Back home, Marriage
Another difficult and bleak period followed. Struggling out of this relationship, I tried to decide what to do next. Jenny suggested agricultural journalism. I was lucky and found a job as a reporter and feature writer with Farm & Country, a monthly agricultural magazine. My talents were better suited to this than tea planting. I met Caroline at Farm & Country where she was working as the editor’s secretary. She has been my salvation.
Adds Caroline: "It happened when I worked for a magazine editor. May 1965, I had come back overnight from a jolly May Day weekend in Padstow with friends, all feeling somewhat jaded. David was scheduled to come for interview as a features writer and I was posted to meet him as he came out of the lift. The doors opened, out he stepped, and my heart gave a jolt as it had never done before. Happily he got the job and we spent many hours en route home in the evenings drinking coffee at Kings Cross station as he missed train after train. Amazingly, fifty plus years on we are still together."
I was immensely grateful to John Tickner the editor (and a well-known equestrian cartoonist), for giving me this opening into journalism. After two years I moved on to Farmers Weekly, based in Fleet Street. I worked my way up the ladder from reporter, when I was taught how to write succinctly by Frank Butcher, the demanding but great-hearted news editor, to a features writer and finally business editor.
I won two Fison awards for agricultural journalism, one award funding a sabbatical to the US to study vertical integration in farming.
With my father in Austria in 1971. Click here to read more about our Austrian adventure.
At Farmers Weekly I travelled throughout Britain writing about farming. It was exhilarating work and I grew to love our great landscapes. True to form in Fleet Street we drank a great deal in the local bars such as El Vino. We used to claim that alcohol ‘inspired’ us!
I left Fleet Street in 1975 to travel and write about international agriculture. My work as editor of the Farmers Weekly business section had aroused my interest in agricultural development and poverty. For six months, I travelled in India and Africa, writing articles on development. I attempted to write a book about international development but my concept was wrong and I could not find a publisher.
