FULL MARKS FOR TRYING (23 page)

Trend Gallery was beautifully fitted out, and very central, but it never became quite as successful as it should have, because though it was aimed at Westerners, the manager and the chief shop assistant were Chinese and so the customers it attracted tended to be Chinese too – very quickly, we had to start ordering clothes in sizes 6 and 8 instead of 12 and 14.

Then Albert branched out into hair. The Cultural Revolution had just started in China, and Chinese women had to cut their hair short, meaning that there were literally tons and tons of the stuff coming on to the market. This coincided with a sudden craze for wigs and hairpieces in the Western world – or perhaps it wasn't a coincidence, perhaps the glut of hair led to the passion for hairpieces. Somehow I was talked into trying to sell Albert's hair in London and, goodness knows how, I found a man who had a concession at one of the big supermarket chains, who ordered a few dozen of a straight, shoulder-length bob stitched to an Alice band. The trouble was that when the package arrived in London, the hair wasn't straight, but frizzy, and Moira and I had to stay up late for nights on end, ironing it. I can't really believe I am writing this; sometimes now my younger self astonishes me.

I also ordered a whole lot of little ringlets on kirby grips which you were supposed to push into your hair above your ears to give a sort of wispy Twiggy look. These did arrive as per the specification, but unfortunately at that moment the bloke with the concession went bust and never took the ringlets, which were still in a box under my bed almost a decade later, long after I had met and married AW and had children. He suggested that if we stitched them to homburg hats we might find a market among bald members of the Hasidic sect of Jews who are not allowed to cut their sideburns.

In the event, I don't know what happened to the ringlets; AW probably threw them out when I wasn't looking.

All in all, my business ventures in Hong Kong were about as successful as my mouse-skin fur coats in Somerset; but even though none of them worked, it had all been extraordinary and exciting – I still keep a sequin dress in the attic in case I ever wonder if I made the whole thing up.

13

In the early Sixties our forward-looking editor, Denis Hamilton, who had just launched the
Sunday Times
colour magazine, started a new investigative column called ‘Insight' which later became famous for its coverage of the thalidomide disaster and led to the victims of the drug being properly compensated.

‘Insight' recruited feisty young Australian journalists, and a whole gang of these suddenly invaded the paper – the most colourful of them, Murray Sayle, becoming a legendary correspondent. In the course of his career with the paper Murray climbed Mount Everest (he didn't get to the top), sailed across the Atlantic single-handed, tracked down Che Guevara in the Bolivian jungle and the spy Kim Philby in Moscow. But Murray's greatest renown in the newspaper world was for his wildly inventive expenses claims. Once, on a sailing story, he put down a claim for ‘old rope' and got it – money for old rope. It was probably the very least amount he fiddled, but everyone loved the wit.

The now-famous war photographer Don McCullin joined the paper at around the same time, and all of a sudden the
Sunday Times
had perhaps the best and bravest group of reporters ever to work together on a publication. There was a new macho mood that could be felt even in the offices of the Women's Pages (for a start, we were all in love with Don who was extremely handsome striding about in his battle-worn fatigues – at least that's what we liked to think they were – but also disarmingly modest. He once gave me an old
Girl's Own Annual
; I was the envy of my colleagues and I still have it).

I became friendly with two of the young Aussies, Tony Clifton and Alex Mitchell, who were irreverent and funny and on a mission to make the world better; they nicknamed me Battersea Bridge because of where I lived. I admired them greatly and, largely because of them, spent my weekends on protest marches. There were so many demonstrations and protests in the Sixties – I remember a bewildered policeman trying to sort out a muddle of marchers in Trafalgar Square, yelling: ‘Civil rights for Ireland over to the right please, Biafra to the left, CND wait over there, Vietnam down the middle.' There was no kettling of protesters in those days.

The young Aussies, who were Marxists, made me feel a bit of a wimp being on the Women's Pages; they'd say, ‘Aw, come on, Bridge, do you seriously want to spend the rest of your life in
fashion
?', and they fired me up to do something more daring and serious – such as go to Vietnam and try to be a war reporter.

