Wisbech Market Place in the 1970s

You know you're chilly when Jack Frost's fingertips are warming themselves up in your armpits and tousling your hair. The fat-bellied Franny Barnett throbbed its spitting two-stroke tank between my knees and I was off over Clough Bridge to a new life through Parson Drove, past German PoW Jack Madder's barber's hut — where he had shortened my Beatle cut so embarrassingly that I refused to go to Aunt Nell's funeral — and down Leverington Common to Wisbech, The Capital of the Fens.

 

My green corduroy jacket buttons welcomed the cold air even where they were high enough to close and my purple square-ended and fringed Sammy tie let cool-hand Frost's other fingers nip my neck.

 

My trousers rode up around my calves and flapped near the drainside. By the time I passed the Rising Sun and rounded the double bend and the drain had swapped sides in Leverington Road, I had learned the first lesson that my chattering teeth were already announcing: if I ever warmed up enough, I would need warmer clothes, a scarf, and maybe even a crash helmet.

 

I cut the engine and coasted to a halt at the bus stop on Wisbech Marketplace. I never trusted the footrest, especially if some wag decided to give the old bike a friendly push, so I wheeled it to the red brick lavatory block and leaned it up near the entrance to the Ladies'. I ran the plastic comb from my inside pocket through my fringe and headed for the bridge opposite the Corn Exchange.

 

The muddy Nene rolled on and ignored me as I hurried for Nene Quay

and the tall little red brick building that was home to The Wisbech Standard, circulation 15,000, biggest selling newspaper in town.

 

The little bell tinkled as I opened the glass-plated door, heading for the stairs. Had I realised, I would have paused and looked round for a moment.

Every day, some say, is a new beginning. For others, a new day can also be a new world.

 

I was leaving a realm of pigshit, sugarbeet, clods, strawberries, backache, spuds, graft, death and corn.

 

Ahead, after a wellington-less sticky start, lay notebooks, newsprint, deadlines, ulcers, adrenalin, excitement, infinitely more death, hot metal and booze. It would be an altidudinous learning curve to which, as my nerves grew tauter, I would strive to take like a swallow to the air — or as it turned out, like several swallows to alcohol.

 

My first morning was bewildering and alien. Roger the editor, the tall, semi-sneering nepotistic son of the previous editor, greeted me with a dominant indifference. His father was still in residence on the second floor, equipped with early stage senility and a walking stick, with which he would attempt to thrash the never existing dog that he sporadically ordered out of the corridors. He also controlled the little box on the mantelpiece in the reporters' room and occasionally an electronic hiss would indicate that he had switched from listening mode to summon one of the hacks into his intimidating sanctum. It was quite often the pretty, jaded blonde in her little skirt.

 

Roger sat in a room with a serving hatch through which Laurie Orviss the deputy editor would recline not far from Clive Frusher, who greeted me with a hello mate, and put me immediately at ease. Like many sports editors I was to meet, he seemed a little above the serious fray of journalism and his horizons were happy to halt at the white lines by the pitches of village sports fields, pub dartboards or scoreboards of multifarious complexities that kept a diligently recorded log of episodes of combative chortling and fun.

 

Laurie seemed to have a better grip on matters of news and ran the linage pool which sold stories to the Eastern Daily Press or occasionally the new Anglia television, and always took a cut from the quid or so that belonged to the reporter who took the original story in.

 

There was Dennis, the suede-toed untipped-smoking pipe-cleaner shaped nervous breakdown candidate who had some time before he challenged two local murderers in the Pondarosa coffee bar to confess all. He disappeared soon after, either to the dole queue or Peterborough Evening Telegraph, no one ever seemed sure. [There are reports that he had been a copy-taker on the Daily Express.]

 

The murderers vanished in their turn to serve 15 years for battering to death a farmer and stealing his empty safe.

 

Then there was Judy Hamey, who occasionally didn't mention horses, but not very often, and Joan Cronin, a mini-skirted smoker in knee length tasseled boots with whom I immediately fell in love, despite her lorry driver boyfriend and the fact that she always had precedence over the office bike, so that I had to walk miles.

 

On that first morning, she sweetly and closely blonde-perfumed over my shoulder and guided me on my first tapping steps on a large Imperial typewriter with its carbon-copying pieces of paper.

 

Then there was Rodney, a poshly-spoken superior type with slick hair, suit and driving gloves who had been there for a year. He was obviously aware of his superiority in every way, and drove me around the undertakers and Toc H headquarters at great speed in the little red office minivan, introducing me as the new junior who would be doing undertakers' calls in future. He showed off his motoring mastery and asked if I was thinking of learning to drive. I smiled quietly and didn't mention that at eight years old I was driving a Fergie tractor or that for several years I had driven two old poachers' bangers at night around the droves of lawless Lincolnshire.

 

He wasn't entirely from the same stock as myself — and some time after I had moved on, drove into a tree and died one tragic evening.

 

PART 2

MATCH AND DISPATCH

My first week was a struggle, but eventful. I realised that the poorest, and therefore hungriest undertaker — the one with the dignified black Bedford van — knew my mother. Although in her ex-nurse's capacity of village seer-in and seer-out of life she always swore by Peter Barnes of Murrow, she sometimes dealt with Ron Cowling, who hailed from the Horsefair.

 

There were others: Mr West, a tall, lurking Roald Dahl lookalike whose speciality was embalming some of the customers who went west, and Bailey's undertaker on Lynn Road, near the police station. Their chief coffin maker had made himself a prime box, complete with window through which he could summon help at his funeral in case he suddenly acquired resurrection. On one wet day I found him filling in a pothole in the firm's little roadway from an urn. It was, he said, a relative sent from America to be scattered in St Augustine's church.

 

But they'll never know.

 

One day he invited me to have a look at a gipsy who had been killed in a car accident.

 

You should see the mess he's in!

 

Ron Cowling often sent his regards to Mum with the request not to forget him when she was laying out a putative client. On smoky, tar-smelling coffin-making mornings I would sometimes spend half an hour crumpling up the newspaper linings to be pitch-pasted then lined with faux silk, or helping him lift the suitably contained bodies from his van into the humble garage chapel or rest. He confessed to being somewhat upset by the drowned child he had recovered from the Nene and said to be careful not to drop my end — but my Mum would have told me about that sort of thing. He became a good source of stories about tragedy during my stint at the Standard, but warned me that the paper were cheapskates and employed youngsters for a pittance then got rid of them after a six-month trial because they failed to make the grade — and because after that their wages would have to rise above £4.10shillings a week.

 

Those first journalistic months consisted of lots of walking by roadsides in the heat with melting tar being spat out by agricultural machines travelling between fields as wedding reports and obituaries were collated. Then frosty days and early morning undertakers when the hard frozen puddles threatened to smash falling bones before the warm welcome of worked coffin wood and the smell of pitch for ensuring nothing unsavoury soiled the funeral shoulders of sombre pallbearers.

 

Once a week, at the Isle of Ely College, I was the only male among girls struggling to learn Pitman's shorthand. I was not very good at it and regretted that I hadn't been allowed to learn it at school because only females were allowed to acquire what were obviously secretarial skills.

 

Pee bee tee dee chat jay ith and way

 

Pa may we all go to

 

That pen is not much good

 

The chants were the first steps to picking up Pitman's. I didn't much like college, any more than school, but I didn't mind the girls.

 

I did manage to get a feature out of one of the tutors I met in the pub after a lesson. He flew aircraft with college students and I sneaked a trip from Swanton Morley in a Morane Rallye with Taffy Rich, an ex Battle of Britain pilot. The words worked and I discovered one of the perks of the trade — doing something that would never have been possible in another job, and being paid for it, however poorly.

 

Such perks were rare, though, and most of the time, if I had an idea for a feature or found a good story, it was snidely stolen from me and given to a more senior hack. I didn't like Roger. He had the entitled air of a spoilt child and a supercilious smile that leered down from below his entitled nostrils.

 

Part 3

 

A NEW BIKE AND A HAIRCUT

On my first week I took in a story about my village primary school at Sutton St Edmund, from which I had absented myself whenever the opportunity arose. It was to be closed in six months' time, but still, £4,850 — a fair sum then — was being spent on refurbishments and installing indoor lavatories after years of having largely open-air outside ones.

 

I took some time crafting it and it was the second story on page one. People in the village were impressed, especially the landlord of The Four Horseshoes when it appeared on television. Laurie had taken a personal interest in the piece, but I did not receive any linage.

 

I lasted two months longer than usual before the Government was blamed for raising employment costs and I was axed. But not before I had learned a thing or two.

 

The bride often wore guipure lace and something else I didn't understand when they left the reception for a honeymoon at an undisclosed destination. Given their fiscal infirmity, it was often Aunt Gladys's spare room for a couple of nights between changing shifts at the canning factory and legitimising the premature honeymoon baby.

 

The Standard had forms that could be put through letterboxes or collected at the office to be filled in, but many found it easier if a reporter helped them.

 

The same was true for deaths, but even more so. I learned the questions quickly and the intro was always the same:

 

The death occurred on - or the funeral was held on . . . for . . . The last line in bold type would read: Funeral directors were . . . The bit of not so subliminal advertising would always be remembered so long as the undertaker contributed 4s 6d to the paper's grief.

