There are exceptions, however, and foreign correspondent Edward Behr’s memoir Anyone Here Been Raped And Speaks English is one such. It is not just an excellent read, but informative on wars that one might not – as in I didn’t – know a great deal about.
Other exceptions I’ve come across of a journalist’s memoirs admirable are the two volumes of autobiography by Michael Green, The Boy Who Shot Down An Airship and Nobody Hurt I Small Earthquake, although Green started out as a reporter, then a sub-editor – a journalist of equal status as a reporter and feature writer but – eventually hung up his quill pen and threw away his copy of The Oxford Book Of Cliches to become a full-time writer (courtesy of playing rugby and taking part in am-dram productions).
To my thinking there is, perhaps, something a little conceited about writing a memoir or an autobiography. Granted that memoir or autobiography might have been written at a publisher’s urging with the publisher having both his beady eyes on sales and the bottom line.
But how many asked to write on with the line ‘tell us all about yourself, the public will love it!’ were able to withstand the publisher’s flattery. No doubt some did and so, of course, we never get to hear of their modesty. But I suspect many were not and were bowled over by a few minutes of high-powered schmoozing, possibly over a good lunch.
Politicians – and it’s worth reminding ourselves of the observation that ‘politics is Hollywood for ugly people’ – are always prominent in the ‘my life and times’ ranks. They seem to regard it as almost sinful not to pen their memoirs once they call quits on their time in politics.
These memoirs are heavily plugged by the ‘serious press’ whose arts pages seem to be joined at the hip with publishers and with whom they are perpetually engaged in mutual back-scratching. Furthermore, those folk who belong to the ‘must-have’ clan can be relied upon to buy a copy of of whichever is ‘the latest’ memoir when it appears in the run-up to Christmas. Thus some sales, though often not many, are guaranteed
If you sincerely interested in reading what some dude has to say about their ‘life and times’ and the memoir is not just to be acquired as a coffee table book to show off to Mike and Mary next door, you are best advised to avoid the Christmas rush, hang fire, then several month later, to visit your local remaindered books store, where most memoirs end up, always in a pristine state and available for a lot less than the initial asking price.
Thus Boris Johnson tome, Unleashed, published eighteen months ago at £30 a pop can now be had for under £4 and sales tumbled by 62% in its second week on the market. David Cameron’s memoir, For The Record, cost a little less, £25 when it was first published, but is also available for under £4. Those who can still remember Liz ‘Lettuce’ Truss and are still interested in her witterings should know that her memoir, Ten Years To Save The World – a ridiculous title from a ridiculous woman – can also be yours for £4, £16 less than its initial price.
Then, of course, there are the, most certainly ghost-written autobiographies, of soap stars, athletes, retired crims, models, thespians, TV ‘personalities’ and anyone else a publisher thinks will sell well to the great unwashed.
. . .
I first heard of Behr’s memoir in the early 1980s when listening to Radio 4 – where else – though what the programme was I can’t recall. It was the title – Anyone Here Been Raped And Speaks English – and its genesis which first caught my ear (so to speak) and, as sometimes happens.
I can even remember the occasion, just as many remember where and when they heard in 1963 that Kennedy had been murdered and in 1980 that John Lennon had been shot dead (in my car at about 7am driving to work in central Birmingham from the nurses’ home in West Bromwich where my girlfriend then lived).
Behr, who died in 2007 having just turned 81, was an experienced foreign correspondent who grew up in France and Britain, who began his journalistic career working for Reuters in London, then Paris (where the pay was abysmal), but mainly for the American publications Time-Life, the Saturday Evening Post and Newsweek. Later he turned his hand to making documentaries.
In his career Behr reported from many hotspots, including Vietnam, India, Algeria and China, so as a ‘journalist’, Behr was the real deal. Perhaps I should explain why I put the term ‘journalist’ in inverted commas: it’s because the word always does such heavy lifting when used that in the real world it has long broken under the weight it is intended to carry and is, arguably, de facto meaningless.
