At this point Chayevsky got from behind the wheel and, waving what looked like a starting handle, grabbed the man who was dancing on the bonnet of his jeep and threatened him with serious damage if he didn’t ‘fuck off’. I imagined this was the point where we were torn to bits. Instead, seemingly nonplussed by Chayevsky’s aggression, the mob quietened and watched him get in behind the wheel and start the car. He gently eased it forward and the demonstration parted to let us through.
‘That could have gone either way,’ I said, when I had stopped shaking.
He nodded. ‘Didn’t want to use the sten. Might have set them off,’ he said, which reminded me. I checked his gun just to see how efficient it might have been. The breech was jammed. It would only have been effective as a weapon if he had thrown it at the mob.
‘This bloody gun is useless,’ I said.
‘I know. That’s why I didn’t use it,’ he said.
I thought of charging him, but then I remembered the starting handle and the look in his eyes, and thought again.
They were frightening and exhilarating times. I was twenty and the youngest captain in the British Army, so the folks at home got to read about this young officer who was forging ahead in a glorious military career and was obviously destined for great things.
What I really wanted was to be one of the journalists I was looking after. I had served an apprenticeship on local newspapers but the men I was working with now were a different breed. These were proper journalists, like I had seen in the movies – tough, smart, worldly. They were also vastly experienced.
I remember a party thrown for the media by General Stockwell. Medals were worn and Ronnie Monson, a taciturn, grizzled Aussie journalist, turned up wearing more medal ribbons than the general. He had reported wars long forgotten. He had also been one of the first journalists into Belsen, so there was nothing on earth he hadn’t seen.
Little did I realise that before long I would be sharing assignments with Sandy Gall, who was then working for Reuters, Denis Pitts, Cyril Page, Terry Fincher and even Robin Day. I began hanging out with them.
The toilets in our apartment block had overloaded the sewage system, which had packed up. Consequently, the block stank and became a health hazard. Many of the journalists were found lodging aboard HMS
Forth,
a former submarine mother ship, now doing duty as a floating NAAFI in the harbour. One night, in the bar, I became embroiled in a dispute with a bar steward who threatened to knife me. I tried to grab him and in the ensuing mêlée was rescued by a couple of drinking companions and taken home.
The next day I was required to explain my actions to a senior officer who said that because the barman was a civilian and not a soldier (in which case I would have been in serious trouble), and because the dispute did not come to blows, and particularly because independent witnesses had heard the man threaten me, he would let me off with a bollocking. He also said he didn’t think it wise for me to drink on board in the future, so HMS
Forth
was off limits. This seemed a minor inconvenience until the day arrived when we were withdrawing from Port Said and I was told I was to report to HMS
Forth
, which would be the last ship to leave. Would they leave me on the quayside with the angry approaching mob?
As it was, they changed their minds and put me on a troopship in charge of a convoy of trucks, carrying our office equipment, which, upon return to England, would disband at Mons barracks. Moreover, my driver in the lead truck was Corporal Chayevsky.
I remember looking at the coast of southern England and thinking the boy who left those shores was not the man returning. It was an optimistic, energising feeling. I felt more confident as a citizen and as a journalist. I imagined I had seen my future.
We set off in convoy for Aldershot, me in the front vehicle with Chayevsky. After a while it occurred to me we were on the main road to London. When I pointed this out, Chayevsky said he was making a short detour in order to take a nostalgic look at the place of his birth. I wasn’t going to argue. I had a couple of months to serve and I didn’t care. We ended up in a street somewhere near West Ham Football Club. I took the advice of my driver and went to a nearby café for a cup of tea.
Upon my return, the convoy looked the same but I had no doubt was a few tons lighter, having been relieved of whatever loot had been hidden away among the office stores. I didn’t enquire, but on the drive to Aldershot, Chayevsky asked me if my dear old mum was looking for a new fridge. We parted company at Mons. I never saw or heard of him after that, but often remembered him. He played an important part in my life – he saved it.
