Читать книгу Out of the Frying Pan: Scenes from My Life - Keith Floyd - Страница 7

Now I shall tell you about my job at the Bristol Evening Post. This will be a short chapter because I wasn’t there very long! Joining the paper was a really exciting event. It was an unusual one because in those days the only way you could become a journalist was to do an apprenticeship on a weekly newspaper like the Somerset County Gazette. There you learnt to type, to do shorthand (it was compulsory) and you wrote the Births, Marriages and Deaths column or the Townsmen’s Guild column, or listed the results of the Agricultural Show, and you had to do that for about two or three years before you had a chance to get onto a daily newspaper. But I was a precocious little sod and without having done any of these I managed to get my job on the Bristol Evening Post which, curiously enough, was located in the centre of Bristol in Silver Street: I was brought up in Silver Street in Wiveliscombe, which I took to be a good omen. In the sixties the typesetting for all newspapers was done with lead and there was a massive sense of excitement as the editions came out, with the compositors working desperately against the clock to bring out each edition, the smell of ink and hot metal and a wonderful hum of huge drums with paper whirling round and all the vans queued up outside, loading up really fast. At that time Bristol had another daily evening newspaper called the Bristol Evening World and they were in serious rivalry to be first with the best stories, to get the exclusives and to beat the other in the race to be out onto the streets.

My first day, I turned up, and I really can’t describe the atmosphere of the newsroom. I suppose there were thirty or forty people all sitting at desks with an amazing racket of manual typewriters being tapped so fast (usually with only two or three fingers) and copy boys (those were the boys who, when the journalist had finished typing his piece and shouted ‘Boy!’ would run over and take the sheet of paper downstairs to where the subeditors were) rushing around. The News Editor was a huge man called Gordon Farnsworth, a North Country man, shouting out instructions and demanding stories. The atmosphere was electric, absolutely electric. I just sat there, bemused, all day, because nobody spoke to you on your first day. Although Gordon Farnsworth did speak to me. He said, ‘So you’re another bloody student…I’m fed up with students, why can’t I have some journalists?’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you mean, what are you talking about?’ He said, ‘Well the Editor keeps taking on these bloody students,’ and it was true because that day three other people of my age had joined the paper with no journalistic experience whatsoever. But the difference between them and me was that they had got temporary jobs because they were going to university and Gordon thought I was the same sort. I said, ‘No, I’m here to learn to be a journalist, that’s what I want to be.’ ‘Huh, we’ll see,’ he said. Terrifying, the first day was absolutely terrifying.

They gave me my own desk and typewriter, an Olivetti Letra 22, and after a couple of days of being shy in the canteen and not knowing what to do I was sent out on my first story. I was absolutely petrified! I had to go to cover an inquest of a man who had drowned in the docks. I thought, ‘Oh, good, thank you. What do I do?’ So I asked another journalist what I should do. ‘Inquests are very simple,’ he said. ‘I’ll write it for you.’ He wrote the outline, leaving only the gaps to be filled in with the facts. He said, ‘You write: “Today at Yate Coroner’s Court a verdict of …was returned on…” and you either fill in death by suicide or death by misadventure or whatever and so on.’ So off I toddled and filled in the gaps. I was quite proud and I couldn’t wait to see the paper…of course it didn’t say ‘by Keith Floyd’ but I took it home to my mum and said, ‘I wrote that!’

After a couple of weeks of really just hanging around and not doing very much at all I was put onto what they called the Duty Desk. You were given a list of numbers of the Police, the Ambulance Service, the hospitals, all of whom had a press helpline. You would ring them up every hour and say, ‘Hello, this is the Evening Post, has anything happened?’ and they would say, ‘Well, there was a crash at Cribbs Causeway,’ or, A woman was found floating in the docks, apparently having committed suicide,’ or ‘There’s been a murder on Bristol Downs,’ or something like that. With that information I would go to the News Editor and if it was an insignificant story he might give it to me to write, or if it was an important story he could give it to a senior reporter to write.

