Radio Girls (17 page)

“Yes, sir.”

He replaced his pen. The eyebrows edged out a few millimeters.

“You're a sweet girl, but whatever Miss Matheson says, I don't think you're suited to her at all. And remember I warned you to guard against ambition.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” She didn't dare tell him that ambition had triumphed.

He sniffed, popping a cigarette in his mouth.

“Modern girls,” he muttered. Maisie knew he didn't mean her.

He didn't know she was one of them now. And if she wasn't suited to the job Hilda was putting her to, she was going to be.

There was no fanfare when she settled permanently into a jerry-rigged corner of the Talks Department, within eyesight of Hilda's door. She could see Hilda if she was at her desk, though being Hilda, she was mostly sprawled on the floor, reading, writing, brain buzzing loud enough to disrupt the transmission waves.

The others were relieved to finally have a secretary at hand full-time and not have to run to the typing pool and be pecked incessantly about how some people were already working under full pressure. Fielden grunted: “I suppose it was inevitable, but Our Lady wants you, so I hope you don't let the side down.”

“I'll need you to draft an announcement of the News division for the
Radio Times
,” Hilda said. An inauspicious greeting, as the BBC's weekly magazine thrived on but despised content given to it by the departments. “And we're going to have to shift some files into storage—if they expand any further, they'll need their own postcode.”

“Yes, Miss Matheson.” Maisie nodded, biting down disappointment. She wanted a more exciting start to this new adventure.

“And, lest you think I forgot (When did Hilda ever forget anything?) here.” She pressed a florin into Maisie's hand. “For your good
work at the salon. Lady Astor's going to come and broadcast. I've wanted her to do so since I started.”

“But I had nothing to do with that!” Maisie hated false credit.

“Not directly. But I think she wanted to come when she saw me as well established, rather than as a favor. And one is never more well established then when one has one's own secretary.”

Maisie rolled the coin in her hand. A florin. Two shillings. Her docked pay wouldn't touch her, and she still had a whole twelve pennies extra. She could get stockings with this.

“Not as much fun, perhaps, but have a go with this, if you like,” Hilda continued, handing Maisie a large notebook overflowing in her exasperating handwriting. “Another after-hours job, so only if you don't mind staying a bit past the time, now and then. I could do it myself, but you're a much better typist than I, and I daresay some extra funds wouldn't go amiss.”

They wouldn't.

“You're still a weekly girl for now, I'm afraid. I hope you don't mind.”

“I don't. Thank you, Miss Matheson.”

“Feel free to make any comment you like,” Hilda said, tapping the notebook.

“What do you mean?”

“Just that.” Hilda grinned. “I say, were you ever able to answer your question? About an equity drop?”

“I . . .” Maisie looked into Hilda's dancing eyes. “I'm working on it.”

“Good. I thought you might be.”

“I'll get an answer soon, I'm sure.”

“I haven't any doubt of it.”

“It's about flipping time,” was Phyllida's assessment of recent events as they strode down the Embankment. “Can't think why the DG was being so tight about a Talks secretary, unless he trowed—thought—a woman wouldn't need one?”

“Why would he think that? Miss Matheson was a secretary to a woman.”

“Aye, but a political secretary, and that's different. Ah, well, who knows with the DG. You were well in there and you can't guess, can you?”

Maisie couldn't. She still respected and even admired Reith. But she wouldn't dare question how his mind worked. He kept them all in Savoy Hill, and that had to be enough.

That Friday, Hilda left early on some sort of weekend adventure. The two producers and Talks assistants assumed “Field Marshal Fielden” would flex his muscle, but even Fielden claimed to have a weekend scheme ahead and so ducked out. Maisie paid no attention to the suppositions or the thoughts of a quiet Saturday morning. She had assignments to begin. She helped herself to some biscuits and opened Hilda's notebook.

It was such an effort, turning Hilda's scratch into words, that she had already typed two pages before the meaning began to sink in. She stopped typing and started to read, realizing her brain was still struggling to catch up.

Or catch on.

“Broadcast speech can be overheard by everybody; the printed word is often overlooked. This universality has its most obvious use in relation to what we call news—the announcement of events. But when we have said ‘news,' we have at once roused the fundamental controversy. What news is broadcast?”

On and on and on—Hilda's thoughts on broadcasting. And news. And what made a valuable story. What radio was, what it ought to be, how to achieve that and then improve on it further.

