McCullin Page #2

urban landscape of the lads, the gang,

The Guv'nors, as they were called in East London,

standing in a derelict house?

Perfectly framed by the building,

and seeing right through the building.

It was so emblematic of gang warfare and the roughness of London.

And here we have a picture which is almost beautiful in its composition.

You could say, there is no beauty in what this gang was up to.

But he related, he had a sensitivity.

An empathy is something you can't fake.

This is the bloke I gave a good hiding to.

HE LAUGHS:

He tried to hit me with a brick.

We had all been to a funeral.

One of the little girls had committed suicide,

put her head in a gas oven over some bloke I grew up with.

We came back from the funeral, and he ran past my car

and snapped the wing mirror off.

And he was peeing in this alleyway,

that's when I should really have laid into him, while he was peeing,

because it's difficult to fight back if you're in a situation like that.

Then he picked a brick up, came roaring at me.

Then I managed to get hold of it and reverse the charges.

Wasn't I lucky to have grown up in a period of the '60s, '70s, the '80s,

when it was all happening?

It was as if, like it was carved out for me, really.

I did grasp the nettle,

I didn't just look at it and think, "God, I wish I was there."

I used to say, "I'm going to go there." And I did.

- NEWSREEL:

- Paris in the spring of 1961,

and the time of President Kennedy's visit, was as beautiful as ever.

I was in Paris with my wife, my new wife really,

we'd only been married a few weeks.

And I was like a fish out of water really,

because I couldn't speak the language.

And whilst we were in Paris, I saw somebody reading a newspaper.

It was a photograph of an East German soldier

jumping over some barbed wire, which was only, at that stage,

separating them from the West.

Of course, the story had been building up,

potentially been building up.

I looked at this photograph, it was a memorable picture.

And I said to her, "When we get back to England,"

knowing I only had 70 in my savings account,

"would you mind if I went to Berlin?"

And she said, "Of course I don't mind."

- NEWSREEL:

- The East Germans don't seem to have girders enough

to plug every hole.

When a soldier's attention is diverted by others,

a hole is cut in the barbed wire,

and Khrushchev's face is slapped again.

I rang the Observer newspaper, and they said,

"We're not interested in you going."

And I said, "Well, I bought the ticket." There was no commission.

So, I got near to a place called Friedrichstrasse,

which was the centre of all the problem.

The Americans were facing the Russians.

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