The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue Read online

  And that was while stationary on the apron. In the stratosphere, a 300 mph slipstream would simply bend you back until your spine snapped.

  We started on the T.11 dual-control version with the instructor in the left-hand seat (always the left-hand seat for the leading pilot, and the right-hander for the copilot).

  It was all learning, a huge curve of new expertise to be ingested and assimilated. And the ground instruction—classroom lessons on aerodynamics, meteorology, aviation medicine, the stresses and strains of G-forces up to six times gravity in the turns and dives, the effects of anoxia, or oxygen starvation, if the breathing apparatus packed up.

  And the first twenty flights with the instructor at first doing it all, then slowly handing over to the pupil, procedure by procedure, until he was satisfied his trainee could handle it all. Then the transfer to the Mark 9 and first solo.

  I was forty-four days short of my nineteenth birthday when I took a single-seat Vampire off the deck, and I believe I was the first and only eighteen-year-old ever to have done so, all because of a leopard-skin poncho.

  I sat on the threshold of the runway, engine idling, asking for clearance for takeoff, waiting for permission, hearing only the low whine of the Goblin behind the small of my back and the sound of my own breathing and heartbeat inside the rubber mask and the silver “bone-dome” helmet; and vaguely aware that my instructor would be in the tower, gnawing his nails with worry.

  “Charlie Delta, clear takeoff.”

  Slowly forward, with the left hand on the throttle; hear the engine moving up from a low whine to a roaring howl; feel the rumble of the wheels increasing to rapid thuds. Control column neutral, light to the touch. Nose wheel off the tarmac. Ease back. Rumbling gone, airborne.

  Three small green lights on the panel ahead, meaning wheel down and locked. Up undercarriage. The lights go red; wheels coming up, but not completely. Red lights out. Wheels fully up. One-third flaps, the takeoff setting up. She’s clean, speed rising.

  Switch radio channel, acknowledgment from the calm voice in the tower. “Charlie Delta, roger.” Then pull back and feel the power, the exhilaration, the adrenaline rush of single-seat jet flight.

  One by one, we did it all. Night flying when all England was a vast blaze of lights below, city by city, edged by the pure black of the sea. Instrument flying with a cowl over the head and vision confined to the panel and no glance outside, the instructor alongside checking instrument readings against the world outside. In northern England, there would be cloud, masses of cloud, and once that great ocean of gray cotton wool closes around you, only the instruments will keep you alive and bring you back to a safe landing.

  Every emergency procedure was practiced over and over again, from engine flameout to loss of radio.

  Sometimes we would find an American bomber out of Lakenheath, patrolling toward the North Sea, formate alongside and give the ally a cheery wave. Other times we would find a Soviet bomber over the ocean, probing the defenses. Another wave, but they never replied.

  Summer ended, autumn closed in, the clouds thickened, we used the clear patches for aerobatics, pulling Gs until the vision narrowed to a tunnel and gray-out threatened. But we never lost the euphoria. Until November.

  You fly in it or die in it, the grizzled flight sergeant had said. And then Derek Brett and his instructor Jonah Jones died in it.

  Ironically, it was in a twin-seat T.11 with an ejector seat that they died. They were in dense cloud over the Pennines, coming home on a radio-controlled tower-guided descent called an ACR-7. They were ordered to fly away from the base down to 12,000 feet, then turn through 180 degrees and fly back toward the base until final landing instructions. But on the turn, they were at 2,000 feet, not twelve. A simple misreading of the altimeter. But the Pennines are 3,000 feet high.

  In the tower, the radio communications simply stopped. The last known position was noted and an alarm put out. It was the mountain rescue team that found the wreckage the next day. But dinner had been taken in dead silence.

  When a fighter impacts a mountainside at 300 mph, there is virtually nothing left but a crater and some bits of metal. The scythe-bladed compressor wheel is right behind the cockpit. Still spinning at several thousand rpm, it just comes off the axle and churns forward until it reaches the ground ahead.

