DAILY      DRONE

LORD DRONE’S MIGHTY FLEET STREET ORGAN,

 THE WORLD’S GREATEST ONLINE NEWSPAPER 

FOR 20 GLORIOUS YEARS

CONTACT THE DRONE



**

JACK THE LAD 

A remembrance of newspapers past by PAT PRENTICE

Wisbech Market Place in the 1970s

You know you're chilly when Jack Frost's fingertips are warming themselves up in your armpits and tousling your hair. The fat-bellied Franny Barnett throbbed its spitting two-stroke tank between my knees and I was off over Clough Bridge to a new life through Parson Drove, past German PoW Jack Madder's barber's hut — where he had shortened my Beatle cut so embarrassingly that I refused to go to Aunt Nell's funeral — and down Leverington Common to Wisbech, The Capital of the Fens.


My green corduroy jacket buttons welcomed the cold air even where they were high enough to close and my purple square-ended and fringed Sammy tie let cool-hand Frost's other fingers nip my neck.


My trousers rode up around my calves and flapped near the drainside. By the time I passed the Rising Sun and rounded the double bend and the drain had swapped sides in Leverington Road, I had learned the first lesson that my chattering teeth were already announcing: if I ever warmed up enough, I would need warmer clothes, a scarf, and maybe even a crash helmet.


I cut the engine and coasted to a halt at the bus stop on Wisbech Marketplace. I never trusted the footrest, especially if some wag decided to give the old bike a friendly push, so I wheeled it to the red brick lavatory block and leaned it up near the entrance to the Ladies'. I ran the plastic comb from my inside pocket through my fringe and headed for the bridge opposite the Corn Exchange.


The muddy Nene rolled on and ignored me as I hurried for Nene Quay

and the tall little red brick building that was home to The Wisbech Standard, circulation 15,000, biggest selling newspaper in town.


The little bell tinkled as I opened the glass-plated door, heading for the stairs. Had I realised, I would have paused and looked round for a moment.

Every day, some say, is a new beginning. For others, a new day can also be a new world.


I was leaving a realm of pigshit, sugarbeet, clods, strawberries, backache, spuds, graft, death and corn.


Ahead, after a wellington-less sticky start, lay notebooks, newsprint, deadlines, ulcers, adrenalin, excitement, infinitely more death, hot metal and booze. It would be an altidudinous learning curve to which, as my nerves grew tauter, I would strive to take like a swallow to the air — or as it turned out, like several swallows to alcohol.


My first morning was bewildering and alien. Roger the editor, the tall, semi-sneering nepotistic son of the previous editor, greeted me with a dominant indifference. His father was still in residence on the second floor, equipped with early stage senility and a walking stick, with which he would attempt to thrash the never existing dog that he sporadically ordered out of the corridors. He also controlled the little box on the mantelpiece in the reporters' room and occasionally an electronic hiss would indicate that he had switched from listening mode to summon one of the hacks into his intimidating sanctum. It was quite often the pretty, jaded blonde in her little skirt.


Roger sat in a room with a serving hatch through which Laurie Orviss the deputy editor would recline not far from Clive Frusher, who greeted me with a hello mate, and put me immediately at ease. Like many sports editors I was to meet, he seemed a little above the serious fray of journalism and his horizons were happy to halt at the white lines by the pitches of village sports fields, pub dartboards or scoreboards of multifarious complexities that kept a diligently recorded log of episodes of combative chortling and fun.


Laurie seemed to have a better grip on matters of news and ran the linage pool which sold stories to the Eastern Daily Press or occasionally the new Anglia television, and always took a cut from the quid or so that belonged to the reporter who took the original story in.


There was Dennis, the suede-toed untipped-smoking pipe-cleaner shaped nervous breakdown candidate who had some time before he challenged two local murderers in the Pondarosa coffee bar to confess all. He disappeared soon after, either to the dole queue or Peterborough Evening Telegraph, no one ever seemed sure. [There are reports that he had been a copy-taker on the Daily Express.]


The murderers vanished in their turn to serve 15 years for battering to death a farmer and stealing his empty safe.


