The Accidental Time Traveller (20 page)

Oh dear, he was beginning to look at me. Meaningfully. I wasn’t sure I could cope.

‘You’d love it in London,’ I said quickly. ‘All those new people, all those stories. And a real chance to make your name. You could be famous, get to cover all the big stories. And you could do it. You’re as good as any of the national people.’

‘Well, I could have a go. I know I’d be as good as my mate on the
Express
and he’s doing all right for himself.’

‘Well there you are then. Go for it. It could be great.’

‘It would, wouldn’t it?’ he grinned. ‘Well maybe I shall.’ He paid the bill – refusing my offer to go halves – and we went in to see the film.

It was
Blackboard Jungle
, and had music with Bill Haley.

‘Best be careful,’ said Phil, ‘when they showed this in some places the teddy boys started ripping the seats.’

‘Oh, a riot. Be a good story though wouldn’t it?’

He laughed as he led the way to the seats.

I was looking forward to seeing
Blackboard Jungle
. I remembered watching it at about two in the morning when I’d come in from a not very good party. That would have been tricky to explain to Phil … But when the film started it wasn’t
Blackboard Jungle
at all, but some feeble cowboy film. I was about to tell Phil we were in the wrong studio when I realised that this was the supporting film, the B movie.

There was an interval and we had an ice cream and then settled down for the main feature. When the titles rolled and the Bill Haley music blasted out, a group of kids near the front yelled and whistled and tried to bop a bit, but everyone else told them to ‘hush!’ and the usherette came down the aisles with a big torch and said loudly, ‘Any nonsense from you lot and you’re OUT,’ and they all settled down quietly again.

‘No riots here then,’ whispered Phil. ‘Think we’ve missed our page one lead tomorrow.’

‘Unless it’s “Usherette curbs teenage gang violence with her torch”’, I whispered back. I could just see Phil’s grin in the dark.

‘Good thing our schools aren’t like that, eh?’ he said later.

I thought of the story I’d done on The Meadows before the new headmistress had arrived there. Disaster. Kids on strike, drugs in school, stabbing in the playground. Mayhem. ‘Oh yeah, good thing,’ I whispered back.

When the lights went up, Phil grabbed my hand. ‘Come on!’ he urged and we scuttled out. Odd, I thought, then I heard a creaky rendition of the National Anthem and those people who weren’t leaving, like us, were in their places, standing to attention. Sliding out just ahead of us were Leo/Lenny and Peggy. They must have been sitting a few rows behind us.

‘Well, that’s something I thought I’d never see,’ said Phil. ‘Still, nowt so queer as folk, as they say.’ He looked at me in a sort of knowing way.

I smiled quickly, to show I understood, but after my very awkward conversation with Billy, I said nothing. It was dark now, and the town was quiet. There were just a few people coming from the cinema and leaving pubs, shouting their goodnights. The evening was over, people were clearly heading for home. I wished I was going home, proper home, wandering along the pavement with my arms wrapped around Will, after something as ordinary as a film. Home together. We could have a nightcap, curl up on the sofa together, go to bed …

I missed him so much I almost gasped with the pain of it. Instead, here I was with Phil, who was a perfectly nice, decent sort of bloke. But he wasn’t Will.

I looked at my watch.

‘What time do the pubs shut?’ I asked Phil.

‘Ten o’clock,’ he said.

Too late even for a drink. Probably just as well.

After we left the town centre, we seemed to have the night and the streets to ourselves. Two buses pulled away from the Market Place, but there were only a handful of cars around. It was very peaceful. The noise of our footsteps echoed along the silent houses, until we got to the Browns’.

So what happens now? I wondered. ‘I’m not sure if I can ask you in,’ I said. ‘It’s not my house and …’

‘It’s all right, don’t worry,’ said Phil. He too looked hesitant.

‘Well it’s been a nice evening,’ he said.

