LITMIR.BIZ

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dignitary would die, and then the chief reporter would turn out the entire staff to make sure we got every name at every door of the church, or perhaps even at the cathedral, and fill columns with them. Names made news, and I expect they still would if papers deigned to cover such mundane events.

      The daily courts in which minor cases were tried were called police courts in those days because the police not only gathered the evidence but conducted the prosecution. The chief reporter showed me the the ropes, but soon I was covering them myself. There were also county courts and, occasionally, assize courts at which a real judge and the barristers who travelled the legal circuit would appear. As an innocent youngster I listened with keen interest to messy divorce cases, some of which went on for days. The London papers were always ready to pay for a bit of scandal, but we were allowed to report only the evidence the judge mentioned in his summing up. There was keen disappointment when, after a sexy case, a spoilsport judge would grant a decree without reviewing the evidence in open court. Looking back on it now, I wonder that the paper allowed such a neophyte as I to report courts when it would have been easy for me to make a costly mistake, but I suppose I learned quickly the simple formula most journalists used to report the courts: name, verdict, charge, sentence, evidence. In Britain in peacetime when there was plenty of paper, courts were extensively reported, sometimes with key evidence given almost verbatim and filling column after column, and I was surprised on coming to Canada to see how little attention was paid to courts. After all, even minor cases can provide tragedy, comedy, or sometimes drama.

      Our circulation went far beyond Exeter and juniors were assigned what the chief reporter called a “parish,” meaning a rural town to which we had to travel from time to time to cover council meetings, courts and other events. As the most junior, I got the parish furthest away, Okehampton, a town on the edge of Dartmoor about twenty miles as the train steamed from Exeter. So at the end of a day of work in the city, or sometimes on a Saturday morning, I would take the train to my parish. Twenty miles doesn’t sound much now, but wartime trains were so crowded that getting a seat was a bit of luck, and one never knew when the local passenger train would be shunted onto a siding to make way for something with higher priority, perhaps a troop train. If there happened to be an air raid warning in effect in Exeter when I was returning at night from Okehampton the train would be parked on a branch line to await the “all clear.” Then I had to go into the office to write my copy. It sounds terrible, but I loved every minute of it — or most minutes anyway. I learned mostly by reading the papers to see how various types of stories were handled, but one subeditor — what we would call a deskman — seemed to take particular pleasure in correcting my English; I remember clearly when he stormed into the junior reporter’s room and said, “Westell, if you confuse accept and except once more, I’ll personally fire you.” I don’t think I have ever since used either word without checking to see I had got it right, so I suppose I should be grateful to him, but at the time I thought him a tyrant. I described earlier the bombing of Exeter in May, 1942, three months after I had started work. While the fire which consumed so much of the High Street was stopped before it reached our offices, the explosions upset our presses, and production of the paper was shifted that very day to Torquay, about twenty miles away, where the chain had another daily. Our editors went by bus to Torquay every day to produce our paper, leaving we reporters, senior and junior, with even less supervision than usual. And the paper became, if that were possible, even less enterprising in covering the news.

      One day in 1943 my father passed on a tip that Bob Hope and his company, who were touring to entertain American troops would be arriving that night at a local hotel he was frequenting at the time, contemplating, I think, marriage to the sophisticated blonde lady behind the bar. I took a seat in the hotel lobby that night and waited for Hope, who arrived eventually. Rushing up, I sought an interview. He, seeing a scruffy seventeen-year-old before him, asked if I was from the “college paper,” to which I replied with all the dignity I could muster that no, I was from the local daily paper. I asked a few no doubt banal questions, and he tossed off a few cracks, and so I had my interview, and rushed back to the office to write up the scoop, making as much of so little as I could. It did appear in the paper, savagely cut in length, and I was advised that the Express & Echo was not much interested in American movie stars. But I’m sure it was one of the best-read items in the paper that day.

      Soon after, when I was twenty months into my apprenticeship, there came the eagerly awaited call to join His Majesty’s navy. On demobilization — in my case almost three years later — one of the few benefits offered to servicemen was the right to get their old job back, so in 1946 I returned to the Express & Echo. At the paper, not much had changed except that the prewar editor had returned, having risen to the rank of captain in the army, and was even more conservative than his wartime replacement. To relieve the housing shortage, the government was buying aluminum homes prefabricated in factories that had previously produced aircraft. The houses were small, but well equipped, and a score or so were assembled on sites in Exeter. I discovered somehow that there was a problem with ventilation, causing moisture to freeze on the inside walls during the cold winter of 1947. So tenants were existing in a sort of igloo, or ice house. I wrote an excited story but it never got into the paper; our editor said that if there was anything to it the problem would be on the agenda of city council’s housing committee and we would report it then.

      Speedway, or motorcycle racing, began in Exeter around that time, and I was assigned to cover this dubious new sport. For a small city, the crowds were large and the interest high, but the paper refused to print more than a few paragraphs. So I conceived the idea of starting a speedway weekly — called Fanfare, naturally — and persuaded a couple of other young reporters to work on it with me in our spare time. It paid its way and survived for several years after I left Exeter, so was I an entrepreneur in the making? I think not; I was restless, looking for new challenges and inclined to a sort of reckless optimism, a pattern which has recurred in my career. A year or so later, frustrated by the Express & Echo, I abandoned my apprenticeship which had more than a year to run, and moved to a larger city. I was at first concerned about breaching my contract, but I reasoned that the Express & Echo had never fulfilled its side of the bargain by providing training. And when I heard that the editor had complained that I was leaving just when I was becoming useful, I thought of the countless hours of cheap and reasonably competent labour I had given the paper, and departed with a clear conscience.

      I would have preferred to have gone straight to London but could find no opening in Fleet Street, so I went to Bristol, the next city up the country from Exeter, where there were two afternoon papers in fierce competition, and a sluggish morning paper. All career changes alter the direction of one’s life, but that one had larger consequences than most. A few days after I started work at the Evening World a young woman returned from holiday, Jeannie Collings, and we were neighbours at the huge reporters’ table. I can’t say I paid her much attention, but she soon noticed that I was something less than a snappy dresser. I was quite likely to have a hole in the elbow of my jacket, and the collar of one of my few shirts was too tight to button up because I had bought it from a smaller colleague in Exeter who needed to raise a few shillings. Such things did not bother me then, and they still don’t. Nature, eating, and drinking made me apple-shaped and clothes, no matter how expensive, don’t sit well on apples. In those days, men could get away with being scruffy, but women journalists were expected to dress respectably, often with hat and gloves, which was quite a feat when wages were low and clothes were rationed. All we young, single reporters lived in rooming houses, some better than others, but Jeannie had a particularly dismal room with no running water. She contrived nevertheless to emerge every day like a butterfly, with clean gloves and starched blouse, having done her laundry in a bowl on the gas ring.

      Конец

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