Abstract
When the author was four years old his newspaperman father summoned an office photographer to picture the apparently happy family he was about to desert and then ignore for the rest of his life. That this caused long-lasting distress to Rupert, his baby sister and the mother who found her 11-year-old marriage callously shredded is understandable. But the discomfort experienced by the reader of this slim volume, published some 55 years since Rupert last saw his father and almost 30 years since his death, is testimony to the beautiful and moving prose with which the writer tells a ripple-in-a-stream story, illustrating how damage can lap upon lives many miles and years from such savage and inexcusable behaviour.
Rupert's father, Michael, was the son of Arthur Christiansen, long-time editor of Lord Beaverbook's Daily Express. He is now largely forgotten except by those who can recall the great days of Fleet Street, when the Express sold more than four million copies each day (his grandfather would, says Rupert, “have been appalled to the depths to which it has sunk today”), or those who have witnessed Arthur's cringe-inducing performance as an editor in the film The Day the Earth Caught Fire.
In awe of his father, Michael wanted more than anything to be a great national newspaper editor and once, “in a manic-depressive frenzy,” told Rupert's mother that if he did not reach his goal by the time he was 40 he would kill himself. I got to know Mike quite well – or thought I did – when, having lost the confidence of the all-powerful Hugh Cudlipp, he was removed from the editorship of the Sunday Mirror and surprisingly accepted the position of deputy editor of the daily title, rather than the large cheque that would have accompanied his departure from the company. To the embarrassment of the management, he proved to be an energetic force in his new role and no reason could be found not to promote him when the editorship became vacant.
He and I rubbed along well, sharing a love of cricket and a belief in my ability as a writing journalist (having followed his father's practice of posting bulletins on the morning's issue, he was kind in his valuation of my work). But some of his ideas were decidedly eccentric. To celebrate Britain's entry into the then Common Market, he despatched writers all over Europe and required me to report from Hamburg, Rome and Nice. Despite my discovering that the British contribution to the vibrancies of these cities had long-since ceased, he gave my reports prominence that puzzled everyone, even me. Returning by car from Paris, from where he had edited the Mirror as the denouement to his Common Market fiasco, Michael had a stroke, causing his departure from the group shortly afterwards. His remaining years were spent running a bookstall in Chelmsford market.
Rupert has little or no sympathy with this blighted professional life and it is easy to appreciate why. His mother, who had given up her own journalistic career to care for the children and support a high-flying husband, never fully recovered from his abrupt departure to marry his secretary, Christina (“She made outrageous play for your father,” former Mirror colleague Felicity Green told Rupert), father more children and clumsily turn his back on his first family. “I am left with unanswered questions which afflict me like a flaring itch,” writes Rupert. “How could a civilised, intelligent, sensitive, kind man, free from the grip of alcoholic or narcotic compulsion, not himself abandoned by his parents or his life, walk away from a four-year-old and a baby?”
His mother “remained the unhappy one, the victim of a moral code which subtly yet cruelly punished the innocent by making them feel inadequate. She bore her divorce like a brand of Cain”. Even more poignantly, he concludes that, as a direct result of her husband's heartlessness, his mother's life “was wasted in worry”.
As for Rupert, he took a double First at Cambridge and won a Fulbright scholarship to Columbia University (one wonders how much were the genes from his father responsible for such intellectual brilliance), but for some years struggled to make his way as “a jack of all literary trades” before becoming opera critic of The Daily Telegraph. And, he asks, could the demon memory of the day a photographer came to call be the source of his homosexual orientation: “Had I overheard my father telling my mother that afternoon that he was leaving – had I heard quarrelling and tears, had I sensed anguish and catastrophe? – and did I begin then and there my quest for a substitute?”
A few months after his father died, Rupert and his sister decided to open a parcel, postmarked Chelmsford, that had been delivered to their absent mother's flat. It contained around 200 letters, still in their envelopes, written by the deserted family across a quarter of a century. Those in the infant Rupert's hand were “bleak and monosyllabic. ‘Dear Daddy, Please come home. I miss you. Love from Rupert’…. We read these letters with our hands shaking and our hearts pounding. Some of them made me sob …” They burned them all and he reflects: “Had it [the parcel] been delivered into my mother's hands, I sincerely believe its venom might have killed her.”
The title of the book comes from a letter from an unnamed “senior Fleet Street figure” to Rupert's parents, both then working at the Daily Mail, before their wedding in 1948. “… with your shared journalistic love, your youth and your love for each other, you just can't miss,” the friend wrote. “I know you're going to be happy.” For Rupert, the phrase resonates through the years with all the terror of a witch's curse.