rivalry which ensured he always tried his best. Moreover, since he’d found himself all alone in the world, his colleagues had become a sort of surrogate family, keeping the emptiness at bay.
He breathed in the sweet, acrid smell of ink from the presses on the ground floor. For once, it wasn’t mingled with the scent of a hundred sweaty armpits. Even in December, it was always hot in the newsroom. All around him, whirring fans fluttered papers on empty desks. Despite frequent requests from upstairs, no one ever bothered to turn off their fan or angle-poise lamp. The air of ceaseless activity had to be maintained at all times.
No matter how often he entered the newsroom, Johnny just couldn’t get over that sense of stepping out on to a stage. His heart rate would pick up each time he came through the door, and he still experienced the same adrenalin rush he’d felt on his first day in the job.
Four years on, he could not quite believe he had made it to a desk in the newsroom of a national daily. In the scheme of things, his was still a lowly position. In the newsroom, your place in the pecking order was reflected by your location in the vast maze of desks: the closer you were to the centre—where the news editor held court—the more senior you were. Johnny was only a couple of yards from the door.
Getting a foot in the door had been a struggle. With no connections in the industry, Johnny had had to do it the hard way. On leaving school a week before his fourteenth birthday—the same day Johnny Weissmuller broke his own hundred metres freestyle world record at the Amsterdam Olympics—the young would-be journalist had landed himself a job running editorial and advertising copy down to the typesetters. From Sunday to Friday, he would put in long hours at the day-job, then three nights a week he’d head off to evening classes at the Technical College to get his diploma in Journalism.
With working days that sometimes didn’t finish till after midnight, it had been difficult for Johnny to keep up with the rest of the group even though he was a quick learner. But he’d persevered, and armed with his shiny new diploma he’d secured a job on one of the local rags in Islington. Not that there seemed much call for a diploma; his tasks ranged from listing jumble sales, weddings and funerals; reporting committee meetings and company outings; casting horoscopes; concocting letters to the editor; compiling easy-peasy crosswords; and, most important of all, making tea. In the end it paid off though: his efforts got him the coveted position of junior reporter on the Daily News.
Much to his dismay, it turned out that his new role entailed doing exactly the same things.
Fortunately for Johnny, he’d been taken in hand by Bill Fox. An old hack with nicotine-stained fingers to match his yellowing short-back-and-sides, Bill had been in the business for more than forty years, working his beat even through the war years, asthma having kept him out of the army.
Perhaps Bill recognised something of himself in the eighteen-year-old human dynamo, or perhaps he was impressed by Johnny’s sharp mind and fierce ambition, then again, maybe he was just won over by the cheeky grin. Whatever the reason, Bill had begun teaching the newcomer everything he knew, ranging from the intricacies of the News’ house style to the tricks of the trade: how to grab a reader by the lapels and not let him go, how to cut and cut until every word was made to work.
Each time Johnny delivered a piece of copy, Bill would lean precariously back in his chair and deliver words of wisdom, punctuating his speech by stabbing the air with the 2B pencil he kept behind his ear: “Remember, Coppernob, with the honourable exceptions of wine and women, less is more.”
But Bill’s advice went beyond the craft of writing and fine-tuning copy. He had covered subjects that Johnny’s Technical College diploma hadn’t touched upon. For him, journalism meant pounding the streets, ferreting out facts and stirring things up. While others his age had opted for a managerial role, sitting behind a desk telling others what to do, Bill preferred a more hands-on approach. He’d been delighted to have Johnny tag along as he demonstrated how to make the most of a lead, and to watch Bill in action was to enjoy a master-class in the art of interviewing reluctant witnesses and worming the truth out of those who were determined to bury it. Persistence, patience and curiosity were his watchwords.
As a result of this apprenticeship, Johnny learned how to turn to advantage the very things that might have worked against him: his deceptively young looks and short stature. He no longer minded being underestimated—if anything, he encouraged it. His job became so much easier when others lowered their guard.
Fox himself was prone to be underestimated by colleagues who judged him on his lack of promotion or love of booze, but to Johnny, he was a hero. Bill was the only person Johnny would tolerate calling him Coppernob—even though his hair was quite obviously strawberry blond.
The crime desk was, in reality, made up of six desks pushed together in a cramped corner of the third floor. These were occupied by a junior, four reporters—two for the day shift and two for the night—and the crime correspondent. Having made his way up from junior, Johnny was determined to gain his next promotion as soon as possible—preferably before his twenty-third birthday. Under a different boss, he would have been moving up the ladder much faster, but Gustav Patsel was a little bully in an age of bullies. While Hitler in Germany, Franco in Spain and Mussolini in Italy ranted and threw their weight about, Patsel swaggered and held sway in the newsroom. Everything about this cantankerous, capricious bore was round: his piggy-eyes peered out from behind round, wire-rimmed glasses. His white bald head was reminiscent of a ping-pong ball. His belly seemed to bulge more by the week: probably a result of too much bratwurst. Proud of his German heritage, Patsel was not shy of vaunting the führer’s galvanising effect on his homeland: the Volkswagen “people’s car”, designed by Ferdinand Porsche and launched in February, was the best car in the world; the Berlin Olympics in August had been the best games ever und so weiter—though he’d been strangely silent back in March when the Nazis invaded the Rhineland.
His colleagues had unaffectionately dubbed him Pencil and ridiculed him behind his back, but Patsel survived by virtue of a Machiavellian grasp of office politics. Even so, it was an open secret that the humourless Hun was looking to jump ship—he had been at loggerheads with either the night editor or the editor-in-chief ever since Johnny had joined the paper.
As much as he longed for Patsel’s departure, Johnny was terrified by rumours that Simkins might be poached to replace him.
The sooner Johnny got promotion, the more secure he’d be. However, to achieve that he needed to make a splash—and that meant a spectacular exclusive. The one that had made his name was a piece exposing a drugs racket at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. A senior pharmacist had masterminded a scheme whereby he and his cohorts were making a fortune on the black market, selling drugs from the hospital’s pharmacy. At a time when patients were struggling to pay for every pill, his cut-price rates had, he claimed, been an act of charity —a noble motive undermined by the fact that not many people needed addictive painkillers in wholesale quantities.
The whole thing had been going on under Johnny’s nose for a while before he smelled a story; back then, his mind had been on other things. It was during a visit to his dying mother that he had been surreptitiously offered cheap morphine by a member of the medical staff. He would have accepted, except that the drug was useless when, as in this case, the patient had bone cancer.
Johnny used his rage at his mother’s imminent death to work tirelessly—with Bill’s help—to expose the racket. The finished piece had raised questions in Parliament and renewed demands for the establishment of a National Health Service. However, apart from a few more prison cells being filled, nothing came of it all.
Johnny’s reward had been promotion from office junior to fully-fledged reporter. Unfortunately, thanks to Patsel, that had translated into the dubious distinction of reporting from the Old Bailey.
Court
