1989 (4 page)

The trip to Lido was also something of an adventure, not least because the Soho pavement outside was by three a.m. regularly lined with Mercedes and even Bentleys, all of them zealously watched over by improbably bulky Asiatic strongmen who had watched
Goldfinger
one time too many and modelled themselves on Oddjob. Lido back then infamously also boasted on its top floor (
inaccessible
to us
gwailo
natives) one of Soho’s most high-rolling
mah-jong
gambling dens. When the restaurant was subsequently burnt down there were never-substantiated rumours that it was not just due to a kitchen fire.

Back in the office, bottles of beer or wine would emerge from private lockers, and we would settle in for several hours of relaxed dining, drinking and telling of tall stories by the old hands. To those outsiders who knew, and who could blag entrance by means of
personal
acquaintance, a return from exotic parts, or a good bit of Fleet Street gossip, the late night weekend dining parties at 85 Fleet Street were the hottest tip in the town for a drink after the eleven p.m. pub closing time.

It was on a long midweek night, however, when we had no more
culinary aspirations than a packed sandwich or a sausage roll from the late trolley, that I learned another essential trick of the
journalistic
trade. If you can’t use your eyes, use your brain. And your imagination.

At around one thirty a.m. on a quiet Tuesday or a Wednesday, a brief report came up on the English language service of AFP, the French news agency. It concerned a shooting at a fiesta in a
Corsican
village, apparently involving suspect Corsican separatists. Two bystanders were injured. Police returned fire and gave chase,
unsuccessfully
, losing the men in the forest. That was it. Nothing more. Just the bare bones of a minor incident in a relatively lawless part of southern Europe. We would put it out, just like that, more or less. It might make one of the solitary paragraph snippets in the NIB (News in Brief) section that the
Daily Telegraph
ran to give the impression it had a global remit. Or might not.

Dave Goddard had other ideas. Dave was another West
Countryman
, with an accent that shouted his origins. Crucially he had also worked for tabloid newspapers as well as in the more cerebral – he would and occasionally did say ‘sterile’ – world of the wire services (us). ‘Here you go, young Peter,’ he said. ‘See if you can turn that into something the
Daily Mail
foreign pages will snap up.’ I stared at him in blank amazement.

‘There’s nothing there,’ I said. ‘Just a few lines.’

‘Just a few lines now, but wait until you’ve worked your magic.’

‘Eh?’ was the best I could manage, gazing at the torn piece of printer paper in my hands and wondering where the magic wand was supposed to come from.

‘Dear, oh dear, oh dear,’ muttered Goddard good-humouredly, shaking his head in a ‘young folk these days’ sort of way. ‘Use what’s there, lad, build on it.’

‘But there’s nothing there.’

‘What do you mean there’s nothing there, there’s masses. How many English village fetes end up with gunfights and car chases?’

‘Er, not many,’ I ventured.

He smiled: ‘Right. So what have you got?’

I shrugged.

‘A human interest story. A good one. Well, good-ish. Have a go.’

I didn’t know where to start and my face said so.

‘Try this,’ said Dave and he grabbed a typewriter, scanned my piece of agency copy for a second and produced something like this: ‘A party in a sleepy Corsican village exploded in gunfire and bloody mayhem as two revellers were caught in crossfire in a shoot-out between militant separatists and armed local police.’

I looked at it for a minute and thought, ye-ess, I see what you mean, but, ‘How do you know it was a “sleepy” village.’ Reuters
fact-training
had got to me.

He gave me a pitying glance. ‘It’s the Med. If they’re not
whooping
it up, they’re having a kip. Ever been down the south of France.’ I had to smile. I had.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Now let’s get cracking.’

It was like pulling teeth – or maybe fitting them – but over the next hour under Dave’s amused but professional and unrelenting supervision I had turned a five-line bulletin into a ‘two-page’ (about 450 words, Reuter pages are short) news story.

‘People screamed and ran for cover …’ Dave put into my mouth. ‘How do you know that?’ ‘There’s blokes firing guns for Christ’s sake!’ ‘… as bullets ricocheted off the whitewashed walls …’ ‘But it doesn’t say anything about …!!’ ‘Do you think they all hit their targets? No, OK so they hit something else first, that’s a ricochet.’ ‘But what about the whitewashed …’ ‘It’s Corsica, everything’s bloody whitewashed!’

