Читать книгу My Bonnie: How dementia stole the love of my life - John Suchet - Страница 8

I am an amateur photographer. My grandfather was a professional—a Fleet Street photographer for 50 years. In a way I have followed him professionally, and like him I always have a small camera at the ready. My photographs are not arty—my brother David is the one for that—but they capture the moment. (Recently, at a family reunion, David ran around with his super-slick camera missing all the shots while he set the focus, aperture, timer, this and that, in between gulps of wine, crying ‘Missed it’ every time he pressed the shutter, while I captured every moment, albeit out of focus and poorly framed.)

The purpose of relating this is to help you understand why I took that photograph of Bonnie and me at our first dinner in the bedsit, and why there are so many photographs of her in this book. From the moment she joined me, I made up my mind to chronicle our life together, from the beginning to the end. And, being a great planner, I thought I knew exactly what the end would be.

In our early days together, I told her I would fill album after album, and then in our extreme old age, probably in a care home, we would turn the pages of the albums together, and remember. Yes! she would exclaim joyfully. In the years that followed, she never minded me whipping the camera out. I rarely needed to ask her to pose. Each camera I’ve had clearly fell in love with her; no camera is capable of taking a poor picture of her.

I kept my word. I filled album after album. Only in recent years have I stopped, because it became clear that the illness was preventing her from enjoying the pictures. Instead of an album, I now put pictures digitally on a picture frame, so they are running the whole time—the family, children and grandchildren, us. But she doesn’t look at them. I think it’s a defensive mechanism on her part, to avoid having to try to remember who the pictures are of. I occasionally draw her attention to one, mentioning the name, but she just smiles without saying anything.

So far in writing this book I have used just my memory. That picture of the first dinner has been on my laptop for years. Now I am about to write about South Carolina, and that means going to Album Number One. More tears.

South Carolina, ah South Carolina. Isle of Palms, to be precise, a short distance east of Charleston. Our private domain, our little corner of paradise. It has faded from your mind now, my darling, but to me, well, if I close my eyes tight I can smell it.

You on the beach, you in the sea, you at the cooker, you relaxing on the sofa. I couldn’t take my eyes off you. You insisted on taking the occasional picture of me. I didn’t know my face was capable of smiling so wide, the corners of my lips reaching halfway round my head. Oh boy, was I happy.

We went to bed together, woke up together, ate together, laughed together. We were a couple. With every passing hour, I learned more about you—what you thought, what you believed, what you read, what you liked. I told you I liked big modern American novels—John Steinbeck in particular, James Jones, Herman Wouk. So did you. You said you loved history, the American Civil War, the history of the Deep South. I said I did too. I said I wasn’t religious; in fact, I found organised religion with its bizarre rituals and ridiculous rules about what you could eat and couldn’t eat, absurd and even dangerous. You agreed. At one point, as nonchalantly as possible I asked, ‘Who is your favourite composer?’ You thought for a moment. ‘I think it has to be Beethoven,’ you said. It wouldn’t have mattered if you had said Stockhausen, but you didn’t, you said Beethoven. I told you that I had listened to Beethoven endlessly in the difficult weeks before I left Moya, the Eroica Symphony in particular. You told me your favourite Beethoven was the Pastoral Symphony, but you asked me to teach you the Eroica, tell you how Beethoven had come to compose it, what it meant, what to listen out for. I thrilled to hear that. No one had ever asked me to teach them anything about art before. (I couldn’t have known just what a meeting of minds it was, given that I was to go on and write five books about Beethoven, all with Bonnie’s endless encouragement.)

And so I explored your mind. Of course, I explored you in other ways too, and you encouraged me. I had never been so happy.

We spent a day in Charleston. We had lunch in a balcony restaurant in an old antebellum building. I took pictures of you at the table. A Dutch couple at the next table couldn’t help smiling as I took picture after picture, my face beaming happiness from every pore. ‘Here,’ said the man, ‘let me take a picture of both of you. That’s what you really need.’ The picture he took shows two people totally in love, with not a care in the world.

