne. How wonderful to be able to hear nothing but the electric clock — you bought the advertising line, even though it was never true. All you could really hear was the wind howling by because the doors had been so badly assembled.
I got my first Rolls when we were running Homebush as a homestay and had a Japanese person staying. It was a beautiful Silver Shadow 2. My guest wanted to play golf and I organised to take him to the course in the Rolls, which spent most of its time under a tarp in the shed alongside the Massey Ferguson tractor, the ute and the fire engine.
When I got it started I always let it run for half an hour to make sure it was going to be okay. At this time it was playing up very badly. I dropped my visitor off at the golf course in Masterton and when I pulled up in the car park to get the golf clubs out, not intending to turn the car off, the engine stopped.
These are a few of my favourite cars
1. Aston Martin Rapide
2. Bentley Mulsanne
3. Hummer H1
4. Mustang 1969
5. Mini Clubman (BMW)
6. Ferguson 35 tractor
7. Land Rover Country (9 seater)
8. Maserati Gran Turismo
9. Toyota Hilux ute
10. Bristol Fighter, 2008
He didn’t notice anything.
‘What a wonderful car,’ he said as he walked away.
It wouldn’t start. By the time he had finished and come back to the car park, the mechanics I found to come and fix it had only just left. I had been there the whole time dealing with my very expensive problem.
‘You’re already here,’ said the Japanese man. ‘I finished a bit early.’
‘Yes, I came early, just in case,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard it’s quite a fast course.’
Homebush sucked the financial lifeblood from me for several years — all my own fault. I built a little airport out the back, with a helipad. I had a real fire engine and a windsock. I put a lake in and roamed around the place on a Massey Ferguson lawnmower.
The contrast with where I had been for work was usually very stark. I was conscious that I was now safe, yet breathing the same oxygen as people I had just seen getting killed next to me. In the laundry basket were clothes with other people’s blood on them, waiting to go in the wash.
One Sunday in 1997, when I hadn’t been home very long, I was chopping some wood. While I was away Rachael had taken the opportunity to have some trees cut down that she knew I would not have wanted cut down. It was a pleasant day, and I was enjoying being back with my family, gritting my teeth bitterly and chopping these giants of the forest up into fireplace-sized logs.
The radio was on and I heard the first report of a car crash in Paris that might have involved Princess Diana. I went inside and turned on CNN, which was a major source of stories for me. I used to watch what was happening, try to work out where the story would be in the three days it would take me to get anywhere and make that my destination.
‘I’m going to have to go to France,’ I said to Rachael after realising what was going on. I rang my AA travel person, Margaret. At home. On a Sunday.
‘You’ve got to get me on a flight, preferably straight to Charles de Gaulle, Paris. If not, then to London and I’ll find my own way after that.’ But by the time I had finished the call I had already calculated that I would be wasting my time going to Paris and I should go straight to London.
On the way, with my cell phone and a camera, I realised I could not possibly cover the accident and her death. There was no way I could get near any of that. I had to find another story. And it had to be a story I could sell, because the arrangement was that Radio Pacific covered my expenses but to actually make any money out of this work I had to sell stories to other broadcasters or newspapers.
So in London I slept with the people who were camping outside Westminster Abbey and carrying their flowers to Kensington Palace and talked to them all through the night, which, of course, was daytime back in New Zealand, about why they were there.
There was no point trying to cover the funeral. Other people had much better vantage points and were doing a much better job of that angle than I could possibly hope to. I would have been swamped in the global wall-to-wall coverage. Miraculously I got a brilliant photograph of the wreaths on the casket which I sold in London and got good money for.
But I still had to come up with something, and by now the ‘Let’s talk to these people who are standing here in the rain/brilliant sunshine/fog’ angle had been pretty much beaten to death. I decided it would be interesting to see how many people were around who weren’t part of the event, who had opted out of participating in this piece of history.
I went down to the shopping area of Kensington, where all the shop and house windows were papered with pictures of Diana. The streets were deserted. I stood in the middle of the road and everything was still. If you were going to make an apocalyptic movie in London, this was the time to make it. The only humans in sight were snipers dressed in black stationed along the roofs of the buildings, obviously prepared for people to break in.
I found, in the end, six people who were walking the streets going about their normal business. In the background of these interviews, at one point, you could even hear Elton John singing his song at the service.
‘When you could just walk for five minutes and be part of this huge event, why are you here instead?’ was the question I put to them all. What was in the psyche of someone who was there and not part of it? One of them had opened his shop in case there was a rush. He didn’t even have his TV on. He just stood in the doorway as the extraordinary sound from the service echoed around the empty streets.
‘Aren’t you tempted,’ I said, ‘to walk for five minutes and see her casket pass by or see the crowds or see the big screen?’
‘No.’
Another person was a vagrant.
‘Are you aware of what’s happening today?’ I asked and she was appalled that I might think she wouldn’t be. She was extraordinarily well informed about the event, but it wasn’t part of her world.
