I Should Have Been at Work. Des Lynam

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СКАЧАТЬ one hotel would take the baskets of fish, returning them empty to me, save for the fillet steak and a mountain of groceries that I would then deliver to his girlfriend’s flat. There would be a steak in it for me as payment. This was plainly dishonest, but at the time I convinced myself that the chef was doing the stealing. I was merely the ‘mule’.

      Soon I had to get a proper job again and found myself in the world of insurance, and started to climb the career ladder. It wasn’t very stimulating but it would give me some sort of future if that was the way my life was going to pan out.

      Then I got married to Sue and off we went in her mother’s coffee-coloured Triumph Herald convertible to the Isle of Wight on honeymoon. We were young, I was 23, Sue not yet 22, but we had already known each other for five or six years.

      Having enjoyed good health since my early brush with illness as a small boy, I was now to experience another nasty shock.

      I had suffered a pretty severe headache one day while at the Farnborough Air Show and, like a fool, had taken a couple of aspirin washed down with a pint of lager. I felt decidedly unwell on the journey home and that night woke and was sick. Frighteningly, I was vomiting blood. Sue called the doctor, who inspected the residue of my insides and decided it was hospital for me.

      On arriving at the Royal Sussex County Hospital, I was wheeled into the reception area, where I was asked for my date of birth, next of kin, etc. Then, the woman instructed the ambulance men: ‘He’s for death list.’ So that was it. Twenty-three years of age and it was all over. I hadn’t had a life. I had achieved nothing. I gripped Sue’s hand and a tear slid down my face. All I could think of to say to her was ‘sorry’.

      And so I was taken to Defflis Ward, named after a former mayor of the town. Thankfully they eventually changed it; apparently I was not the only one who, over the years, thought they were on the way out instead of up to the third floor.

      I was diagnosed with a slight scarring of the duodenum, an indication that I had had an ulcer at some time. But I soon recovered and was back on my feet, but banned from ever taking aspirin again.

      It was the middle of the Sixties. I was in my early twenties with a wife, a mortgage and a career in insurance. I had passed the examinations of the professional body, which made up some way for my not going to university. I had reached the heady heights of inspector, the company had supplied me with a car – a shining new pale green Ford Anglia – and I spent my days racing around Sussex, calling on insurance brokers, assessing risks of burglary or fire or anything else insurable and, in the main, was having a pretty good time of it. Up till now the Sixties had hardly swung for me, but I was on a fast track to promotion to branch manager, and would probably be one by the time I hit thirty. I would have earned a reasonable salary for the rest of my life

      But was I happy? Hell, no. I constantly felt there was more to life. More to me. I felt that I had made some wrong decisions and was now paying for them. It looked as though I would be stuck in this world of business for the next thirty-five years – fine for some, but not for me. My private life was pretty good, and I had an excellent group of friends; but there was a burning dissatisfaction within me.

      But my thoughts about the future, and how I might escape from my routine, slipped way down my list of priorities one day in early 1968. My mother, who had scarcely had a day’s illness in her life, suddenly suffered a brain haemorrhage and was rushed to hospital, where she was operated on. The prognosis was not good. If she made any recovery at all, she would almost certainly have been severely disabled. Day after day for a month, my Dad and I, often with my wife Susan, journeyed the thirty or so miles there and back to visit her in hospital. Day after day we would imagine improvements in her condition: ‘I’m sure I saw a flicker of a smile’ – ‘I thought she moved her fingers ever so slightly’. We were trying desperately to give each other some comfort, some hope. After a month my darling mother passed away at the tragically early age of fifty-four. She had been my rock. I loved her very dearly. She was a sensible, funny and charming woman. A looker in her day who rode motorcycles when young and was the life and soul of any party. And dance! How she loved to dance, twirling round the floor on a fine pair of legs. She was the youngest of eight children, but the first to die apart from a brother who had suffered from tuberculosis before the War. Her other brothers and sisters lived on to healthy old age. I and my father were distraught. I had never seen my Dad cry before. We wept together and could find no consolation. I thought my life had come to an end too. I had recently discovered W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Funeral Blues’, made more famous years later in the film Four Weddings and a Funeral. At the time, I certainly felt as though the clocks had all been stopped. Nothing else would worry me ever again. Nothing could be this bad. We hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye. I worried that she was going into the unknown without our support. She would be scared. I wouldn’t, at that stage, have minded paving the way for her.

      As the weeks went by, I was even surer that security didn’t matter a tinker’s cuss. I needed to grab life by the throat and wring some meaning out of it. I felt I could write something, but what? I had been unable to get my break into journalism, and as time went by the chances were becoming slimmer. Why would any paper take on someone who worked in insurance? I had offered the odd article to the local papers and to football magazines. Sport was my interest, so I contacted a few sportsmen and asked if I could write a profile on them, without being able to guarantee that the article would ever see the light of day.

      Amazingly, several agreed. Even more amazingly, one or two were published.

      Seeing my by-line in print had given me a thrill and I began to imagine that sooner or later I would get my break.

      And it came, not from print journalism, but from radio.

      In those days, to get into the BBC was well-nigh impossible, unless you had either exemplary qualifications or connections. I had neither and it hadn’t even occurred to me to try to breach the citadel at Broadcasting House.

      But then I saw a notice in the local paper that the BBC was opening up local stations around the country and that one of the first would be Radio Brighton. It registered with me and a little later, when the station was under way, they began advertising for people who might have an interest in broadcasting to get in touch. I didn’t know anything about broadcasting but I rang them up and, to my utter astonishment, I was invited to come and have a look at the station and try my hand, or rather my voice, in front of the microphone.

      A gentleman called David Waine, who was probably no older than me but whose face I recognised from regional television, gave me what transpired to be my audition. Years later, David was to become a very senior figure at the BBC but, at this time, he had given up his television job to embark on a new radio adventure.

      ‘You have a good voice,’ he said. ‘Very fluent.’ He told me that he would get in touch. He knew of my interest in sport.

      I now began to think that my dear mother was pulling some strings for me. The feeling was strong. I was gaining some confidence from the thought, or the fantasy, whichever it was, that I was throwing off my shackles of self-doubt, of concern for the future. Not long after, I found myself in the studio on a Saturday afternoon reading football results and other sports news. It was great fun, entirely unpaid.

      In no time at all, under the experienced (he had been in the business for weeks) eye of an amiable chap called John Henty, I was presenting the Saturday night sports desk. Soon I was writing a weekly review of the local press, which involved arriving at the studio at 6.30 in the morning; reading through the three local weekly papers and writing, by hand, a three-minute piece to be voiced live just after the 8 a.m. news bulletin. I was amazed that I could do it at all; but I was also apparently making it interesting and funny and getting a terrific response. The local newspaper editors began paying attention to it, occasionally complaining if they thought I СКАЧАТЬ