CHAPTER 9

Warm beer, cold rain

The passage to ‘the old country’ was a rite for young Australians in the 1960s. Britain was an inviting place; its borders were open to Australians, and they could work and vote the moment they came ashore.

The voyage took a month. It was half happy recklessness, half a grim introduction to life beyond a lucky country’s safe shores. To reach the cultural comfort of Britain, we had to pass through less familiar places; north through the Indian Ocean to Colombo and Bombay, into the Red Sea towards Egypt and the Suez Canal, and on to the Mediterranean.

We saw the Pyramids of Giza on the banks of the Nile when tourism was so undeveloped the only sign of it was a tiny Coca-Cola stand alongside the Sphinx, which was so unprotected we climbed it and put crumbling pieces in our pockets. But the streets of Colombo and Bombay were desperate. Great Victorian buildings, remnants of British rule, were juxtaposed against seething poverty. In Colombo, crowds of begging children were whipped away by police under orders to make life easier for cash-carrying tourists. But they were so desperate they kept returning until we paid them to go away.

In Bombay, there was the hot, sour smell of street sleepers, hundreds of them packing the pavements, and prostitutes crouched behind small windows, like ragged mannequins, trapped by their pimps. In Egypt, not much had changed in the 15 years since I had lived there. Beggars with missing limbs still cried for help, and crouching women held out pleading hands, as they cradled undernourished babies, black flies crawling on their faces.

It was far from the orderly, sanitised world we had left behind, and not new to me. But the girls wept and the boys stood in silent shock. They might have seen brief black-and-white images of scenes like these on their small-screen televisions, but this was living, reeking real life.

In the days before instant, all-seeing video, when the world was more isolated from itself, Australia was especially alone. Television newsreels arrived by air from America and Europe long after the event. When John Kennedy was murdered in 1963, television stations made a special effort and were proud to broadcast footage from Dallas a day or so after the event. Newspaper photos from overseas were ‘radio photos’ — so raw in detail that artists were employed to paint it in.

We would return from these trips ashore to the cocoon of Orcades, where our own reality ruled. Orcades was like every ship making this voyage in the 1960s — a teeming party boat, quiet every hung over morning, and jumping by early evening. Drink was cheap, the bars closed late, and the music was loud.

It would not be long before giant jet planes were carrying more than 300 passengers to London in less than a day, forcing passenger liners to rethink their business models. Sea travel would become luxury, slow-going excursions to nowhere, catering to mature passengers looking for tranquillity — the same generation who were in Orcades in 1965, dancing wildly to Tom Jones and ‘What’s New Pussycat?’, and closely and hopefully to The Beatles’ ‘If I Fell In Love With You’.

I didn’t dance much. It was rutting season in these ships, the sole social interaction involved girls and boys hooking up, and I never quite worked out the rules. Making casual conversation with strange women was impossible for me, at least when I was sober. At home, I would walk around the streets for an hour searching for the courage to phone and ask someone for a date.

In Orcades, I watched confident — and sober — men strike up casual conversations with pretty women, and by midnight be arm-in-arm, laughing and drinking. It looked miraculous to me — I wondered how they did it.

When I found the courage, it wasn’t real courage at all; and too much brandy and ginger ale makes you bad at picking the right moment. When The Righteous Brothers were singing ‘You’ve Lost that Lovin’ Feelin’’, I thought it was the perfect time to ask a woman, crying in a corner, if she wanted to dance. ‘Oh, please, fuck off,’ she said.

Rex attracted women without even trying. Sometimes they even asked him to dance. He was lucky with women — even after the car accident that nearly killed him and completely changed his face.

We were driving too fast along a dirt road in his mother’s sky blue VW Beetle when we were both 17. Rex was at the wheel, and when the car went into a skid he braked, which is never a good idea. ‘We’re going to roll,’ he shouted, and sure enough his mum’s bright new VW made one complete flip before landing on its side in a roadside ditch. I stayed inside but Rex was thrown out. I found him squirming in the dirt 20 yards from where the car had landed. He was delirious — cheering on a football game — and blood was seeping from his head in several places. We were way out in the country, and the only visible structure was a farmhouse about a quarter-mile away. The farmer’s wife gave me a flannel to wipe my face while she called an ambulance.

