The longer I live the more do human beings appear to be fascinating and full of interest…Foolish and clever, mean and almost saintly, diversely unhappy – they are all dear to my heart.
Maxim Gorky (Russian writer, 1868-1936)
When I was a young journalist in the early ‘seventies I travelled a lot within the British Isles. Others yearned for exotic and glamorous places, but I was always excited to get on a train for Durham, or Leeds, or Liverpool or Glasgow. My purpose was reportage – for the New Statesman, the Sunday Times, Nova Magazine, the Daily Telegraph Magazine, etc. My passions were social issues and human interest; if there was a strike I wanted to know why and what the people felt like. Yorkshire miners, agricultural workers in the Lake District and north-east, steel workers in Consett, night cleaners in East London…these were just a few of those I talked to at length and (this very important) had fun with. Oh, they learned that this little lady could drink ‘em under the table.
I once sang ‘Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner’ in an East Glasgow pub on New Year’s Eve and was bought tots enough to keep out the cold that bitter Hogmanay – when the buses were off the road because of ice and mountainous drifts, but I dug my hire car out of deep snow next day to slide perilously to another interview. Who needed holidays? Who needed foreign glamour? I found excitement enough with my fellow men and women right here at home. I made placards for the night cleaners and caroused with them – dressed to the nines, like my friend May Hobbs, their leader. I marched with Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill at the head of the Yorkshire Miners’ Gala and once spent an entire shift underground with the men, feeling the astonishing, terrifying weight of earth above me, as my head torch made the black walls glisten.
I went out drinking with Glasgow gang members, who were so intrigued by the lady journalist from London that I was probably the safest woman in that edgy city that night. I interviewed prisoners’ wives, and runaways, and drug addicts, and feral children on a Tyneside estate. I lurked in a republican bar in Dublin with an old IRA man and kept my mouth shut. I sat inside a cell in Barlinnie (a very special dispensation) and interviewed a man doing life for multiple murders. So many assignments, so many stories. This was my job – and I loved it.
As the train pulled out of one of London’s main line stations, I would look out of the window at the backs of the houses – and wonder about the lives of those who lived there. Notice beautifully-kept little gardens and rubbish-strewn patches in the same row of houses – and marvel at the differences between people. Make up stories about a boy riding a bicycle across waste ground or an old man hanging out his own washing and wish I could meet them.
Time after time I would experience that frisson, that rush of joy, I first felt in 1969, within the unlikely surroundings of a Rasta café in the rough St Paul’s area of Bristol, when I chatted to a guy whose magnificent dreadlocks reeked of ganja…and felt accepted. That day my epiphany told me that this wonderful privilege of access to lives so different from my own was the gift of my chosen career, journalism.
(Oh, those were the days. Things have changed so much and the market for that kind of reportage shrank and shrank, as celebrity pap took over…)
So now perhaps you can understand why I used the quote from Gorky at the top of my Mail advice column this week, in order to celebrate that multifarious humanity, which – for all its faults – I learned to love through my work. Forty-six years since my name first appeared in the national press, my life has changed (of course) and so has the nature of my work. Had you told me when I was a fearless roving reporter for the left-wing New Statesman that I would end up a columnist on the centre-right Daily Mail I would have laughed in disbelief!
But as I always tell my readers, you never know what will happen. And I read Gorky’s words, remember how it felt then – and STILL (because of my advice column) find human beings endlessly ‘full of interest.’
And worthy of love, compassion and forgiveness too.