Then there was Judy Hamey, who occasionally didn't mention horses, but not very often, and Joan Cronin, a mini-skirted smoker in knee length tasseled boots with whom I immediately fell in love, despite her lorry driver boyfriend and the fact that she always had precedence over the office bike, so that I had to walk miles.


On that first morning, she sweetly and closely blonde-perfumed over my shoulder and guided me on my first tapping steps on a large Imperial typewriter with its carbon-copying pieces of paper.


Then there was Rodney, a poshly-spoken superior type with slick hair, suit and driving gloves who had been there for a year. He was obviously aware of his superiority in every way, and drove me around the undertakers and Toc H headquarters at great speed in the little red office minivan, introducing me as the new junior who would be doing undertakers' calls in future. He showed off his motoring mastery and asked if I was thinking of learning to drive. I smiled quietly and didn't mention that at eight years old I was driving a Fergie tractor or that for several years I had driven two old poachers' bangers at night around the droves of lawless Lincolnshire.


He wasn't entirely from the same stock as myself — and some time after I had moved on, drove into a tree and died one tragic evening.


PART 2

MATCH AND DISPATCH

My first week was a struggle, but eventful. I realised that the poorest, and therefore hungriest undertaker — the one with the dignified black Bedford van — knew my mother. Although in her ex-nurse's capacity of village seer-in and seer-out of life she always swore by Peter Barnes of Murrow, she sometimes dealt with Ron Cowling, who hailed from the Horsefair.


There were others: Mr West, a tall, lurking Roald Dahl lookalike whose speciality was embalming some of the customers who went west, and Bailey's undertaker on Lynn Road, near the police station. Their chief coffin maker had made himself a prime box, complete with window through which he could summon help at his funeral in case he suddenly acquired resurrection. On one wet day I found him filling in a pothole in the firm's little roadway from an urn. It was, he said, a relative sent from America to be scattered in St Augustine's church.


But they'll never know.


One day he invited me to have a look at a gipsy who had been killed in a car accident.


You should see the mess he's in!


Ron Cowling often sent his regards to Mum with the request not to forget him when she was laying out a putative client. On smoky, tar-smelling coffin-making mornings I would sometimes spend half an hour crumpling up the newspaper linings to be pitch-pasted then lined with faux silk, or helping him lift the suitably contained bodies from his van into the humble garage chapel or rest. He confessed to being somewhat upset by the drowned child he had recovered from the Nene and said to be careful not to drop my end — but my Mum would have told me about that sort of thing. He became a good source of stories about tragedy during my stint at the Standard, but warned me that the paper were cheapskates and employed youngsters for a pittance then got rid of them after a six-month trial because they failed to make the grade — and because after that their wages would have to rise above £4.10shillings a week.


Those first journalistic months consisted of lots of walking by roadsides in the heat with melting tar being spat out by agricultural machines travelling between fields as wedding reports and obituaries were collated. Then frosty days and early morning undertakers when the hard frozen puddles threatened to smash falling bones before the warm welcome of worked coffin wood and the smell of pitch for ensuring nothing unsavoury soiled the funeral shoulders of sombre pallbearers.


Once a week, at the Isle of Ely College, I was the only male among girls struggling to learn Pitman's shorthand. I was not very good at it and regretted that I hadn't been allowed to learn it at school because only females were allowed to acquire what were obviously secretarial skills.


Pee bee tee dee chat jay ith and way


Pa may we all go to


That pen is not much good


The chants were the first steps to picking up Pitman's. I didn't much like college, any more than school, but I didn't mind the girls.


I did manage to get a feature out of one of the tutors I met in the pub after a lesson. He flew aircraft with college students and I sneaked a trip from Swanton Morley in a Morane Rallye with Taffy Rich, an ex Battle of Britain pilot. The words worked and I discovered one of the perks of the trade — doing something that would never have been possible in another job, and being paid for it, however poorly.


Such perks were rare, though, and most of the time, if I had an idea for a feature or found a good story, it was snidely stolen from me and given to a more senior hack. I didn't like Roger. He had the entitled air of a spoilt child and a supercilious smile that leered down from below his entitled nostrils.


