It was my school catching fire that set my lifestyle for the following 30 years (as a journalist, note, not arsonist). Some instinct made me phone the Manchester Evening News and report that the headmaster was helping to put out the blaze. He got the headlines and I got two record vouchers for my trouble. Bingo! Instantly, I was convinced there was money to be made in journalism. I was quite wrong, of course, but I still can’t hear An American in Paris or Holst’s Planets Suite without thinking of that moment. Two years later I joined a local paper, having just turned 17.
Wobblin' Wobin
I signed up for three years, putting my name to an apprenticeship contract known as ‘indentures’. Working conditions were as Dickensian as the word suggests. I bashed out my first reports of rose fetes, weddings and funerals on an ancient typewriter borrowed from my father as the Stockport County Express did not think I deserved one of their crappy Remingtons. Nor did I merit a desk: a plank slung between two other desks had to do. My ‘stories’ consisted mainly of long lists of the attendees at the aforesaid events, having been told to harvest as many names as possible so they would buy the paper to see themselves in print. I also had to make the tea. (My Turn To Make The Tea by another Dickens, Monica, was a brilliant take on the subject, based on her days as a junior reporter.)
When my three years were up I sought instant escape. However, an uphill career ladder loomed if I wanted to achieve the Holy Grail of working for a national newspaper. I bucked at the thought of climbing the rungs via a district evening paper, followed by years on a regional daily paper in order to prove my worth. And, frankly, I wasn’t too sure if the goal itself was something I really wanted. I needed something that hadn’t been invented in those days but we know now as a gap year – and I found it.
The small ad in the Press trade paper leapt out at me. ‘Athens News requires an Associate Editor. Minimum three years’ journalistic experience. No knowledge of Greek necessary.’ I replied that they had found precisely the right chap: I had the exact professional qualities and most certainly did not speak Greek. By return I received a letter of appointment, asking me to present myself ‘by February 16th, unless we find ourselves at war with Turkey in the meantime.’ The year was 1964.
A year in Athens night-editing a small English-language daily paper was fun. I worked alone, with no supervision, and as long as the paper appeared on time everyone seemed happy, my many mistakes drawing no comment. That year gave me a permanent love of Greek music, and led to something that would change my life forever (more in a moment). It also provided me with my first byline in a British national newspaper when the Sunday Express agreed to my becoming their active, unpaid, Man in Athens.
I hope I’m not boring you with all this ancient Hellenic history. You’ll get the importance when I tell you that, eight years after returning to London, I exchanged a few words of Greek with a beautiful woman I saw at a party and met my destiny. One year later we were married. We still are, 47 years later.
Mira (her name really does mean Destiny in Greek) has been, and is, the love of my life: my friend, confidante, constant companion and cheerleader through thick and thin. We’ve never had children. Instead, we started a business together (a travel agency in Fleet Street); sold it; started another (an agriturismo in Tuscany, making wine); sold it; and have now retired, happily, to the South of France. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to the newspaper business.
I joined the Daily Mail after Greece, and worked as a reporter and foreign correspondent, with a period based in New York, which I loved. (An Englishman with a British accent and an Italian name? What’s not to like?) I graduated from that to the art of warfare, invasion and coups d’état as a reporter in Czechoslovakia, Israel, Egypt, Greece and Cyprus. (Ah, yes, Cyprus. Mira spent a lot of her childhood there, hence her facility with the language. Five others, too, by the way.) There followed ten happy years with The Sunday Times, until Rupert Murdoch arrived seeking volunteers for redundancy and I seized the day. Next, I was recruited to join the weekly news magazine Now! as Deputy News Editor – do you really want to know all this? – and was rather hoping another ten years of quiet hackdom might ensue. Instead the job lasted ten minutes: Now! became Then! on the very morning I joined. I picked up a year’s pay in compensation and found myself leading the lunchtime news. When a news agency reporter I knew finished interviewing me and asked his way to the Gents’ I told him I hadn’t a clue: I’d been there so little time I hadn’t needed to go. The bastard filed that in his report and the world had a giggle.
By then I’d picked up two golden handshakes, and a third was to come. I was recruited to become Features Editor of a new paper being launched by the owners of the Daily Mail, a venture I believed doomed to failure called the Mail on Sunday which considered itself totally independent of its daily sister – a huge mistake. I had an unhappy, inglorious, period and found myself surplus to requirements after Sir David English, Editor-in-Chief of the daily, staged a palace coup. I’m happy to see the MoS flourishing now, anyway.
It was mid-life crisis time, and destiny struck again.
Was it coincidence that Mira received a takeover offer for the travel agency at the very moment I decided to quit my job? Long story short, we sold our home, she sold the business, we quit London and gave ourselves a year’s sabbatical. First port of call, Australia (my pick). Three months there, then Italy (her choice). We enrolled in a ‘language and art’ course in Florence. Oh boy. Little did we realise that Tuscany would later occupy our lives for at least 14 years of pain, agony, pleasure and even joy (did I mention’ thick and thin’ earlier?)
I had no Italian and my few Greek phrases cut no ice. But it was evidently in the blood. My immigrant great-grandpa came from Genoa and settled in Manchester. His son, Louis Rocca, was famous in his day for having given the local football club the name Manchester United. My dad, a generation later, could only remember the words gelato (ice cream ) and gabinetto ( toilet). I had to come up to speed, fast. The rest of that story formed the basis of my first book, Catching Fireflies, which the publishers saw as a kind of Peter Mayle epic (to my distaste); I held on to the electronic rights and re-published it myself on Amazon with all the redacted bits back plus an extra 10,000 words. This was the ‘riserva’ version, full-bodied, which I called Chianti On The Rocks.
Two other books followed. The first told the story of the Jews of Iraq, based on Mira’s mother’s memoirs she sent to us in tiny instalments over 20 years. The second was a novel inspired by a friend’s amazing experience in Peterborough. He sent almost 3,000 messages to the local BBC radio station over three years. They appeared to come from more than 80 individual listeners though all were the creation of his own vivid imagination. Nearly all were read out on air and to this day, unless they read the book, nobody at the station has a clue about their provenance or that they had been ‘had’– totally without malice.
So now to my new venture, a book for kids called The Amazing Adventures of Wobblin’ Wobin. It’s a kind of travelogue, bird’s eye view of the French Riviera, which I hope will appeal to 7-11 year olds and their parents.
Read all about it and more on my website: www.tonyrocca.com – and thanks for having me!