Sometimes I would be allowed to go with the senior reporter to see what he did and how he did it, which was really exciting. I remember from one of the helplines I discovered that the steelworks were on strike. The Editor told me to ring up and find out what was going on, so I phoned up the union representative and said, This is the Evening Post, can you tell me what is going on?’ and he said, ‘Well because we haven’t been paid properly we’re going on strike and this will disrupt things for as long as it takes.’ I reported this verbally to the News Editor, who said, ‘Well that’s OK, you can write that story.’ All these stories start with the word ‘today’. Today 600 steelworkers went on strike for better working conditions. A spokesman said…’ (you always have a spokesman and never a name and if you haven’t got a spokesman you invent one).

Digressing a bit, I remember one occasion I was sent out to the scene of a stabbing. I didn’t know what you had to do at the scene of a stabbing, there was nothing there. So I went back to my News Editor and said, ‘Well I went there but what do I do now?’ He said, ‘Well, who did you speak to?’ I said, ‘Nobody.’ He said, ‘Yes you did, you spoke to a passer by.’ I said, ‘No I didn’t.’ He said, ‘Yes you did, I’m telling you, you spoke to a passer by who said…’

Anyway, I’m typing out my story about the steel strike slowly and painfully, although I have already improved quite a lot at the old two-finger typing over six or seven weeks, when I’m aware that the words I’m typing are being spoken by somebody. I look up and there is a senior reporter behind me reading out exactly what I’m typing, down a phone. This was one of Bristol’s celebrated journalist characters called Joe Gallagher and he was the Chief Crime Writer for the Bristol Evening Post and also what’s called a ‘stringer’ or a correspondent for the London Evening Standard or the Daily Express, so whatever stories he sold to them he got a fee from them. He was dictating my story and was going to get paid for it. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘I’ve sold it to the Standard, dear boy, you ought to get into that.’ ‘Well how do I do that?’ I asked. ‘You speak to me because I handle these things.’

So Joe and I became quite good friends. He was a small, bespectacled, pugnacious, slightly balding Irishman who always wore flamboyant waistcoats and a trilby hat. I have no idea how old he would have been because I was seventeen and everybody was very old to me. Over time I also got to know his great buddy, a Yorkshireman who was the Sports Editor, Bob Cooper. Joe and Bob were inseparable and were up to all sorts of scams, really dyed-in-the-wool ex-Fleet Street professionals of the old school. They made themselves an absolute fortune on the paper because they invented a game called ‘Spot the Ball’. This shows a photograph of a man kicking a football and you have to mark with a cross on the picture where you think the thing was. People had to send in, I can’t remember, two shillings or something like that to have a go and win fifty or a hundred pounds. This thing really took off and the management of the paper was totally unconcerned and hadn’t seen it as anything more than a bit of fun, completely unaware that Joe and Bob were making an absolute fortune. They were doing nothing illegal or wrong, it’s just that it was their business and the paper let them print it because they thought it was good for the readers. They didn’t realise that these blokes suddenly became very, very rich. Once the paper saw how rich they had become they thought, ‘Hold on a minute, we want to be having some of this.’ As far as I know they were obliged to buy out Joe and Bob, who both promptly retired. Joe, with all this money, went off to Portugal to buy a restaurant. But that’s another story.

By now I was quite well integrated in the paper and even Farnsworth was taking me a bit more seriously and giving me more jobs. I was enjoying it very much. I soon realised we also had a morning paper called the Western Daily Press. When I joined the Evening Post, the Western Daily Press still had advertisements on the front page like The Times. Suddenly like a whirlwind a former Daily Express man came down to take over the paper and revolutionise it (it was a broadsheet paper in those days) and turn it into a campaigning, go-getting, sleaze-busting, hot, bright, brand-new newspaper. This, of course, shocked all the old hands who had been working on it for years because it really was a genteel paper that never looked for trouble and simply reported nice news. This was exciting to me because Eric Price, who had come to take over the Western Daily Press, had actually worked under the great editor Arthur Christiansen, so to me he was a hero. But he was like a film star newspaper editor: he didn’t actually have an eyeshield but I swear to God he had one really. He would march up and down with his waistcoat undone, shouting, ‘What the hell’s going on! Where’s my story, I need this now! Get off your arses!’ He was like a god to me and I contrived to meet him in the pub that we used to go to across the road in between editions (called the White Hart, I think). ‘Who are you, lad?’ he asked. ‘I’m Floyd, sir.’ I plucked up courage and asked, ‘Would it be OK if I came in and worked at night?’ because all the morning papers worked in the night. He said, ‘Yes you can.’ There was a lovely old-fashioned News Editor then on the Western Daily Press called Norman Rich, a gentle old man who was approaching retirement. He was such a gentleman that he wouldn’t say he hated Eric Price and the new paper. He would say he was ‘disappointed by the change and was looking forward to retiring’ because this wasn’t his style of journalism at all. So after I finished at 5.30, when the last edition of the Evening Post went out, I would go to the pub for a couple of hours and then come back and hang around the reporters’ room, unpaid because I enjoyed it so much, at night. In between I would talk to Norman when there wasn’t much to do and he would tell me tales of the old days of journalism. I learnt a huge amount from this kindly man and also from the Country Editor of the Western Daily Press, whose name, sadly, I forget. He too was on the verge of retirement and hated the way things were going. But seeing that I was excited about the way the paper was headed, clearly getting on very well with Eric Price, who was an authoritarian, albeit gifted, editor, known to hire and fire at the drop of a hat, he said, ‘I can see you’re doing very well here, lad, but I want to tell you something. As you climb up the ladder be careful who you tread on because you never know who you may meet on the way down.’ I have never forgotten that.