The week soon came to an end, and if there had been no care in the world down in South Carolina, that was not the case back in Washington. I filed the occasional story, with no encouragement from London. Then, on 18th June, the space shuttle Challenger took off with a female astronaut on board. Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. It was a big story and News at Ten wanted a piece from me.

It was the sort of story I knew I excelled at. Plenty of good pictures, with a strong storyline. I put a report together, and for the last 15 seconds I overlaid a song, ‘Ride, Sally Ride’, which had been written and recorded to commemorate the event. I was pleased with my efforts.

Sadly, London was not. They took my voice off the report and gave it to a London-based reporter to re-edit and script. That was just about the most humiliating thing they could have done. I was mortified, and maybe for the first time began to understand the true import of what was happening. It seemed that I had gone past redemption. I could have gone up on that shuttle myself, become the first journalist in space, and still they would not have been satisfied.

I didn’t know what to do, but knew I had to do something. I felt aggrieved. Were my reports really that poor? Was I failing in the job quite as much as my bosses judged I was? The answers didn’t matter. They thought that, and that was all that mattered. Still I pondered what to do. But it wasn’t long before my mind was made up for me.

One afternoon the phone in our little love nest rang. It was ITN’s managing editor in London. ‘The editor wants you in his office tomorrow afternoon, 2 o’clock.’ ‘But I’ve…I’m not sure…The flights…’ ‘Two o’clock tomorrow afternoon, in his office,’ and he hung up.

I put the phone down, thought for a moment, and turned to Bon. ‘I’ve got to fly to London tonight. David Nicholas wants me in his office at 2 tomorrow afternoon. I think they may be about to sack me.’ I braced myself for I knew not quite what. At the very least, I expected dismay from her, at worst frustration, even anger, that I had allowed things to come to this, put my job on the line, our future at risk.

She smiled. ‘That’s all right,’ she said, ‘we’ll do something else.’

I remember that moment as if it were yesterday. I can hear the managing editor’s voice, remember his words and my words to you exactly, my Bonnie, and of course your response. It was a seminal moment in our fledgling relationship. The full import of it didn’t immediately sink in, but it didn’t take long. What you were saying was that for us to be together was not only more important than my job but the only thing that truly mattered.

I remember returning your smile, and feeling as if a ton weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

Memories. So wonderful when shared, so painful when not. Today is 27th April 2009. I am writing these words 26 years to the day since I collected you at Baltimore Washington airport and we began our life together. I have not mentioned this date to you for some years now, my Bonnie.

Tonight I cooked dinner, a pretty motley affair, which relied on the microwave. We sat eating together, not talking much. You said a couple of things. They made sense, but bore no relationship to what was happening. When I said the carrots tasted good, you said of course they did, you had made them specially.

Then a nice bubble bath, except that for some reason you hate it, and those little sobs as I get you ready cut into me like needles again. But once I get you out, into your nightie and into bed, you are happy. You are sleeping peacefully now as I write about our past together.

We flew to London and took our suitcases to my parents’ flat in that block in Baker Street. I walked to ITN in time for my 2 o’clock meeting with the editor. I was in a pretty grim mood, made worse by the few familiar faces I saw in the building, including the receptionist, all looking at me as if I had the plague. Word was out. So was I, or at least I was about to be. I thought better of putting my head round the newsroom door. Frankly I just wanted the axe to fall and the sooner I got out of the building, the better.

Reuters, the BBC and now ITN. All flops. Good going, John. Bon’s words were, of course, ringing in my ear, in a kind of gentle sound loop. That’s all right, we’ll do something else. It was wonderful to know I had her support, particularly since I had so little right to expect it. But the question remained: what else could I do apart from journalism? In a word, nothing. I had always wanted to be a professional musician. I wasn’t bad on the trombone, but turn professional? I hadn’t touched it for 15 years or more. I could busk in a tube station. The thought brought a wry grin to my face.

