The old line that if you remember the 60s you really weren’t there is given a proper pasting by this clear-sighted and intricately detailed memoir. It crash lands right into the middle of that fabled decade and makes sure we’ll never forget it either. Philip Norman (born 1943), biographer of the Beatles, has the journalist’s vital gift of recall – faces, places, tones of voice – but also the funny bones of a satirist. We Danced on Our Desks might be the drollest account of life on a 1960s newspaper since Michael Frayn’s Towards the End of the Morning.
What the book straightaway makes clear is how slow, for most, the 60s were to catch fire. The glum 50s had made very poor kindling. The teenage Norman worked shifts at Ryde pier pavilion on the Isle of Wight, where his ex-RAF father was manager and an alcoholic bankrupt. His mother had abandoned ship long before. Such were the straits that Norman couldn’t afford a badge for his school blazer, while home was the upstairs of a derelict pub he shared with a grandmother who sold rock (16 tons per summer) on the esplanade. It’s a childhood comprising Dickens and Patrick Hamilton, but the bright boy survived to leave school with A-levels and the prospect of a job on the Hunts Post, wangled for him by his mother.
The sight of his first “byline” (sacred word) sets him on the way. His lively style earns him a posting on the Northern Despatch in Durham and soon he’s not only writing a pop column but illustrating it with cartoons. He catches the eye of the editor of its sister paper, the Echo – one Harold Evans – whose verdict on an early sketch of Norman’s (“byzantinely funny”) makes the tyro glow “radioactive”. He will become grateful protege to Evans when the two meet again in London, having won via a young writers’ contest a berth on the Sunday Times Magazine, in 1966 the most stylish and coveted title in Fleet Street (though its actual home was a copper-fronted building in Gray’s Inn Road). Here, under the benign eye of Pickwickian editor Godfrey Smith, the new recruit takes to the life of weekly champagne parties and breakfasts at the Connaught alongside a crew of other “young rips” and “rampant egomaniacs”. He has much to learn about metropolitan sophistication: on overhearing someone say he was “dying for a joint”, Norman assumed he meant the kind his grandma did on Sundays, “with Marmite added to the gravy”.
The author isn’t above sending himself up or putting himself down. Indeed, despite enjoying the perks of an expense-account Weimar he remains prey to cringeing around people with an Oxbridge education. (During an earlier stint on the Cambridge Daily News, he recalls the glimpse of an undergraduate closing the window to his study – “I would have given my soul to change places with him”). That lost future haunts him and it colours his view of colleagues who apparently regarded it as their birthright. Mark Boxer, for instance, whose “beautiful, wary face” recalls Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein, initially impresses young Norman, but his entitlement begins to pall and eventually inclines Norman to think the man a snob and his cartoons “meagre of both line and wit”. Another staffer, “Mrs” Susan Raven, is also a Cambridge graduate, but endears herself with a mixture of professional knowingness and sexual innocence. Other staff, less often seen, include Lord Snowdon (house photographer), David Sylvester (his one-man art education) and James (White Mischief) Fox, who wins “expense man of the year” with his immortal claim: “Taxi there – and back.”
In the meantime, he clocks up high-profile interviews faster (and with less fuss) than Piers Morgan. This was an era when newsprint still lorded it in the media, before PR machinery blocked the way between writers and their subjects. He shares his Polo mints with Elizabeth Taylor in the back of her limo, spends a day looking after Stevie Wonder and scores a genuine coup in tracking down the elusive Colonel Gaddafi. From the Beatles press officer he gets an insider’s account of how ruthless the fab four could be, suddenly becoming as unavailable to importunate friends “as Henry VIII after signing one of his wives’ death warrants”. John Betjeman and PG Wodehouse (“smudgily benign”) are among his literary scalps, though perhaps less eye-catching than the hotel food fights between George Harrison, Eric Clapton and friends that for him sum up the 60s, “a second childhood for the children of the drab, unhopeful 50s”.
From Clapton, incidentally, he derives a strange fellow feeling. Both came from a broken home whose emotional legacy – insecurity, helplessness – they hid beneath the shelter of others’ strong personalities. Norman seems forever in search of the paternal love he missed at home and finds himself attracted to men whose very unlikeliness as surrogate fathers is forlornly touching. The first, from his set visit to Where Eagles Dare, was Richard Burton. The second was Johnny Cash. He also compensated for the absence of parental figures through an extremely tender relationship with both Grandma Norman, she of the fast-selling Ryde rock, and his maternal grandparents Ag and Gus in deepest Clapham, among the last survivors of the “true cockney London” of gas mantles, jellied eels and music halls.
We Danced on Our Desks offers a window on another lost world, a silver age of journalism when a magazine could please itself and celebrities would wait to be invited into its charmed circle. It’s also an unbeatable portrait of a writer finding his voice amid the distractions of a dementedly sybaritic decade. The book has been ably produced by a small press, Mensch, after certain major publishing houses passed on it. Given the standard of memoirs those companies do serve up you have to wonder. Perhaps they took fright at this book’s readability, verve and wit.
• We Danced on Our Desks by Philip Norman is published by Mensch (£14.99)
Molly & the Captain by Anthony Quinn (Little, Brown Book Group, £16.99). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
