5 SHAPE

Having observed two springtimes in the Bois de Boulogne, experienced two fourteenths of July from the top of the Butte Montmartre, spent two Decembers strolling past the Christmas shop windows of the Rue de Faubourg St Honore on a Saturday afternoon en route to browse amid the polished wood bookcases of Galignani’s splendid shop in the Rue de Rivoli followed by coffee and cakes and a spot of reading in my favourite cafe near the Palais Royale, I suddenly found that my demob from the RAF at SHAPE was almost upon me. 

Could I bear it? The question I thought I would never ask myself now loomed over me. I toyed with the idea of signing on for another year - something else I thought I’d never do - and discussed it with my squadron leader but was given no guarantee that I would remain at SHAPE if I did.  Since the great military headquarters, which I had grown to love and where much of the time I did not even have to wear uniform, was the vital factor in my negotiations, I immediately retracted what was surely my foolhardy plan. 

The many good English friends I had made (though surprisingly few Scottish ones) were also on the brink of demob and only one of them, Jim Fox, planned to settle in Paris, where he already had a room in the house of a White Russian landlady near the Parc Monceau and would eventually become a celebrated photographer.  He’s still living there and we correspond from time to time.   His civilian ambitions struck me as enviable, and I’m glad he fulfilled them. 

Would SHAPE, I wondered, be interested in employing what is nowadays known as a writer-in-residence?  Negotiations reopened, but it turned out that there was already such a person,  who operated privately in this capacity and was referred to as a rock of Gibraltar in his immobility. What he wrote, if anything, I no longer recall.   Besides, I reminded myself, I was a music critic, wasn’t I, with a job awaiting me back home.

All the same, I had got to know various British journalists resident in Paris including the film critic Calais Calvert and a delightful Darby and Joan called Frank and Topsy Tole who lived in a tiny attic and worked for one of the London papers. Better an attic in Paris, I thought, than a penthouse in Kensington. They invited me periodically for supper, and it was through them that I had my first taste of Mont Blanc, a concoction of chestnut puree and sour cream to which I soon became addicted.

But it did not lead to a job and in the end my demob preparations prevailed. I cleaned out my locker, on whose top shelf I kept my French cheeses, and every weekend a bucket of oysters which I shared around the billet.    An invitation to the annual Paris pastrycooks’  ball - like a scene from a Massenet opera -  formed my goodbye to the  city I loved, and still love, above all others. The two pretty French secretaries I sometimes worked with, Annie Lambert and Claude Diraison, waved me goodbye. 

Meanwhile in Edinburgh, where it still seemed too cold to wear an open-necked shirt,  a new editor awaited me at the Evening Dispatch. Theoretically, I was still a trainee, but a more confident one than I had been two years previously.  The Thomson Organisation had by now decided that the brash Londoner, Jack Miller. was not the answer to the paper’s problems and had replaced him with the neat, polite, and affable Alec Bowman, a deft, quietly experienced journalist from The Scotsman. He wasn’t the answer either but I thought him an admirable editor while he lasted, intelligent and easy to get on with. 

If he had a quirk it was that he fancied himself as a music critic.  In my absence abroad he had sometimes deputised for me when an event of special importance occurred.  It was not a pleasure he desired to give up. Would I mind, he asked  with his infinite gentleness, if he continued?  It was not for me as a trainee to object, especially as the terms he offered me in return proved conspicuously generous. Since it was a journalistic tradition, nowadays in London sometimes withheld, to supply critics with two tickets for events, Alec artfully proposed that once in a while he would take one ticket and give me the other,  and we would attend the performance together. 

This, as he doubtless knew, could have seemed offensive. Young though I was,  I was the critic. But the operative word was “occasionally” and he did not abuse it. Indeed it happened so seldom that it never caused an embarrassing  predicament. In return he offered me even better terms than I already had. In addition to being music critic - an appointment now to be rather grandly upgraded to “our music critic” - my job was to be expanded, thanks to my Parisian experience, to being film critic as well, and also, though in a smaller way, an art critic. 

Though I felt concerned that my field of authority hardly stretched that wide, he pointed out that I would be the paper’s official cultural correspondent. Perhaps it was no more than an old Scottish way of getting one person to do several jobs, but who was I to refuse?  It was a great offer. Even if it meant working under more than one name with not much of an increase in salary, it suited my youthful journalistic ambitions very well. 

On the subject of music, Bowman took care not to overplay his hand. Only once did we come close to clashing.   That was over a Rosenkavalier at the Edinburgh Festival which we both wanted to review. Bowman reviewed it. I accompanied him, feeling a bit like a plumber’s mate. But he took good care to check his facts with me before committing them to print. 

He was a good editor to work for, never causing trouble and always coming up with ideas which he knew might attract me, like being a general features writer as well as a critic. When Edinburgh rashly decided to get rid of its double-decker trams, I said adieu to them under the heading “A Farewell to Trams,” supplied by Bowman himself. Now that trams have returned, amid a prolonged, painful, and costly dispute with foreign suppliers, I’m happy to know that I still have, somewhere among my files, a yellowed cutting of my nostalgic 1950s article. 

1 July 2014