A Young Reporter With Not-So-Great Expectations
I worked four decades for newspapers and my strongest memories are of my first two jobs for small papers. I was young, dumb, and learned something every day—about journalism and the so-called real world.
Poppy, the first-person protagonist in the novel “My Turn to Make the Tea,” goes through the same learning process. As the only woman on the staff of The Downingham Post in provincial England, she writes about lightweight subjects, mostly.
“You do a thousand and one things besides your official job of reporter. You think up headlines for other people’s stories, you read proofs, and recorrect corrected proofs, and you reword ill-written advertisements and Birth, Death, and marriage notices (only In Memoriams are inviolate and have to be printed just as they are sent in), and worst of all, you have to rewrite some sense into the rambling reports on darts matches and whist drives sent in by local correspondents for the villages.”
I love the way she writes about mistakes. In the first chapter she gets a name wrong in a court story about a man who dumped a bowl of potatoes on his wife’s head during an argument. The woman whose name was mistakenly put in the story shows up at the office and chews out Poppy, who abjectly promises corrections plus published apologies in multiple editions.
Her editor, the textbook curmudgeon Mr. Pellet, chews her out. She stands there and takes it, expecting to be fired, but he cools down and says the woman is silly. Poppy brings him a cup of tea and keeps her job. It’s not clear if a correction ever ran, but an apology certainly didn’t. Editors in the late 1940s hated apologies, just like editors do now.
She learns about work-life balance when her co-worker, Vic, asks who in the newsroom wants to join him for a drink in the middle of the day. Poppy says she needs to wrap up some stories. “Finish them in the afternoon,” Vic says. “What do you think this is—a stop press edition?”
The lesson: “When you feel like a drink, go and have one.”
Poppy knows there’s “a gulf as vast as the Grand Canyon” between working on a provincial paper and working on Fleet Street. Like my fictional Millerton Eagle, The Downingham Post’s focus is stiflingly local.
“In the provinces you are not really a newspaper in the strict sense of the word. You are more like a parish magazine. … Tremendous events may be afoot in the great world outside, but you are only interested in what happened within your fifteen-mile radius.”
She says working on The Post is more fun than toiling for a big paper because you’re involved in the weekly adventure of putting out the whole thing, not just doing your one little job. I can vouch for that.
I laughed at one thing Poppy and her colleagues blatantly did. It’s something done secretly on many papers, even today, though newsroom management officially forbids it. I never, ever considered doing it.
At the instruction of their editor, The Downingham Post reporters would sit down together in the newsroom and happily clip articles from their competitor, The Downingham Messenger. They’d change the headline and first sentence, then copy the rest to get “an original story.”
This is not only unethical, it can cause a reporter great embarrassment. One of my long-ago coworkers lifted information from another paper and ended up having to copy something else—the correction the other paper ran the next day. Then he had the pleasure of explaining how two competing newspapers made the exact same mistake in the same story.
Dickens was the great-granddaughter of the author Charles Dickens, who gave us Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, and other novels so famous that people who don’t read much have heard of them. She wrote more than 30 books, including two other workplace books about her experiences as a cook and a nurse. She married an American serviceman and lived in the United States until her husband died. She moved back to England and died in 1992 at the age of 77.
