John Simpson is a television journalist. Indeed he is far more than that, being the BBC’s World Affairs editor, an amazing title that makes me think of Emperor Ming the Merciless, enthroned above the galaxies. Apart from the fact that Mr Simpson does not provoke calamity, their job descriptions are not dissimilar: the bombers go in, and there he is, in safari suit or burkha, white-haired, his face sleek with concern, presiding over the ruins of cities.
The only thing is, what does he do with the rest of his time, when there are no bombers and the cities are merely falling apart? The answer seems to be that he writes autobiographies. Days from a Different World is the fourth of them, and takes him up to the age of seven. It is the strangest autobiography I have ever read.
To start with, there is a great deal of dialogue. Now a child remembers very little, if anything, of what adults say. The most you can hope for is a memory of some bizarre behaviour. For example, I am writing the biography of the poet R. S. Thomas, and in the course of my research met his wife’s niece, the one house guest on any regular basis. I thought there might be extracts from the poet’s table talk, but all she could remember was that Thomas regularly finished off all the custard and licked out the cake mix. This had fascinated her as a child.
Presumably John Simpson would have had moments like ‘Listen, what do you think of this? “Iago Prytherch his name, though, be it allowed,/ Just a smelly old man from the bald Welsh hills.” No, better not. “Just an ordinary man of the bald Welsh hills.”
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