You have to have friends. I'd never had great friends in the sense of lofty friends and I've never had access to great influences, but you make use of what you can, and Guy got me in there as my father had got me in there first. So I went in and I went to work with Brockie.
And it was the first time that I'd ever met working class English people. Because journalists in those days were not graduates, they were you know, leg men. They went about. The Sunday Express newsroom except on Sun... Saturdays, when the paper was gearing up for the... 'the stone' as they say, there were only seven or eight people in the newsroom. They wrote everything. Brockie was the diplomatic correspondent, he was the naval correspondent, he was the defense correspondent, he was the diplomatic correspondent and he was the industrial correspondent. And sometimes he was Alan Brockbank and sometimes he wasn't, depending on how they wanted to arrange the by-lines. But he didn't sit in the office like journalists do now, looking it all up on a screen, getting hand-outs and phone calls, he went everywhere, and I went with him.
So I had a marvellous education in the underbelly of, to some extent, business and also politics. We went to the pubs, where the people like Herbert Morrison and others used to congregate, outside Transport House, and I began to hear how real people spoke in England. Not provincial people, they were mostly Londoners, but there they all were, and I learnt you know, just how shabby and cheap most people were. It was very reassuring. It was good fun and eventually one day I remember Guy said to me, 'You doing anything, Fred?' I said, 'No, no, no, sir'. I nearly always called people 'sir' in those days, I mean, I tried not to, but even with journalists... 'Oh', he said, 'would you write this up as if you were in Peking, old man?' And he handed me a piece of copy from the Press Association which was about the fact that whatever had happened in Peking, I don't know what, and instantly, you know – nothing comes more easily than falsehood – instantly I was, 'As I was looking out of the Forbidden City, I noticed large crowds had assembled, and blah, blah, blah'. All of this. Well, that was okay.
