Then I discovered there was a small paper on Fleet Street called Canada News. It was owned by Roy Thomson’s empire and was put out for the benefit of the Canadian troops on bases in Germany. So cheap was the operation that it relied on dupes of Canadian Press copy mailed over from Canada.
We would edit the copy and ship it up to the paper in Edinburgh, which Thomson owned. It was printed there, sent back, and then dispatched to Germany. This process took so long that the troops got the Grey Cup results just about when the baseball season opened.
Three women worked in the office. They told me that the previous editor, who was from Victoria, was a very morose man, as anyone working on Thomson wages would be. One Monday morning he didn’t appear at work. Tuesday he didn’t show up. Wednesday he didn’t show up. By this time, they detected a funny smell coming from an unused closet at the back of the office.
They opened the door and found the man, who had hanged himself. I always waited in glee for the first time I ever ran into Ken Thomson, son of Lord Thomson, and I would say, “Oh, Mr. Thomson, we have a mutual family friend.”
I never thought that years later I would meet at Rosedale cocktail parties a now-aging Ken Thomson who, in fact, inherited his father’s peerage but never once went to the House of Lords and declined to use the title that was his. He told me he was a great fan of my column, which appeared in the Globe and Mail, one of his papers.
Eventually, I found myself living in a basement flat with five Australians. One was an architect, another was an engineer named Vaughan Dobbins, a third was journalist Dick Conigrave, and the others were always out of work. It was a terrible place when in the winter the wallpaper was soaked in water.
The first Saturday night I was there, as the lads prepared to head out to the pub, the first one took a bath in the only tub. When he got out, he yelled, “Next!” To my astonishment, the next Aussie climbed into the same water. When he got out, a third guy got in. That was how much hot water the flat had.
Some months later Elliott Leyton, a friend from Vancouver, arrived in need of a free bed. When Saturday night arrived, I casually climbed into filthy, cooling water and beckoned him to follow. He glared at me as if I had lost my mind, and I realized I had adapted to the circumstances.
Elliott is now a professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland, is a world-renowned expert on serial killers, and is quoted in newspapers around the globe.
Aussies are a different breed. It’s a known historical fact that Britain, attempting to populate the far-off island colony, sent English convicts to settle in Australia. So, after a few pints at week’s end in the local pub, I used to say to the Aussie blokes, “You guys come from the worst criminals in England.”
The Aussies replied, “No, every one of our ancestors were individually chosen by the finest judges of England!”
One of their rituals was that every Sunday they would open the fridge, collect the leftovers, chop them up, and whip them with eggs. The result was what we called a “meadow muffin,” which went down well with beer. Decades later I made the same thing for my children and their spouses. They sat there politely and ate the disgusting dish that I was so proud of.
In time I got a job on the North American desk at Reuters in the most prestigious building on Fleet Street. There were six of us, and our total job was to take the wire copy coming in from around the world and change the word lorry to the word truck and the word bonnet (on a car) to hood, which is what it was called across the ocean. The work wasn’t exactly mind-expanding.
All of this was in the 1950s when every home in London burned coal as fuel. When the word smog was invented by Time, meaning smoke mixed with fog. In the winter in London it got so bad that elderly people with lung problems died by the score. The Reuters newsroom was fifty yards long, and sometimes at night we couldn’t see the other end of the place.
We scraped together enough money to get tuxedo rentals for Vaughan Dobbins’s London marriage in 1958. That’s me in the foreground on the far left.
One night I was doing a rewrite about Prince Charles and yelled over my shoulder, “How old is Charles?”
I heard this voice from an American whose name was Ed Fitzgerald, who said, “He was born at 9:14 p.m. on Sunday, November 14, 1948.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you a little story. I was bureau chief at United Press International in London. As you can imagine, with the birth of a future king imminent, there was a ferocious race between the different wire services to get the news first to all of the papers in the United States.
“So I came up with a brilliant plan. We would write, waiting for the birth, two stories. One would say, ‘Queen Elizabeth tonight gave birth to a boy.’ Followed by all of the attended drivel. The second story would say, ‘Queen Elizabeth gave birth to a girl.’ With all of the usual details of what that would mean in the royal line.
“We had an attendant, the usual dumb Englishman who transmitted the copy to New York. There were two keys that sat before him. All he had to do when we got the word from the attendant we had standing outside Buckingham Palace was to push either the boy key or the girl key.
“One of his buddies, on his coffee break, came over to gossip with him and rested his elbow over — guess what? The girl key that went off to New York and three hundred newspapers. That’s why I’m no longer bureau chief of United Press International.”
Because of the Australians, I met at a party one night a seventeen-year-old girl called Leonie Leahy, whom one of the guys had met on the ship from Australia to England. She was a dancer and immediately got a job in the chorus of My Fair Lady, the biggest musical ever to hit London.
The original stage-door Johnnie, I waited at the outside theatre door after seeing My Fair Lady thirty-seven times and took her home on the back seat of my Vespa. She was the second strongest Catholic in the world after the pope.
We went to cast parties where I met Rex Harrison and his lady, Kay Kendall, who tragically died young of cancer. Leonie ended up as the prima ballerina of the Oslo State Opera in Norway.
One day at a party where all of the Canadians and the Aussies got into the brown ale, Jerry Lecovin, a guy I’d gone to UBC with, arrived. He was a lawyer I’d never met personally but had seen many times in the student reviews where he did a great imitation of Groucho Marx. Jerry explained at the party that he had this great idea to buy a Volkswagen and go through Russia, this being 1959 when the Soviets allowed foreign tourists to bring their own vehicles into the country.
He needed two other guys to share the cost with him to make it viable. “Fotheringham,” Jerry said, “you know everybody. Find me two other guys.”
I quickly found Keith Powers, a crazy Canadian journalist from Thunder Bay. And they urged me to become the third. I said I couldn’t possibly because I’d been saving for three years to get back to Vancouver to get a real job.
Months went by and one morning, after Powers finished the all-night shift at Reuters, we met with Lecovin in a greasy spoon for breakfast. Lecovin said he was abandoning the idea because he couldn’t come up with a third person.
I sat there and suddenly thought to myself, I’m going back to Canada, and for the rest of my life whenever the words Soviet Union come up in the conversation, I’ll be saying, “Oh, I could have gone there once, you know.”
Common sense sank in and I said, “I’m a go.”
At the Finland–Soviet Union border we were all lined up in the customs shed with a pack of American businessmen. Off in the corner was a gang of large, fat, old Russian women, all dressed black to their ankles