by David Nobbs
‘What’s for tea?’ he said, enunciating slowly, carefully. It was a stupid remark on two counts. It was past midnight, and he knew the answer anyway. Tea on Monday was liver and bacon, with boiled potatoes and cabbage, followed by rhubarb crumble.
‘Never mind “what’s for tea?”,’ said Cousin Hilda, her mouth working painfully. ‘What sort of time do you call this?’
Henry stared at the barometer. ‘Quarter past stormy,’ he said. ‘Didn’t realize it was as late as that.’
He sank slowly to the floor. A stranger inside him began to laugh hysterically.
‘Journalists!’ said Cousin Hilda grimly.
The headline in next morning’s Daily Express was ‘Four shot dead in Thurmarsh pub massacre’. Henry would have been the first journalist on the scene, by more than half an hour.
2 Contacts
PREMIER HOUSE, THE Chronicle and Argus building, was situated on the corner of High Street and Albion Street. It had a curved frontage in lavatorial marble. A large green dome proclaimed its importance. Henry entered with a thick head and a sense of dread.
The newsroom was on the first floor. It was large, noisy and dusty. The windows were streaked with grime, and the lights were on all day, bathing the room in the brownish-yellow hue of old newspapers. There was a perpetual throb of suppressed excitement, even when nothing at all was happening. When there was a murder or a big crash, or expenses were being filled in, the excitement became almost palpable.
The reporters sat at four rows of desks. It was like school, and Henry had been to too many schools already.
Terry Skipton, the news editor, sat behind the news desk, facing the reporters as if he were their form master. He admitted no Christian names into his puritanical world. ‘Good morning, Mr Pratt,’ he said, emphasizing the surname, as if it were a judgement.
Henry had hoped that Helen’s beauty would turn out to be illusory, but it pierced him like a hard frost. He had hoped that Colin would look as if he too had experienced a heavy night but, perhaps because he always looked ravaged, he seemed untouched. The freshly laundered Neil Mallet gave him a friendly smile. So did the young woman at the desk on his right. She was less beautiful than Helen, rather big, squat-faced. She said, ‘Hello. I had a day off yesterday. I’m Ginny Fenwick.’ He got an erection simply because she was friendly.
He tried hard to look busy, like everyone else. The phone on Ted’s desk rang, and he heard Ted say, ‘That’s funny. The editor wants to see me. Something about the police.’
Henry’s heart sank, but he hurried over to Ted’s desk.
‘I’d better come too,’ he said.
‘You what?’ said Ted.
They entered the editor’s office. It was an airy room, with a wide window looking out onto the inelegant bustle of Albion Street. On the walls were framed copies of momentous editions of the Argus – the abdication, two coronations, the beginning and ending of two world wars, the day the circulation reached two hundred thousand. Mr Andrew Redrobe was small and neat. He looked more like a shrewd businessman than a romantic newspaperman, his nose sharpened for profits rather than elongated for sniffing out scoops. His green-topped desk was large and neat.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked Henry, giving Ted a questioning look, which was answered with a shrug.
‘All this is my fault, sir,’ said Henry. Damn that ‘sir’. He’d promised himself that he’d never say ‘sir’ again after he left the army. ‘Last night I got rather drunk.’
‘Oh?’
‘Yes. I … er … I was … excited.’
‘Excited?’
Mr Andrew Redrobe hadn’t told them to sit down. Henry felt like a naughty schoolboy.
‘Yes, sir.’ Damn. ‘I was carried away by the atmosphere.’
‘I’m not with you. What atmosphere?’ said the puzzled editor.
‘Meeting my new colleagues. Talking. Drinking.’
Ted Plunkett looked almost as surprised as Mr Andrew Redrobe.
‘Let’s get this right,’ said the editor. ‘Are you saying you were excited by spending an evening with members of my editorial staff?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Damn.
‘Good God.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Damn. ‘I … er … I took a red light. I was arrested. Being … er … slightly … er … over the … er … I’m afraid I gave Ted’s name as my own.’
‘You went to five different schools, covering the whole stratum of public and private education, didn’t you?’ said Mr Redrobe.
‘I did, yes,’ admitted Henry, as if it had been his fault.
‘What did I say to you last week, Ted?’ said Mr Redrobe.
