1989 (2 page)

On the Western side, the Wall changed over the years from a basic, breeze-block structure topped with barbed wire to a uniform curtain of concrete slabs three metres high topped with a cylindrical concrete drum with a circumference designed to make it
impossible
to get a grip on, though it was only ever envisaged that anyone trying to climb it would be coming from the other side.

In the East, paradoxically, the Wall was less intimidating, as if the authorities wanted to achieve the impossible and make it disappear. The frontier retreated often by as much as ten to fifteen metres and the Wall as seen by ordinary East Berliners more closely resembled that of a factory compound, just under three metres high and still built of breeze blocks or in places even brick. It bore simple signs that said
Frontier area, strictly no admittance
or
Trespassers will be
prosecuted
. The difference lay in what everyone knew separated the two walls, the ‘death strip’ of tank trap obstacles, barbed wire and armed guards patrolling with dogs and orders to shoot to kill. At more isolated spots watchtowers sprouted on concrete stalks manned by men with night-vision binoculars and automatic weapons. Over the nearly three decades of its existence at least 136 people died (that is the official figure), but including those dragged back bleeding whose bodies were never recovered, there were certainly substantially
more than 200. In the East everyone knew someone who knew one of them.

The East German hope was that for West Berliners, faced with a blank wall, the other half of their city would eventually be forgotten. And gradually it was. West Germans, whom the logic behind the ‘two German states’ doctrine insisted were as foreign as British or French, were consequently just as free to visit East Germany (that is they could apply for a visa, which would not always be granted). But until 1971 the same regulations did not apply to West
Berliners
(a remnant of the blockade mentality that hoped one day all of Berlin would be capital of the GDR) who were only allowed
occasional
visits. The West Berlin city senate erected wooden viewing platforms at strategic locations – the Brandenburg Gate, Bernauer Strasse – where you could climb up and peer across at what had once been the continuation of the same street, even perhaps to wave. Few East Berliners dared wave back. Later only tourists climbed the platforms, while the grey expanse of the Wall itself became the world’s biggest blank canvas for graffiti artists. Early examples were political:
Shit Wall
;
Last one to leave, turn out the lights!
, then
tourists
with no traumatised memories and their own trivial axes to grind joined in:
Geoff Boycott rules
, and
Leeds United AFC
are but two typical examples from the early eighties. In the end the abstract artists took over dabbing broad swathes of colour. Parts of the Wall attained such a cultural significance in their own right that there would be some who complained of ‘vandalism’ when they were torn down.

But on that night of Thursday, November 9th, 1989, the
prospect
of the bulldozers moving in went from fantasy to possibility to probability and finally reality within just a few hours. The scenes that most people around the world would have imprinted on their retinas were those from the Brandenburg Gate. That too was one of those accidents of history. There was no crossing point at the Gate, but precisely because it was where foreign leaders were brought to see the ‘inhumanity’ of the Wall, this was the spot where the East Germans had tried to make it least threatening. Here the Wall was lower, and flat-topped, without the cylindrical ‘anti-climb’ drum on top, not least because the Gate itself, as a historical monument, was
manned twenty-four hours by East German troops in full
ceremonial
dress. In true ‘bizzaro world’ form, the East German
government
also brought visitors to the Gate, to show off the effectiveness of the ‘anti-fascist protection wall’. When faced with concrete proof of an unpalatable reality they chose simply to turn interpretation of it on its head.

But the flat surface meant that on that fateful night, drunk West Berliners could do the unthinkable: climb onto the Wall. And dance. Bewildered East German guards ordered them to get down, then called up reinforcements, but what were they to do? Shoot? Almost uniquely among border guards the world over, their ‘shoot to kill’ orders applied to their own citizens trying to leave rather than others who might try to get in. And in any case they weren’t doing that, were they? They were just dancing, and waving beer bottles. By the time someone had the bright – if just possibly fatal – decision to take a pickaxe to part of it, nobody really knew what the rules were anymore.

One pickaxe of course was never going to do serious harm to a structure as solid as the Berlin Wall. At least not physically. But the images that went round the world – and more importantly back into East Germany where millions also sat glued to their screens, albeit in ever dwindling numbers as they piled into cars or trains and headed for Berlin – were devastating. Yet that too was more circumstance than foresight. The world’s cameramen had gathered at that spot simply because it was the most photogenic – most of the reporters who hurriedly jetted in over the twenty-four hours after the first crossing point was opened spoke little or no German. All they wanted were images. And tipsy West Berliners – goaded on by their presence – provided them. As Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan had prophesied a decade earlier, the medium had become the message.