I served in ‘Her Majesty’s Press’ (as the joke is, cribbed from a TV sitcom of many years ago about a tabloid newspaper) for 44 years, from June 1974 until I retired April 2018, and, to take the military them further, never above the rank of ‘private’ in whatever outfit was paying my wage.
In those 44 years I never once called myself ‘a journalist’ as I have too much respect for what good journalists do and the lengths they will go to do their job well. If asked, I always responded that I was ‘a reporter’, then ‘a sub-editor’ but usually simply that ‘I work for a newspaper’.
For many ‘civilians’, working in the media, whether in broadcasting or print – now dying a painful death – carries a wholly spurious glamour, as though ‘the journalist’ is closer to ‘the real action’ and ‘knows more’ than the ordinary Jill and Joe. And the word ‘spurious’ is obliged to do some very heavy lifting indeed. Possibly even the description is too kind.
So someone writing for, or working in some editorial capacity on, Trout & Salmon, Woman’s Own, Take A Break, What Car and any number of publications (foreign, as in non-British, readers must supply their own print titles), whether online or in print, is just as much ‘a journalist’ and entitled to describe themselves as one as men and women around the world putting their lives in danger and sometimes losing it trying to pass on accounts to the public.
Of that second group there are many who, frankly idealistically, report what authoritarian states and other criminal players to not want see reported but which they believe ‘the governed’ should know: take a look at how many of these journalists and media workers – here the inverted commas are certainly not necessary – died since January 2025, a total of 144. I can report that in my 44 years as ‘a journalist’ my life was never once in danger.
For too many ‘a journalist’ is still a man or woman who dines with government ministers and under-ministers, who has useful contacts in the government and who is privy to a great deal of inside knowledge which, sadly, she or he – winking and tapping their nose with a forefinger – is at present unable to reveal, but who now and again shocks the world with a ‘scoop’. Bullshit.
Behr did not just talk the talk but walked the walk, so his memoir Anyone Here Been Raped And Speaks English is certainly not some vainglorious account of various media triumph. He strikes me as having been a very honest man who, in this memoir, simply calls a spade a spade and does not care to gild the lily in any way.
Behr, who died in 2007 having just turned 81, was an experienced foreign correspondent who grew up in France and Britain, who began his journalistic career working for Reuters in London, then Paris (where the pay was abysmal), but mainly for the American publications Time-Life, the Saturday Evening Post and Newsweek. Later he turned his hand to making documentaries.
In his career Behr reported from many hotspots, including Vietnam, India, Algeria and China, so as a ‘journalist’, Behr was the real deal. Perhaps I should explain why I put the term ‘journalist’ in inverted commas: it’s because the word always does such heavy lifting when used that in the real world it has long broken under the weight it is intended to carry and is, arguably, de facto meaningless.
I served in ‘Her Majesty’s Press’ (as the joke is, cribbed from a TV sitcom of many years ago about a tabloid newspaper) for 44 years, from June 1974 until I retired April 2018, and, to take the military them further, never above the rank of ‘private’ in whatever outfit was paying my wage.
In those 44 years I never once called myself ‘a journalist’ as I have too much respect for what good journalists do and the lengths they will go to do their job well. If asked, I always responded that I was ‘a reporter’, then ‘a sub-editor’ but usually simply that ‘I work for a newspaper’.
For many ‘civilians’, working in the media, whether in broadcasting or print – now dying a painful death – carries a wholly spurious glamour, as though ‘the journalist’ is closer to ‘the real action’ and ‘knows more’ than the ordinary Jill and Joe. And the word ‘spurious’ is obliged to do some very heavy lifting indeed. Possibly even the description is too kind.
So someone writing for, or working in some editorial capacity on, Trout & Salmon, Woman’s Own, Take A Break, What Car and any number of publications (foreign, as in non-British, readers must supply their own print titles), whether online or in print, is just as much ‘a journalist’ and entitled to describe themselves as one as men and women around the world putting their lives in danger and sometimes losing it trying to pass on accounts to the public.
Of that second group there are many who, frankly idealistically, report what authoritarian states and other criminal players to not want see reported but which they believe ‘the governed’ should know: take a look at how many of these journalists and media workers – here the inverted commas are certainly not necessary – died since January 2025, a total of 144. I can report that in my 44 years as ‘a journalist’ my life was never once in danger.
