A FEW months ago I wrote about my time as a young reporter in a district office of the Burnley Evening Star. For most of the time there were only two of us in the place. As the junior, I would arrive at 8.30am, unlock the door, make a coffee, have a cigarette and do the police, fire and ambulance calls.
Some time between 9.15 and 9.30 a bus would stop outside and a balding, red-faced, middle-aged, overweight man would emerge. If the weather was dry he would remove his cheap plastic leather-look shoes and wipe his sweaty feet on the pavement.
He would charge through the front door and make a dash down the corridor to the loo. Often he didn’t make it in time. I well remember one day when the office cleaner, Edna, arrived for work and immediately returned to her house around the corner. She came back with a pair of washing tongs with which she brandished a pair of filthy underpants at my colleague. ‘I know these are yours,’ she told him. ‘You disgusting man.’
Such were the unedifying scenes I witnessed while working beside George Marston (not his real name, as he might just conceivably still be alive). Every morning he would sit at the desk, hands shaking, vowing never to touch another drop. And every evening he would be in his local, downing beer after beer after beer. An equally thirsty reporter of my acquaintance told me that during his own stretch at the district office he and George would get through an incredible 40 pints each in a day-long session.
Of course Marston could not drive – if he did he would have been permanently over the limit – so I had on occasion to act as his chauffeur. One day he asked if I could pick up his son John at the family home as he was going on a school trip. George came along for the ride and sat in the front while the teenage boy got in the back. ‘Now then, John,’ he said. ‘Hello, dad.’ ‘How are you doing?’ ‘OK, dad.’ ‘Tell me, John, how old will you be now?’
I occasionally met the long-suffering Mrs Marston, who had to get the bus to Burnley every week to pick up her husband’s expenses before he squandered the money on drink. She was quite presentable for someone who lived with a hopeless sot.
One Monday he arrived at work several hours late with his arm in plaster. He told me he had staggered home from the boozer in the early hours and crawled up the stairs to bed. At the top he noticed his glasses had slipped to the end of his nose. He tried to adjust them, pushed too hard and fell backwards down the steps. He slept where he landed and realised only the morning after that he had a broken arm to go with his hangover.
There were advantages for an ambitious young reporter in having such a colleague. I got to do all the good stories while he snored in his chair. And I would knock off early, leaving him to man the telephones while I was given a free seat at the cinema over the road.
One afternoon I was half way home when I realised I had left my wallet in the office. I got back to find a party in full sway with a motley collection of drunken ne’er-do-wells carousing around the desk swigging spirits from the bottle. Fortunately they hadn’t found the wallet.
On one of my days off a woman reporter from head office was ordered to be my stand-in. She later told me that Marston asked her to go and interview a recently bereaved widow and gave her the address. ‘Where is that?’ she asked. ‘I’ll show you, it’s not far.’
They arrived at a smart property on a hill, Marston puffing, panting and sweating. The girl rang the doorbell and a well-dressed woman answered it. ‘Hello, I’m Gill Stradling from the Evening Star. Sorry to trouble you, but . . .’
At that point Gill was elbowed out of the way. ‘Can I use your bog, love?’ asked George. ‘I’m dying for a piss.’ Unsurprisingly, the interview did not go ahead.
As you can imagine there were few highlights during my time at the district office, which overlooked a graveyard. I do recall, however, a most entertaining lunchtime interview in the pub with the dynamic young Rossendale Labour MP Mike Noble. He had brought along his colleague Joel Barnett, the member for Heywood & Royton and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, no less. He it was who gave his name to the notorious Barnett Formula which bestowed untold riches on the Scots. We did not, however, discuss fiscal issues but rather football matters over a few jars.
Noble was a lovely man, a college lecturer who reverted to his former career after defeat in the 1979 general election. He died of a heart attack aged only 48 while watching Burnley FC at Turf Moor.
After a year in the district office, having not for the first time witnessed Marston vomiting into a filing cabinet, I rang news editor Ray Horsfield and told him I’d had enough. ‘Not surprised,’ he said. ‘I’m amazed you lasted this long. Back to Burnley!’
By the time I left for the Daily Mail, George’s excesses had become such that he was made to work at the head office where the chief reporter could keep an eye on him. One morning the editor discovered two empty beer bottles on his desk. There could only be one culprit. George admitted that he had got lucky the previous night with a barmaid from the Red Lion. She was his on the editor’s carpet for the price of a Newcastle Brown. And they say romance is dead.
Old jokes’ home
After the boys at school found out I had a potentially fatal peanut allergy, they used to hold me up against a wall and play Russian Roulette with a bag of Revels.
A PS from PG
When news reached me through well-informed channels that my Aunt Agatha, for many years a widow, or derelict, as I believed it is called, was about to take another pop at matrimony, my first emotion, as was natural in the circumstances, had been a gentle pity for the unfortunate goop slated to step up the aisle with her – she, as you are aware, being my tough aunt, the one who eats broken bottles and conducts human sacrifices by the light of the full moon.
PG Wodehouse: Joy in the Morning