I didn't really know what that was and was damn sure they wouldn't have given it to me anyway.Then I read Gellhorn's description of setting sail in a hospital ship for D-Day after her husband Earnest Hemingway had swiped her accreditation: "A military policeman stopped me and asked me my business and I said I was just going to interview the nurses, the women's angle, for Colliers, the American magazine I was working for Nobody gave a hoot about the women's angle It served like a perfectly forged passport. For her, the reporter was the written equivalent of the camera's shutter. The immediacy is apparent from the first page of any report of hers you read; her technique of heaping images fast, on top of each other, looks easy - until you try it.Sitting in the restaurant of the Esplanade hotel in Croatia in 1991 reading A Stricken Field, it was eery how the mood recalled the novel's powerful opening description of a hotel dining room on the eve of war in Europe 40 years before: the sickly excitement, the competition for sources, the hum of egos: the hyperactive, edgy atmosphere. Somerfield and Kwik Save confirmed they were in "nil premium" merger discussions. Somerfield, where Asda has displayed a passing interest, fell 3.5p to 253p and Kwik Save gained 17p to 307.5p.B Elliott, once a giant of the machine tool industry, added 5p to 106.5p after its management produced a pounds 45m cash offer and among the tertiary oil shares Sibir, off 5.5p at 28p, mounted an agreed share exchange offer for its parent, Pentex, down 3p at 17.5p. Car dealer Alexanders motored 5p to 19.5p after saying it was in bid talks.
Healthcall, a health support group, rose 6p to 87.5p on a management buyout at 90p.Bass, thought to have lost the tender battle for Intercontinental Hotels and Resorts to the US Marriott International group, rose 16p to 950p. The company has cancelled analyst meetings pencilled in for this week. Ladbroke, out of the Intercontinental running, rose 1.5p to 284.5p.Marston Thompson & Evershed, the Burton-on-Trent brewer, firmed 3p to 259p as managing director David Gordon departed. Thorn, the rental group, lost 9p to 146.5p after chief executive Mike Metcalf left following a profit warning.Chemical group Courtaulds hardened 6p to 269.5p despite sell advice from stockbroker Sutherlands. British Petroleum fell 8p to 787p with SG Securities suggesting the "tide has turned" and shares should be sold.For a time financials put on another storming display as the story of a Barclays bid for National Westminster Bank went the rounds again.
NatWest ended 34p (after 43p) higher at 1,174p and Barclays, figures today, closed up 45p (after touching 59p) at 1,931p. The responsibility to report remained, nonetheless, and she advised newcomers "to limit yourself to what you see and hear and not suppress and invent".To that extent, she was a product of the photographic age (and she loved photography). Still, she had "no time for that objectivity shit", and expected reporters to make moral judgements on what they saw. Not since Joseph Conrad has anyone combined the skills of novelist and reporter so productively.In later life, she remarked that she belonged to the "Federation of Cassandras", for she had come to have little faith in the ability of journalists to prevent evils. "I thought it would be fine," she wrote in 1939, "if the ones who order the bombing and do the bombing would walk on the ground some time and see what it is like".
