4.

I had read somewhere, probably in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, that the best route into journalism was to start as a tea boy on a national newspaper.

So the week I left school, as my gap year before university began, I posted off a letter to the first newspaper Editor I could think of, who was John Junor,fn1 Editor of the Sunday Express. At the time, he was the towering laird of Fleet Street: Scottish, trenchant, cranky, the author of a widely read column of opinion, and famous for proclaiming that only homosexuals drank white wine. It was to Junor I addressed my job application to push the tea trolley.

Amazingly, he replied. I was summoned for an interview at his office off the newsroom in the Beaverbrook Building. Sir John was sitting behind his desk, wearing a white nylon shirt through which you could see the contours of a string vest. He was holding my letter and shaking his head. ‘I’ve read your letter, sonny, but you can never be a tea boy here. The unions won’t wear it. You have to be the son of a tea boy to be considered, or a nephew. If I so much as suggest it, they’ll down tools, we couldn’t get the paper out …

‘But I’ll tell you what,’ he went on. ‘I can send you to the Falmouth Packet as a trainee reporter. It’s a local rag down in Cornwall, one of ours. We can pay you fourteen pounds a week. That’s if you want the position.’

As I left the building, down half a mile of linoleum-covered corridors reeking of printer’s ink, I passed a trundling tea trolley laden with a steaming urn and china mugs. I glared at the young lad pushing it along, whose family connections had denied me my big break. Instead, I was relocating to the deep south-west.

The Falmouth Packet, named for the eighteenth-century steamships which plied the Atlantic, was one of the most profitable local newspapers in the country. It had the highest penetration of sold copies to population: virtually everyone in Falmouth read it. The Editor of the Packet was in no doubt why this was. He sucked on his pipe and disclosed to me his secret recipe. ‘Mention as many names as possible in your copy, young man. Each name printed is a sold copy. When I send you to cover a school Sports Day, don’t come back with fewer than a hundred names – kids, parents, teachers, all of them. If it’s a council meeting, name-check everyone, they’re the worst, the councillors, vain to the bone. If I send you down the marina, mention every boat – dinghies, yachts, tubs. Remember, every name printed is a sold copy …’

I lived with a landlady on a street lined with palm trees. The going rate for my tiny bedroom was £2.20 a night, but I was offered a weekly rate of £14, to include breakfast, and access to a lounge where the TV was permanently on and travelling salesmen watched sport in mournful silence. In the mornings, a dainty display of tinned prunes in a crystal dish, cereals and a jug of tinned pineapple juice were showcased on a dresser. My landlady presided over the dining room: ‘When you’ve finished your juices, I’ll bring you your breakfasts.’ Every morning I enjoyed a gargantuan fry-up, with a bonus smoked kipper nestling between the eggs, bacon and beans.

On my second day, the Editor loomed over my desk. ‘Alright, young man, I’m giving you a big story to get your teeth into. This has front-page potential, so I’m taking a risk here …’ His dentures rattled. ‘British Rail has announced they’re adding Cornish pasties to the buffet on their south-west routes. I want you to ring all the Cornish Members of Parliament for a reaction.’

It felt like a daunting assignment. Would MPs want to speak to me? Having obtained the telephone number of the House of Commons from Directory Enquiries, I rang the seven Cornish MPs in turn – the MP for Camborne and Redruth, MP for Truro and Falmouth, MP for St Austell and Newquay … Most were Liberals. All took my calls at once; I sensed they were sitting in their offices, gloriously unoccupied. And all revered the Cornish pasty. ‘The Cornish pasty, in my highly partial opinion,’ said one, ‘is the finest culinary invention on God’s good earth. I have campaigned ceaselessly for this day. I know I speak for every one of my constituents when I say if I had to eat only one dish for the rest of my natural life, it would be the Cornish pasty.’

Soon I specialized in covering silver and golden wedding anniversaries of Falmouth citizens. I would be sent round on my moped (the orange moped had come with me on the train) to interview the anniversary couple in their front rooms.

‘May I ask, what is the most exciting thing that has ever happened during your wonderful long marriage?’ I would enquire, notebook in hand.

The couple exchanged glances. ‘I don’t think anything exciting has happened, not really. The birth of our daughter, Jeanette, I suppose. We’ve led a quiet life.’

‘And have you planned any special celebrations for your big day?’

‘No, nothing planned. Just a normal day really. Our daughter may pop round.’

My piece would be headlined: ‘Falmouth couple celebrate 60 years of quiet marriage. Nothing planned in celebration.’

