Sleep and youth restored all my battered self-confidence during the night, and next morning I strode off down the Strand toward Fleet Street in love with London and with life. That morning I was a happy conqueror. There was nothing I could not do, and everything in London delighted me.
The traffic driving on the wrong side of the street delighted me. The big red double-decker buses delighted me. So did the people jumping on and off them, and the ritual cry of the conductors as the buses lumbered away.
“Hold very tight, please!”
The dense crowds hurrying along the Strand delighted me, especially the men with their black bowlers, black overcoats, and black umbrellas. A weak January sun tinted the foggy air a pale gold, which softened the weight of so many swirling blacknesses: black cars, black clothing, black taxicabs, black streaks in the walls of buildings where poisonous air was eating away layers of white Portland stone.
On an island in the Strand stood a bombed church. Just the shell of a church, really. Nothing left but walls and tower. Through open window holes, rubble was visible inside. It was my first view of what war had done to London: the ruined church of St. Clement Danes. As a newsboy for Deems and Mr. Hearst in 1940, I had read about the devastation of the London blitz in the papers I hauled up Lombard Street. That seemed a lifetime ago. Now I was standing in the very place where those German bombs had fallen, gazing on the ruin they had done. Being here was terrible, and thrilling, and delightful.
Looking down the turmoil of Fleet Street, I was startled to see a jumble of medieval turrets and spires on the skyline. What could it possibly be, I wondered, but a castle from the age of chivalry. Never mind that it was just the fake-medieval architecture of the Law Courts, built in the 1880s. On that first magical morning in London, my heart and spirit turned everything into delight.
London, London, London! I was in London! I had been imagining it all my life. At first it had been the fairy-tale city where the bridge was falling down and Dick Whittington’s amazing cat made him a rich man. Later it became the sinister place where Fu Manchu hatched diabolical plots, Henry VIII chopped heads, and Jack the Ripper did unspeakable things to women in the night. Then, the city of the Mermaid Tavern where Shakespeare and Ben Jonson caroused, of the Tabard Inn where Chaucer joined a pilgrimage to Canterbury, and the Old Bailey where hard-drinking Sydney Carton first saw the woman for whose love he went to Paris, the guillotine, and a far, far better rest than he had ever known.
From my moviegoing days I knew Waterloo Bridge. There Robert Taylor had kissed Vivien Leigh farewell and gone to die in the trenches. I knew the elegant town houses of Belgravia and Mayfair, too, having seen Leslie Howard take Wendy Hiller to tea in them so she could practice talking like the nobs. I knew about gentlemen’s digs in Marylebone from watching Basil Rathbone of Baker Street instruct Doctor Watson in the science of deduction.
Now, passing into Fleet Street, I seemed to have known London all my life, and, heartened by this delusion, I went into a Lyons tea shop to get some breakfast. Trouble right away: It was impossible to understand the Cockney woman behind the counter until another customer, speaking impeccable Ronald Colman English, said, “She is asking if you wish to have milk in your coffee.”
After that I didn’t dare try ordering anything as complicated as food, but retreated to a distant table, nursed my coffee, lit one of my smuggled Chesterfields, and felt absolutely wonderful in spite of being unable to understand English.
My euphoria that morning was pure childish exuberance. Reality didn’t justify it. I faced problems that would have sobered anybody less innocent than a twenty-seven-year-old with a fool’s confidence that he could do anything he put his mind to. My being in London as a working newspaperman was absurd. Like D’Artagnan on his first day in Paris, I was the classic hick in the great metropolis, a country boy from Morrisonville, Virginia, a police-station sophisticate from Baltimore. True, I had taken a college course in English history, the one known on campus as “Wars and Whores,” but the professor was a medievalist and lost interest after the Wars of the Roses.
I lacked every asset required of a foreign correspondent except curiosity and energy. I had little notion of how the British government worked, knew nothing about British politics, and knew less about the causes of Britain’s economic despair, which was the big story out of London. Diplomatic issues like German reunification and the Austrian peace treaty didn’t interest me. I was hopelessly untutored in such staples of the London news budget as the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Defense Community. When I tried to overcome this ignorance by reading about them, my eyes got glassy and I nodded off.
