On my last night I took Brendan and Beatrice to a posh Dublin restaurant to thank them for their hospitality. As we entered the dining room the head waiter approached, hand outstretched in greeting. Brendan removed his jacket and hung it on the man’s index finger. The evening ended in the kitchens with a choir of chefs and Brendan leading the singing. I never saw him again. He went back on the bottle and died three years later, aged forty-one.
When I heard the news I thought of something he said to me in Dublin. We were talking about the time he collapsed in London and he said he used to lie in hospital during his recovery ‘thinking about croaking and who would miss me’. He said, ‘I thought of all those reporters who bought me booze and made a small bet with meself they wouldn’t mind me croaking, providing I did it in time for the first editions.’
He didn’t let them down.
16
OUR MAN IN THE CONGO
The day after I interviewed Miss Great Britain I was told to get my jabs and fly off to cover the war in the Congo. I was to be based in Elizabethville, the capital of the breakaway province of Katanga. The Congo was a mess. After seventy odd years of colonial rule, the Belgians had pulled out and left behind an inadequate infrastructure for efficient governance. Old tribal differences surfaced and the province of Katanga, rich in mineral resources, declared independence under President Moise Tshombe. United Nations troops intervened but only added to the confusion, and the entire nation was heading toward the catastrophe that has lasted to this very day.
I was told to meet Cyril Aynsley, who was ending his stint in Katanga, at Ndola Airport, in what was then Rhodesia. We would report the arrival of the United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, who was on his way to meet President Tshombe for peace talks. On the face of it, a routine task, this assignment was to prove both tragic and instructive. We stood at the perimeter fence to watch the Secretary General’s plane arriving, and a little ahead of schedule a plane touched down and people alighted. The watching media disappeared to write their stories.
Cyril stayed put. I asked him why he wasn’t moving.
‘Nothing to report,’ he said.
‘But we saw the plane and Hammarskjöld arrive,’ I said.
‘You saw a plane arrive and a man who might be Hammarskjöld get off. But can you be certain?’ he asked.
Even when he was being bullied by the newsdesk into confirming the story of the Secretary General’s arrival because it was appearing in the opposition papers, Cyril refused to compromise, maintaining what they were printing was a rumour and not a fact. He was proved triumphantly right when it was discovered that the plane had crashed six miles from Ndola Airport and all on board had been killed.
Cyril Aynsley was one of the finest journalists of his generation and I count myself lucky to have worked with him. He was tough but courteous, punctilious in the way he researched and wrote his stories, a marvellous example to an imposter such as myself, which is how I felt when in his company.
Cyril went home and I travelled to Elizabethville where I found a room in the Leo Deux Hotel and met up with Dan McGeachie, a colleague on the
Daily Express
, and a
Daily Herald
journalist who was to become a lifelong friend, Jon Akass. McGeachie was a blond, rugged and fearless reporter who had already demonstrated the kind of man he was in a hotel bar in Ndola. We were sitting at a table having a drink when a black man and his family came tentatively into the room. It was a time when people were challenging the unofficial and unspoken apartheid of the era. As the white manager moved to throw them out, McGeachie stood and said, ‘My dear friends. Thank you for coming. Please join us.’ We sat and drank with people we had never met before, with McGeachie’s direct stare challenging the manager to do something about it.
Jon Akass was also a good man, handsome with brooding good looks. One of the best all-rounders in Fleet Street, he was a marvellous writer.
Our hotel was the meeting place for Tshombe’s mercenaries, about a hundred of them, almost exclusively European, who were employed to sit and await a war that might not happen. There were a few professional soldiers among them but the majority appeared to be social misfits who had seen too many war movies. One used to sit in the hotel bar juggling with two hand grenades. ‘My presents for the United Nations,’ he would say if anyone asked. At night the bar resembled the Last Chance Saloon in Dodge City.