Knowing nobody who lived within fifty miles of Falmouth, I ate alone most evenings in a Chinese restaurant named Ming’s Garden, where I was generally the only customer. During these solo dinners, I read the complete works of E. M. Forster, in chronological order, beginning with Where Angels Fear to Tread and ending with Maurice.

Fresh from the Falmouth Packet, I set off on an adventure with my school friends John Scott and Trelawny Williams. I can’t now remember how we hit upon the idea of crossing Russia by train to Iran, and then hitch-hiking back to England overland from Isfahan, but it was to be the first of many such expeditions. This first one was notable for an almost total lack of preparation, beyond buying flights to Moscow and, at the Soviet Intourist office in Piccadilly, reserving Third Class train tickets from Moscow’s Paveletsky terminal to Tehran, a ten-day journey covering (very slowly) a distance of approximately 3,000 km via Tbilisi. John’s mother, the Duchess of Buccleuch, organized a weekend at their Northamptonshire house, Boughton, at which various distinguished experts were assembled to offer us advice. The Russian-born Byzantine art historian Tamara Talbot Rice, already very old, briefed us on the Seljuks of Asia Minor, and must have been aghast at our level of ignorance. She cautioned us against travelling on foot in Eastern Turkey at night, owing to rabid Anatolian dogs.

In those Soviet days, the only practical way of entering Russia was on an organized tour, which we would join for two weeks before striking out on our own. So we were shepherded in and out of coaches around Moscow and St Petersburg, accompanied by guides who kept a beady eye on us at all times. One problem, as a group of three friends, was that each night one of us had to share a bedroom with another single man on the trip. This rule could not be relaxed. The single man was a 74-year-old British union official, a steel worker from County Durham, whose life ambition had always been to visit the USSR, a country he worshipped from afar. His hatred of England and admiration for Russia was compounded by acute respiratory problems, probably due to asbestos.

All night he coughed up phlegm from deep in his lungs, and fulminated against the ruling elite of Great Britain. Everything in Russia delighted him. The breakfast buffet, consisting of slices of cardboard cheese and vile chalky coffee, thrilled him. ‘You could never find a spread like this in England.’ The Soviet space programme dazzled. ‘You can’t see the English putting a feller into outer space.’

On our final day in Moscow, a group of officials showed up. ‘I am sorry, it is forbidden to travel by train to Tehran. Your tickets are invalid, you will fly instead.’

‘But we want to go by train, we have our tickets already.’

‘Flying is better for you. You will prefer.’

‘We insist upon the train. We have paid.’

The officials disappeared to confer. Eventually, ‘Okay, you may go by train. But you will have different tickets.’ We had been upgraded from ‘3rd class hard’ to First. Quite how lucky this was, would soon become clear.

I have always loved railway sleeper carriages. The First Class compartments on the Moscow–Tehran Express had deep Tsarist sofas with antimacassars, steaming samovars and brocade curtains. For ten days, we would be cocooned in splendour, cutting through the birch forests and endless lakes of central Russia. Only when the train pulled out of the station did we discover one crucial drawback … there was no dining car, nowhere to buy food on the train for a week and a half. Through the open doors of adjoining compartments, we saw passengers surrounded by picnic baskets. They glared mulishly. As often happens when food is unavailable, we suddenly felt incredibly hungry.

For twenty hours, the train rattled through snow-covered forests, never stopping. Trelawny found two hard-boiled eggs at the bottom of his rucksack, and these were much enjoyed.

In the middle of nowhere, the train slowed at a deserted platform, with a megalithic statue of Stalin on a hilltop behind. In a trice, hordes of old ladies – babushkas – staggered out of the shadows with baskets of produce: tinned sardines, black bread, lemons, knobbly cucumbers … We bought armfuls through the windows. Each day, the process was repeated. As we neared Tbilisi, Georgian champagne was on offer and Sulguni cheese in brine.

One evening, we strolled the entire length of the train to find the ‘3^rd class hard’ accommodation. There must have been a hundred carriages, and the closer to the back of the train, the less salubrious they became. ‘Third class hard’ was a barrack hut on wheels, eighty wooden berths per compartment, occupied by Soviet soldiers returning home, plus a healthy selection of Kazakh and Azerbaijani predators, who visibly perked up at our arrival. I remember us declaring that we were furious with the Intourist officials for denying us this more ‘real’ encounter with the country and its people, but it was a pleasure to slink back into our imperial seclusion.