At Mons I came across my old training captain. We bumped into each other in the officers’ mess. He appeared not to recognise me and I didn’t provide any clues. There was a moment when his eyes seemed to register the three pips on my shoulder and I thought he shook his head in disbelief, but maybe I was imagining things. What I didn’t imagine was the reaction of my drill sergeant as we passed each other in camp and saluted.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said, when he recognised the young captain he was acknowledging. He had forgotten his advice about needing a sense of humour in the army.
When I was demobbed I informed the
South Yorkshire Times
of my availability and was offered five quid a week and a job in head office in Mexborough. As I was earning fifteen quid a week as a captain in the army I thought I might as well re-enlist. I tried a couple of other newspapers without getting an offer, so I took a job at a local glass works, driving a fork-lift, shifting palettes from one place and stacking them in another. As the new recruit, I was also given the job of a daily visit to the nearby pub where I would fill two buckets with Barnsley Bitter for my workmates to sup. I was told gruesome stories of initiation ceremonies for new male employees, carried out on the night shift by female workers. I looked forward to being seriously interfered with, but nothing happened.
The job served its purpose. It kept me going financially until I could move on. I also experienced the drab and monotonous routine of factory work, a production line of labour stretching from school to retirement without change and without hope of anything better. We had been told in 1946 that things would be different. We assumed we were the masters now. A decade on and it seemed to me that for the vast majority of people in Britain nothing much had changed.
On the other hand, I had seen the alternative, a world beyond the one served by the Barnsley Traction Bus Company. As soon as I could afford the fare, I was off!
11
OPENING FOR BARNSLEY WITH DICKIE BIRD
I was rescued from the glass works by my old colleague, Don Booker. He arranged for me to meet the editor of the
Barnsley Chronicle
and I was hired as a reporter. Arthur Hopcraft, who later went on to a distinguished career as a television playwright and who also adapted John le Carré’s
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
for television, was a fellow hack. For all he was quiet and reserved by nature, Arthur was easily recognisable as the only man in Barnsley to wear a bow tie to work, which was an oddly flamboyant gesture for one so diffident. He also favoured beige as a feature of his out and about wardrobe, which, in Barnsley at that time, had him singled out as a colourful character. He was a good reporter and a marvellous feature writer with an enviable elegance.
He loved football and went on to write
The Football Man
, one of the best books ever written about the game. There was unspoken competition between us. We would try to outdo each other with fancy phrases, showing off like competing birds of paradise. I was particularly proud of a reminiscence about Barnsley Football Club in which I pointed out that Roy Cooling, a blond and handsome inside forward on Barnsley’s books in the days of my youth, had the romantic looks of the young Scott Fitzgerald. I imagined this would display to the general public, and to Mr Hopcraft in particular, that I had a working knowledge of contemporary American literature they might find surprising, and don’t get me started on Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos.
What I wrote was: ‘A particular favourite of mine was Roy Cooling, then a young and promising play maker, who bore a distinct resemblance to the young Scott Fitzgerald.’ Sadly, my ambitions were frustrated by a subeditor who had never heard of
The Great Gatsby
. He changed my line to ‘Roy Cooling . . . who bears a distinct resemblance to Scott of the Antarctic.’
They were good days, ripe with youthful energy, a feeling we were on the springboard of our careers. I was still inspired by those glamorous men I had met in Port Said but, on the other hand, I hadn’t entirely given up my ambition to be a professional cricketer.
Playing for Barnsley and opening the innings with Dickie Bird, we once put on nearly 200 together. I scored a century and went to my 100 by hitting a six into the gents’ toilet, from where my father emerged holding the ball like some precious gem. He had been hiding while I went through what are called ‘the nervous nineties’. From the moment I left Cudworth Cricket Club when I was fifteen or sixteen and joined Barnsley he had given up playing himself to watch every game I played but he couldn’t simply stand and watch. He had to contribute. He would position himself behind the bowler’s arm alongside the sightscreen and semaphore his mood – happiness, concern, disgust even, to his son.