 

The same streets of demise would come up often in the late Sixties. They contained the simple houses with lino floors and outside lavatories and coal fires with small sooty ranges and cloth sausages under the doors to stop the draughts.

 

It was usually the teary widow who would answer the door. I soon developed a funereal face and often, as a black joke to keep myself sane, would pass my open hand from my forehead down over my face and assume a sombre expression. It became a job description party piece.

 

Frequently, Fred would be in the curtain-drawn front room-cum funeral director's box room, surrounded by an aura of stilled time and the faint beginnings of the unmistakable scent of death.

 

Would you like to see him, he looks so peaceful? It was a happy release in the end . . .

 

And you would loiter just inside the draped door and agree that he looked much younger than his avowed last age. Often the tale would be told of how they fell in love before he went off to the trenches and their parents objected but they stuck together and their first was born soon after he came back and they were married. Yes, you would agree, as you clutched the home-made cake and sipped your tea, that the son couldn't be expected to come back all the way from Australia and everyone would understand.

 

But people were always unpredictable in the company of death. The most timid of the bereaved could turn into vengeful monsters and the most violent assassins could become helpless puppies.

 

So the first weeks of a young reporter gained their legs. The office bicycle could only be used if the job was three and a half miles away. Otherwise, use your own transport at your own expense, or walk.

 

I walked.

 

Soon after I encountered my first cooling journeys to work, I acquired a blue and white crash helmet, scarf and waterproof leggings and an old RAF Irvin flying jacket from Bullen's Army and Navy store in town.

 

Sometimes the old Francis Barnett would be charged into life and I would jump on its torn seat and gun the blue-fumed 200cc engine after the fire engines, which invariably ended up at a chimney blaze or straw stack. 

 

Occasionally I would get lucky and catch up with a real hot story. But the excitement of a good one in the paper would be tempered at the end of the week when each reporter's column inches were measured up. There, obituary column quantity counted more than the thrill of a short page lead. Even if the fire really had been started, as the firemen always attested, by a rat chewing matches.

 

I received a humiliation about halfway through my time at the Standard, which seemed to give Roger quiet satisfaction. For reasons I forget, I was sent to interview Wisbech town council's clerk. He was an officious little man, hiding in a suit who obviously felt superior, although to who or what, I couldn't imagine. I sensed our mutual dislike during our conversation and went back to the office well aware that things had not gone well.

 

As I reached the top of the stairs, Roger's sarcastic smile was waiting. He'd had a phone call from Mr Dixon, who complained about my long hair.

I think you'd better have it cut, announced the editor.

 

I was not sensitive about much, but my Beatle-style haircut was mine and it didn't welcome intimate intrusions.

 

The implications were clear, though. Cut or walk.

 

With every humiliating barber's snip, I hated Mr Dixon more. I briefly wondered if Roger had been lying, to disguise the fact that he wanted to impose the image of the paper on me, but concluded that it seemed to be Mr Dixon's style.

 

Nothing I encountered about him later changed my mind.

 

 

Part 4

BLAZING SADDLES

 

My naive confidence in continuing employment grew because I knew I was doing well, so after a few weeks, I sold my motorbike to a boy who eventually only paid with a black eye and sore ribs when I got a ride on Uncle Mick's Velocette to reclaim it and not the money. Uncle Mick was over six feet tall and a gentle giant, but he didn't look it, so the boracic buyer's family stood well back as he laughed and said to me you mustn't do that, Laddie and the boy got up and whimpered bloodied away. So for a time, I had two bikes and one was a second-hand relatively new twin cylinder Honda Benly 125 Supersport like the Yamaha Bill Ivy was riding to victory on the race track. I got it on HP that Dad didn't qualify to act as guarantor for, but another family member did.

 

On the second day I had it, I parked it on its stand next to the Marketplace lavatories and trotted in to work. Soon afterwards, the fire engines screamed past the office. I was too late to chase them, so Brian Asplin, the new dynamic chief reporter, sent me down to the fire station past Mush Friend's, the scrap dealer's, to find out what it was.

 

Disappointed by the response, I sulked back to the office and announced that it was hardly anything and had been put out. Everyone laughed, and it made a diary piece:

 

Was Pat's face red!

Wisbech Standard reporter Pat Prentice, always on the look out for a good news story, was aroused from his desk when he saw a fire engine speeding over Wisbech bridge on Saturday.

"I'll nip down to the fire station and see what it is", he told his colleagues.

After running to the station and finding no-one there, he was disillusioned by the sight of the returning fire tender, and he reported back rather disconsolately that there was evidently no story, as it was nothing much.

But the 'nothing much' turned out to be his own motor cycle, which he had left parked on the Old Market.

Our now somewhat deflated 'newshound' was soon seen to be running in the direction of his machine, with a definitely changed expression!

The fire, which had been put out by the time the fire brigade arrived, was caused by an electrical fault, and damage was negligible.

 

It was the bike's first visit to the mechanic, to be rewired. Many times after that, after I moved jobs, it would be back in the garage for new big or little ends from Japan. I was riding a souped-up limited edition new era machine with a high performance engine that was changing the face of European motorcycling.

 

And I was paying for it — though not as high a price as Bill Ivy did when he died aged 26 after crashing a faulty 350cc Jawa at the 1969 East German Grand Prix.

 

All I achieved was trimming up the local speed king who rode a high-pitched Greaves very quickly, and who I respected even more when he flagged me down one day, scarfed and helmeted, and told me I was a good rider on a good bike.

 

I forget his name, which doesn't please me, but Uncle Mick knew him and liked his style.

 

Alas, the time ticked by to when the undertaker's warning of doom came true. The supercilious Roger told me after six months that there was a Government financial squeeze and my job was in danger. Barry, another boy who had started with me, had left, but I could stay for another two months as long as I remained on the same wage.

 

I fell for the penny-pinching con until they found another young stumer. On the last Saturday morning, Roger came into the reporter's room at midday after everyone else had left. He smiled oilily and announced that things had not improved, so, sadly, that was my last day. Then he walked out.

 

My tears were too proud to present themselves. Instead, I threw my calls list into the bin with a match after them and as the flames got hungrier my typewriter bit the wall. I grabbed my clobber and hurtled down stairs hardly able to see from behind the red mist. I never found out who I bumped into and knocked down on the way out, or how much damage the door suffered as I slammed it and left it shaking and sobbing its shattered stained glass on to the 15,000 circulation street.

 

I was well on to Leverington Common before the flood blinded my goggles and the sightless angry young man throttled back his 75 mile-an-hour rage.

My world was in ruins. My hopes and dreams — my only chance — of a better life had been destroyed by a bunch of merciless cheats. I was a failure who had been condemned. The monster of despair was lashing its tail in a deep, dark, dungeon.

 

My future now lay in a potato grave.

 

The next few weeks were empty. I didn't sign on the dole, and fretted about my next motorcycle payment. I knew I wanted to be involved with writing, so I scoured the papers for adverts. I applied for a PR job with Perkins engines in Peterborough without success. I didn't appreciate it then, but that was good fortune. PR people are paid liars even though they are generally well remunerated for their hired souls.

 

I did do the odd job for Joe, the next door neighbour who dealt in anything and was a potato agent between carousing, brawling and drinking. He was a very important part of my formative life and I liked him a lot.

 

In the midst of my gloom, Dad rattled a copy of the tabloid Spalding Guardian at me. It contained a weekly column called Ayscoughfee Owl, after a town museum and gardens. Dad used to say your man writes a lot of common sense, and he had found out that the wise Owl was the paper's editor. Write him a letter, he said. He seems a fair man and might give you a chance.

 

I had little hope and nothing to lose, so I wrote and sullenly dropped the envelope in Taylor's village Post Office letterbox.

 

A reply must have shocked me by arriving quickly because by the next time a bus for Spalding left from its weekly stop in the neighbouring village, I was on it.

 

PART 5

A JOB AT THE STANDARD

 

Death is something that is impossible to understand. The end of everything, unless you are lucky or naive enough to believe in a trust-me afterlife. The spirit and memory of the person lives on and for their close associates the pain of bereavement cloys.

 

One thing I took with me to my desperate interview was something I understood from first-hand experience.

 

From the shooting death of my friend at the age of fifteen, I had hit a wall of emptiness. I came to realise that whatever you did, whether it was despair, anger, blame, nothing could resolve or explain the situation.

 

My initial extreme shyness and intimidation by authority had diminished when I realised what the human body was, lying cold in a mortuary without the trappings of importance.

 

I would imagine imposing people as being dead. I would talk to beings who, sooner or later, would be cold pieces of pork. How could they be overawing?

 

I took that to The Lincolnshire Free Press and Spalding Guardian and managed to hold on to it to give me courage as I climbed the stairs and entered the editor's office.

 

The wise owl wore thick dark-rimmed spectacles and looked straight in the eye. He was, I realised at once, very straight. He was blunt and asked almost immediately why I wanted to be a reporter and why I had left the Standard. I don't remember what I said, except that I didn't know why I had to leave. I'm not sure if he said anything, but I got the feeling that he knew.

 

A disabled man entered, seemingly by accident, and Tonie Gibson quickly agreed something with him, then introduced him as Derek Able, the advertisements manager. We shook hands and he eyed me up and down and asked if I played football.

 

No, I said, do you?

 

His crippled leg clearly told me he couldn't, but somehow my nerves blocked that signal to my brain. They both guffawed loudly, before I realised my faux pas. Then Gibson pushed open a glass window and shouted to Malc can you come in for a moment.

