Journey of a Lifetime

In Britain, where we at least let grass decide its own colour, narcissism has also come to stay—observe the stately march of opulent health farms where the submissive can easily lose, along with avoirdupois, several hundred pounds a week. Only a couple of these country mansions were in operation when I filmed my first report in 1960; today scores of them are relieving patients of many pounds, one way or the other.

Even for Panorama it was hard to deal with the subject too seriously when the presenter was Richard Dimbleby, and not at all sylph-like. He came rolling up to me at the end of the programme, making predictably caustic comments about slimming. We also got a lot of irritable correspondence from enthusiasts after that, yet I have always held that for anyone with the money and the time such a regime can do nothing but good. It is like being lectured by Nanny and sent to bed without supper.

Establishments vary from earnest nature cure centres catering for those with little faith in orthodox medicine, to antiseptic Victorian mansions where society matrons tussle with the years and Show Biz straightens its elbow.

For anyone not really sick, one of the cheerier hydros full of tubbies expensively repenting excess is a more agreeable retreat than those chintzy halls where arthritic old ladies knit by the fireside and silently disapprove of the merely weak-willed. The Surrey hydro where we filmed was populated by jolly carboholics resisting the temptation, alcoholics drying out and executives escaping the telephone: “For a break my Chairman goes to the South of France and puts on a stone. I come here and lose one. He feels guilty; I feel great.” Both ways, it’s expensive satisfaction.

One night during my recce I was watching television amid a subdued group in dressing gowns. The Saturday night play was just reaching its climax when a man in the statutory white Kildare coat strode in and switched off the set, in mid-sentence! I leapt up in outrage. “Ten o’clock,” he said, reproachfully. “Time for bed.” I was about to dash him to the floor when it came to me that this was exactly what we were all paying heavily for: a return to the secure days of Nanny knows best.

Once you have accepted such discipline there is a certain consolation in surrendering to father-figures who know what is good for you, having your days planned down to the last half-grapefruit. The carrot cocktail bar, where you sit and boast about the number of pounds you’ve lost, exudes a dauntless Blitz spirit and a communal sense of self-satisfaction at growing, if not lovelier, at least a little lighter each day.

Whatever the economic charts indicate, we are in the middle of one expansionist trend; at least 10 million men and 12 million women are overweight. We spend some £50 million a year on slimming foods which usually taste like crushed cardboard, exotically packaged lotions, complicated massage and exercise equipment, and pills—yet we all lose weight best by practising one magic exercise performed sitting down, though still difficult: you shake your head from side to side when proffered a plateful.

Insurance companies say that any man of 45 who is 25 lb above his proper weight has lowered his expectation of life by 20 per cent. Put in a more daunting way, he will go at 64 when he might have made 80. Repeat after me: No, thank you…

A sensible girl I took out in New York refused her apple pie à la mode with the boring chant, “A moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips”. She had a tidy diet which did away with tiresome calorie and carbohydrate counting: the Zero-Cal. She did not eat.

In California Elaine Johnson, a 35-year-old housewife, was 20 stone and so fat she could not cross her legs or sit without breaking the chair. She started her rigorous regime after getting wedged in a cafeteria doorway—a telling position from which to face facts.

At the same hospital Bert Goldner weighed in at 425 lb, or almost 4 cwt. He was so spherical he could not sit or lie without fainting from lack of oxygen, so had to sleep standing up or kneeling. During a nap he once toppled over and broke a leg.

In Beverly Hills I went to see that little round impresario Allan Carr, living in disco style behind his guarded electric gates. He had made his fortune from Saturday Night Fever and Grease, and thought he had won a lifelong battle with avoirdupois after a major bypass operation ensured that all food would just slip through his stomach without registering. Many people undergoing that six-hour operation die of heart failure, so he did sincerely want to be slim.

During the next five years he lost 150 lb. Then, in the interests of staying alive, he had to have it all put back in old-fashioned order again, and immediately gained 75 lb. Allan Carr may be small and round and aggressive, but he is a man of decision: he had his jaw wired up so he could not eat.

