A Sort of Life (18 page)

I had been on
The Times
only two months when the General Strike was declared.
The Times
was the only paper which continued to be issued without interruption from the first day of the strike, although at the beginning it appeared in the form of a single multigraphed sheet. Our success aroused the jealousy of Winston Churchill, who seized a quarter of our paper stocks for his extravagant
British Gazette
. As the
Gazette
was badly edited, over-printed and maldistributed, great bundles of his journal, manufactured with our paper, were dumped loose around the streets for anyone to pick up. Being one of the editorial staff I was automatically a strike-breaker, and there were moments of drama, even in the quiet of Printing House Square.

Among the notices on the wall of every room there had always hung instructions on what to do in case of fire – if a bell rang three times we were to file out in an orderly way and proceed I forget where. It was an instruction which seemed as far removed from reality as the little book on style with which each of us was supplied, and in which we read that we must not spell ‘bunkum’ ‘buncombe’ or ‘Marquess’ ‘Marquis’. Now, when an unmistakable fire-alarm sounded in the afternoon on the second day of the strike, no one paid any attention. We were all of us a little sleepy, for we had been up the whole previous night while the multigraph machines turned out the famous single sheet of May 5, 1926, Number 44263 of
The Times
, price twopence. We had worked as loaders and packers, for there was little subediting to do, even though the single sheet finally managed to include, apart from news of the strike, a weather report, broadcasting, sport, Stock Exchange, and a Court Page of five lines which might have been written by Sir John Betjeman (‘The Prince of Wales returned to London from Biarritz last night, travelling from Paris by air’). The machines did not stop till eight in the morning, and then we had all walked home, for there were no trams, no tubes, no buses. Little wonder that not one of us paid any attention at first to the fire-alarm.

The bell rang once, twice, three times. Someone asked with mild curiosity, ‘A fire?’ After a while the assistant chief subeditor, Colonel Maude, rose and moved with his usual elegant and leisurely gait into the corridor. He was a man of great courtesy, very tall and slim with a soft blond moustache; you would have taken him for a military attaché but never for a journalist. I remember that he always apologized to me in a low drawling voice when he handed me any work at all – even a small paragraph for the News in Brief on a prize vegetable marrow – and now,
when he returned to the room and sat down, it took quite a time to realize that
The Times
– so he was telling us – had been set on fire. He was seated again at the long table, which was usually presided over by the chief subeditor, George Anderson, but it was opening-time and at opening-time Anderson always took a short leave of absence. The strikers apparently had squirted petrol through a grating into the basement and had managed to set alight one of the great rolls of paper which stood there. Maude obviously was not disturbed, there was no copy to deal with, and my fellow subeditors chatted a little while on the subject of fires in general and the feasibility of burning down
The Times
. One of the subeditors was an elderly man who ran a small farm in the country and therefore always dealt with the agricultural page. He told us a few anecdotes about rick-fires, which passed the time until the all-clear sounded. Later that night there was a small fight between the loaders, of whom I was one, and the pickets in Printing House Square; the Sporting Department acted as storm-troops and there were few casualties. Nor was there any bad feeling. The revolutionary atmosphere south of the river died away on the bridges.

More from curiosity than from any wish to support the Establishment I became a special constable and I used to parade of a morning with a genuine policeman the length of Vauxhall Bridge. There was a wonderful absence of traffic, it was a beautiful hushed London that we were not to know again until the blitz, and there was the exciting sense of living on a frontier, close to violence. Armoured cars paraded the streets, and just as during the blitz certain areas, Bloomsbury and Euston among them, were more unhealthy than others like Hampstead and St John’s Wood, so Camberwell and Hammersmith were now considered more dangerous than the City. Our two-man patrol always ceased at the south end of Vauxhall Bridge, for beyond lay the enemy streets where groups of strikers stood outside the public houses. A few years later my sympathies would have lain with them, but the great depression was still some years away: the middle-class had not yet been educated by the hunger-marchers. On the side of the Establishment it was a game, a break in the monotony of earning a secure living, at its most violent the atmosphere was that of a
rugger match played against a team from a rather rough council school which didn’t stick to the conventional rules. ‘I’m almost sorry now that it’s over,’ I wrote home, ‘as we had as much free beer as we wanted at the office while it was on,’

There was yet another advantage. I felt accepted now. I even received a silver match-box from the management. My three months’ trial was not yet finished, but in the cameraderie of free beer and unusual duties I had become an established member of the staff. Oxford had at least taught me to drink pint by pint with any man.

