About The Chronicle

Frankie Allen stood in the lift, his back to the wall, facing the mock-Tudor bar he had just left.

He had not looked back when he had pressed the button to summon the lift to the first floor of the Elizabeth Hotel in Johannesburg. Perhaps he didn’t want to look back at the colleagues remaining in the bar, carrying on with their drinking and chatting, carrying on with their lives. But in the split second it took for the lift doors to close Frankie Allen turned around and surveyed the scene for the last time – the laughter, the smell of spilt beer and stale cigarette smoke, of perfume, of sweat from what he would never describe as honest toil.

Pressing the button to summon the lift Frankie Allen had turned his back on journalism and the mock-Tudor upstairs bar of the Elizabeth Hotel. The moment was not lost on one of the younger members staff, the deputy news editor of the Star in Johannesburg who still had his career ahead of him.

“Christ, those lift doors are closing on Frankie’s life,” perhaps not realising the wisdom, the irony, the metaphor in those words.

From that day in the early 1970s Don Bentley could not see a lift’s doors closing in front of him without thinking of Frankie Allen. He also thought of a journalist described as Frankie’s partner in crime Barry van Rensburg and all the others who had carried a look of trepidation, of anxiety at leaving the great family of journalism and steeping out into the real world they had viewed from behind their typewriters, and later computer screens, to contemplate the unknown.

In many occupations, retirement is something to be eagerly anticipated, something to be relished and cherished, something to work towards.

The journalism Bentley had known operated in a parallel universe to the real world beyond the newsroom and the joys of that world did not necessarily apply to that trade, where different rules and a different perspective came into play.

Every profession has what sociologists call an “occupational mythology” to sustain it, a mix of workplace conventions, dramas, gossip and socialising. These conventions usually only touch on socialising out of hours, of golf days and office and works outings, but in journalism work and socialising with contacts and colleagues comes as part of the job. The office watering hole is as essential to journalism – particularly newspaper journalism – as the newsroom, a place where introductions to stories are honed and headlines written and re-written.

The coffee machine or tea trolley might suffice as the meeting point in other offices, but journalists gather to talk their business in that universal place “over the road”, because a watering hole is always over the road, but not too far to walk.

Drink fuels the mythology of journalism, in which journalists make their profession glamorous and glorious to themselves and others. In what other occupation can the alcoholic be celebrated and regaled, and divorce be seen as an occupational hazard? Journalists have to be larger than life.

Frankie Allen left the Elizabeth Hotel watering hole, and indeed the Star, for a life of retirement living on a sheep farm as far from the city of gold, Johannesburg, as he could get.

The farm was situated among blue mountains in the semi-desert Karoo in the Eastern Cape and the office gossip posed the question what would Frankie do in such a place, the home of relatives near the historic town of Graaf-Reinet. For a start it was at least 15 kilometres from the nearest pub, in the Dutch pioneer governor’s residence, the Drostdy House, now an upmarket boutique hotel on the town’s dusty main street.

Barry van Rensburg, like the others in the Elizabeth Hotel watching the lift doors close on Frankie’s life, defended his friend and his decision to cut all links with both the Star and Johannesburg. Van Rensburg was picture editor of the newspaper, and Allen the caption writer who sat between Van Rensburg’s desk and that of the chief sub-editor in the newsroom. Van Rensburg and Allen were inseparable, both in the Star building and over the road at the Elizabeth Hotel.

Van Rensburg had a romantic view of Graff-Reient and the area’s Valley of Desolation. In recent years he had taken to swinging a camera again as opposed to directing photographic coverage and choosing pictures and had just returned from holiday to the Eastern Cape where he had photographed the last of the steam trains crossing the Lootsberg Pass, threading through the flat-topped mountains above Graaf-Reinet, before they were phased out in favour of diesel traction.

“Oh the mix. Steam and smoke and the early morning Karoo light, blue cranes flapping by the trackside, a photographer’s dream,” he had announced to those assembled in the bar when he returned.

Frankie was not into photography, someone interjected to point out. He was more at home in a betting shop up on the hill above Johannesburg, in Hillbrow.

Barry van Rensburg didn’t reply, but a few days later he had news for his photographic team, and the rest of the newsroom. He had made a decision to retire after 40 years in journalism, and follow his good friend Frankie out the door.

“I’ve been picture editor for so long I’ve forgotten why I entered this business, to actually take pictures not to bollock or praise other people for theirs. I’m going back to being a photographer, to freelance, and take pictures of what I want to, without pressure to meet a news schedule.”

