Watching the door

I was in Belfast and Derry last year on holiday, and while I was there read Kevin Myers’ fairly recent memoir of reporting the Troubles in the north of Ireland 35 years ago, first for RTE and later as a freelance. You realise, some way in, that you are watching a man coming to terms with post-traumatic stress. He never says it, of course, and my saying it here is not intended to diminish a well-written and compelling book. But about half way through Watching the Door,  he admits us to a dream he had, every night for several years, even after he has left the city.

The men appeared out of nowhere. They were masked and armed and said not a word. Both raised their guns, but only one fired at me, hitting me neatly in the neck, and down I went, on my back. I knew I was doomed, that the wound was fatal. My spine was severed, and my trachea torn open. The two men walked over to finish me off … As I began to speak, the air merely bubbled through the bullet hole in my trachea, splattering boiling hot blood over the ice-cold rain on my face. Then they fired.

The catalogue of killings is relentless – he acknowledges his debt here to David McKittrick – the violence remorseless, his own part in it all captured on the page. In the introduction, he describes his role as being that of ‘a maggot’; at the end, working now as a freelance, the final straw is the La Mon tragedy in which 12 people were burnt alive:

Each penny earned in this way now depended on someone’s death. No killing, no money. The relationship was immutable and unavoidable. A fireman watching television in the base earns the same as a fireman fighting an inferno. Not me. I needed bodies. After my initial report about Le Mon I told NBC to look elsewhere.

The psychology of the violence is well captured, as is his increasing distaste for it. A story about a powder-blue Mercedes, owned by one of the two drivers who ferry him around for the Irish broadcaster RTE when he first joins the station’s Belfast bureau seems to stand for it all. The driver is shot by a soldier while changing a battery within sight of an army barracks. The Catholic car dealer who buys it from his widow, and his business partner, are both killed by the UDF when they drive it on business to the Protestant Shankill Road area. The hooded body of one is left on the back seat. The car, now unsaleable in Belfast, is sold cheaply through a Dublin newspaper: the new owner died in the vehicle on the way back south after losing control on a bend.

Belfast was [in 1972] now like that Mercedes: cursed from on high, and violent and terrible death awaited the unwary at every turn and every hour. … Every morning brought a harvest of bodies of the stupid, the unlucky and the gullible who had died terribly.  Protestants and Catholics were equally likely to fall victim to this lethal mood.

The life of a journalist in such circumstances inevitably becomes complicit, to the point of becoming a target. One of the UDA hard men tries to kill him (he’s saved by a tip-off from a companion); he flees from a planned beating by the IRA; a pistol is cocked to his head by a member of the Paras; he stumbles out of the debris of a pub bombing only because he happens to be in the urinals when it explodes.

It’s an honest story, well told. I think he may be too hard on himself, looking back at 60 on his 20-something self, for I am not sure that others would have fared better. Buried in the story are several occasions when he did the right thing, either as a journalist or as a person, sometimes at some risk to himself. And he’s sharp on the British government and the British Army’s place in the conflict, and their blindness to the role played in the conflict by the UDA and UVF loyalists.

In a memorable passage, he observes that Belfast in the 1970s had, as a city, become clinically insane. He starts by believing that he understands its madness, but realises that the longer he stays the less true this is. He’s walked into a world, and a time, which is impossible for an outsider fully to grasp; he’s tolerated for a while by those who live there while he suits their purposes, but he’ll never learn their codes and private meanings.

‘Smart work for civilisation’

Controlled anger is one of the hardest registers for a journalist. It is the thinnest of tightropes between ranting, on the one hand, and bathos or special pleading on the other.

So I was impressed to find an outstanding example in the excellent biography of the war correspondent George Steer, written by Nicholas Rankin. Steer is best known (largely, it should be said, as a result of Rankin’s work) for his coverage of the bombing of Guernica, where he broke the story of German involvement, and collected enough evidence to refute the black propaganda that followed both from Germany and Franco’s Nationalists.

