But as I’ve tried to indicate, I was in a complete trance. At night after work I was going to a coffee bar with university students and other people older than myself and I was talking to them about Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edith Piaf, Maria Callas, and it was a completely bizarre and unreal situation. I wasn’t, and I didn’t even know about it, but many of them were smoking pot. At the time I was blissfully naive about all of that, I was just drinking my coffee and sitting on the edge, enthralled by the way these people spoke, the books and the music they discussed.
In fact I was in such a trance, it was only when, something like thirty years later, to my amazement I was accosted in Dublin by Michael Aspel and kidnapped onto ‘This Is Your Life’ that I discovered anything about these people. Before the guests come on to This Is Your Life’ you hear their voices and they say something which is designed to jog your memory of some past event. I heard this voice saying, ‘Floydsie, you still owe me for a suit!’ I sat there like a stoat under a snake, or vice versa. Who the fuck was that? Then I remembered. It was Jeremy Bryan, a brilliant reporter from the Bristol Evening Post, with whom one night I had set off to cover a fire or a plane crash or some disaster. In fact, it wasn’t even that. We were all in the pub, the White Hart, and as far as we were concerned, work was over and we had probably had a few too many. The phone rang in the pub and the landlord called Jeremy over and said, ‘You’ve had a phone call and you’ve got to go.’ ‘I want to come too!’ I shouted. ‘In fact, I’ll take you there, because I’ve got a motor scooter.’ Well, we crashed. Wrecked Jeremy’s suit, never did get to the disaster, and spent the whole night in the Bristol Royal Infirmary, not seriously wounded in any way, just with scratches and bruises.
Another great This Is Your Life’ surprise that night involved a wonderful Evening Post journalist called Roger Bennett, who, a little bit like the Country Editor of the Western Daily Press, had always impressed upon me the importance of acknowledging people as you travel through life. Indeed many years after the time we are talking about now, Roger Bennett went on to become a very successful broadcaster at the BBC. Whenever I was in town he would always ring me up and ask me to go onto his programme and I always would. He said to me one day, There are some people we both know who are now very famous (much more famous than me) who don’t have the time to come onto the programme.’ Apart from being a brilliant journalist and broadcaster he was also a superb jazz musician. When I was first on the paper at the age of sixteen, I spent many nights listening to Roger playing with the Blue Notes Jazz Band down at the Old Duke or wherever they were performing in Bristol (a great jazz city). I didn’t know this at the time, but later I was to work for Acker Bilk and get to know all the jazz musicians, and I used to babysit for Roger. In fact, as I write this book roughly in 1999 (it might be the year 2000 when I finish, I’m not too sure) it was only a couple of years ago that Roger retired from broadcasting, and I was very pleased to be invited on to a special programme for him to pay a tribute.
So many people like this came from Evening Post days, because – yes – it was a family paper but it was also a family in its own right. The people were very concerned and caring people and I owe that paper so much.
Another crisis took place shortly after this. It was decided that I was overdoing things and I was called into the Editor’s office and told that it would be better if I worked on one of their weekly newspapers, in this case the Bristol Observer. I was gutted by that, but it’s what I should have done at the very beginning really. I had gone in too fast, too high and too quick, and, as they told me, I was only there half the time (although I was there all the time). I was actually working from eight in the morning to one the next morning, nearly every day of the week. I thought I was physically and mentally there, but I was only seventeen years old and I suppose I was dropping a few clangers from time to time.
So they put me onto the weekly paper. I still had my weekly Youth Notes column. I had to go round to Alverston and I think somewhere called Pucklechurch and all the suburbs and villages of the surrounding area of Bristol to see the vicar to find out what had happened that week, and to the Townsmen’s Guild and the local planning committee. I was bored out of my brains. I really felt totally put down, although in retrospect it was a good thing. It enabled me to learn how to put a story together, under less pressure than I had been before. But I felt thoroughly pissed off. I was attached to a really worthy senior reporter who never came up with anything sensational but had his ear to the community all the time and understood what was going on. He taught me how to get responses from people because he was gentle and casual about what he said and personable in the way that he did it. He had the confidence of people and got all the stories. But I – and bearing in mind that at one or two o’clock in the morning I’m with all these intellectuals – am feeling very unworthy as a cub reporter on a weekly newspaper and I’ve got a really split personality and a fair degree of resentment.
So I went to see the Editor, Richard Hawkins, to express my dissatisfaction and unhappiness with this position. He said, ‘Well you’ve only got yourself to blame really, I mean you burnt yourself out by doing too much and anyway it’s where you should have been in the beginning, it’s where you should have started. But,’ he said, ‘If you don’t really like that, and I do know you have some good points [he was a very sarcastic man, Richard Hawkins], I need a personal assistant and you can be that personal assistant if you want.’ He had a secretary anyway and I didn’t really know what it meant being a personal assistant. But he did also say that he would put my salary up to £7 a week. That was a hike from £4 7s 6d up to £7 – absolutely massive! But then, as now, I was a shopaholic, a spendthrift and never able to hold onto money, ever! So what seemed to be almost a hundred per cent increase in salary did not result in there being any more pennies in my pocket on Monday morning than there were at the previous salary. Then, as now, I was obsessed with good shoes, silk ties, proper clothes (old fashioned they may be, old fashioned I am). In the sixties, in the week you wore a suit and on Saturday mornings a sports jacket – that was de rigueur. I always felt it was important to have a good tie, good shoes and a well-cut jacket. Even then, although I couldn’t afford it, I used to have my suits handmade. This was my mother’s fault because when she worked at a cloth factory, as I’ve already told you, she would bring home these bolts of cloth, these remnants that had a flaw in them, and she was able to get the finest West of England worsted and wool fabric for very little money. In Wiveliscombe there was a man called Mr Berry, who used to sit cross-legged on a wooden stage in the window of his house, hand-sewing suits, and even as a schoolboy I had handmade suits, because they were cheaper for my mother than anything at Weaver to Wearer, John Collier, Burton or something like that. So I had been cursed, and with my grandfather being a boot and shoe maker and repairer, I have this ridiculous fetish for handmade clothes and handmade shoes, and nothing will stop me from buying them.
However, I am now the Editor’s personal assistant. In reality I am the Editor’s servant. In board meetings, on directors’ days my job was to go to Avery’s the wine merchants, to the actual cellars, and collect the exquisite wines they wanted. I was to bring up the Beefeater gin, not Gordon’s, and the particular sherries they liked and be on hand to take notes at the whim or requirement of my Editor. This put me in a curious position, because I was only seventeen but people like Eric Price and Joe Gallagher and all the senior people reckoned I had the Editor’s ear and they would ply me with questions to find out what was going to be happening within the company or what was going to be Editor’s policy, of which I knew nothing at all. I used to say, ‘I don’t know, all I do is fetch and carry, I’m just a servant.’ They thought otherwise. So my position was bizarre. I was intellectually crucified by the brilliance of my Editor, who inter alia would ask me, ‘By the way, have you read Brideshead Revisited or Lady Chatterley’s Lover?’ I would say no, but promptly go out and buy those books or whichever he suggested.