Free Going Up by Frederic Raphael Page A

One of the press people described how the roof on the half-finished Festival Hall had been prefabricated in several large, hooped pieces. I could come and see if I was interested. Of course I was. ‘No inside access yet, unfortunately.’ He led me to a 70-foot wooden ladder attached, halfway up the building, to a girder, to which another ladder of the same length was tied, at a reverse angle. ‘Once you’re halfway up, all you have to do is swing yourself round and onto the other ladder and on you go.’ I invited him to lead the way. ‘Lean away from the ladder,’ he called down to me, ‘otherwise you bump your knees and block yourself.’ However shakily, what had to be done was done. At length, I swung myself over the parapet of the roof, took a deep breath, and showed interest in the metal tracks along which the sections of the roof were due to be rolled.
    While we smoked our Woodbines, my guide told me the then new joke about the worker who went out of the gate every day with a wheelbarrow with waste paper in it. The security man checked it for stolen goods (there was no shortage of pilfering on any building site) but never found anything. After several weeks, the guard said, ‘I know you’re nicking something and I promise not to do anything about it, but what the hell is it?’ The worker said, ‘Wheelbarrows.’
    With a long look at London’s flat, often still flattened, horizons, I climbedover the parapet and onto the first of the two pliable ladders. Back at the office, I wrote up the details of the revolutionary roof. Bernard Drew stabbed my work onto the spike without hesitation.
    The sad-countenanced John Prebble was the Beaver’s house intellectual. In his mid-thirties, he smoked a straight pipe, lit with proletarian Swan Vesta matches, wore serious glasses and did not mix with the artisans. Having served in the Royal Artillery during the war, he owed his job, to some degree, to the fact that, like the Beaver, he had been raised in Canada. Prebble had his own small office. Its tight window opened only onto the newsroom, whence I could see him frowning over sources from which to cull material that would pass muster with the Beaver. Even a junior reporter could recognise a man who had hoped to have better things to do than try to wrest readers from Kathleen Winsor. I did not know at the time that Prebble was an ex-Communist. It amused the Beaver to employ left-wingers such as Michael Foot and, in due time, Alan Taylor, whom he could massage, with praise and money, into becoming right-handed, as it were. Prebble left Fleet Street after writing a 1956 bestseller, about the Tay Bridge disaster of 1879, and found a new allegiance in Scottish nationalism.
    The other feature writer with an office (and a page) of his own was Logan Gourlay, a tall, narrow, dandified and equally unsmiling Scot who covered show business and reviewed movies. With an elastic expense account, he could afford not to acknowledge the engine room crew even when we shared the lift with him. Not long after I joined the paper, he was found guilty of padding his expenses and dismissed. He later edited a book entitled The Beaverbrook I Knew .
    Although His Lordship never came up to the office from Cherkley Court, his manor in the Surrey countryside, the proprietor kept a long-sighted eye on his publications. Fear (and vain hope) of a ‘call from the country’ procured adherence to his foibles. One of the loftiest of his courtiers, George Malcolm Thomson, was said to have told another journalist that, whenalone with Max, he felt like Napoleon’s Marshal Ney. To which the other replied (or said he had): ‘Surely you mean Marshal Yea.’
    It was mandatory to deny the existence of the Beaver’s blacklist. All the same, I soon learned, as if by osmosis, never to speak well of Lord Louis Mountbatten. In the Beaver’s inferno, ‘Dickie’ had an irredeemable place in the deepest circle of the damned: too vain to take expert military advice,