“It also prohibits you from talking,” he told me, “which is worse than not eating. I was very frustrated, as you can imagine, but you always carry little clippers around with you in case you choke or something, when you can snip the wires. So there I was sitting in the movie theatre watching Diana Ross in The Wiz.

“I knew it wasn’t going to be good—I have these instincts about certain movies, so I didn’t go to the première because I didn’t want to lie to people, or hurt their feelings. I went on a Saturday. By the end of the first 45 minutes I disliked it so much, I was so nervous and agitated I just had to tell my friends what I thought about it.

“So I went to the men’s room and took the clippers out and snipped my mouth open. I just couldn’t stand not talking, at that moment. That’s how I lost my mouth wiring. I’d had it on for ten days and I couldn’t yell, I couldn’t carry on, I couldn’t talk on the phone very much. It was just terrible.”

One of the few remaining ways of drastic dieting open to him, I suggested, was sleep therapy, as practised in India, where it’s a relief to stick to boiled eggs and a Coke.

“I’ve thought about it. You just go down to Rio for the Carnival, wear yourself out, and then sleep naturally for two or three weeks afterwards; but that’s too slow, I haven’t got the time to spare.”

I suggested he should travel to some of those places I had visited around the world where food was anything but enticing. He had done that, too: “The best place is Egypt. It’s like going on a scenic vacation and a diet at the same time. There’s absolutely nothing you can eat in Egypt.”

Mixing with people with extreme weight problems makes one feel slim, instantly. Even reading diets offers a sense of quiet achievement; in a health farm it’s positively therapeutic.

The form at our farm was a Sunday arrival with pseudo-medical test that evening: blood pressure, heartbeats, weight, and the old army how-do-you-feel routine. The usual treatment is a complete fast, by which they mean three oranges a day. Should you be determined to take on the world, reduce to three glasses of hot water a day, with a slice of lemon to take the taste away.

Mornings are filled with mild action: osteopathy, ultrasonic therapy, infra-red and radiant heat, saunas, steam and sitz baths, plus various combinations of sweat-inducing bakery: mud, wax, cabinet, peat and blanket baths. Best of all, massage and manipulation, which comes in all forms from distinctly painful to Wake up, Sir.

A health farm is rigorously asexual—all slap and no tickle—but, as I always say, it’s nice to be kneaded.

Looming ominously behind such agreeable time fillers, there are enemas and colonic irrigations. Nature-cure enthusiasts explain that in decoking the engine, waste poisons must all be swept away for a fresh, empty start—and that’s the way they gotta go. This may or may not be medically sound, but it is not a thing I will willingly take lying down.

The various spin-off activities, or non-activities, seem more therapeutic: complete rest (or stultifying boredom); non-availability of demoralizing distraction, like pleasure; the spiritually uplifting and unusual sensation of being above temptation. I derived additional and permanent benefit by giving up smoking forty or fifty a day on the assumption that if I had to be mildly unhappy anyway I might as well be totally miserable. I have never restarted that horrible habit.

On a fast, with a dark brown mouth, cigarettes are as resistible as everything else. The whole system is so outraged, one further deprivation goes unnoticed. I commend this ploy to the addicted. I also—giant stride for one man—cleaned my car, a beneficial and constructive exercise which took care of two soporific afternoons.

Because of the pressure of television I have had no time for health farms for several years—so the car needed another visit even more than I did. Then the Metropole at Brighton launched the largest health hydro in Europe. I joined a cheery group drinking mimosas on a private Pullman from Victoria and submitted to the inaugural weekend of events and slimming treatments. Without any struggle at all, I put on five pounds.

Nature cure, treated seriously, is not an expensive folly. Ignoring its unworldly cancer-cure fringe, the theory seems eminently reasonable: rest, restraint, simple food. Write off those who triumphantly smuggle scrummy-tuck into their bedrooms or creep off on afternoon dainty-tea crawls; their weighty problems are here to stay.

The ideal fortnight, down on the farm, is ten days’ fast (during which you lose a stone) and four days’ gentle return, via yoghurt, to salads and plain food. This puts four pounds back into that shrunken stomach. The more flab you take with you, the more you leave behind. Heavy drinkers and the very fat watch, fascinated, as it melts away and long-lost toes creep coyly into sight.