Van Rensburg had done the sums and realised that he had enough in his pension after a working life-time with the Star to pay his way.

And van Rensburg, one of the most popular people in the office who would hold court in the Elizabeth Hotel for a few hours every evening after work, said he was not leaving town like Frankie, and he would be calling into the Elizabeth Hotel from time to time.

After van Renburg’s lavish send-off in the Star building, he was indeed scarce about town – for about a month. Then he began to be seen more and more frequently in the mock-Tudor bar of the hotel across the road from the Star building.

Sometimes he would be seen with his camera bag, but most often not. Sometimes he accepted assignments from the Star for feature articles and sometimes not.

One of the Star’s sports journalists, who had returned from working in the company’s New York bureau, was looking for a photographer for an important, freelance assignment that might aid his dream of returning to America to work there permanently.

While in New York he had made contact with Sports Illustrated magazine and had agreed to supply some features for them about South African sportsman, as part of a wider campaign to compile a resume to be shown to prospective American employees, Sports Illustrated included. The sports journalist knew the golfer Gary Player personally and had arranged to write a feature about an aspect of his life that was not common knowledge, a passion for raising horse racing on a stud in the Karoo town of Colesberg.

Van Rensburg was to go with the sport writer to take pictures.

The photographer’s drinking had become a source of concern for the patrons of the Elizabeth Hotel for some months after his retirement. Worse, Barry van Rensburg was out of step with the craic in the pub, not working at the Star he had little to contribute in conversation about day to day journalism, and the issues that concerned.

It is a common problem for retirees – in all trades and professions – who meet up with former, working colleagues, trying to maintain contact.

Van rensburg, when asked, couldn’t even tell of his adventures as a freelance photographer, his assignments and travels, simply because he did so little.

The trip to photograph Gary Player promised to be an opening for not just the sports writer but Barry van Rensburg, perhaps proving to his ex-colleagues back at the pub that he still had it. It might even give him a new direction that would keep him out of the watering hole, where most afternoons he was to be found waiting for his former colleagues to cross the road from the em>Star.

Barry van Rensburg and the reporter drove for a day into the hot and hostile world of the Karoo. There was Gary Player to meet them with a cup of tea. The interview commenced and when it came to take pictures the trio encountered a problem. Barry van Rensburg had forgotten to bring any film for his camera.

After about a year in the Karoo, Frankie Allen retuned to Johannesburg, not to visit his former colleagues in the Elizabeth Hotel but to frequent another bar well away from the Johannesburg business district, a bar in the apartment-world of Hillbrow where rents were cheap.

Within 16 months of retirement, Barry van Rensburg was dead aged 59, after being declared an alcoholic.

The assignment was not the one reporter Lucy Archer wanted when she looked at the newsroom diary that morning. Courts were sitting, there might be a juicy case and here she was presented with the prospect of joining a dating agency with the eventual aim of writing a feature article about this growing social phenomenon.

She came to Bentley to complain, who always provided a sympathetic ear for reporters with a complaint, a grouse. Bentley always listened, and understood.

He’d been there, done it, and understood. What’s more, as Bentley observed more and more frequently with advancing years, nothing seemed to have changed much in the business of news gathering. Stories, and issues, and a reporter’s response to them, came round again and again. Lucy’s complaint took him back to years ago, to the English military town of Aldershot where he worked as a sub-editor briefly between Fleet Street jobs, looking for a quick buck to see him by.

The news editor of the Aldershot News had taken note of the growing number of advertisements for dating agencies appearing in the classified pages and appearing on radio and television.

In the old days as Bentley remembered them it was all about signing up to a physical agency with modest offices on the High Street, presenting a form with personal details to a friendly intermediary and handing over a black and white photograph of yourself and a modest fee.

Now the friendly intermediary, the “counsellor” had vanished and the internet had taken over. Lucy Archer was signing up online, attaching a carefully selected colour photograph in PDF form to her email.

Instead of waiting in anticipation for a letter giving details of a “date”, as in days of old, and possibly their telephone number, now it was instantaneous. An email with picture would arrive and an assignation could be arranged online.

“Shit,” said a reporter from the 1970s with the same assignment, as Bentley remembered it 40 years on. Sally Ritchie sat not in front of a computer terminal, but a sit-up-and-beg Royal typewriter.