Even the editor’s secretary wouldn’t look me in the eye. ‘You can go in,’ she said, as she tidied some papers on her desk. David Nicholas was sitting behind his desk, a look of thunder on his face. I sat in the single hard chair facing him. He kept his voice low, his natural authority enhanced by the dramatic quality of his Welsh accent.

‘I don’t know what’s happened to you,’ he said, ‘but you have let me down, me and ITN. You are a disgrace. I gave you the top job because I believed in you, and you have blown it, quite simply blown it. Your reports have been appalling. The Sally Ride piece—you put music on it, for god’s sake. What on earth were you thinking about? This is a news organisation, News at Ten is the country’s premier news bulletin, it’s not light entertainment.’

I said nothing. There was nothing to say. I had messed up. But I knew I had Bonnie to go home to. That’s all right, we’ll do something else. He spoke some more. I honestly can’t remember what he said. My mind went onto a kind of autopilot, prepared to kick back in when he delivered the coup de grâce.

‘Right, this is what I have decided. I am bringing you back to London at the end of the year. You will go back on the reporters’ desk at the most junior level. It’s up to you to work your way back up again.’

I didn’t take in the words at first, but ran them rapidly through my mind again. Back at the end of the year, back on the reporters’ desk. I was dumbfounded, so much so that I actually said, ‘Aren’t you going to sack me?’ The faintest smile played on the corners of his lips, but swiftly disappeared. ‘There are those who think I should. Very senior people. But no, I am not going to sack you. You were a good reporter before you went to Washington. That’s why I gave you the job. I don’t think that has changed. Something has gone badly wrong. I know about your marriage breaking up, and that can’t have helped, but that’s not why I am keeping you on. I am doing it because I believe you have it in you to put this behind you, and I am giving you the chance to prove me right.’

I thanked him and left.

A few years ago, shortly after I had retired from ITN, I received a letter from David Nicholas asking if I would come to south London to give a talk to young people from deprived backgrounds, at an event organised by the charity of which he was President. ‘Just tell me where and when, and I’ll be there,’ I replied.

More recently, in fact only a couple of weeks after I went public about Bonnie’s condition, he phoned me. He wanted to tell me how sorry he and his wife were to hear the news, what a lovely person Bonnie was, and how obviously happy we always were. I asked him how he was. ‘Pretty good for someone who’ll be 80 next birthday’ he replied.

In June 1982, Israeli forces had invaded southern Lebanon, then in the autumn there occurred the infamous massacre in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, and a year later, in one of the bloodiest phases of the war, more than 10,000 civilians were killed.

Where was I, ace war correspondent, veteran of the Iran Islamic revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in the summer of 1983 as the Middle East burned? In Newport, Rhode Island, covering the America’s Cup—and very exciting it was. America was at risk of losing this most prestigious of all sailing trophies for the first time in over a hundred years. A British team was competing, financed by the entrepreneur Peter de Savary, along with teams from other nations, but everybody knew that the team to beat was the Australians. The rumour was that they had a secret revolutionary keel, kept literally under wraps. Every time the yacht was lifted from the water, protective screens went up first.

It was, for a reporter, a peach of a story. It had everything—drama, excitement, rivalry. I got close to the British team, so had plenty of material with which to provide reports for News at Ten. I interviewed Alan Bond, the multi-millionaire backer of the Australian team (later to go bankrupt and serve a prison sentence for fraud). I was in exactly the right place at the right time when the American skipper paid an evening visit to the Australian team the night before the final race, having already begun to drown his sorrows at the certainty of defeat the following day. And I was there, with my camera crew, when the Australians finally lifted their yacht from the water with no protective screens, revealing the worst-kept secret in sport, a winged keel.

And would you believe it, my pieces were running—as I had transmitted them by satellite to London—on News at Ten. No complimentary messages yet, but it was a start.

