Sharon Griffiths - Time of My Life

Golden weddings! I hadn’t done those since my early days on the weekly. But off I went dutifully with Marje. We had to walk to the old people’s houses. There seemed to be only one van for the staff, and the photographers used it all the time. Reporters had to walk.

Marje strode briskly along.

‘Have you been on The News long?’ I asked, with the little breath I had left. She was setting a cracking pace and I was struggling to keep up.

‘Since the war,’ she said. ‘I was on the switchboard and when all the men got called up there was only me and old Mr Henfield left, so I started doing everything.’

The war again.

‘Young Mr Henfield, the one who’s editor now, was in the army. And Gordon and most of the others. John, the Chief Sub Editor, was in the RAF – got the DFC but he never talks about it. The younger ones weren’t, of course. Billy and Phil were just a bit too young, lucky for them. But they’ve done their call-up and their fifteen days since.’

‘Fifteen days?’

‘Yes, you know. Two years’ national service and then fifteen days every year for three years. Don’t they do that in America?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said vaguely, too fed up to argue about this American business. ‘Something very like.’

I was really getting into this 1950s thing. It was almost as if I were really there. But it was a bit worrying that everyone else seemed to have done so much research. Maybe they’d had more notice than I had. That wouldn’t be hard. Ah well, I would just have to wing it. Tricky though. I was trying to get my head around the fact that the war had only finished ten or eleven years ago, because that was as if, well that was as if it had been finishing just when I was doing A levels. Weird.

Walking along, I could see bits of the present town but not many. I had to say that the TV company had been very thorough. You could almost believe you really were back in the 1950s. There were so many more shops, for a start, lots of little ones. Lots of butchers, a couple of bakers. No candlestick-makers, but a fishmonger, two bookshops, lots of tobacconists, a wool shop, toy shop, baby clothes, another couple of chemists, a china shop, a couple of ironmongers. No supermarkets, but grocers’ shops like Home and Colonial, and Liptons … To be honest, it all looked a bit run-down.

Then I could smell it … coffee. Proper coffee …

‘Oh Marje, can I really smell coffee?’

‘Probably Silvino’s is just around the corner.’

‘Silvino’s?’

‘Italian coffee bar.’

‘Oh glory be. We haven’t got time, have we? Just for a quick coffee. I’m longing for coffee …’

‘No time, sorry,’ said Marje and I had to ignore the tantalising smell as we hurried off to the first golden wedding. Nice couple. (Recipe for happy marriage – he always tipped up his pay packet on a Friday night and she always had a hot meal ready for him.)

Luckily, George the photographer turned up to take their picture when we were there. He was only a young lad, in a baggy suit that looked far too big on him, but he seemed to know what he was doing. And he had the van, which meant that Marje and I could squash into the rickety front seat and get a lift to the next golden wedding couple. Eric and Bessie had met in the church choir, still sang in it. They said the secret of a happy marriage was never to let the sun go down on a quarrel. Bessie looked smug and Eric tried to pinch my bum. Randy old goat.

I suppose they were all extras. There seemed to be an awful lot of them. I didn’t realise that the TV company had such a huge budget. Still, I suppose when they did the Castaway series they took over a whole island for a year, so a big film set for a few weeks would be comparatively cheap. Looked very real though, fair play.

Afterwards, while George went off on another job, Marje and I walked back to the office and I remembered about my Oxo tin. I opened it carefully. Inside was a brown paper bag. It smelt of candles and polish and a musty under-the-stairs sort of smell. Inside that was a sandwich made with doorsteps of good white bread, filled with something that smelled a bit odd. I took a tentative bite and tried to work out what it was. It had a sort of fishy taste. Sort of. A bit like cat food.

Then I remembered my gran’s kitchen cupboard, those funny little jars. Fish paste. I was eating a fish paste sandwich. I suppose it made a change from M & S’s poached Scottish salmon with dill mayonnaise and watercress on oatmeal bread. And the bread was nice.

Then Marje had to show me how to type up a story.

What a chew! There was this mucky black paper, carbon paper, that made a smudgy sort of copy. You had to put three pieces of paper together, with two bits of carbon between them, and roll them into a typewriter. The typewriter took for ever. It was so heavy. You really had to bash the keys. And I kept forgetting to push the thing that made it go to the next line, so I kept typing on the roller instead of the paper. And you couldn’t delete mistakes!

‘Bet you wish computers were invented,’ I said to Marje.

‘Computers? Why?’ She looked at me blankly. She was very good at pretending to belong to the 1950s. I think she must have been one of the testers rather than a competitor.

‘Well, you know, quick and easy to type, correct your mistakes, spell check.’

‘Spell check?’

‘Yes, it corrects your spelling for you.’

‘That’s handy if you can’t spell. How does it do it?’

‘Um, I don’t know really. But that’s before you start on the internet.’

‘The which?’

‘Internet. You can find anything you want to know in seconds. About anything. Facts, figures, famous people, shopping. You can go on the internet, find things and buy them.’

‘How does it do it?’

‘I don’t know, but it’s wonderful. And—’

‘You don’t know much, really, do you?’ said Marje, lighting another cigarette. ‘Especially about spelling.’ She turned back to my chaotic-looking copy and carried on swiftly marking up my mistakes. Most of them weren’t actually spelling mistakes you understand, just typing mistakes from using the heavy typewriter.

‘That computer thing must have rotted your brain. Here,’ she handed my piece back to me, ‘you’d better type it again or the subs will go mad. See you in the morning.’ She picked up her string bag of shopping and went home to cook supper for her husband.

I typed up the golden weddings again and, because there were no messengers around, and because I was curious, took it along myself to the subs’ room. The subs, all men, were smoking pipes or cigarettes and sitting around a long table, marking up the copy ready for the printers. As soon as I walked into the room I had that feeling you get in some offices – as though you’d walked into a private club and you’re an outsider. Horrid.

One of the men looked up from the piece of paper he was writing on and whistled at me. Another sat back in his chair. Soon all the men, six of them, were sitting staring at me. The first said, ‘Well, well, what have we got here? Hello girlie, who are you?’

‘Rosie Harford. I’m here for a while as a reporter and features writer.’

‘Features writer eh? We used to have one of those, but the legs fell off,’ said one young man. They all laughed uproariously as if he had made the wittiest remark ever.

Another older man leant across the desk. ‘Well Rosie, you’ve certainly got rosie cheeks. Rosie by name, rosie by nature. If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?’

More sniggers.

‘Watch yourself,’ I said. ‘That’s sexist language.’

They looked shocked for a moment and then the laughter started again. Slowly at first and building up as each man joined in more noisily than the one before.