Journey of a Lifetime

We were miserable enough anyway, with our missing copy which never left the battlefield. By then we were ready to catch any flight to anywhere that wasn’t Korea. To ensure my final story got through, I had wangled a lift back to the Japanese mainland and handed the fragile news in to the Eastern Telegraph office in Kobe. At least I knew that story would be in London within a couple of hours.

In return the cable office handed me a mass of anguished messages from ExTel in London, warning me that few of my stories were getting through. The US Signals proved so chaotic that despite assurances from their PIO most copy had been mishandled, due possibly to incompetence or, more likely, unpleasant interference by the Chinese army. Correspondence had been lost for days—then sent full-rate.

Behind our backs, in a frozen Korea which we had left so triumphantly to return to Tokyo, the enemy had recaptured the capitals of Pyongyang and Seoul, and despite all this, or perhaps because of it, the Tokyo press corps continued to file and add to the piles of unsent messages, though it was no longer a big story. Both sides were closing down. The world was almost as weary of Korea as we were.

My recall was surrounded by Louis Heron of The Times, Tommy Thompson of the Telegraph and most of the fraught press corps. Front-line correspondents were moving back to their normal Far East stations, or going south to look at the increasingly threatening situation in French Indo-China which seemed favourite for the next upheaval.

In Tokyo, Gordon Walker, my friend with the Christian Science Monitor and an old Japan hand, drove me to Haneda Airport with Randolph Churchill and gave us our Japanese-style farewell presentos. Then we boarded, flew towards Mount Fuji and home. It was a happy relief to surrender to the deep, deep comfort of a BOAC Argonaut.

Randolph, easily diverted by conviviality, had not been a spectacular success as a correspondent—though he wrote well enough when he wanted to. He had been flown out by the Daily Telegraph to replace poor Christopher Buckley, killed by a mine within an hour of reaching Korea. Unlike Randolph’s father Winston, who had success as a correspondent in the South African war, he had little experience of the nuts-and-bolts legwork in the field of cabling and deadlines, nor, I suspected, was he much interested.

I had on occasion stepped in at the last moment when he was over-tired or emotional, to complete and file the Daily Telegraph piece for the unexploded Randolph. That may have been why I found this choleric character usually friendly.

He was also something of a celebrity, particularly among Americans. This was a new experience for me—“celebrity” was a different status which could prove a hindrance for other working press men who were not being asked for their autographs. Randolph, however, never objected to holding the stage.

“I can never win,” he told me. “If I achieve anything they all say it’s only because of Father, and when I do something badly they say, ‘What a tragedy for the old man.’”

He was said to drink a couple of bottles of whisky a day, though I never ran into that. He had lost six attempts to enter Parliament, though he held an uncontested wartime seat in 1940-45. A biographer wrote, “Aside from his heroically dismal manners, gambling, arrogance, vicious temper, indiscretions and aggression, he was generous, patriotic, extravagant and amazingly courageous.” Michael Foot, a political opponent, said, “I belong to the most exclusive club in London: ‘The Friends of Randolph Churchill’.”

He and I planned to take a few days off during this return journey—from battle fatigue, you understand. First we went ashore in Hong Kong, where I bought an export Humber Hawk for eventual delivery at home, thus avoiding a waiting list of several years in the UK market, such were the idiocies of international financial controls.

Here we ran into the Churchill groupies again, chasing the son of the most famous man in the world. It was my first experience of autograph hunters and fans, for which we did not have much time. In Korea it had been a full-time job, and the target was merely to stay alive. Little did I know how life would change.

In Bangkok nobody knew who I was, of course, except that I was travelling with the noisy Englishman who was drinking. We were invited to dinner with the ambassador, which was not noisy at all, but I had the opportunity of observing Randolph on the social rampage. There’s no doubt that, much as I liked him, after a few drinks he could become a responsibility. Excellent and amusing company, he was always in a state of suspended eruption. Other guests had to speak carefully in case he exploded. The nearest to a compliment you could get was to say that he was as rude to ambassadors as he was to waiters; he made no nice social distinction.

One evening Randolph and I filled in an hour of happy irresponsibility pedicab-racing like gladiators through some deserted streets. It sounds most improbable today, when Bangkok shows us only fumes and endless jams.

This was the time when we called in the brilliant Noël Coward; his “Mad dogs and Englishmen” started all the uncertainty. We could never be quite sure about these sharp lyrics: What did they do in Bangkok at 12 o’clock? Did they “foam at the mouth and run” or possibly, as in Hong Kong, “fire off a noonday gun”? I’ve seen that gun. We celebrated “the inmate who’s in late”, and gave up. It was a relief to be singing about a war, instead of trying not to be killed by one…

Bangkok was a very suitable place to relax and watch some blue movies in a palatial House of Pleasure, appreciating the skill of a Thai cameraman which was delicate, even in gross situations.

