In My Wildest Dreams Page 2

  'Saw your film last night,' he said while the traffic piled up behind the corpse. 'And I want to give you this for Barnardo's.' It was four pounds. 'Somebody gave it to me as beer money' I thought it might have been 'bier' money – a joke in the undertaking business perhaps.

  Cherie Booth is now President. We meet at an event sponsored by Monopoly in aid of Barnardo's. Mindful of the newspaper stories about Mrs Blair allegedly using her position as wife of the Prime Minister to feather her own nest, I warned her: 'Don't let the press photograph you with handfuls of Monopoly money.'

  She replied smartly, 'Or the card that says "Go to Jail".'

  Barnardo's do not have orphanages these days; their efforts are concentrated on deprived, abused and sick children. In those times they cared, as much as they could, for 8,000 children of various sorts. One of the orphanages was called Babies Castle.

  I did cross swords with Barnardo's once about an advertising campaign that I thought was unacceptable, a baby supposedly photographed injecting heroin, a toddler about to jump from a roof, a man with his head blown apart. I wanted to resign as a vice-president but was dissuaded. An even more grisly set of full-page advertisements appeared the following year and the Advertising Standards Authority banned them.

  It is not altogether known that people invited to appear in the famous pages of Who's Who are required to compile their own entry. When, to my considerable surprise, my name was added to that illustrious list in 1973 I summed up my career in the armed forces succinctly: Army Service 1949-51. Rose to lance-corporal.'

  Even that meagre rank was acting, unpaid, and did not last long. I was demoted for failing to arrive on time at a Sunday cricket match for which I had been selected, having had my trousers thrown from a window by a Chinese girl I years later christened Juicy Lucy in my novel, The Virgin Soldiers.

  This mishap was reprised in the Carl Foreman film of the book and (since she was an eager cinema goer) I often wondered if she had recognised herself, if not her name. Juicy Lucy was, in fact, the nickname of a Chinese airline stewardess I met years later in Hong Kong and I appropriated it for the story. Later still, in America, I discovered that Juicy Lucy had been a jazz tune in the nineteen-twenties and thirties. After The Virgin Soldiers was published it passed to yet another generation via a pop group and a popular health food bar in London.

  As for the title The Virgin Soldiers itself, I will never write three more potent (or profitable!) words. Perhaps in the singular it will be carved on my tombstone. In more than forty years, since I first penned them, they have been quoted by politicians and military men, including Field Marshal Montgomery, in newspapers, on radio, television, and in the sports world.

  The novel has scarcely been out of print since first publication in 1966. There have been all sorts of figures quoted for worldwide sales but I don't know how accurate they are. I have lost count. It was the first novel of the twenty-nine, and that simple soldier's story has been a long-lasting blessing to me. The film and its sequel still appear on television (usually after my bedtime) and it has attained, over the years, the odd status of a cult movie and the book has now been dubbed 'a classic'. My ambition had only been to write a story.

  But the book and the film gave a hopeful author in his thirties a leg-up which most first novelists could only enjoy in their dreams. It was a lucky try. It was many years before I reread it (most of my books I have never reread) and I had to wonder what all the success had been about; to me it seemed nothing more than a beginner's novel. Today, if I could write it again, it would be three times as long, three times as well written – and probably sell about a third.

  One dark afternoon in winter, sitting by a log fire in my house, I decided to try my hand at writing a detective story. By bedtime I had the framework and some of the characters; it was called Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective. He was an amalgam of some of the policemen I knew when I was a young reporter in Willesden, London, the old X Division of the Metropolitan Police. I have a great affection for him.

  Willesden was a gritty, working-class, area in those days with many Irish inhabitants. One day I saw two hundred sober and stone-faced Irishmen march towards the Catholic cemetery with a coffin carried at the front of the parade. One of the bearers was a tiny man, much shorter than the others, and he held up the coffin with one muscular extended hand and arm. The lodgings I inhabited, one tight room at the top of a house, had a blackened fireplace where two would-be IRA members had ham-handedly tried to make a bomb. The house became Dangerous Davies's lodgings in the story.