  The mountain rescue men brought down two stretchers with body bags, and the morticians did what they could when transferring the contents to coffins. The family of Flight Lieutenant Jones elected to take his coffin home. Flying Officer Derek Brett was buried at Retford church cemetery nearby.

  He was a man on a permanent commission, hence his elevated rank. He was older than most of us, married with a baby son. Formerly in air traffic control branch, he had lusted to fly and passed all the tests, joining us at Worksop as others dropped out or were “chopped.” Our original twelve from Kirton Lindsey were down to six, but increased to about a dozen by late joiners from earlier courses.

  It was on a bleak winter’s day of sheeting rain that eight of us, chosen for equal height, carried Derek’s coffin to the Retford grave and stood in the downpour as the obsequies were completed. Then we went back to Worksop and flew again.

  I think that in the lives of most young men there comes a moment when the boy simply has to grow up and become a man. For most of us, it was the day we buried Derek Brett. We realized this thing, this Vampire, was not just a great-fun sports car loaned by a generous queen for us to amuse ourselves over the north of England. It was ten tons of aluminum and steel that, if not treated with respect, would kill you.

  The remainder of us all got our wings and there was a parade in late March 1958. It was sheeting rain again, so the parade was in the largest hangar on the base. An air vice marshal came up from London, and one by one took the bright white stitched-wings emblems off a cushion held beside him and pinned them on our chests. Until then, it was the proudest moment of my life.

  The thing about wings is that they are yours and yours alone. You cannot inherit them from an indulgent father; you cannot buy them in Savile Row; you cannot win them in a lucky draw; you cannot marry them along with a pretty girl; you cannot steal them on a shoplifting spree. You cannot even earn them in a team event. You fight and you struggle, you study and you learn, you practice and you persevere, and finally you do it alone, high above the clouds, in a single-seater.

  I could have stayed on, signed the extension, or increased the National Service commission to a direct (eight-year) commission or even a permanent (twenty-year) career. But I only wanted to fly.

  I wanted to be assigned to a Hunter squadron. The swept-wing supersonic Hawker Hunter was then the main frontline fighter of the RAF. I was told very bluntly that there was no hope of a Hunter unit. They were for the alumni of Cranwell College, the lifetimers. At best I would get the left-hand (copilot) seat in a Hastings cargo plane on the mail run to Malta; at worst, and most likely, I would drive a desk.

  So I decided to go for my next choice of career. There was a song back then called “Moon River,” and it contained the lines: “Off to see the world. There’s such a lot of world to see.” Fifty-seven years later, I can agree with that. There is, and 90 percent of it is terrific. I did not have the money to travel, but I knew people who did: the editors of the great daily newspapers. I would become a foreign correspondent.

  And finally I had conquered the bug. The little boy on Hawkinge airfield had not flown a Spitfire, but he had done the rest. He had got his wings. So I opted to leave.

  But I still had four weeks of terminal leave and I still had my RAF ID card. There was one more adventure to be attempted. I could still use that card to hitchhike to the Middle East, which I yearned to see. I made my way down to the great Transport Command base at Lyneham, Wiltshire. There I mooned about the officers’ mess until I found a friendly pilot who would be flying out to Malta as captain of a Blackburn Beverley the next
morning. Could he fit in an extra passenger? Why not? (Things were much more informal back then.)

  So I showed up on the flight line that thirty-first of March and found the Beverley was taking a replacement jet engine out to Luqa, the big RAF base on Malta. There were three other passengers hitching a ride. One was an air vice marshal, a second was an army captain, just appointed aide-de-camp to the British governor, and the third was a schoolboy of eighteen joining his parents on the staff of the High Commission.

  The lumbering freighter took off and waddled its way across France to the French air base at Salon, outside Marseille. There we refueled and set off again. Not for long. Out over the Mediterranean, there was a loud bang and the starboard inner engine blew up. It simply disintegrated. Through the portholes of the passenger compartment, we watched several cylinders with pistons attached tumbling lazily down the slipstream.