Anyway, after a while on the daytime paper covering little stories such as charily fund-raising events or the presentation of a wheelchair or a guide dog, the evenings were eminently more exciting. One night Eric said, ‘Right, there are prostitutes living in normal houses down in St Paul’s. Go down and see how many you can find and then we’ll expose them.’ I would go on vice patrol and all sorts of exciting things like that. It was often after midnight before I finished on the paper and I would go to this eccentric coffee bar which was full of strange, bearded, artistic, intellectual beatniks and hang out in there until about two in the morning. Then from virtually the city centre of Bristol I would walk five miles home every night because I never had enough money for a taxi. My pay at the time was £4 7s 6d a week. I spent most of it on beer in the interludes between press running and on bus fares in the mornings and I gave my mother a pound a week for my lodging, paid for my lunches and went out one night a week for a bowl of spaghetti bolognese and six half pints of lager and ten Nelson cigarettes, and walked home again! But what I was doing, of course, although I didn’t realise it at the time, was burning the candle at both ends. It wasn’t doing me a lot of good and I was extremely tired. I was unaware of my tiredness, I was on a roll and thought the whole thing extremely exciting.

Little by little I go to know some of the other journalists and quite a lot of them took me under their wing. They were all a bloody nice bunch but there were a couple that I just stood in awe of. One of these sat at the back of the reporters’ room in a black leather jacket, black shirt and dark glasses and smoked Gauloises. Farnsworth hated him. This bloke didn’t write any news at all. The Editor had decreed that the Western Daily Press would have an arts page. This of course was anathema to Gordon, who thought newspapers should be full of news, not art; and not only that, it wasn’t even his paper – it was the Western Daily Press so this bloke was responsible to Eric Price, but much to Gordon Farnsworth’s annoyance he would work in the office during the Evening Post’s hours (it was the same newsroom for both papers). He and a man called Anthony Smith used to write a brilliantly funny column in the Western Daily Press called ‘Brennus and Berlinus’. The Western Daily Press was the most unlikely venue for this incredibly funny, witty, highly intelligent comedy piece (they would also cover what was on at the theatre etc.). ‘Brennus and Berlinus’ had to be, as far as I am concerned, the forerunner or the seeds of a very famous play called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead because this man with whom I played cricket, with his long black hair, hooked nose, scraggy face, black jacket, dark glasses and Gauloises was none other than Tom Stoppard!

In, I think, the typesetting department was someone else who became outrageously famous. He was called Charles Wood and he wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade. There was another man on the paper lurking around there called Derek Robinson who wrote, amongst other things, The C’rec’ Way to Speak Bris’l, which was a parody on the way they speak in Bristol, and The Goshawk Squadron, and other wonderful books about the First World War. Then there was a man who wrote A Day in the Life of Joe Egg, a play about a paraplegic boy. The whole place was swarming with these people who were already brilliant but we didn’t know they were going to be as famous as they became.

