by Tim Pears
‘I’m burning in the building there, Keith,’ he explained.
‘No, you don’t, mate, no, don’t mess with the neg like that,’ Keith admonished him. ‘Mr Baker doesn’t like anything fancied up.’
Otherwise, though, Keith was a good teacher: he got on with his work and left James free to watch him, to ask questions when he wanted to, and make his own mistakes. James learned habits of scrupulous cleanliness and of systematic order that he didn’t have. In the office, they would go through James’ own negatives and prints with a magnifying glass, and James went back into the darkroom on his own, after the others had left work, and kept developing till late at night.
‘There’s a family of compositors on this paper,’ Keith told him in the office one afternoon, ‘who can trace their line back to the time of William Caxton.’
‘No, really?’ James replied, as gullible as he was shy.
‘It’ll all change,’ Keith averred. ‘They’ve got it sewn up down there, mate,’ he said, pointing through the floor. ‘It’s a closed shop. But it’ll all change.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, Keith,’ Roger Warner interrupted. ‘Take no notice of him, James. Nothing’s going to change. We work together, the paper comes out on time every day, the punters buy it. It works: don’t fix it.’
‘It doesn’t bloody work,’ Keith muttered.
‘Roger’ll have you believe the whole ship runs on sweetness and light,’ Derek, one of the staff photographers, declared dismissively. ‘The truth is you’ve got the union downstairs and the bosses upstairs. If they could produce the paper with robots, the bastards would. It’s only the union being strong that safeguards everybody’s job, yours included, son. Know which side you’re on.’
‘Hey, you,’ Roger said, ‘the lad’s not been here five minutes and you’re putting ideas in his head. Leave him alone. Our job, Jim boy, is to take photographs. Good ones. Leave politics to the father of the chapel. And as for you,’ he added, addressing Derek, ‘shouldn’t you be down at the council chambers?’
‘I’m on my way,’ Derek said reluctantly, draining his mug. ‘They’ve got dogs fouling footpaths on the agenda: the shit’ll hit the fan today.’
James thought that was meant to be a joke but he held off smiling because nobody else did. You could only tell when Derek was trying to say something funny by the fact that he said it with even more clipped vehemence than he said everything else.
James felt as out of place on the newspaper as he had at school or at home, but it wasn’t a problem because it was clear that the other photographers did too: they were misfits who had nothing in common except their work. It couldn’t have helped, he thought, that they were all different ages: Roger Warner was sixty-odd, and the other two staff photographers, Derek Moore and Frank Spackman, were around fifty and forty respectively, while Keith, the printer, was in his late twenties. James realized that he’d stepped onto a conveyor belt, but that didn’t bother him either because all he wanted was to take photographs.
Gradually James was sent on errands: submitting contact sheets to the subeditors for their perusal, taking prints down to the composing room where they were transformed into plates for the presses, and seeking information from the cuttings library. There were three floors: on the ground floor the printing presses, behind the front desk where the public were dealt with; on the first floor the journalists; and upstairs the management and administration with committee rooms that James never saw.
The middle floor was split by a long corridor lined by partitions of brown metal and frosted glass. On one side ran offices, with the editor, Mr Baker, at one end and the typing-pool at the other. In between were two long open-plan offices in which the reporters and the subeditors worked.
On the other side of the corridor were the toilets, the photography department, the cuttings library and, at the end, the office of the Echo’s weekly sister paper, the Gazette.
James hardly said a word to anyone outside the photographers’ office during his first days, intimidated by the institution, the noise of the presses churning in the bowels of the building like the engine of an ocean-going liner, the hectic deadlines, but above all the people. The subeditors were the worst; strange monsters deranged by the fact that their day was split in two: in the mornings they were tyrants of furious temper and concentration, shouting at the typists, bawling at the journalists and rubbishing the photographers as they rewrote poor copy, brainstormed banner headlines, cut and pasted pages, and rolled up articles and inserted them in missiles which they popped into pipes to shuttle down to the typesetters below.
Every morning was a mounting crisis of last minute telephone calls, traumatized egos and shredded nerves right up until, shortly after midday, the first edition had gone to press. And then the office emptied, the subeditors disappeared, every last one, and James walked into an eerily silent room in which echoing curses were dying into silence as if onto the bridge of a ship marooned with no survivors. The first time he dashed back to the darkroom.
‘Everybody’s gone,’ he told Keith. ‘There must be a fire and we haven’t heard the alarm.’
Keith smiled behind his tinted glasses. ‘They’ve gone to the pub,’ he explained. ‘They’re a bunch of drunken sods,’ he added.
The subeditors returned an hour or two later, transformed by their liquid lunch into avuncular jokers and jesters, having sailed once again through the storm into calm waters. They scrutinized the fresh day’s paper with blackening fingers, and then spent the remaining hours of their working day updating later editions with incoming news in an altogether more relaxed mood, as well as flirting with the secretaries and swapping crude jokes with the typesetters without showing any regret for their diabolical behaviour of only hours before.