 

Soon I was gripping the hand of Malcolm Scott, the chief reporter, and a very pipe-clenching solid man indeed. We agreed it was good to meet each other, but I wasn't sure how transient the encounter would be. When he stomped out, Tonie said he had to get on because a deadline was approaching. I stood up to go and, as if in passing, he asked how soon I could start if he were to offer me a job.

 

I said now, and he bellowed a laugh. It wouldn't have to be that soon, he said.

 

Be here at nine o'clock on Monday.

 

Many years later, at Malcolm's funeral and surrounded by some very distinguished journalists he had nurtured, Tonie Gibson told me that I had wanted the job so desperately, he hadn't the heart to turn me down. And that he had lied about my lack of a university degree, which had by then become a requirement for the National Council for the Training of Journalists.

 

Thanks, Tonie — and it's not the first time I've said and thought that.

He and Malcolm gave me my chance and taught me the very soul of my trade.

 

There would come a day — when Soviet coup plotters kidnapped Mikhail Gorbachev — that I would gaze across the vast open-plan newsroom of The Daily Telegraph, and behave in a way I knew they would have done.

 

Four things I took from the Standard: the realisation of corporate treachery; a distinct aspiration not to fail again; a template of a character to emulate, and the harshest lesson from death.

 

The character was Brian Asplin, who had joined the Standard as chief reporter shortly before my demise. He walked like a cannonball and was the epitome of determination. I resolved to be inexhaustibly positive - an attitude that later exhausted me and taught me another valuable lesson in survival.

 

The other lesson was not to be nervous about interviewing someone who had been recently bereaved. Death is the ultimate sting, and nothing can hurt you more. The numbness and grief cannot be worsened. Reactions may differ, but not because you have added to their pain.

 

That little piece of hard-earned knowledge must have given me the edge in my early days. That and the fact that death and dead bodies were no stranger to me. Road crashes, train crashes and plane crashes did not shock or frighten me. Already such occurrences were normal.

 

So I was never worried about knocking on doors and asking next of kin about recently lost loved ones. Many people would consider that as heartless and unfeeling, but I've been there — and you can't hurt them any more. Some will tell you to get lost — they always do — but many will be ready to talk. Indeed, need to.

 

None will be hurt any more than they already have been. You cannot reap more pain than the old man with the scythe.

 

The atmosphere at The Lincolnshire Free Press and Spalding Guardian was vibrant. Not the grinding passive resentment of the Standard, but there was a frisson of purpose and professional fun. I realised at some point in my career that really good newspapers tend to be dictatorships. A good editor will inspire, lead from the front, and weld his staff into a unit with a purpose: reporting the truth and exploiting free speech.

 

On my first morning, I mentioned to Malcolm Scott something that Father Mulligan had told us on his visit to our little council house the previous week. His parishioners were organising a trip to Lourdes and a boy called Peter, a quadriplegic teenager, was already being cheered up by the prospect of a visit to the shrine of Our Lady in hope of a cure.

 

Instead of a resentful Standard style sniff and curt demand to mention it to a superior, Malc beamed. Before long, I was at my new desk behind a large Imperial and flipping through the phone book to find Mulligan's phone number in Holbeach, where, having arrived with half a crown in his pocket, he was about to build himself a bungalow and the first new Catholic Church in the area since the Reformation.

 

Then I was speeding off in a yellow and red minivan, shared by reporters and the circulation department, with a photographer to interview the excited boy and take a picture of him as he dribbled his way towards the goal of physical redemption.

 

And the young photographer, in grey herringbone jacket, Rolleiflex camera with trailing flashgun wires and cynicism, had an attribute that I could hardly have dared aspire to: almost shoulder-length hair.

 

Not only was I being given my head, it was also going to be free of tonsorial censorship.

 

Two days later the story appeared on the Spalding Guardian's page one with a large picture of a smiling Peter in his wheelchair. I had a large byline, something I hadn't expected, but thrilled me. Malc laughed. It was the normal reward for finding your own story, or if you'd done particularly well.

 

He predicted that I'd be getting more.

 

I took a paper home at teatime and put it on the table. Mum picked it up and read the front page closely.

 

Ooh, she said. This is about that boy Father Mulligan was talking about. Then she studied it more closely. Look, she said, this reporter's got the same name as you.

 

It is interesting how the printed word cements reality into its own dimension.

 

We did a follow-up picture and story when Peter came back, still full of optimism, but still in his wheelchair.

 

PART 6

NO SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE ENGINES

 

I fell into the buzzing world of news eagerly. As well as two papers a week, an envelope was sent every evening to the Peterborough Evening Telegraph, a sister paper which paid for stories which could be run on the same day we used them, or afterwards.

 

It was a world so different from Wisbech. The reporters swapped ideas and argued and were always busy.

 

Little Fay Young stamped her foot at any hint of injustice and challenged the editor if she thought he wasn't taking something seriously. She had a very readable weekly column called the Young Idea. It was run on alternate weeks with A View From the Sixties, by a dour and reminiscing old Scot called Gerry German, whose reporting career had mellowed into a scissor and glue-wielding compiler of valuable files. I soon learned that a smart trick often before going on a story was to check the files to see if the person or subject had been in the news before.

 

Hugh Clancy, a one-lunged Burma war veteran, was the senior reporter with a posh accent and attitude of a judge or coroner. He was old-school strict and cruelly administered night jobs, but underneath was an old softie. He reminded me of my Dad because of his military attitudes.

I gave up smoking in Spalding, partly because of Hugh. At my fagmost, I was lighting sixty untipped Players or Senior Service a day, but then I discovered Balkan Sobranie, a rich, gold-tipped black exotic cigarette. Hugh coughed and complained until Tonie and Malcolm agreed that I would kill him if I didn't keep my distance from his worryingly wheezing mono lung.

 

I did stop, but after a couple of weeks I found people were falling out with me, snapping and being irritable and I could hardly conduct a civil telephone interview. Tonie stormed in one day and said if I didn't start smoking again he would sack me. Even Hugh agreed something must be  done, cough, old boy, but I would have to keep my distance and kick the Balkan poison.

 

I started again on Gold Leaf and Silk Cut, but they didn't quite do the trick. One day I took a drag of a Gold Leaf that had become slightly damp. The taste put me off, and Hugh was suddenly a healthier colleague. I became a non-smoking bore, announcing to everyone that I had given up - and substituting every declined smoke in the pub for an extra gulp of bitter.

 

Sheila Robson was the woman's editor and everybody's mother. She soon adopted me and once very professionally excused me from the attentions of a girl from a fortunately brief liaison who wanted a father for her pending child.

 

It had nothing to do with me.

 

John Claridge was a fellow denizen from East Elloe, a small under-rated area of South Lincolnshire marked mainly by mud and potatoes and manual agricultural labour. He covered many councils and knew the secrets of devious local officials whose proclivities could echo deviant plotters from the Middle Ages.

 

Annie Henshell, a law graduate from Hull University, added a worldliness and laugh to the room, and although I was 17 and she was 23, I soon found myself initially showing her the ropes of interviewing people before she began attending parish council meetings and regularly joining in with suggestions to the clerk - a local solicitor who had the parishes in his monopolised power - about what should be done.

 

David Young, the deputy editor, did the lion's share of sub editing, sitting opposite the Brylcreemed and abrasive sports editor whose polished black shoes pounded along the corridor to allocate tasks concerning competitive matters to mild-mannered Ray Tucker. And conducted an affair with a siren in Market Deeping that I found out only when peering, unobserved, on my knees into the bottom drawers of the file system.

 

She obviously heard the rustling.

 

That's Pat Prentice, he said as he discovered my presence. One of my best reporters.

 

Within a few months, a couple of reporters came and bruisedly limped away because the urgency and dedication demanded by the trade did not suit them to Gibson's standards.

 

Mary Goddard very scenically legged it to jobs, and one morning, late, Eppy came coughing up the stairs, cigarette in hand and fag ash on her micro-skirt. Fresh from a convent and mansion of a former Labour MP destined eventually for the Lords, she soon became an object of very considerable interest to me. But that was after I had acquired a Ford Anglia, passed my driving test, and begun collecting the imprints of high-heeled shoes on the roof above the rear seats at the remote after-pub Fleet Fen pumping station.

 

Death forms a large part of news, and in the sixties Fens, jack-knived lorries and road crashes were a staple. Speeding out with a photographer to blue lights and bodies was the norm.

 

Because it was expected of me, I became a proper reporter and quickly learned tricks to get people to talk openly. It was a law to let them know you were from a newspaper, but equally a talent to allow them to forget. Then they would be indiscreet and often reveal more than they ought. If they complained when they found themselves exposed in print, you could fairly remind them that you had told them who you were.

 

Exceptions were made when stories were heard in pubs. Then, amid the bonhomie of embarrassing revelations, a phone number would be obtained so a call could be made the next morning to confirm the tale - often with mixed results.

 

As darkness descended on Spalding on one winter evening, the scream of a jet was heard and bangs and flashes exploded around the disturbed town.

They're bombing, by God, announced a wheezing Clancy, and I was out in the van with Dickie Snasdell.

 

Acres of smallholders' greenhouses on the outskirts of town had been smashed and burned and tales of indignation and terror were hastily jotted in my notebook.

