whose son, a Morpeth male nurse, died hanging from the back of his hospital bedroom door; she wailed outside the court as officials gently explained to her that her son had stood on a pile of books with a noose round his neck to ‘stimulate sexual glands’. The books had slid apart and the boy had been left choking to death on the door. Then there was the teenager arrested for stealing a toaster from his grandparents. They wanted him imprisoned. His real ‘crime’, it quickly turned out, was that he was homosexual – ‘indecency with a male’ was our journalistic cliché – and he was swiftly remanded. On his way out, he made a pass at the most senior policeman in all Blyth.
And we wrote in clichés. Always clichés. When the police were seeking a hit-and-run driver, they either ‘spread their net’ or ‘narrowed their search’ or ‘stepped up their hunt’. Company directors were ‘bosses’, scientists were invariably ‘boffins’, officials were always ‘chiefs’, storm-battered ships inevitably ‘limped’ into port. Suicides were always tragic, brides always beautiful, angry councillors were ‘hopping mad’ and protesting villagers would always ‘take to the streets’. Those who discovered bodies were ‘horror-struck’ or ‘mystified’; the latter applied to the construction gang building a new Blyth bypass who excavated dozens of corpses – all in their Victorian Sunday best – and thought they’d discovered a mass murder before realising they were digging up an old cemetery. Needless to say, Tory election candidates always ‘lashed out’ at the sitting Labour MP, Eddie Blythe.
They actually taught us to write like this. There was a whole Thomson Newspapers school of journalism in Newcastle which I and my fellow ‘cub’ reporters from other Chronicle district offices were ordered to attend once a week – much to the disgust of my senior reporter in Blyth, Jim Harland, a Sean Connery lookalike with a reservoir of immense kindness and – for really stupid reporters – volcanic anger. ‘You learn journalism on the job, not listening to that bunch of wankers,’ Harland once told me. But sure enough, every Thursday morning, I’d arrive in Newcastle on a pre-war double-decker bus from Blyth – the interior filled with a suffocating fog of blue cigarette smoke – wolf down an egg sandwich at the aptly named Rumbling Tum café and endure hours of shorthand, legal advice and clichés.
The best stories could be told in 400 words, we were told. All the facts in the first para, plenty of punchy lines, equal time to all parties in a dispute and a good ‘kicker’. No anger, no passion, no suggestion that there was right or wrong. I was reminded of Joe Friday in Dragnet. ‘Just the facts, Ma’am, just the facts,’ he’d yell at the broads. We were given ‘story-lines’. Write the intro to the following: a retired soldier – who once took part in the Normandy landings – was blaming the local council because his wife had disappeared after seeing a ghost in her council-supplied house. Answer: ‘A mystified D-Day vet lashed out at council chiefs last night after his terrified wife fled “phantoms” in their council home.’ Anything that moved away from this rubric, that suggested a more subtle, nuanced approach – perhaps the old soldier was suffering from shellshock or his wife was mentally ill or perhaps the ghosts were real – was wiped out. Our Thomson ‘trainers’ quickly decided that a reporter called Simon Winchester would never make the grade. He was too imaginative, too thoughtful, too critical in his approach. Simon, of course, went on to become the best Guardian correspondent in Belfast. We were supposed to write stories the readers would easily ‘understand’. Readers were in a hurry, tired, often not well educated, we were taught. Having talked for hours to miners and part-time shipyard workers and firemen and cops and landladies, I didn’t think our readers were that dumb. I thought they might like something more than our clichés. But not according to the journalism teachers. We had to have ‘key’ words. Lash out. Bosses. Phantoms. Chiefs. Terrified.