‘Yes it has,’ I said, and meant it. ‘Thank you very much. And you should definitely have a crack at the
Express
. Really.’

‘Yes I think I might, but don’t mention it to the others, will you?’

‘No, of course not.’

‘No well, thank you.’

‘Thank you.’

‘See you tomorrow then.’

‘Yes, see you tomorrow.’

He shifted his mac, which he had been carrying, from arm to arm and back again, then said again, ‘Right. Well, see you tomorrow then.’

‘Yes.’

‘Goodnight Rosie.’

‘Goodnight Phil.’

He turned and strode off up the road, leaving me with the key in the lock, wondering about not even getting a goodnight kiss …

Phil was a friendly face around the office, however. Someone to share a joke with, nip out for a coffee with. He was a lovely straightforward sort of chap and easy to talk to. Gordon had been a lech. Henfield still was. Alan more or less ignored me, and after that first disastrous evening, I avoided the sub editors as much as possible. Phil was the nearest to normal I had.

I was into the 1950s way of working now, adapted to a very different rhythm to the one I was used to. For a start, the phones didn’t ring as often. People were more likely to turn up at the office, so I was constantly running up and down the stairs to see them. Or we would be out and about a lot more. Many of the people we interviewed didn’t have a telephone, or wouldn’t be comfortable interviewed that way. It was all face to face.

I didn’t keep stopping to check texts on my phone – still dead and useless. And, above all, there was no internet, no emails, no constant bombardment of information and press releases and news flashes. It was surprisingly restful. You could get on with doing something in your own time without constantly checking your in-box. Getting information was tricky, but up on the top floor, the librarians waded through files and cuttings and found out most of what we wanted.

It just wasn’t instant. No one expected things to be instant. And after a while, neither did I. All our twenty-first-century toys were designed to save us time and energy, so why were the 1950s so much less stressful? Weird. I would love to have talked about it to someone, if not Will, then Phil, but I wouldn’t have known where to begin.

‘You know I’ll be going back home soon,’ I said to him one day as we’d sneaked out for a coffee. ‘And you’ll be off to Fleet Street.’

He looked crestfallen for barely a second as his thoughts of a future with me fought with a future in Fleet Street. To my relief, Fleet Street won hands down. ‘I’ve gathered some cuttings together, to show what I can do,’ he said. ‘I’m going to send them to my mate so he can show them to his editor.’

‘Good move,’ I said.

Phil was straightforward enough. As for Billy … it was tricky being alone with him. I found it hard remembering how to behave, hard to behave naturally. Sometimes I could feel him watching me, but when I looked he was always intent on his story on the typewriter. Until one day I must have been quicker and caught his glance. And what a glance.

We gazed at each other across the newsroom. It was no ordinary look. I could feel myself blushing. With that Phil came in with a bag of currant buns.

‘Feeding time at the zoo,’ he announced, offering the bag around, ‘courtesy of Councillor Armstrong, baker of this parish. Hopeless councillor but, luckily, a very good baker.’

He bowled a bun to Billy who batted it away with a ruler. Instinctively I reached up and caught it, to cheers from them both.

‘Owzat!’ shouted Phil. Billy smiled. An ordinary friendly sort of smile, which was both a relief and a disappointment to me.

A sort of camaraderie developed. But the real breakthrough came a few days later.

Billy was in with Smarmy Henfield. Alan was at a council meeting, and Phil was on the phone. The office was quiet and peaceful. I was typing away at some odds and ends of stories, when a messenger came up from reception to say there were two ladies downstairs who wanted to talk to a reporter. Off I went.

‘Theatricals,’ said the young messenger knowingly. Certainly the girls had stage presence. They were about eighteen years old, very smartly dressed and very heavily made up, with vivid red-painted nails. In the dusty reception area of
The News
they looked positively exotic.

‘Are you a reporter?’ one of them asked me, eyeing me up and down and not looking terribly impressed. ‘A
proper
reporter?’