  The skipper, Flight Sergeant Farmer, did brilliantly. He would have closed the engine down, but there was nothing to close. Just a large munch-sized bite out of the starboard wing. Running across the void were the fuel lines to the outer engine. If that went as well, there would be a one-way flight straight down to the ocean, where, with the huge jet engine in the hold, we would sink like a stone. The right wing was suffused with extinguisher foam, the Beverley dived to the surface of the sea, and we limped back to Salon.

  The schoolboy brought up, the air vice marshal prayed, and the exquisitely turned-out army man just sniffed, which I took to be his comment on the RAF generally.

  Back at Salon, there was a major turnout of fire trucks, which were not needed. The RAF presence there was a tiny unit of three: one officer and two NCOs. And there was one further problem. The following day was April 1, the fortieth anniversary of the RAF, founded in 1918. There would be a huge party at Luqa, where we were supposed to be.

  The air vice marshal insisted we had to have one anyway. He pulled rank, emptied the RAF reserve of francs, and we set off for Salon town. I recall that much good red wine was drunk, I interpreted into French and back, and we all ended up in a friendly bordello, where I think that schoolboy grew up a bit to a round of applause while the army officer just sniffed.

  It took three days for a substitute Beverley to be flown out from Lyneham, and eventually we made it to Luqa. But it was not to be my week. That evening, a sailor was knifed in the gut. It was the first of the rioting led by local politician Dom Mintoff, seeking independence. Everyone was confined to the base. I tried my hitchhiking again and found a skipper prepared to offer me a lift to Cyprus. So I took it.

  At Nicosia, I got short shrift. The island had been consumed by the EOKA, another independence-seeking group, but for the moment there was a cease-fire operating. I was told there was no room for a spare body hanging about the mess, so the education officer noticed a free offer by Middle East Airlines for a cultural weekend in Beirut. So I took that, too, and was deposited in Lebanon. Unfortunately there was another revolution brewing there as well.

  I was taking a stroll through the souk, drinking in the local color, when there was a sound like tearing calico, and two bodies, riddled with machine gun fire, fell through the awning of a fruit stall. Unbeknownst to me, the Druze tribesmen had come over the Chouf Mountains and launched what turned out to be the civil war against the government of President Chamoun.

  I went back to the St. George’s Club, to find the British press corps lining the bar (where else?), so I gave them my first contribution to the media, an eyewitness account of what was going on outside. The grateful reptiles stood me several rounds of drinks as they filed their copy with long-shouted phone calls to London.

  Unfortunately, I was so squiffy I went outside to the swimming pool, fell asleep, and awoke badly sunburned. Two days later, I took the free MEA flight back to Nicosia. And the cease-fire ended. The war resumed. The commanding officer was incensed to see me again, and with his impetus I found myself on the “rumble” (spare) seat of a Canberra jet bomber heading back to Luqa. From thence, a Hastings freighter took me home to Lyneham without its engines falling off.

  I had been away three weeks, experiencing one midair near disaster, one civil war, and two uprisings. So from Lyneham, still in my blue pilot officer’s uniform, I hitchhiked back to my parents’ home in Kent. But before leaving for the Middle East, and after my decision to leave the service, I had applied for a job in journalism.

  My father had consulted the editor of the Kentish Express as to how his son should best start. That fine man advised against a weekly like his own, but recommended what he called “the finest provincial daily in England.” He referred to the Eastern Daily Press, based in Norwich, Norfolk. I applied, secured an interview, and got a job as an apprentice, starting in May. There would be a three-month trial and, if extended, an indenture of three years.

  Returning home from Malta, I stripped off my blue uniform for the last time. I was allowed to keep my stainless-steel watch, which kept perfect time until the mid-seventies. After a fortnight with Mum and Dad, I left for Norwich and a new career.

  KING’S LYNN

  After an initial three weeks at the newspaper’s head office in Norwich, I was posted out to the most westerly office within the circulation area, the market and port town of King’s Lynn. My trial appointment was confirmed and I spent my three-year indenture there.

