Destination? Open ground halfway between the Oval and the Thames. Alert state? Heat wave – meteorological and political. The grass has given up pretending to be grass; dusty cardboard with the occasional flattened mat of straw. The smell of melting tarmac and the sound of distant traffic fight their way through the haze. Dark-skinned boys in shorts play cage football. Umbrellas are parasols, handkerchiefs are wetted flannels.
It is a midweek afternoon and, to all intents and purposes, I constitute 50% of the white faces south of the river. The other half, Jerry Westerby, raises a hand.
‘Found me,’ he beamed from a bench beside the footballers’ cage.
He looked much as I remembered him, except everything had expanded, the shoulders, the stomach, the face of the one-time sportsman, journalist and now retiree. The latter, I realised at a glance, was sitting as uncomfortably about him as a heat dome over the near continent.
But he was not recognisable from the drink in his hand. A cheap supermarket water bottle rather than a Fleet Street hostelry’s finest gin.
I had received his postcard the previous day. Cryptic crumbs laid a trail. Just enough of the Old Cold Warrior’s method for me to decipher who, when and where.
‘No drinkie in the Pleasure Garden. Parkie on the warpath at fire water. How you doing? My, my, bald and bespectacled. Time flies. Or are you in disguise?
‘Just getting old, Jerry; how about you?’
‘Even older and very underemployed. Rag’s gone online, whatever that means. Pencil and notebook chaps sent into the prairie to starve to death. Still got the itch though, still looking for the smoke signals. Story’s always somewhere. Can’t stop old Jerry.’
As he took a drink from his bottle, I filled the space beside him. Made myself comfortable while trying to avoid the sad eyes. Was he declining or had I forgotten how untidy he could be? Dirty collar. Sweat-stained shirt. Two buttons in the wrong holes.
‘That your old office? On the corner?’ he asked, ‘Secret World, that kind of thing?’
He looked around surreptitiously, eyes to the corners of their sockets as if playing the bad cowboy in one of his beloved Westerns. He gave the big laugh, the one that once filled his father’s rag’s newsroom, and the press boxes of test match pavilions near and far.
‘In the old days, you knew where to be careful. Berlin. Moscow. Behind the Bamboo Curtain. Somewhere with a wire fence and a man in a bad coat. Now it’s anywhere outside your front door. Or inside it, come to think of it. Look at poor Widders. More to that than meets the coverage, don’t you think?’
He nodded towards the stump of buildings connecting the main road to the Pleasure Park.
‘What happened to your old place? No sign of any satellite dishes or bulletproof glass, no lean sorts with expensive watches smoking outside the back door. Outbreak of peace? All done on this strange thing called the internet? Your old tribe on W-F-H?’
He spelt the acronym clumsily, as if struggling to construct the modern abbreviation from a less embarrassing old-fashioned sentence.
‘Repurposed, Jerry, seems to be the University of Huddersfield Ring Road’s London campus these days. Teach northern shop girls to be brain surgeons. Where the workshops and motor pool were, flattened and replaced by apartments.’
‘Buy to speculate and owned by a Chinaman,’ concluded Jerry.
‘Russian,’ I corrected him. ‘I can remember when this was slum clearance; park your car on the rubble for free and go shop-shop in the high street.’
Jerry trumped me. ‘Before that, fine town houses for the ladies and gentlemen. Then flats. Then immigrants. Then slums. Then demolition. Now a park for the natives to stab each other in – but only after nightfall you’ll be pleased to hear. Knives de rigueur but no proper drinkies for pale face.’
After another swig of water, he leaned towards me and moved closer to business, ‘So, you keep in touch with your old department? The secret tribe? Still know a bit?’
‘A bit.’
‘Old Jerry’s not connected at all. Doesn’t have to be. Loose lips and all that. Loud types, wine bar types. A new class emerges, those who think they’re clever because someone important knows their name.’
There was no need to buy them a drink or put an arm around the shoulder. No need to listen to boyfriend trouble or girlfriend trouble; just let them talk. Out it gushes. Old Jerry earned the ear cheaply these days.
‘But only in one or two watering holes. Mustn’t let the oiks know. Sat still all these years while the big beasts moved around me. Suddenly found myself nice and close to the Big Chief’s tee-pee. Earshot range. Interesting company.’
‘What are you bursting to tell me, Jerry?’
‘Used to be military attaches and commissars, or a chap in a boiler suit bashing tin for a MiG, now it’s spads and lobbyists. Not to worry. Bit of a dog’s dinner, but once you give your scouting a code name it all starts to fall into place.’
‘You know the game, Jerry, I need who, what, where, when, why.’
He reached into his trouser pocket and for the first time I noticed he was without his statutory notebook. In its place he presented in an open palm something I would have expected him to regard as witchcraft: a memory stick.
© Always Worth Saying 2026
