After our marriage, my wife and I had gone back to the States for two years while I finished college, so my job at the Echo was not only my first real job in Britain, but my first real grownup job, and throughout the two years I worked there I never ceased to feel like a fourteenyearold masquerading as an adult, doubtless because nearly all my fellow subeditors were old enough to be my father, except for a couple of cadaverous figures at the far end who were old enough to be their fathers.
I sat next to a pair of kindly and learned men named Jack Straight and Austin Brooks, who spent two years patientlyexplaining to me the meaning of sub judice and the important distinction in English law between taking a car and stealing a car. For my own safety, I was mostly entrusted with the job of editing the Townswomen's Guild and Women's Institute reports. We received stacks and stacks of these daily, all seemingly written in the same florid hand and all saying the same numbing things: 'A most fascinating demonstration was given by Mr Arthur Smoat of Pokesdown on the Art of Making Animal Shadows', 'Mrs Evelyn Stubbs honoured the assembled guests with a most fascinating and amusing talk on her recent hysterectomy', 'Mrs Throop was unable to give her planned talk on dog management because of her recent tragic mauling by her. mastiff, Prince, but Mrs Smethwick gamely stepped into the breach with an hilarious account of her experiences as a freelance funeral organist.' Every one of them went on and on with page after page of votes of thanks, appeals for funds, longwinded accounts of successful jumble sales and coffee mornings, and detailed lists of who had supplied which refreshments and how delightful they all were. I have never experienced longer days.
The windows, I recall, could only be opened by means of a long pole. About ten minutes after we arrived each morning, one subeditor so old he could barely hold a pencil would begin scraping his chair about in an effort to get some clearance from his desk. It would take him about an hour to get out of his chair and another hour to shuffle the few feet to the window and finagle it open with the pole and another hour to lean the pole against the wall and shuffle back to his desk. The instant he was reseated, the man who sat opposite him would bob up, stride over, shut the window with the pole and return to his seat with a challenging look on his face, at which point the old boy would silently and stoically begin the chairscraping process all over again. This went on every day for two years through all seasons.
I never saw either one of them do a lick of work. The older fellow couldn't, of course, because he spent all but a few moments each day travelling to or from the window. The other guy mostly sat sucking on an unlit pipe and staring at me with a kind of smirk. Every time our gazes locked he would ask me some mystifying question to do with America. Tell me,' he would say, 'is it true that Mickey Rooney never consummated his marriage with Ava Gardner, as I've read?' or 'I've often wondered, and perhaps you can tell me, why is it that the nuanua bird of Hawaii subsists only on pinkshelled molluscs when whiteshelled molluscs are more numerous and of equal nutritive value, or so I've read.'
I would look at him, my mind fogged with Townswomen's Guild and Women's Institute reports, and say, 'What?'
'You have heard of the nuanua bird, I take it?'
'Er, no.'
He would cock an eye. 'Really? How extraordinary.' And then he'd suck his pipe.
It was altogether a strange place. The editor was a recluse who had his meals brought to his chamber by his secretary and seldom ventured out. I only saw him twice in all the time I was there, once when he interviewed me, a meeting that lasted three minutes and seemed to cause him considerable discomfort, and once when he opened the door that connected his room to ours, an event so unusual that we all looked up. Even the old boy paused in his endless shuffle to the window. The editor stared at us in a kind of frozen astonishment, clearly dumbfounded to find a roomful of subeditors on the other side of one of his office doors, looked for a moment as if he might speak, then wordlessly retreated, shutting the door behind him. It was the last I ever saw of him. Six weeks later, I took a job in London.
Something else that had changed in Bournemouth was that all the little coffee bars had gone. There used to be one every three or four doors, with their gasping espresso machines and sticky tables. I don't know where holidaymakers go for coffee nowadays yes I do: the Costa del Sol but I had to walk nearly all the way to the Triangle, a distant point where local buses go to rest between engagements, before I was able to have a modest and refreshing cup.
Afterwards, fancying a bit of an outing, I caught a bus to Christchurch with a view to walking back. I got a seat at the top front of a yellow doubledecker. There is something awfully exhilarating about riding on the top of a doubledecker. You can see into upstairs windows and peer down on the tops of people's heads at busstops (and when they come up the stairs a moment later you can look at them with a knowing look that says: 'I've just seen the top of your head') and there's the frisson of excitement that comes with careering round a corner or roundabout on the brink of catastrophe. You get an entirely fresh perspective on the world. Towns generally look more handsome from the top deck of a bus, but nowhere more so than Bournemouth. At street level, it'sf essentially like any other English town lots of building society offices and chain stores, all with big plateglass windows but upstairs you suddenly realize that you are in one of Britain's great Victorian communities. Bournemouth didn't even exist before about 1850 it was just a couple of farms between Christchurch and Poole and then it positively boomed, throwing up piers and promenades and miles of ornate brick offices and plump, stately homes, most of them with elaborate corner towers and other busy embellishments that are generally now evident only to bus riders and window cleaners.
What a shame it is that so little of this Victorian glory actually reaches the ground. . But then, of course, if you took out all that plate glass and made the ground floors of the buildings look as if they belonged to the floors above, we might not be able to see right into every Sketchley's and Boots and Leeds Permanent Building Society and what a sad loss that would be. Imagine passing a Sketchley's and not being able to see racks of garments in plastic bags and an assortment of battered carpet shampooers and a lady at the counter idly cleaning her teeth with a paperclip, and think how dreary life would be. Why, it's unthinkable.
I rode the bus to the end of the line, the car park of a big new Sainsbury's at the New Forest end of Christchurch, and found my way through a network of pedestrian flyovers to the Highcliffe road. About a halfmile further on, down a little sideroad, stood Highcliffe Castle, formerly the home of Gordon Selfridge, the department store magnate, and now a ruin.
Selfridge was an interesting fellow who provides a salutary moral lesson for us all. An American, he devoted his productive years to building Selfridges into Europe's finest shopping emporium, in the process turning Oxford Street into London's main shopping venue. He led a life of stern rectitude, early bedtimes and tireless work. He drank lots of milk and never fooled around. But in 1918 his wife died and the sudden release from marital bounds rather went to his head. He took up with a pair of HungarianAmerican cuties known in musichall circles as the Dolly Sisters, and fell into rakish ways. With a Dolly on each arm, he took to roaming the casinos of Europe, gambling and losing lavishly. He dined out every night, invested foolish sums in racehorses and motorcars, bought Highcliffe Castle and laid plans to build a 250room estate at Hengistbury Head near by. In ten years he raced through $8 million, lost control of Selfridges, lost his castle and London home, his racehorses and his RollsRoyces, and eventually ended up living alone in a small flat in Putney and travelling by bus. He died penniless and virtually forgotten on 8 May 1947. But of course he had had the inestimable pleasure of bonking twin sisters, which is the main thing.