I never made a lot of money from these stories. There are agencies in London that you can use, who will take 20 per cent to send your work around the world. But it’s very difficult to organise, especially for a story with any currency. You needed an office to do that for you if you were out in the trenches. Usually I was in a place where it was very hard to get the information out except for my phone calls to Radio Pacific. I couldn’t transmit photographs. I could write the occasional feature as long as it wasn’t time dependent. However, by the time I had enough hours to do that I was usually too exhausted.
One of the most extraordinary things surrounding the death of Diana was that only a few days later Mother Teresa died. After the Princess of Wales’ funeral a lot of people were mourned out, but I was sure there would be something worth doing in India. I phoned Derek from London because he approved all the trips.
‘We should do this Mother Teresa thing because I think there’s a lovely thing there between these two people.’
‘It sounds expensive, Paul.’
‘Almost certainly, but I think we should do it. I think it’s good for our audience’.
Derek was tight-fisted but his love for radio used to override his reluctance to spend money. And to his credit, he never once said: ‘Wasn’t there a cheaper way to get there?’
I went to a travel agency in Regent Street in London.
‘I’ve got to get to India,’ I said. ‘Any airline other than Air India.’ I didn’t want to arrive with intestinal complications. There’d be plenty of time for that later.
‘I can’t.’
‘All right, Air
India.’
The travel agent got me a flight to Mumbai and a transfer to Calcutta, but I had to wait for a couple of days, and that was frustrating because I knew how far behind I would be when I got there. I read all the background I could and managed to worry about everything. What if I couldn’t get near the casket? No one knew what it was going to be like there — whether the whole thing would be run by her order or if the government would take charge. It might be impossible. To take my mind off things I went down to Bristol to visit my gran, who I hadn’t seen for years. She was still in the squalid little terraced house that I used to go to when I was a little boy in my Jesus boots. My schoolboy photo still hung on the living room wall. I had to interrupt her conversation every time my cell phone rang because I was negotiating global travel to cover a major event. I was reminded again of how different everything could have been if I hadn’t had the idea of something better lodged in my mind from an early age.
As I was leaving Heathrow the whole project fell into place. I saw a newspaper poster that read: ‘Two Saints Die in One Week’.
What bollocks.
No matter how much you idolised and idealised Diana, and no matter how much you can reasonably criticise Mother Teresa, because she was saintly but she was far from perfect, you have to admit they were living totally different lives. One of them had dirty hands and the other one didn’t. There was a nice feature — the contrast between these two holy celebrities. I had the guts of the yarn written in my head by the time we reached India.
Mumbai was a nightmare. Between the stench and people pissing in the streets and sifting through dust looking for food, it’s a nightmare at the best of times. When the whole world is landing on its doorstep, it’s even worse. There were journalists arriving and being swept away in the cars they had booked, by the drivers who would be with them the whole time. No one was interested in helping me. I thought I was going to have to wake up a beggar to get any assistance.
Eventually I got on board my flight to Calcutta. I was squashed in next to an obese Russian journalist. It was my practice to try to befriend other journalists for various reasons. Some were great to get information from, others were good to cadge off, though I always made sure there was something in it for them. Usually you could exchange information that was of use to each other. When the journalist was from a big organisation, the New Zealander with the backpack and a cell phone was a novelty.
The Russian journalist was moaning from the moment he sat down. He was sweating torrents and appeared to have every illness under the sun, including some that were new even to India. He thought the assignment was ridiculous and he was going to do it as quickly as possible and get back home to collect his mafia bribes or however he earned most of his living.
When the hostess came around with our meals I went to take mine but was stopped by a hairy Russian paw.
‘Wait one moment,’ said my new friend. ‘We are both very hungry but very scared. This food will kill us, won’t it? What is it?’
‘Lamb korma,’ said the hostess.
‘As I suspected. It will kill us. No, no, no, we won’t be having any of that. Bring me something that is entirely shrink-wrapped and my colleague will have that too.’
When we arrived at Calcutta he asked where I was staying. I didn’t have anything organised but it certainly wouldn’t be a luxury hotel like the one he had booked. There’s a paradoxical law of travel: the worse the country is, the more expensive the expensive hotels are, but the less chance you have of surviving in a cheap hotel. In the end he put me up in his hotel and we agreed to split the bill.
Obviously, I was more enthusiastic about this story than he was.
‘We’ve got to go to the slums,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to cover the work she’s done, we’ve got to talk to the people who are in there, the sisters who are doing the dirty work and everything like that.’
He waddled along reluctantly. We went into some of the missions Mother Teresa had in the slums. I have never seen anything like it before or since. The concrete floors were on an angle so that the people who were brought in covered with maggot-filled wounds could be put on the floor and hosed down and the maggots would be washed away. The stench was what you would expect under those conditions. There was not a surface that you could touch that wasn’t blazing hot. Your shoes became impregnated with the filth that was on the floor. It was truly squalid.
