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.
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