 

Back in the office as I banged out copy, calls were made to RAF Wittering and the Yank airbases in Norfolk and Suffolk. The Berlin Wall had nothing on the wall of silence from the military that night. I eventually went to the Pied Calf and then home.

 

Early the next deadline-day, I was back at my desk. The RAF Press liaison officer was imperious, officious, and, I suspected, a little embarrassed. I also got the impression from frequent clicks, that we were not the only conversants on the line. The USAF referred all calls to the RAF - Hey, that's not our territory. This is Britain.

 

There was an impenetrable silence of denials that an Allied aircraft had missed the Holbeach bombing range on the Wash and hit Spalding with its practice bombs by mistake.

 

Eventually, after many calls, I snapped.

 

Look, I said, I have 20 minutes to deadline. If you didn't do it, it must have been the Russians. I'm going to write a story saying the Russians must have done it and you still don't know anything about it.

 

I slammed the phone down and Clancy guffawed but said I couldn't really do that. Before I had the chance to answer my phone rang. The RAF spokesman was eclipsed by a click on the line and an American voice confessed that, hey, as it happened, one of their pilots had made a little mistake and a few little practice firecrackers had, er, slipped out.

Sorry.

 

We'll make good any damage.

 

The mistake covered the front and the back and several more pages of damages and embarrassment over the following months.

 

PART 7

MISCHIEF IN THE PUB

 

With two newspapers a week, it wasn't always easy to find a lead story. That was when Malc really showed his talents. Two of his favourite tactics were pubs and planners.

 

Many people do not realise that the public are allowed to peruse the planning department decisions of councils. Often, councils camouflage controversial development decisions in verbose council minutes, so in lean times, it was down to the planning office.

 

On many occasions, the late realisation of changes to an area such as demolitions or buildings, cause public outrage.

 

Malc's modus operandi was to chat to the planning chief and identify something controversial that had slipped under the radar. Then it was easy to approach those who would be most affected, tell them, then reveal their outrage in a magically conjured-up splash story.

 

But my favourite was the pub. One particularly popular tale was discovered on a damp day when stories were scarce. Malc parked one of the office Minis behind a village church wall.

 

Come to the pub in about twenty minutes, he said.

 

I sauntered around and eventually ambled in to the taproom. The silence was immediate and afternoon domino hands were frozen as hostile eyes watched the second stranger of the day threaten the bar. I ordered a pint and nodded. There were grunts and heads turned away. The only one to answer that afternoon was the solid figure on a stool at the end of the bar: Malc.

 

I'd taken a few sips before he asked if I'd come far. I said I was just passing through to Spalding and he said so was he, but it looked like a nice village.

It may not be obvious to everyone, but pubs are centres of learning as well as places to socialise and imbibe. Customers like to learn, but also demonstrate their standing as scholars or founts of wisdom - even if the only verity they possess is the loudness of their voice.

 

A little speculation will soon elicit an unsolicited comment to clarify who knows what.

 

And so, a little speculation about what the roadwork signs were for paused the dominoes again.

 

I spoke to Malc and he spoke to me, and occasionally a comment was flung in from the domino table. Our aim was just to get the conversation going between strangers so that gossip could be shared and maybe a story would emerge.

 

It did.

 

As we discussed the roadworks Malc commented that he noticed the soil on both sides was being added to as well. Ha! said the most informed of the domino-aitrixes. Nearly became a bloody grave t'other day.

 

And there it was: the Guardian's splash story in two days' time. One of the workmen had stepped onto the new silty roadside soil. It had rained the night before and he began to sink in. When he tried to move, he found he couldn't and when he eventually called to his mates for help, they laughed. But not for long.

 

At five feet five and weighing nearly twenty stone, his predicament began to sink in. Eventually, a mobile crane had to be summoned to place a sling under his armpits and gingerly pull him out.

 

I waited for Malc by the van. All that remained was a few phone calls to find our heavyweight and gather more quotes to add to the ones from the pub that Malc had noted after announcing that he was a reporter.

 

As my confidence increased, the stories began to roll in. I found a pub — The Vernatts — where tales abounded and Dave Winkley, the landlord, ruled like a mischievous prefect.

 

Although he had a first degree in electronics from Cambridge, running a pub was more in his line. He loved mischief as did his mates in the Spalding and District Grass Track Car Club.

 

There was never a dull moment. At that time, Spalding had a thriving bulb industry ruled over by Dutch families, as was fitting for Holland County, part of Lincolnshire. Every year acres of tulips bloomed and visitors flocked in, especially on the day of the Tulip Parade, when the Tulip Queen rode the lead float followed by others festooned with flowers.

 

In the surrounding days, Wink always made sure there was a large vase of daffodils on his bar. Strangers would be surprised to note him occasionally taking out a bloom and casually eating it.

 

There was one inviolable rule that regulars had to adhere to, under pain of not getting served: they had to know the number plates of all the town's CID cars.

 

Many after-time evenings were occupied with foreign blue films, sometimes shown upside down and backwards, or duck run competitions in which two-bob bits had to be transported across the floor without the use of hands and deposited in a half pint glass.

 

On one occasion, the police raided the premises after time and put sticking plasters on all the glasses to denote what level the undrunk beer had been at. Wink surveyed the little sergeant and his minions with a humorous glint in his eye. When everyone had been warned of pending charges, Wink stuck his chin out and demanded to know how they had entered the premises. The sergeant pointed to the door beside the bar.

 

Exactly, said Wink. The public door is closed because this is a private party and you entered through my private kitchen without permission. There were Mr Plod murmurings before the Elastoplast was reluctantly removed from the glasses. Wink insisted that the sergeant should ask permission before he led his little band out through his kitchen and the outside back door was politely closed behind them.

 

But all the customers left on foot that night, and great care was taken for several months afterwards about motoring away while over the drink-drive limit.

 

When the brewery decided to maximise profits by closing The Vernatts, a siege ensued during which regulars locked themselves in, fired 12bore shotguns at the dartboard and drank everything before finally staggering out — one of the last men defiantly drinking the remnants from a can of paraffin.

 

Stories came from everywhere: courts, where George Gregory, threatened with detention for a poaching misdemeanour, escaped such harsh retribution by vowing to commit suicide if he was separated from his dog.

And the youth charged at East Elloe Court with stealing an apple box, indignantly explaining that it was his — and under magisterial inquisition, elaborating that he carried it through Long Sutton ev'ry Sataddy mornin' cos I's stands on it to bugger th'orse. And it was his pony as well.

 

The clerk hastily advised an adjournment for a reappraisal of proceedings and eventually a penalty of an entirely different nature.

 

Bent councillors and their machinations were innumerable. One planning committee chairman, owner of a construction company and friend of a former MP with shares in his concern, always managed to win the big project tenders.

 

Another cunning countryside member had regular epileptic fits and his erstwhile beefy committee enemy would sometimes pick him up in his chair and carry it out of the room, where he would recover and palely reappear eventually, replace his seat, and carry on the discussions.

 

A very ardent cultivator of the Press, especially young male reporters, he was once the centre of an incomplete night-time narrative involving a Saudi princeling, an inconveniently-timed seizure, and emergency helicopter flight from the teeth of adversity to Addenbrooke's hospital in Cambridge, where, it was confessed confidentially later, a very complicated medical procedure had been largely accomplished.

 

An ambulance called to a heart attack victim arrived too late after three times going to the wrong village.

 

A woman died at a Sunday church service and was kept propped up until it ended.

 

We felt very near to God, said the Vicar.

 

Not long afterwards, a darts player hit a similar score and sat in a corner awaiting an ambulance or undertaker until after his team had won.

Geoff Capes, an Olympic shot putter, decided to repeatedly kick a ball on to the pitch as he fooled around with friends during a Holbeach football match. When the ref eventually confiscated the offending article, he was laid out, along with the two opposing centre forwards.

 

Big Geoff wants his ball back

 

This played well in all the national papers as well as ours - and Big Malc, refusing to be cowed, talked him out of marmalising me when he pounded up the office stairs looking for the offending reporter. Had he realised I had made a small fortune from my linage payments, he might have been even more unsettled.

 

PART 8

ACCIDENTAL DEATHS AND AN ESTABLISHMENT STITCH UP

 

A town bank manager died in captivating circumstances that were to be revealed in a report from the inquest. His funeral was attended by VIPs from far and wide, who eagerly gave their important names to reporters at the church gates. They were not so keen to learn that he had died by strangulation when, after chaining his arms and legs together and locking the bedroom door so his scantily-clad wife could use her duplicate to burst in and liberate him with her kind attentions, he had slipped over and expired after getting himself into a terminal tangle.

 

Arnold Smith, a gentle beekeeper, wandered into the office one day as I was about to take the mouthwatering Mary Goddard to the Pied Calf. I always made it a point of listening to people because, as Malc said, everyone had a story to tell.

 

As Mary fretted and sighed and eventually gave up and slipped away to pursue a solitary dinner, the kind-eyed old man droned on about bees and agricultural sprays and doom for our planet — and mesmerised me with his knowledge.

 

Nature man warns 

of bee blunder

 

That was Tonie's lead story headline with my copy underneath. It was an early warning from a saintly saviour who has a nature reserve named after him now that he has gone.

