Alan Whicker - Journey of a Lifetime

Mixing with people with extreme weight problems makes one feel slim, instantly. Even reading diets offers a sense of quiet achievement; in a health farm it’s positively therapeutic.

The form at our farm was a Sunday arrival with pseudo-medical test that evening: blood pressure, heartbeats, weight, and the old army how-do-you-feel routine. The usual treatment is a complete fast, by which they mean three oranges a day. Should you be determined to take on the world, reduce to three glasses of hot water a day, with a slice of lemon to take the taste away.

Mornings are filled with mild action: osteopathy, ultrasonic therapy, infra-red and radiant heat, saunas, steam and sitz baths, plus various combinations of sweat-inducing bakery: mud, wax, cabinet, peat and blanket baths. Best of all, massage and manipulation, which comes in all forms from distinctly painful to Wake up, Sir.

A health farm is rigorously asexual—all slap and no tickle—but, as I always say, it’s nice to be kneaded.

Looming ominously behind such agreeable time fillers, there are enemas and colonic irrigations. Nature-cure enthusiasts explain that in decoking the engine, waste poisons must all be swept away for a fresh, empty start—and that’s the way they gotta go. This may or may not be medically sound, but it is not a thing I will willingly take lying down.

The various spin-off activities, or non-activities, seem more therapeutic: complete rest (or stultifying boredom); non-availability of demoralizing distraction, like pleasure; the spiritually uplifting and unusual sensation of being above temptation. I derived additional and permanent benefit by giving up smoking forty or fifty a day on the assumption that if I had to be mildly unhappy anyway I might as well be totally miserable. I have never restarted that horrible habit.

On a fast, with a dark brown mouth, cigarettes are as resistible as everything else. The whole system is so outraged, one further deprivation goes unnoticed. I commend this ploy to the addicted. I also—giant stride for one man—cleaned my car, a beneficial and constructive exercise which took care of two soporific afternoons.

Because of the pressure of television I have had no time for health farms for several years—so the car needed another visit even more than I did. Then the Metropole at Brighton launched the largest health hydro in Europe. I joined a cheery group drinking mimosas on a private Pullman from Victoria and submitted to the inaugural weekend of events and slimming treatments. Without any struggle at all, I put on five pounds.

Nature cure, treated seriously, is not an expensive folly. Ignoring its unworldly cancer-cure fringe, the theory seems eminently reasonable: rest, restraint, simple food. Write off those who triumphantly smuggle scrummy-tuck into their bedrooms or creep off on afternoon dainty-tea crawls; their weighty problems are here to stay.

The ideal fortnight, down on the farm, is ten days’ fast (during which you lose a stone) and four days’ gentle return, via yoghurt, to salads and plain food. This puts four pounds back into that shrunken stomach. The more flab you take with you, the more you leave behind. Heavy drinkers and the very fat watch, fascinated, as it melts away and long-lost toes creep coyly into sight.

The benefit of the outrageous bill at the end of it all is that one may be stunned, upon release, into sensible eating— though most patients edge slowly up to the weight they took with them. Sterner souls change their life pattern—better and smaller people for ever.

All right—so I got the car cleaned.

After the well-regimented, almost gentlemanly war I had known with the Eighth Army in Sicily and Italy, I saw at once that Korea was going to be something else: dirtier, more confusing, prisoners murdered, not a good place to be. There was no front line—every divisional HQ was in as much danger as its forward company.

As the US Army was due to rediscover in Vietnam, all an enemy soldier had to do to become a peaceful and invisible civilian was to hide his weapon, take off his jacket and stroll through our defences. I don’t even want to write about their treatment of prisoners.

The war that we had just won with the capture of North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, was unwinding almost as soon as we’d finished their Hungarian caviare and champagne—a trifle sweet, but quite acceptable at that hour in the morning. We were sitting on the tatami after sleeping in ditches, so it felt like the Ritz, but we were not happy.

One of the early tragedies of any war is communication. At the front in the dying months of cable, a correspondent hands his story in to US Army Signals with blind faith and from then on it’s up to them and the cable company, right through to Fleet Street.

Meanwhile the US Army apparently had too much on its plate to deal with us adequately. For a short period, all our messages were lost. This was the time for suicide or murder, knowing what we had risked to get those stories.

Along with most of the other foreign desks, ExTel despaired and gave up, telling me to make my way home to London. It was an escape clause: one such instruction was enough.

We were miserable enough anyway, with our missing copy which never left the battlefield. By then we were ready to catch any flight to anywhere that wasn’t Korea. To ensure my final story got through, I had wangled a lift back to the Japanese mainland and handed the fragile news in to the Eastern Telegraph office in Kobe. At least I knew that story would be in London within a couple of hours.

In return the cable office handed me a mass of anguished messages from ExTel in London, warning me that few of my stories were getting through. The US Signals proved so chaotic that despite assurances from their PIO most copy had been mishandled, due possibly to incompetence or, more likely, unpleasant interference by the Chinese army. Correspondence had been lost for days—then sent full-rate.

Behind our backs, in a frozen Korea which we had left so triumphantly to return to Tokyo, the enemy had recaptured the capitals of Pyongyang and Seoul, and despite all this, or perhaps because of it, the Tokyo press corps continued to file and add to the piles of unsent messages, though it was no longer a big story. Both sides were closing down. The world was almost as weary of Korea as we were.

My recall was surrounded by Louis Heron of The Times , Tommy Thompson of the Telegraph and most of the fraught press corps. Front-line correspondents were moving back to their normal Far East stations, or going south to look at the increasingly threatening situation in French Indo-China which seemed favourite for the next upheaval.

In Tokyo, Gordon Walker, my friend with the Christian Science Monitor and an old Japan hand, drove me to Haneda Airport with Randolph Churchill and gave us our Japanese-style farewell presentos . Then we boarded, flew towards Mount Fuji and home. It was a happy relief to surrender to the deep, deep comfort of a BOAC Argonaut.

Randolph, easily diverted by conviviality, had not been a spectacular success as a correspondent—though he wrote well enough when he wanted to. He had been flown out by the Daily Telegraph to replace poor Christopher Buckley, killed by a mine within an hour of reaching Korea. Unlike Randolph’s father Winston, who had success as a correspondent in the South African war, he had little experience of the nuts-and-bolts legwork in the field of cabling and deadlines, nor, I suspected, was he much interested.

I had on occasion stepped in at the last moment when he was over-tired or emotional, to complete and file the Daily Telegraph piece for the unexploded Randolph. That may have been why I found this choleric character usually friendly.