  I have now written four books about the hapless Dangerous Davies and his sidekick the philosophical Mod. The unique Bernard Cribbins was the first television Davies and Bill Maynard the elderly muttering Mod. Now, years later, Peter Davison is the latest incarnation of Davies and captures the difficult character perfectly. Mod has been transformed from an old Welshman to a young Irishman, Sean Hughes. It works so successfully that, although I have been encouraged to write a further adventure, I feel that the story has been taken out of my hands. From our family point of view the notable triumph is that our talented son Matthew wrote one of the episodes of the first series and two episodes of the series they are filming as I write. I have had nothing to do with his success (or the series for that matter). It has taken him ten years of hard graft and biting disappointment to find success but he is so fearful of accusations of nepotism that he even refuses to let me see his scripts.

  I cannot pretend that the origins of The Last Detective lie outside the real murder mystery in my own family, as described in this book, the sordid killing of my fifteen-year-old niece in a field next to a Birmingham fairground. Being the dispersed family that we are I did not realise she was my niece until more than ten years after it happened. As a reporter I even wrote one of the newspaper stories myself from London, unaware of my relationship to the victim. Thomas is a common enough name and there were quotes in the press from the girl's father (who wasn't) and mention of brothers (which she did not have). Her mother had taken up with another man after my brother Harold's death.

  The facility which enabled me to think up Dangerous Davies in that afternoon by the winter fireside was, I am sure, something I honed in my newspaper days. At the Evening News I wrote articles on myriad subjects to order, often at a couple of hours notice. This has been continued even up to today by an occasional commission from the Daily Mail after lunch with fifteen hundred words to be researched, composed and faxed by five o'clock. The fax and the word processor, on which I am working now, are my only forays into modern technology. I tell people I have only just got rid of the carrier pigeons.

  Computer matters still confound me. When I had finished my airport novel Arrivals and Departures I decided that I did not much like the name of one character – Jack Richardson. So I asked my secretary to tap the instruction that would change all the 'Jacks' to 'Edwards' which resulted in a manuscript which referred to 'the Union Edward' flying at the flag mast and fears that an airliner might be 'hi-Edwarded'.

  Keeping my hand in with journalism has always been pleasing and rewarding. The Evening Standard once dispatched me to Las Vegas to write what in the trade are called 'colour pieces' about the imminent Mike Tyson versus Frank Bruno world heavyweight fight. I told them I knew nothing about boxing but they sent me anyway. My wife asked me to get both combatants' autographs to be auctioned at a charity event.

  The amiable Bruno was easy enough (I had played cricket with him!) but the mean-eyed Tyson was something else. I explained that the autograph would raise a lot of money for disabled children. 'And how do I know you're not going to take the bucks for yourself?' he asked nastily. He is not a particularly tall man and I did not have to look up very far to meet him eye to glinting eye. 'Don't you speak to me like that,' I snapped back. There was an unpleasant pause. I tried not to blink or go pale. At least my death would make the headlines. Tyson grunted and gave me the autograph. At the auction it fetched about a hundred pounds. Hardly worth dying fo
r.

  Fleet Street is now vanished. And vanished with it is my generation. Once it was called the Street of Adventure (not to mention Shame) but is now a citadel of banking, insurance and IT, as they call it; the bars serve cafe latte for God's sake. All that remains among the blank buildings, modest despite its poetic spire, is the journalists' church (Father forgive them, for they know very well what they do). St Brides in these after-days is often the venue of a memorial service. Men, who laughed coarsely, drank with dedication and knew priceless stories for sale, are only ghosts, staggering slightly as they pass on their way to their spectral upright Underwoods.

  Not only men either. There were redoubtable women journalists (what their descendants in the trade now call 'feisty'), like the one who recently died in her seventies. I recall when, as an attractive young woman, she travelled halfway down America in the company of a man who turned out to be a multiple rapist. After he was apprehended the police asked her if she had been assaulted and she answered: 'He'd have to get up early in the morning to rape me.'