Of my companions in the subeditors’ room (most of them seemed much older than I was) I remember faces and characteristics more than names. The youngest subeditor, apart from myself, was so fastidious that he could eat nothing, he said, which had been touched by the human hand: for dinner in the canteen he took only a cup of tea. Yet he was plump enough, so that he must have had somewhere at home a hygienic source of supply. I would try to tempt him with a tin of sardines, but there was obviously some doubt in his mind as to what happened between the netting of the fish and the tinning. I connected his fastidiousness with his employment, for he was in charge of the Court Page and he had a desk all to himself, loaded with such superior reference books as the
Almanach de Gotha
, Debrett’s
Peerage
and Burke’s
Landed Gentry
.

There were other faces which returned to me often later in dreams. At least once a year, until quite recently, I dreamt I was entering the subeditors’ room after a long absence. I would find an empty chair but not in my old place, and I would feel a sense of shame because I had been away so long and had returned only temporarily (the faces I saw around me were many of them by this time the faces of the dead) I would take Crockford down from the shelf over the coalgrate and check the name of an obscure vicar who had grown a prize vegetable marrow.

I can think of no better career for a young novelist than to be for some years a subeditor on a rather conservative newspaper. The
hours, from four till around midnight, give him plenty of time to do his own work in the morning when he is still fresh from sleep – let the office employ him during his hours of fatigue. He has the company of intelligent and agreeable men of greater experience than his own: he is not enclosed by himself in a small room tormented by the problems of expression; and, except for rare periods of rush, even his working hours leave him time for books and conversation (most of us brought a book to read between one piece of copy and another). Nor is the work monotonous. Rather as in the game of Scrabble the same letters are continually producing different words; no one knows at four o’clock what the evening may produce, and death does not keep a conventional hour.

The young subeditor gains too some small insights into the vanities of the famous. J. M. Barrie before making a speech would send to
The Times
a typescript which included some passages that his audience must have taken for whimsical impromptus. (His speeches were always printed verbatim in the first person – a distinction he shared only with the Prime Minister.) ‘I see the Archbishop of Canterbury smiling sceptically in my direction and wickedly shaking his head …’ I would read this at four-thirty in an after-dinner speech which was to be delivered at ten. Did the Archbishop have a prompt copy?

Another amusement was to discover unconscious obscenities in the copy handed in – not always perhaps unconscious. Charles Marriott, the art critic, was continually trying, or so it seemed, to slip something by, and the correspondence editor himself was responsible, at the time when Hyde Park was much in the news because of the Chiozza Money case, for the headline, ‘Blocking in Hyde Park’.

And while the young writer is spending these amusing and unexacting hours, he is learning lessons valuable to his own craft. He is removing the clichés of reporters; he is compressing a story to the minimum length possible without ruining its effect. A writer with a sprawling style is unlikely to emerge from such an apprenticeship. It is the opposite training to the penny-a-liner.