I was unhurt, apart from a lot of aches next day, but pretty well every bone in Rex’s face was shattered. He was in hospital for weeks. Even when he came out, his head was locked in a metal cage to keep it in place. His face was so altered that old school friends didn’t recognise him.

That was the bad news.

The good news was that Rex’s new face looked pretty handsome, and he was chosen to read the news on NWS 9, Adelaide’s first television station, which Rupert launched in 1959. Three or four times each night, for 60 seconds, he would read the Minute News — right through prime time on the station almost everyone in the state of South Australia was watching.

Rex became famous, which meant that going to parties with him was complete misery. It also made him very confident with girls. In the ship, only South Australians recognised him, but he had started behaving like a television personality by then, and it was useless to compete.

At sea with Rex, there were gratifying moments when even the best of the women-catching men knew they were beaten. The ship’s officers changed the game whenever they marched into a room, braid shimmering on the epaulettes of their starched-white uniforms. When the ship’s surgeon showed up, shoulders bright with gold and crimson, everyone backed away as if a twelve-point stag had arrived in the glen. Even Rex was in awe; whenever the surgeon walked into the dining room — tall, blond, and glamorous — Rex would stand to attention, salute, and shout, ‘I honour you’, and the surgeon would look mystified.

Four weeks is a long time to be sealed off in a cruising village. It leaves a lot of time for romance to bloom and then go wrong. There were break-ups and jealousies and mild scuffling. But everything had a limited sense of consequence simply because we all knew it could not last. The days cooled, Tilbury was getting closer, and when we arrived our perishable world would vanish like a midnight coach.

The sky was the colour of concrete at the Tilbury dock, and the cold wind forced a thick drizzle into our faces. The puddles on the uneven dockside soaked through my white canvas shoes. England felt wintry, even in June, after sailing through the baking Red Sea.

We could see Mike Quirk, our Adelaide friend, among the welcoming crowd, jumping and waving. He was wearing a black polo-neck sweater underneath a brown corduroy jacket, and boots with long, pointed toes. We admired his London modishness.

Our first stop was a pub, the first English pub I ever set foot in. It was a heart-sinking moment.

‘A lager, please.’

‘A what?’

‘A lager. Really cold.’

‘We’ve got bitter. You can have a pint or a half. But it’s not very cold, mate.’

These were the first two unpleasant surprises awaiting all Australians: rain and warm beer. In the 1960s, cold beer was overwhelmingly the favoured drink in Australia. It represented three-quarters of the country’s alcohol consumption. In British pubs, the only beer on tap was room temperature. In bottles, the most popular was something called Watney’s Pale Ale. It had a medicinal taste, but Brits seemed to love it. The closest to home for a beer-loving Aussie was a Carlsberg, a Danish invasion that was kept on a ‘cold shelf’ that managed to chill slightly the bottom quarter of the bottle.

But London was a dream of familiar sights, most of which I had never seen. The wandering old River Thames, St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, Horatio Nelson glowering from his mighty granite column; the grey importance of Whitehall sweeping towards the Gothic Revival limestone of Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster; the Mall, wide, red, and flag-lined, heading long and straight to Buckingham Palace; the diesel grumble of black cabs; the high, narrow red buses. I was in a film set.

Much of central London was a sprawling memorial to its triumphs and pride. A country had to have felt good about itself once to celebrate its success in such a glorious, permanent way.

But in 1965 the people living amid these everlasting monuments were going through a historic update. A new generation, conceived in the relief of peace, was through adolescence and into adulthood and the world was tilting towards them. They liked different music and clothes, but above all they were gripped by a dawning sense of possibility and iconoclasm that reached deep into the country’s working-class.

The sclerotic class system I had seen as an Army sergeant’s son was not looking so invincible. The Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, had a rich Yorkshire accent, even if he did amplify it in public; bright new playwrights such as Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter, were East End boys; film stars and high-profile photographers like Albert Finney, Michael Caine, and David Bailey were the sons of bookies, porters, and tailors. Jean Shrimpton, a former typist, was the world’s most famous model, and Sandie Shaw had quit her job in the Ford factory at Dagenham to reach number one in the hit parade. A new kind of self-esteem was rising, it was said, to replace the lost grandeur of empire.