  The lady who said, 'Just mention me in passing,' when I began the original version of this story repeated her modest request when I embarked on this new introduction. She cannot, however, escape responsibility as a co-conspirator in what has been an undeniably nomadic life. In a little under forty years together we have had twenty-six residences, sometimes three concurrently, a house in the country, an apartment in London and a place abroad.

  When Diana and I lived in the Close of Salisbury Cathedral, in an exquisite Georgian house with its long, green, garden floating down to the Wiltshire River Avon, we sometimes wondered what a pair like us was doing there. Me, failed working class and she from a terraced house in Leicester. But the residents, some very exalted, were glad to see us and said that we brought a breath of fresh air to that ecclesiastical enclave.

  Military and naval neighbours, who included Admiral Teddy Gerlitz, the redoubtable Beach-master of D-Day, were ever kind and tactfully praised the rank of corporal (promoting me at a stroke) as the best in the army. We were once invited to an officers' mess dinner where Lance-Corporal Thomas and his missus sat at the top table, our faces reflected in the regimental silver. In the same barracks I discovered, to my huge amazement, an old comrade from the teenage soldier days in Singapore, who had signed on when the rest of us were heading home, and who was now the Regimental Sergeant-Major – which is undoubtedly the best rank in the British army.

  The longest we have remained in any location, to date, was our fine house, the Walton Canonry in the Cathedral Close at Salisbury, where we lived for ten years before we noticed the lease was getting dangerously low. The shortest stay was eighteen months (it was a converted piggery). So far we have spent five years at Lymington, Hampshire, in an enjoyable old house overlooking the harbour and we do not plan another move until 1 cannot manage the four flights of stairs.

  Before we could become owners of the remarkable Walton Canonry at Salisbury Close we had to be vetted by the Dean and Chapter who pronounced us 'eminently suitable'. This suitability included the financial assets sufficient to replace the roof and to refurbish the building. Just to ensure that we had commissioned a good job the cathedral architect would slyly climb to the roof with a magnet to make sure we were using the right kind of nails.

  There had been a dwelling on the site since 1198 when the great cathedral was first constructed and we inherited a list of occupants since that time: the first was one William of Gerdstock, who came from Normandy.

  The classic Georgian house we had moved into was built in the early seventeen hundreds by Canon Isaac Walton, son of Isaak Walton 'The Gompleat Angler'. He died of cholera before he could occupy it and it passed to the titled Eyre family whose coat of arms remained above the huge front door. Me with an escutcheon! Before the Second World War the Ganonry was the home of the artist Rex Whistler, who was killed soon after D-Day in Normandy, not far from the place where William of Gerdstock had come.

  Edward Heath was the first of our new neighbours to invite us to lunch. As I looked from his window towards the elegant Close and the lofty and lovely cathedral, I said: 'I never thought I would ever live in a place like this. I'm a working-class boy.'

  'So am I,' he said truthfully.

  To mark his eightieth birthday the BBC filmed a programme and came to Salisbury to interview us. Considerably to my surprise the producer asked bluntly: 'Is Edward Heath gay?'

  'No,' I replied immediately. 'He's bloody miserable.'

  Actually he was not. I am not a political animal so I took him as I found him, quirkish but often kind. He conducted a village band in 'The Cornish Floral Dance' on our lawn and they never forgot it. He also cleared his crammed diary so he could be chairman at a Foyle's literary lunch, which was given for me in London, attracting a more illustrious top table than I would have ever been able to manage. He made a funny speech and I swear he had never read a word of my book. The venerable Christina Foyle said it was the best lunch since 1931.

  As a former prime minister Ted had twenty-four-hour security (and had survived attempts on his life). His armed guards became as much neighbours as he was. It was not unusual to find one of them sitting having coffee in our kitchen with his sub-machine gun parked on the table.