At the frontier with Iran – then the most sensitive border crossing in the world – the train halted for a day for the wheels to be changed on every carriage to the narrower gauge of the Persian railway, then edged, with infinite slowness, across a mile of raked sand, heavily mined, while Soviet troops faced backwards on the roof to prevent their citizens doing a runner. From watchtowers, American soldiers and the Shah’s border guards followed the progress of the train towards them. Only four passengers by now occupied the 100 carriages – John, Trelawny and me, and the Director of the Moscow State Zoological Museum. Thus we arrived in Iran, where several hundred hawkers immediately boarded the train selling Coca-Cola and kebabs, and postcards depicting the Shah, Reza Pahlavi and Empress Farah and their family. The Pahlavis seemed highly popular rulers.

The weeks that followed were revelatory for me. The intense dry heat of the country, Islamic architecture, the mosques of Isfahan, Yazd and Shiraz, hitching long distances in blinding sunshine … all of these experiences were formative. Despite (or perhaps because of) living in four stately homes of unrivalled magnificence, John sought out the cheapest, roughest hotels in every town, and if we could barter down the price from 30 rials a night to 15, we would devote as long as it took. All night through the hardboard-thin walls of the Abadeh flophouse or the Fasa hotel, we could hear the violent throat-clearing, retching and spitting of our fellow guests, mainly truck drivers, interspersed with random angry shouts and sobbing. Recently, I found the diary I had kept on this trip and was struck by the distances we covered, the number of sites we visited each day, and the negligible sums of money we lived on.

In every shop and bazaar, framed photographs of the Shah were displayed; I’m sorry to say we had no inkling of the revolution waiting to erupt, barely a year later. Our interests were, anyway, architectural more than political. The mosques in Yazd lay in ruins, the mud walls of the old city collapsing. Persepolis had yet no giant coach park, and the ruins of Xerxes’ palace were unfenced and free to clamber over. I think we fancied ourselves as travellers in the grand tradition of Robert Byron and Fitzroy Maclean, dawdling in the crucible of ancient civilizations.

It was while hitching from Yazd on the roof of a petrol tanker that I fell off onto the road, my rucksack following close behind and landing on my spine. I did not actually hear the slipping of my disc, but felt it soon enough. The excruciating pain drew a line under the trip, as I was invalided home in agony to King Edward VII’s Hospital, in Marylebone.

My back remained a problem for ten years, despite the attentions of the most distinguished and expensive back doctors the length of Harley Street. It would only eventually be cured, in two minutes flat, by a peculiar faith healer in a furry-hooded anorak … but that miracle lay far ahead into the future.

Discharged from hospital, limping and brimming with painkillers, I embarked upon an Italian Grand Tour with Craig Brown and Guy Lubbock, meeting up with John on his return leg overland from Iran. We drove in a dark green Datsun Cherry, loaned by Guy’s mother, the actress Moyra Fraser.fn2 In the boot were two small tents, in which we proposed to sleep.

It was unfortunate that, two days into the trip, all our luggage and money were stolen while we swam off a Porto Ercole beach. We now had only the clothes we stood up in. Craig wore his seersucker dungarees for the next two months.

At this moment of crisis, Guy declared, ‘We’ve been sort of invited to stay with Lady Melchett in Porto Ercole if we want. Well, her daughter Pandora Mond once said we could, at a party …’

We were sceptical. Did we really want to stay with some stuffy titled Brit we hadn’t met?

‘The daughter’s fun,’ said Guy.

Sonia Melchett’s pink villa overlooking the sea was film-star magnificent. If she was surprised by the arrival of four complete strangers, teenagers without luggage, she hid it well.

Outside on the terrace, we found the publisher Lord Weidenfeld and the novelist Edna O’Brien, and a host of other alluring guests, including Pandora – who was every bit as fun as advertised.

Sonia Melchett – London’s primary hostess, presiding over a soirée of politicians and authors at her Tite Street home – was the most generous and tolerant of people. We couldn’t believe our luck. George Weidenfeld told long, long stories about his Nobel Prize-winning authors and friends; the worldly Italian foreign correspondent Paolo Filo della Torre taught us the proper way to cut a peach (sideways, parallel to the stalk) for easy removal of the stone. The sun beat down.

After a week, we reluctantly peeled off to see Florence, Siena and Urbino, sleeping one night in the tents on the central reservation of an autostrada, with three lanes of traffic rushing past on each side. But we soon returned to the Melchetts’ for a second bite of the peach. Edna O’Brien was rather taken with John, and spent much time giving poolside reflexology to his feet. The novel she was writing was called Johnny I Hardly Knew You.

Craig was beside himself. I remember going to post postcards with him in the port, and our messages home all began, ‘You won’t believe who else is staying in the same villa …’

Embarrassing how celebrity-struck we were.