I was a young man in need of the education London was prepared to give. Finishing coffee and cigarette, I walked out into Fleet Street, strode past Temple Bar, and started learning.
The Sun had two rooms on the fourth floor of the Manchester Guardian’s London offices at 40 Fleet Street. In the British style, the fourth floor was called the third floor. The elevator was small, slow and creaky, and was called the lift. When I stepped out of it and entered the office, Joan Graham was already there. She gave me a big welcoming smile and in a hearty voice said, “Watch your cock!”
I did my best not to look startled. Joan then started explaining the office routine in such colorless language that I figured her bawdy cry had been a standard London greeting which none of the guidebooks had warned me about. Later I learned that what she had actually said was, “Wotcher, cock?,” a perfectly polite Cockney expression that could be roughly translated as “How’s it going?” I was going to need English lessons.
The office was painted a chilly pale blue. Two big desks faced each other under fluorescent lights. There were two electric heaters and a gas-burning fireplace for warmth, some rickety bookshelves holding most of the volumes of an Encyclopaedia Britannica and Burke’s Landed Gentry, two telephones, a Royal typewriter, a cheap radio, and a single file cabinet that was a model of disorganization. Two big windows looked down into Fleet Street. These provided a good northern light and the title for a weekly column, “From a Window in Fleet Street,” in which the Sun’s London man could write about anything that struck his fancy. The windows overlooked the St. Julien Tobacco Shop, the Kardomah Exhibition Café, and the Protestant Truth Society. By stretching my neck, I could also see St. Dunstan-in-the-West, where John Donne had once preached.
Joan and I were the entire staff. She was tall, as tall as I was, and broad-shouldered, with carriage as stately as a duchess. Her hair was coppery red. Wide cheekbones, flawlessly straight nose, wide eyes, and thin lips heightened my impression of a formidable woman, which proved wrong. She was a few years older than I and had done some military service that showed her the horror of Warsaw after the war. She once told me that, for macabre entertainment, she and her friends would drive first-time visitors into the rubble of the ghetto at night, headlights off, then hear them gasp when the headlights suddenly went on to reveal carpets of swarming rats, rats everywhere, thousands and thousands of starving rats.
One of my predecessors had hired her for a job that was a little bit of everything. Secretary, office manager, and backup correspondent, Joan also wrote a weekly column about Paris. To get material she disappeared into France for a week every month or so for a bout of glorious eating and occasional dissipation. Though Joan and I were the entire staff, I held the title “Chief of the London Bureau,” and from the first day on the job Joan insisted I bear the title proudly.
She began my first day of indoctrination by insisting I needed calling cards bearing my title. Being chief of such a paltry organization seemed comical to me, and I said calling cards would make me look more so. Joan insisted. A chief without a calling card was unthinkable. She looked very formidable that morning. Anyhow, what did I know about local customs? Titles obviously carried a lot of weight in London, even when they were meaningless.
Seeing that I was spineless on the calling-card issue, Joan immediately led me out of the office and up Fleet Street to Chancery Lane, where I watched as she ordered a hundred calling cards from a stationer. While we were out, she decided, I might as well meet the bankers, so I followed her up into Aldwych to a branch office of the Guaranty Trust Company of New York. There I shook hands with several banking types and signed a confusion of official papers.
Chieftainship empowered me to write checks on the Sun’s bank account at the Guaranty Trust. This gave me the right to deplete and replenish the office’s petty-cash box and to write checks for important office entertainments and such other necessities as a chief might deem vital, whether they were necessary or not. I was also entitled to draw $250 a month above my salary as a cost-of-living allowance. Since the cost of living was cheaper in London than in Baltimore, this made me a rich man by my standards and by the standards of most Londoners. The dark side to my new financial blessings was the obligation to balance the bank book each month to Baltimore’s satisfaction, no easy job if you hadn’t grown up doing arithmetic in pounds, shillings, and pence.
Chieftainship meant people were dying to meet me instantly. Joan led me back to the office to meet the Western Union man and the Commercial Cables man. My first day on the job and there they were, the two of them, wearing their raincoats and looking like secret agents in a British spy movie, waiting in the office when we got back from the bank. They had thought about me crossing the stormy Atlantic and were happy to see I had made it safely and hoped I had had an enjoyable voyage. Hoped the fog wasn’t causing me any inconvenience. It was a bit worse than usual, the fog, and they hoped I didn’t mind it too much. They had just dropped by to say so, that’s all, to let me know they had been thinking about me, and to tell me I could phone them at any hour, day or night, if I ran into any problem in London or anywhere in the British Isles, any problem at all.
