THE NEW GPW (London) offices were at the west end of High Holborn. We had three rooms on the top floor of a building with an oblique view of the dirt-mantled roofs of the British Museum. There was my office, Faith’s annexe and a kind of waiting room where journalists and photographers would gather and that swiftly came to be an informal club. We had a cupboard with a decent supply of liquor (gin, whisky, bourbon, sherry) and cigarettes — courtesy of our New York parent office — a couple of shabby, soft sofas and walls covered with framed photographs and past issues of Global-Photo-Watch. In the time between the pubs closing after lunch and reopening in the evening it was an even more popular venue to gather and while away the dead hours of the afternoon. Free booze, free cigarettes and kindred spirits.
We had opened the offices in the early summer of ’43 and had become something of a holding pen for various American newspapers, magazines and the smaller wire services. Apparently our ability to supply swift accreditation via ETOUSA (European Theatre of Operations US Army) had become well known. It was nothing to do with me — Faith Postings did all the liaising and paperwork and she was clearly very good at it. So, as it turned out, we were also acting as proxies — and charging a fee — for around a dozen other American publications and press agencies, including Mademoiselle and the Louisiana Post-Dispatch. Once the journalist or the photographer had the accreditation from ETOUSA they would be assigned to a particular unit in the services — the air force was the most popular — where they would be handled and supervised by that unit’s press officer and department.
By this stage of the war the process was running fairly smoothly. The journalists — including several women — once accredited, were issued with uniforms and granted the honorary rank of captain. There was always a considerable amount of paperwork involved but, once assigned, the working atmosphere depended on each unit’s particular disposition towards the press — ranging from lax and friendly to hostile and authoritarian — an attitude usually determined by the personality and character of the commanding officer.
One day at the end of May ’44, Faith popped her head around my door and screwed up her face apologetically.
‘There’s a strange gentleman here asking for you. Insisting. Says he knows you.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Mr Reade-Hill, he says.’
Greville was standing in our club-room peering at the photographs on the walls through spectacles so cloudy they seemed opaque.
‘Greville?’
He turned, snatching off his glasses, and strode across the room to embrace me, kissing me on the cheek. I smelled the odour of poverty coming off him, that sour reek of the unbathed, of unwashed clothes. He looked pale and considerably older and his moustache was untrimmed and grey. His suit was shiny with wear and the obvious repairs had been crudely stitched — by Greville himself, no doubt.
We went for a stroll, had a cup of tea and a sandwich in a café and ended up sitting in the watery May sunshine on a bench in Bloomsbury Square. The talk had been banal — all about family matters and a lot of disingenuous quizzing of me about my job at GPW. I was waiting for the real reason for our encounter to arrive.
At the Great Russell Street end of the square, a silver, deflating, three-finned barrage balloon was being winched down on to its lorry. About half a dozen young WAAFs were fussing around and their excited girls’ voices carried across the grass to us.
‘The thing is, darling, I’m pretty much broke, these days,’ Greville said, looking across the square at the barrage balloon, not wanting to meet my eye. ‘I’m afraid young Bruno rather cost me a fortune, one way and another.’ I sensed Greville’s old pride and confidence had turned to bitterness. I remembered the handsome, dashing figure he used to cut in his dinner suit, hobnobbing with royalty, aristocrats and millionaires.
By now the balloon had been pulled down on to the grass and the WAAFs were fussing about its rear end, looking for the leak, I supposed. The balloon was huge, fifty feet long, and as it was half deflated it pulsed and billowed as if it were alive, somehow, gasping for breath, a fantastical sea monster washed up in this small square in central London.
‘I was talking to your mother,’ Greville said, his voice heavy with shamefaced apology, ‘and she mentioned, just in passing, that — ah — you were hiring half the photographers in London.’
‘Not true. We tend to deal only with Americans. We’re an American magazine.’
‘Yes. Of course — silly of me. Thought she’d got it wrong. Anyway, it was a chance to catch up, at least.’ Now he turned to me. ‘I always regret our. . Our little falling-out over your lost photographs. Your Berlin ones.’
‘We didn’t fall out, Greville. The whole thing was a nightmare.’
‘I wish I’d been a bit braver, though. I think it was having all those policemen in the drawing room. And then the word “obscene” being mentioned all the time. Very disturbing word, “obscene”, especially when it’s repeated every five seconds, very destabilising. I wasn’t thinking straight.’
‘It was all a long, long time ago,’ I said, consolingly, and unreflectingly put my hand on his knee, feeling it bony and fleshless, like a thin log beneath the worn worsted of his trousers. I took my hand away.
‘And then this bloody war finished me off,’ he said with some vehemence, and went on to relate that since 1939 his work as a society photographer had virtually ceased.
‘And I’m someone who took a portrait photograph of the Prince of Wales,’ he said. ‘And do you know what my last job was? Three months ago. Some fucking woman wanted me to take a picture of her cockatoo.’
‘Ah. Pet photography.’
‘Exactly. The graveyard.’
I thought a bit. I couldn’t bear to think of Greville Reade-Hill photographing people’s pets.
‘There is one job I might be able to swing your way,’ I said. ‘But it would mean going abroad. Italy.’
‘I love Italy.’
‘Greville, the war’s on there, also. It’s not a holiday.’ I had remembered that one of our GPW photographers had been invalided home, injured by shrapnel.
‘Yes, of course. You’re not sending me to Monte Cassino, I hope. That doesn’t sound much fun at all.’
‘No. But I could get you accredited as one of the photographers we have with the Second Army Corps.’
‘British Army?’
‘American.’
‘I love Americans.’
‘On one condition — that you don’t go near the front line.’
‘No fucking fear!’
We stood up and I suggested he return to the office with me and give all his details to Faith, and we wandered slowly back to High Holborn. I sensed Greville’s confidence returning: an almost physical change seemed to be taking place; he stood taller, his stride lengthened, as if he’d had some sort of mystical transfusion.
‘Where do you live these days?’ I asked.
He looked a little embarrassed. ‘Actually, I’m living in a sort of hotel in Sandgate, on the south coast. Your mother’s very kindly helping me out. What does this job pay, out of curiosity?’
‘A hundred dollars a week.’
‘What’s that in real money?’
‘About twenty pounds.’
‘Marvellous. Bloody hell. Saved my life, Amory, darling.’ He nodded, squared his shoulders and turned to me again. Smiled at me. ‘Darling Amory — resourceful, helpful, sympathetic, lovely — you couldn’t give me a small advance on my salary, could you?’
*
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
This morning I brought Flam back from his overnight stay at the vet’s in Oban and carried him into the cottage and laid him in his basket by the fire. He seemed a little livelier, trying to lick my face, patently glad to be home. I set him down and then placed a bowl of ‘high protein’ dog food in front of him. He sniffed at it but otherwise wasn’t interested.