Authors: Henry Williamson
The Sports Editor said that Cecil Parkin had signed for Rochdale, the Central Lancashire League Club, the previous year. He was a friend of Jimmy White, the financier, and received, so it was rumoured, the largest salary ever paid to a cricketer in the League. He was one of the best bowlers ever known in the North, and Rochdale had released him often, to play for the County. There was a rumour that Parkin had been selected for the Test team, which was going to Australia in the winter. “Parkin’s refused to open his mouth to reporters so far, but go to Lord’s and see what you can get out of him, will you?”
He took the underground to St. John’s Wood, and paid to go in. Parkin was pointed out to him, standing by a roller. It was early morning; a match was to start in ten minutes. He winced at the idea of pestering anyone, and while approaching the tall thin figure standing by the big roller knew that he had equal but
opposite feelings about being accosted. Then he saw that Parkin was spinning a ball with nervous restlessness between the third finger and thumb of his right hand. Parkin continued to spin the ball as Phillip, straw hat on head, came up to him. A bleak look came on Parkin’s face. When the spinning stopped Phillip noticed a long yellow core of hard skin down the middle joint of the third finger; obviously he spun the ball from that core, or corn.
“Good morning, Mr. Parkin. I wonder if you would give me some hints on how to bowl, for one of Lord Castleton’s papers. I don’t in the least want to pry into your personal or business affairs, which are private to yourself. What tremendous strength you’ve developed in those fingers! Practice, practice, practice, I can see!”
Parkin, while spinning the ball, told him how his wife had helped him to learn to bowl by going with him twice a day to the nets on the Tunstall ground to bat to his spin bowling. Mrs. Parkin helped him for two seasons, facing a dozen cricket balls sent down at a time, one after the other. She was a heroine, and he owed his success to her. He practised leg-breaks and googlies—off-breaks with a leg-break action. Success was a matter of not turning the bowling arm too much, but to spin the ball with the fingers.
“Thank you very much,” he said, and wrote his account while sitting on one of the wooden benches at Lord’s, to the knock of ball on willow and modulated ejaculations of “Oh, well played, sir”, “Pretty to watch, pretty to watch”, etc. In twenty-five minutes the work was done, and he went back to Monks House.
The following Sunday half a column headed PARKIN ON BOWLING appeared on the front page in the early Northern edition of the paper, and to his surprise he saw on a placard the same words, in heavy type, and under the words
by
Phillip
Maddison.
Not a word of his description was cut. The Light Car Notes also appeared as written, although Bloom had scratched the back of his head while reading the final paragraph.
“Are yer serious about oatmeal in a leaky radiator, to get yer home?”
“Yes. It will prevent the pistons seizing. The bit about draining the radiator on arrival, and the driver having a hot meal already prepared, is a joke. But it will delay the boiling away of water in the cast-iron jacket.”
“Well, I don’t know what the Chief will say, but he sent yer, so I’ll print it.”
Phillip’s other stories were (a) an interview in Nottingham with a woman who on her 104th birthday had been taken by
The
Daily
Picture
in an aeroplane; and (b) another with a parson in Lincolnshire.
Asked how it felt to be up in an aeroplane the aged woman had replied, “Horrible!” But the Chief was interested in the aeroplane, so that would not do; and the Chief’s brother owned
The
Daily
Picture,
so when the same reply was given to the question, “How does it feel to be 104?”—“Horrible!”—Phillip had used his imagination.
From Nottingham he had gone by local trains, changing three times, to Hogworthingham (as instructed by Ownsworth) to interview the schoolmaster-parson whose photograph had appeared in that morning’s
Trident
with a fierce Kaiser moustache above a condemnation of the V-blouse, a new fashion which allowed, in the hot summer, an inch or two of flesh below the throat to be exposed to air and light.
He found the parson in a small Church school in a village. He was a mild, clean-shaven old gentleman who, hearing that the caller had had no lunch, offered him eggs and bacon, and while the meal was being prepared by his wife, showed him round the school, an ancient building of one classroom in which a dozen small boys sat on one side, and six or seven small girls on the other.
“You were well disguised in the
Trident
photograph, sir, if I may say so,” said Phillip, sipping coffee with his eggs-and-bacon.
“I fancy the reporter got that photograph from a volume of
Lincolnshire
Worthies,
where it appeared with an article of mine written fifteen years ago,” smiled the rector. “I wore a slight moustache in those days, and it appears to have been touched up.”