Part 3


A NEW BIKE AND A HAIRCUT

On my first week I took in a story about my village primary school at Sutton St Edmund, from which I had absented myself whenever the opportunity arose. It was to be closed in six months' time, but still, £4,850 — a fair sum then — was being spent on refurbishments and installing indoor lavatories after years of having largely open-air outside ones.


I took some time crafting it and it was the second story on page one. People in the village were impressed, especially the landlord of The Four Horseshoes when it appeared on television. Laurie had taken a personal interest in the piece, but I did not receive any linage.


I lasted two months longer than usual before the Government was blamed for raising employment costs and I was axed. But not before I had learned a thing or two.


The bride often wore guipure lace and something else I didn't understand when they left the reception for a honeymoon at an undisclosed destination. Given their fiscal infirmity, it was often Aunt Gladys's spare room for a couple of nights between changing shifts at the canning factory and legitimising the premature honeymoon baby.


The Standard had forms that could be put through letterboxes or collected at the office to be filled in, but many found it easier if a reporter helped them.


The same was true for deaths, but even more so. I learned the questions quickly and the intro was always the same:


The death occurred on - or the funeral was held on . . . for . . . The last line in bold type would read: Funeral directors were . . . The bit of not so subliminal advertising would always be remembered so long as the undertaker contributed 4s 6d to the paper's grief.


The same streets of demise would come up often in the late Sixties. They contained the simple houses with lino floors and outside lavatories and coal fires with small sooty ranges and cloth sausages under the doors to stop the draughts.


It was usually the teary widow who would answer the door. I soon developed a funereal face and often, as a black joke to keep myself sane, would pass my open hand from my forehead down over my face and assume a sombre expression. It became a job description party piece.


Frequently, Fred would be in the curtain-drawn front room-cum funeral director's box room, surrounded by an aura of stilled time and the faint beginnings of the unmistakable scent of death.


Would you like to see him, he looks so peaceful? It was a happy release in the end . . .


And you would loiter just inside the draped door and agree that he looked much younger than his avowed last age. Often the tale would be told of how they fell in love before he went off to the trenches and their parents objected but they stuck together and their first was born soon after he came back and they were married. Yes, you would agree, as you clutched the home-made cake and sipped your tea, that the son couldn't be expected to come back all the way from Australia and everyone would understand.


But people were always unpredictable in the company of death. The most timid of the bereaved could turn into vengeful monsters and the most violent assassins could become helpless puppies.


So the first weeks of a young reporter gained their legs. The office bicycle could only be used if the job was three and a half miles away. Otherwise, use your own transport at your own expense, or walk.


I walked.


Soon after I encountered my first cooling journeys to work, I acquired a blue and white crash helmet, scarf and waterproof leggings and an old RAF Irvin flying jacket from Bullen's Army and Navy store in town.


Sometimes the old Francis Barnett would be charged into life and I would jump on its torn seat and gun the blue-fumed 200cc engine after the fire engines, which invariably ended up at a chimney blaze or straw stack. 


Occasionally I would get lucky and catch up with a real hot story. But the excitement of a good one in the paper would be tempered at the end of the week when each reporter's column inches were measured up. There, obituary column quantity counted more than the thrill of a short page lead. Even if the fire really had been started, as the firemen always attested, by a rat chewing matches.


I received a humiliation about halfway through my time at the Standard, which seemed to give Roger quiet satisfaction. For reasons I forget, I was sent to interview Wisbech town council's clerk. He was an officious little man, hiding in a suit who obviously felt superior, although to who or what, I couldn't imagine. I sensed our mutual dislike during our conversation and went back to the office well aware that things had not gone well.


As I reached the top of the stairs, Roger's sarcastic smile was waiting. He'd had a phone call from Mr Dixon, who complained about my long hair.

I think you'd better have it cut, announced the editor.


I was not sensitive about much, but my Beatle-style haircut was mine and it didn't welcome intimate intrusions.


The implications were clear, though. Cut or walk.


With every humiliating barber's snip, I hated Mr Dixon more. I briefly wondered if Roger had been lying, to disguise the fact that he wanted to impose the image of the paper on me, but concluded that it seemed to be Mr Dixon's style.


Nothing I encountered about him later changed my mind.


MORE NEXT WEEK