A biography about my Pappy
My Pappy has three loves. The first is his family, the second is journalism and the third is New York City. He gets a lot of satisfaction out of his work and he thinks he got the most out of covering the fighting in Northern Ireland. My Grandma says that Pappy went over to Northern Ireland for the weekend and stayed for two years. Northern Ireland is a part of the UK but Ireland claims it but the British won't let go of it and the IRA who are mainly Catholics, are trying to take the British out, or at least, come under the Irish government not the government in London. Pappy met a lot of IRA people in the flesh and they were charming . You wouldn't think that they were the kind of people to leave bombs in crowded restaurants and kill lots of people. So Pappy's liking for the IRA was evened out by the dead bodies he saw. The bombs were put in hotels where journalists were staying. Although they liked journalists, they liked to scare them and to try and make sure they would write nice things. Some journalists were afraid to write anything bad about the IRA but my Pappy wrote that he approved of Northern Ireland and that was what he believed. He did not have to write anything he didn't believe. The IRA were Catholics and the Irish republic is an Irish country and the IRA and the Catholics wanted to become part of the Irish republic (its like walking on an imaginary line) . Most journalists supported the IRA's goal of becoming part of Ireland but they thought it was a shame to kill people. He found the job satisfying but it was always nice to come home and Pappy enjoyed getting on the plane and know he was leaving the bombs and the killing behind him.
There was one time Pappy got on the plane and he sat back and ordered a gin and tonic and he looked down the aisle as the plane was going up and a brief case slid down the aisle. The IRA had warned they were going to bomb planes but the journalists didn't think they were going to do it but the suitcase coming down the aisle was scary. So Pappy called out to people around him asking who owned it. Nobody said anything so he called the air stewardess and said ‘excuse me, there is a brief case here that nobody is claiming and it is scaring the hell out of me’. She agreed and went off to tell the captain and he came on the loud speaker and asked everybody if they owned the suitcase in the aisle and nobody said anything. He turned the plane on its wing and it turned back to Ireland and there were fire engines, the army and the police with guns waiting at the airport. They were told to leave the plane quickly and as they were leaving the plane a man said 'hallo there, has anyone seen my brief case?' . My Pappy wondered why the army hadn't shot him there and then! He must have been asleep!
By this time, Pappy had lived in three countries. Britain, Ireland and USA. But Singapore was thousands of miles from his home and it was going to be a new experience for Mary, Tracey and Adam and Pappy! He had come to England when he was thirty years old and single and he had no plans to marry. He had gone to work for Reuters International News Agency as a journalist and he became friends with some fellow journalists at Reuters who seemed to hang around pubs a lot. One day he walked into a pub in Notting hill Gate and there was a girl talking to a friend of his. They were introduced and a month later they got married. That girl was my Grandma! Now Grandma and Pappy have two children and four grandchildren. A far cry from his ‘halcyon days’ in Notting hill Gate!
In Singapore, life for Pappy seemed to go on as usual. He would go into the office everyday and the only thing different was that the people around him were mostly Chinese. However, for Grandma and the children, life changed. They were able to afford an Ahma, which is a servant, and Grandma found time to play tennis and learn how to play bridge. There were times when Pappy had to leave Singapore and travel around Asia. The two most exciting places were Vietnam and Cambodia. There are 3 Asian countries called Indo China and they were all at one time run by France.
Cambodia is like Vietnam and there was a war there. It was part of the same war that was going on in Vietnam. The food in Vietnam was part French and part Chinese and it was the best food he had ever had in his life.
In Cambodia, life was a lot different. the people were starving and being bombed every day by communist forces. Communism is a form of politics. My Pappy has told me not to get into this! The rockets started early in the day and went on through the night. There were explosions all day long. One day a rocket hit a girl’s school and killed six girls about my age. There had been two rocket explosions and Pappy had gone to see what had happened. When the bomb hit the girls school, Pappy was there because he had gone to the first explosion. At the school there was a brick wall and there were cars parked against the wall which he tried to use for cover. When the second rocket went off he heard it coming. Pappy took a dive and landed on a girl about my age. It was clear she went to this private school and she could speak English. They got up and Pappy apologised and this ten year old girl 'that is alright, you would have been killed and not me if the explosion had reached us' and Pappy thought that for a girl that age to say something as cool as that was a sign of what war could do to people.