“Of all the stories I have to get. This could be so embarrassing. I’m not looking for love, well not in that way. Why me?”

The news editor explained that among his staff Sally Ritchie appeared the perfect candidate for this assignment. She was unmarried, and unattached, and in her late-twenties, which might appear a perfect age for someone looking for love.

“Are you saying that all women in their late twenties are on the shelf, can’t find a man?” she had said indignantly to the news editor, a man in this late 50s, and happily married to the woman he met in the newsroom 25 years previously.

“No, Sally, didn’t mean it that way. I meant to say, you, unlike my younger staff, are experienced in journalism, have a nice touch with your writing. If anyone can do this story, bring interest to it, empathy maybe, explain why in this age people have to advertise for someone to share their dreams, you are the person to capture that in words. Know what I mean?”

The news editor was going overboard in his praise of Sally Ritchie, partly to make up for the clear error of judgment in suggesting she might be incapable of finding a partner on her own, and in desperation to find a female member of staff to tackle the assignment. He didn’t tell her that two staff members had already refused to do the story, which no doubt she would discover, hopefully after she had gone on her date and written her story.

Obtaining money from petty cash, to pay the dating agency fee, Sally dully signed up. One of the photographers took her picture and she carefully went through the form in which she was required to give details about herself.

A requirement of the assignment was to conceal the fact she was a journalist, and not to give any details that might reveal her real identity. She was given a fictitious name.

Age was easy, no need to lie on that point, as she suspected many people do, but her occupation proved a problem. She couldn’t put down anything that hinted at working for a newspaper. Secretary, maybe, but too boring. Sally thought long and hard about what occupation she could pursue outside of journalism. Nurse maybe, but what if her date asked questions about medicine or medical procedures – what if he was a doctor. Air hostess would also pose problems about describing the foreign places she had never visited.

Sally Ritchie settled on being a librarian, a safe occupation in which she would not be required possibly to discuss her work.

In truth Sally Ritchie was looking for love, and she had become more and more aware of her age as her thirtieth birthday approached.

The town of Aldershot might be full of soldiers as the biggest military garrison in the country but it was not a happy hunting ground for women seeking a partner. Troopies looking for sex filed into the town centre at weekends where they took over the two night clubs there, or the handful of pubs.

They were invariably drunk, aggressive and only looking for a quick lay. Any local girl looking for a serious relationship tended to avoid Aldershot on a Saturday night and head for the more cultured environment down the Hogs Back towards London, or the country town of Farnham in the opposite direction.

Sally Ritchie had been in an unfortunate office relationship with a young reporter who had recently secured a position on a Fleet Street newspaper. Sally was aware that the word among her office colleagues was that she had been dumped by the reporter moving up the journalistic ladder in London, but it was more complex than that. Sometimes the lives of two journalists, with all the pressures of the job, simply could not run together.

One thing was certain: Sally Ritchie would never resort to signing up with a dating agency or indeed placing an advertisement in a newspaper seeking a companion. There was something not only contrived in that, but something unnatural, as she would put it. Romance, and finding someone to share your life with, might be a lottery but she believed in fate, that that certain person was just round the corner, waiting to be discovered, bumped into, sat next to. Love was not meant to be mail order, and in her view dating agencies carried a stigma about them, as did those people who used them. And how, when people asked how you met your partner, could you confess it was through a dating agency. And worse, how could you tell your children.

All these thoughts ran though Sally Ritchie’s head as she filled in the questionnaire to be dropped in at the dating agency on the High Street.

In a few days a letter arrived from the Happy Moments agency, with details of a young man interested in meeting Sally Ritchie. Twenty-nine-years-old, Sally’s prospective suitor looked very presentable in a dark, pin-stripe suit, if a little unkempt. His hair was long and wavy and clearly had not seen a comb on the day the picture was taken.

He gave his occupation as chartered accountant and Sally Ritchie thought Robert Jones looked anything but an accountant, with that long hair and slightly wicked smile. Perhaps he was one of those international accountants who travel the world, add up columns of figures in exciting places, the ones she had seen presented in an advertisement on commercial television for the accountancy profession.

She would ask him about it, quiz him, and perhaps her probing and questioning, at length, might prevent him from finding the time to ask her about her life as a librarian. On that score she had decided she would just avoid the subject, say she preferred not to talk about work on social occasions. She had a problem in that she did not know any librarians and could not determine what they did apart from putting books on shelves. There must, however, be a great deal to cataloguing. The information about her date did not indicate where he lived and she decided if he used the Aldershot library, and said he had never seen her there, she would say she worked in a back office.

