Mr Paparazzi. Darryn Lyons
was a scary experience, I had no fear for the duration of the trip. I genuinely believed I wasn’t going to get shot, that something would save me. Perhaps it was the confidence of youth; I don’t know. I wanted to continue in the tradition of the great war photographers, people like Tim Page and Donald McCullin. Donald covered the Vietnam War and on one occasion his camera stopped a bullet. I figured the same would happen for me. My dream at the time was to work for the Magnum agency, a gritty war and real-history picture agency that employed the world’s best photographers.
We headed towards Timisoara, which had been one of the strongholds of the Securitate (secret police). Snow had begun falling gently, and looking ahead on the road we saw a quite surreal scene. A guy with a huge, frozen handlebar moustache was driving towards us in an enormous horse-drawn wooden cart with stone wheels, complete with a wooden chuck on the axles. His whole family was on board; it was like something from The Flintstones. I felt like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future, but instead of a DeLorean I had a Ford Transit. The family wasn’t far from the border, but whether they got out of the country I don’t know. I guess that’s why I felt invincible. I couldn’t get shot, because I was dreaming. For the boy from Geelong, it was like walking onto a movie set; the problem was that it was, in fact, all too real.
I drove on for a couple of kilometres before being forced to brake abruptly as there was a child in the road. He was around nine or ten and was pointing a .303 at me. We were prepared for most eventualities and were equipped with the main in-demand items for bribery – namely alcohol, cigarettes and sweets. The kid came up to the window and started shouting, ‘Bonbon!’ (sweet). I translated this as ‘Boom boom’ and figured we were in big trouble. Luckily Geraint’s grasp of foreign languages was better than mine and he reached for the sweets. We hurled bags of Mars Bars towards our would-be killer and he wandered off, sat by the dusty road and put his gun down. His mission complete, he started eating happily. Had we not handed over the goodies, he would certainly have shot us. I don’t know where his mum and dad were; they were probably dead.
The whole country was extremely dangerous and I don’t know how we managed to blag it. Before we left London we had learned a few stock phrases in Romanian and that certainly helped. There were checkpoints every five kilometres and the only way through was by bribing the guards with cartons of cigarettes or mini-bottles of Tullamore Dew whiskey.
After hours of driving, we made it to our destination. The Intercontinental Hotel became our base of operations, but it was very primitive. The top three floors had been the Securitate’s headquarters. We had rooms there, but the hotel was basically a concrete shell and we lived rough. Occasionally the power came on, but it was sporadic at best. We travelled with a neg scanner and I had my darkroom kit with me. Those school photography lessons really came in handy. I developed my own film and transmitted black-and-white images via our wire machine. The maximum that could realistically be sent was around four or five images a day, and the chances were very high that the line would cut out.
If you weren’t in the hotel you were fucked. There was a camaraderie among the media who were based there. Everyone was looking for three things: a reliable phone line to get copy and images out, the next big story, and a stiff drink. All the journalists sat together on the roof at night and got smashed on looted bottles of red wine or whatever we could find. We would place the empty bottles on the ledge and wait for them to get smashed by a flying piece of ordnance or a sniper’s bullet. After nothing to eat for days, and too much drink, we went crazy. I danced around, playing chicken with the snipers – poking my head up to invite potshots. Everyone else had fucked off. There were no rules; it was like the Wild West. All around us was the most amazing pyrotechnics display as gunfire and tracers lit up the sky. It was like a press room crossed with a borstal, a beehive with a death buzz.
The Securitate had left in a hurry; the rooms were filled with files and high-frequency surveillance equipment. By that stage the whole town was full of snipers, but I was still fully gung-ho. As well as danger, there were great pictures everywhere. The hotel’s basement held a torture chamber; one poor guy had been left to die there on a concrete butcher’s block. A huge knife protruded from near his genitals, and piano wire was tightened around each of his fingers. Appallingly, the wire had been used to drag his body over the block so that the knife sliced through him. It was horrifying, but I took the picture. This was the first time I truly smelt death. Once you have experienced that, it never leaves you.
I coped in this environment better than I thought I might. There’s a parallel of sorts between a sniper tracking down his target and a paparazzo chasing his. Though of course our object is not murder. I hate guns, let alone shooting people for real.
There was no real plan to our travels around Romania; we had to use our initiative. Our brief was just to do what we could do. We were there for about a month, though at times we thought we were never going home. I think the office forgot about us. The classic command from the desk to the team on the ground was, ‘Stick with it!’ The number of times we heard that … It was also true that, to an extent, we concealed from the office the real level of danger unfolding around us because we didn’t want to be pulled out early. We wanted to get stuck in. I was John Wayne with a camera in a world of complete lawlessness, and for a boy who liked danger this was everything – the real deal.
One problem was that at the time no one at home really knew what was unfolding there. I don’t think the desk knew what they were sending us into. They were more worried about who’d won Lotto than our safety. We were among the first journalists in, though, of course, we were Red Cross, not journalists! We did in fact have a fairly significant cargo of aid items that we distributed to hospitals and orphanages for The Mail’s charity.
Geraint was an excellent writer and had a cool head – though we were both pretty scared at times. I was able to deal with the overload by going into a kind of professional trance. By operating almost as a robot I lost touch with the passion and care within me. It sounds bastard-like, but it was the only way to cope and keep my sanity. I certainly didn’t sleep. Adrenaline is the most incredible drug and when you’re on it all the time you can do anything. It kept me alert to what was unfolding around me. It was exciting and exhausting.
The irony was that the only picture I got into the paper was a head shot of Geraint to accompany his daily foreign feature page. I was taking the greatest shots of my career, we were recording history, but I couldn’t get a fucking picture in the paper to save my life. It became quite demoralising. The only real avenue for my work was through news features. I got a Romanian guy to pose with a ripped-up copy of The Mail to try and get something in, but even product placement failed me. Nothing got syndicated elsewhere; Solo, The Mail’s syndication arm, was so useless I’d be surprised if they ever sold a picture. In many ways it was easier for The Mail to get hold of Reuters stuff for the news as they were wiring all the time.
In the end we were pulled out. Geraint left first and then I was off. We dumped the van, which was wrecked by now, and headed off – I guess we lost our deposit at Kennings. My destination was not London but Berlin, where I arrived just in time to miss the Wall coming down but in time to catch the euphoria of it all. I was in and out in a couple of days.
I had the war bug now, and in 1989 when the Czech revolution happened I was on the first plane to cover it as a freelancer. Andy Kyle just told me to go for it and we’d work something out later. I flew Aeroflot and the plane was like a converted troop carrier. The flight was very scary; the crew were celebrating and as drunk as skunks. The flight attendants were enormous women who tottered down the aisles handing out jugs of beer to everyone as the plane lurched from side to side; at one point it was almost upside down.
I arrived in the Czech capital on the night of the regime change. History was unfolding and the atmosphere was unbelievable. The Iron Curtain had fallen and everyone was ecstatic. I was there for a week, and for some reason I got more pictures into Time magazine than into The Mail. I had some wonderful colour transparency stuff and syndicated it to loads of titles through Rex Features.
The Daily Mail cricket team featured some of the paper’s big-hitters – in every sense – and was a real social affair. There were plenty of characters, and I got on with some better than others. Hal Austin was our dynamite