Out of the Frying Pan: Scenes from My Life. Keith Floyd
and my other uncles and so on Sunday afternoon walks she would sing folk songs, with a slightly risque rearrangement of the words.
Some years later she was found dead in a snowdrift on a hill where once she had taken me tobogganing. It was her only exit from a private hell that, until too late, no one had been aware of.
Then there was my one and only thespian performance, when somehow, after the nightmare of the fancy dress party, I agreed to be Mowgli in the Scout and Cub group’s annual jamboree in the Town Hall. My mother sewed me a loincloth of rabbit skin and my father improvised me a dagger from one of my grandfather’s leather-cutting knives. Painted from head to toe in cocoa and water I stood on the stage and said, defiantly, ‘I am Mowgli.’ To this day I cannot remember if I completed the performance or ran backstage.
I missed my friends the Ranseys, not least Mrs Ransey, who, like my own mother, was one of nature’s intuitive cooks with a real, fundamental knowledge, love and respect for food.
Sometimes, on my Vespa 125, I whizzed down the A3 8 like a mad wasp, flat out at 45 miles an hour, to Wiveliscombe for the day, but it wasn’t the same. Then I thought it had changed; now I know that I had. I was staying out later and later listening to blues, folk songs, monologues and poetry readings. The rows at home, no longer squalls, were now developing storm status and one day, with just a small duffel bag, I set off for work as normal, and instead of taking the bus to College Green, my place of employment, I caught another to the A4 and hitchhiked to London. I survived, somehow, in late-night coffee bars, railway stations and parks for three days and three awful nights before I was arrested for loitering, or possibly vagrancy, at four o’clock one morning somewhere close to Bow Street Police Station. I was tired, hungry and, worse still, I had failed. Contact was made with my parents, who assured me my safe return was more important than anything and there would be no retribution. As bad as this was, it proved to be a watershed in our relationship.
I had decided I wanted to be a newspaper reporter and my parents, in a complete reversal of their crushingly modest ambitions for me, agreed I could have a go at it. I had no idea how you set about being a journalist but I had read a book called Headlines All My Life by a Fleet Street editor called Arthur Christiansen. He was, as Editor of the Daily Express, probably one of the greatest editors of this century. (He had also had a bit part in the film The Day the Earth Caught Fire.) I did not know that the accepted route into journalism was by joining a weekly newspaper as a copy boy. I, with a head full of Evelyn Waugh, Hemingway, James Thurber, Simon Raven, Somerset Maugham, Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Graves and Jack Kerouac, boldly wrote to the Editor of the Bristol Evening Post and asked for a job. Despite my parents’ new attitude, they warned me not to be disappointed after aiming so high. I knew from films and novels that reporters wore bow ties, trench coats and trilby hats, so scraping together all my available resources, selling my fishing tackle and even my Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley LPs, I went to the nearest gentlemen’s outfitters and bought the aforementioned clothes for my interview with the Editor of the Bristol Evening Post.
Can you imagine it? A seventeen-year-old with a shiny, acned face, dressed in such a way. I sat in the outer office while the secretary announced my presence. She returned after a few seconds and said, ‘When the green light flashes, knock and go in.’ A big, round-faced, smiling man with short cropped hair sat behind the desk, his fingers propped together forming a pyramid between his elbows and his chin. On his neat desk there was a Penguin edition of The Trial of Lady Chatterley. He wore a dark, well-cut suit, a white shirt and a bow tie. A bow tie! So they did wear bow ties. I was wearing a bow tie. He looked at me askance, not patronisingly, but he seemed to stare right through me. ‘Do sit down,’ he said. He rearranged his fingers to clutch the lapels of his jacket and leant back in his chair. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘I’ve brought you some essays I wrote at school,’ I said. ‘We don’t write essays on newspapers,’ he said, reaching to take them from my trembling hand. I told him about my school days. I told him of my dissatisfaction of being a filing clerk in the Architects’ Department. I told him about the books I had read and lied, successfully, about one or two I hadn’t. All of a sudden, the interview, or perhaps the confessional, was over.
He ushered me into the outer office and I realised for the first time how tall he was. There was no conclusion, and I stood, awkwardly, wondering how to leave. I suddenly decided to say, ‘Well, will you give me a job or not?’ He looked down at me, and his breath smelt strange. Later I was to know it was garlic. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘as a matter of fact I will. My secretary will take the necessary details and you will report to the News Editor a week on Monday at 8.30 a.m. His name is Farnsworth: he will probably eat you alive, but don’t worry.’ Before I could utter a word he disappeared into his office. It was going to turn out to be the single most important day of my life. Not that I would know that for another twenty-four years.
Now I shall tell you about my job at the Bristol Evening Post. This will be a short chapter because I wasn’t there very long! Joining the paper was a really exciting event. It was an unusual one because in those days the only way you could become a journalist was to do an apprenticeship on a weekly newspaper like the Somerset County Gazette. There you learnt to type, to do shorthand (it was compulsory) and you wrote the Births, Marriages and Deaths column or the Townsmen’s Guild column, or listed the results of the Agricultural Show, and you had to do that for about two or three years before you had a chance to get onto a daily newspaper. But I was a precocious little sod and without having done any of these I managed to get my job on the Bristol Evening Post which, curiously enough, was located in the centre of Bristol in Silver Street: I was brought up in Silver Street in Wiveliscombe, which I took to be a good omen. In the sixties the typesetting for all newspapers was done with lead and there was a massive sense of excitement as the editions came out, with the compositors working desperately against the clock to bring out each edition, the smell of ink and hot metal and a wonderful hum of huge drums with paper whirling round and all the vans queued up outside, loading up really fast. At that time Bristol had another daily evening newspaper called the Bristol Evening World and they were in serious rivalry to be first with the best stories, to get the exclusives and to beat the other in the race to be out onto the streets.
My first day, I turned up, and I really can’t describe the atmosphere of the newsroom. I suppose there were thirty or forty people all sitting at desks with an amazing racket of manual typewriters being tapped so fast (usually with only two or three fingers) and copy boys (those were the boys who, when the journalist had finished typing his piece and shouted ‘Boy!’ would run over and take the sheet of paper downstairs to where the subeditors were) rushing around. The News Editor was a huge man called Gordon Farnsworth, a North Country man, shouting out instructions and demanding stories. The atmosphere was electric, absolutely electric. I just sat there, bemused, all day, because nobody spoke to you on your first day. Although Gordon Farnsworth did speak to me. He said, ‘So you’re another bloody student…I’m fed up with students, why can’t I have some journalists?’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you mean, what are you talking about?’ He said, ‘Well the Editor keeps taking on these bloody students,’ and it was true because that day three other people of my age had joined the paper with no journalistic experience whatsoever. But the difference between them and me was that they had got temporary jobs because they were going to university and Gordon thought I was the same sort. I said, ‘No, I’m here to learn to be a journalist, that’s what I want to be.’ ‘Huh, we’ll see,’ he said. Terrifying, the first day was absolutely terrifying.
They gave me my own desk and typewriter, an Olivetti Letra 22, and after a couple of days of being shy in the canteen and not knowing what to do I was sent out on my first story. I was absolutely petrified! I had to go to cover an inquest of a man who had drowned in the docks. I thought, ‘Oh, good, thank you. What do I do?’ So I asked another journalist what I should do. ‘Inquests are very simple,’ he said. ‘I’ll write it for you.’ He wrote the outline, leaving only the gaps to be filled in with the facts. He said, ‘You write: “Today at Yate Coroner’s Court a verdict of …was returned