But before he arrived in Spain, he had covered the Italian assault on Ethiopia; he was one of the last foreigners to leave Addis Ababa as it fell, he married his first wife there, and later Hailie Selassie became the godson to his eldest child. After he had left the country, the Italians massacred thousands – including many members of the intellectual modernising group, the ‘Young Ethiopians’, which included many Ethiopian friends of Steer’s – after a failed assassination attempt on the Italian Viceroy, Rodolfo Graziani. This provoked a long article by Steer in the Spectator - of which this is just an extract:

Marshal Graziani, who executed so many men in Tripoli and who allowed his native troops to massacre Harrar in May, 1936, is distributing bonbons to the Ethiopians whom he has spared. Somebody throws a hand grenade. Graziani survives. The Italians are quickly pulled out the crowd of Ethiopians, and the Ethiopians are machine-gunned to a man. Three hundred dead. I call that smart work for civilisation.

Graziani is carried off to a hospital. The lovely planes take off from Akaki, over the sighing blue gum into the brilliant air. The little tanks rattle through the still-ruined streets. In the afternoon, ammunition is handed out to the Blackshirts, and the biggest massacre since Smyrna begins.

They kill all the Young Ethiopians, all my friends: not one they tell me survives. They are dead because they spoke French, wore sometimes European clothes, behaved decently, loved their country and wanted to make it more efficient and more civilised. But unfortunately the Italians beat them to that game.

Of course, the most famous British journalist to cover the Italian campaign in Ethiopia was Evelyn Waugh, working for the Daily Mail (which inevitably supported the Italian fascists). Waugh later got four books out of his experience of Ethiopia: Black Mischief and Scoop, of course, and two non-fiction books, Remote People and Waugh in Abyssinia (I’m guessing that the pun was deliberate).

The two men knew each other, but didn’t like each other; Steer was sympathetic to Ethiopia’s history and culture, while Waugh, like many Europeans, thought it medieval. When Waugh reviewed Steer’s book on the Ethiopian campaign, Caesar in Abysinnia, he was sharp (Rankin uses the word ‘waspish’), suggesting that Steer had an affinity with the Ethiopians because he had been born in South Africa, and implying that he wasn’t, perhaps, a ‘proper’ European. Waugh’s view of Ethiopians was summarised in a letter in 1935 (this is the original punctuation) to Diana Cooper:

‘i have got to hate the ethiopians more each day goodness they are lousy & i hope the organ-men gas them to buggery’.

Which, of course, the Italians went on to do, ruthlessly and illegally. As Gandhi remarked when asked his opinion of Western civilisation: I think it would be a good idea.

Fitting up the news

Thanks to my colleague Tomi Isaacs for alerting me to Charlie Brooker’s fine parody of the typical television news report. It made me realise how little has changed in TV news since I worked in it in the 1980s, except that the graphics are better and cheaper satellite time and technology means that ‘live’ has become so over-used that it is meaningless. (The ‘live’ two-way with a correspondent standing outside a deserted government building in the late evening is surely a target for Brooker for another day.)

Long distance cricket

I followed most of the Ashes, the one-dayers against Australia, and the Champions Trophy games via the ball by ball coverage on cricinfo, so I was amused to read an account of the so-called ‘synthetic broadcasts’ constructed by the Australian broadcaster ABC to cover the Ashes in Australia in 1934 and 1938. (I’m indebted to Gideon Haigh’s excellent book Inside Out for this).

A panel of broadcasters convened in the studios in Sydney and reported more or less as live the ball-by-ball information sent by means of coded telegrams by Eric Scholl at the Test match grounds. Sound effects were provided by a pencil and a block of wood; crowd noises came from a gramophone record. The listening public was enthralled, staying up to listen until the small hours of the morning. Employers complained.

And how unlike the coverage on cricinfo, much as I depend on it in the absence of a Sky Sports subscription. Reading between the lines of some of the summer coverage, they have a team of writers based in Melbourne, who watch the television coverage and transcribe it into ball by ball updates. In 70 years we’ve updated the technology but the method seems all but identical. Cricinfo, it should be said, does have a journalist at the ground. He (almost invariably he) feeds colour into the ball-by-ball commentary from time, but his main role is to write the Bulletin, the analysis pieces at the end of each session of play. To describe the action, it doesn’t really matter where you are; to understand it, well, you still have to be there.

Idling away

On Friday I picked up An Apology for Idlers, the Penguin mini-edition (or ‘Great Ideas‘, to use their label) of some of Robert Louis Stevenson’s journalism, prompted in part by a glowing review a while back by Nicholas Lezard. There were other motives as well. I love Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses, which conjures, tenderly, a whole pre-electric childhood, and having been partly educated in Scotland Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was inescapable. I’m sure thatI read Treasure Island at some point, of course. But although I’m interested in journalism I’ve never read any of  Stevenson’s.