 

On a Christmas morning when I had volunteered to work, my Ford Anglia took me out to a marsh council house. There, resplendent in a fluorescent crimson Christmas shirt and tie, I saw the mother who answered the door wince at the shocking colour of my sister's present.

 

I had forgotten it as my car hurtled to speak to the family of a girl who had been in my school class and grown from an ugly duckling into a fragrant swan, but who now resided in Spalding mortuary. She had taken a bath in the draughty house where central heating was only a rumour. To keep warm, she had plugged in an electric fire in the next room and precariously perched the twin bars on the bathroom windowsill. When the wind blew, the draught through the window dislodged the fire into the bath water. This beautiful girl's brother heard her scream but was too late. It was also too late at the inquest, when the coroner outlined the dangers of mixing electricity and water.

 

It fell to me to report the road crash deaths of two other boys from my occasional old school as they headed back with their drugs from a pop concert at Boston Gliderdrome.

 

I was now flying on adrenaline and the thrill of the next byline.

 

My days were long and evenings longer and without anything to eat before I headed home to a huge meal to be heated up by my Mother. The carefully wrapped bacon sandwiches she prepared for me every day were neglected and when she occasionally cleaned my car she discreetly removed them as she carefully cleaned the glove compartment, being careful to replace the condoms where she pretended she hadn't found them.

 

Then one day it happened. I was in a house looking out of an upstairs window and talking to a woman about a neighbourhood dispute when a wave of nausea overcame me.

 

From being very young, when I felt tense, I had sucked a piece of liquorice or a peppermint to defray an insistent involuntary gagging.

 

Now I crammed mints into my mouth to no avail. I was on wobbly, heaving ground and, how I'll never know, I made it back home.

 

There followed the worst weeks of my life, that would haunt me for the rest of my life and ensure that I had to ease up before I ever crumbled again.

I had, the doctor assured me, acquired an ulcer through neglect. My acids had decided that in the absence of food, they would eat my stomach.

I was also extremely depressed and suffering from delayed shock. And I had worked — and abused myself — to exhaustion.

 

About 24 months earlier, as I was about to leave school, my only real friend had gone out shooting pheasants. I had promised to go with him as usual but had not been well. He went with another boy who promptly shot him dead when a bird flew up.

 

I had taken the event on uncharted terms during my trip to see him in the mortuary and at the funeral, but its impact had bided its time.

 

Now I was fed Librium tablets and kept tranquillised as a kid in my head with unremitting cruelty sealed in episodes of darkness from which there was no escape.

 

As weeks passed I fretted about losing my job, which only added to my burden. From then on to this day, I find it almost impossible to sit indoors at night and I frequently sleep properly only when dawn is near.

 

The seductive green and black pills led me into another trap. For years afterwards I fought to give them up and always needed some in my pocket in case my insecurities took me by surprise. It would be years before I escaped their domination, with the help of Guinness and karate.

 

At some point, I found the courage to go back to work, at first for easy afternoons doing desk jobs and following up telephone stories from council minutes. But with delicate promptings from colleagues about regular meals and rest, I returned to what for our trade was normality.

 

My inherent anger at any kind of authority was reinforced by the injustices that fought to remain hidden.

 

A Methodist leader and prominent magistrate drove his car into a school lollipop lady on a zebra crossing. Whether he was drunk at the time was not clear, but the lady's anger was. He refused to comment and threatened legal Armageddon, but the paper stuck to its guns. For a follow-up story, I discovered after deluging the police county PR officer, that the magistrate had been given a private caution and there the matter would lie.

 

The story did more than appear in the paper. It passed from religious eminences to legal and Freemasonry ones and even the Holbeach beat Bobby knew about it and my unhappiness at what I considered to be an Establishment stitch-up.

 

For the next few months, after I had drunk more than my legal limit, a blue Ford Anglia with knicker ribbon flying from its aerial could periodically appear driving on to pavements, through police and court car parks with its hooter being blown and a voice declaiming through an open window: I am a magistrate!

 

More than once, a Bobby turned his back and didn't see it — and more than once, my chance of using absolute privilege in a court of law to expose the injustice was denied me.

 

Eventually my anger launched me back into the game albeit on a diet of Librium and beer.

 

PART 9

FLOGGING ENCYCLOPEDIAS, A THREAT FROM ROBERT MAXWELL AND AN INTERVIEW WITH MR BODY

 

One of the advertising girls returned from a course on how to sell, only to find herself signing up on her doorstep to buy volumes of encyclopaedias. She was embarrassed but wanted to know how she had been tricked.

This was to be a lengthy chase. First I knocked on many doors asking if anyone had been conned into buying a never-ending supply of expensive books.

 

Some had.

 

Then I had to find the salesmen. A word with a CID man who happened to be eating a sandwich in Winfrey Avenue car park in a vehicle with a number I for some reason recognised, spurred me on.

 

If I found them, the police would like to know. And if they did, they might - just might - tell me.

 

I trawled around offices and finally found where I thought the little team were operating from. The offices were empty and the people next door said they hadn't been seen for a while. I could see through a window that there were lots of papers lying around, so after some thought, decided to pay the premises a visit after dark.

 

Getting into the office was not much of a problem, even though a small pane in the door was accidentally broken. The papers appeared to name the company involved and there seemed to be some kind of salesmanship script involved.

 

I decided I would take them back to the office to study them and maybe have them photographed.

 

Someone once told me that when in a tight corner, to keep speaking. It didn't matter what was said, just keep the initiative by dominating the conversation. I remembered when, halfway down the stairs, I met Rod Tester coming up. He owned the building and I had seen him around town. He also saw the broken glass and papers in my hands. I blurted on as he accused me of breaking into his property, but I assured him I hadn't, although I was interested in the people who were there. Were they by any chance selling books for him?

 

While I had noticed him round town, he had noticed me and knew I was a reporter. Finally, having accused me into a sporadic silence, he said he wouldn't be too bothered about the glass so long as if I found the newly decamped tenants I would tell him where they were. They had skipped without paying their dues and he suspected they would be doing the same somewhere else.

 

The papers revealed the company they worked for and also contained a script to be closely followed that would, through deceit and downright lies, trick customers out of their money and into a sort of inertia selling commitment to buy unwanted publications.

 

I passed on my knowledge for Mr Tester and the CID to peruse other towns in search of the pedlars of perfidy.

 

The next step was alien to me, but led to Companies House, where firms are registered. With advice from the adverts manager, I found links that led to other companies and eventually to a man called Robert Maxwell.

It was impossible to telephone him, but a heavy-handed minion eventually told me that if we used a word of this nonsense, Mr Maxwell was big enough to buy my little rag and eat me for breakfast.

 

I mentioned that if he wanted to meet me face to face and tell me that, I would be most obliged. He hung up. And the story took up the whole of the back page.

 

A few days later I had a visit from the constituency agent for the Conservative Party. Normally, when he honoured us with his presence, he and his waxed jacket and Labrador were entertained in a private room with coffee and biscuits. This time, to Hugh's slight discomfort, he came with an invitation for me to meet the MP, Richard Body, at his monthly surgery on Saturday.

 

To a boy just turned 17, this was a big event, even if I could imagine he was dead so I could be on a more equal social footing. On the appointed day, I appeared in the office wearing my best tie and with the stains on my suit trousers diligently sponged by Mum. Then it was a couple of quick nervous vomits and off I went.

 

As the grandson of a miner killed at Trimdon Grange, the son of one who had also fought in two world wars and the half brother of two pitmen who were war veterans as well, I was not a natural Tory. But as much as I tried, I could not bring myself to really dislike the gangling, soothing, coffee dispensing Mr Body.

 

He said my story about Mr Maxwell had been read with great interest in Westminster, and teased out of me all sorts of details I had forgotten or not included in my story. At the end of our meeting we shook hands and I left feeling a little more grown up and valuable than I had when I had pulled the chain on my last flecked visit to the office lavatory.

 

Some time later, Maxwell was ruled unfit to run a public company. But it did not hamper his career too much, nor was it my last brush with him. Much later in my career he was surprised to learn that I would not be fulfilling his expectation that I would accept the offer of one of his editorships.

 

It was encounters like this that underlined my need to learn shorthand. Spalding sent me to Stamford to a woman who constantly dictated Dear Sir, I am in receipt of your letter of the fourth inst, but I rarely had to record that statement. It was the only obstacle I could now see to my success and eventually, through Mrs Heavysides, one of the office secretaries, and two trainee journalists' block release courses at Harlow, I managed to achieve 80 words a minute in readable bursts.

 

Whilst at Harlow, I also honed my skills at cheeky freelancing. One of the tutors, most of whom reinforced my mantra that those who can do and those who can't teach, let slip a juicy morsel.

 

Ronnie Kray, one of the gangster brothers, had shot a man dead in a London East End pub called the Blind Beggar. Some nurses who worked nearby had decided they needed to take up lessons in self defence.

I checked it out and sold it to a Sunday paper, to the chagrin of the tutor, who accused me of stealing his story.

 

That's journalism, I told him insolently.

 

He was giving me the idea.

 

By now I was the man for the job. Malc looked tense one morning when I arrived just before I was late. The reporters' room was quieter than usual and expectant and for a moment eyes fell on me as I entered.

Dickie Snasdell was standing, long hair already speckled with grey and pockets bulging with light meter and flash extension wires.

 

We were clearly ready to go. Malc said he couldn't come just then because there were things to do, but he would be there as soon as possible.