The best piece I ever wrote was under the guidance of the Assistant News Editor, Jack Powell, a lovely, gentle chap and a very experienced journalist. They sent me off to do a story on Cyril Fletcher opening the new gas showroom in Queen’s Road in Bristol. I came back and I said, Today[!] comedian Cyril Fletcher, sporting a carnation and a red bow tie, opened the new Gas Board showroom in [wherever it was]’. Jack said, ‘No he didn’t. I tell you what he did: “Today comedian Cyril Fletcher, dashingly dressed in a red bow tie and sporting a carnation, quipping merrily, opened Mr Therm’s new home in Queen’s Road, Clifton, Bristol.” It’s the way of putting it. Mr Therm’s new home, not the gas showroom.’ Gordon Farnsworth said, ‘That’s jolly well done,’ but I didn’t tell him that it was actually Jack who told me how to write it. Through that I learnt to look at words in a different way but still get the same information from them.

So I was on a crest but I felt that Gordon Farnsworth was waiting for me to fall in some way. I don’t think he approved of the fact that I went to the pub quite so frequently. I don’t think he approved of the idea that I hung out with the older, experienced senior reporters and I think he was suspicious of my relationship with the Editor. And the fall did come. One of the important things to remember about the Bristol Evening Post was that Gordon Farnsworth was forever saying, This is a family newspaper,’ and every bit of local news had to be included. In fact, when the paper was founded it was created by the citizens of Bristol. Under the banner of the Bristol Evening Post it said: The paper that all Bristol asked for and helped to create’. They recognised that the citizens of Bristol felt they had a stake in the paper. Absolutely anything that went on in Bristol, the paper had to be there.

Anyhow, I was sent one day to a hotel to cover a reception at which the Rotary Club were to present a load of wheelchairs from money they had raised for disabled people. Apparently there was to be a lunch as well, and all I had to do was list the names of the important people who had made donations and who the recipients were, and go back and write a very simple story. Once again the story would start ‘Today…’ as all stories did: Today, Mrs George McWhatters, wife of the chairman of Harvey’s Wine Merchants, presented three wheelchairs to so and so.’ I went back, filed my story and thought no more about it, until a couple of days later Gordon Farnsworth came up to me, screaming with rage. ‘You’re a disgrace, an absolute bloody disgrace. I’ve had Mrs McWhatters on the phone. They said you went to the reception, you had lunch and you had their wine and you didn’t even bother to write the story.’ I said, ‘I didn’t have lunch, I didn’t know I could have lunch, and I did write the story.’ ‘No you didn’t! You are fired?’ And he went off to see the Editor to complain about me and that was it!

I thought, ‘No, this isn’t fair and it isn’t actually the case at all. I did write the story but where it’s gone I don’t know.’ So I went down to the sub-editors’ department and spoke to Ernie Avery. He said yes, he’d seen the story but he’d spiked it because he didn’t feel it was very interesting and he didn’t have room for it. So I went to the Editor and said, ‘Look, this is the case, I didn’t not write the story, I’ve been incorrectly dismissed and this isn’t at all fair.’ So anyway Gordon, a big, brash Yorkshireman who always found it very hard to be criticised or to be wrong, actually did a very kind thing and took me out for fish and chips and a pot of tea! He said, ‘I’m sorry about that, lad,’ in his lovely Yorkshire accent. ‘Sorry about that, but you know, you’ve got to take it a bit easier. You’re working in the day and at night, and quite frankly I think you’re overdoing it.’ I didn’t think I was overdoing it at all. I was in a trance, I so loved working there that I was drugged by the whole thing – by the noise of the presses, by the smell of the ink and the hot metal, by the clatter of the typewriters, by the shouting of the reporters, by the ringing of the telephones, by the hustle and the bustle and the whole thing.

Two weeks after the first complaint Gordon said I could go to the Bath and West Show, a big agricultural show in the West Country, which in those days was held in a place called Ashton Park, within Bristol itself. I believe it now has a permanent home somewhere near Shepton Mallet. My job was simply to collect the results of best heifer, best flower arrangement, and all that sort of thing – a pretty easy job – and then phone the results back to the office. There was a press tent, which was great fun, and it was there that I discovered Tuborg lager. I evidently must have had quite a few, because I recall being woken up by the huge size twelve boot of Gordon Farnsworth, who had made just one concession to the hot weather. He had taken off his jacket but was still wearing his tightly buttoned waistcoat, collar and tie. He sat down beside me and said, ‘Come on, lad, you can’t be falling asleep on duty.’ We got chatting and he asked me what my hobbies were. I explained to him that I was in the process of restoring a 1934 or 1935 Austin 7 Saloon which I had bought for £5. Every Sunday, on my day off, I would fiddle with it in some way or another. I would regrind the valves or put in new bushes in the steering department (I can’t remember any of the technicalities of it now, it was nearly forty years ago). I was quite obsessed by this car, and there I was sitting on the grass at Ashton Park, telling Gordon this story.