‘“English education fails dismally to fit people for real life,”’ quoted Ted.
‘Precisely. You’re the proof of the pudding, lad.’ The editor sounded grateful to Henry for proving him right. ‘You’re a total mess.’
Henry didn’t wish to agree and didn’t dare to disagree, so he said nothing.
‘I don’t think we’ll hear any more of this matter,’ said Mr Andrew Redrobe. ‘We pride ourselves on having a good relationship with the police. But I don’t want that good relationship endangered by your juvenile antics, Henry Pratt. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Very clear, sir.’ Damn.
Outside, in the corridor, Henry said, ‘I’m sorry, Ted.’
‘No! Please!’ said Ted. ‘I’m flattered to find how deeply I’ve impinged on your consciousness.’
‘Sorry.’
‘You’ve impinged pretty deeply on Helen’s consciousness.’
Henry went weak at the knees.
‘What?’
‘She thinks you’re attractive. I’ll never understand women.’
Ted stomped back into the newsroom, just as Colin Edgeley came out.
‘The editor wants to see me about last night,’ said Colin grimly. ‘Apparently that landlord’s complained.’
The editor raised his neat eyebrows neatly at the reappearance of his most junior reporter. He listened to their tale in pained silence, once pushing a hand discreetly through his neat, Brylcreemed hair.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Luckily for you, which is more than you both deserve, I don’t think we’ll hear any more of this. We pride ourselves on having a good relationship with the licensed victuallers. But I want it kept that way, so … no more antics. You’ve proved yourself a good journalist, Colin. I’d hate to lose you. You haven’t proved anything yet, Henry. I’d hate to lose you before you have the chance. I still think it’s possible you could have a career in journalism.’
Neither of them spoke.
‘I’d like to line all your headmasters up, Henry Pratt, and show you to them. You’re a walking condemnation of the system. You’re a living indictment,’ said the editor.
Again, Henry found it impossible to say anything. Colin didn’t help him out.
‘You must have gone pretty close to the Vine last night, Henry,’ continued Mr Redrobe. ‘You didn’t see anything of the incident? Nothing at the police station?’
Oh god. Don’t blush. Don’t give yourself away. Show some nerve.
‘No, sir.’ Damn. But the voice sounded steady enough. ‘I think I must have got home just before it happened.’
‘Mmm.’ Did the editor believe him? Did it matter? His career was ruined. ‘You are now going to be educated in the forcing house of the provincial press. In the school of life. In the college of the streets. I expect a vast and rapid improvement. I’ll need it.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Damn. ‘Sorry, sir.’ Damn.
‘Oh, get out.’
‘Don’t you worry, kid,’ said Colin, as they walked back to the newsroom. ‘You’ll be all right. I’ll look after you.’
‘Mr Pratt?’ called out Terry Skipton.
Henry approached the news desk with trepidation. His nerves felt shredded. Terry Skipton had high, slightly humped shoulders, no neck at all, prominent, heavily lidded eyes and a large nose. He looked like a slightly deformed frog
. Behind him, to Henry’s left, was the great table round which all the sub-editors sat, honing their headlines.
‘A man’s phoned about a cat, Mr Pratt,’ said Terry Skipton. ‘Pop in on your calls, and see if you can make something of it.’
Henry’s spirits leapt. His hangover was forgotten. The sixth sense of the born journalist visited him for the first time, and told him that he was about to have his first scoop.
On the tram, returning promptly for his tea, Henry tried to read the rest of the paper. A new air-raid warning had been developed by the Home Office, to protect against radioactive dust in the event of an H-Bomb attack. That was reassuring. Billy Panama, American Yo-Yo Champion, had made a personal appearance at Cockayne’s in High Street, and Johnny Hepplewhite, aged 14, had become Yo-Yo Champion of Thurmarsh. That was interesting. And yet … again and again Henry was drawn back to page 8, as if he feared that his scoop would no longer be there.
Those readers who have lodged at 66, Park View Road will not need to be told that tea on Tuesday consisted of roast lamb, with roast potatoes and cauliflower, followed by spotted dick.