‘Ambulances rushed to the scene to tend the wounded amid scenes of chaos …’ ‘Wait a minute there’s nothing here about
ambulances
!’ ‘You think they didn’t call one?’ ‘No, but …’ ‘Tsk, tsk!’ ‘… the gunmen fled at high speed in their getaway car pursued by the wail of police sirens …’ ‘There’s nothing here about, oh I see.’ I was
beginning
to. ‘They had a car, right? You don’t suppose they drove off at a leisurely pace?’ ‘No. And I suppose the police would have …’ ‘Used their sirens? Too bloody right they would.’

When we were finished, I was exhausted. Exhausted and
incredulous
. And exhilarated. All at once. Dave was beaming. ‘Well done, lad, we’ll make a decent newsman out of you yet.’

Something inside me still niggled, told me this was dishonest, but then I looked at it and read it again, and the original, and thought, no, it’s not. It’s a story. ‘It’s not just about telling people the news,’
Dave told me another night, ‘it’s about making the buggers read it. Making them care.’ And he was right. And the story? It made the
Daily Mail
. Not big, but it made it. And the
Telegraph
too.

I had lost my virginity. I was a proper journalist at last.

The completion of my Reuters training involved a year in Brussels, an experience I have not gone into in detail here because as the office junior much of my time was spent playing pinball and
drinking
beer in a succession of mock Irish and English bars that adhered like plastic leeches to the periphery of the European Commission’s Berlaymont building.

The highlight of the average day in the office was watching as one by one the sun-sensitive external Venetian blinds on the concave wall of the Berlaymont facing us rattled down slowly a blade at a time. Clack. Clackety. Clack. The greatest intellectual challenge was striving to figure out what a Green Pound was, and understanding the thick Irish accent in which the commission spokesman gave his daily midday briefings in obligatory French. The journalistic
highlights
were an endless series of commutes to the European
Parliament
in Strasbourg or Luxembourg to write stories nobody ever published on debates nobody cared about. Wry amusement came from studying the strange pond life symbiosis between British tabloid journalists and government ministers, such as when portly Labour Agriculture, Fisheries and Food minister John Silkin would emerge from a meeting and declare, ‘Gentlemen, fish have come up but the chips are not down!’ Brilliant, John, love, just brill!

On return to London, with the threat of a move to the ever more important but deadly dull economics desk looming, journalism was fast losing its lustre. On the other hand, my private life was settling down. I had just moved into a shared house with Jackie, a girlfriend I had known from university, and the ‘m’ word, as yet unspoken, was hovering just over the horizon.

It was at that point that somebody mentioned the ‘b’ word: Berlin. The idea struck me like a thunderbolt hitting a lightning conductor: a shock out of the blue and yet all of a sudden blindingly obvious. I’m not sure whose spectre haunted the city more in my mind: Liza Minnelli, Adolf Hitler, or Michael Caine. But I was sure
of one thing. Berlin was exciting, and scary. All at once. And totally irresistible.

Berlin was a name that in the early eighties still worked like an incantation. Not least because there were two of them. Or maybe three. Nobody born in the second half of the twentieth century did not have a mental vision of the Berlin that had vanished: the dark, foreboding capital of the thousand-year Reich, of
monumental
architecture draped in swastikas, red and white and black above a sea of stiff outstretched arms. Berlin was Mordor, the lair of the Dark Lord, the Heart of Darkness, the city where Liza Minnelli in that poster above my Paris bed had given sultry embodiment to the black magic of stockings, suspenders and jackboots; pre-war Berlin was Sodom and Gomorrah and like them had sunk in dust and ashes.

In the 1970s we thought primarily of West Berlin, plucky little West Berlin, talisman of the Cold War, the brave city that had been cut off by the engulfing communist sea, that had stood besieged, isolated and alone against the Soviet juggernaut, risking starvation; the city British and American airmen had risked their lives to feed during the 1949 blockade when the Russians had tried to starve the Western part of the city into submission; the city where US
President
John F. Kennedy had proclaimed – in only slightly mangled German – that the proudest boast anyone could make was to be one of its citizens. A city that still sat there, ringed with a siege wall unlike any other in urban history, wealthy, glitzy, ever so slightly tacky, a capital that was no longer a capital, not even legally part of any country, a beacon of freedom. And a magnet for spies.

