In My Wildest Dreams (21 page)

He also organised a running-backwards race which had the contenders trotting rear first up the main street of the borough. As they came in this curious fashion, Tom Merrin, now of the
Daily Mirror,
observed them with a sinking heart. 'I knew they were something to do with Phibbs, who was nowhere to be found,' he recalled. 'They came backwards through the office door and began claiming prizes.'

Some trusting soul at the local greyhound stadium commissioned Phibbs to organise a gala night which Phibbs promised would include the personal appearance of a famous and voluptuous film actress. Two hours before the event, with bands preparing to parade, flowers and champagne all ready, Phibbs still had no idea from whence his star was to come. Then the unexpected piece of luck, for which he had been waiting confidently, arrived with the casual mention by a local policeman that he had a pretty foreign girl, a friend of his daughter, staying at his house. In no time the young beauty, who spoke little English, found herself being feted at the dog track, carted around on an open float to the cheers of the punters who were in no doubt they were viewing a Scandinavian film actress. The young lady, having enjoyed it immensely, merely wondered why it had happened.

These fantasies sometimes affected the personal lives of Phibbs's colleagues. One Sunday afternoon while he was walking with his wife and baby (who had recently – according to Phibbs – survived as a kidnap victim), I happened to be playing soccer and they paused to watch. At half-time Phibbs, who apart from being in the American Airborne Forces and MI5 simultaneously, had played soccer for several first division teams and cricket for Yorkshire, approached and said it was obvious to him that I had star quality. I believed every word and was overcome with delight when he promised he would arrange a trial for me with Clapton Orient, now Leyton Orient, the local professional side. I dubbined my boots, had my kit washed, and could hardly sleep while I waited. Nothing happened and after a week I jogged his memory. 'Tuesday,' he said without hesitation. 'It's all fixed. Be at the ground by four for a trial.'

I had always harboured a hidden dream that one day I might be a footballer and cricketer as well as a writer (just like Phibbs) and on the Tuesday I turned up at the stadium to find it deserted except for an old man sweeping the terraces. 'Help me sweep up and I'll give you a trial,' he promised after I'd told him why I was there. Although this sounded dubious I was ready to try anything. After half an hour of sweeping and picking up debris he went into the dressing room and appeared with a football. He placed himself between the goalposts and I kicked the football at him. When it was almost dark he picked up the ball and walked towards the dressing room. 'You'll never do,' he sniffed. 'Got no left foot, 'ave you.'

It was Phibbs who announced to the junior reporters one day that he was concerned for the well-being of a number of foreign students and workers in the area. 'They don't seem to have a social life at all,' he complained, while we wondered what the catch was. 'I think we ought to give them a chance to meet some local people, have a get-together, and help them make friends.'

Knowing him as we did, we dispersed with doubt-hung faces. Later, predictably and cheerfully, he announced that he had arranged a social evening and if we would just contribute as little as half-a-crown a head each then the whole enjoyable idea could go forward.

To some of us this was a sizeable slice from our wages, but we glumly put the money into the hat and Phibbs took immediate charge of it. He revealed a sudden friend in the wines and spirits business on the far side of London, who would provide the drinks at half price. Phibbs would personally drive the consignment to the social.

On the night of the 'Overseas Friends Evening', as it was heralded in our paper, a good number of French students, former German and Italian prisoners of war, and Indian restaurant waiters turned up. Unfortunately Phibbs did not. We waited with grim, growing certainty. The sandwiches hardened with our hearts. There was not a drink in the room. In the end the foreigners began to get a bit awkward and we had to send out for some crates of beer. The guests eventually went off into the Walthamstow night grumbling at British promises which had gone unfulfilled. One of the Germans told me that he had always thought that Englishmen kept their word. He had been under the impression that some sort of Bacchanalian feast was to be provided. All he had been offered was a curly cheese roll, a bottle of brown ale which he could not open and a couple of songs he did not know. There had also been a decided shortage of likeable women.

Phibbs turned up the next day swathed in splints and bandages.

'The bloody car,' he said throatily, looking from his dressings like a man peering from prison. 'Turned right over. Smashed every bottle. Nearly finished me, I can tell you.'