‘We had an amazing run on Wensleydale today,’ said Norman Pettifer, who ran the cheese counter at Cullen’s. He was a slightly stooping, sallow-skinned man whose mouth was set in an expression of disappointment borne with fortitude. He had arrived at number 66 as a temporary measure, while looking for a new job and a house for his wife and family. The wife and family had never materialized. Nor had the new job. This would be his pinnacle, to be manager of the cheese counter at Cullen’s, and mothered by Cousin Hilda.
‘Did you indeed?’ said Liam O’Reilly, the gentle, bewildered, shiny-faced, almost teetotal Irish labourer who seemed to have been at Cousin Hilda’s since the beginning of time, and even that degree of conversational initiative caused him to blush with confusion.
‘An amazing run? How amazing!’ said Barry Frost. Norman Pettifer searched his face for signs of sarcasm. Barry Frost, Cousin Hilda’s most recent ‘businessman’, was a junior tax inspector from Walsall, with smelly feet and a talent for amateur operatics. He was a big-boned man with large features that were not quite rugged. Henry had once met his fiancée, a strikingly attractive PE instructor from Dudley, with smelly feet and a talent for amateur operatics. Henry hoped that they and their feet would hum together through a happy life, but he did wish Barry Frost wouldn’t sing the leading role from The Desert Song under his breath throughout tea, occasionally referring to the script at the side of his plate. Norman Pettifer spoke of the time he had seen the Lunts in the West End. Barry Frost searched his face for evidence of sarcasm.
It was warm and airless in Cousin Hilda’s basement room. A fire glowed merrily in the little blue-tiled stove, but there was nothing merry about Cousin Hilda. She was thin-lipped, thick-scowled. She gave Henry an extra large portion of spotted dick, so he knew that she was still displeased with him. Once he met her eyes, and what he saw there was pain, and it shrivelled him up inside. He knew, as he forced down his concrete pudding, that he loved Cousin Hilda very much, but that he couldn’t bear to live here much longer. He turned to page 8 of the Argus. ‘When Thomas Hendrick …’
‘Where are our manners, Henry? We don’t read at table,’ said Cousin Hilda.
‘Barry does,’ said Henry.
‘Barry is paying,’ hissed Cousin Hilda.
Barry Frost banged his copy of The Desert Song shut, and gave Henry a look that might have abashed a sizeable tribe of Rifs.
‘I offered to pay, Cousin Hilda,’ said Henry.
‘We don’t talk about money at table,’ said Cousin Hilda. They didn’t talk about money, sex, food, drink, pleasure, religion or politics at table. ‘Besides,’ she continued. ‘Mr Frost has his “lines” to learn.’ She sniffed as she said ‘lines’. Barry Frost had replaced Tony Preece, an insurance salesman who at night became a struggling comic called Talwyn Jones, the Celtic Droll. ‘What do people think my establishment is – a theatrical “digs”?’ said Cousin Hilda’s eloquent sniff.
Soon the three ‘businessmen’ were gone, and Henry faced his disappointed surrogate mother, across the corner table, among the debris of spotted dick, in the stifling basement room, with its smell of the water in which the greens had been overcooked, which Cousin Hilda, who hated waste, saved for her six sad, overwatered rose bushes.
Henry was determined to say, ‘I’m going to find a flat.’ He also felt that he should say, ‘I’m very sorry about last night.’ Why couldn’t he bring himself to say either of these things? Why did he say, instead, ‘Did you see my scoop about the cat?’
Cousin Hilda ignored this. Her mouth was working painfully as she prepared her words. ‘About last night,’ she said at last. ‘I don’t want any repetition.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled gracelessly.
‘All right,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘You were led astray. Journalists! If your poor parents were alive today to see you become a journalist, they’d turn in their graves. They’d blame me.’
‘No!’
‘It’s a responsibility.’
‘I don’t want to be a responsibility,’ said Henry. ‘I’m not ready for the responsibility of being a responsibility.’
‘Mrs Wedderburn thinks you’ve turned out so well,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘Only yesterday I met her in the Co-op. I won’t use Cullen’s. I don’t like Mr Pettifer’s cheese counter, it’s no use pretending I do, I was never one for pretence, not like some I could mention.’ She sniffed twice, once for Auntie Doris and once for Uncle Teddy, with whom Henry had lived before Cousin Hilda. ‘So to save Mr Pettifer’s embarrassment it’s best I go to the Co-op, even if it is further from the tram. “Ee, Hilda,” she said. “Hasn’t your Henry turned out well?”’