  The chief reporter was the veteran Frank Keeler, a terrific journalist who became my mentor. He was a stickler for accuracy, dunning into all cubs he ever mentored his personal philosophy: check, check, and check again. Then write. I still do.

  On a minuscule salary, I could just afford a scruffy little bed-sitter above a pet-food store on Paradise Parade, the country’s most inappropriately named highway. In summer, the minced dog meat stank, but in winter the warmth rising from the caged pets below kept my heating bill down.

  There was a lavatory but no bathroom, so for hygiene I had to go to the office, in the attic of which there was an old bath that I brought back into commission and used for three years. There was a kitchen comprising a single gas hob running off a bottle, and a cold-water tap. I learned to cook eggs just about every known way and not much else. I am still no use in the kitchen and it is the one room I try to avoid.

  But at least, using my RAF savings, I had my first sports car, which was my pride and joy. It was an MG TC model, made in 1949, black with scarlet leather seating. Back in 1949, the technology for making paper-thin sheet steel was not known, or when I crashed it, it would have crumpled like a tissue and killed me. But it was built like a truck, which enabled me to survive the crash. But we’ll come to that.

  The apprenticeship I was serving was devised by the National Council for the Training of Journalists. It involved three years of on-the-job training and night school to study typing, shorthand, libel law, constitution, and theory of journalism, which is a long way from the real thing. At the end, there would be a series of written examination papers and a diploma. Never in the past fifty years has anyone ever asked me for it.

  King’s Lynn was and remains a bustling market town with rural Norfolk to its east and south, the flat and featureless Fens to the west, and the North Sea outside its ancient harbor and port. The port then played host to a constant stream of small freighters plying their trade between the Norfolk coast and the ports of Western Europe, particularly Germany.

  Coverage of news concentrated on the town, its council, magistrate’s court, police station, chamber of commerce, and just about every activity concerning the townsfolk, with further supervisory coverage of the surrounding villages. As training for what came later, it was superb.

  Reporters on a national paper, let alone an agency, will never meet their readers. For those on a regional or local paper, they are right outside the door, and come in personally to complain about inaccuracies. So the standards have to be high, and they are. I recall one old buffer, puce with outrage, storming into the office to complain t
hat in the results of the cage-bird show at the Corn Exchange, his canary had been wrongly placed. And it really upset him.

  In three pleasant but uneventful years, only two episodes remain in the memory. Because of my languages, especially German, Frank asked me to be the new “port reporter” and keep an eye on ships coming and going. On my first summer vacation, unable to afford a holiday, I managed to be taken on as a deckhand on a German freighter called the Alster. She plied between King’s Lynn and Hamburg. So I spent two weeks on her.

  As soon as she docked in Germany, I was off to explore Hamburg, starting with the seamen’s zone known as Sankt Pauli. This included the famous Reeperbahn and its surrounding maze of streets and alleys that constituted the red-light district. My deckhand wages did not afford much more than a few beers, but some of these were taken in the old Zillertal, a beer hall famous for its foaming steins of ale and oompah-oompah brass bands. I went there because my father had told me about it.

  In the spring of 1939, when I was still a baby, he and a friend from Ashford had treated themselves to a short vacation and picked Hamburg, where they arrived by ferry. They both went to the Zillertal, but on emerging heard a scuffle down a side alley. Peering into the gloom, they observed two Nazi thugs beating up an old Jew.

  He and Joe Crotnall may have been just shopkeepers from a small market town who knew nothing of the reality of Germany under the Nazis, but it took them only twenty-four hours to take a dislike to the strutting young men with their armbands and the sign of the broken cross. Neither were Jewish, but they just waded in.

  In his time in Chatham Dockyard School, my dad had been a useful middle-weight and his father had once been the boxing, wrestling, and bayonet-fighting champion of the Nore Command, which then contained 50,000 sailors. Anyway, he and Joe Crotnall (who told me the story ten years later) flattened the two assailants. Then, as a crowd gathered, it was time to get out of there. They ran for their car and sped out of Germany into Holland before getting into any more trouble.