The benefit of the outrageous bill at the end of it all is that one may be stunned, upon release, into sensible eating— though most patients edge slowly up to the weight they took with them. Sterner souls change their life pattern—better and smaller people for ever.

All right—so I got the car cleaned.

6 RANDOLPH: AS RUDE TO AMBASSADORS AS HE WAS TO WAITERS

After the well-regimented, almost gentlemanly war I had known with the Eighth Army in Sicily and Italy, I saw at once that Korea was going to be something else: dirtier, more confusing, prisoners murdered, not a good place to be. There was no front line—every divisional HQ was in as much danger as its forward company.

As the US Army was due to rediscover in Vietnam, all an enemy soldier had to do to become a peaceful and invisible civilian was to hide his weapon, take off his jacket and stroll through our defences. I don’t even want to write about their treatment of prisoners.

The war that we had just won with the capture of North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, was unwinding almost as soon as we’d finished their Hungarian caviare and champagne—a trifle sweet, but quite acceptable at that hour in the morning. We were sitting on the tatami after sleeping in ditches, so it felt like the Ritz, but we were not happy.

One of the early tragedies of any war is communication. At the front in the dying months of cable, a correspondent hands his story in to US Army Signals with blind faith and from then on it’s up to them and the cable company, right through to Fleet Street.

Meanwhile the US Army apparently had too much on its plate to deal with us adequately. For a short period, all our messages were lost. This was the time for suicide or murder, knowing what we had risked to get those stories.

Along with most of the other foreign desks, ExTel despaired and gave up, telling me to make my way home to London. It was an escape clause: one such instruction was enough.

We were miserable enough anyway, with our missing copy which never left the battlefield. By then we were ready to catch any flight to anywhere that wasn’t Korea. To ensure my final story got through, I had wangled a lift back to the Japanese mainland and handed the fragile news in to the Eastern Telegraph office in Kobe. At least I knew that story would be in London within a couple of hours.

In return the cable office handed me a mass of anguished messages from ExTel in London, warning me that few of my stories were getting through. The US Signals proved so chaotic that despite assurances from their PIO most copy had been mishandled, due possibly to incompetence or, more likely, unpleasant interference by the Chinese army. Correspondence had been lost for days—then sent full-rate.

Behind our backs, in a frozen Korea which we had left so triumphantly to return to Tokyo, the enemy had recaptured the capitals of Pyongyang and Seoul, and despite all this, or perhaps because of it, the Tokyo press corps continued to file and add to the piles of unsent messages, though it was no longer a big story. Both sides were closing down. The world was almost as weary of Korea as we were.

My recall was surrounded by Louis Heron of The Times, Tommy Thompson of the Telegraph and most of the fraught press corps. Front-line correspondents were moving back to their normal Far East stations, or going south to look at the increasingly threatening situation in French Indo-China which seemed favourite for the next upheaval.

In Tokyo, Gordon Walker, my friend with the Christian Science Monitor and an old Japan hand, drove me to Haneda Airport with Randolph Churchill and gave us our Japanese-style farewell presentos. Then we boarded, flew towards Mount Fuji and home. It was a happy relief to surrender to the deep, deep comfort of a BOAC Argonaut.

Randolph, easily diverted by conviviality, had not been a spectacular success as a correspondent—though he wrote well enough when he wanted to. He had been flown out by the Daily Telegraph to replace poor Christopher Buckley, killed by a mine within an hour of reaching Korea. Unlike Randolph’s father Winston, who had success as a correspondent in the South African war, he had little experience of the nuts-and-bolts legwork in the field of cabling and deadlines, nor, I suspected, was he much interested.

I had on occasion stepped in at the last moment when he was over-tired or emotional, to complete and file the Daily Telegraph piece for the unexploded Randolph. That may have been why I found this choleric character usually friendly.

He was also something of a celebrity, particularly among Americans. This was a new experience for me—“celebrity” was a different status which could prove a hindrance for other working press men who were not being asked for their autographs. Randolph, however, never objected to holding the stage.

“I can never win,” he told me. “If I achieve anything they all say it’s only because of Father, and when I do something badly they say, ‘What a tragedy for the old man.’”