A assignation was arranged for a restaurant in a city hotel, not in Sally’s home town but Guildford. In consultation about how the story would be approached, the news editor and Sally had agreed that it was best not to do it in Aldershot itself, because it was a small town and she would be bound sooner or later to bump into her “date” if he came from the town or surrounding areas. Lucy had had qualms about the story, masquerading as someone else, being devious and it was partly on her insistence it was done outside of Aldershot. The news editor also gave Sally the name of Adele, Adele Smith.

To her surprise, Sally Ritchie enjoyed the encounter at the restaurant and her story later was not an understated, disguised condemnation of this approach to finding a partner as she feared it would be. She now acknowledged that agencies and even newspaper advertisements placed by individuals had their place in a fast-paced world where people were too hard-worked and busy to meet anyone outside their family or workplace circle.

Without naming him, the story said that her date appeared kind and personable and had gone to a dating agency because he had had difficulty meeting the right women socially who might share his interests. He had had dates, had girlfriends, but nothing ever lasted and the women he met in life never seemed to fit the bill of what he looked for in a woman, something he told Sally he didn’t know himself.
He was looking for someone special, someone who might join in adventures in the outdoors, of hiking, and canoeing and the girls he had met had not wanted to do this.

“So why not try a dating agency?” he had told Sally over dinner, trying to explain, excuse himself for advertising for love, because in truth that is what he, and the woman he knew as Adele, were doing. “And who’s to judge if this is the right or wrong thing. Perhaps it’s just an extension of fate, two people writing to the agency at the same time, say. You meet people in all types of strange and unexpected ways. Why not this way?”

Despite Robert Jones’ defence of this approach to love as the dinner went on they both seemed intent on giving excuses for turning to advertising for a partner, and unspoken words said that they might have preferred to find love in different ways, and this was a last resort.

“And yes, we can find ways of love in all the strangest places. I once went out with a bloke who came round to buy my car,” said Sally Ritchie with a smile. Robert Jones laughed.

“Well that’s strange,” he said. “I once went out with a girl whose car I had run into. I was tuning the radio in the car, wasn’t paying attention, and I ran clean into the back of his Morris Minor. Actually I had also been drinking, but not too much. Just a few at the pub after work. Man was she angry, jumped from her car – it was her father’s – but the anger soon subsided when I apologised repeatedly and said I’d make good all the damage.

“We exchanged notes about my insurance company, and then addresses and it just took off from then. But her old man never liked me, always mentioned his pride and joy, his bloody Morris Minor when I went around there.”

On first dates, dating agency dates, participants are supposed to be on their best behaviour, perhaps present a sanitised version of themselves that wasn’t necessarily true to life.

Robert Jones, telling the story of the car-crash date, appeared to be letting his hair down. Sally Ritchie might have been new to the art of agency dating but she thought that one of the cardinal rules would have been to steer clear of mentioning you enjoyed a drink, and make sure you did not consume excessive alcohol first time out.

Robert Jones did not appear to be adhering to this rule. One bottle of good red turned to two, and Sally Ritchie was surprised that the accountant was so readily prepared to abandon the sobriety rule. Likewise, with nothing to lose, knowing this was going to go nowhere, was an exercise merely in the interests of journalism and a good story, Sally Ritchie joined the young accountant in a celebration of alcohol.

Sally Ritchie was quickly changing her mind about accountants. Perhaps that advertisement was right, the accountant of today was a high-flying, high-living man about town.

Looking at the unkempt Robert Jones, and his fondness for a good red, Sally Ritchie thought that he could easily pass as a journalist, perhaps he was in the wrong profession. She didn’t know any accountants, but she knew of many journalists and Mr Jones fitted the bill perfectly.

About his profession, he was critical, satirical and dismissing. The wicked smile that Sally Ritchie had detected in his photograph certainly mirrored his personality, it was not strained and rehearsed and put on for the camera and for whoever might see it on his personal file put out my the dating agency. Sally Ritchie liked the accountant who said he came from Woking down the tracks towards London.

The staff of the hotel restaurant were eager to close. It was 11pm and Sally and Robert were still deep in conversation, two empty bottles of red on the table and two brandy glasses.