An education.

“W
ill a shilling do?”

“Go ahead, pet. I expect you know how to use it.” Miss Cryer waved her to the phone at the back of the little post office.

Maisie pulled out her pad. There were several phone boxes within a hundred yards of Savoy Hill, but there was nearly always a queue, and anyway, she wanted to take notes as she talked. She expected the call to cost sixpence. The extra money was for Miss Cryer's confidence. The post office on Savoy Street that she managed with such tender respect, from morning till eight at night, was also a purveyor of rather good sweets and thus another pillar propping up the BBC.

A receptionist answered and hearing “Miss Musgrave of BBC Talks” put Maisie through with no waiting.

“Good morning, Mr. Emmet. Thank you so much. I won't take but a moment of your time.”

“Not at all, not at all. Just having elevenses,” he assured her. She could tell he was deepening and smoothing his voice, attempting to sound radio-perfect.
It wasn't his voice so much as his attitude—he's lucky Miss Matheson didn't beat him to death with a pencil.

“I was wondering, Mr. Emmet, if you could explain to me a bit
what happens if a nation experiences an equity drop. Is it a political concern at all?”

“Is this for an upcoming Talk?” he asked brightly. “Do you want to have me back again?”

Not on our lives.

“We are exploring a number of routes, and hearing your thoughts on this would be useful,” she said, opting for partial truth.

“Ah, I see. Well, in the simplest terms, it means negative equity. That is, a nation's holdings and general wealth are worth less. Its currency is less competitive. That can affect costs and national income—exports and the like. Mind you, it happens all the time. A strong economy overall can weather it. Look at your America, all those mad ups and downs over the last hundred years at least, yes? But the economy's soaring. Aren't people living better than ever before?”

Spoken like someone who's never walked through the Lower East Side in Manhattan. Or the East End of London, for that matter
.

“Can you tell me what happens if there is an equity drop in a weak economy?” she asked.

“That's when you might have a problem,” he said with an alarming chuckle.

“It's funny?”

“Oh, not for them, of course, but it's usually due to mismanagement somewhere, so it's deserved. And then they are ripe for someone to come in and sort things out at a good rate.”

The man was making an argument for the benevolence of vultures.

“Someone? How do you mean?”

“An outside nation, perhaps, or someone with strong views and personality. Italy's still got any number of problems, but you see how Mussolini's created order. Order means a strong economy.”

“I see. Thank you, Mr. Emmet. That's enormously helpful.”

Back in the office, correspondence typed, calls put through, scripts marked, and rehearsal schedules fixed, Maisie found herself with a moment to think. Her eyes wandered over her notes and she remembered Hilda's word “connection.” She had meant it differently, but . . .

“Miss Matheson?”

Hilda was reading through the listings for the
Radio Times
.

“Mm?”

“If we were to do a Talk on Germany's economy, could we perhaps draw a parallel to the American South after the Civil War?”

Hilda looked up at her, pencil between her teeth.

“It's not perfect,” Maisie said quickly, “but the South's economy was a mess after the war and the North didn't do a whole lot to help, and then the South made some . . . well, not political changes, exactly, I guess, but policies that weren't very good. I'm not wording this well . . .”

The pencil dropped into Hilda's lap as she smiled broadly.

“You're very clear. It's a good thought. Everyone thinks the marginal parties in Germany, and here, for that matter, are just that, marginal. Worse, actually, a joke. But that's the sort of thinking that a party can use to advantage as it gains adherents.” She picked up the pencil and brushed her skirt. “Probably want to be mindful of politics, keep it more historical, a Talk on the South and the years since the war ended. That would sound innocuously educational, but of course there's a bit more to it than that, for those really listening. I suppose there would be no way to mention that America does a fair bit to prop up the German economy—”

“Does it?” Maisie was surprised. “I haven't read that.”

“Hmm. Really must get Mr. Keynes in here. A series would be ideal.”

Maisie saw Hilda start spinning into the future and attempted to keep her in the present.

“Also, Miss Matheson, I know what an equity drop is.”

“Yes, I thought you might,” said Hilda. “Anything else?”

“Well, not really. Have you gotten any further—any more propaganda or anything?”

“Done!” Hilda ticked the top of the listings page and handed it to Maisie. “Off to the
Radio Times
they go.”

It wasn't the answer to Maisie's question, and they both knew it.
Hilda was not only good at ferreting secrets from others, but she was a wizard at keeping her own.