Bonnie was with me in Newport, which more than made up for the fact that the only place in the world I really wanted to be was southern Lebanon. I know that sounds a bit bizarre, but from the day I became a reporter all I ever wanted was to be on the biggest story in the world every day. Impossible, of course, but it’s what every general news reporter wants. The America’s Cup may have been a peach of a story, but I would much rather have been in the infinitely more dangerous Middle East, covering something that would have an impact on the history of the region. The realisation of that brought home to me just how close I had come to scuppering the job I still adored. I was a reporter at heart, it was a reporter I wanted to remain, and thanks to the editor’s continuing faith in me, albeit drastically diluted, I still had a chance.

None of these intense thoughts prevented Bonnie and me from enjoying the large jacuzzi bath in the small apartment we were staying in, and locally caught lobster for dinner.

It had to end, of course, and I worked in the Washington bureau with a team who knew I was a lame duck correspondent. The remaining months were painful. There were no more big stories on which I could demonstrate my new-found commitment, and I found myself longing for the end of the year.

It was just as well things were quiet. Bonnie and I were like talking machines. Now that we were together, finally and fully, we just wanted to learn as much about each other as we could. We talked and talked, as we had before, but this time with the warm comfortable feeling that we were together. This wasn’t snatched time into which we needed to pack as much as we could. She told me more about her family, her brothers. She said she would love me to meet her family. I’d love her dad, she said. He had mellowed a lot now, but used to be a bit of a tyrant. She described a Sunday lunch when they were all children, and her youngest brother Jon had disagreed with something their dad had said. He exploded. ‘Don’t you ever question anything I say again!’ I told Bonnie that my dad had taught my brothers and me to question everything. She loved that.

She filled me in on her background. She had done well in high school, so well that she was invited to apply for entry into one of America’s most prestigious universities, Cornell. She got in, but not in the subject of her first choice. There we found common ground. She had wanted to study the arts, particularly literature, but her dad had thought human ecology was more useful. I had wanted to study modern languages, but the only vacancy was in the social science faculty. We laughed at shared joys and frustrations.

She told me that when she had first come to the UK to marry and settle, she had got a job with the Flour Advisory Bureau on the strength of her Cornell degree. She travelled the UK, lecturing at Women’s Institutes on how to make bread. She told me it was part of the rules that she always had to wear a little hat and a two-piece suit. Sixties Britain. God, how we laughed.

That also cleared up a slight mystery. Her American accent had all but disappeared, just small traces remaining in the occasional elongated vowels. Bonnie explained that the Flour Advisory Bureau had told her that in some areas the ladies might find her accent difficult to understand. If she could anglicise it, that would be much appreciated. So she had consciously adopted a more English speaking voice. Ironically, when she went home, her family accused her of snobbishness because she had an English accent.

One evening we went to an all-Beethoven concert at the Kennedy Center. Later I said to her, ‘Do you know, one day I would really like to write the story of Beethoven’s life.’ ‘Do it,’ she said. ‘I think it’s a wonderful idea.’ I shook my head in disbelief. I still wasn’t used to the utter luxury of being with a woman who would support me in whatever I wanted to do, without qualification. It took my breath away.

We returned to London from Washington at the end of 1983. My wife and children would be moving back into the house in Henley, so Bonnie and I had nowhere to live. Don’t worry, said my mum, I will fix it, and fix it she did. I couldn’t have got a mortgage on a house, having no money whatsoever for a down payment, but I was able to rent a flat because I had a salary from ITN. Mum secured a small flat for us on the top floor of that large mansion block directly over Baker Street tube station, the same block of flats where I spent the first 10 years of my life. Ah yes, the very same block where I had surreptitiously turned up two-and-a-half years before to pay the clandestine visit to my parents.

This is hard to believe, and even harder to write. The intimacy has gone, and it is slowly killing me. There, I have said it.

The task ahead of me was not just daunting, it was well-nigh impossible. Back in London I was persona non grata, a leper, unclean. No one would make eye contact, let alone speak to me. I sat at the reporters’ desk, my head buried in a newspaper. Less than three years before, I had been not just a popular and gregarious reporter, but lauded by my peers for having secured the impossible, the Washington job. I was the toast of the newsroom. My parting gift was a reference to the fact that on my final day in the office before leaving for the States, I had been bought one drink too many by my colleagues—a t-shirt which said ‘John Suchet, Newsh at Ten’.