Sally Ritchie had dreaded this story, had complained to Don Bentley about it, but now found herself reluctant to leave Robert Jones’ company. She agonised how to tell him that this was a one-off, and there would be no more dates. How could she say that? Eventually she just said she had had a great evening and would be in contract. She would leave it for a while, however, because she had other men recommend by the dating agency to see.

As she mentioned the others, she suddenly felt somehow insincere and shallow. The word “unclean” even sprang to mind. She was giving the impression she was road-testing prospective partners, and what would the young accountant think of her? If this was for real, she had really joined the dating agency to find a partner, the Robert Jones would be her instant choice, she couldn’t think of a more appropriate person to meet, even if he was an accountant from Woking.

The manager of the restaurant phoned for a taxi and Sally Ritchie was soon on her way to a mythical suburban home where she said she lived with her parents. She looked back to the restaurant as the taxi sped away and she could see the accountant standing on the pavement, looking in her direction and giving a weak wave.

Sally Ritchie thought daily about the young accountant in the days after their meeting.

She was attracted to him, felt comfortable in his company, loved his sense of humour and his tall, handsome looks, even if he was slightly ruffled and unkempt at the edges. He could have been a journalist, the people whose company she felt comfortable with most. Accountancy? She couldn’t see how there could be creativity and excitement in that.

At one point Sally Ritchie felt the urge to phone the accountant, to arrange to meet him again. Finally she would have to confess the reasons for their original meeting. How would the accountant handle that? Would be feel betrayed, humiliated, a subject of derision, or would he take it in good heart, see the point of their encounter. She suspected the latter.

Sally Ritchie never phoned Robert Jones. However much she felt attracted to him, she couldn’t shrug off the stigma she attached to the dating agency game. Two people, as they had discussed over dinner, could meet in strange and bizarre ways, a someone buying your car, a victim in a rear-shunt, but an advertisement for love? She never did phone Robert Jones

Robert Jarvis was not happy. When he went to the diary in the Woking News and Mail newsroom he expected to be dispatched to the Oval cricket ground 25 miles down the track in London, where a player from Woking was making his debut for the Surrey Cricket Club first eleven.

Instead, Robert Jarvis had been assigned a story about dating agencies. The news editor had taken note of the growing number of advertisements for such agencies in the Surrey newspapers and thought that it would make an appropriate story.

He cast around the office for suitable candidates and came up with the name of Robert Jarvis, a young man without family ties, who certainly needed a good woman to give him a love interest and keep him out of the pub.

The story had been sprung on Jarvis without warning and immediately on seeing it
entered in the diary he marched over to the news editor’s desk to protest.

“But, boss, I don’t need no agency to find a woman, this stinks.”

“This isn’t about finding a woman, at least for you, it’s about a story, discovering what drives people to sign up with these agencies. Are there not really enough people seeking partners to go around, or why are they so hard to meet. Now snap to it.”

Jarvis duly signed up with an agency, providing a picture that the News and Mail’s lone photographer had taken for him. He made no effort to smarten his appearance for the photograph and thought it fortunate when it was taken that he had been wearing his only suit, a blue pin-striped one, that morning after returning from a funeral for a distant relative.

Filling in the dating agency application, Jarvis struggled with the notion of putting down an occupation that was not journalism, the only occupation he knew and the only career he had wanted to pursue.

He settled on chartered accountant, an easy option because his father and his brother were accountants, and he at least knew something about the profession.
His father had assumed he would follow a family tradition – his grandfather was also an accountant – and was surprised that his son had resisted the pressure to pursued this career, and had gone into the uncertain and unpredictable world of journalism instead.

Jarvis, though, anticipating the encounter coming his way, decided to be an accountant for the evening, cut down on his fondness for alcohol and at least present an acceptable appearance, in the name of journalism.

Jarvis, thinking over his new role, also realised that he might be in for a bonus. What if his date was crying out for sex? He could end up in bed, on company expenses.

Ending up in bed on company expenses was very much on Jarvis’ mind when he received a letter from the dating agency with particulars of a rather attractive young woman, named Adele Smith. They were to meet for dinner at a restaurant in the nearby city of Guildford – paying their own way – and, as it said in the dating agency literature, see how things progressed from there.

Robert Jarvis aka Robert Jones – “Just call me Bob, everybody else does” – found Adele Smith charming and engaging. She hardly fitted the description of the librarian that was given as her occupation.

He had decided to go easy on the drink during the dinner but, excited about being in the company of someone so lovely and witty, found himself pouring drinks hurriedly and ordering a second bottle. He was surprised that the librarian who didn’t want to talk about her job, but wanted to talk about politics and art and sport and good food, and having fun, matched him drink for drink. Two bottles of good red were quickly consumed and then some fine brandy followed.