“It's quite simple, Bert, really. You just need to make a bit more space in the layout for the article,” Maisie explained, imitating Hilda's patient tone.

She didn't like Bert, but she liked the office of the
Radio Times
. As with most rooms in Savoy Hill, it was an awkward sliver of a space, cut at an angle like a layer cake. The higgledy-piggledy tables sported revolving exhibits of layouts in various stages and the tangy-sweet smell of the glue that pasted each article and photo into place hung in the air—a permanent, intoxicating perfume.

The magazine prompted a host of Savoy Hill snickers, not least because of its subhead: “The Official Organ of the BBC,” which the boys all found hilarious. Maisie thought it was carrying a joke too far till Phyllida told her: “Well, you know it was founded by the DG and it's all his idea, so they call it ‘Reith's organ.' Horrifying thought, hey?” Maisie was duly horrified.

It was an organ born of defiance. At the BBC's birth, the newspapers showed their pique by refusing to print program listings. So Reith had tapped his hat and ordered a magazine out of thin air. The first issue, brave and brazen in its scrolling font, appeared in 1923. It sold for tuppence and could take advertising, thus earning both keep and profit, so the magazine was one of Reith's darlings. But despite the prepared text from each department, the editorial staff, secure in their darlingness, continued to put what they dubbed “little flourishes” in entries, explaining with an amused patience to complainants that they were being paid to tend to the needs of the readers, not listeners, and were deaf to arguments that these were, in fact, one and the same.

An occasional cough from Reith restored order for a few weeks, until the determination of the “real” writers took sway again. The magazine was expanding, adding longer articles as accompaniment to the listening fare, and profiles of broadcasters. These were
supposedly democratic, but the stage and film performers always held prominence, especially the prettiest women with the sultriest photos. Broadcasters like Vernon Bartlett shrugged this off—“I'd rather ogle Betty Balfour than my poor mug any day”—but Hilda was outraged. Maisie, convinced this was a lost cause, threw her passion into a defense of the prepared listings.

“It's dashed ugly for a girl to lecture a fellow, you know,” Bert lectured her. “In medieval times, you'd be put in the stocks,” he added, delighted with his wisdom.

“I don't mean to be impolite. It's only that we need you to print the listings as we write them,” Maisie told him. “We shouldn't have to keep asking.”

Or indeed, ask at all, but Bert required temperance. He was a young man trying to be old, thinking his journalist's requisition bow tie, tortoiseshell glasses, and pencil in permanent residence behind his right ear gave him gravitas.

“I keep telling you, we know what we're about; the magazine sells well and it's helping pull in more listeners. And we print those letters, too,” he added with a gusty sigh. He'd have preferred real writing there, but letters from listeners were more of Reith's darlings, their effusion from the masses proof of his greatness. At Hilda's insistence, the
Radio Times
also printed some criticism. (“So long as they aren't the ones that sound like they came from Broadmoor, and via Mars at that,” Hilda directed. “But thoughtful criticism is good for balance and makes everything more interesting.”)

“Who's making the work that pays you, anyway?” Maisie argued.

“Awfully shrewish, aren't you? They always said you were a silent one.”

I bet he wears glasses to keep people from seizing that pencil and cramming it into his eye.

“I'm sorry,” she said, “but we do need these listings to be accurate, you see?”

He took the pages in false surrender and stalked away, a string of grumbles in his wake. Maisie lingered, eyes wandering over the
layouts and the pile of magazines, fresh from the printers. A photograph of a large wireless was on front.

“Could I have the loan of some back issues?” she asked.

“What?” He hadn't realized she was still there. “What do you want them for?”

“Just to read. May I? Three months' worth? Oh, and the new one, please?”

He scrunched up his mouth. Eventually, the desire to thwart her was overcome by the reasonableness of her request.

“Well, all right, but don't get the idea I'm a lending library,” he warned. He made a great show of finding a box and going to the storage shelves to fetch the magazines. “You'll be sure to keep them clean, of course?”

“I shall handle them with gloves,” Maisie promised, lying with solemn ease.

“Now, if there's one thing Lady Astor cannot abide, it's being treated as though with kid gloves,” Hilda warned the Talks Department. “The attention she demands for her status is as an MP, not as a viscountess. So long as anyone who encounters her employs the same general respect, politeness, gratitude, but firmness we have with all the broadcasters, you can't go wrong.”