A couple of weeks or so after my return, there was a leaving dinner for a senior ITN executive. I arrived, sat down, and realised fairly quickly that the seats on either side of me were being left empty. No one would sit next to me. Finally a fellow reporter sat beside me, but only because she was a late arrival and there were no other places, and she didn’t exchange two words with me throughout the meal. Much later I learned that in the days following she had raised many a smile by saying her career was cursed, she had sat next to John Suchet.

Shortly after this I was summoned by the managing editor—he who had phoned me ordering me back to London to face the editor—to tie up administrative loose ends from my inglorious tenure in Washington. By now the treatment I was receiving was beginning to stir a certain amount of anger in me. Yes, I had failed, yes, I expected no hero’s return, but this was all going a bit far.

I sat opposite the managing editor, listening stony-faced as he went through a checklist of issues to do with the house which ITN rented in Washington. Moya and the boys were still over there, and arrangements had to be made to bring them back. The managing editor was a man I had known for more than 10 years, yet the way he was speaking to me, his tone of voice, was that of a headmaster addressing an errant schoolboy. Finally I decided to make a stand. I didn’t lose my temper, but I came out with a sentence I had prepared, carefully honed, and rehearsed in the bathroom mirror. I injected menace into my voice, because I knew I had a clincher that would throw him, put him on the defensive.

‘My contract in Washington is for four years. By bringing me back early, you have broken my contract.’ ‘Sue us,’ he said, without missing a beat.

I walked home with tears pricking the back of my eyes. It wasn’t just humiliation, it was total humiliation. I could take so much, I decided, but things had gone too far. I was now a senior television journalist with a wealth of experience. All right, I had fallen down on the Washington job, but I had proved in the preceding years that I was not just a capable reporter, but a pretty good one. Why else had David Nicholas given me the Washington job? And I had had enough. I would resign. Simple. Resign and get another job.

Bonnie took one look at me as I walked through the door, and said ‘I’ll fix you a drink, you look drained. What on earth has happened?’ I relayed the conversation to her, and said ‘But don’t worry, they’ve humiliated me for the last time. I am resigning. I will hand in the letter tomorrow.’

Just as I remember word for word how she said That’s all right, we’ll do something else, so I remember word for word what she said then. ‘No you won’t. You’ll go back in and you’ll show them. You’ll work your way up again, and prove them wrong.’

I could have told her my mind was made up and that was that. But I didn’t. I knew deep down she was right, but my reasoning was different to hers. She believed in me, she knew I had been a good journalist, and she didn’t want to see me throw it away. All I knew was that there was nothing else I was qualified to do.

Mind you, I came close to carrying out my threat a week or so later. Still stuck on the reporters’ desk, with no story. Neither the home news editor nor foreign news editor would assign me to any story. The only time I ever got on air was when I put my voice on some agency picture that had come in from the other side of the world—floods, a volcano, Korean riots, that sort of thing. I decided to do something about it.

I knocked on the senior news editor’s door and asked if I could have a word. I should point out that this was a chap who had joined ITN within a few months of me. We were very good friends as well as colleagues, had socialised outside the office and had worked together in Northern Ireland.

‘Look,’ I said, trying not to sound too aggressive, ‘I’m getting a bit fed up. No one will give me a story. Not home desk or foreign desk.’

He shot up from his chair, slammed his hands down on the desk, and said, ‘Listen mate. You are in disgrace. Do you hear that? In disgrace. Now get out of here and go back to the desk. You’ll get a story when you prove you know what to do with it.’

My jaw dropped. I walked—limped—back to the desk and quickly pulled a newspaper up in front of my face. I really did have tears in my eyes.