A gunman was under police siege in Whaplode Drove. I was to go, but do exactly as the cops said and not take any risks. Was I clear on that? It wasn't worth taking risks.

 

We were rebelliously pensive on the way and there was a mood of command and hostility as we approached the police cordon which was complemented by an ambulance and fire engine.

Away across a large muddy field was a sewage tanker already axle deep in mud. Further away was a low concrete pillbox left from a wartime artillery position.

 

The cordon was unyielding. Guns were involved so Dickie took long shots with his 35 mil Pentax and surreptitious pictures of the uniforms. I found out what I could - which was little.

Come on, I said to Dickie.

 

He was reluctant, but I winked and he came. I got in the van and urged him to drive off.

 

I had noticed a track running by the bunker and thought if we could get along it we could shout to the gunman. I was used to shotguns and, believe me, knew how deadly they could be. But I also knew they had a limited range, and after that, the dispersed pellets would rain down like relatively harmless hail.

 

We were definitely not being brave, but the lure of a good story was like the opportunity of a good hit for a drug addict.

Dickie pulled the van to a dirt clogged stop and I stepped out into ankle-deep muck on the track that the police, with their untrained unFen eyes, had obviously not expected to be there.

 

Birds were singing and flitting along the sparsely dotted hedges on the edges of the fields and I took a few steps and shouted. After a few loud hails, a distant voice answered back. Who were we, what did we want? We could get off his land and go away.

 

I waved, pretty sure that unless he had a .22 rifle, he wouldn't hit us. I pointed to the van and said I was from The Free Press and needed to talk to him. We could help him, if he told us what the problem was. There wasn't any way out of the cordon.

 

It wasn't instant, but nervous negotiations found us walking with our hands up towards the bunker.

 

An old wiry man with grey stubble appeared behind a double barrel hammer shotgun, not unlike one I owned. He didn't look so dangerous up close, and his eyes had a glint of defiant humour, not madness. He motioned us into his fortress. It was festooned with sacks and a vacuum flask and a large young man who turned out to be his son, loomed unthreateningly on an upturned crate.

 

Now then, the old man cackled and found out our names and who we were. He knew Hugh Clancy and asked why he wasn't there. Hugh wrote a weekly Growers' View column, which many of the farmers read.

 

The determined old man was clear: very soon after dawn he had spotted a council tanker illegally discharging sewage, obviously collected from council house lavatories the day before, on to his land. It was a shortcut for the driver and his mate, but they had been caught brown-handed instead of taking the time to drive to the sewage farm. Willie had waved his gun and forced them to abandon the truck and trudge away.

 

Now the council wanted their wheels back. But they weren't going to get them.

 

Ever.

 

They had polluted his soil.

 

I warmed to Willie and he laughed and slapped me on the back and said you get off now and tell 'em that.

 

I was rebuked soundly by Malc, who had fielded formidable phone calls from the police, but his relieved smile made it OK.

If you went down a mousehole you'd come up with a rabbit, he said.

Dickie's pictures were atmospheric: the old man, bewhiskered in black and white collarless shirt, pointing his shotgun defiantly through the concrete slit window.

 

The Wild Man of Whaplode Drove was born with dramatic front-page subheads to Tonie's pen and grew up very quickly on radios and televisions nationwide.

 

Willie won. The police withdrew, because he had done nothing wrong but carry a gun on his own land and the council were uncharacteristically quiet.

Over the months the standoff remained. There were many follow-ups and old Willie would walk the ten miles or so from Whaplode Drove to Spalding and appear at the office in wellingtons and tattered and fading old grey agricultural string-belted suit. He always demanded to see Clancy, but usually bellowed when he got the boy. Who then got the latest story.

The thing about Willie was that he was far from being a fool: nor was his son, who also walked long distances to school and passed 13 GCE O Levels and As, but couldn't be bothered to remember how many. Hugh chortled and said you know, Willie is an original feoffee, directly descended from Richard III's time.

 

A feoffee was someone granted a freehold under feudal law. Willie and Hugh obviously remembered. But the council had forgotten, to its cost.

Many parish council and district council and probably waterboard meetings mithered over the problem for many months. Someone set fire to Willie's tractor and a threat was made to hinder his drainage. Over the following months, the water table in surrounding fields rose alarmingly and farmers protested loudly.

 

Willie announced that he had simply dammed a vital little conduit on his land that a forgotten ancestor had created and was his to do with what he liked.

 

Hours of angst and thumbing of ancient legal land rights were pored over to no avail whilst winning Wild Man Willie smiled on.

Many years later I drove past the by-now dry again acres, and in Willie's field was a rusty brown tank, lying on its side and embedded in earth.

 

At some point, Tonie left to be editor-in-chief in Bury. He offered me a chief reporter's job in Newmarket, but I said I hoped for other things but if he ever found himself running an evening paper, I would willingly join him. It felt a little like betrayal, but he said he understood and he often joined us later for our Friday night drinks

 

 

PART 10

A LOAD OF BOLEX (CAMERAS)  AND BODIES ON THE LINE

 

David Young took over as editor and I seemed to be getting most of the big stories. My first murder was in Boston. A woman called Virgin - possibly the only one in town - was found bleeding heavily. A person no better than she should be, she managed to say that a boy had attacked her as she left a dockside pub - the kind, an erudite reporter for the Boston Guardian noted, where your feet stuck to the carpet.

 

I managed to find her son, who was lodging in Spalding, but he was not willing to provide much copy.

 

Months later, a youth was arrested for a minor infraction and was so nervous that the duty sergeant told him he was acting as if he had stabbed Mrs Virgin.

 

He said he had.

 

He eventually served a long sentence and was released to kill again.

 

By this time, David had decided I needed a pay rise that he couldn't afford. He said I could freelance in the mornings and work for him the rest of the time.

 

There were four local TV stations and Bob Whittaker, a newspaper circulation manager in Boston, had Bolex cameras to shoot mute film. Our combined pictures and words were soon bringing in quite a lot of money, and I was even earning regular quids by phoning in radio reports of sheep market prices that were given to me in writing every market day.

 

It was with the cameras, which I often used, that I learned to disrespect television. Film from one winter ice skating scene could be passed off as one from another area.

 

A demonstration about a lack of sanitary conditions was filmed four times as housewives emptied bucket toilets on council steps, but the fact that they had been taken there by a Nottingham Guardian Journal circulation van was not screened.

 

The camera, especially television ones, very often does lie.

 

I found myself on television on one of my last big stories in Spalding.

It was a foggy winter Wednesday on January 28, 1970. Ruby Sherrard, a level crossing keeper, opened her gates to let a sewage tanker over on the remote road. A train destroyed the tanker, and half the cottage, killing a man in the cab and injuring another, along with a few passengers.

 

The call came to the office from a fire brigade contact and myself and Dickie Snasdell were off in a van. Hugh Clancy groped his way there in his own car after the scale of the disaster became clear.

 

How we found it I'll never know, nor how we survived the blind journey.

When we got there, the scene was brown. A thin slime from the tanker had anointed everything and even the stinking fog was crap-coloured.

 

Dickie photographed the half demolished cottage with a broken doll and cracked pictures before disappearing down the metal-strewn line. I kicked an old brown boot and something wet bit my lip as it danced away, trailing a severed ligament.

 

I eventually caught up with the stooping camera flashes of a mumbling Dickie, who was one-handedly warding off reality with his Pentax while copiously vomiting and pressing the shutter. The pictures he gained under the bogie wheels of the derailed train would never be published anywhere but as inquest evidence or in a coroner's journal.

 

I intrepidly consumed many peppermints, squeezed hygienically from their paper wrappings through lips that I found I had to keep wiping between retches.

 

Grim would not describe the scene of ridiculous tragedy.

 

Back at the gates along the mangled line, a man stood, leaning on his bicycle as he had been when I passed him 20 minutes before. He seemed to be deaf and had ignored Hugh, whose officious tones were dulled by the miasma of misery.

 

I touched his shoulder and noticed that like his cap, it was damp and stained. He looked at me as if he was waking up and his answers to me were toneless and matter-of-fact. He was just behind the tanker and about to cross when the train appeared with a crash and a screech.

 

I opened my mouth to scream, he said, but I got it full of shit. He seemed ashamed of that and kept apologising for it. He constantly rubbed his mouth and spat.

 

Many times since, I have noticed that in the darkest moments of human experience it is embarrassment, sometimes self-deprecating humour and matter-of-fact narrative without adjectives that over-ride the American account of: it was just like in the films.

 

Soon the blue lights that we had arrived with increased and lit up the gloom and the sirens blanketed the hardly audible furtive drips from surrounding surfaces.

 

Bob Whittaker was filming and fretting about how he was going to get his stuff to the TV stations in Norwich and Leeds.

 

It was time for ulcers to complain and strong machine coffee, lots of hand scrubbing and extra strong mints back at the office. My fists flailed and hammered and swiped the typewriter carriage as copy paper and carbon sheets were spewed out to the editing pen of David Young. The deadline was midday the next day, but by the time I left pages one, two and three were ready to go with copy to be updated tomorrow with updates on casualties.

 

A jaded few late pints was all I got in the pub at the end of an exhausting night.

 

You love it don't you, said David as I finally slumped, tongue lolling and head on the desk.