It was more than their music that made The Beatles a triumph. They were class liberators, too. As a Liverpool boy in Adelaide, I watched these rough-tongued Scouse lads on television acting cheeky and confident with the Royal Family. No one had done it until them, and they talked just like me.

Time magazine, in the days when it had a serious influence, would soon make Londoners even more pleased with themselves by coining a description that would stick for years — Swinging London. ‘In a once sedate world of faded splendor, everything new, uninhibited and kinky is blooming,’ it said. ‘London is switched on. Ancient elegance and new opulence are all tangled up in a dazzling blur …’ The Rolling Stones, it ruled, were ‘a new breed of royalty’.

It turned out that this era was not so much bringing down elitism as redefining it. We re-distributed our wealth upwards to rising musicians, shilling by shilling, and forgave them when they left their tenements and pebbledash semis and disappeared into Surrey mansions in the back seats of psychedelic Rolls-Royces, raising their own dynasties and sending their children to private schools where they grew up without provincial accents and led pro-hunting protests. We forgave them because, while our money made them rich, their music made us happy. It was a trade we understood, just as we accept the wealth of modern footballers — we can see what we have paid for with our satellite subscription and season ticket.

Socialism was on the march in the 1960s, and capitalism was on the defensive, but few complained about the wealth of our new working-class heroes. For us, the sinners were complicated corporations and banks, and tycoons whose abstract fortunes we couldn’t understand.

Although our heroes may have joined the upper crust we had loved to see them mock, because of them it never seemed so inaccessible again.

You could see in the streets, in the fashions, how old traditions were crumbling — miniskirts and bright colours confronting staid bowler hats and striped pants. There has been a clear victor: 50 years later, skirts are still short, and the bowler hat extinct.

I had seen a little of London as a child. We had passed through after disembarking from troop ships at Southampton, but we always headed straight to Euston station for the connecting train to Liverpool. We might have waited hours to catch the Liverpool train, but Mum thought we were safer waiting on the hard seats at Euston, and that is always what we did.

Australians in London carved out their own ghettos and dominated certain pubs. Before high commissions and embassies became fortresses against terrorism, the vast ground-floor of Australia House in Aldwych was open to anyone, and was a hangout for young visitors. Scores of newspapers from home were kept on file. The streets outside were a marketplace where young Australians back from a European tour would park their camper vans with ‘For Sale’ signs in the window, ready for new arrivals to make the trip — sleeping bags and Primus stoves included. Parking rules were more relaxed then.

The Surrey, a pub down the hill towards the river, was an Australian-occupied zone. So was Earl’s Court, then a cheap and rowdy world of shabby bedsits with perhaps London’s highest ratio of gas rings per head of population. So many Australians arrived there in the 1960s it was nicknamed ‘Kangaroo Valley’. There were no livelier pubs or noisier neighbours. Rising property prices would later civilise Earl’s Court, and make it duller, as the Australians scattered.

Rex and I stayed with Mike Quirk and a group of other Australians and Canadians. The tough street in Willesden where they lived was badly lit, and the flat itself had only a one-bar electric fire in the tiny living room. There was a sofa and a chair. We slept on the sloping floor. The tiny kitchen’s tabletop was an old door resting on a bathtub. There was no running hot water.

But here I was in the big city, excited and broke apart from the sacrosanct return fare in the bank back in Adelaide, and £50 cash. I needed a job.

I first set foot in Fleet Street when Rex and I went job hunting without appointments. We were getting desperate for work, and thought it was a bold, Australian thing to do — I wasn’t really Australian, but my British passport certified me as an ‘Australian Resident’. We walked up the dusty stairway circling the brass cage of an elevator shaft in 10 Bouverie Street, just off Fleet Street, across from the News of the World, the newspaper Mum caught me reading when I was five years old.

