I WAS THE CLARK KENT OF THE PENARTH TIMES
AT SEVEN, I knew I wanted to be a reporter. I’d like to claim I was inspired by grandiose visions of speaking truth to power — but the reality was a lot more embarrassing. In post-war Britain, families like mine didn’t squander cash on buying books, and there was no television. So much of my spare time was spent reading second-hand comics — mostly Superman.
They arrived in this country in vast bundles used as ballast in cargo ships. After that, they’d end up being sold for a penny or two in local newsagents, and then get swapped between one scruffy kid and another. Superman, as all aficionados will know, took as his human alter ego a chap called Clark Kent — and Clark Kent was a reporter. Ergo: reporters were akin to Superman.
So the idea was to break free from my grim existence in the back streets of Cardiff, and save the world into the bargain by becoming Superman. And Lois Lane — adored by everyone who read the comics — would be my girlfriend.
You could say that for a very small boy, that logic was perfectly understandable. Not so much for a teenager, maybe. At 15, when I left school, my one ambition was to get a job on a local paper. I got mine by lying. I’d been told that the editor of the Penarth Times — a weekly paper in a small seaside town a few miles outside Cardiff — was more impressed by athletes than brain-boxes.
So I allowed him to believe that I’d often been first across the finishing line when Cardiff High School staged its cross-country races. It was technically true — but only because I was so hopeless at running that I chose instead to cycle alongside the real athletes, shouting encouragement (or abuse). My deception worked. ‘Just what reporters need,’ huffed the editor, ‘plenty of stamina and determination!’ I still feel a twinge of guilt — but only a very small one.