Abstract
In the 1950s, at a time of full employment and when a university education was a rare requirement for many trades and professions, this was the book that sooner or later – usually sooner – fell into the hands of those teenagers who had leapt or stumbled into journalism. This usually meant local newspapers (graduates sometimes proceeded immediately to the posh end of Fleet Street, only often then to proceed backwards into the provinces or the suburbs).
Monica Dickens, great-granddaughter of Charles, had joined the Hertfordshire Express in Hitchin after expulsion from St Paul's, being presented at court as a debutant and writing a book about her experiences working as a cook. The rest of us arrived by a more direct route, straight from O- or A-levels, but we relished her book, an only now obviously part-fictionalised account of covering weddings, local fetes, flower shows, am-dram productions and, moving up the food chain, magistrates courts. What fun it all sounded.
Yet, re-reading it, life on the Downingham Post strikes one as hideous. The grumpy, unadventurous editor looked “like a man who prods pigs with a stick on market day … the most unliterary-looking person I had ever met.” The editorial staff consisted of a small bunch of losers, mostly dedicated to avoiding inconvenient “diary jobs” and, according to the office junior narrator, nicknamed Poppy – the author's alter ego – demanding she put the kettle on to supply frequent cups of tea. In their eyes, it was always her turn.
Downingham is portrayed as being insufferably dull – a small, small-minded town where nothing much ever happened and yet which supported two weekly papers. Reporting the daily grind was arduous and about as much pleasure as the acute bronchitis that incapacitates one of Poppy's miserable colleagues. As an enticement to becoming a journalist, it's an advertisement for coal-heaving or going down the mines.
Descriptions of work in the machine and press rooms are accurate and familiar to all print journalists of a certain vintage – the hammering of a line of type to render a literal or other mistake unreadable, for example – but Poppy's digs, where she paid for a room and, remarkably, full board, read like the kind of shabby rooming house full of bizarre characters that the author's great-grandfather might have created.
How all this enthused me and other young trainee reporters I cannot imagine. Certainly I must have read it prior to settling in at my weekly in London's East End and deciding that it, and life on the streets around it, offered the most excitement to be found anywhere on earth, with the possible exception of the Southern California of Raymond Chandler's novels, a locale it would take me another 17 years to reach. But then, my colleagues were not of the type Monica Dickens invented for My Turn to Make the Tea, possibly having discovered an equally dismal collection at the Hertfordshire Express.
My editor – at 30, he seemed to me quite an old man – was skilled and always encouraging and left the paper for the nationals en route to becoming sports editor of the Daily Express. Of the reporters, the only woman moved onward and upward, via Reynolds News to the Daily Mirror, where she became education correspondent, and another was to work at the Daily Mail in Edinburgh and the Mirror in London before becoming a producer-director for Man Alive at the BBC. And the sports editor joined the Daily Mail sports desk in Fleet Street. I don't recall what happened to the one other member of staff or our lone photographer, but the talent and enthusiasm exploding daily in three crowded first-floor rooms combined to offer a springboard to the stars.
Along the way we worked hard, played hard and learned fast, certainly to know very soon that even in the un-PC days of the 1950s, never to use the word “nigger”. The author didn't (and Penguin should have known better to allow “work like niggers” to remain in subsequent editions).
Poor Poppy. Her susceptibility to trying to assist friends about to be featured unfavourably in the local press leads to her removing offending lines of type from a chase on the stone, leaving a two-inch gap prominent on page five. She is sacked, of course, to be replaced by “a promising lad of 16, fresh from school” to take her place on the Post.
Monica Dickens was, I feel, well out of the business. This story suggests she didn't take to it or it to her and she left it to marry, move to the US and write many successful books. But, unlikely though it strikes me now, Poppy's doleful experiences at the Downingham Post fired the ambition of a generation longing to tread the pavements in the Street of Adventure.
My paper was called the Post. So Poppy's 16-year-old replacement might have been me, catching a bus to deliver copy to “the Print”, covering the reserves of the borough's prominent amateur football team, learning how to drink with colleagues not much older than I, watching the great Count Basie band at the enormous palace of a cinema – now a hulking relic to make one's heart sink – that dominated the main street. And, every now again, putting on the kettle.