On the news they showed one of the few remaining copies of the Magna Carta, which had sold at auction for zillions. ‘God, look at that writing, how small it is,’ Bon said. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘probably written by a…a…’ I couldn’t think of the right word. Clerk? Squire?

‘Scribe,’ she said, quick as a flash. I looked at her in utter amazement. She had a satisfied smile on her face.

A while later it seemed my luck changed. I was sent to Beirut. In the middle of the night I was the only passenger on board a ferry from Limassol in Cyprus to Jounieh, a port just north of Beirut. I stood on deck in the darkness, the salty wind blowing in my face. In the distance was the red glow of a city in the grip of civil war, and I was moving slowly towards it. Most sane and rational people would have been heading as fast as they could in the opposite direction. I cannot pretend I was totally at ease, but a blast of Beethoven’s Eroica into my ears from my battered old Walkman gave me the courage I needed and fired me up. A war zone. A big story. At last, at last.

From the moment I set foot on Lebanese soil, it was as if the civil war stopped. It seemed I had brought peace to the region. I managed to get just a single report on News at Ten in two weeks, before coming home. Hardly my fault that I had not been given the chance to prove myself, but galling nonetheless.

It wasn’t long before I was back in the Middle East. The war between Iran and Iraq was at its height, putting at risk the safe passage of oil down the Gulf, out into the Arabian Sea, and on to the Western world. At the southern end of the Gulf lay the narrow Strait of Hormuz. It was vital that this stretch of water be kept open, and that task fell to Oman. It just so happened the Sultan of Oman was a graduate of Sandhurst, a great Anglophile, and more than happy to have British forces on site to patrol the waters.

ITN dispatched me to cover this British effort for News at Ten. I didn’t know why it seemed as if I was slowly being brought out of the wilderness, what with Beirut and now this, and I didn’t stop to ask. Simple, I hear you say. They were giving you another chance, another opportunity to prove yourself. Television news should work like that, but usually doesn’t. Much more likely that the reporter, or reporters, they wanted to send were unavailable for some reason, and yours truly was not.

Whatever the reason, I hooked up with a camera crew and went. I was back in my element: a strong picture story unfolding before me, with British forces naturally keen to get as much favourable coverage as they could, therefore being highly co-operative. I got several reports onto News at Ten, and was told on my return they were highly thought of.

More. On 14th June 1985 a TWA passenger plane was hijacked en route from Athens to Rome. With a primed grenade held to his head, the captain defied Beirut control tower and landed. Over the next three days, the plane made four flights between Beirut and Algiers. It wasn’t long before they began to carry out their threat to kill passengers. I was sent to cover the Algiers end. There I got close to a senior TWA executive, who, when the drama appeared to be approaching its end, flew my camera crew and me in his executive jet to Athens, allowing us to satellite exclusive coverage to London. More praise.

And then, roll of drums, fanfare, on 7th July 1985 Boris Becker became the youngest-ever player to win the Wimbledon men’s title. ‘He’s flying back to Monte Carlo tomorrow. It’s where he trains. Get on the plane with him,’ the foreign editor said to me. She didn’t need to say it twice, I can tell you.

Despite a thousand media scrumming, pushing, shoving, bribing, to get on that plane, I made it with my camera crew. In Monte Carlo his manager made it clear that there were to be no interviews. I hung around, and got good pictures of Boris, an interview with his manager, and plenty of colour. I satellited my report for News at Ten. The foreign news editor made a point of telling me my piece was well received, I had made the story mine, and so I would be sent in a fortnight’s time to Becker’s home town of Leimen, near Heidelberg, to cover his triumphant return. I duly went, covered the civic reception, filmed young boys on the tennis courts hoping one day to emulate their hero. Becker himself walked out onto the balcony of the town hall, to cheers from the throng below. Again my report was lauded.

Wonder of wonders, people in the newsroom were beginning to talk to me again. I was being treated almost normally. The foreign editor, who had chanced her arm by dispatching me to the Middle East, and to cover Becker, even took me aside to say things were going well for me.

But the rehabilitation was not yet quite as complete as I thought.