Now and again one of the mercenaries would feel the need to fire his pistol into the ceiling. As the bar was situated beneath my bedroom I used to sleep in the cast-iron bath as a precaution. I was terrified of being shot in the arse. As I settled down at night in my armour-plated bunker, I felt sure Cyril Aynsley never did this, not to mention my other great hero, Ernest Hemingway. Moreover, it seemed to me that my diet in those days consisted mainly of United Nations accreditation passes.
Travelling outside Elizabethville meant being stopped at roadblocks set up by renegade soldiers, who were often whacked on drugs and would demand identification. They were mostly illiterate but able to recognise the United Nations passes because of their bold blue lettering. Possession was an excuse for a beating, so coming upon a roadblock I would eat my press card. My record was three in a day.
I swiftly came to the conclusion that, while I might have dreamed of a life as a war correspondent, I wasn’t up to the job. It seemed to me I spent most of my time in a state of disorientation. I couldn’t settle in the new surroundings. It was difficult to make sense of the situation I found myself in, and I was unable to focus on the job in hand. I filed just a couple of stories in three or four weeks and the office became restless. I decided to restore my reputation with a bold exclusive.
The chance came when I was talking to a pilot in the bar of the Leo Deux who said he could fly me up country to the border town of Kaniama where a state of emergency had been declared after skirmishes between Congolese troops and Katangese gendarmerie. This might be the end to all the posturing between the two sides and the start of the war. He would provide the necessary passes guaranteeing cooperation from the troops in the area and there would be two or three others in the plane but no other British journalists.
There was shooting as we landed about twenty kilometres from Kaniama, but it was sporadic and distant. It was a typical African airstrip – a skid mark in the bush with a few tin huts at one end. About a dozen gendarmerie sat around in the afternoon sun. They wore the standard combat jacket, camouflaged trousers and a variety of footwear ranging from plimsolls to climbing boots. They were all lance-corporals. There were no privates in Tshombe’s army.
They watched us without much interest as we walked towards them across the tarmac. We said hello. No one stirred. In the distance there was the faint chatter of small arms fire. One of the soldiers reflectively picked his nose, another pushed his helmet farther back on his head with the business end of his automatic rifle. More silence. We didn’t really worry. This was the old Katanga routine. The photographer in our party produced a box of cigarettes and proffered it to the nearest soldier who grabbed it, extracted a cigarette and put the box in his pocket. ‘Passes?’ he asked.
We produced them. The finest there were. Signed by General Moke, Commander-in-chief of the Katangese army. And in Swahili too. They described us as ‘Friends of Katanga’ and instructed all troops to give us every assistance. The smoking soldier looked at them dispassionately and handed them around his colleagues. Most of the soldiers held them upside down when reading them. They were handed back.
A soldier asked me for a cigarette. I handed him the packet. He put it in his pocket and grinned. I grinned back and said, ‘We want to go to town to see what the fighting is like.’ He kept grinning. The first soldier said, ‘You will have to wait for the major.’ We asked how long the major would be. He shrugged. It depended, he said. The major was bringing in some deserters and might take a long time about it. All the soldiers laughed at this, but it seemed a pretty obscure joke to us. We pointed out that our passes were signed by General Moke. And wasn’t he the big boss, never mind the major?
‘Big boss in Elizabethville, maybe. But here . . .?’ The soldier shrugged his shoulders.
There was nothing to do but wait, so we wandered around the airstrip. At the entrance there were two native policemen in their blue uniforms and white helmets. One of them was wearing suede winklepickers. But they seemed friendly and both spoke English. They told us they were Rhodesians who had joined the Katangese police force after independence.
One of them explained, ‘Rhodesia no good for us. Katanga good. We bosses here. Katanga Number One.’ He said the major would not be long. The deserters he was collecting had been arrested after they had done a bunk during the border fighting and tried to make it back to their villages. They were to be taken to the nearby army camp for punishment but the major had promised that he would first bring them to the airstrip so that his men could have a look at them.