For those of us on the ground, swept up and carried away by the euphoria it was also difficult not to see philosophy, if not theology, in the tide of history. I could not help but recall that November 9th, 1989 was to the day exactly fifty years plus one after Kristallnacht, Joseph Goebbels’ orchestrated pogrom of violence against the Jews. It was also the anniversary of the defeat of Adolf Hitler’s ‘beer hall

putsch’ in 1923. Even for a convinced atheist it was hard not to feel a shiver down the spine.

That was the story that appeared on the front page. My waitresses, my friends and the whole mad mix-up that led to the fall of the Wall, were reserved for the lengthy colour/analysis piece on the Focus pages inside. But even that was not the whole of the story.

The Berlin Wall was not just a concrete manifestation of the Iron Curtain, it was its most potent symbol. Almost its soul. Its fall was to bring in its wake the end of the Cold War, the collapse like dominoes of Moscow’s satellite dictatorships in Eastern Europe and finally the implosion of the Soviet Union itself. The year of miracles, 1989, would give the world a new chance, which surely only fools would throw away.

The long and winding road that led me to Checkpoint Charlie on the night the Berlin Wall came down began improbably enough thirteen years earlier on the outskirts of Paris where I was trying to hitch a lift to the Côte d’Azur. That was when I learned my first journalistic trick: know how the story is going to end before you start writing it.

I have to give a little context here. I was in the third year of a modern languages degree at Magdalen College, Oxford, reading French and Russian, and spending it, as linguists were supposed to do, abroad. Rather than appreciating a paid job with free
accommodation
in one of the world’s most glamorous cities, I regarded my ‘year out’ as purgatory away from the hedonistic delights of
seventies
studenthood.

Theoretically I had landed on my feet, with a position as an ‘
assistant
’ – you have to pronounce it the French way ‘
ass-eees-t’ahn
’ – a sort of guinea-pig native speaker for the locals learning English to laugh at – in the posh Lycée Lakanal in the southern Parisian suburbs. I say ‘posh’ because it had a formidable academic record and boasted famous old boys such as André Gide and was housed in its own magnificent parkland in the leafy suburb of Sceaux, which is more or less to Paris what Hampstead is to London. But in the stark reality of a cold wintry day in October with the leaves ripped from the trees by a biting wind, Lakanal’s imposing old brick buildings, seen from the street, looked to me more like a maximum security state penitentiary.

This was not helped when I announced my presence and
immediately
felt both the immense pressure of French bureaucracy and my own linguistic inadequacy as I was asked to fill in a sheaf of forms with my personal details. I fell at almost the first hurdle. Age, date of birth, sex were no problem but, ‘
État civil
’? I knew what this meant:
was I married or single? I simply had no idea what the French for ‘single’ was. We had learned about people being ‘
marié
’ but no one had ever taught me the opposite. ‘
Simple
’ didn’t sound right, nor did ‘
unique
’ or ‘
seul
’ or any of the other random words my panicky brain flirted with. Eventually a kindly – if somewhat exasperated – secretary smiled tartly at me and said she presumed, at my age, I was ‘
célibataire
’. I was horrified. Even as I realised instinctively that that had to be the right word, just the fact that it contained the concept of ‘celibacy’ was so far removed from anything I had hoped for from a year in Paris.

Things did not get better when I was eventually shown to my room, up long echoing wooden-floored corridors and into a bare space with an iron bed, a clunking radiator and fantastically high ceilings. These would have given the room a feeling of lightness and airiness if it weren’t for the fact that the windows were so high up, that at a compact five-foot-six I couldn’t quite see out of them without standing on a chair. Luckily I did have a chair: just one, an old wooden classroom chair which stood next to an old wooden classroom desk, inscribed with the initials – and possibly the teeth marks – of countless generations of bored French adolescents. As they closed the door on me – thankfully without the sound of a key in the lock – I looked around dolefully at my spartan cube, with its walls painted hospital green, obliquely up at the white overcast sky and directly up at the solitary light bulb dangling yards above my head. I reflected that if it ever needed changing I’d be in trouble. Luckily it never did.