He was said to drink a couple of bottles of whisky a day, though I never ran into that. He had lost six attempts to enter Parliament, though he held an uncontested wartime seat in 1940-45. A biographer wrote, “Aside from his heroically dismal manners, gambling, arrogance, vicious temper, indiscretions and aggression, he was generous, patriotic, extravagant and amazingly courageous.” Michael Foot, a political opponent, said, “I belong to the most exclusive club in London: ‘The Friends of Randolph Churchill’.”

He and I planned to take a few days off during this return journey—from battle fatigue, you understand. First we went ashore in Hong Kong, where I bought an export Humber Hawk for eventual delivery at home, thus avoiding a waiting list of several years in the UK market, such were the idiocies of international financial controls.

Here we ran into the Churchill groupies again, chasing the son of the most famous man in the world. It was my first experience of autograph hunters and fans, for which we did not have much time. In Korea it had been a full-time job, and the target was merely to stay alive. Little did I know how life would change.

In Bangkok nobody knew who I was, of course, except that I was travelling with the noisy Englishman who was drinking. We were invited to dinner with the ambassador, which was not noisy at all, but I had the opportunity of observing Randolph on the social rampage. There’s no doubt that, much as I liked him, after a few drinks he could become a responsibility. Excellent and amusing company, he was always in a state of suspended eruption. Other guests had to speak carefully in case he exploded. The nearest to a compliment you could get was to say that he was as rude to ambassadors as he was to waiters; he made no nice social distinction.

One evening Randolph and I filled in an hour of happy irresponsibility pedicab-racing like gladiators through some deserted streets. It sounds most improbable today, when Bangkok shows us only fumes and endless jams.

This was the time when we called in the brilliant Noël Coward; his “Mad dogs and Englishmen” started all the uncertainty. We could never be quite sure about these sharp lyrics: What did they do in Bangkok at 12 o’clock? Did they “foam at the mouth and run” or possibly, as in Hong Kong, “fire off a noonday gun”? I’ve seen that gun. We celebrated “the inmate who’s in late”, and gave up. It was a relief to be singing about a war, instead of trying not to be killed by one…

Bangkok was a very suitable place to relax and watch some blue movies in a palatial House of Pleasure, appreciating the skill of a Thai cameraman which was delicate, even in gross situations.

I returned to London by way of New Delhi and Istanbul, and went on to cover the riots and revolution in Cairo and the Canal Zone. Randolph resumed editing his father’s biography. It was business as usual.

My dictionary merely said, “An oppressive hot southerly or south-easterly wind, blowing in Egypt in the spring”. That didn’t sound too bad, yet it did have curious effects. For days the sun shone through low, hot sand clouds and the world was a hideous bright yellow, as though seen through a pair of cheap sunglasses. Gritty sand got into food, air and bed, tempers frayed, nerves stretched—it was the suicide season and it was not passing unnoticed for I had spent eight months in the Canal Zone, and noticed my occasional twitch and mutter.

“Shouldn’t worry about it, old chap,” I told the shaving mirror one morning, after listening to some aimless chatter. “A lot of people talk to themselves.”

As a foreign correspondent I was used to waking up in a different bed or a different country, but eight months in Egypt was a sentence devoutly to be avoided. We were all growing restless. “I’d prescribe a short swan journey,” said James, soothingly. He was our conducting officer, appointed by the War Office to look after correspondents. “Try Cyprus—it’s our only escape hatch.” It seemed a wise weekend move.

A brisk transport captain offered me a berth on a troopship: “You’ll be in Famagusta in twenty-four hours. You can have three days of wine and women and be back by Monday.” He gave me what the army somewhat disdainfully called “an indulgence passage”.

I threw a toothbrush into my typewriter, thanked James for the thought and sped up the Canal Road for Port Said, past the morning convoy of liners, oil tankers and merchantmen heading east. I was having an expeditionary pink gin in Navy House, enjoying the well-ordered peace of the RN, when a 10,000-ton American Liberty ship called, typically, Joseph E. Brown rammed the jetty with a fearful crash and nearly came upstairs.