The man who was of chief importance to me in those days was the chief subeditor, George Anderson. I hated him in my
first week, but I grew almost to love him before three years had passed. A small elderly Scotsman with a flushed face and a laconic humour,
¹
he drove a new subeditor hard with his sarcasm. Sometimes I almost fancied myself back at school again, and I was always glad when five-thirty came, for immediately the clock marked the hour when the pubs opened he would take his bowler hat from the coat-rack and disappear for thirty minutes to his favourite bar. His place would be taken by the gentle and courteous Colonel Maude. Maude was careful to see that the new recruit was given no story which could possibly stretch his powers, and if he had been chief subeditor I doubt if I would ever have got further than a News in Brief paragraph. At the stroke of six, when Anderson returned and hung up his bowler, his face would have turned a deeper shade of red, to match the rose he carried always in his buttonhole, and his shafts of criticism, as he scanned my copy with perhaps a too flagrant headline, would have acquired a tang of friendliness. More than two years went by, and my novel
The Man Within
had been accepted by a publisher, before I discovered one slack evening, when there was hardly enough news to fill the Home pages for the ten o’clock edition, that a poet
manqué
had dug those defences of disappointed sarcasm. When a young man, Anderson had published a volume of translations from Verlaine; he had sent it to Swinburne at The Pines and he had been entertained there for tea and kind words by Watts-Dunton, though I don’t think he was allowed to see the poet. He never referred to the episode again, but I began to detect in him a harsh but paternal apprehension for another young man, flushed with pride in a first book, who might suffer the same disappointment. When I came to resign he spent a long time arguing with me, and I think his real reason for trying to prevent my departure was that he foresaw a time might come when novel-writing would fail me and I would need, like
himself, a quiet and secure life with the pubs opening at half-past five and the coal settling in the grate.

No other group of men – not even the air-raid wardens at my post in Gower Street during the blitz nor my fellows later in the Secret Service – have so planted themselves, nameless though they may have become, in my memory. Perhaps this is always the case with a young man’s first real job: the impression in the wax will never go quite so deep again. Even those with whom I had only a transient contact are impressed there, Geoffrey Dawson, the editor (whatever his later politics of appeasement I can only remember his kindness to a young employee), Vladimir Poliakoff, the diplomatic correspondent, in a grey homburg hat with a very large brim, who would come into our room to consult the files, carrying with him an air of worldliness and mystery (why was he not reading them next door in the foreign room where he naturally belonged? Perhaps he wished to remain for obscure reasons of state incognito), the medical correspondent, Doctor McNair Wilson, who was, I think, more an authority on Napoleon than on medicine, and in my last year the future editor, Barrington-Ward, a cold complacent man, prematurely bald, who suddenly appeared, like an unspoken threat, unexplained and inexplicable, in the room of kindly old Murray Brumwell, the assistant editor. He had, I can see now, the smooth assured air of a Dauphin, but I thought of him even in those early days as Pecksniff, though Pecksniff had a good head of hair. Later, when I had fallen on evil days and tried to return to
The Times
, he wrote me a letter which Pecksniff could not have bettered. ‘Since your day,’ he wrote with a vague reminiscence of Longfellow, ‘the tents have been folded and moved on.’

That summer I finished my second novel and wrote to my mother, ‘The gamble of the thing is getting it typewritten, as one has to have two copies against wear and tear. Could you advance me five pounds and let me pay you back at the rate of about ten shillings a week?’ They were five wasted pounds, and I can only hope I paid her back. I sent the typescript to Heinemann. It was July, 1926. There was an acknowledgement and afterwards a long
silence – it seemed as irrevocably lost as though I had dropped it into the coal-fire of the subeditors’ room. Months went by … the new year came … February … March … I even began a third book which I soon abandoned, a detective novel, the first of so many unfinished novels –
Fanatic Arabia
, which in spite of its title taken from Doughty began in a London bus station and was never intended to move further than the Midlands;
Across the Border
, an African story, which opened in Berkhamsted; a school novel of a timid boy’s blackmail of the housemaster who had protected him; a spy story called
A Sense of Security
… Even today, until I have passed a quarter of the course, I am uncertain whether I will be able to reach the end.

The detective story I still believe to have been ingenious. A young governess was found murdered in a country house, and a multiplicity of strange clues baffled the police. Only the local priest recognized behind them a child’s psychology and realized where they led – to a small girl of twelve who had committed the crime because her beloved governess was in love with a man. The priest, of course, did not betray the child … Now I can detect the various threads of my short experience which intermingled: my sister’s governess, jealousy of the man she was to marry, perhaps the long summers at Harston House, even Father Trollope and my new conversion; yet, if I had been asked about the story then, I would have said it bore no relation whatever to my life.