The location of this tragedy was never firmly identified, except it was many miles distant. Even when a paragraph appeared in our paper headed: 'Reporter's Narrow Escape', the geographical information was vague. Phibbs said it was in the Middlesex area but confidential telephone enquiries to several police stations and hospitals in the region failed to establish the occurrence. Also, considering the scale of his wounds, Phibbs emerged from his bandages somewhat quickly. Several years later I saw him staggering along Fleet Street with identical injuries.

Woodford was a leafy place compared to the gritty streets which I had been trudging. It had a wide green, a lilied pond with frogs below and a willow above, canopies of trees over its housetops, and open country stretching to Epping Forest. The local member of Parliament was the venerable Sir Winston Churchill and while I was there a powerful statue of the famous man was unveiled. The office of the
Woodford Times
was across the road from the green where I played cricket on a Saturday. There was a good homely cafe which provided thick-lipped cups of tea and doorsteps of bread and margarine, where the lady liked me and told me of her many hours on the operating table. It was spring and I took to the place with a smile.

Also, coincidentally, the district included Woodford Bridge and the Dr Barnardo Home where I had, five years before, been separated from my brother. It was part of my duties to make an occasional call at the home in search of news and one day they whispered in my ear that Princess Margaret was to make a visit. I hurried away and wrote the story. Thus Barnardo's provided me with my first scoop and my first front page headline; an odd instance of after care.

Unfortunately, the big day was a Thursday, when the
Woodford Times
was actually going to press. For the first time, but by no means the last, I had to imagine what would happen and compiled a graphic description of the bunting and the crowds, the pleased staff and the thrilled children, with details (gleaned from my friendly contact) of what the Princess was wearing with her smile. The whole thing was set and the paper was ready to be printed. Then Her Royal Highness failed to turn up.

She had been taken mildly ill and at the last moment the event was cancelled. The distress of the Barnardo authorities was nothing to mine. Panic-stricken, knowing that even now the details of the event that did not happen were being fed into the rollers of the printing press, I got to the telephone, fiercely ejected a nun who was jabbering to someone in Ireland, and called Mr Harold at Voluntary Place. 'Oh blimey!' I heard him howl. I could hear him running to stop the presses, which he managed to do. He returned to the telephone. I could hear him trembling. 'You've got three and a half minutes to write the story,' he said. 'You'd better start now.'

I managed to piece it together as I went along, something 1 learned to do as a matter of course in time to follow, and I got my front page headline after all.

In that suburban village sensations were rare. There was the exclusive story that Mrs Renée Dubois, a local celebrity, did not believe in God and Canon Wansey, the rural dean, did. I managed to get them together in the village hall on a Tuesday night and the debate was a sell-out. But mostly life was peaceful. A circuit of rural police stations, undertaken once a week, rarely yielded sensation, although country crime sometimes tends to the exotic. A drunk drove a steam roller he had found parked into the River Roding; a man alleged that someone dressed like Robin Hood had fired an arrow at him in the forest; what was said to be a human hand found buried among trees turned out at the postmortem to be the paw of a bear, how it came to be there we never solved.

It is a continuing tradition. A friend told me in lugubrious earnest that he had suffered a major loss, all his garden gnomes had been stolen during the night. 'Twenty-one assorted gnomes, pixies, elves and trolls,' he reported deeply. And the windmill.'

The police, he added, said, 'It wasn't malicious.' The gnomes, pixies, elves and trolls were later found lined up at a country bus stop, but he never got the windmill back.

My daily round in Woodford, now undertaken by bicycle, included the required calls on undertakers and the subsequent usually sad and often embarrassing calls to bereaved homes. Once a widow actually clutched me as she wept because there was no one else to clutch. It was an unhappy task gathering memories for publication but the final shame was the instruction that the reporter, having garnered all the information about the bowling club, war service, the love of his garden or her interest in knitting, would then be required to ask for three shillings and sixpence for the insertion of an official notice, separate from the news report, in the Deaths column. I managed to do this a couple of times but it stuck in my throat. Fortunately there was a rider to the instruction which said that if the bereaved family refused to part with three and sixpence then the reporter was to insert the death notice anyway, free, the idea being to make the rival newspaper think we were carrying more advertising than we actually were. I, and most of the others who had this indignity forced upon them, simply wrote the notice without asking for the money and said that the family had refused to pay up. It was such a miserable subterfuge.