Then there was the other side: East Berlin, the less than half a city that was the capital of less than half a country, where jackboots still strutted dilapidated streets, where citizens spied on one another and their own soldiers shot them if they tried to leave; a city of crumbling tenement blocks, cobbles and comical cars, where the red banners of the Nazis had been replaced by the red flags of communism and secret policemen lurked in every alleyway on the lookout for secret agents.

I had read Len Deighton’s
Funeral in Berlin
, seen Michael Caine play Harry Palmer on the big screen and was as willing to believe
they were as likely to smuggle live men in coffins across the
innercity
border as well as swapping American spy plane pilots for KGB colonels in tense exchanges on isolated bridges. There was no doubt about it, Berlin was magic. Black magic, maybe, but that only made it all the more appealing.

There was more: I would have an office of my own. No boss sitting over me. My own little fiefdom.

A fiefdom, of course, was precisely what it was intended to be: technically subservient to Reuters Bonn, the large office which covered the economic superpower that West Germany had become. It housed dozens of native staff who ran the German-language news and economics service. There was also an office in West Berlin, with two West German staff. But for reasons both political and
historical
the East Berlin office was staffed from London, by a Briton. The main reason for this was that Berlin had in theory remained under the control of the victorious World War II Allies. This meant that when Reuters, still emerging from its role in the British wartime propaganda set-up, opened a separate office in the Soviet sector in the 1950s, (in itself a controversial move as it implied recognition of the division of Germany that had already
de facto
occurred) no one ever suggested the correspondent should be anything other than one of the ‘Allies’. Despite Reuters’ claim that it had since become an ‘international’ agency, as far as the East Germans were concerned it was still British and that meant the correspondent had to be too.

Reuters were not exactly entrusting me with the front-line bureau it might have seemed. Berlin may once have been the potential flashpoint to spark a new world war, but the Wall had – as both sides tacitly acknowledged, without mentioning it overmuch to the Germans – stabilised the situation: a concrete agreement to differ. By 1981 the Berlin Wall was twenty years old and it seemed as if it would be there forever. It was easy to forget that in the first hours of its creation there had been what appeared to be a Mexican
standoff
: if the armed forces of the West intervened, what would happen? We will never know. It was a deadly game to see which superpower could outstare the other. The West blinked first.

On August 13th, 1961, the authorities in the East, having seen their population gradually drain to the West through the open plughole that was West Berlin, had simply stopped the leak by doing what
everyone
had thought was impossible: building a wall. Not just through the heart of the city – and therefore also dividing the underground rail system and the river traffic – but all the way around West Berlin, mirroring the impassable border erected in 1952 between the two German states.

The Wall had gone up overnight. Almost. At first little more than a barbed wire fence manned by armed soldiers it quickly became concrete. Literally. Bricks were laid rapidly to a height of two metres, at least a metre back on Soviet sector soil so the workers, watched over by armed troops, could work on it from both sides without standing in the West. Then they built a second wall behind it, to leave a ‘death strip’ in between. Over the next twenty years the Wall evolved into its final form: a largely anonymous cinder-block wall some three metres high in the East and a vertical concrete slab
construction
facing the West, also three metres high but topped with a ‘half-barrel’ rounded top that effectively denied purchase to anyone trying to climb it. From either side.

The truth in 1981, however, was that the situation in Europe had stabilised in a balance between East and West that people weren’t exactly enamoured of, but at least had come to live with. The focus of the ongoing tension between the superpowers had moved.
Primarily
to the east, where the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had provided a new arena for Moscow and Washington to fight their proxy war. The Soviets had got bogged down supporting a puppet secular atheist communist government, and the Americans had retaliated by supplying arms to religious fundamentalist patriot resistance fighters. They called themselves
mujahideen
, those who were involved in
jihad
, or righteous struggle. Many of them went on to be even more famous under another name: the Taliban.