In London we live in a long narrow apartment, with a corridor that runs the length of it, rooms off to the side. Bon walks up and down this corridor, up and down, day after day. Unless I sit in front of the telly, of course, in which case she comes and sits with me. But if I am at the computer, as I am now, up and down, up and down.

A strange development. Uncanny as it may sound, but if I need to go into the bedroom, to hang something up, say, she is there ahead of me, just a few paces ahead of exactly where I want to be. If I need to go into the kitchen, there she is, just a few paces ahead of exactly where I want to be. Whatever room I am heading for, there she is, exactly a few paces ahead of me.

It made me smile to begin with, now it just makes me cross. This morning was pressured. I needed to wash loads of laundry—her clothes, my clothes, towels, bathroom mat, etc. I was under pressure. I needed to get it done, because I also needed to do some food shopping. Up and down, up and down, always just a few paces ahead of exactly where I needed to be.

I brought some dry T-shirts into the bedroom to hang up, needed to get to the narrow gap between the bed and the cupboards, and yes, bingo, there she was, exactly two paces ahead of me in the narrow gap. I lost it. I walked aggressively on, knocking her out of the way. Yes, you are gasping with horror. So am I, at writing it. But I did it. I had had enough; end of tether time. She cried out and staggered. I opened the cupboard door and hung up the shirts. I pushed past her again. She collapsed on the bed, horror on her face.

I walked back down the corridor, cursing myself out loud. Why, John, why? Why did you do that? Why?

She forgot pretty quickly, which is a hallmark of this insidious disease. I too calmed down. We had lunch, and in the afternoon watched snooker on the box. She hasn’t the slightest idea of what is happening on the green baize, but as long as I am happy watching, she is happy too.

At the end of 1985, President Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines called a snap presidential election for March 1986. I’ll rephrase that. A nasty corrupt little dictator, kept in power by American backing, called a presidential election in the Philippines that he knew he could rig. To make sure that there would be no surprises, he had taken the sensible precaution of having the opposition leader assassinated. As you do. Interesting story, but interesting enough for the world’s media to decide to cover it? No.

But guess what happened then? The assassinated politician’s widow announced she would run in her husband’s place. Slightly more interesting, but still not quite up there. The Philippines were a long way away, nothing that happened there would have any impact on Britain. However, in the weeks that followed it became clear that the widow’s campaign was not some folly, but was attracting growing support, both nationally and internationally. It was becoming front-page news in the British papers.

You didn’t need to be an ace journalist to realise this was a good story. But from ITN’s point of view it was marginal. A long way away, expensive to cover, when we could easily take in video coverage from local television and the agencies, and voice it in London. I had always adopted a policy of not putting myself forward for a story. I didn’t hang around the home and foreign desks, pleading to be sent away. If they want me, let them come to me—a policy that had certainly not helped my cause in the months following my return from Washington.

Since things had been going rather better for me of late, maybe now was the time to be just a little more assertive. I did it on the spur of the moment. In the corridor between the newsroom and the toilets I happened to pass the senior foreign editor—she who had taken me aside to compliment me. ‘Er,’ I said, trying not to sound too hesitant, ‘the, er, Philippines, good story, I was just wondering, if, er, I don’t know if you are going to send, but, er, if you did, I would certainly like to, er…’

She cut me short. ‘We are not sending. Anyway even if we did, we wouldn’t send you.’

If she had punched me in the solar plexus, it would have caused less pain. Damn damn damn, why did I ever ask? I walked back into the newsroom, jaw set, pretending the encounter had never happened.

In television news, things happen more often by accident than by design. The same foreign editor, a few days later, said to me, ‘Hope you’ve been following the Philippines story. We want you to go in a couple of days.’ What had made her change her mind? Was the reporter she had in mind unavailable? I soon put all speculation out of my mind. I was going, that was all that mattered.