All along one side of the street, tightly parked lorries were piled with huge reels of newsprint. The reels were being slung with thick rope and lifted by cranes off the lorries and into a building. People walked nonchalantly along the pavement beneath their crushing weight.

No one was expecting us at the office of British United Press. It was the British wing of United Press International, the US news agency that had employed famous journalists such as Walter Cronkite, Harrison Salisbury, and Martha Gellhorn. On the third floor, we stood at a high wooden counter, and banged on a rusty desk bell. Rex and I wore suits and ties; our jackets buttoned very high, our ties very thin, according to the fashion of the day. Behind the counter were a horseshoe of desks and a battery of black teleprinters. It was a small room and the teleprinters filled it with their rattling and ringing. No one sitting at the desks heard us until we began shouting.

A tall man in a white shirt with pencils in the breast pocket came towards us. He was slim apart from the belly pressing against his belt. His hair was combed close to his head on each side of a dead straight parting. It was shiny and pure black, but he was not young.

‘We are journalists from Adelaide in South Australia looking for work,’ Rex said.

Frank H. Fisher, the editor of British United Press, looked at us in fierce silence. I felt an urge to flee, but Rex was closer to the exit and in my way. He was also less timid.

‘Even a few shifts would be good,’ he said.

‘Where are your CVs?’

Fisher took them and read quickly, for less than a minute.

‘Come back at ten tomorrow morning and we can talk,’ he said.

We left feeling exhilarated and brave, and went across the street to The Tipperary pub to settle our nerves and drink alongside actual Fleet Street journalists.

Next day, Frank Fisher gave us each a handful of cables from UPI correspondents. ‘Choose two stories from them and edit them for transmission,’ he said. ‘No more than five hundred words a story. You’ve got an hour.’

This is when I discovered ‘cable-ese’ — a long-dead prose form dating to the days when distant correspondents filed stories by telegram. Every word in a cable cost money, and cable-ese is a compressed, money-saving dialect. Instead of writing ‘does not know’, a cable would say ’unknows’. If something was not wanted, it was ‘unwanted’. If a correspondent was heading to Saigon, he was ‘Saigonwards’. If there were no news on American casualties in a particular conflict, but the correspondent would send a story as soon as possible, his cable would say — ‘unnews khe sanh casualties will file soonest’.

This lost language created memorable lines. A UPI correspondent, quitting in frustration, wired his office: ‘upstick job asswards’. Evelyn Waugh, when he was a journalist, was cabled in Ethiopia about a nurse said to have died in an Italian air raid: ‘require earliest name life story photograph american nurse upblown’. Discovering the story wasn’t true, Waugh replied, ‘nurse unupblown’. One journalist was fond of signing off memos sardonically, ‘ellenkay’ — love and kisses.

These cables were sometimes riddles. Acronyms saved words, and politicians would often be referred to by job title only.

Fisher had told us not to refer to the clippings library for information — this was to be a test of how we wrote and how much we knew. The first cable I looked at said: ‘exlagos stop pm nairobiwards prooau talks president’. I had to make a coherent intro from these words. My throat dried.

exlagos — Fine, the capital of Nigeria. That’s the dateline.

PM — Prime minister, obviously.

nairobiwards — He’s heading to the capital of Kenya.

prooau talks — He was going for talks about the OAU. That, I was pretty sure, was the Organisation of African Unity.

president — Kenya’s president was Jomo Kenyatta.

All good, except who was the prime minister of Nigeria? I had no idea, so I skipped to another story. I passed my test, and in June 1965 became a desk editor at British United Press. I also discovered, and never forgot, the lyrical name of the Nigerian prime minister at the time: Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa.

Within a few weeks, I learned other new and exotic names: Kenneth Kaunda, Julius Nyerere, Mobutu Sese Seko, Jean-Bédel Bokassa, Moïse Tshombe, Souvanna Phouma, Hastings Banda. I discovered countries and tyrannies I had never heard of — places boiling with revolution, civil war, martial law, insurgencies, or riven with apartheid. The main thing I learned was how little I knew.

The important break for me was that British United Press was tiny and strapped for cash. Within two months, at the age of 21, having just discovered a country called Upper Volta, I was in total charge for 10 hours a day of the BUP news feed to national and provincial newspapers all over the country. I’m not sure paying customers were well served by my good fortune, but it was great for me.

