“All this, from a tent in Zimbabwe”
Just after the snows had melted, two friends died within a few days of each other.
The first to leave us, on January 23, was Noel Wain. I’d met him when he joined The Western Morning News as chief reporter. I was his deputy. Later he became picture editor, and in a final chapter, he cut free and discovered his real vocation as a painter.
This is one of his pieces, a painted collage of objects found on a Westcountry beach. It was created in 1989.
Four days later, we lost Brian Pedley, whom I knew when he and I were at Television South West, where he was a senior producer, working principally on the evening news magazine.
I liked to think that at least in spirit (if not in fact) Brian was descended from that robust line of Westcountry non-conformist radicals, those upright, unbowing dissenters whose stock also produced the late Labour leader Michael Foot, who was, like Brian, one of Plymouth Argyle’s passionate pilgrims.
Brian was a master of popular TV journalism, a tough discipline which required a bold field of vision, a pitch-perfect ear for colloquial speech with a talent for getting words down onto paper then back up in the air as if newly spoken, an affinity with the audience, and an instinct for the stories that would entertain or resonate with them. What he did not ever do was to cross the boundary into that demeaning and patronising travesty of his craft, “populist” TV.
Perhaps because of that decency and scruple, on more than one occasion he reached out an arm to steady a tipsy superior and save him from tumbling into the consequences of his tipsiness, rather than push him over the edge and take his job.
He preferred, I know, that unpredictable but endearing toper to the cynical shits who succeeded to the superordinate post. They tried and failed to turn Brian into their sort of management stooge, sending him off, among other irrelevancies, on one of those ludicrous courses where people are supposed to develop their “skills” by fording rivers and bridging ravines with a length of rope, some barrels and a few planks.
“How did it go, Brian?” I asked. “Oh, you know”, he said, grinning and raising his eyebrows. “Bit damp”. And then that unforgettable, rumbling chuckle.
Though I worked with Noel at The Western Morning News, we didn’t become fast friends until he’d left to paint and I was with TSW. Our homes were only a few doors from each other in Ann’s Place and Somerset Place in Stoke (Stoke, Devonport, that is).
I lived alone then, and Noel and Jacqui frequently asked me round for supper and great, long, swerving conversations, after which he and I, now mildly intoxicated, played fluent duets on his African drums.
Both us were prone to something we called “creative mishearing”. I remember him whooping when I thought he’d said “sub parrot”, and from then on – “Ah, Sub Parrot, come in” – that was his nickname for me.
One night, after listening to a concert on Radio 3, Noel sighed, “just think, all that from a tent in Zimbabwe”. “You idiot,” Jacqui said. “It was the Assembly Rooms in Derby”.
Brian and Noel had this in common: they were enchanting company and engaging conversationalists because they were the kind of cultured, gentle, inquiring and largely self-taught individuals who were once the mainstay of regional newspapers and broadcasting.
T S Eliot wrote that "we cannot afford to forget that the first - and not one of the least difficult - requirements of either prose or verse is that it should be interesting." These two gentlemen were interesting not because they mugged the camera, but because they stepped back and told the story. Or rather, the story, in whatever the medium, seemed to be telling itself.
Their deaths reminded me of the loss, decades before, of another good friend, who was also a mentor (our evenings, I now realise, were as much seminars as social events): Mike Tilson, one-time deputy editor of the Tavistock Times.
There were about half a dozen of us apprentice journalists, none older than 19 or 20, who were drawn into his orbit. He was in his late fifties, I guess: grey crew-cut hair, bright eyes behind round steel spectacles, sharp features – think of a sparrow hawk that’s gone vegetarian.
He lived by himself in a tiny granite cottage in the Tamar Valley, beside some fields where a farmer grew cauliflowers and anemones. A little wooden table with his portable typewriter on it; a neat, small fireplace where he burned coal and logs; and bookshelf after bookshelf: all of Dickens, all of Orwell, all of the two Lawrences (T E and D H), Penguins black, red, grey and green (Simenon), reference books, guide books, art books – and poetry; in particular, he loved Milton, Shelley and Blake (we’re back, I see, with radical dissent).
Once when we were there, and he returned from his galley kitchen with the omelettes he’d cooked, he saw me reading his Everyman edition of the poems of Francois Villon.
“Like them?” he asked.
“Very much”.
“Have it”.
“I couldn’t”.
“Go on – I’ve got two copies”.
And I have it still - here it is:
This morning, thinking of Noel, Brian and Mike, I tried a little translation:
Prince, n’enquerez de sepmaine
Ou ells sont, ne de cest an,
Qu’a ce reffraing ne vous remaine:
Mais ou sont les neiges d’antan?
Prince, please don’t moan “where’d that week go?”
Or sing your “wish it were last year” song.
You might as well ask me whether I know
Where all the melted snow has gone.
RIP, mes amis.
Beside Jonathan Meades, the best writing it has been my good fortune to come across this week. I can think of no-one better qualified in every sense to pen such tributes to men with such attributes.
ReplyDeleteThank you Mr Wintle.
Nicely written Frank.
ReplyDeleteAnd in the same spirit of mishearing I wan't using my specs so, to add to my own catalogue of misreading, I was amazed to be told that by you that Mike Tyson had once been deputy editor of the Tavistock Times...