For too many ‘a journalist’ is still a man or woman who dines with government ministers and under-ministers, who has useful contacts in the government and who is privy to a great deal of inside knowledge which, sadly, she or he – winking and tapping their nose with a forefinger – is at present unable to reveal, but who now and again shocks the world with a ‘scoop’. Bullshit.
Behr did not just talk the talk but walked the walk, so his memoir Anyone Here Been Raped And Speaks English is certainly not some vainglorious account of various media triumph. He strikes me as having been a very honest man who, in this memoir, simply calls a spade a spade and does not care to gild the lily in any way.
Indulging in hyperbole, all too often the go-to strategy of many memoirists, is not his style. Instead he chooses to recount what he saw and experienced in an understated manner marked and illuminated by a very dry sense of humour.
Behr was born in Paris and grew up first in France, then in Britain of Russian Jewish stock. I am not one to indulge in silly stereotyping and shall resist from speculating whether his ‘Jewishness’ contributed to his ability to stand apart and observe as throughout history Jews, ghettoised and always in danger of persecution were obliged to do.
Of course, as the brighter ones among you have noticed, I have not at all resisted from such speculation despite my phoney promise not to do so. Hey-ho.
Behr was born in Paris and grew up first in France, then in Britain of Russian Jewish stock. I am not one to indulge in silly stereotyping and shall resist from speculating whether his ‘Jewishness’ contributed to his ability to stand apart and observe as throughout history Jews, ghettoised and always in danger of persecution were obliged to do.
Of course, as the brighter ones among you have noticed, I have not at all resisted from such speculation despite my phoney promise not to do so. Hey-ho.
But what is not speculation is that in Behr’s years in Britain, in his second decade as a public schoolboy as St Paul’s and the later as a Cambridge student, he developed that dry, ironic and detached sense of humour which is our own. This make his memoir often very funny despite the many horrors he describes.
A first example and a good case in point might be the title of Behr’s memoir, Anyone Here Been Raped And Speaks English. It is what he heard a BBC reporter covering the civil war in the Sixties in the then Congo shout out to a crowd of Belgians waiting to board a plane to be evacuated to Europe.
The reporter wanted to interview a rape victim and necessarily it had to be in English, hence his question, on the face of it, a pragmatic, but essentially heartless and brutal question, though and oddly ‘funny’ and telling anecdote. Behr simply repeats it starkly, without outrage, letting the disgust speak for itself.
Another of his anecdotes recalls when General de Gaulle was on one of his two visits to Algeria as Franc’s new president while the FNL were fighting for independence and the French colonialists were having none of it and wanted Algeria to remain as it then was a ‘part of France’. De Gaulle, pragmatically, was in favour of granting independence but had to tread very carefully indeed, and the matter almost lead to civil war in France.
He was doing one of the usual politicians’ things, visiting a school, in this case a primary school. In preparation for the visit, the young children had been rehearsed and urged by their teachers to shout ‘Long live De Gaulle from the bottom of your lungs’. And that’s what the youngsters did, greeting a, probably bemused, general with a loud chorus of ‘Long live De Gaulle from the bottom of your lungs’.
Highlighting the often macabre black comedy of war, Behr repeats an account, and as an honest man stresses that his anecdote is second-hand, from the French army office who witnessed it. A bomb had exploded in a crowded restaurant in Algiers, killing many diners, and one of Behr’s correspondent colleagues happened to be nearby and went to take a look at the scene. It was carnage, the walls spattered with the blood of the bomb victims.
The correspondent looked around and asked the army officer: ‘Is that blood?’.
‘No,’ the officer replied, presumably sarcastically, ‘it’s red wine.’
The correspondent ran a finger down the wall, then stuck the it in his mouth to taste what the substance might be.
‘No,’ he told the officer, ‘it is blood.’
On another occasion, during the Biafra war in Nigeria, also reported to Behr at second-hand but which he later confirmed with the sound recordist involved to be true, the authorities were brutally executing even those guilty of petty crimes.
