Paper cuts

AFTER giving up on My L.A. I picked up Monica Dickens’s My Turn To Make The Tea, her semi-autobiographical account of working as a junior reporter on a provincial paper in the late 1940s/early 50s. The book is pretty lightweight (I got through it in a night) and very witty and engaging.

There’s no real plot but that doesn’t matter as the book’s entertaining enough. Dickens’ character Poppy describes the day-to-day life of being the only female reporter on the Downingham Post, the frustrations and chauvinism she experiences as she tries to add some sparkle to the deadly dull pages, and the characters and situations she meets in the boarding house where she’s lodging.

This was journalism in the old days: no computers, cellphones, police scanners, internet or page design software. Reporters did everything by phone or by actually going out and, you know, reporting. Being a good writer was secondary to getting the facts right. Stories were written up by hand and then typed on the office’s one and only typewriter. No sub-editors on a paper this size; reporters were expected to hang around and read the page proofs as they came off the Linotype machine.

Poppy starts off wanting to change the paper, to introduce a column aimed at women and maybe report on what the Rotarians’ dance was actually like, not just list all the important people who attended. Almost everyone who starts life on small-town paper feels the same idealism (even as a non-scribe, I wanted to redesign every paper as soon as I got there — apart from Wales on Sunday, which ruled in the design stakes). But as Poppy’s editor Mr Pellet explains:

“Everyone who comes here,” he said, “starts off by thinking this is a lousy old rag and they must have been sent from Heaven to bring it up to date. Do you know why people read this paper? Because they’ve been reading it for umpteen years, and it’s still more or less the same as the first copy they ever read. It’s safe. They know where they are. In Downingham they’ve been eating meat pie and chips on Saturday nights since the world began, and if they were suddenly asked to eat their joint on Saturday and their pie on Sunday they’d think the bottom had dropped out of life.”

And the sad thing is, he’s right. If my girlfriend had got control of the Cynon Valley Leader back in 1998 she’d have updated it, added some interesting stories and features, some new sections, possibly even got the photographer to take actual photographs and not just shitty snapshots — and the paper would have closed in a month. People like the dull, the safe, the predictable. For better or for worse, golden wedding anniversaries, cheque presentations and the local soccer team’s descent into utter crapness are the bread-and-butter of local papers.

So Poppy’s idealism is slowly eroded by the daily grind of reporting and the weekly rush to get the paper to the press, which is located in the basement of their office. Reading about this was one of the more interesting parts for me, much the same, I imagine, as when one of my younger cousins reads about that archaic music storage system called “the tape cassette”:

Wednesday was the worst day of each week. We went to press, or, as we liked to say in our nonchalant Fleet Street jargon, we put the paper to bed. Each page was built up in a ‘forme’, a heavy metal frame with screws around the sides to hold the type in place… When we had written our last paragraph and Ernie or Ricky had turned it into type, we then had to read a proof of it, recheck the corrected proof, and finally correct a proof of the whole page. There were always one or two mistakes… and Harold would bend over the forme and pick out a line with a pair of eyebrow tweezers. It was then reset and dropped delicately back into place again and the forme screwed up.

To proof a page I click “Print”. To send a page to the press I click “Send” and then “OK”. Much easier. I miss the pressroom at the building I worked at in Wales, the slight shudder of the desks when it started up, going for a fag after sending the north edition of WoS at 9.20 on a Saturday night and picking up fresh copies on the way back (and getting my arms and shirt covered in wet ink in the process), the smell of the machinery and ink, the people who worked there… then the press was moved to Cardiff Bay and the building lost something. But I can’t work on hot metal and a Linotype machine is as much of a mystery to me as QuarkXPress would be to the Downingham Post’s Harold.

Eventually Poppy moves on, leaving Downingham and the Post behind. My Turn To Make The Tea may be light but it’s packed with great characters and anyone who’s worked on a paper will recognise the Post’s employees as people they’ve probably shared an office with.