I returned to London by way of New Delhi and Istanbul, and went on to cover the riots and revolution in Cairo and the Canal Zone. Randolph resumed editing his father’s biography. It was business as usual.

My dictionary merely said, “An oppressive hot southerly or south-easterly wind, blowing in Egypt in the spring”. That didn’t sound too bad, yet it did have curious effects. For days the sun shone through low, hot sand clouds and the world was a hideous bright yellow, as though seen through a pair of cheap sunglasses. Gritty sand got into food, air and bed, tempers frayed, nerves stretched—it was the suicide season and it was not passing unnoticed for I had spent eight months in the Canal Zone, and noticed my occasional twitch and mutter.

“Shouldn’t worry about it, old chap,” I told the shaving mirror one morning, after listening to some aimless chatter. “A lot of people talk to themselves.”

As a foreign correspondent I was used to waking up in a different bed or a different country, but eight months in Egypt was a sentence devoutly to be avoided. We were all growing restless. “I’d prescribe a short swan journey,” said James, soothingly. He was our conducting officer, appointed by the War Office to look after correspondents. “Try Cyprus—it’s our only escape hatch.” It seemed a wise weekend move.

A brisk transport captain offered me a berth on a troopship: “You’ll be in Famagusta in twenty-four hours. You can have three days of wine and women and be back by Monday.” He gave me what the army somewhat disdainfully called “an indulgence passage”.

I threw a toothbrush into my typewriter, thanked James for the thought and sped up the Canal Road for Port Said, past the morning convoy of liners, oil tankers and merchantmen heading east. I was having an expeditionary pink gin in Navy House, enjoying the well-ordered peace of the RN, when a 10,000-ton American Liberty ship called, typically, Joseph E. Brown rammed the jetty with a fearful crash and nearly came upstairs.

Crunching through huge concrete slabs, the bows of the misguided Joe narrowly missed the stern of our cruiser Cleopatra. In keeping with traditional naval fun I urged my hosts to signal their Lords of the Admiralty: “Cleopatra raped!” They would not buy it. The captain gave a thin smile; I could tell he was thinking: “Look, Whicker—we do the jokes.”

Inside the docks I hunted for the Empire Sovereign. “That’s it,” said a sentry. Nothing in sight except small harbour craft. “There,” he said, pointing at the kind of boat which takes trippers from Richmond up to Kingston. “No, no,” I said patiently, “I’m looking for a troopship, ocean-going. Probably around 15,000 tons, promenade decks, restaurants, staterooms…” At that moment the words on the tiny stern came into focus: Empire Sovereign. “Oh,” I said weakly, “that’s it, is it?”

Some troops were being handed lifebelts and ushered below decks and a few Cypriot workers were already being seasick. I was allocated a cabin the size of a medium wardrobe, with eight bunks. Eight! Two passengers were already established; the others, wiser, must have gone by air. Even with three, it was jammed.

When our little craft began to shudder we stumbled up on deck. A fusspot of a tug, only slightly smaller, nudged and chivvied us into mid-stream and we glided towards the Mediterranean, past the Simon Artz store, past the sky-high KLM sign and the broad beach, and those posh passengers travelling port-out-starboard-home.

Deck loudspeakers blared music and people waved from other ships. It was pure Golden Eagle. I felt we were bravely sailing to Margate, watching out for the Luftwaffe.

As we left the shelter of the harbour wall something odd began to happen. The Med, as far as the eye could tell, was a millpond. Ignoring this, the Empire Sovereign forced herself through the water with a peculiar corkscrew motion—none of that straight up-and-down style ships have known and used for centuries. Passengers began to notice, and retreat below.

The troop commander, a pleasant CSM, came round with anti-seasick pills. “I’m never sick,” I said, waving them away. We spiralled into another treacherous swoop. “Well,” I said, clinging on, “practically never.” He then delivered the clincher: “It’s 249 miles.”

We gathered silently in the miniature saloon: a sprinkling of army officers on swans of varying legitimacy, a middle-aged man with little brown hair and a lot of peroxide wig, a thin subaltern freshly married to a young army nurse. She, pale and about to be ill, disappeared morosely to spend her honeymoon night in the Ladies’ Cabin (Gentlemen’s, with chintz) and the groom mooched off down the companionway, kicking things.