I’ve only dipped into the title piece over the weekend. It was written in 1877, but there’s a section at the start of it which seems strangely topical:

Just now, when every one is bound, under pain of a decree in absence convicting them of lèse-respectability, to enter on some lucrative profession, and labour therein with something not far short of enthusiasm, a cry from the opposite party, who are content when they have enough, and like to look on and enjoy in the meanwhile, savours a little of bravado and gasconade. And yet this should not be. Idleness so called, which does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formularies of the ruling class, has as good a right to state its position as industry itself. It is admitted that the presence of people who refuse to enter in the great handicap race for sixpenny pieces, is at once an insult and a disenchantment for those who do.

The text – now out of copyright – can be found online here.

The picture, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’, is by the American portrait painter John Singer Sargent.

Return journey

I thought about writing something here when the journalist and novelist Gordon Burn died, quite young, earlier this summer, but realised that I had nothing to add to the encomia that littered the obituaries pages.  “One of the greatest – and arguably underrated – British writers of his age*, said one, and I don’t really disagree with that. His journalism – for me a former journalist – was exceptional. In a world where there is plainly too much journalism I’d seek his pieces out.

But looking through an old notebook I found recently – which read a bit like a longhand blog – there was a piece on an article by Burn from 2005 that was worth sharing, a meditative reflection on a return home to Newcastle after the death of his father, even if his memory, perhaps appropriately for such a genre, is playing tricks. The whole thing is worth reading, even if you know nothing of Newcastle and care even less, but there’s a striking quote and a striking image.

The image is of some elderly Tynesiders singing songs in a pub in the late afternoon. It turns out that they are tourists, living in Greece now, come back for a nostalgic visit. “They were voluntary exiles, travelling in the opposite direction to the economic migrants from the former eastern bloc and elsewhere for whom they had made space; ex-pats come back to revisit not what was actually there, but what they wanted to see.”

The quote is from the American writer Toni Morrison:

“They straightened up the Mississippi river in places, to make room for houses and liveable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use but in fact it is not flooding, it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has perfect memory and is trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that; remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.”

Towards the end of the article Burn acknowledges that he has only recently “admitted” the claim of Newcastle on him.

“It is a nostalgia prompted by the sense that the entire world is now a space traversed by signals, everything virtual, nothing solid; our employments increasingly having to do with abstract operations, every operation stroked one way or another into the digital network economy. To go “home” was to return for a time to a time where, at the risk of sounding like the bleary-eyed saloon-bar crooner, and to quote the historian Robert Colls, nobody talked of “community” and everybody belonged to one.”

Dog bites man

When I was a trainee journalist, we went through that exercise where we worked out what news was. “Dog bites man” happens quite a lot, so obviously isn’t news. “Man bites dog” is unusual, so probably is.

But of course, it doesn’t actually work like that. When Rupert Murdoch’s son James, now responsible (among other things) for protecting and promoting the commercial interests of one of the largest pay-TV operators in Europe, uses a lecture platform to make a meretricious, and substantially misleading attack on the BBC, it is widely reported as ‘news’.

And without getting into the detail (though Will Hutton has a good critique), James Murdoch has worked in the UK long enough to know the difference between a publicly-funded independent broadcaster and a state-controlled broadcaster, but this is exactly the sort of smearing elision that you see all the time of the Murdoch-controlled Fox News. (Blogger Tom Freeman described the speech as “laughable hypocrisy“.)

What actually happens in a newsroom is that the daily news agenda is driven by the news editor’s “forward diary”, which mostly details the comings, goings and pronouncements of the powerful and the official. Reporters are assigned as a result of this to cover the expected stories, most of which are more about dogs biting men than the other way around. And even ‘unexpected’ news stories, such as earthquakes, have their own expected dynamics; eight days or so afterwards, inevitably, there will be a miraculous rescue of a survivor who’s been trapped in the rubble. Michael Frayn captured this predictable aspect of journalism, hilariously, in his novel The Tin Men.

There’s a better quote about news gathering, from memory, from a disaffected member of the White House press corps: “What reporters do is to hang around the corridors of power waiting for important people to lie to them.”

Gideon Haigh on the Ashes

The Australian journalist Gideon Haigh is probably the best living cricket writer, certainly in English, and during 2005 we had the luxury in England of having him write a column in The Guardian – later edited, quickly, into one of the best books on that epic series.