Inevitably my last year at Lakanal didn’t turn out to be as bad as it had first seemed. I have bittersweet memories – perhaps as lonely boys sent to English boarding schools do – of pre-dawn starts with steaming bowls of hot milk left to warm on the radiators in the canteen ready for mixing with strong, piping-hot coffee to form your own blend of
café au lait
; of twenty-five-centilitre bottles of red wine served with lunch to the teaching staff and the university students who in return for free accommodation kept order in the boarders’ dormitories at night; of school lunches that – unlike anything I had ever experienced back home – would creep onto my menus for life: ‘
lapin aux pruneaux
’, rabbit with red wine and prune sauce.

And one ridiculously romantic vision that – more ridiculous than romantic – was somehow quintessentially French: a bright
blue-skyed
freezing winter morning beneath the coppiced plane trees in the still empty playground watching the steam rise from the
newly-rinsed
open-air
pissoirs
. Monet could have worked miracles with it.

Over time I managed to brighten up my room, most significantly covering one wall with a full-size cinema poster, picked up at
Les Puces
, the sprawling flea market held each weekend at
Porte de
Clignancourt
.
The film:
Cabaret
, with Liza Minelli, posing large-as-life on my wall in her stockings and bowler hat against the Brandenburg Gate and the film’s French subtitle,
Adieu Berlin
. It had to be fate.

Which leads me back to that fateful hitchhiking journey south. For all that I had got used to Lakanal and life in the Parisian suburbs, as soon as the weather started warming up – and there was a break in the school timetable – the idea of a few days soaking up the sun in St Tropez, or wherever I could get a lift to, seemed irresistible. That was why I was standing with my thumb out on one of the southern slip roads off the Paris
périphérique
, only to find that the first car to stop and offer me a lift anywhere in the general direction of the sun happened to be driven by an Englishman.

His name was Terry Williams and he was a journalist. He told me he worked in the Paris bureau of Reuters News Agency. Had I, he asked, as a linguist, ever thought of going into journalism? Well, yes, maybe, sort of, I replied. As much as I had thought about going into anything other than a student bar. The world ‘beyond university’ was unimaginably far away, and didn’t bear thinking about. I was thinking about getting back there. Not leaving for good. It’s only a year away, you know, he told me as we headed south on the
autoroute
, the warm wind from the Midi flowing in through the open windows of his sports car. It’ll go fast. He meant the year. I hated him for it. But it was true, I knew. In little over fifteen months I would be out there in the real world. I would have to do something. Maybe even get a job.

It was then that Terry made up for everything with what I now know to be one of the oldest saws in the book: ‘The thing about
journalism
,’ he said with a grin, ‘is that it’s the worst job in the world.’ And he paused before the punchline: ‘But it’s better than working.’

He didn’t take me very far along my road south, but he did give me a card and told me his brother also ran a newly opened
journalism
school in Cardiff. A few weeks later I took him up on the
invitation
to drop in and take a look at the Reuters office in Paris. It wasn’t particularly impressive. Terry was ‘minding the desk’ which meant sitting there with his feet up watching the television news, with a printer from the French news agency AFP (Agence France-Presse) chuntering away next to him, feeding out screeds of paper which he glanced at occasionally and now and then tore off, and attached to a growing pile fixed to a clipboard. ‘Slow news day,’ he said. ‘Might nip out for a beer later.’ The job didn’t seem particularly exciting but it didn’t seem particularly strenuous either. Before I left, however, he did something which is the reason for this little Parisian interlude in a story otherwise primarily concerned with Germany: he told me a secret. ‘If you should ever think of applying to Reuters,’ he said, ‘you should know there’s one question they always ask, and there’s only one right answer.’

That was how I found myself, barely thirteen months later – in the last stages of my final year at Oxford with the prospect of finals still to come and unemployment beckoning unless I found myself a job – sitting in a room on the fourth floor of No. 85 Fleet Street in front of an intimidating audience of mostly middle-aged men with clipboards.

I had just about survived some thirty minutes or so of grilling on international affairs: ‘What did I know about Charter 77?’ (the then recently formed movement dedicated to human rights in
Czechoslovakia
). I answered most of them on a wing and a prayer. And then a severe-looking man who couldn’t have been older than his mid-forties despite a shock of snow-white hair and thick glasses leaned back thoughtfully, chewed the end of his ballpoint pen for a second or two, then flicked the chewed end towards me and in a clipped Scottish accent posed a question it seemed he had only just come up with.

