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Lake House: Then and Now

I am back at Lake House and my teeth - cutter in journalism Daily News after 30 years - I am old (76 years and something) but Lake House is stimulatingly new, the newness of a mischievous babe and incredibly sophisticated, not the kind of adjectives that my old news barrack - rooms would have had the audacity to use: my colleagues in that past era would have screamed in horror at such pedestrian vulgar descriptions. for, we were then a cynical, albeit lovable bunch - riotous, revolutionary, most of the time violent, but, I must say this - brilliant, not very savoury adjectives again, yet true.
 

There were also highly literary forms which we of old school of journalism would call scintillating journalism. At Lake House then, my colleagues in the Daily News were unmistakably indulging in scintillating and inspiring journalism - not humdrum writing with sticks instead of pens. It was not just writing as a task, a job.
 

Reading the memories of the good old days… ANCL file photo

Sincere love to write

It was pure art - not writing for money, for a by-line, not for position, for security - to hell with family, the so-called vulgarity of social security, it was sincere love to write, in Hemingway’s words to write even one true sentence honestly, a good, one sentence. No matter how long it took to write that one good sentence. That was Papa Hemingway’s attitude to writing and most of us in the Daily News in the olden days were devotees of the great American writer.

There was no anxiety or perturbation to search for a lead story - the Page One focusing main story. Some reporter smartly clad in tussore suit, with a tie to boot, would announce authoritatively”. I will write the Lead Story.” And everybody nodded in agreement.

And it would be so. His story would be the Lead. There was no hassle, the Editor’s jurisdiction, if there was any, came later.

The News Desk woke up late, after or around 10 a.m. The debris of the previous stormy night was distinctly apparant; papers strewn everywhere, on the floor, on tables, half-eaten meals lay on dirty plates, still accumulating bacteria, type-written old and new copy paper, sleeping looking for resurrection, and if you were a “stringer”, in modern parlance a free-lancer, you crept in early, to grab some story “a handout” as some senior “staffers” named it scoffingly and with professional disdain. You did not fight back. You didn’t retaliate because somehow you had to find a story, for a stringer a story was as important as the money - because as Maugham very eloquently noted “to keep body and soul together.”

And then at the end of the News Desk, seated majestically on a large desk neatly dressed in tie ceaselessly puffing at may be 100th cigarette, though it was only morning, was the charming old M.M. Thawfeeq (Fiqo to us) subbing unperturbed, oblivious to everything around him, including the overnight news room dirt and debris. Fiqo had been an institution at Lake House even before we aspired to be journalists. At that hour when we approached him Fiqo pretended to be annoyed. You sat before him reverentially; he ignored you but shoved his pack of cigarettes before you. He was like a hermit in meditation. He was totally immersed in his subbing. You gingerly fished out a fag from the pack and he told you matter of factly”..... “Now get the hell out of here,” You got the hell out, but with thanks for the free smoke.

Old bosses

Little later he invited you back and asked you to join him at breakfast. You just obeyed.

Fiqo had a congenital physical deficiency, he was hunched and walking was a perennial hazard. I helped him downstairs and he hailed a taxi outside Lake House and we got in. I knew his destination. We drove to the old Baillie Street YWCA Restaurant.

Fiqo was spruce as he sat down. As the waiter came around, Fiqo ordered everything - except pork. Fiqo was a meticulously adherent of the Islamic faith. We ate and I finished off surfeitly contended. Fiqo was still eating and he looked at me disparagingly. I had a cup of tea and a smake (of course Fiqo’s). Fiqo was still eating. I smoked another cigarette - Fiqo’s. And then Fiqo paid the bill and we drove back to Lake House. During our long breakfast we had hardly spoken about the newspaper. He related some old stories, some personal. In a way I was his confidante.

The reporters trooped in haphazardly. Most looked unslept, some displayed awesome hangovers. Though they looked bed raggled, they were sprightly and spirited notwithstanding the shaken off foulness. They paused to sign on some attendance sheet and peered at the assignment register and they were off. All that was okay by me but I had to find a story. I was nearly in tears. How was I going to find a story? When you were a stringer with no source for a story you get frustrated. Stories did not fall on your lap like manna.

Of course there were the free handouts from the Government Information Department. But they were scorned at the News Desk. They were State news sent to newspapers as “plants”. There was no creative news value in them. They were not originally creative stories. Just plants.

My dear friend and mentor William de Alwis strode in handsomely with a Gary Cooper gait puffing away at his unshakeable, worn-out pipe, tall and steady like his father, R.E. de Alwis, the veteran newspaperman, whose elegant portrait was hung above the old sports desk, staring down at you sternly but benevolently. The redoubtable news reporter, Willi, was hailed as the best crime reporter that Lake House had produced. When he walked in I went up to him like a disciple to a guru.

Willie was lanky and tough-bred but he had a solemn, kind heart. He spoke with a drawl. He may have looked a Ceylonese version of John Wayne or Hamphrey Bogart with the all West Cowboy exterior but inside him he had a profound clemency. He takes me in, I had known him before I came to Lake House: his brother-in-Law Gerry Samarasinha and I worked together at the old Bank of Ceylon.

Willie says in his lazy, languid drawl: “Look son, we are going to the Police Headquarters. There is a story awaiting us.”

I follow in his footsteps. Inside the Police Headquarters we sit at the big cop’s desk. I am timid and muted, Willie drowls on but he takes no nates. The big cop keeps talking. I am curious. Then we walk out and Willie invites me to the Lord Nelson bar down Chatham Street.

At the bar counter Willie calls for two drams of arrack. It is too early in the day. I wince but Willie downs his drink before the bartender could serve it. I am still amateurish, nevertheless I follow suit.

Unique friendship.

We are out of Lord Nelson. Years ago they demolished the bar and the snooker table and replaced it with a mosque. But I remember something poignant of the old Lord Nelson. It was a place patronised by Lake House journalists. Cartoonist Mark Gerryn played snooker there and his lovable friend, skilled writer Eustace Wijetunga drank with him there. After Eustace died. Mark doggedly refused to enter the Lord Nelson. It was a unique friendship.

To be continued