To James these monsters were all too familiar, scaled-down versions of his own father. When one of them shouted at him to reprint this fucking photograph, you can’t tell the bloody mayor from the fucking statue, and have it back on my desk in three minutes flat or you can fuck off back to whatever pit you climbed out of, he had to develop the photo with trembling fingers, in a state of shock.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ Keith asked him, and James explained that he’d only been here a couple of weeks and he’d already made a mortal enemy.
Keith grinned. ‘Don’t take it personal, mate,’ he said. ‘They’re like that to everyone. It’s part of their job. No one takes any notice.’
Keith was right. There existed between the subeditors and the rest a daily battle followed by mutual amnesia and then conviviality. Except, that is, for the reporters, with whom they shared an uneasy truce.
The reporters were a less volatile breed, divided, James discovered, into two kinds: the younger, ambitious journalists for whom working on this provincial paper was a stepping-stone to one of the nationals, seeking stories with which to make their name; and older hacks each with their own network of contacts (among policemen, council employees, publicans and others around the town) whose mastery of the newspaper’s style meant that, unlike their younger colleagues crouched over their typewriters, they were able to dictate entire articles to the typists off the top of their heads, making it up as they went along, down to an exact word count. They referred only cursorily to the mysterious hieroglyphics of their notebooks – in which each had evolved their own personal shorthand, less for reasons of speed than because the one thing they had in common with the younger reporters was the conviction that every other bastard was after their scoop.
The typing-pool was a small room with three bored young women who painted their nails and did crosswords until the phone rang or someone rushed in with a deadline a minute away: then the girls stubbed out their cigarettes and spat their gum into the bin and, to James’ amazement, their slender fingers hammered the heavy keys of ancient typewriters, not like the reporters stabbing with two forefingers, no, rather making the keys dance, their feet leaving effortless footprints on the white paper, as if the girls
were reading an article that was writing itself, which they had nothing to do with. James knew theirs was a mechanical skill, anyone could do it really; but it looked magical, the typographical equivalent of an image appearing in the darkroom, and he loved watching them. If they ran out of things to type, though, they lit up cigarettes and teased the gauche young man about the girlfriends he was surely keeping secret from them, and he made stammered excuses and headed back to the darkroom, where no one could see him blushing.
Downstairs were the presses, constantly clattering and churning, and you had to shout to be heard. The men – they were all men down there – carried on elliptical, sporadic conversations as they worked, yelling a few words to each other at their machines during momentary pauses which only made sense with reference to another such sentence broadcast a quarter of an hour earlier. It could take two men working side by side all morning to discuss the previous evening’s football.
James felt uneasy among grease and ink and heat, and the smell of burning metal (especially since people were always shouting at him). He fancied Robert would be comfortable down there, but it made James feel out of place. It was the ground floor but (with the windows all painted over for some inexplicable reason) it felt like the basement, the bowels of the building, those presses not printing newspapers but powering the building itself, the engines of a ship. As he went downstairs to the plate room he wouldn’t have been surprised to see water spilling down the steps or puddles swilling across the floor as he, his father’s drunken sailor, swayed between the machines.
At the end of his second week on the paper James received the first pay-packet of his life, a square brown envelope containing a pay-slip detailing gross wages and deductions for income tax, national insurance and voluntary trade union contributions as well as, in cash, his net pay of £27.80 one week in arrears. He persuaded Zoe to leave her part-time usherette in charge of the cinema for the evening and took her out for a Chinese meal.
Zoe, who apart from the film reviews never read newspapers, was unsurprised by James’ descriptions of alcoholics, clock-watchers and brutes.
‘Well, sweetheart,’ she sympathized, ‘you know, you won’t work there for ever. You don’t even have to stay there now. There are other places.’
‘What do you mean, Zoe?’ James asked. ‘It’s great. I’ll be taking photos soon, too.’
She had to admit he looked happier. ‘Have you made any friends yet?’ she asked, brightening up. He told her about Keith and the lugubrious Derek.
‘The trouble is,’ she told him, ‘you and me, we’re two of a kind. We’re both loners, really.’
James answered a number of ads in the ‘To Let’ section of the paper: having inside information, he was the first to reply; landlords sometimes returned from placing their ad at the newspaper office to find their phone already ringing. Zoe accompanied him, advising caution, and James took her advice. He rejected rooms in shared houses both with students near the college of further education (‘Studying stops you growing up, sweetheart, you can tell they take their washing home to Mummy’); and with non-smoking professionals in Batley (‘Petit-bourgeois anal-retentive types, James; you’d be screaming in a week’).
They saw a minuscule apartment off Blockley Road (‘There’s not enough room to swing a cat in here,’ Zoe sniffed. ‘No pets!’ said the landlady. ‘I thought I put that in the advert! No pets allowed!’).
They dismissed grease-stained, paint-peeling bedsits, let by absentee landlords, whose squalor even the letting agent apologized for. And a garret in Northtown in the house of a widow who, rather than money, wanted someone to weed the garden and read aloud to her in lieu of rent.
‘She’ll have you listening to her life-story and escorting her to the cemetery,’ Zoe assured James. ‘She won’t leave you alone. You can forget that one.’
‘It’s clean,’ James protested. ‘It’s quiet.’
‘It won’t do at all, silly. Come on, let’s get back and have a cup of tea.’