Jarvis enjoyed the company of Adele Smith so much that thoughts of sex, an easy lay, fell by the wayside.

Looking into her blue, sparkling eyes, he felt guilty, ashamed, he should have contemplated such a thing as luring her into bed.

“If she’s so desperate for love, she might be desperate for sex” was the thought upper in Robert Jarvis’ mind when he entered the restaurant for his date, acting on the notion that she might be prepared to sleep with him first date in the hope that she might keep him. Adele Smith he soon decided was not a woman for one-night stands. She was that sort of woman who would make a man wait for it. She kept her body and the promise of it under lock and key until she decided the time was right.

And what a body she had. But the more Jarvis drank, the less he concentrated on the curve of her breasts under a loose-fitting, green jumper, and her lithe legs tucked under the table, but on the quality of her conversation, her jokes, her self-deprecating humour.

“Tell me about life in the library,” he said at one points to which she replied, “That’s a closed book.”

If he didn’t know better she could be a journalist and perhaps that’s the way it should have been, the career she should have chosen. He wanted to mention this once, suggest a career change but felt it would sound facetious. And, anyway, why should an accountant be advocating she make a career change to journalism? He might give the game away. But surely she would have considered that, if she loved books, and perhaps there was something about not journalism but journalists that repelled her, the drunk, the unsocial hours, the cynicism, an unkempt life. He doubted it, though, felt she would fit nicely into a newsroom, especially with a near-bottle of good red inside her, followed by a brandy whose glass she swirled in her hand to warm it.

“Fuck,” said Jarvis to himself, “she’s lovely.”

When it was time to go, he asked if he could call her again. “No,” she said firmly, “wait for me to call you.” She said he had some other men recommended by the agency to go out with.

Outside the hotel, Jarvis watched her climb into back seat of the taxi, her slender, sculpted legs neatly swivelling and swung sideways so her dress was not pulled up above the knees, for her ride home to the Guildford suburbs.

“Fuck me,” he said giving her a weak wave as the taxi made its sway down Guildford’s ancient and cobbled High Street. “She’s road-testing men.” He was thinking of a beautiful, demure young woman trying out all the models to find the best one, as though she was buying a new car. The dating agency had just been the start of the process, the new car catalogue, and Robert Jones did not want to be a part of it, even if he struggled to repress a primal instinct buried deep inside him that told him otherwise.

Jarvis was now beginning to feel the effects of the drink in the cold night air.
He felt a sense of melancholy, and loss, which he merely put down to the drink, the alcoholic remorse he knew so well, striking at an earlier stage than the hangover next morning.

He thought of Adele Smith next day, felt an urge to phone her, but all the while the thought of her road-testing men came home to him. Where was the spontaneity, the notion of fate, the sense of two lonely souls in an alien and unfriendly world finding each other, coming together against all the odds.

Twenty-four hours on, Robert Jarvis felt that the drink was still talking, he was talking and thinking like an agony aunt in a newspaper, or the writer of women’s romance novels.

In truth, Robert Jarvis had just come out of an unhappy romance, and was looking for that special person the authors of women’s fiction always laid on for their leading men and ladies.

He was tired of one-night stands, of doing the rounds of night-spots and pubs that played rock and the blues as weekends. He wanted a partner, a soul-mate, someone to share a good bottle of red with. Adele Smith might have fitted the bill, but here was a librarian road-testing men, like she would dip into and out of new novels looking for a good read. Robert Jarvis decided Adele Smith was not the woman for him, although he conceded that in the words of the romance writers she had stolen his heart.

Sally Ritchie wrote her story, and was pleased with it, as was the news editor. She asked that the newspaper not use a picture byline. Woking might be eight miles distant but she didn’t want anyone there, namely a young accountant with a wicket smile, to see who Adele Smith really was, and their encounter had been merely a means to an end, not finding love but finding a good angle to a story.

Robert Jarvis typed the final full stop to his story. He gave it a quick read and then rose from his seat and crossed the floor to where the news editor was sitting.

“Finished that dating agency story boss, but do you mind if I don’t have my picture on it. Sort of grew attached to that girl, we got on really well and I’d hate her to know it was all for a story. Know what I mean?”

“Sure,” said the news editor without looking up.