Yes, we had to be ‘trained’. I still remember the guffaws of our ‘Stop Press’ printer in the Blyth office when he read my report of a launching in the local shipyard by the wife of the chairman of the Central Electricity Generating Board. ‘Mrs Smith smashed the Champagne against the hull of the vessel,’ I had written, ‘and the workers cheered as she slid down the slipway.’ Then there was the Tory election candidate who, in my interview, ‘smiled as he spoke of his many and varied pastimes’. Harland collapsed. ‘You’re a fucking innocent, Bob,’ he screamed. ‘What do you think our readers will make of “many and varied pastimes”?’
But I also remember what the Chronicle didn’t say. My reference to the weeping mother outside the Morpeth coroner’s inquest was cut from the story. The tale of Captain Fortune’s fish never made it – the paper needed a quote from the longdeparted Polish trawler captain to ‘balance’ the story. My report on the dangerous state of Blyth staithes was followed by a formal apology to the National Coal Board – inserted by Chronicle editors without any reference to me – to the effect that the wooden pier met all safety standards. A wolfish smile crossed my face weeks later when a roar of splintering wood and exploding steam shook the Blyth office. A tank engine – its driver mercifully unhurt – had crashed down through the flimsy old pit-props and settled precariously on the edge of the dock. We reported it straight – no reference to my previous story, nor to the grovelling apology we had carried only weeks earlier.
I had nothing against the Chron. When Liverpool University offered me a place to read English, the editors cheerfully accepted my resignation and wished me luck in my studies. When Liverpool then unforgivably decided that – without O-level maths – they couldn’t after all give me the promised place, John Brownlee equally cheerfully offered me my job back. Then when Lancaster University gave me a real undergraduate place, Brownlee sent me off again with his best wishes. He later wrote me a stunning reference for the Sunday Express which impressed its late, irascible editor, John Junor. Harland overrode my desire to stay on the paper. ‘Don’t be a fucking eejit,’ the coal miner’s son solemnly told me. ‘Go do your studies, Bob, and get a degree.’
Which is what I did. Within months, I was studying linguistics and reading Noam Chomsky and learning, thanks to David Craig’s English lectures on Dickens, of the social devastation which the Industrial Revolution had spread across northern England, indeed across the very area where I had been a cub reporter. The decaying mines, the growing unemployment, the doomed shipyards – even the rotten wood of the Blyth staithes – suddenly made sense. But I had to go to university to understand this. Journalism was about history. But not in the Chron.
And in the end, it was this thought – the idea that language and history shape our lives – that lured me back this month to the north-east of England. I had a suspicion that the language we were forced to write as trainee reporters all those years ago had somehow imprisoned us, that we had been schooled to mould the world and ourselves in clichés, that for the most part this would define our lives, destroy our anger and imagination, make us loyal to our betters, to governments, to authority. For some reason, I had become possessed of the belief that the blame for our failure as journalists to report the Middle East with any sense of moral passion or indignation lay in the way that we as journalists were trained.
When I returned, a cold, heavy rain was falling across Blyth. The old harbour was a dark, mud-sided, empty lagoon. There were no more shipyards. The mines had closed – all but one pit up the coast – and the power station, glowering through the murk on the other side of the river, had been decommissioned. At the end of Middleton Street, the newsagent – grills on the windows, damp stains covering the ceiling – told me Blyth was still dying. ‘Fourteen per cent unemployment, thirty-four drug deaths in four years,’ he said. ‘No future.’ I bought the Chronicle. The wooden staithes had disappeared. So had the railway. The beach garden where I used to read was still there, its curved stone balustrade broken and collapsing into the sand.
I knocked on the door of number 82. My landlady, Mrs Hamilton, was long gone. The couple who now lived there allowed me to climb the stairs, turn right at the top and push open the little cubby-hole where I slept almost forty years ago. Seven-by-five. I hadn’t got the measurements wrong. There were bookshelves in the room now, newly painted, centrally heated, the old gas-pipe concealed within the wall. The room where I had eaten my bacon breakfasts – Mrs Hamilton provided full board – contained a magnificent marble fireplace which I could not remember. The new owners of number 82