I assured them I was.

‘Well we’ve got a story to tell and we want it told. He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.’

‘No he shouldn’t,’ said the other.

‘We’re decent girls.’

‘Never heard of such a thing.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said gently, ‘if you were to start at the beginning …’

Their names, they told me, with perfectly straight faces, were Marcella and Loulou. They were actresses with a touring company that was appearing at the Civic. I’d seen the notices and the reviews. It wasn’t going well. It was a sort of French farce, I think.

‘We play the maids,’ said Loulou, or it may have been Marcella. ‘We wear very short skirts that show off our assets.’

I bet, I thought.

‘But we have a lot of lines to say. We’re actresses.’

‘We can sing too.’

‘And dance.’

‘We used to be Dinky Diamond Dancers, but that was when we were young. Now we are developing our careers.’

‘Good for you. So what’s the problem?’

‘Mr Hennessey.’

‘He runs the company.’

‘It’s not going well. Hardly anyone in the audience even though he’s given tickets away.’

‘Hardly a snigger when he drops his trousers.’

‘Even though he’s wearing huge spotty underpants.’

‘So he said,’ and here their brassy confidence faltered a little. ‘He
told
us.’

‘That it would be better if, instead of him taking his clothes off,
we
did it.’

‘If
you
did it?’ I looked up sharply from my notebook. ‘He wants you to take your clothes off on stage?’

‘Yes. He says we’ll be behind a screen – sort of hiding –when one of the wives comes in.’

‘Then the juvenile lead rushes in and “accidentally” knocks the screen over. And there we are.’

‘With nothing on.’

‘As nature intended.’

‘My mum will kill me.’

‘My dad’ll disown me.’

‘But he said it will get the audiences in. All the men will come.’

‘Good clean family fun, he says.’

‘But we don’t want to do it.’

‘We’re not going to.’

‘We’ve got principles.’

‘So we’re going home. Leaving the company.’

‘Right,’ I said, trying to sort this out. ‘Your boss wants you to be naked on stage and you don’t want to be, so you’re walking out. That seems sensible. So what’s the problem?’

‘He hasn’t paid us.’

‘Not for four weeks.’

‘Says there’s no money and there won’t be unless we take our clothes off.’

‘No punters, no pay, he says.’

‘And certainly not what’s owed us.’

‘We’re actresses, not strippers.’

‘Why should we?’

Exactly. The phrases ‘constructive dismissal’ and ‘sexual harassment’ floated around in my head, but I didn’t even think about it. Not where we were.

Instead, I got Charlie down to take a picture of the girls who, serious actresses that they were, pulled their skirts up above the knee and puckered up provocatively. I went around to see their actor manager, who was a slimy little beast. It was hard to imagine him as a jovial cove in huge spotty underpants. He was also a calculating old rogue and knew the value of publicity. He said if the girls would come back until the end of the run – another two weeks – even with their clothes on, he’d pay them all he owed them and they would be free to go.

‘And what about some compensation?’

He looked at me angrily.

‘What do you mean compensation?’

‘I mean you’ve upset those girls, bullied them into walking out of their jobs. Not to mention the fact you haven’t paid them for a month.’

‘Upset? Those two? Hard as nails, the little trollops. They’re lucky to have a job at all. Have you seen the way they move on stage? Like baby bloody elephants. No one’s queuing up to give those two jobs, believe me. And don’t tell me that they wouldn’t show all they’ve got if they had the chance. They’d have gone to Fanshaw’s Follies and worn nothing more than a few feathers and a smile if they could. But they haven’t got the ankles.’

I thought ankles were probably the most irrelevant qualification, but no matter.

You could see the actor/manager was dreadfully torn between paying up and the chance to turn bad publicity into excellent publicity. His business brain finally won. Eventually, we agreed that the girls would get all the wages due to them today, and that if they stayed to the end of the run, they’d get an extra fiver each.