His arms and chest and hands were scraped and raw and bleeding. Pappy looked around and there were people lying on the ground bleeding and dying. The ambulances came and they opened the back door of the ambulance and just started throwing people in. Pappy was very dazed but he asked a friend why they were being so rough and in such a hurry. The friend replied that the Khmer Rouge (the enemy) fire rockets into town and then all the fire engines and ambulances and the army arrive and then they fire again and hit all the people who go to help so that is why throw they them in in a hurry and drive away before the next round of rockets comes in.
When he was walking in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, he saw a man in a white suit looking really smart. Then the bomb went off and Pappy saw him being thrown into an ambulance and his suit was red with blood.
Pappy got back to the hotel and he was raw so he went to a hospital and he walked in and there were people lying on the floors and he decided his injuries were not bad enough to deprive anyone of those people who were probably all dying. So he wouldn't get in the way so he just went back to his hotel and took aspirin and he finally got to sleep that night. He was having bad nightmares so he finally turned on the light and he was black with flies all over him because of his injuries and Pappy went crazy! All the foreigners decided it was time to leave Cambodia, only the airport had shut down because of the bombs which were falling on it. So Reuters told Pappy that he could spend anything to get a plane home however he could not buy himself a flight anyway as the runway was closed. The army had pushed the enemy back but the airports were still closed. Luckily the American embassy (every country has an office in other countries and these offices are called embassies and if you are in trouble in a foreign country, you go to the embassy of your country) managed to get an aeroplane to take Americans out of Cambodia. The problem was that the airport was still being bombed. The plane was parked just out of range of the bombs however, they had to get to the plane so he ran through the bombs dodging them as he went. He got to the plane and it took him home!
When he got back to London he started to fly around the world for Reuters and he went to Belgrade which is what is now known as Serbia. Pappy arrived by train. An old man walked up to him and asked if he wanted a taxi. Pappy replied’ yes please’ and the man asked pappy which hotel he was staying in. The man hoisted his suitcase on his shoulder and said 'follow me' So Pappy followed and he crossed the street and kept on walking and Pappy thought this taxi is a long way away so they walked and walked and walked and finally he put the suitcase down and said 'here we are' He didn't have a taxi at all, he had carried the suitcase the whole way. He then asked for ten dollars. My Pappy said ‘what? that is a lot of money' The man said that he had to carry the bag all that way! It turned out a taxi would have cost $2 but the man had charged $10. My Pappy had been had!
Pappy went to Savannah High school which could have been a fun time. Everybody else enjoyed it except Pappy and that is because of his stammer and the teachers were not very nice about it. They didn’t help Pappy at all. They thought it was his own fault and that he should pull his socks up. Pappy's stammer has plagued him every moment of his life. Every job he did was achieved despite his stammer. It made a good life out of what could have been a wonderful life.
While he was in Savannah he was a copy boy and then a junior reporter on a local paper. But Pappy wanted the good things so he went to New York and got a job on a news agency there. He loved New York. He worked a lot of shift work and no matter what time he got off work , New York was always moving. Buz, buz, things are always happening. You could do anything at any time. You could go to the cinema or to a restaurant at 4am. Pappy loved it! Pappy was working on a newspaper in New Jersey which is right next to New York and he had always wanted to go abroad and there was an advertisement in the paper for a journalist to come to London and work for Reuters and he decided to try it. There were about two hundred people applying for that job. Pappy got the job! He decided to stay in London for a year and he would travel around a bit on his holidays and then he would go back to New York and he is still here! And that was 1962, 48 years ago!
Pappy retired from Reuters but they called him back to teach young journalists and Pappy enjoyed it a lot because he was surrounded with young graduates who asked intelligent questions and who went a long way towards keeping Pappy's brain working! Pappy then went to work for a charity shop which he enjoyed for four years. And then Pappy had to stop as he had a stroke. He recovered quite well from this. In fact, so well that another charity asked him to go to a country called Laos and help run an English language newspaper there. So Pappy was in Laos for three months. Laos is near Vietnam and Cambodia. He brought me back a green dress and a peasant’s hat which I loved. I wore it all the time!
One of the student journalists summed it up in a in-house magazine by describing Pappy as the world’s greatest and grumpiest journalist. My Pappy is the most interesting man in the whole wide world and I love him.
Eleanor Lawrie
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