 

It was a good paper by anybody's definition and I was home in time for Thursday tea. As I walked in, I caught a glimpse on Dad's freshly acquired old TV of some of Bob's film that had made it to Norwich a day late. The gaunt wild eyes of a lean figure wearing a sheepskin flying jacket and carrying a pen and notebook was emerging from the fog on a debris-dotted track.

 

It was me.

 

Later I learned that the wife of one of the victims had been undergoing a cancer operation at the time of the disaster and had never regained consciousness. A son, drunk and still mourning the tragedy, rode his skidding Fibreglass motorbike tank to a flaming splintering death months afterwards.

 

During all this, I had got to know Eppy quite well and we moved into a flat together and worked and drank and at the end of the month when the money ran out, survived on a book called 101 Ways With A Potato.

 

I had noticed her immediately, and it seemed that she had noticed me.

Our relationship had begun after a day on which Howard - not the best name for someone with a stutter to announce his presence on the telephone - crashed a car. It was an office-new fast Cortina 1300 crossflow head estate with brakes that pulled sharply to the left when applied suddenly. One afternoon a call came through to reporters, but emitted only silence yet a hint of fitful heavy breaths.

 

Hello, Howard here, was initially somewhat stammeringly stifled by shock, but eventually after several calls I was speeding to Cowbit Bank. There, at least twenty feet below and many rolled yards distant in a grassfield surrounded by inquisitively munching Jersey milkers, was a black severely dented tube with its wheels dead and pointing skywards.

 

And here, like the ghost fate had surely designated him to be that day, was Howard, emerging from a house to walk in staggering circles roughly in my direction.

 

Having delivered him home and successfully pleaded with Tonie not to sack him because the car was lethal, I was obviously on Howard's Thankyou list.

Some days later, he appeared at my sister's where I was visiting, with his girlfriend and Eppy. We went to the Swan in Parson Drove and he said Thank you and they left. Except Eppy stayed, which my drinking mates seemed very amenable to. At some point as they crowded around her, this miniskirted newcomer announced that she had once drunk a pint of beer in ten seconds.

 

Not realising that she was still only seventeen, Nelson, the ex-RAF navigator landlord, mumbled into his base-voiced beard that if she could do that, he would buy everyone a drink.

 

Nelson had been very kindly towards me when he learned of my ulcer. He had weaned me on to bull's eyes - pints of milk with a shot of rum.

 

The Elgood's pint glass was taken by Eppy and deposited empty on the bar four and a half seconds later. She ordered another and the round was free.

Finally, Nelson, his luxuriously hirsuit mask unable to camouflage his mirth, handed me a pint of milk and enquired:

 

Will you be taking it neat?

 

It disappeared with ridiculed laughter chasers and I was back on the beer. It took me some time, but by the end of the evening I had outdrunk her and she climbed into my passenger seat to head for God knew where. It turned out to be via the top of Broadgate Road, where, she from the open left-hand door and me from the right, vomited our differences onto the night.

 

This was the girl for me.

 

PART 11

EVENINGS SAVING THE ET

 

Months passed, and I arrived at the Spalding office on a jaded morning, mild-hangovered and ready to go. At the top of the stairs stood David Young, mild, thoughtful, helpful, and much under-rated editor. Beside him was the tall, besuited son of the newspaper chain's owner.

 

Tonie's called me, said David. Got your car?

 

Well, I got here, I said.

 

Charles Winfrey smiled from an impressive, if not greater height, and said I was starting at The Peterborough Evening Telegraph.

 

Now.

 

David said don't be frightened, do it.

 

Tonie wants you to do a story in Market Deeping on the way. You'll meet Jack Brindley there and he'll show you the way back to the office. I knew of little Congleton Jack Brindley from his brilliant pictures in the ET. I couldn't be working with him?

 

I was.

 

My Ford Anglia found its way, and very unusually, I can't remember what the story was, except that it was complicated and quick, and I must have followed Jack back to the ET's new office in Woodson, Peterborough.

 

At the top of the open-plan office stairs I was shown to a dirty desk with a fag-strewn plastic bin and an old Olympic bashed-up typewriter. Tonie didn't say hello. Can you do it? You've got forty minutes.

 

I told him I could.

 

I would.

 

Every take of copy paper was taken to Phil Hoare, the newly-sacked news editor who was now chief sub editor.

 

The smoke from my borrowed Senior Service was inhaled into my aching ulcer belly and I battered the typewriter keys. It seemed I had briefly started smoking again.

 

A large young person appeared, blue shirt tales hanging out, and said I must be awfully thirsty, and he was very impressed by my reporting. Could he perhaps get me a coffee? It must have been an exhausting morning.

God yes.

 

He came back with one of the most welcome non-alcoholic drinks I had ever had, and introduced himself as Stephen Pitt-Chambers, who was subbing my copy. Very soon afterwards, he said he thought we had enough copy. It read well. He wasn't sure, but if it turned out to be too long, did I want to suggest anything that could be cut? He produced a black of my copy and I was very surprised. Sub editors, even at that time in my career, were supreme. They had seen it all, done it all, and could spell it all, knew the names of the types to use, planned the page, chose the pictures, and wrote the headlines.

 

And he was giving me the power he had.

 

He was surrendering his editorial might - and it made sense. His shirt tales flapped away. The next machine threepenny-bit plastic cup of coffee came with a proof of the first front page Telegraph splash story I had.

Tonie told me how to spell your name, he said.

 

I think you've done rather well.

 

The word was that Tonie had been drafted in to save the ET. The last editor had returned from holiday to find a brown envelope on his desk bearing news of his demise.

 

The paper was floundering and it was shit or bust.

 

Tonie swept in more like a bomb than a new broom. He shouted and heads rolled and new reporters who had made names for themselves on weeklies also owned by East Midland Allied Press were drafted in.

 

The paper had to change and we were going to do it.

 

Bill Ellerd-Styles, brought up by an RAF officer and who had more staid ideals, haughtily decamped eventually to The Times and Daily Telegraph where I caught up with him later.

 

He imperiously ridiculed and spiked my first new Sun-style puff for the reborn Tingling Telegraph, only to see it unspiked and on the front page.

 

His stance was understandable and today I sympathise. He was a good colleague in Fleet Street later. But this was Peterborough and survival was at stake.

 

He left and circulation did begin to soar.

 

The pace was frantic from the first day. A new news editor arrived from Corby - Alex Gordon, a fiery little ginger Scot whose cries of Great, Great, greeted every likely story.

 

Evening paper life had a different tempo. The starts were early and ulcer-inducingly frantic until the midday deadline, when suddenly the presses rumbled and the newsroom drooped. A beer and snack lunch prepared for an afternoon of slower-burning stories or features, unless there was a court case or conference or agricultural show.

 

Being an evening paper reporter made me feel good, but never important enough to be called sir, which one of my school friend's mothers insisted on doing at an agricultural show. She was serving lunch and I asked her several times to call me Pat, because she knew me.

 

I can't, she said. You're in the VIP tent, so I call you Sir.

 

It made me reflect that the class system sometimes has itself to blame. Later, when I moved in more elevated circles, I developed a dislike for fawners and people who almost grovelled in the presence of anyone with a title or perceived importance.

 

Oddly, my killer work instinct did lapse once. Bob Bush, a gentle smallholder in my parish who had been engaged to Olive Lamb for years, suddenly married her. Her old mother had died and they thought it would be a scandal if they shared the house unmarried.

 

It was a good story and I knocked on their door. They were pleased to see me and Bob poured me a bottle of Elgood's light. I gently approached the subject of a story and they were aghast at the thought. They were honest, simple people and were too shy for publicity.

 

Many news people would have done the story anyway, but it would have destroyed them. I raised my glass and congratulated them and left with a slight feeling of failure but well-being at doing what I knew deep down was the right thing.

 

Not far away in his little shop and post office, Mr Slater was fuming at the taxman stealing his living. He threatened to shoot the Inland Revenue collector when he visited, as he was promising to do.

 

Did he mind me doing a story?

 

Not at all. With a picture as well. He loved it - and the cash demand was reduced by compromise with a clearly intimidated victim.

 

It is often said that if a government wants people to know something, it will be lying. Equally, that official inquiries will be a whitewash - and the longer and more costly, the more brushwork will be involved.

 

British Rail inquiries were said to be run along army lines, with the top brass rarely getting any blame. The eventual proposed verdict on the Sutterton Dowdyke crash was that Ruby Sherrard, the crossing keeper, was to blame, even though the train had been delayed and the sound of its approach was shrouded by freezing fog and no mechanical warning system had been in place. 

 

From what I knew, the conclusion seemed deeply suspect, so I drove to see her in my spare time. She was reluctant to talk, but I thought it only fair that she should give her side of the story, and went back several times. Eventually, Tonie called me into his office and said he'd had a complaint that I was harassing a troubled woman and that I should leave her alone. I explained that I thought she was being made a scapegoat and should be encouraged to speak out. Tonie said we should not hound vulnerable people.

 

I agreed - and after some thought - drove back to try again that evening, with a borrowed camera, just in case.

 

She was still not speaking, so I waited outside in case she appeared. At some point, a very angry man left the house to threaten me and tell me to leave them alone. I feared the worst, but got out of the Evening Telegraph van. When confronted, some tempers can be moderated, and with open arms and flattened palms, I quietly explained that I thought the verdict was unfair and was being persistent because I wanted to correct an injustice. After much persuasion, he relented and agreed to soothe the way for an interview.