In 1967 I was leaving the
Sunday Times
anyway because I'd been recruited as assistant editor of a brand-new magazine –
Élan
, it was called – so I decided to take a bit of time off between jobs and go to the Far East where I could
a
) check up on Tessa who had moved from Hong Kong to Bangkok (Mum was worried about her being away so long, and wanted me to try and persuade her to come home),
b
) visit Hong Kong and see Albert Poon and all my friends connected with the shop and the hair, and
c
) stop off in Vietnam and become a world-famous war correspondent. (The
Sunday Times
news editor agreed that if I came up with any stories he would give them due consideration.) And
d 
) Tessa and I could visit our cousin Simon (now a British Army officer), temporarily serving with the Trucial Scouts in Dubai.

Extraordinarily, the other day, in a box in the attic, I found the bill for my ticket for this journey; it says London–Bangkok–Saigon–Hong Kong–New Delhi–Bombay–Dubai–London, £395.

Just before I left the paper I did perhaps my starriest fashion piece – on the Beatles' wives; well, three wives and a sister-in-law: Maureen Starr (Ringo's wife), Cynthia Lennon ( John's wife), Pattie Harrison (George's wife) and her sister Jenny, because Paul didn't have a wife then. The photograph was taken by Ronald Traeger and it came out in the paper in September 1967. I think the wives agreed to do the story because they were eager to promote their new discovery: a group of Dutch hippy designers – they called themselves The Fool – whose crazy clothes they loved and wore themselves, and had chosen to stock in the Beatles' new boutique, Apple, which was about to open in Baker Street. We all met up at the studio and I was amazed how pleasant and unspoiled they seemed to be; I don't remember any security people being there, and I don't think we even had a hairdresser. I felt a bit sorry for Cynthia Lennon because, though the others all had the same Sixties look with pretty elfin faces almost hidden by their long hair and fringes, she was in a different mould – a bit plumper (which is why I think we put her at the back) and round-faced, and I had to spend some time trying to get her curlier, shorter hair to look the same as everyone else in the picture.

14

Before I set out on my great Eastern adventure, Tessa decided that she
would
like to come home with me at the end of the trip, and in the meantime she would join me on my travels, and so we met in Bangkok and flew together from there to Tan Son Nhut (as it was then known) airport in Vietnam.

On the plane we had to fill in our Vietnamese immigration forms – I put ‘
Sunday Times
reporter' (later I was awarded a press card by the Vietnamese authorities as well as one from the US Army, giving me the title of honorary major), but Tessa put ‘Tourist', which meant that every morning in our hotel we were telephoned by the Minister of  Tourism
himself
offering us an excursion to Dalat, a beautiful place in the mountains. We were keen to go, and he agreed to take us, but in the meantime there was always the small problem that the Vietcong had seized the road in the night and we would just have to wait through the day until the Americans got it back again; he'd let us know. We never did get to Dalat, but the Tourist Office sent round some brochures for Tessa: one of them said ‘Go for a walk in the fairytale woods that surround Saigon.'

Tan Son Nhut was the busiest airport in the world at that time, and Tessa and I hadn't given a single thought as to how quickly we would be able to get a flight out of  Vietnam and on to Hong Kong, so, though we'd planned to be there for five or six days, we ended up having to spend more than three weeks in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) before we could get seats on a plane.

Neither had we given a thought to what a war reporter should
wear
 – we just went in our normal London clothes. I clearly remember the look of incredulity, mixed with horror, mixed with thin humour, that crossed the face of the
Sunday Times
's Far East correspondent, David Bonavia (who had been asked to meet us at the airport), when he saw us coming through Customs towards him in our miniskirts. He took us to the ‘journalists' hotel' in Saigon, the Caravelle, which had a pavement café/bar with wire netting around it so that grenades couldn't be chucked in, and introduced us to some reporters and then, probably with a sigh of relief, he rather disappeared out of our lives.