The situation in Europe however, thanks to the conciliatory ‘
Ostpolitik
’ practised by West German chancellor Willy Brandt and the 1975 Helsinki Accords on Security and Cooperation in Europe, could roughly have been described as ‘all quiet on the Western front’. That is not to say there were no tensions brewing. The two
sides, ever watchful of each other’s supposed military superiority, were just beginning a new arms race, with the US deploying new medium-range missiles in Britain, Italy, the Netherlands and West Germany, and the Soviet Union doing the same in Czechoslovakia and East Germany. In the end, and sooner than anyone expected, that new arms race would have an effect on the Cold War, but not at all in the way either of the power blocs intended.

In the meantime, East Berlin had become a bit of a backwater in news terms. It was seen primarily as a source of features which would be translated by the Bonn office and fed out to West German newspapers to tell their readers about the lives of their less fortunate former fellow citizens. Bonn, of course, would have preferred the correspondent to be a West German, but the East German
authorities
, who when it suited them could choose to play the old ‘
four-power
’ game they otherwise refuted, wouldn’t hear of it. There was clearly a feeling amongst the communist authorities that a Briton would stand out more, would be less likely to get under the skin of the country and thereby would cause less of a nuisance.

And they might have had a point in my case, because there was one distinct problem when it came to me accepting the job. Well, two actually, though the first seemed – to me at least – clearly the most important: I didn’t speak German. Well, I did, but not
properly
. I had done it at A-level and got a grade A, but my steep
learning
curve in Paris street slang had made me realise how far even the best schoolboy command of a foreign language falls short of real working competency in the country. Since leaving school I had
concentrated
on my French and my Russian, working as hard as I could – given the even greater difficulty of spending long periods amongst native Russian speakers. My German, meanwhile, was limited to the sort of stuff they taught seventeen-year-olds in ‘conversation classes’ at school: I could order an ice cream and ask how to play
Skat
(though not understand the answer, it’s a card game whose rules I’ve never got the hang of) or say ‘
Borussia Mönchengladbach
are my favourite football team’, but that was it. The idea of reading newspapers, dealing with official press releases, asking questions at press conferences or talking to dissidents was terrifying to say the least.

The other problem was in its own way every bit as pressing: I couldn’t drive. This would be a serious impediment in Berlin, as although I would be based in the East, I would be expected also to cover the West. I could do that by getting across on public transport, although it would mean queuing with tourists and other pedestrians at the two recognised border crossing points, but the real problem was that the office in the East relied on most of its basic supplies – printer paper, ink, telex ribbons – being brought over from the West. And lugging several dozen heavy boxes on foot wasn’t going to be easy, not least because there would be customs checks every time. I had taken lessons, of course, at some stage, but I hadn’t needed a car at university; there was no place for student parking, and not much for anyone else either, in the medieval, bicycle-friendly streets of Oxford. And moving to congested, crowded London with the Tube and buses hadn’t made me see the need for one either.

All of a sudden things were different. My girlfriend, although apprehensive about me going abroad again – this time for an
indeterminate
period – and with our future not exactly decided, bravely volunteered to give me a crash course. Pun intended. This mostly involved doing lengthy three-point turns in the narrow streets of Peckham, south London, in the car she had inherited from her grandfather: a venerable Hillman Imp. With only weeks to go before I was due to leave, I fought my way through the tortuous
meandering
suburban route that on the whim of some bureaucrat with more inspiration than common sense is called the South Circular to a test centre in Wandsworth. I had decided it would be good for me to drive the whole way and as a result was exhausted by just the strain of getting there on time, which we nearly didn’t. I took the test. And failed.

Driving was something that would have to be put on the back burner, to be sorted out in Berlin. Reuters were hesitant about this, but someone in the Bonn office suggested I could write a fun feature about taking the driving test in East Germany. And that was that. From then on it was my problem. The other one was my domestic situation: we decided to get married, but not until the summer when my wife-to-be would have completed her own professional exams even though she would not be able to practise as a patent attorney in
a communist country. It was a brave step on her part which I
appreciated
. But the magic of ‘Berlin’ was potent for both of us. She would not come out to join me, however, until after the wedding which meant I would spend my first few months there alone. I suspect the Stasi were glad to hear that because waiting for me in the flat in East Berlin were two women: the fusspot and the honeypot.