“By what is called, euphemistically, the Art Editor, sir.”
The old fellow went on to explain that some time previously he had suggested to the girls, on the breaking up of the Easter term, that as the weather was cold, they should take care to remember the old tag,
Cast
not
a
clout
till
May
be
out.
“We get the cold Polar airs over the North Sea during the spring and early summer, you see. I rather think that the local representative of
The
Daily
Trident
got hold of the story somewhat late, and interpreted my remarks in the way you have seen. Do help yourself to coffee, won’t you?”
“Please correct the stupid impression,” he continued in his mild voice. “I see other papers are repeating it. And only this morning I had a 200-word prepaid telegram from
The
Daily
Picture,
asking for my opinion on the subject of ‘Scandalous tendencies of modern woman’s dress’. Of course I don’t hold such silly opinions. If it is healthier and easier for women to wear skirts half-way between ankle and knee, as they have since the war, why shouldn’t they? Sensible dress does not mean that a woman is flighty, and prepared to abandon all modesty.”
“Of course not, sir.”
He thanked the parson and went away, promising that he would read an exposure of
The
Daily
Trident
in next Sunday’s
Weekly
Courier.
In the train he wrote a long and scornful article, and on arrival at Euston took a taxi to Monks House. He was hardly inside the room when the jackdaw’s beak and eye peered round the door of the glass cage and the editorial voice croaked, “What’ve yer got?”
“A scoop!” cried Philip, fumbling in his poacher-pocket. The jackdaw came out of the glass house, took the manuscript, glanced at sheet after sheet, dropped them one by one upon the floor; then on flat feet, with dejected head, he shuffled back into the cage.
“You can’t write against the
Trident
,” the voice said plaintively. “Don’t you know the Chief owns it?”
“Of course! But this is true!”
“What else’ve yer got?” shuffling out of the cage again.
“Who owns the
Picture,
sir?”
“The Chief’s brother. Why? What else’ve yer got?”
“Old female aeronaut is polite foremother of the hamlet, articulate glorious Milton,” replied Phillip, with a straight face.
Bloom glanced at the copy, and croaked, “Did she really say her father helped William Blake to publish his poems, and that she reads Conrad and finds him the greatest living writer in English, and that another hundred years aren’t enough for her to read all the authors she wants to read—Somerset Maugham, John Galsworthy, Henri Barbusse and T. S. Eliot? She did? All right, Newell, have it sent upstairs, but first take out that bit about her father knowing William Blake and she reads Conrad and the others by candle-light all night.”
Left alone, Phillip looked at his V-blouse copy. All wasted. Harry Ownsworth came to his help, by suggesting that if he
took out the words blouse and modern dress, and put in a few negatives, he could turn it into
Parson
attacks
Flighty
Mothers.
Hadn’t the rector said something about the unhappiness in a home caused by flightiness?
Phillip rewrote the story from this viewpoint, and to salve his conscience went to see the Art editor, who arranged the photographs, and asked him to shave off the Kaiser moustache. When the first country edition appeared at 9.30 on Saturday night there the wretched rector was, on page 3, grim and grey-faced with pin-pointed dark eyes and stiff, clean-shaven upper lip.
“What a cad I am.” he told Ownsworth. “That gentle host, treating me as though I were a gentleman!”
“Better than have the Chief spotting the aged female aeronaut reading Conrad in the paper while
The
People
reporter says she is an orphan who can neither read nor write,” grinned the News editor.
On the Tuesday morning, when Phillip received an envelope with £12/12/-, Ownsworth said, “Bloom said you might be a new star. We sold 15,000 more copies last week of the Northern Edition, due to your Parkin story.”
Walking down Bond Street that afternoon, Phillip stopped at the Copenhagen pottery shop, and seeing a tawny owl on one of the rows of naturalistic glazed animals and birds, went in and bought it for £10/10/-. From there he went to a music shop in Oxford Street for records of
Parsifal,
heard from the Doves’ Nest where he had lain, stretched out, head on arms and eyes closed, in the azure spirit of the music—azure to him above the eternal tragedy and hopelessness of the world. Playing this music in the garden room until after midnight, he determined to go down to Folkestone on the following Saturday night, and in the morning ask permission from Mrs. Trevelian to present the porcelain owl to Spica in token of friendship and for help received in his literary career. Nothing more.