‘She makes me sound like a cake,’ said Henry.
‘Now then, Henry,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘There’s no call to be rude about Mrs Wedderburn, who lent you her camp-bed in time of need.’
‘I really don’t see why I shouldn’t pay,’ said Henry, who didn’t want the burden of Mrs Wedderburn’s good opinion. ‘I’d rather not be indebted.’
‘Indebted,’ snorted Cousin Hilda. ‘“Indebted,” he says. If I charged you it’d put you on a footing with poor Mr O’Reilly. It’d put you on a footing with poor Mr Pettifer.’ Her voice developed an acid coating of disapproval. ‘It’d put you on a footing with Mr Frost. You are not my lodger. You are my son.’
Henry blushed and Cousin Hilda looked embarrassed too.
‘Well you are … now … you are.’
He was pleased, of course. He was moved, of course. He was also appalled. How could he say he was looking for a flat, now?
He had to tell her about the weekend.
‘Er … by the way …’ he said. ‘I’m … er… going away for the weekend.’
‘Away? You’ll only have been at work a week.’
‘I have alternate Saturdays off.’
‘Where to, “away”?’
‘London.’
‘London?’ Cousin Hilda couldn’t have sounded more surprised if Henry had said ‘Outer Mongolia’. ‘London? What do you want to go to London for?’
‘I’m going to spend the weekend with Paul Hargreaves.’
‘Oh.’ Cousin Hilda was rather ambivalent about Paul, the brain surgeon’s son, the friend from public school days who had visited Thurmarsh briefly in the summer of 1953. She had disturbingly contradictory feelings about private education, since she believed strongly in standards but despised people who put on airs. ‘Well, I’ve met worse boys, even if he didn’t think we were good enough for him.’
‘That isn’t true,’ said Henry, knowing that it was. ‘One of the boys I used to fag for, at Dalton, is making his début for England at rugby.’ For a moment, Henry wished he really was going to watch Tosser Pilkington-Brick versus Wales, rather than lie naked with Lorna Arrow in the Midland Hotel. But only for a moment.
‘Rugby!’ said Cousin Hilda, as if it were the apogee of huma
n absurdity. ‘I don’t know!’
‘I feel the same,’ said Henry. ‘If God had meant us to play rugby, he’d have given us oval balls.’ It was out before he could stop it. To his relief, Cousin Hilda didn’t seem to understand it. ‘I have to go out now,’ he said.
‘Out?’ Cousin Hilda sounded astonished at his geographical profligacy.
‘Yes. I have to develop my contacts.’
‘Contacts?’
‘That’s what we journalists call the people in places of influence who can put stories our way,’ explained Henry airily, with all the experience of twenty-four hours.
‘And what people in places of influence are you seeing tonight?’
‘Tommy Marsden.’
‘Tommy Marsden!’
‘Ace goal poacher of the Third Division North.’
‘Aye. Well … don’t be “late”.’ For ‘late’, read ‘drunk’. Her mouth was working again, with the tension.
‘I won’t,’ he said, and gave her a quick kiss, which astounded them both. ‘Did you see my scoop about the cat?’
‘Cats!’ said Cousin Hilda scornfully. ‘Scoops!’
They sat in an alcove in the bar of the Conservative Club, of which Tommy was an honorary member. Above them was a portrait of Sir Winston Churchill. The carpet was blue. They could hear the occasional clunk of snooker balls from the back room.
They talked about the Paradise Lane Gang. ‘Those were the days,’ said Henry. He didn’t remind Tommy that it had all broken up in fighting and bitterness when Henry and Martin had gone to the grammar school. He wanted Tommy in a good mood.
‘Aye,’ said Tommy. ‘Does tha see Martin at all?’
‘We have a jar every now and then. We sup some lotion,’ said Henry. ‘It isn’t the same. I think becoming a sergeant’s made him take himself very seriously.’
‘It’s age,’ said Tommy Marsden. ‘I’m twenty-one.’
‘I’m twenty. It’s frightening. Are you married or engaged or owt?’ His dialect was returning, in Tommy’s company.
‘Chuff me, no,’ said Tommy. ‘Mr Mackintosh says many a promising career’s been nipped in t’bud because a player’s shagging himself to death. Same again?’