I worked from 10pm to 8am four days a week, including weekends. While I was wrestling with a long read on the Mekong Delta, my happy Aussie friends would phone me with drunken accounts of their Earl’s Court parties. But midnight in London was late afternoon in California, and the day was just beginning across Asia. In Vietnam, where American escalation had begun after the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, terrible events were unfolding. While the rest of Britain slept or caroused, I was happily lost down a black hole of lonely nights and no social life, learning about the world, buried in a mountain of foreign cables, and guided by the big atlas I kept hidden in a drawer until I was alone.

Working in a small office is the best thing a young journalist can do; it forces you to learn at the deep end. This did not mean I was unsupervised. The ever-looming Fisher marked my overnight work — literally. His first daily task was to sit with the overnight file and read it, page-by-page, armed with a thick pencil and a constant frown. Fisher was looking for factual mistakes and clumsy sentences, but his fetish was the purging of all American terms before copy went on the British wire. This was a challenge, since all but a few correspondents were Americans writing for their home audience. Fisher was bad company when he was displeased, and nothing angered him more than Americanisms. No one seems sure who first said that the Americans and British were two peoples divided by a common language, but it could easily have been Fisher.

He gave a loud grunt at every mistake, pressing a heavy black circle around it with his pencil. Sometimes he would type a stern note, put a copy on every desk, and pin the original to the notice board.

Some translations were easy. ‘Fanny’ refers to the human backside in America, but definitely does not in Britain. We knew that labor needed a u and that center should be centre, and defense defence. But others were subtler, and a small misunderstanding could lead to a big mistake. When American negotiators want to table an issue, they mean put it aside. When the British say it, they mean they want to discuss it, often urgently.

There were dozens of other traps: it was lorry in Britain — not truck; tin — not can; pram — not baby carriage; hotel porter — not bellhop; burgled — not burglarized; cheque — not check; lift — not elevator; rubbish — not garbage or trash; spring onion — not scallion; launderette — not laundromat; maths — not math; city centre — not downtown; anti-clockwise — not counterclockwise.

This crash course in language and world affairs proved a great education, but did not pay well. Fisher was a good teacher, but he was also cheap, with a tight budget to manage. His first pay offer before I joined didn’t even cover my share of the rent for the bedsit in Swiss Cottage that Rex and I had found. When he told me to take it or leave it, I told him I couldn’t afford to work for him, that I was a member of the National Union of Journalists, and his offer was lower than the union minimum. I accepted his increased offer, although it was still beneath the NUJ minimum. Fisher told me the minimum only applied to national newspaper journalists who had reached the grand old age of 24.

After a while, when I was more confident and learning fewer new things, the BUP job began to feel like solitary confinement. I was reading and writing about the world’s turmoil, while sealed away from it in my ticker-tape tomb, released each morning to head home to bed, against the rush-hour tide.

The excitements of London were taking place in my absence. After almost a year of lonely learning, I began writing to national newspapers. I wrote to dailies and Sundays, tabloids and broadsheets, and papered the wall next to my bed with their curt rejections. At first, I pinned them up in defiance, but took them down when there were so many they became discouraging.

I got a couple of interviews. John Grant, the brusque Home Editor of The Times, spent 30 minutes with me, and Jack Crawley at the Daily Mail, who liked to conduct his job interviews over drinks, took me upstairs at The Harrow in Whitefriars Street. I was told it was traditional for the interviewee to buy Crawley his drinks. Both told me I was too young and inexperienced, and needed to learn the ropes at a local paper somewhere in Britain before attempting the London big time. They refused to count The News in Adelaide.

I wrote my final letter to the runt of Fleet Street, a broadsheet with dwindling sales and a doubtful future. It was called The Sun. The paper was bottom of my list, and I lied in my application letter and said I was 24 instead of 22. This was a great age, I decided, and quite old enough for a job in Fleet Street. It would also qualify me for the NUJ minimum wage.

Within a week Barrie Harding, news editor of The Sun, had invited me to an interview.