They were irresistible in their gentlemanly salesmanship, and in time I came to think of them as good business friends and pleasant company. Cable companies in London competed hard for the transatlantic newspaper business. These customer calls were regular events intended to spread good will. Joan advised me to divide the business evenly between Western Union and Commercial Cables, so competition would keep them hustling, and it worked. Phoning either outfit, we could count on a courier picking up the copy under fifteen minutes and delivery in Baltimore without delay.
As we were packing them out the door, the phone rang with an invitation to lunch with Tony Cole, head of the Reuters news organization. He very much wanted to introduce me to his top editors at a lunch in the Reuters building. Would that be agreeable? And if so, would such and such a date be all right?
Of course it wasn’t agreeable. It was horrifying. Lunch alone with Tony Cole, head of the whole Reuters news organization, would have been hard enough. But a boardroom meal at which all his top editors would be invited to see through me would be appalling. I could imagine the conversation, each editor skillfully exposing my total ignorance of diplomacy, politics, government, economics…
Fortunately, it was Tony Cole’s secretary on the telephone, not Tony Cole himself, and fortunately, she was talking to Joan, not to me.
“I can’t do that,” I said to Joan.
“Mister Baker would be delighted to come to lunch,” Joan said to Tony Cole’s secretary.
She was right, of course, as she explained. One didn’t say no when Tony Cole proposed top-level lunching. He was said to be a friend of Swanson’s. Besides, the wine would be superb.
Next: Had anyone, she asked, told me about the bootlegger?
No, somebody in Baltimore had told me we had an account at Berry Brothers and Rudd where I could buy whiskey and excellent wines, but nobody had mentioned a bootlegger.
He bootlegged newspapers, not liquor, Joan said, and he was invaluable because you couldn’t buy tomorrow morning’s newspapers on the street tonight, as you could in most American cities. With ten newspapers in vicious competition, there was a natural reluctance to let the other players see your daily scoop while they still had time to duplicate it in their late editions. The “bootlegger” got early editions anyhow and, for a nice fee, delivered them to us around eleven each night. This would let me go home with the comforting assurance that I hadn’t missed any earthshaking stories.
Now Harry came in to be introduced. He was the Guardian’s copy boy, though he was never so called. He was always simply “Harry.” Harry was the precise opposite of the man on the train the previous afternoon. I knew at first glance that he liked me, probably because he indiscriminately liked almost everybody American. He was small and wiry, a man in his forties with a receding hairline and a broad smile showing big teeth. He always wore a suit on the job, but later I saw him stripped down to vest and shirt-sleeves a few times when temperatures soared into the seventies.
Harry was South London with all that implied: not much schooling, hard-working, fast-moving, canny about people, street smart, indomitably cheerful, outspoken, an urban democrat who liked a laugh at the nobs’ expense. He was a page out of Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, a Sam Weller in the service of journalism, and his speech of course was Cockney. He often discussed with me some story he had read in the “Dily Mile.”
Harry was to prove indispensable to my survival. Throughout the night he made repeated trips up to my office bearing copy off the news-service wire, running accounts of developments in the House of Commons, and copies of the stories being turned in by the Guardian reporters. The Sun’s agreement with the Guardian gave us the right to use Guardian material, and without it I would often have been lost. If something unusual was breaking at night in London, I could rely on Harry bursting into the office to alert me, breathing hard from running up to the fourth floor with the bulletin.
That first day on the job, Harry played the tour guide of the Guardian office for me, introducing me to reporters like Francis Boyd, who covered the House of Commons; Richard Scott, who covered the Foreign Office; Mark Arnold-Forster, who covered Labour politics; and Philip Hope-Wallace, who reviewed theater and opera and whose airy writing style, sassy and light as a water strider skimming a pond, I was soon struggling, foolishly, to make my own.
About five that afternoon Dave Lampe came by the office and said I must come with him and meet Gerry Fay immediately.
I was tired of meeting people by this time. Another time, I told Lampe. Not today.