It truly was an extraordinary story. Corazon Aquino, in her own words a ‘plain housewife’, was having an impact not just in her own country but around the world. She was in every newspaper, on every television bulletin, as first hundreds, then thousands, then millions of Filipinos poured out onto the streets of Manila, all dressed in yellow—the colour of her party—and all holding up the thumb and forefinger of their right hand, making an L: Laban, or Freedom.

Marcos did what dictators do. He ordered the tanks onto the streets to open fire. But the world’s television cameras were everywhere. The army dared not. This was to be repeated with much more global impact less than four years later in Berlin and across central Europe, then in Moscow itself. People revolt against dictatorship? No problem, send in the tanks and open fire. But you can’t do that when there are cameras present. Still no problem. Censor the coverage, control it. But with satellite technology you can’t. The dictatorships of the world were learning a brutal lesson, which would bring their tyrannies to an end. Only in one country could some sort of control be exerted. Thousands died in Tiananmen Square in Beijing when the tanks opened fire. The Chinese put an instant lid on it, but even they could not stop news of the massacre leaking out. The world was changing, and my profession was at the forefront of it. It makes me proud today to think that television news played a part in the downfall of Communism.

And in the downfall of dictator Marcos. He won the election of course, with 99.9999999% of the vote. But Cory (the name by which the world had come to know her) was not giving up. On the same day, in two different parts of Manila, Cory and Marcos were both sworn in as President. For 24 hours, the Philippines had two presidents. But then the Americans told Marcos he was finished, and flew him and his flamboyant wife Imelda out of Manila by helicopter. As the rotor blades whirred overhead, the people stormed the palace and uncovered riches beyond their dreams, not to mention Imelda’s 2000 pairs of shoes.

(I can personally vouchsafe for Imelda’s ownership of one of the biggest diamond rings I have ever seen. Covering an election rally, we were filming the appalling president and his wife on a small stage that had been erected in a town square. At the end of his speech, they advanced to the front of the stage to extend their hands down to the crowd. I saw Imelda deftly remove the ring from her finger and slip it into her pocket before extending her hands.)

Night after night, I was hitting News at Ten with lengthy reports. The world watched the Philippines, fascinated and fixated. Praise was coming back to me from London day after day. I was truly back in my element, doing what I did best. The day after Marcos flew into exile, the city erupted with joy. That, for a journalist, was easy to cover. But what do you do the day after the day the city erupts? You can hardly film it erupting again. Well, that’s what the BBC reporter did, but it is not what I did.

I got the one and only scoop of my career. I secured a one-to-one interview with President Corazon Aquino. It led News at Ten. How did I achieve this stunning result? By hard work, graft, working the telephones, milking my contacts, journalistic instinct? No. By pure good luck. The right cameraman, the right place, the right time, and a lot of luck. Later, back in London, I was telling a senior colleague just how lucky I had been, and he said, ‘Funny how the harder you work, the luckier you get.’ I accepted the compliment graciously, but really you don’t know just how lucky I had got. Nor am I going to tell you. I shall just allow you to bask in my total rehabilitation as an ITN reporter.

When finally the story was over, the Philippines had its new housewife president, and I arrived home. I opened the front door of the flat and Bonnie was there, waiting for me. She had a huge smile on her face. I expected some sort of questioning, the sort any wife might want to ask of a husband who had just spent several weeks in one of the more exotic countries in the world, where all sorts of sensual delights were readily available. Did she interrogate me? No. She said nothing, took my hand, and led me straight into the bedroom.

I was awarded the Royal Television Society’s Journalist of the Year accolade for my Philippines coverage. The citation talked of my ‘ability to bring clarity to confused situations’. I mention that for two reasons. My grandfather, the press photographer, gave me a birthday card when I was 10, showing a boy playing a trumpet. Inside it said, ‘Blow your own trumpet, because if you don’t nobody is going to blow it for you.’

The second reason is just slightly more relevant. Had it not been for Bonnie, her wise words, her encouragement, her belief, her support, her everything, not only would there have been no RTS gong, there would have been no career. Left to make my own decision, I would have blown my career clean out of the water (again).