Don Bentley was so engrossed in his book on journalism and that he didn’t notice the young woman looking at him. Not at first. She sat facing him on the Basingstoke semi-fast and her eyes shifted from the cover of Bentley’s book, and its title, How to be a Journalist, to Bentley and back to the cover again. After a while, looking up as the carriage rocked and swayed as it crossed the points at Clapham Junction, Bentley sensed that he had attracted someone’s attention. He looked up briefly from the book, saw the girl, and looked at the book again. Only this time he had difficulty concentrating, on a chapter extolling the virtues of learning Pitmans shorthand. Bentley looked up again and caught the young woman’s gaze. She gave Bentley a smile before turning her head to gaze out of the carriage window, at the rows of dreary red-brick houses in Battersea on the approach to Waterloo.

It was only a brief encounter, the name of a black-and-white film Bentley had seen that very week on television, but the image of the lovely girl with the beautiful smile stayed with the young messenger all day. He carried the picture of her face as he carried his briefcase on his rounds through the backstreets and alleyways leading off Fleet Street, and a portrait stayed with him as he ventured further afield, past Ludgate Circus into the City of London business district, and during one sortie late in the afternoon to the office of a glossy magazine based in London’s fashionable West End.

Bentley was not just thinking of the friendly face, but thinking of how and when he might get to see the girl again. And perhaps get to meet her.

Bentley had taken much in during that brief encounter. He thought as much on his rounds. It was as though he had taken a picture with his Brownie Box camera, only this picture was in colour not black-and-white. The girl had not uttered a word, but she oozed sophistication. She was certainly not from the council estate where Bentley had grown up, any council estate, but she made no pretence about being posh. She wasn’t “up herself” as Bentley’s Cockney school friends would say.

She spoke of the Sixties, was a tune with a magical age that the Beatles and the Stones had brought to Britain’s youth. Bentley and the other teenagers who held the rock stars and fashionistas in awe knew of no other age, but knew this one to be magical all the same. Their parents decried the Swingin’ Sixties, and so did vicars and bishops on television, and that was enough for Bentley and his Cockney mates to believe they lived in “fab” times.

That girl stayed in Bentley’s thoughts for every minute of his waking day. She wore a sleeveless frock with a pattern of tiny, brightly coloured daisies on this summer’s morning. Under the frock was a white T-shirt, a style that set the girl apart from the other young women riding the semi-fast from Basingstoke each morning. They dressed in regulation starched white blouses during the summer months, blouses covered in jumpers in blues and black when the autumn arrived and then the winter chill set in.

The girl sitting across from Bentley had a faint tan on her bare arms, and a face kissed by the sun. It glowed. Bentley could not describe it in any other way. The face was long and narrow, framed in fair hair that fell down the face on each side of a parting in the centre of the head. The hair tried to fall straight but hugged the contours of the girl’s head until it curved inward at the point of her chin.

The eyes were a sparkling blue – Bentley only had a glimpse, but he registered bright blue – and on that smile he saw a faint smudge of lipstick, a delicate shade of red, the red of the breast of the male chaffinch that Bentley had seen that very morning he had seen the girl.

Bentley just had to see that girl again. Just to look. He might not pluck up the courage to go and talk to her, or open up a conversation if she was seated again across from him on the train, but he felt compelled to seek her out, just to look, to convince himself his eyes were not paying tricks on him, beauty could be found amid the routine and the mundane and the dreary on the Basingstoke semi-fast.

Bentley was not to know it at the time, but that fleeting image of a girl in a floral frock would stay with him forever.

For a week Bentley searched the platforms at Woking at the start of his journey seeking out the girl’s face among the passengers of his usual train, the one the girl had travelled on, the 8.15am originating in Basingstoke. And he searched the train itself, walking from one end to the other, pushing past standing-room only passengers.

Each day he asked himself, why had she been looking at him? Was she just bored because she didn’t appear to have something to read herself? Bentley tried to picture her again, sitting there in the seat across from him on the Basingstoke semi-fast. He had only a series of fleeting glances to go on but Bentley had a firm image of the young woman in his mind. She had certainly made an impression on the young messenger boy with designs on being a reporter.

The girl was young, about Bentley’s age, 17 perhaps. Perhaps older. Fair hair, maybe blonde. Blue eyes, definitely blue eyes, and a warm smile.

Each morning for months Bentley looked for the young woman, peering up and down the platform at Woking while he waited for the Basingstoke semi-fast. He had assumed she had got on the train at Woking, but then thought perhaps she had joined it down the line. That possibly explained why he had never seen her before.