Conceit in his powers as a reporter was soon reduced when he realised that what was done one week was forgotten the next and all was to do again.
There were three men reporters and one woman writer on the paper. All were fed on clippings supplied by Harry Ownsworth. Two of the men—North and Singates—were on the staff at £8/8/-a week each, while Phillip and Miss Vivienne Lecomte were on space. For these two it was not what they wrote and
turned in which counted for payment, but only what was finally printed in the paper.
Four days a week all four reporters were sent out on stories, only to find that some were dead the next day because one or more of the dailies had got there first. So most of what they had ‘got’—perhaps a hundred or more miles away after train journeys taking from early morning to late at night and written in the early hours of the next morning—was impaled on The Spike, a tall steel poniard with a wooden base in the centre of the News editor’s desk, where sat Harry Ownsworth with his scissors searching through a pile of morning and evening London papers, provincial weeklies, parish magazines, trade journals, Society magazines, and wrinkling his sloping forehead for ideas.
As the end of each week drew near, when
The
Weekly
Courier
became a live newspaper covering Saturday’s events, so the punk rose like so many paper butterflies impaled on the steel thorn by a mechanical shrike.
And then, on Saturday morning—a change of scene, a quickening of tempo. The paper was now alive, covering the world served by the news agencies,
Reuters
and
Associated
Press.
From these clicking machines on pedestals, topped by glass domes, writhed endless lengths of paper tape, reproducing electric impulses which had travelled along submarine cable and telephone wire.
The
Weekly
Courier
room was deserted; Bloom moved into the news-room of
The
Trident
with its big subbing table, editorial desk, and barrister’s table—there was a barrister permanently employed to vet possible libel. Heightened tempo induced tension as afternoon slumped into evening, with damp proofs trodden upon the floor like Bank Holiday litter among furlongs of tape. Bloom, his invariable dark suit looking more shapeless than ever, became a waif-like wanderer in slow movement from upholstered editorial office to news-room, his face becoming more haggard from nerve-strain in the electric light as he glanced at the latest news at the head of the writhing worm of paper issuing from a tape-machine, while the building vibrated periodically with the basement roar of rotary machines printing succeeding country editions. He seemed lost in his own maze as he picked up a damp galley proof only to drop it again, adding it to the hundreds of other proofs trodden flatter and scattered farther from the feet of the sub-editors sitting in shirt-sleeves around the mahogany subbing table. As the dead-line for the
London edition drew nearer Bloom seemed to be partly shattered; he approached, as though wishing to avoid, his reporters standing by, looking drabber and becoming more querulous as the electric night ground on below his feet. But he never swore or cursed, nor did his face ever become maniacal.
Late one Saturday night a rumour went round that the Chief was in the building. The effect on Bloom was immediate. “Find out who says so,” he cried to North, the first reporter he saw. The lines seemed to deepen across his brow, his eyes were apprehensive. Then seeing Phillip come in, “Well, what’ve yer got? Well, why not? That’s what yer here for, to get the story when yer sent out on it! Why didn’t yer give the butler ten bob, he’d ’ve talked then! Shut the door in yer face? The front door! What’s wrong with the servants’ entrance? That’s where a reporter should go. Here, Ownsworth, send Singates—Maddison’s fallen down on the stolen pearls story!”
Singates, the crime reporter, pseudo hawk-eyed, dressed in old burberry and felt hat pulled down almost to level of tips of ears and nose, hurried away, muttering. North came back and said, “The Chief hasn’t been in.” Fed-up, Phillip cried to Bloom, “Fallen down! It was a story no-one should have stood up for! I’ve missed tea, dinner, and supper trying to get that mouldy nonsense about her Ladyship’s pearls! Why don’t you print real news—about the unemployed, for instance! Why not run a campaign to employ the unwanted nuisance of ex-service men on making new roads for the coming age of the motor lorry and the popular motor-car? And here’s another idea! Hundreds of millions of pounds’ worth of sewage are turned every year into the Thames. The black mud of Southend-on-Sea is only sewage sludge! It ought to be called Southend-on-Drains! The sewage should be reclaimed, and returned as engine grease, and even lighting gas, and compost for the fertility of our cornfields depleted in the war! Do you know that if the river Thames were cleared salmon would come back to the river?”