  One autumn afternoon I was taking our dog – by this time a sweet-natured Rottweiller called Gipsy – for a walk in the cathedral grounds when she dug into a depression apparently full of leaves and found a body. My artificial hips prevented me getting down to investigate so I returned to my house and rang 999. The Close had a high security rating and as I returned one of Sir Edward's guards was already striding towards me calling, 'Where's the body, Mr Thomas?'

  A police car and an ambulance had arrived smartly and as we walked across the grass, the guard with his machine gun and me with the pleased dog, the body sat up. It was a poor wrecked woman clinging to a vodka bottle. The ambulance crew knew her and they assured me I had done the right thing because it was cold and she might have died in that hole.

  The split-minute security in the Close saved our house from burning down even before we lived in it. A retired surgeon, practising his golf, spotted a finger of smoke coming from a window. A spark from a workman's blowtorch had smouldered and set fire to some wood shavings. The Salisbury fire brigade was there almost in seconds and prevented the flames spreading to the roof. The builder in charge of the work mentioned that he had insured the house for a million pounds only that day.

  There was rarely a dull moment in that holy place. In the cause of ecumenical understanding the bishop once took a delegation to meet the Pope in the Vatican. They were puzzled by the Holy Father addressing them in German. He thought they had come not from Salisbury but from Salzburg.

  The inhabitants of the Close were of absorbing interest. There was a dying canon who had the choir from his Oxford college ranged around his bed in Salisbury hospital so they could sing him to heaven. 'He left all his money to them as well,' sniffed the dean.

  When I first moved to the Walton Ganonry, an angular lady was heard to wail biblically: 'We have a pornographer come among us!' She became a sweet friend and loved to tell stories of her time in the Sudan where her husband had been a district officer. He would go on a tour of his area, about the size of Wales, mounted on a camel but sitting backwards so that he could read a book.

  By and large critics have been fair with me, although some do not bother to read the whole book. Certain newspapers either ignore my work entirely or, at the best, are patronising. But, as any writer must admit, it is the bad reviews you remember long after the pleasure of praise has gone. The late Auberon Waugh, a fat man with the expression of a disturbed barn owl, and someone with all the bile and none of the talent of his famous father, made a vicious attack on my second novel Orange Wednesday (which was top of the best-sellers) during which he complained that my work always (always? And it was a second novel?) failed to give him any sense of sexual anticipation. I have never since replied to a criti
c but on this occasion I wrote to the magazine concerned pleading that I was a writer not a faith healer.

  Poor Auberon, on one and the same day he had a novel published and two remaindered. My agent, Desmond Elliott, not lacking in bile either, bought some of the remainders and advertised them for sale at one pence each with the catchline: 'Spend a Penny on Auberon Waugh'.

  Desmond and I parted company shortly after the publication of the original edition of In My Wildest Dreams. The reasons seem trivial now but we never spoke again in twenty years. Urged by Diana and Matthew I had intended to send a reconciling letter to him (although I was assured it would be rejected) but he died in New York before it could be written.

  When you write a book you have no idea how many people will read it. Rarely is there any instant reaction either. It is not like scoring a goal or playing Mendelssohn's violin concerto. There is no applause. The book goes off over the horizon and for all you know disappears on the other side.

  But then rumours drift back, people mention it. Sometimes it has even played some significant part in their lives. A lady wrote from a remote place in Cumbria. Her husband had gone to the Carlisle library to collect one of my travel books. 'I never saw him alive again,' she said. 'I found him dead of a heart attack in the car which was in a ditch.' She asked a passing hiker to telephone for assistance. 'Then,' she related. 'I sat beside him in the car, the man who had been my husband for forty years. Your book was on the seat and I opened it and began to read. It got me through the worst half an hour of my life and then through the next week. Thank you.'

  An actor once told me that he had married a young dancer, on the spur of the moment. They went off to Spain, in the winter, and before long had run out of conversation. 'It was getting desperate,' he said. 'Then in the village newspaper kiosk we came across a couple of your paperbacks, curled by the sun. We had both read your novels and we took these back to the hotel. We enjoyed them, laughed and discussed them, then we swapped. It would not be too much to say that you saved our marriage.'