A first example and a good case in point might be the title of Behr’s memoir, Anyone Here Been Raped And Speaks English. It is what he heard a BBC reporter covering the civil war in the Sixties in the then Congo shout out to a crowd of Belgians waiting to board a plane to be evacuated to Europe.
The reporter wanted to interview a rape victim and necessarily it had to be in English, hence his question, on the face of it, a pragmatic, but essentially heartless and brutal question, though and oddly ‘funny’ and telling anecdote. Behr simply repeats it starkly, without outrage, letting the disgust speak for itself.
Another of his anecdotes recalls when General de Gaulle was on one of his two visits to Algeria as Franc’s new president while the FNL were fighting for independence and the French colonialists were having none of it and wanted Algeria to remain as it then was a ‘part of France’. De Gaulle, pragmatically, was in favour of granting independence but had to tread very carefully indeed, and the matter almost lead to civil war in France.
He was doing one of the usual politicians’ things, visiting a school, in this case a primary school. In preparation for the visit, the young children had been rehearsed and urged by their teachers to shout ‘Long live De Gaulle from the bottom of your lungs’. And that’s what the youngsters did, greeting a, probably bemused, general with a loud chorus of ‘Long live De Gaulle from the bottom of your lungs’.
Highlighting the often macabre black comedy of war, Behr repeats an account, and as an honest man stresses that his anecdote is second-hand, from the French army office who witnessed it. A bomb had exploded in a crowded restaurant in Algiers, killing many diners, and one of Behr’s correspondent colleagues happened to be nearby and went to take a look at the scene. It was carnage, the walls spattered with the blood of the bomb victims.
The correspondent looked around and asked the army officer: ‘Is that blood?’.
‘No,’ the officer replied, presumably sarcastically, ‘it’s red wine.’
The correspondent ran a finger down the wall, then stuck the it in his mouth to taste what the substance might be.
‘No,’ he told the officer, ‘it is blood.’
On another occasion, during the Biafra war in Nigeria, also reported to Behr at second-hand but which he later confirmed with the sound recordist involved to be true, the authorities were brutally executing even those guilty of petty crimes.
A British film crew had set up its equipment to witness one such execution by firing squad, the petty thief tied tied to a post waiting to die with the firing squad just about to be given the order to fire.
‘Wait a minute,’ the sound recordist called out, ‘there’s something wrong with my settings’. The officer charge of the squad paused and allowed the recordist to get things straight. He fiddled about for a minute or two, then announced: ‘Right, all done, you can carry on,’ the order was given and the poor thief was executed.
Like it or not, there is something horribly, horribly funny about these anecdotes even though we will be laughing despite our horror. But it is not Behr’s intention to be funny, but to try to convey just how bizarre, macabre and downright awful matters can be.
That will not be unknown to some reading this account, though I’m sure most of you, like me, lead dull, humdrum and above all distinctly safe lives, but Behr was one of the few who risk their lives allowing us, in a way, to carry on leading our dull and humdrum lives in safety.
There is much, much more Behr’s memoir, a great deal more, so if you feel inclined to read an entertaining and above all honest account of how some journalists go about their job, you can do a lot worse than get a copy and read it.
‘Wait a minute,’ the sound recordist called out, ‘there’s something wrong with my settings’. The officer charge of the squad paused and allowed the recordist to get things straight. He fiddled about for a minute or two, then announced: ‘Right, all done, you can carry on,’ the order was given and the poor thief was executed.
Like it or not, there is something horribly, horribly funny about these anecdotes even though we will be laughing despite our horror. But it is not Behr’s intention to be funny, but to try to convey just how bizarre, macabre and downright awful matters can be.
That will not be unknown to some reading this account, though I’m sure most of you, like me, lead dull, humdrum and above all distinctly safe lives, but Behr was one of the few who risk their lives allowing us, in a way, to carry on leading our dull and humdrum lives in safety.
There is much, much more Behr’s memoir, a great deal more, so if you feel inclined to read an entertaining and above all honest account of how some journalists go about their job, you can do a lot worse than get a copy and read it.
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