Crunching through huge concrete slabs, the bows of the misguided Joe narrowly missed the stern of our cruiser Cleopatra. In keeping with traditional naval fun I urged my hosts to signal their Lords of the Admiralty: “Cleopatra raped!” They would not buy it. The captain gave a thin smile; I could tell he was thinking: “Look, Whicker—we do the jokes.”

Inside the docks I hunted for the Empire Sovereign. “That’s it,” said a sentry. Nothing in sight except small harbour craft. “There,” he said, pointing at the kind of boat which takes trippers from Richmond up to Kingston. “No, no,” I said patiently, “I’m looking for a troopship, ocean-going. Probably around 15,000 tons, promenade decks, restaurants, staterooms…” At that moment the words on the tiny stern came into focus: Empire Sovereign. “Oh,” I said weakly, “that’s it, is it?”

Some troops were being handed lifebelts and ushered below decks and a few Cypriot workers were already being seasick. I was allocated a cabin the size of a medium wardrobe, with eight bunks. Eight! Two passengers were already established; the others, wiser, must have gone by air. Even with three, it was jammed.

When our little craft began to shudder we stumbled up on deck. A fusspot of a tug, only slightly smaller, nudged and chivvied us into mid-stream and we glided towards the Mediterranean, past the Simon Artz store, past the sky-high KLM sign and the broad beach, and those posh passengers travelling port-out-starboard-home.

Deck loudspeakers blared music and people waved from other ships. It was pure Golden Eagle. I felt we were bravely sailing to Margate, watching out for the Luftwaffe.

As we left the shelter of the harbour wall something odd began to happen. The Med, as far as the eye could tell, was a millpond. Ignoring this, the Empire Sovereign forced herself through the water with a peculiar corkscrew motion—none of that straight up-and-down style ships have known and used for centuries. Passengers began to notice, and retreat below.

The troop commander, a pleasant CSM, came round with anti-seasick pills. “I’m never sick,” I said, waving them away. We spiralled into another treacherous swoop. “Well,” I said, clinging on, “practically never.” He then delivered the clincher: “It’s 249 miles.”

We gathered silently in the miniature saloon: a sprinkling of army officers on swans of varying legitimacy, a middle-aged man with little brown hair and a lot of peroxide wig, a thin subaltern freshly married to a young army nurse. She, pale and about to be ill, disappeared morosely to spend her honeymoon night in the Ladies’ Cabin (Gentlemen’s, with chintz) and the groom mooched off down the companionway, kicking things.

A few of us attempted a meal, mostly at a very acute angle, and afterwards I rummaged through the ship’s library. “Real sailors’ books,” mumbled an old Merchant Navy officer. He was wearing a beret, half-glasses, a woollen cardigan and looked like someone’s granny. It turned out he meant 1928 throw-outs from seaside libraries, well-thumbed love stories about counts and heiresses. Certainly no meat strong enough to take mind off motion.

I bought a bottle of whisky for 15 shillings, and settled down with a paratroop officer who confessed he would have flown over but was frightened of landing in an aeroplane. Nobody would play poker, so we lurched off to our cabins, reminding each other it was only for twenty-four hours, after all.

I struggled up into a top bunk, and waited to be rocked asleep. During the night a gale blew up and it began to seem doubtful whether our gallant little ship could make it through the night. I was thrown to the deck three times, which is enough to wake anyone.

In the morning the weather was so bad we could not put into Famagusta, so while my Cypriot friends waited on the quayside my ship waited in a bay up the coast. We lurked there, a mile offshore and heaving, for four days. Nothing to read, nothing to do, drink all gone, madness coming fast.

On the fifth day the weather broke and I stumbled ashore, took a taxi to Nicosia and flew straight back to the Canal Zone and the khamsin. “You look much calmer,” said James, when I reached the press dorm. “Nothing like a holiday, eh?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing like.”

7 NO ONE CARED ENOUGH

They were the generation of women who went into the ’39 war and came out at the other end, unscathed but changed. Well-mannered, well-dressed, determined and resourceful, the Scarlett O’Haras of the post-war years. Brought up expecting to live the opulent lives of their parents, they were aware such a world no longer existed, so, instead of clinging to the past, they reinvented themselves and became the bridge between Mrs Miniver and The Beatles.