One afternoon, calling at a cottage where an old lady had died, I was astonished to see, as the door was opened, not one but
two
coffins in the tight front room. As sometimes happens, the death of one lifelong partner resulted in the quick following of the other. Then I discovered that the deceased woman's sister had dropped dead on hearing the news and the deceased man's brother had done likewise. Naturally I told this to one of the senior reporters and it appeared the next day in all the national newspapers. He pocketed the proceeds.

I was, however, becoming aware of the bounty called linage, the journalist's perk of adding to his income by transmitting local stories of sufficient interest to Fleet Street newspapers. On November the Fifth I was on a bus and I saw Woodford Council workmen dismantling Guy Fawkes bonfires which had taken children many hours to build. Getting off the bus I asked the men why this was happening and was informed that the bonfires were in unauthorised places. I telephoned the London
Evening News
and they sent a proper reporter to Woodford and the topical story appeared on the front page that evening. 1 received one guinea for my tip. When I showed it to one of the boys at the hostel he said: 'Don't you feel like a common informer?'

The trouble was that I did.

Naturally I was deeply in love again; now with a laughing woman reporter called Sybil who was in her twenties and never caught so much as a sniff of my devotion; her unawareness was such that she went off and married another journalist called Fred who roared around on a motorbike. Fortunately a fresh girl with blonde ringlets joined as a junior and within a few days I had charmed her to having coffee at the Kardomah and taken her to the ballet at the People's Palace in the Mile End Road.

Since I had now been a reporter for several months I was able to impress her considerably. When no one else was looking I would turn my collar up, speak out of the corner of my mouth and wear a pencil behind my ear. I lent her a book about journalism and, keeping to my scenario, I inserted a creased piece of paper between its pages as if it were some overlooked message. It read something like: 'Thomas – re. the Smithson murder story. I think you're right. The police won't listen. Keep digging.' It was prosaically signed 'Miss Rose', who was my chief reporter on the
Woodford Times.
I had folded the paper – the rough toilet-roll variety upon which we wrote our reports – and abbreviated some of the words so that it looked authentic. Reality, however, was somewhat less breathless; a round of dancing displays, Conservative whist drives, flower shows, rabbit club meetings, and amateur theatricals, with the odd funeral to add drama.

Possibly because I had no real home to which I could return in the evenings, I came in for a great many of these assignments, which few others welcomed. Rotary Club functions replenished my repertoire of jokes and I drank chummy half-pints of brown ale with the elite of the Chamber of Commerce. Dancing school displays were graphically described, as was
See How They Run
performed energetically at the parish hall. I took an interest in people's angora rabbits and King Edward potatoes. Pleased organisations wrote appreciative letters to the editor and I was given another ten shillings a week. At sports meetings I noted the winning times for the egg-and-spoon race ('A new record was set at Woodford Green on Saturday . . .') and if at weekends I made a few runs or scored a goal on my own behalf I made sure it was well reported. Once I was playing football on a Sunday and we lost 14–1. My report failed to mention by name any of the numerous goal scorers on the victorious side, indeed their blitzkrieg was mentioned only in passing, but the construction and final execution of my brilliantly worked, though lonely goal, was recounted in detail. It appeared with the headline: 'Fine Goal by Thomas'.

Part of my mid-week duties was to visit vicars and ministers and to keep a finger on the pulsating world of Women's Institutes, Mothers' Meetings, as well as the Folk Dance Society, the Model Engine Club and the Woodcraft Folk. A mechanical Methodist minister used to whirl me around his parish on the back of his powerful and terrifying motor cycle. Once I was so frightened that I bellowed over his shoulder that even if he were ready for Heaven I was not. One day we went to a district gathering of a wives' and mothers' organisation. About a hundred of them were sitting around the wooden walls of a large hall, facing inwards, slapping their thighs and singing: 'Thousands have been here, thousands more to come . . .'