Dave Lampe had mastered the art of persisting through whispering. It wasn’t a whisper, actually, that he spoke in, but a voice so low, and in such a monotone, that it had a hypnotically persuasive effect. It was a voice both boring and irresistible, and he began applying it to me.
Softly, so gently that I almost had to strain to hear him, he began analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the Guardian and its people, the very people with whom I would be working most closely in London. The London editor, he said, was John Beavan, but John Beavan was not suited for the job, did not do it well, was not much interested in it, and would soon go on to another job.
My interest in John Beavan, whoever he was, and in the office politics of the Guardian was nil, but I could not convey to David the true depth of my indifference. And he droned on, and on.
The number two man in the office should have been made London editor long ago, and would be soon. He was a marvelous newspaperman, a brilliant editor, an excellent writer. What’s more, he liked Americans.
This paragon was named Gerard Fay, universally known as Gerry Fay, pronounced “Jerry.” He was really more Irish than English, being descended from the Fays who established Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, though his mother was…
Peace, David! Drone no more. Telephone this incomparable semi-Irishman downstairs and see if he has time to shake my hand.
No phone call was necessary, for the truth was, said David, that he had run into Gerry Fay downstairs, and Fay had issued strict orders to bring me down at once, and Lampe had said he would.
Incidentally, had I noticed the item in the Guardian’s “London Letter” today about my arrival? Gerry had written that.
Dave opened the Guardian and showed it to me. NEW “SUN” MAN, a small headline said.
“A new ‘Baltimore Sun’ man arrived in London tonight to replace Mr Rodney Crowther, who has returned to Washington to watch the new Administration coping with its fiscal problems and to write about what he sees. The new correspondent, Mr Russell W. Baker, is the youngest ‘Sun’ man to come here in many years…”
Three more sentences, all literate enough, but hardly lines of genius. I was startled about being news to the Manchester Guardian, but shouldn’t have been. There had been a working relationship between the Sun and the Guardian since 1924. There had even been an agreement during the war that if Hitler should succeed in occupying Britain, the Guardian would continue to be published on the Sun’s presses in Baltimore.
So I let Lampe lead me down to the second floor, and there was the incomparable Fay seated behind a desk in the London editor’s office. With outstretched arm and an imperious wave of his index finger, he silently directed us to the sofa where he wanted us to sit and continued his conversation.
Watching him, I judged he must be far more Dublin than Manchester. Round face, bright red cheeks, chestnut hair rather thin on top, piercing blue eyes—the face was intelligent, aggressive, not a tired seen-it-all face like so many newspaper faces, but an interested, curious, receptive face. In theatrical contrast to the blackish grays I had seen all day on London males, he wore a sports jacket, a necktie of jaunty color, and a bright yellow tattersall vest.
Finishing the telephone business, he popped out of the chair and came briskly around the desk for Lampe’s introductions. He was neither tall nor short. His presence was so intense that you didn’t notice things like short or tall, and afterward, if asked, you could not have said because it didn’t matter.
We exchanged handshakes, then, without further small talk, he said, “Come, we’ll have a beer,” and moved briskly out into the hall and started down the stairs while asking if I liked beer, then rapidly explaining that if I didn’t they had Scotch at the Clachan though it was bloody expensive considering it was only seventy proof, we were lucky in America about the Scotch, they sent all the good stuff to the States, and it cost less there than the weak seventy proof Scotch cost in England, what did I think of Alistair Cooke, and how long was I going to go on living at the Savoy, I ought to get out of there as soon as possible, too many Americans living in luxury, and find a place of my own in a neighborhood where I could get the feel of living in London. Hampstead might be good for someone like me with small children, though it was a bit remote, he lived in Highgate himself, north London, good bus and Underground service though.
All this was calmly spoken in flawlessly constructed sentences without any of the verbal stuttering common to the casual conversation I was accustomed to at home, but the pieces came at me so rapidly that before I could think of a response to one subject he had moved on to another. The pace at which he spoke and his clarity of expression left me feeling slow-witted and clumsy of tongue, a sensation I was to suffer often during the early days in London before I learned to speed up my speaking rate.
