‘Do not go gentle . . .’

Cadet journalists would ask why they were required to learn shorthand. Was it really that important?

Yes and no, I would say. Shorthand could be a good servant but a bad master. If you used it with your mind in neutral, which really was the danger, you could easily miss the significance of what you were taking down. It was a skill that needed to be used with mental alertness.

Not having been through a cadet course, I never learned shorthand. The closest I came was a kind of speedwriting, mostly of my own manufacture.

Only once was I almost caught in the breach. It was when I was working on the Western Morning News and Evening Herald in Plymouth, England.

I had applied for the reporting job from London and went down a day before the final interview. I discovered which pub the local journalists frequently, found a few there and introduced myself.

“South African?” said one. “How’s your shorthand?”  Non-existent, I said.

“Well,” he said. “The editor always tests applicants by asking the shorthand form for two words. ‘Hospital’ and ‘ambulance’. Nothing else.”

There and then, they taught me how to scribble the two words and the next morning it all went as planned. Except that the editor then asked me my shorthand speed.

“Speed?” I said. “Yes, how many words a minute?” he said.

I had no idea what the average shorthand speed was but had to say something. “About one-twenty words a minute,” I said.

His eyebrows shot up. “Really?” he said. “A hundred and twenty? That’s very good!”

Some weeks later, the printers of the Kellogg’s cereal boxes began a nation-wide strike. It spread to the printers of provincial newspapers. A few of the smaller publications never recovered.

But our editor had a plan. He called me into his office. “We can’t use our presses because of the silly strike, but I want to produce three editions of the Morning News on our roneo machines.

“We’ll obviously get news from our own reporters but the agencies are also  affected by the strike. Now, you are far and away the best shorthand writer we have. So I want you to monitor the BBC radio news and give us the contents of every broadcast.”

Dark gloom! The next few weeks were hell. But somehow I got through them with a hugely tested memory and improvisation. When the strike ended, the editor said he was extremely grateful. So was I.

Still, my ordeal brought me several new friends, mainly from the group who knew about my shorthand disability. Another was a Welshman, John Summers, the only other reporter not from Devon. John and I had something else in common. The previous year I had worked for some months behind the bar at the Taff’s Well Inn, near Cardiff. He was from Swansea.

I had an old Fordson van, and on our time off the two of us would sight-see. On one occasion, we heard that author John Steinbeck was in Kingsbridge. “Let’s go and interview him,” said John.

We pooled our money, brought a large and expensive bunch of flowers, and found the cottage where the Steinbecks were staying. We knocked on the front door and John Steinbeck opened it.

“We brought these for your wife,” we said. “Thank you very much,” said Steinbeck and promptly closed the door.

One of John Summers’s ambitions was to sail the Atlantic. I was planning to emigrate to Canada at some stage anyway. We located a yacht for sale that had made the trip several times and began preparations.

First, we needed to be conditioned to open water. When we weren’t working, we would hire a runabout and putter around Plymouth Sound among the ships. Getting bolder, we drove to Salcombe and hired a sailing dinghy from a firm owned by the Queen’s Yachtsman, Uffa Fox.

We set out and, in the middle of the bay, hoisted the sail. The dinghy almost overturned. Fox himself raced out in a runabout and yelled, “Put down the bloody centreboard!”

John’s  Atlantic ambition cooled after that but he had another: to write a book (faction, fiction based on fact) about Dylan Thomas, and the poet’s tragic life. He found it deplorable that someone with that talent should have died so young and alone in New York, alcohol addicted and penniless.

On our trips around, John Summers would recite Thomas’s poems at length, in his own Welsh accent, in particular the poem about death: “Do not go gentle into that good night”  . . . “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.”

Later that year, I left Plymouth and returned to London. For a while, John and I kept in touch. He moved to the Sunday Telegraph and covered the Aberfan mining disaster in 1966. He personally filed a writ to the High Court on behalf of the survivors and bereaved, and eventually had the money in the relief fund unlocked.

After I came back to Africa, the contact was broken.

But this week I traced John Summers on Google. He had continued to have an eventful life. He wrote a novel about Aberfan called “Edge of Violence” which Treasury lawyers tried to ban. He interviewed Winston Churchill in the last year of his life.

He became a full-time writer and travelled the world via Australia and Canada. He wrote about his travels, a novel about growing up in Wales during the Depression, another entitled “Rag Parade”.

Also, fulfilling that second ambition, a book called “Dylan” which was a mixture of events in Thomas’s life and his own.

And, ironically and tragically, when John Summers died in 2008, there was a mirror image of Dylan Thomas in that too. He had become embroiled with the Swansea council over the release of his second wife’s will. He was forced to leave the marital home and move into a council flat.

After a demand for £6,000 in back taxes on that home, he wrote to his friend Harry Greene. “I’ve come to the end of my life, Harry . . . Every penny I possessed — gone. House gone. Everything gone.”

When Greene received the letter, he immediately alerted Swansea police, who broke into John Summers’s flat and found him already dead, apparently of natural causes.

Whether my friend John went “gentle into that good night”, or whether he “raged against the dying of the light”, only he could know.