A few days later, back in the office, he said to me, ‘How would you like to write a feature about your hobby?’ I was so excited and I wrote all about it, and at the age of seventeen I had a full-page feature with a byline ‘by Keith Floyd’ in the Bristol Evening Post. Things got better and better and I was then given a commission, a job to go to Stratford-upon-Avon, where a group of enthusiasts and volunteers were cleaning out and restoring the Stratford-upon-Avon canal. I started, again, inventing lines, things like ‘Mr Smith, the Director of Operations, said, “We’ll get this canal open or we’ll die in the attempt,” ’ which of course, he didn’t say at all, but it sounded better than what he had really said. I thought it was quite good journalism but they phoned to complain. I couldn’t understand that. All I was trying to do was convey their enthusiasm, but there I was, in trouble yet again! The paper did print the story, however, and it was my second byline in a month. People began to look at me rather suspiciously, wondering how I was apparently succeeding so well against the odds. Certainly the other young, temporary reporters who were just waiting to go to university were not getting anything like the breaks I was getting but that was really because, I think, although Gordon was a gruff old fucker, he really was on my side, and he wouldn’t give these boys jobs because he didn’t feel that they were at all serious. He felt that they were just killing time before university, which was something he did not approve of. I wasn’t paid any extra for these stories – they all came within my weekly salary.

Then I was given, for reasons I can’t understand, a weekly column called Youth Notes, and I was bylined for it. It was really a resume of what the various youth clubs were doing in Bristol – for example who had won the National Speaking Championships. It was a kind of diary page, and for me at the age of seventeen it was incredibly prestigious. It’s important to remember, while I’m crowing about being so famous at the age of seventeen, that this was around 1962, when teenagers had no roles. People in positions of power were older – much older than they would be today. Today, in the year 2000, yes it’s quite normal for young people to be at the top of the tree, but it absolutely wasn’t the case then, so in many ways I was exceptional.

But as I’ve tried to indicate, I was in a complete trance. At night after work I was going to a coffee bar with university students and other people older than myself and I was talking to them about Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, and it was a completely bizarre and unreal situation. I wasn’t, and I didn’t even know about it, but many of them were smoking pot. At the time I was blissfully naive about all of that, I was just drinking my coffee and sitting on the edge, enthralled by the way these people spoke, the books and the music they discussed.

In fact I was in such a trance, it was only when, something like thirty years later, to my amazement I was accosted in Dublin by Michael Aspel and kidnapped onto ‘This Is Your Life’ that I discovered anything about these people. Before the guests come on to This Is Your Life’ you hear their voices and they say something which is designed to jog your memory of some past event. I heard this voice saying, ‘Floydsie, you still owe me for a suit!’ I sat there like a stoat under a snake, or vice versa. Who the fuck was that? Then I remembered. It was Jeremy Bryan, a brilliant reporter from the Bristol Evening Post, with whom one night I had set off to cover a fire or a plane crash or some disaster. In fact, it wasn’t even that. We were all in the pub, the White Hart, and as far as we were concerned, work was over and we had probably had a few too many. The phone rang in the pub and the landlord called Jeremy over and said, ‘You’ve had a phone call and you’ve got to go.’ ‘I want to come too!’ I shouted. ‘In fact, I’ll take you there, because I’ve got a motor scooter.’ Well, we crashed. Wrecked Jeremy’s suit, never did get to the disaster, and spent the whole night in the Bristol Royal Infirmary, not seriously wounded in any way, just with scratches and bruises.