A few of us attempted a meal, mostly at a very acute angle, and afterwards I rummaged through the ship’s library. “Real sailors’ books,” mumbled an old Merchant Navy officer. He was wearing a beret, half-glasses, a woollen cardigan and looked like someone’s granny. It turned out he meant 1928 throw-outs from seaside libraries, well-thumbed love stories about counts and heiresses. Certainly no meat strong enough to take mind off motion.

I bought a bottle of whisky for 15 shillings, and settled down with a paratroop officer who confessed he would have flown over but was frightened of landing in an aeroplane. Nobody would play poker, so we lurched off to our cabins, reminding each other it was only for twenty-four hours, after all.

I struggled up into a top bunk, and waited to be rocked asleep. During the night a gale blew up and it began to seem doubtful whether our gallant little ship could make it through the night. I was thrown to the deck three times, which is enough to wake anyone.

In the morning the weather was so bad we could not put into Famagusta, so while my Cypriot friends waited on the quayside my ship waited in a bay up the coast. We lurked there, a mile offshore and heaving, for four days. Nothing to read, nothing to do, drink all gone, madness coming fast.

On the fifth day the weather broke and I stumbled ashore, took a taxi to Nicosia and flew straight back to the Canal Zone and the khamsin. “You look much calmer,” said James, when I reached the press dorm. “Nothing like a holiday, eh?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing like.”

7 NO ONE CARED ENOUGH (#ulink_7ce3c8d7-6692-5507-8cdf-d4506bb4e977)

They were the generation of women who went into the ’39 war and came out at the other end, unscathed but changed. Well-mannered, well-dressed, determined and resourceful, the Scarlett O’Haras of the post-war years. Brought up expecting to live the opulent lives of their parents, they were aware such a world no longer existed, so, instead of clinging to the past, they reinvented themselves and became the bridge between Mrs Miniver and The Beatles.

Edana Romney was South African, creamy-skinned and red-haired. In the late 40s she starred in films, notably Corridor of Mirrors—remembered fondly by film aficionados for her endless close-ups. It was directed by a youthful Terence Young, who went on to tackle various James Bonds. She was married to John Woolf who, with his mischievous brother Jimmy, dominated much of the British film industry in the Fifties and Sixties—John a producer of significance, Jimmy a powerful agent and lover of Laurence Harvey.

Pictures of Edana show her in billowing evening dresses, waist cinched, a glittering show-business figure in a drab time of rationing and clothing coupons. All plain sailing until her marriage ended. Abruptly she did another Scarlett and began a new career in a new medium: she became BBC television’s first agony aunt, with Edgar Lustgarten.

She moved into a stylish flat overlooking Hyde Park, rented Rose Cottage on the D’Avigdor Goldsmith estate near Tonbridge, and settled down with her elegant mother Min and Freddie the butler. It was an eccentric, stylish ménage that would survive some forty years of adventures on both sides of the Atlantic.

Chintzy Rose Cottage was transplanted lock, stock and steaming crumpets to San Ysidro Drive, a charming house in Beverly Hills, then to Summitridge, once home of Corbina Wright, a notorious gossip columnist. They lived well, though by Hollywood standards frugally.

None of them had ever given a thought to driving a car—so here in California, where only the criminal or the eccentric actually walk anywhere, they lived in grand isolation. Connected to the world only by an overworked telephone, Edana settled down to a new career as a writer.

She had fallen in love with Richard Burton. Not Burton of the velvet voice and Elizabeth Taylor, but Burton the nineteenth-century adventurer and explorer. He translated the Kama Sutra, wrote about and patronized male brothels and polygamous Mormons and, risking death, coloured his skin for a forbidden visit to Mecca, Islam’s most holy place.

For Edana it was almost an eighteenth-century life. She would stay in her boudoir most of the morning on the phone to friends, handing out advice and dreaming dreams of the dashing Burton. She wrote and rewrote her screenplay in a book annotated with ideas for location, strips of fabric for costumes and grand delusions: Sean Connery would play Burton, Richard Attenborough would direct. Someone once suggested that Tom Stoppard might rewrite the script. “Tom who?” she said, grasping the project ever closer to her. She forgot that Hollywood promises have a shorter life than celluloid kisses.

Over the years, many years, Burton became an obsession. To finance her dream she visited the Sahara, courted the sheikhs of the Gulf and the Ivory Coast, mortgaged her home and her life and finally—lost everything.

The Manson murders terrified Hollywood but brushed lightly past Edana. Every high-profile actor expected to be shot or kidnapped any day, but Edana and I were invited to a party at the home of Joan Cohn, the movie mogul’s widow and a major figure in Beverly Hills. It was an A-list party which would surely overcome the fears of the most macho film stars—indeed most of the great and the good in the film world wereon parade.