Eventually, though, she had to let him go. At the end of October James moved into a room in a large house less than half a mile out along the road from the cinema.
The house had three storeys and a basement and had been divided into eight bedsits, each plain white door fitted with its own Yale lock. The hallway was bare except for a telephone that only took incoming calls and a permanent litter of junk mail and letters addressed to long-gone tenants, which built up against the wall behind the front door. It was picked up and thrown away once a week by the cleaning lady, a short, intimidating young woman who muttered imprecations and curses beneath her breath as she hoovered the carpets, cleaned the windows and scoured the bathroom. She didn’t speak to the residents but rather scowled at them instead, responsible as they were for grimy rings around the bathtub and the dust, human hair and flakes of skin that filled her vacuum cleaner. James assumed she couldn’t speak English, since she looked like a disgruntled Spanish peasant, and he kept out of her way.
There were no mirrors in the hallway and only a single mirror-tile in the bathroom, glued to the wall above the sink. The bathroom was bare, as the tenants each kept their toiletries in their rooms, passing each other on the stairs like migrant workers carrying sponge-bags containing individual toothpaste, toothbrush, shampoo, soap and even toilet-paper.
There was no communal sitting-room or kitchen, just eight separate bedsits each with a sink and a small stove, the bathroom on the first floor, and an extra lavatory in the basement with a shower that dripped. The house had a desolate and unloved atmosphere, but behind the eight locked doors were eight solitary little worlds. James felt at home. He tiptoed through the hallway and up the stairs with a bag of groceries; he let himself into his first-floor room and boiled some plain rice with vegetables, not craving at all the rich meals of his childhood; and he spent contented evenings listening to John Peel on the radio and reading paperback books he borrowed off Zoe: he chose mostly nineteenth-century Penguin Classics, and, encouraged by the alienated youths of Tsarist Russia, James suffered for a short time the illusion that he might be a central character in his own life-story, rather than a peripheral observer. His life was getting under way.
It was weeks before Charles noticed James’ absence from the big house on the hill; he hadn’t noticed his brief return. No one had elected to tell him that James had left home, vowing never to come back. That was one of the problems of being a tyrant: when you were in the habit of shooting the messenger, people declined to give you unwelcome information. Finally, in the middle of November, Charles said to Simon: ‘I say, it’s high time we had a party, and Judith tells me it’s James’ birthday this week. Where is our helpless hermit? We need to sort out a guest list.’
‘He doesn’t live here now, Father,’ Simon revealed.
‘Because when you’re part of a family,’ Charles continued, ignoring Simon, ‘you have certain responsibilities. One of them is to throw your fair share of parties – even when you’re a recluse in your own home.’ He paused. ‘What on earth do you mean he doesn’t live here any more?’
Simon courageously explained that James had moved down town, and got a job on the local newspaper.
‘Why the hell didn’t anyone tell me?’ Charles demanded, and Simon feared the worst. ‘I could have had a word with the proprietor. And the editor. How does he expect to get anywhere without my help?’
‘You didn’t need to, Father. He got the job anyway.’
‘Are you sure?’ Charles asked. ‘Well, good for him,’ he decided. ‘He’s obstinate. If he wants to stand on his own two feet, I admire him for it.’
Relieved at Charles’ benign reaction, Simon recounted James’ return from the farm, his assault on Robert, and even his vow never to return home.
‘Well, he’s made his bed, as far as I’m concerned, and he can ruddy well lie in it,’ Charles decided. ‘It’s a shame,’ he concluded. ‘We could have done with a party at the moment.’
Charles had some excuse at least f
or being so out of touch with events in his own household during that time (as well as for wanting a party). His iron rule of the company was being challenged by the union, subverted by foreigners and, he declared, undermined by an incompetent Cabinet. In protest at the Conservative Government’s prices and incomes policy – freezing wages and prices in an attempt to curb inflation – power workers, coalminers and railwaymen had gone on strike. The Government responded by declaring a state of emergency: within a matter of weeks soldiers, trained to kill for their country and die for each other, found themselves doing the very jobs they’d once escaped from, delivering coal to power stations and trying to produce the nation’s energy. Middle Eastern countries had, meanwhile, halved their supplies of oil – the other main source of power – while quadrupling prices.
Everyone was affected. Bank lending rates rose, credit controls were tightened and public spending was cut. Cars formed long, fuming queues for petrol that could only be bought a gallon at a time, and when they got out onto the open road they found a speed limit of 50 mph had been imposed. Robert found his trade in second-hand cars badly hit.
Television blacked out halfway through the evening (which finally weaned Simon off the habit for good) and families were told to only heat one room and spend the rest of the winter together inside it. Children were sent home from school to save heating classrooms – which would have an important consequence for Alice – while hospitals operated on emergency generators, and police stations by candlelight.
In the New Year a three-day working week was introduced.
‘My workers – or shirkers – do three days and I have to work seven to make up for it!’ Charles thundered.
The Prime Minister called a general election in March, so that the country could help put the unions in their place, asking: ‘Who Governs Britain?’
‘Not you, you ruddy idiot!’ Charles yelled back at the television.
