Awk, Awk, Awk ......

A couple of decades ago I stumbled over some brilliant writing by James Cameron, a journalist from the mid-twentieth century and one for whom the old title, 'foreign correspondent', was minted.


I lost the book - well, I loaned it to a friend who never got around to giving it back.  Recent events in the shape of the tidal wave of duplicity routinely passed off as journalism in the News of the World and now engulfing journalism more widely and our political system, made me find another copy and re-read it, for I was sure Cameron would have something to say from his coverage of events then which would have relevance now.  I managed to find a copy.  Not the print I had or wanted [which contained chronological references to when Cameron originally wrote many of the pieces in his anthology] but a print nonetheless, with a glowing Foreword of respect from Andrew Marr in 2005 - pre-dating his [Marr's] super-injunction.  Even that brief 'issue' [the abuse of super-injunctions] has been swept aside in the torrent of almost daily revelations about who News International bugged and if they were still alive at the time.


I digress.


Cameron's book.  Get it.  Read it.  Read it again.  Called 'Point of Departure' it is a revelation, a window into how journalism used to be.  It covers the world and the events and issues which focused minds in the middle of the last century.  It also finds Cameron cross and re-cross a world where RyanAir and EasyJet had yet to arrive and make flight today almost as common place as getting a train or bus.  Cameron's trip to Enver Hoxha's Albania illustrates this difference, albeit indirectly, when he describes having upset his hosts and being expelled from the country forthwith.  The drama of the moment was somewhat lessened by the reality of there only being two flights every 15 days in and out of Tirana.

James Cameron - India 1967

Cameron is clear that probably the biggest issue for him in his lifetime was the nuclear bomb.  It is his story and he tells it well.  Suffice to say he was one of the founding members of CND.


Prior to this he was one of the few Brirtish journalists to be witness to a test, by the US, of a nuclear bomb.  If I remember right, he has some unique claim in having witnessed 3 such tests.


His first relates to the US navy testing the effect of the overhead detonation of a nuclear bomb on their fleet.  In short they parked a load of ships in and around the Bikini atoll and dropped a bomb.  Amongst thousands of others, Cameron was there as witness.  


In the debriefing afterwards, journalists were provided with an overload of data as to the immediately observed effects of the bomb.  

"I had listened to every conceivable exponent of the obscurer isms, down to the underwater specialist whose contribution to the sum of human knowledge was the fact that the shrimps at the bottom of Bikini Lagoon could talk.  They made a sound, he said, resembling : "Awk, Awk".  Questioned after the explosion as to the behaviour of the atomised shrimps, he replied : "They are still saying 'Awk, Awk', only shriller."  It was one of the merriest of occasions, for those who took their fun out of the world's despair."

When re-reading this recently it struck me that this piece could well have been written very recently in a study of the banking failures of these last few years and how these had affected you and I, only this time it is not shrimps at the bottom of Bikini lagoon who are shrilly crying 'Awk, Awk', it is humanity itself.