Ann Leslie - Killing My Own Snakes

A MEMOIR

MACMILLAN

First published 2008 by Macmillan

This electronic edition published 2008 by Macmillan
an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
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ISBN 978-0-230-73885-0 in Adobe Reader format
ISBN 978-0-230-73884-3 in Adobe Digital Editions format
ISBN 978-0-230-73886-7 in Mobipocket format

Copyright Ann Leslie 2008

The right of Ann Leslie to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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To my beloved husband Michael and daughter Katharine

Acknowledgements

I want to thank all those whove helped me in a long career, and those whove taken the trouble to confirm, or challenge, my memories when I was writing this book; any errors are, of course, my own.

I also owe thanks to the Macmillan team; to my agent, the incomparable Ed Victor; to Matthew Parris for finally convincing me to write it; and above all to the Daily Mail and Paul Dacre for giving me so many extraordinary journalistic opportunities over the years.

Those whove been brave enough to help me in the face of sometimes mortal danger to themselves and their families cant be named, but my gratitude to them is boundless: they are the necessarily anonymous heroes and heroines of my and any foreign correspondents story.

Picture Acknowledgements

All photographs by courtesy of the author, except the following:
17 Tom Blau 18, 25, 28, 33, 36 Associated Newspapers
22, 23 BBC 31 Reuters 34 Granada Television
38 Christina Fallara 39 BCA Films 40 Charles Green

Theres a dwarf in Oldham, says he was at school with Gary Grant, growled the News Editor, an irascible Scot. He stared at me malevolently over the huge handle-bar moustache adorning his blotchy face. On his desk, his special moustache cup which had a shelflike rim on one side designed to keep the facial foliage dry while he slurped his tea, heavily laced with single malt. And, while youre about it, lassie, theres a flock of sheep frozen to death on the moors.

Er, do we have an address for the dwarf? I asked nervously. Or, indeed, the frozen sheep? I added. Tom Campbells expression darkened further. You find the dwarf! This is called J-O-U-R-N-A-L-I-S-M, lassie. Not what you are used to at Oxford University! (he did a bizarre version of what he perceived to be my lah-di-dah accent). You find the dead sheep by looking for hooves sticking up over the snow. And you know what? Youre keeping a good man out of a job!

Yeah, I knew not least because he never stopped telling me. I was everything he hated: a woman, young, someone whom he could accuse of being a bloody intellectual, someone from the despised South, someone who was upper-middle-class, an Oxford graduate, privately educated, and thus someone who was ipso facto a stuck-up snob and, above all, someone whod been hired by the loathed London Head Office in Fleet Street.

The only woman he rated was the fearsome Peggie, who hed decided was one of my boys; I was informed, possibly inaccurately, that she dressed in a camouflage outfit of brown and green blobs, seemed able to match Campbells remarkable alcoholic intake, and was given to barking Kill! Kill! And she was only covering the Pennines.

I, on the other hand, had been born and brought up as a daughter of the Raj on the subcontinent, surrounded by servants. And later, walled up among nuns in damp, chilblain-riddled English convents. During my early life in India and Pakistan I had survived a riot (and still have small scars on my back), had experienced a bloody massacre on one of the killing trains after Partition, had narrowly escaped death from a black krait snake, been bitten by a dog with rabies, and acquired all the emotion-dampening, shoulder-shrugging stoicism of a lonely expat child. But none of that equipped me for dealing with Tom Campbell.

And in any case, Id never wanted to be a journalist. I was just filling in time before I decided what I really wanted to do. Forty-six years later Im still filling in time.

I certainly never expected to find myself being mortared, fired on by snipers and knifed by a would-be rapist in the Gulf, or interviewing a war criminal who boasted that the best way of punishing your enemies is to scoop their eyes out with a rusty spoon.

Or flirting over coffee with a chortling Gorbachev stranded on a ship in a Maltese storm. Or finding the urbane David Niven turn spiteful when I refused his attentions, or being proposed to by James Mason, or being bossed about by Mrs Thatcher over hairdos and campaign potty stops.

Or being there in Communist East Berlin when the Wall came down, or chatting about make-up and their forthcoming execution with two female murderers on Americas Death Row, or having my bad back cured by a voodoo priest in Haiti, or watching Nelson Mandela walk to freedom out of his prison gates in South Africa after twenty-seven years.

Or sharing substances with Salvador Dali, or punching Muhammad All in the jaw to make him pay attention, or giving a gossip-hungry George W. Bush the latest on Camilla Parker Bowles.

Or indeed trudging blindly across the Buckingham Palace gravel (my contact lenses having popped out), wearing an absurd floral hat, in order to receive a Damehood from the Queen.

On day one of my arrival in the Manchester office, Tom Campbell informed me, Youre not at the bloody Savoy today! I had in fact never been to the Savoy, but Id made the great mistake of turning up on my first day at work wearing what a womans magazine had said was suitable for a first job: neat, but not gaudy. Id bought a cheap copy of a Chanel suit.

But today I had to find a dwarf. So with a sinking heart I drove out on to the snow-covered moors. I didnt bother looking for sheeps hooves sticking up out of the drifts. I knew this brief, foolish, time-filling attempt to be a journalist was at its end. Id never done any university journalism, was at the time deeply incurious about politics, crime and fashion newspaper staples then and now and had only got the newspaper job because a nice man from the Daily Express, whom I met in an Oxford pub, offered me it at the then stunningly lucrative wage of 20 a week.

Id been a swot at school so had won a prestigious scholarship to Oxford and had consequently been listed in The Times; I was therefore much in demand on the recruitment milk round. Languid young executives from top companies would take rooms in the Randolph Hotel, ply me with warm white wine and peanuts, and ask, Have you ever thought of a career in detergents?... in marketing?... in thread? To which, of course, I could only reply No and Er, frankly... But Id said yes to the journalism offer, and look where it had got me. Looking for a dwarf and some dead sheep.