I arrived in Berlin for the first time in the late spring of 1981. Summer was in the air and the laid-back youth of Europe’s most
student-oriented
metropolis were drinking beer in leafy pavement cafes and smoking dope in the green parks and along the beaches of
windsail-dotted
lakes. It wasn’t at all what I had been expecting. But then this was West Berlin. ‘Our’ side of the Wall. Like a version of London centred on Chelsea and Hammersmith and surreally severed from The City and the East End, West Berlin had turned its back on the East, forgotten where its roots lay for the sake of enjoying a glitzy affluence that its inhabitants all knew deep down was fragile.

While paying lip service to the aim of a reunification that none of them imagined they would see in their lifetimes West Berlin’s politicians and business people had created a whole alternative city structure. They might not quite have forgotten that the fractured metropolis’s roots lay in the East, that the original ancient city of Berlin lay wholly within the district of
Mitte
(Centre), now on the other side of the Wall, but they simply didn’t bother much about it. Out of sight and out of mind. They were more concerned with the tax incentives and financial aid from Bonn that kept the
semi-isolated
city’s commerce alive.

Shortly after I arrived – by then already installed in my more sober surroundings in the East – I was given an aerial tour of the
extraordinary
entity that was West Berlin, courtesy of the British Army which maintained a small fleet of helicopters on a base at Gatow in the far west of the city. They graciously picked me up from a more central, and more imposing venue: the main athletics field of Hitler’s vast 1936 Olympic Stadium, which then housed the British Army’s Berlin HQ. (It has since been hollowed out, refurbished and partly roofed over to serve as the scene for the 2006 World Cup Final.)

Lifting high into the sky in what was little more than a tiny glass
bubble we soared towards the Kurfürstendamm and other central landmarks so I could get my bearings, then turned towards the
outermost
perimeter. What astonished me at first was the vast amount of greenery and lakeland – the Grunewald forest and the Tegelsee, Havel and Wannsee lakes (a house near the last was the scene of the notorious 1942 conference that decided on the Final Solution to the ‘Jewish Problem’). If West Berliners were cut off from the
surrounding
countryside, they still retained easy access to vast swathes of leisure land that most urban dwellers would have envied.

And then came the cut-off point: the long, winding, erratically twisting double wall of concrete with white sand in between, dotted with watchtowers like malignant mushrooms on concrete stalks, patrolled by armed guards, men with jeeps, and dogs. The total
circumference
of the Wall which looped out into the countryside all around West Berlin was 156 kilometres. From the air it looked not so much like a ribbon running round the Western half of the city as masking tape sealing it off, a wrapping around an awkward-shaped object, that in the middle got tangled up in it, as the ‘death strip’
narrowed
to begin its urban incursion. From the air it was more cruelly apparent than from the ground how the Wall cut streets in two and turned thoroughfares into cul-de-sacs. We did not venture across into the East, which would have been seen as a ‘provocation’ in Cold War language, a violation of Warsaw Pact airspace, but we could hover just to the west of the Brandenburg Gate and stare down the long majestic and all but empty avenue of Unter den Linden that lay in a straight line in front of us, leading to Alexanderplatz, and beyond it – for me at least – home.

On the way back to the base the pilot diverted out beyond the Tegelsee towards what appeared to be a strange little walled garden just beyond the so clearly marked boundary of West Berlin itself. When I asked, he explained – shouting over the roar of the rotors – that that was exactly what it was: a walled garden. I was already aware that the Berlin Wall had been the greatest – and most cruel – postcode lottery of all. When the Allies had come to divide up the city, they simply did it along the lines already drawn up by the city post office. This had led to the front doors of the houses in Bernauer Strasse being sealed up while their inhabitants were still inside
them. But here it had resulted in something altogether more odd: the ‘walled garden’ was a set of allotments, which because they were owned and used by people with a postcode in what was now West Berlin, had been bizarrely, with a scrupulousness that verged on the stereotypical German, left alone. East Germany had not
appropriated
the land. In fact, the West Berliners still used them.