It took the major another hour to arrive, but when he did it was in style. He sat in the front of a jeep, one leg negligently hanging over the side. He wore sunglasses and a neatly cut light-brown uniform. The back of the jeep seemed to contain a platoon of gendarmerie. The jeep stopped opposite us and we saw for the first time that the soldiers were guarding three very bruised and frightened-looking fellow soldiers who were hatless and had their arms bound behind them. The major watched, hand on hip, as the three deserters were hauled from the vehicle and thrown, face downwards, on the road. Their guards then started to beat them. Rifle butts were crashed into their necks, boots were planted again and again in their groins, they were hauled to their feet and smashed and clubbed to the floor by rifles and clenched fists. The major watched it all without emotion.
Our party stood by, rooted, helpless, except the photographer who slipped into the middle of the mob taking pictures.
And then the two policemen moved in. One of them drove his heel into the mouth of one of the prisoners and slowly and deliberately turned it through a full circle. The other contented himself by kicking all three prisoners about the head with his winklepickers. By this time the dozen gendarmerie we had met on the airstrip had joined in. I suppose that the beating lasted about five minutes. It seemed much longer. And the unreal terrifying thing about it was that throughout their ordeal the prisoners did not utter a sound of any sort. They just lay there in a dreadful awful silence.
The beating was stopped by kind permission of the major. He gave the command to put the prisoners in the jeep. They seemed unconscious. More likely they were dead. They were tossed on to the floor of the jeep and their guards piled in on top of them. The major slid into the front seat, arranged one leg nonchalantly over the side and drove away. There were spots of blood on his suede boots.
The two policemen rejoined us. Well, not all of us. The photo grapher was a little way away being sick against a tree. The policemen looked wild-eyed, flushed and excited. I asked what would happen to the prisoners. Winklepickers said, ‘They will be taken to the camp for punishment.’ What punishment? He grinned and drew a finger across his throat.
We left. There was nothing else to do.
Our pilot, who had been allowed into town, returned about this time. He later admitted he had a girlfriend in Kaniama. We began to suspect we had been conned, that we had paid for our pilot to have an afternoon in bed with his mistress. But we were all too traumatised and depressed by what we had witnessed to take him to task. We were late flying into Elizabethville and, as we approached the airport, I saw tracer curving out of the bush and over our plane. The locals were enjoying a bit of target practice.
About a week later I was at a party in Elizabethville and met a high-ranking officer in the Katangese police force. He was saying how well-behaved his men were and I couldn’t resist telling him what I had seen.
He was unperturbed. ‘They were deserters. They deserved their punishment,’ he said.
I pointed out that no one deserved that kind of beating.
The officer, who was a little drunk, became angry. ‘You are trying to tell us how to behave. I know how to behave as well as any of you people. I can prove it. Have you been in the Boy Scouts?’
I said no.
‘Well I have. I was a Boy Scout and I know how to behave. Once I even went to a Scouts’ jamboree in Birmingham,’ he shouted.
It was a fitting epitaph to my time in the Congo, surreal and discomfiting. It had the virtue of convincing me that I would be happier in future interviewing beauty queens than reporting men being kicked to death. The problem was it would take a couple or so more wars for the people who employed me to cotton on.
17
DISENCHANTMENT
I wrote my ‘exclusive’ but it didn’t appear. I wasn’t told why. A week or two later I returned to London and went for a drink with Richard West, now working for an excellent magazine called
Time and Tide
. I recounted my adventure and he said I should write it for his periodical. I said the
Express
wouldn’t allow it, he said the
Express
wouldn’t know about it if I wrote under an assumed name. He said ‘Warren Brady’ sounded suitably hairy-chested and convincing for a war correspondent.
Mr Brady wrote a couple of articles for
Time and Tide
, as did Jack Braithwaite, another West invention, who wrote about life up north in Yorkshire. One day Jack Braithwaite received an offer from Brian Glanville, the journalist and author, then scouting for Secker & Warburg, to write a book about life in Yorkshire. We met in a suitably discreet bar away from Fleet Street where I confessed my duplicity. Later we became colleagues on
The Sunday Times
where I wrote a sports column about the heroes of my youth in a style first invented by Jack Braithwaite.