Another great This Is Your Life’ surprise that night involved a wonderful Evening Post journalist called Roger Bennett, who, a little bit like the Country Editor of the Western Daily Press, had always impressed upon me the importance of acknowledging people as you travel through life. Indeed many years after the time we are talking about now, Roger Bennett went on to become a very successful broadcaster at the BBC. Whenever I was in town he would always ring me up and ask me to go onto his programme and I always would. He said to me one day, There are some people we both know who are now very famous (much more famous than me) who don’t have the time to come onto the programme.’ Apart from being a brilliant journalist and broadcaster he was also a superb jazz musician. When I was first on the paper at the age of sixteen, I spent many nights listening to Roger playing with the Blue Notes Jazz Band down at the Old Duke or wherever they were performing in Bristol (a great jazz city). I didn’t know this at the time, but later I was to work for Acker Bilk and get to know all the jazz musicians, and I used to babysit for Roger. In fact, as I write this book roughly in 1999 (it might be the year 2000 when I finish, I’m not too sure) it was only a couple of years ago that Roger retired from broadcasting, and I was very pleased to be invited on to a special programme for him to pay a tribute.

So many people like this came from Evening Post days, because – yes – it was a family paper but it was also a family in its own right. The people were very concerned and caring people and I owe that paper so much.

Another crisis took place shortly after this. It was decided that I was overdoing things and I was called into the Editor’s office and told that it would be better if I worked on one of their weekly newspapers, in this case the Bristol Observer. I was gutted by that, but it’s what I should have done at the very beginning really. I had gone in too fast, too high and too quick, and, as they told me, I was only there half the time (although I was there all the time). I was actually working from eight in the morning to one the next morning, nearly every day of the week. I thought I was physically and mentally there, but I was only seventeen years old and I suppose I was dropping a few clangers from time to time.

So they put me onto the weekly paper. I still had my weekly Youth Notes column. I had to go round to Alverston and I think somewhere called Pucklechurch and all the suburbs and villages of the surrounding area of Bristol to see the vicar to find out what had happened that week, and to the Townsmen’s Guild and the local planning committee. I was bored out of my brains. I really felt totally put down, although in retrospect it was a good thing. It enabled me to learn how to put a story together, under less pressure than I had been before. But I felt thoroughly pissed off. I was attached to a really worthy senior reporter who never came up with anything sensational but had his ear to the community all the time and understood what was going on. He taught me how to get responses from people because he was gentle and casual about what he said and personable in the way that he did it. He had the confidence of people and got all the stories. But I – and bearing in mind that at one or two o’clock in the morning I’m with all these intellectuals – am feeling very unworthy as a cub reporter on a weekly newspaper and I’ve got a really split personality and a fair degree of resentment.

So I went to see the Editor, Richard Hawkins, to express my dissatisfaction and unhappiness with this position. He said, ‘Well you’ve only got yourself to blame really, I mean you burnt yourself out by doing too much and anyway it’s where you should have been in the beginning, it’s where you should have started. But,’ he said, ‘If you don’t really like that, and I do know you have some good points [he was a very sarcastic man, Richard Hawkins], I need a personal assistant and you can be that personal assistant if you want.’ He had a secretary anyway and I didn’t really know what it meant being a personal assistant. But he did also say that he would put my salary up to £7 a week. That was a hike from £4 7s 6d up to £7 – absolutely massive! But then, as now, I was a shopaholic, a spendthrift and never able to hold onto money, ever! So what seemed to be almost a hundred per cent increase in salary did not result in there being any more pennies in my pocket on Monday morning than there were at the previous salary. Then, as now, I was obsessed with good shoes, silk ties, proper clothes (old fashioned they may be, old fashioned I am). In the sixties, in the week you wore a suit and on Saturday mornings a sports jacket – that was de rigueur. I always felt it was important to have a good tie, good shoes and a well-cut jacket. Even then, although I couldn’t afford it, I used to have my suits handmade. This was my mother’s fault because when she worked at a cloth factory, as I’ve already told you, she would bring home these bolts of cloth, these remnants that had a flaw in them, and she was able to get the finest West of England worsted and wool fabric for very little money. In Wiveliscombe there was a man called Mr Berry, who used to sit cross-legged on a wooden stage in the window of his house, hand-sewing suits, and even as a schoolboy I had handmade suits, because they were cheaper for my mother than anything at Weaver to Wearer, John Collier, Burton or something like that. So I had been cursed, and with my grandfather being a boot and shoe maker and repairer, I have this ridiculous fetish for handmade clothes and handmade shoes, and nothing will stop me from buying them.