By now we had got out of the building, walked a few doors down Fleet Street, and wedged ourselves into the human uproar of the Clachan in Mitre Court, favored pub of Guardian men for beer. For wine and whisky they went, like most of Fleet Street, to El Vino, a few yards farther down the street. Gerry intended to introduce me to the higher ceremony of El Vino soon enough, but realizing probably that he was dealing with a kindergartner, he decided to start me in a typical Fleet Street pub with the common drink of the trade.
Planting himself at the bar, he ordered a bitter for himself, and another for me, and another for Lampe after explaining that bitter was hardly more than improved water, without the unpleasant gassy quality of American beers, but if American beer was my preference I could get it in most pubs by asking for “lager.” Then he said I must come to Sunday dinner at his house, and I thanked him for suggesting it and tried to catch up with his conversation by telling him what I thought of Alistair Cooke, just to show him I knew Alistair Cooke was the Guardian’s American correspondent, and he said, “Will Sunday after next do?”
Sunday after next?
For dinner at his house. I’d thought his mention of Sunday dinner was one of those meaningless politenesses people get off in idle conversation like the American line about having lunch sometime, but he had really meant it.
For Sunday dinner.
Yes, Sunday after next.
What was remarkable about it was that under the food-rationing program a British family’s meat allotment provided meat for only one meal a week. Inviting a guest meant his own family would have to eat a little less. This man was determined to be my friend. Knowing me less than ten minutes, he was offering me one of the more precious gifts a Londoner could make. Though normally cautious about making friends, I was now a lonely stranger in a foreign city, and I accepted.
Our glasses were quickly emptied. The teacher again, Gerry said good pub form required each drinker to take his turn buying a round for his party.
“Three bitters here!” I shouted to the woman of the house, put down my mystifying coins, and lit one of my Chesterfields.
“Before lighting up, I’m afraid, you must also offer the cigarettes around,” Gerry explained.
How innocent I was. So much to learn.
Back in the office late that night I wrote to Mimi:
“Good evening, darling,
“Well, here I sit, chief of the goddamn London Bureau, issuing orders and signing checks and not knowing the first—get this—bloody thing about what it’s all about. I’ve been lounging around Fleet Street all day getting acquainted. The Guardian’s second man here, Gerry Fay, seems like a very nice guy and he introduced me to the local pub this evening for some British beer. Not half as bad as it’s supposed to be, but a little bit watery…
“I think you’re going to like London. I saw a little bit more of it today. That’s no joke about the men wearing black bowler derbies, either. Coming down Fleet Street today everybody stared at me as if to say, ‘Why you damned bareheaded Yankee, where’s your bowler?’ Apparently I really look the American because I stopped in a small shop for coffee—terrible!—this morning and the charwoman immediately asked me if charwomen in the United States come up and sweep around your table while you’re eating. She then proceeded to do just that…
“I have been in a complete stew ever since I set foot in England. Meeting this guy and that, fending off cable-company representatives, being inspected by critical English newspapermen, going over the office accounts, trying to learn that this bogus-looking British currency is really more valuable than Monopoly money, trying to force down this food and wishing I had time to just sit down for a few hours and talk it all over with you…
“Well, it’s elevenish here and the paper bootlegger just came in with tomorrow’s news. Not very exciting. I find it very peculiar to think that now, as I’m preparing to go off to bed, it’s only 6 P.M. in Baltimore, Kathy is still up and romping round the house and you are probably just getting dinner, but I suppose you forget about the time difference after a while.”
At about the same time my mother at Marydell Road was writing, too:
“I’ve been thinking of you and wondering how you’re doing in the fog of London. I saw in the paper yesterday that London had one of the worst fogs in its history on Monday. Transportation was very bad, it said, and many people were late for work. I thought it would be a shame for you to be late for work on your first day in the office.”
This day, January 20, was also the first day on the job for President Eisenhower, who was taking the oath in Washington about the time I was being introduced to Gerry Fay. I was too absorbed in my own problems and too uninterested in politics to remember that it was also a momentous day in Washington. A few days later Mimi’s letter contained a postscript:
“According to the news broadcast on now, an amusing story is going around the Washington pubs. Last Thursday Eisenhower looked up from his desk and said, ‘What day is this?’ and one of his aides said, ‘Thursday.’ To which Ike replied, ‘Good Lord, only two days. It seems like two years.’”
I knew exactly how he felt.