It’s not hard to get into the slums where the missions are based, but it is dangerous. These people have good reasons to kill you and not much to lose. When you go into the missions themselves, you ask yourself why anyone goes there if they don’t have to — like the Australian girl we met who had committed to six months helping the nuns.
Some people had criticised Mother Teresa for not doing more to publicise the plight of people she helped. By exploiting images and other PR tactics, they argued, she might have done more for them. Her answer was that that was someone else’s job. She was too busy helping the people in front of her. I’ve even heard her criticised for living the high life — by which the critic meant eating the odd banana when those around her couldn’t afford even that. Well, it wasn’t very high.
All in all, the contrasts with the earlier funeral in Kensington could not have been more marked.
In London, no expense had been spared. Everywhere you looked, there were lovely sepia or black and white photos of Diana looking thoughtful and sometimes carrying black children. Most read: ‘Diana Princess of Wales, 1961–1997’. In Calcutta, there were hand-painted pictures and the words: ‘Mother Teresa, 1910–Forever’.
We got to the hall where Mother Teresa was lying and saw the seemingly endless stream of people waiting to file past her casket. They had as many fans and air conditioners going as possible but it was hot and she was decomposing. They put a cover on her to keep flies off but there was no denying the smell.
When it came to the funeral, again, the big guns were doing all the blazing. Huge rigs had been built for the lighting and there were podiums erected for the cameras so the anchors from CBS, NBC, CNN and the rest could all do their thing.
My Russian friend got out as soon as the funeral was over, absconding under the shadow of darkness without telling me, though he did pay his share up to then. I was left again with the quandary of how to do something nobody else was doing. I decided to take a shortcut and go straight to Mother Teresa’s headquarters, Mother House, which was where she lived and where she would end up.
The next day I was the first European journalist who was allowed through the door, and one of only a handful who were there as the casket was taken in. After a while I was ushered into the room where her casket had been placed with the first candles lit by its side.
‘You are number one,’ a nun told me. And I thought, if I never did another story, if I never made a penny out of this one, that moment in time was worth all the effort.
I made quite a bit actually, and got a good story out of it. I used a picture I had taken in London of a girl in a public school uniform who had paid £3.75 for a small bouquet of flowers, which were being sold outside Green Park. She had stood in line for some hours, drinking a Coke and waiting for her turn to place them at the palace gates as a tribute to Diana.
Alongside this, I had followed a girl who had never been out of the Calcutta slums and who had stolen a flower and waited for three days in 98 per cent humidity, with no food, to walk past Mother Teresa’s body and leave her flower. As she walked away, certainly heading back to horrendous squalor, one of the nuns blessed a petal from a flower that had been taken from Mother Teresa’s body and handed it to her. I took a photograph of her clutching that petal. And in the contrast between those two girls you had the difference between Mother Teresa and Diana. That was my story, which ran in the UK and generated a lot of complaints for the way it allegedly denigrated Diana.
“I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE EASY. DESERT STORM HAD BEEN NOTHING IF NOT A MAJOR MEDIA EVENT, SO I WAS SURE THERE WOULD BE ROADS WHERE THEY WERE
NEEDED AND LOTS OF POINTS WHERE YOU COULD GET LINKS AND TRANSMIT YOUR MATERIAL WITHOUT TOO MUCH DIFFICULTY.”
* * *
IN 1998 THERE WAS pressure being applied to Iraq over allowing UN military inspectors into the country. Weapons of mass destruction and all that. Tensions had flared and looked like they were going to ignite. There was a stand-off between the US and Saddam Hussein. The military build-up in the area had begun. The frigates were in the Gulf and stealth aircraft were in Jordan. Well, if the inspectors couldn’t get in, I would have to, on behalf of Radio Pacific.
I thought it would be easy. Desert Storm had been nothing if not a major media event, so I was sure there would be roads where they were needed and lots of points where you could get links and transmit your material without too much difficulty.
As I was deciding when to go it suddenly looked like the country might be closing its borders entirely. So I left in a hurry, which meant I got off to a bad start. I had no idea what I was going to do. Would the war have started by the time I got there? Would it be over? Was it even going to happen?
I had just $1000 in cash and a credit card to pay for hotels. I couldn’t afford a satellite phone, and hoped I wouldn’t need one but was sure that, if I did, I could rent one in Jordan, which is the most westernised of the Arab countries. I was going to get into Iraq through the Jordanian border.
It took myriad flights to get to Jordan. On the last leg, I met a young English man, Simon, who explained he was going to tidy up his affairs in Jordan where he had been working for a member of the royal family as a tutor for their children.
‘I haven’t got anywhere to live,’ I told him. ‘Do you know of anywhere?’
‘My hotel is nice and modestly priced for what it is,’ he said. ‘I’m going to be staying there for a couple more days and you could have it after me.’