However, I am now the Editor’s personal assistant. In reality I am the Editor’s servant. In board meetings, on directors’ days my job was to go to Avery’s the wine merchants, to the actual cellars, and collect the exquisite wines they wanted. I was to bring up the Beefeater gin, not Gordon’s, and the particular sherries they liked and be on hand to take notes at the whim or requirement of my Editor. This put me in a curious position, because I was only seventeen but people like Eric Price and Joe Gallagher and all the senior people reckoned I had the Editor’s ear and they would ply me with questions to find out what was going to be happening within the company or what was going to be Editor’s policy, of which I knew nothing at all. I used to say, ‘I don’t know, all I do is fetch and carry, I’m just a servant.’ They thought otherwise. So my position was bizarre. I was intellectually crucified by the brilliance of my Editor, who inter alia would ask me, ‘By the way, have you read Brideshead Revisited or Lady Chatterley’s Lover?’ I would say no, but promptly go out and buy those books or whichever he suggested. As a consequence I was able to educate myself quite well.

But equally importantly, Richard Hawkins was a gourmet: he lived for food. He would often have to have meetings with terribly famous people and I remember once having to go to London with him on what I thought was a business trip but it was to meet Peter O’Toole, who was a friend of Richard’s in those days. Although I can only say this is a rumoured story which I will go on with in a moment, I do remember when I met Peter O’Toole – and to this day he wouldn’t know who I was – whom I admire enormously but have not seen again from that day to this, in a pub in Chelsea or Kensington, he said, ‘Have you ever seen the head of a Guinness? It looks like the face of the man on the moon.’ He took a pen from his pocket and drew a face on the head of a pint of Guinness. Of course, Peter O’Toole at that time was very famous in Bristol at the Old Vic and he was also, by all accounts, a monstrous tearaway. I mean, he was Jack of all the lads! I do have an apocryphal story about him: I claim that I think, that I might possibly know, a probably totally untrue story – on the day that Peter O’Toole was appearing in Bristol Magistrates Court, alleged to have possibly been arrested for being drunk and disorderly, I happened to be in court. I didn’t think it was worth reporting so the story didn’t go any further. Just as well in view of the strict contractural obligations insisted on by the producers of his next film, Lawrence of Arabia.

Working for the Editor really was bizarre. I was attending lunches or going to the then amazingly prestigious Thornbury Castle or Hole in the Wall restaurant in Bath. You have to remember, dear reader, I am seventeen years old and it’s 1961 and the world is very, very different from today. My position was an uncomfortable one: I would scribble notes down while the Editor talked to an MP or someone and I was told to go and collect things from the car and fetch and carry. I was a fag, if you like, in the public school sense, to the head prefect. I remember my first meal at the Hole in the Wall as if it were yesterday. It was partridge stewed in white wine with cabbage and juniper berries. There was a bottle of splendid Gevrey-Chambertin and the pudding was called Chocolat St Emilion. It was mouthwatering, it was breathtaking, and it was nothing to do with the Saturday nights I spent out with my ten shillings! The fact was that we were so ignorant about cooking at that time. We never knew how to cook spaghetti. How did you get it into the saucepan? It was hard and came wrapped in blue waxed paper. We soaked it in water to make it soft, we broke it up in bits. It was a long time before I learnt that you just pushed it gently down into the boiling water so that it curled around the pan. That’s how little I knew about food at that time.

I went out probably two or three times a week with Hawkins – Mr Hawkins to me, of course, and Sir – to the White Tower in London and the Dorchester Hotel. At the age of seventeen I was eating beyond my means. Nothing has changed! Today I am eating beyond my means. It was an unholy relationship. I was too independent, too self-opinionated, too unformed, uninformed, unmoulded, but I knew that I was not somebody’s lackey. That isn’t where I was meant to be.

So, kicking my heels one night, I bought a ticket for the cinema and sat spellbound in front of the great Stanley Baker and Michael Caine movie Zulu. The following day, without a thought, with what must have been irritating self-confidence, I bounced into the recruiting office in Colston Avenue, Bristol, and volunteered myself for a short-service commission in Her Majesty’s Land Forces.