‘Say we were to send you somewhere to cover a breaking news story,’ he intoned ominously, ‘what do you think would be the first thing you might do when you got there?’ I bit my lip and let my head
drop as I ummed and ahhed a bit as if trying to mull over such a
difficult
question. In fact I was desperate not to let him see the smile I was having immense difficulty suppressing. ‘We-ell,’ I began. And in my head I was playing over my Parisian mentor’s words: ‘There’s any number of sensible things you might do of course, find a hotel, have a shit and a shower, hit the sack or get yourself a stiff drink.’ But that wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear.

So I furled my brow and gave a vintage performance. ‘I suppose,’ I said slowly, as if I was just working this out, and looking for some sign of reassurance, which was decidedly not forthcoming from the man with the white hair and impenetrable glasses, ‘I suppose it might be sensible to find a phone or a telex, some way of getting in contact with London to be sure I can get the story back.’ (Mobile phones were still something you saw on
Star Trek
.) The white-haired man, who I would later learn was Reuters Chief News Editor Ian McDowell (more frequently referred to as Ian McDour) looked at me for a second, and then nodded slowly, as if he thought that wasn’t necessarily the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. There were a couple more questions, but somehow they seemed like an anti-climax, to me at least, and maybe they were to them too. I’d come through the big one, and as I walked out of the office with a nod to the other
candidates
sitting nervously on chairs outside, I had a sneaking hunch the job might be mine. And it was.

I have no misgivings about the ‘sneaking’ either. All’s fair in love and journalism, not that the two mix much. Two other colleagues of mine – both of whom came through the Reuters training process – have publicly identified the main characteristics of a successful journalist as, and I quote, ‘ratlike cunning’ and ‘intelligent guile’. One has been a successful Reuters bureau chief on most continents and the other is the editor of an esteemed British national
newspaper
. There is also one other element, which had been on my side that day back on the
périphérique
in Paris, one which editors prize in their journalists as much as Napoleon prized in his generals: luck.

Knowing the answer to the $64,000 question was not, of course, the only thing that got me the job, even if it was probably the clincher. All ten of us who got hired – with another to be taken on twelve
months later after a sponsored year at the new Cardiff journalism school – had been tested on our basic mastery of the English
language
, our ability to marshal facts and our command of one other language fluently and a second at a basic level of competence. I had had no difficulty proving the first in French – after a year living with students in the Parisian suburbs I had acquired a facility with the current
argot
that mystified some of my Oxford tutors but would have let me pass for any
mec
on the
métro
. My Russian, despite my degree, was at an altogether different level: I could read (if not exactly race through) Gogol and Dostoevsky but with the Soviet Union still a difficult destination, my experience of the vernacular on the ground had been limited to a two-week holiday course. But it was good enough to be my ‘banker’. The signal absence, you will have noticed, was the language that would eventually become more important to me than any other: German.

In the meantime we all had a more basic linguistic function to master: typing. None of us could. Not properly anyhow. I had spent an hour or two a week during the summer before starting the job in September, bashing away on an ancient Remington typewriter of my mother’s, but it weighed a tonne and had been ill-maintained. It would all be different when I got to the real world of journalism and super modern equipment, I told myself.

It wasn’t. The trainees were dumped not even in the hallowed 85 Fleet Street headquarters but in a draughty building belonging to British Telecom around the corner in Seacoal Lane. And our
equipment
was – yes – heavy, old, ill-maintained typewriters. Not
necessarily
Remingtons: anything that came to hand, it seemed. I would later discover to my surprised dismay that it was little different in the newsroom itself. We weren’t taught to type properly. I discovered later very few journalists could ‘touch-type’, even though some were lightning fast with two fingers alone and in at least one instance, with just one. We were given news stories to analyse and rewrite; we played through scenarios of being fed reports from police, firemen, army, and told to ‘type it up’ and make ‘a story’ out of it. Typed. We got sore fingers.

Our training was undertaken by a variety of senior
journalists
from ‘across the road’ but supervised by a genial, grinning,
expansive-waisted West Country man called George Short
*
, who saw to it straight away that we understood the most important duty of a trainee journalist: buying his betters a beer. Fleet Street was tribal in those days. And each tribe had its watering hole. Printers and journalists on the newspapers hardly spoke to one another – there were literally demarcation lines on the floor in the print works which no journalist dared cross for fear of triggering a walkout. But the journalists too all drank in different places. It wasn’t that they didn’t mix with one another, just that if you weren’t in the office it was a good idea to be in the office pub: that way in a crisis all hands could get, however unsteadily, to the deck.