My work schedule was:
● Open the mail for the editorial department.
● Take morning orders for tea from either the reporters' or the sub-editors' rooms and distribute it (in the orderers' own mugs) appropriately.
● Visit Bradford's three courts - sometimes twice in a morning - and pick up handwritten copy from reporters.
● From midday onwards, make hourly visits to the print room to pick up copies of the latest edition of the newspaper and distribute them to about a dozen recipients in the building.
● Take afternoon orders for tea as above.
In between times I would...
● ...scour Bradford's tobacconists for "acceptable" brands of cigarettes for the sub-editors...
● ...infrequently take a bus to beg a photograph of some guy killed in a road accident or at work from his recently bereaved widow...
● ...pick up the Wool Prices, of which I wot nothing.
Every three weeks there was a nightmarish addition to this schedule in which - every half-hour during the afternoon - I would take teleprinted lists of jockeys at all the day’s horse race meetings and amend race programmes for the Late News box.
Unimaginative, surprisingly exhausting – sometimes impossible - work, you’d say. And you’d be right.
Irregularly, I ceased to be a tea-boy. After a hurried dinner at home I would bus to a Bradford suburb, watch half an amateur dramatic society play (no time for the rest), return to the late-night office, write a review. Not well; not all were published.
The key word was “write”.
It was what I’d always wanted to do.
A good place to start. First jobs are rarely glamorous, but they can teach us how to work steady and reliably. Then, if we are lucky, we open our wings and fly away. Who knows where?
ReplyDeleteBROTHER SIR HUGH has, for imponderable reasons, been unable to post this comment on Tone Deaf, so I have stepped in to help. The uncharitable among you will no doubt say: "RR helped himself". I don't blame you.
ReplyDelete******
You are one of the fortunate in pursuing a career based on your vocation albeit with various ups and downs but those are inevitable throughout the whole of life.
I did have a vague vocation. Asked by Father what I wanted to do as my term at grammar school was ending I replied,
“I'm not sure. I like the outdoors, perhaps something in forestry?”
With his gruff autocratic voice he replied,
“There’s no money in that - you’d better go with Uncle Oliver”
I reckon if I’d been a girl I might have ended up with an arranged marriage.
I was well tutored for a few years in the ways of providing service by my more understanding uncle. That lead on to an interesting and reasonably successful career providing asset finance to many different kinds of business, only marred by the need to kowtow to the irritating whims of the senior management of my employers. I have a smug feeling knowing I have now drawn my pension from them for longer than my term of employment.
At the risk of inflating your ego more than I should I reckon many people have benefited from your inborn writing skills and not least myself - I have frequently felt the stab of your sharpened sword, and whilst you may not agree I know I have learnt much and whatever I write now would be inferior without having had that input.
Colette: I might, if I were feeling contumacious, dispute "lucky". Happily I have a full belly and am inclining towards a 30-minute doze.
ReplyDeleteSir Hugh: Three points:
(1) Suppose you had insisted on forestry? At that time there was no money in newspaper journalism either.
(2) Given senior management's irritating whims why didn't you move on? Or become a senior manager yourself and find out how enjoyable it is to impose your own irritating whims?
(3) I'm not sure I agree with the concept of "inborn" skills.
I always wanted to be a writer. I would write poems in kindergarten and ask the teacher if I could read them to the class. She always said yes. One poem began, "Now that I am old..." I wish I still had that. I went to college thinking I would study literature and journalism and finally begin writing. To fulfill a university science requirement I took a Physical Anthropology course and studied the evolution of primates. I fell in love. I changed my major and my life. As I've gotten older, I've grown to love writing again, and reading the words of fine writers.
ReplyDeleterobin andrea: Mate what you know about the principles of social anthopology with an ability to write clearly, unexpectedly and entertainingly, and you will enter an admirable elite - the blessed few who bestride the Two Cultures. Check CP Snow's essay on that very subject and you'll find yourself capable of adding one cubit to your stature. (Quote: Holy Bible).
ReplyDeleterobin andrea 2. Although my mother wrote poetry and had it published it was decades before I could even consider verse (my preferred term), in fact after I started blogging. Other bloggers encouraged me but all I could manage to begin with were classical forms (Notably the Shakespearean sonnet); I needed a rigid structure which helped me contain what I had to say. Here are two sonnets, both involving my wife; the first two or three weeks after we met in London, the second centring on our golden wedding anniversary
ReplyDeleteAutumn 1959
Hearing the pulse of Betjeman we rode
The line north-west to its extremity.
By Spice Isles (Wembley Park and Chorleywood)
To empty smoking roads of privacy.
That newness of ourselves we lost elsewhere
Yet I may touch the texture of that day:
The soft beige calf-length coat, the sleek gold square,
Suede gloves, the cloud-sprung head, the breath’s bouquet.
While I – a shabby swain – in mackintosh,
The stigma, later, of perverted age,
Smooth jowled, smooth cropped, smooth mind, all false panache
A vagrant on an unaccustomed stage.
An afternoon of chance-bred unity,
That led to this, a vital memory.
St Mary and St Eanswythe (church), October 1 1960
A golden day but let’s forsake fool’s gold
And go in search of useful tolerance.
For there’s no credit, dear, in growing old
And worshipping a doubtful permanence.
Instead we’ll build a fire of cliché sticks,
Burn cards of happiness and humdrum verse,
Distrust old facile “love” since reason mocks
An easy word to hide a lie or curse.
Let’s dwell on anger - pardoned on the wing,
A hand outstretched to aid a swollen knee
A joke that shares more than a wedding ring
A glass of wine that seals complicity.
Spare symbols, mantras, ill-used sentiment
Just say, do, listen, to our hearts’ content.
I envy you your primary school confidence. It was ages before I could even consider any form of public performance.
Well obviously you were at the start of a brilliant career.
ReplyDeleteBut apart from all the proper stuff you did and learned to do, the actual tea boy business is sorely needed and I don't know how often I have longed for a tea person to walk down the corridors at work, maybe followed by a biscuit lad.
Just a short note on your comment to my post on the Lullaby and your question about Brahm's Wiegenlied.
I cannot verify this but it was often said during my childhood that Magda, wife of goebbels, sang this to her six children the night she poisened them. One reason it never featured in my childhood uprbringing.
Sabine: I can't be absolutely sure your first sentence was or wasn't intended to be ironic. Whatever, the adjective "brilliant" doesn't apply. Almost two-thirds of my career was spent among specialist trade and/or industrial magazines, here and in the USA, which the majority would never have heard of. None had general appeal and it wasn't until the final eleven years, when I edited a magazine which dealt with a subject I truly understood (logistics), that I came close to achieving what I wanted and ending up with a somewhat battered reputation. Water under the bridge.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't matter whether the Goebbels anecdote was true or not, it left a song (always a subjective experience) tainted and that would have been enough. I sympathise wholeheartedly since something musically similar happened to me. A friend, now alas dead, gave us an LP of a very well-known soprano singing Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs. It was our first exposure to this masterpiece and we loved it. Also the performance.
Later we were to discover the soprano had continued to be employed in Nazi Germany during the war and wasn't in the slightest bit apologetic about the moral compromises this must have involved. Later still I watched her run a Masterclass based on a demanding Mozart aria where she was totally unfeeling towards the young soprano student, left her in tears. I am no longer able to listen to that Strauss expert with any kind of detachment. For what it's worth I understand your situation.