Sadly, the advertising downturn means that there’s not a repeat performance for this year’s series. Happily, though, the internet means that we can still access his coverage is Australia’s Business Spectator (and if that seems strange, it’s worth noting that Haigh also wrote, pre-crash, one of the best books on the dizzying corporate greed of the last 20 years).

Here’s a couple of good moments from his coverage so fa, three days into the first Test of the five-match series:

From his preview (which also includes a characteristic flourish about Churchill and the Dardanelles):

The five-test series was for a century the standard unit of international cricket rivalry.  Now it is only played by the format’s pioneers over the course of Ashes.  Late last year, England played West Indies in a Twenty20 match that lasted less than three hours for a grubstake of $US20 million.  For England to now spend seven weeks playing Australia mainly for honour and glory seems almost unpardonably decadent.

On Pietersen’s dismissal by the Australian  spinner Hauritz in England’s first innings:

The beneficiary of Pietersen’s largesse was a deserving one: Nathan Hauritz, said so often not to be Shane Warne that he must sometimes feel like issuing a pre-emptive public apology.  Hauritz would have been an onlooker had Brett Lee maintained fitness, and still seems to lack the variation necessary to prosper at the top level.  But the delivery in question could hardly have been improved on, drifting away toward slip and dragging Pietersen so wide that he almost ended up on the neighbouring pitch.

And on Hughes’ dismissal by Flintoff in Australia’s first innings:

Taller, stronger, Flintoff’s first over to Hughes almost justified his selection on its own, five deliveries from round the wicket bouncing sternum-high, a sixth veering past the outside edge, bowler following through down the pitch with his jolly jacktar’s swagger.  The ball hit Prior’s gloves with a satisfying whack rather than the clang that sometimes emanates from them.  Hughes was in Year 10 when Flintoff made the Ashes of 2005 his own: this must have been like living out a still-fresh schoolboy fantasy.

More daily at the Business Spectator.

Poetry: news that isn’t news

Photo by Fiona Hanson, Reuters

Now that Andrew Motion is standing down as Poet Laureate after a ten-year stretch he’s been writing about the experience. Although both the Queen and Tony Blair told him when he was appointed that he didn’t have to write anything, the nation’s newsrooms had a different view.

You’ll just have to take my word for it: every time there’s been a royal birth or wedding or death in the past 10 years, a terrible low rumble has begun in newsrooms across the country. A rumble that has soon led to people ringing me up to ask whether I’m “thinking of doing something”. The voice at the other end of the line puts the question in such a way as to make me feel that I’ll be castigated as an idle sherry-swilling republican if I don’t take the top off my pen and start rhyming at once.

But of course, the arrival of a new ‘royal’ poem – he’s written eight – wasn’t of itself news.

I sent them to my agent, who sent them to newspapers, where they landed on news editors’ desks. News editors don’t think a poem is a story in and of itself, so they then get on the phone to as many people as it takes to find someone who doesn’t like the poem – then they have their story: poet laureate writes another no-good poem.I’m not the first laureate to complain about this. … The point is: it’s bad for poetry in general – but journalists apparently have some difficulty (or, more likely, no interest) in grasping this.

The accelerating decline in newspapers is well-documented, and much of it is down to digital technology and generational change. But I can’t but wonder – I write this as a sometime journalist myself – whether this ingrained cultural response by journalists, which frames so much of the way the ‘news’ agenda is constructed and framed, hasn’t also got something to do with it.

The wrong genre

Kelly Sotherton, by Phil McElhinney

You get so used to the routines – or cliches – of sports interviews that it’s always refreshing when something breaks out of the frame. In this week’s Sport magazine, the heptathlete Kelly Sotherton is asked:

If you were writing the novel of Kelly Sotherton’s life, how would it end?

Of course, what the question is supposed to do is to invite the athlete to imagine themselves in the classic ‘sports biopic’, where they come from behind to clinch an elusive world title against their long-standing arch-rival.

What she actually answered was this:

It would be a horror – like Steven King – and I’d be found dead, half-eaten by my cats in my living room. Or something like that.

The journalist was so surprised they had to ask the question a second time, a different way around (“Let’s phrase that another way”). Definitely more John Carpenter than Any Given Sunday.

The great photograph at the top of this post was taken by Phil McElhinney – see his photostream on Flickr here.