His most emphatic gesture was reserved for when I went to cut a ball and missed. I loved cutting outside my off stump and wasn’t bad at it. My father, however, had been brought up on the Yorkshire coaching manual, which insisted, in the words of the immortal Maurice Leyland: ‘Never cut until June is out, and even then only when you have thought about it.’ What he did if I shaped to cut the ball and missed was a mime Monsieur Marceau would have paid to see. It involved firstly throwing his arms in the air with his face towards the heavens, then putting his head in his hands and shrugging his shoulders as if sobbing with uncontrollable grief. After that, he would stand to attention and, looking in my direction, wave a fist at me.
One day when I was playing and missing quite a lot and my father was giving a command performance, the wicket keeper said to me, ‘Does tha’ reckon yon bloke’s having a fit?’
I said it looked like it.
‘Does tha’ know him?’ he asked.
I shook my head.
‘Must be the local nutter,’ he said.
I nodded in agreement.
‘Poor sod,’ he said.
When I first played for Barnsley as a teenager I was so paralysed by fear and the reputation of opposition players I could barely play a shot. My slow play once proved too much for one spectator who, after watching me for about half an hour without much happening, shouted, ‘I don’t know thi’ name, lad, but I have to tell thi’ tha’s got about as much life as a bloody tombstone.’
This particular spectator made a career of coming to all our home games and abusing the players. Whenever I walked to the wicket he would shout, ‘Oh, good God, not him again.’ He had a running feud with our skipper, Ernest Steele. When we were taking a terrible pasting in the field, and every ball seemed to fly to the boundary, he bellowed at Steele, ‘Put another man there, Steely.’ After thirty minutes of this, Ernest Steele turned to his tormentor and shouted, ‘How many bloody fielders do tha’ think I’ve got?’ ‘Obviously not sufficient,’ came the reply.
When batting, Ernest liked to give the wicket a good whack with the back of his bat after every ball, to flatten out bumps, real or imagined. After one particular hefty thwack his critic yelled, ‘Ay up, Steely, tha’ wants to be careful, there’s men working under theer.’
We played in the Yorkshire League. It was tough, hard cricket and no place for sensitive souls. For the young aspiring player it was a true test of whether or not you might make it into the world of a professional cricketer. There were old pros in the Yorkshire League capable of setting the most severe examinations.
George Henry Pope, who captained the Sheffield United team, was one of the finest all-rounders of his generation and certainly one of the best swing and seam bowlers there has ever been. Keith Miller said he learned everything from Pope about bowling in English conditions, including secreting a thick coating of Brylcreem inside his cap to keep the ball shiny. George Pope was a tall, bald man with a large nose and rubbery face. As well as being a master cricketer, he was a genius at psychological warfare. As I walked out to play against him for the first time he said in a conversational tone, but loud enough for me to hear, ‘Here comes a new victim. Shouldn’t take long – lbw bowled Pope.’ He was right, second ball. You could say he talked me into it.
He was also a master at umpire tampering. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Umpire, and how are the roses in your garden?’ he would say to the official, who was flattered at how George Pope of Derbyshire and England should know he grew roses for the local show. ‘And how is Elsie?’ he would continue, asking by name after the umpire’s wife. And there was more, after which the umpire was not simply regarding George Pope as his best friend but was also considering adopting him. It was generally known in the Yorkshire League that if George Pope appealed against you for lbw, you could start walking.
Our professional was Ellis Robinson, of Yorkshire. He was an off-spin bowler with a terrible temper if things went wrong. The Barnsley wicket at that time was a masterpiece prepared by a groundsman of genius called John Mathewman. It was a batsman’s paradise. This did not suit Ellis Robinson, who was made to toil, often fruitlessly, for his wickets. The more frustrated he became, the nearer he ordered you to field at short leg, trying to psyche out the batsman. More often than not, the batsman regarded the close field as a challenge to his manhood and would attack with even greater vigour, sometimes causing considerable damage. I was given the suicide mission on several occasions. I didn’t know which was worse, being hit by the ball or bollocked by Ellis, who had a fine repertoire of insults.