The journalists – some British, some Australian, some American – were welcoming, suggesting stories I might do, and generally trying to be helpful. A few of them have remained friends to this day, and one of them, Derek, an Aussie, came into my life in a serious way after I got back to London; we went out together for two years – he was my accomplice when we stole Gerald Scarfe's pictures. We went to France together on holiday which was very daring in those days, and the hotel receptionist gave him the registration form to fill in. ‘Hey,' he said, ‘the French are so open-minded, there is even a place on this form to put the name of the girl you're with,' and he pointed to where it said
Nom de Jeune Fille.
Sadly, I pointed out that this meant Maiden Name, and not Name of Your Young Girlfriend, in French. He was very disappointed. Mum and Dad didn't like him at all – once we turned into their driveway and we could hear, quite clearly through the open windows, Dad calling out: ‘Here's Brigid with that awful man again.' (This was quite unusual for Dad whose normal comment on meeting our boyfriends was: ‘Well, he'll be bald by the time he's thirty.')

Back in the Caravelle café in Saigon, it turned out that
I
might be able to help the journalists – there had recently been an election in Vietnam and the new president, an army officer, Nguyen Van Thieu, was being difficult with the press corps about interviews. But our new friends thought he might agree to see me, a woman and a fresh face on the scene, so they offered to write my questions and lend me a tape recorder if I would share the results with them. Amazingly enough, they were right, I
did
get an interview with President Thieu – I was all set for my SCOOP, but the day before my appointment, something happened to my throat, I couldn't speak, and Tessa had to cancel it. I had no idea what was wrong: I had a huge lump in my throat and watering eyes and I had to keep swallowing – with great difficulty – every five seconds; at the time I thought I must have got cancer, but now I know it was my voice having a nervous breakdown at the very idea of interviewing the President of  Vietnam with an unfamiliar tape recorder, and a list of political questions about a war and a country I knew very little about. It took a week or more for my voice to start going back to normal.

Saigon was an attractive city that could almost have been in France, with its outdoor cafés, and people on bikes and scooters; but there were coolie hats and policemen in khaki shorts with thin brown legs, and slender black-haired Vietnamese women in traditional, skin-tight
ao dai
dresses to remind us that we were in the Orient, and most of all there was a perpetual THUD THUD THUD in the air from endless helicopters flying over the place, and a pit of fear in our stomachs to remind us that we were in a war zone. Not long before we arrived, a woman they called the Dragon Lady had been scaring Saigon: she would appear from nowhere, riding on the back of a motorbike, and open fire on US soldiers on the streets.

I had booked us into the Majestic Hotel which overlooked the Saigon River; I think our room was on the third floor, but every time we got into the elevator, the lift boy would press the button for the top floor where there was a popular bar. The doors would open, the crowd of American soldiers would turn to see who was coming in, and there were Tessa and I in miniskirts, the only two ‘round eyes' in town apart from the
real
women war correspondents (a couple of whom had been banned from going to US bases because their toughness demoralised the troops who preferred to think of ‘their' Western women as gentle and soft-spoken). There would be yelps and shrieks of delight, while we would be frantically wrestling with the lift boy, trying to press all the buttons for any other floor, just to get us out of there.

As we kept writing to Mum, who was desperately worried about us, we were in the
centre
of Saigon and did not feel in any danger from the enemy – little knowing that the Tet Offensive, when waves of  Vietcong fighters came right into the heart of the city, was to happen shortly after we left. Instead, as we did NOT report to Mum, we did feel wary of the US Army. I am not saying this in a vain way – we could have been the two Ugly Sisters, we could actually have been Cro-Magnons or Neanderthals: just being female and Western and in our twenties made us horribly desirable to the American soldiers, even after we'd swapped the miniskirts for trousers.

We were adopted by an American officer who'd taken a shine to Tessa – I think we met him at one of the evening press briefings (which, in my role as ‘war correspondent', I solemnly insisted we attend) – and this was quite a good thing in the way that when you are surrounded by a gang of beggars in Morocco or India, it is better to select one as your ‘guide', and then the others will leave you alone. But I never quit Tessa's side for an instant. One afternoon the officer invited us back to his army quarters in Saigon to buy something in the PX (the store for military personnel), or for tea, I don't remember. Time went by, and then, suddenly, it was: ‘Whoops! Oh dear! I am so sorry, but I can't take you back to your hotel now because the curfew has started, and we would be shot.'