 

The meeting led to a series of stories, at the end of which, Tonie called me to his office again. He was very stern and said that I had ignored his order and gone back to pester the woman. At the end of the reprimand he told me to bugger off and behave in future - and he was giving me a pay rise.

After that, I confronted the authorities with some uncomfortable and prominently-published queries.

 

Some time later, the verdict on Mrs Sherrard's culpability was moderated, and her name was cleared.

 

PART 12

CRASHING INTO BIG GEOFF

 

My football match encounter with Geoff Capes, the undisputed strong man, did not leave me with any ambition to see him again. But fate had other ideas, and decreed that I would bump into him.

 

I traded in my Ford Anglia for a red MG Midget sports car complete with a newly-installed automatic headlamp dipper, acquired one evening in the saloon bar of a backstreet Wisbech pub. With the magic lens prominently displayed on the dashboard, I approached Saturday Bridge crossroads one morning. The junction was a notorious accident black spot, caused by roads converging at 90 degrees. If two drivers were approaching at the same speed and had a small blind spot in the car, they would fail to see each other until they made contact. So it was with me - and by the time I hit the brakes and disastrously the heel-and-toe accelerator at the same time, a green car had been shunted off the road to roll into a ditch.

 

My dented little car spun to a stop and I staggered out, bleeding from the lip. I was obviously in shock and worried about the other driver, who suddenly emerged, swarming up the bank and hurling dire threats and abuse. I wasn't having that, and not yet realising that the collision had been my fault, I volunteered that if he kept on in that vein, I could pretty soon make sure that he would be knocked back into the drain.

 

Except that in all probability, I couldn't.

 

As he pulled open his shirt to check for injuries, an acre of muscle spilled out and he kept growing bigger.

 

It was Capes.

 

By now, he was a policeman in Peterborough, and either because of that, or shock, an acute verbal assault was all I received as he thundered round in angry bewilderment. When the ambulance quickly arrived, he climbed in like a lamb. But the police sergeant said it would probably be best if I rode with him to be checked up, with the newly torn-out automatic headlamp dipper discreetly under my pullover to avoid any unwanted attention over its provenance.

 

I was eventually fined for driving without due care, to which I pleaded guilty.

 

Eppy reported the case for the Free Press. The last sentence read: Prentice was given time to pay.

 

Even before my childhood mate Anty was killed in a repaired written-off car, I found out the perils of salvaged wrecks. Late one evening on the A1, a father, mother, and two children died when their car collided with a lorry. It was two written-off vehicle halves welded together and came apart in the crash, throwing the occupants into their graves.

 

In the morning I headed to the caravan site where they had lived and scrimped and saved their meagre wages to buy their bargain nemesis.

 

The victims' names had been released by the police, so I assumed the neighbours would know about the tragedy. I knocked on the fragile door of the next-door caravan and an elderly woman answered. I gently asked if she could tell me anything about her neighbours and she invited me in for a cup of tea and a thorough description of her lovely friends.

 

At about the same time as an urgent chill ran down my spine, she suddenly ceased her rheumy-eyed praise and asked: Nothing's happened to them, has it?

 

For once, my instinct was not to part with the news as urgently as possible.

The woman sank into her seat and after a shocked while, clutched her chest and said her doctor had told her she should not have shocks because she had just come out of hospital after a heart attack. Then she began to pant - and went very grey and quiet.

 

Oops!

 

I stood up and the tea party was over. I put my hand on her shoulder and asked who her doctor was, and told her to take deep breaths and relax. She seemed more frightened than heart threatened, so I decided not to call an ambulance but to ask her doctor's name. She exhaled it and I said I would go to see if he could visit her.

 

A hungry deadline was looming, but Waiter Sensible was not ready to serve the victuals just yet. I headed for the nearby surgery, which fortunately I knew, and hastily panted out my story to the receptionist.

 

I had to see the doctor, who luckily was dealing with his last appointment of the morning before starting his outcalls.

 

She let me go to wait outside his door and as I waited, admitting the splash story into my notebook, I listened to the mumbled and door-muffled embarrassment of the wilting patient who could no longer acquit himself to his wife's satisfaction.

 

It seemed to take ages, but eventually he came out - and in I went, to spill my story.

 

Then I found the nearest phone box and dictated my copy, hoping that the colour that the woman's quotes were adding to the tragic tale was not about to fade in a mortuary.

 

Later that day, splash screaming and back in the office, I received a call from the doctor to say the lady had been given medication and would be all right.

 

And thank you, young man. You did the right thing.

 

There was a first time for everything . . .

 

I didn't hear that my childhood friend Anty had been killed until some time later.

 

I don't see much of him now, but given that he was confirmed dead after a car crash years ago, it's perhaps surprising that we talk at all.

 

When we do, naturally, one of us always mentions his death.

 

It happened at Tydd Gote when his MG 1100 car crashed into a bus stop late at night after the pubs. He was more likely to catch the shelter than a bus in that semi-drained marsh-edge outpost at that time of night. The car snapped in two, the subframes buckling like a narrow 'A'. The car had been in an earlier prang and repaired, leaving the new bottom as flimsy as silver paper.

 

The vehicle ended up as little more than a ball of scrap and when the ambulance and police arrived, Anty was pulled out, still miraculously attached to his pulped face, pronounced dead and his body covered up and placed by the roadside.

 

At some point, Sgt Plaskitt arrived from Long Sutton and lifted the blanket to view the corpse.

 

"Ah noticed it bubble o' blood from 'is marth and ah confirmed 'im alarv," he told me weeks later.

 

So Anty was taken to intensive care and his face was sewn up with about 180 stitches and although he couldn't recall the crash and years later suffered from occasional memory blanks, he remembered me then and called out my name from his bewildered hospital bed.

 

He stayed in hospital for quite a time and I visited him regularly. Even when his nose, chin, eyelids and eyebrows had been successfully sewn back on, his mind was not right. He kept hallucinating about a woman who appeared at the end of his bed early every morning with a shaving brush and mug, then reappeared with a towel round her shoulders, clean-shaven. It troubled him, but the nurses just laughed it off.

 

He had obviously been sent mad by his ordeal, but he was so certain that the apparition was real and the nurses were conspiring against him, that I insisted on seeing the matron.

 

At first, she weakly told me that she couldn't talk to the Press and that there was nothing happening to worry my friend. But when I emphasised that his healing was being affected, she closed her door and sighed.

 

Could I be relied on to keep a confidence?

 

I said it depended, but Anty's recovery was at stake, so I would be considerate.

 

Thus, it emerged that Anty had not been the only car-crash victim that night. In Wisbech, a woman had been hit by a car - except it wasn't a woman, just a man dressed as one.

 

Such a delicate matter had been resolved by placing him in a discreet ward that could only be reached via the intensive care unit. He obviously had mental health problems, and no one wanted to hurt him anymore.

Every morning, he went for a shave past Anty's bed.

 

When I told my friend, his fretting instantly ceased and his recovery resumed.

 

By chance, "Anty Back From The Dead" made the splash in the Peterborough Evening Telegraph later, when he came out of hospital. The picture of his car was spectacular and his face left no doubt about the truth of the story.

 

He walked into The Swan in Parson Drove, raised his pint and, despite my pleas, refused to say "It's good to be alive".

 

He didn't know that he had been dead, so being alive was just normal, the only existence there was, he said.

 

Several ales later, he relented - and my intro was born.

 

Needless to say, his insurance company refused to pay out on the grounds that the car had been badly repaired. The splash helped his case, which he eventually won. But for many months afterwards when he was driving his lorry, he would forget who he was and where and why he was on the road. Then he would find a ring road to drive around or a parking place until his brain got back into gear again.

 

He kept the newspaper cutting in his cab, to assure him there was life after death.

 

So much for deadlines.

 

PART 13

OVER AND OUT

 

At this point in my rantings, I realised that every old hand was writing memoirs that no one would want to read - or believe.

 

So I stopped and went to The Ship, in March (the Fenland town, not the month, or walk).

 

Hacks - proper ones - are the rubbish collectors of history, whose reports are frequently plagiarised or misrepresented by "modern historians", provocative columnists, celebrity-swollen TV cue card readers or social media "citizen journalists".

 

I am often lectured now about stories that I recorded first-hand, by latter day watchers of television who are viewing documentaries portraying events that happened 40 or so years ago, when I was there and the TV thaumaturges weren't.

 

I smile.

 

That's history.

 

Be plausible.

 

Accuracy and truth can be an encumbrance to fame-flecked green-room marionettes and purveyors of toothpaste, politics, and soap-powder.

 

And that's about the end of A Remembrance of Newspapers Past.

 

I can still recall many more years, about 60 countries, fifty years of adventures, being lied to, shot at, fucked over, Fun, Friends and Froth.

 

One day, perhaps, a highly-privileged and talented actor will play Lord Drone in a broadcast series.

 

I hope his character will be driving a suitable Jaguar . . . One with polished walnut fascia, silent clock, leather-scented seats, electric accoutrements that all work at the same time (including windows and radio aerial). A limousine that drones along smoothly, does not guzzle any petrol or oil, drives well when it's icy, and has very good brakes...

 

M'Lud, I humbly salute you.

 

Old hacks never die. They simply soak away.

 

 

 

© Pat Prentice