He reeled off the names of all the stations down the line. He had heard them a thousand times, reeled off by the station announcer. There was a rhythm to the words, like the rhythm of wheels on track, the beat, the meter of poetry. Basingstoke, Hook, Winchfield, Fleet, Farnborough, Brookwood, Woking, Waterloo.

The stations where she might have joined the train, and the towns where she might live, flashed through Bentley’s mind like the Basingstoke semi-fast picking up speed on the last leg of his journey, non-stop to London.

Bentley stuck to the same routine when he arrived at the station. He quickly scanned the platforms looking for the girl and then looked down the shiny, silver tracks, for the train; smoke above the distant treetops at first, then the first sight of the locomotive, side on at first before it swung around the bend into a straight stretch of track leading to Woking station. With each puff of steam and smoke, with each wobble and sway of the mighty locomotive as it cross the tangle of tracks at the station’s throat, Bentley felt the excitement welling deep inside him. Would this be the day he saw the girl again.

Finally, after a month or so, Bentley had his lucky day. As the train came into the station Bentley saw the girl, standing in the corridor of one of the carriages. He hurried along the platform to join her carriage, moving along the corridor to where he thought he had seen her.

Bentley squeezed past a portly woman, folding her Times to let him pass, and then he saw the young woman. He stopped for a moment, and then thought it wise to push on. Several passengers were moving thorough the corridor, hoping to find seats at the head of the train, and Bentley joined them, trying to hide the fact the girl was his target.

Bentley was now just a few feet away and as the girl pressed against the corridor window to let the passengers past she caught sight of him, and turned towards him, blocking his progress.

“Hello again,” she said. “And how’s the journalism? That’s want you want to be, right? Sorry but I couldn’t help notice, the book on how to be a journalist. That’s just fab.”

Bentley was speechless for a moment, but then found the courage to speak up. He had not been mistaken in recalling her appearance. She was indeed fair haired, straight hair parted at the middle and falling down the sides of her face, gently curving around her chin. A face encased in two crescent shaped moons. Bentley could now see she was slim and tall. She wore a white blouse with a floral pattern on its collar, and washed blue denim jeans.

He said finally: “Oh, yes, that’s what I want to be. I’m thinking about it, but I dunno, I’m a bit low on the qualifications.”

“But that’s what you want to be, right? That’s your desire in life?” she continued, as the steam train picked up pace, the pounding, puffing, pulling locomotive drumming in the background. She seemed to tie her words to the rhythm of the steam engine exhaust beat.

“Yep, I think so. Well, I know so but I gotta long way to go. Who’s going to take me on for a start?”

Bentley suddenly thought he was talking too much, revealing too much, and, anyway, would the young woman want to hear what he had to say? Perhaps she was just being polite, felt it appropriate to indicate that she remembered him. She had obviously done so, and remembered his book on journalism. Bentley noticed that the girl also had a book this time, which she had been reading as the train pulled into the station. He decided to leave it at that, and he now looked out of the window, at suburban Surrey flashing by, to give the girl a chance to get back to her reading.

“But why journalism?” the girl persisted, “And what do you do now?”

Bentley felt embarrassed about being a mere messenger boy. He thought of lying, and saying he was a commercial artist who wanted to switch professions, but she would no doubt ask him what firm, and what he drew. He decided to be honest.

“Oh, don’t laugh. I’m a messenger boy of sorts. I wanted to be an artist and I was going to learn all that stuff in a studio, instead of art school, but I’ve now had second thoughts. I dunno but this journalism has sort of gripped me, I can’t think of anything else I’d rather be.”

Bentley looked at the book the girl had in her hands as he spoke. At first he thought it was a book of poems, but he then saw that it was a book of plays.

“Well, you’ve got to follow your dreams,” the girl said, lowering her head and looking at Bentley. “You know, I know it sounds strange, but we are all born to do something. It’s like what we were born to do, what we are here to do, but so few of us discover it, or know of it but never do it.”

The young woman held her book up and showed it to Bentley. It was a Harold Pinter play, The Dumb Waiter.

“You want to be a journalist, I want to be an actress. Please, don’t you laugh at me now. There’s a million young people out there, with dreams, who want to be actors, want to be on stage or in the films. I’m going to do it. I’m going to succeed because that is what I was born to do. That’s what I was put on the planet to do. I feel it in inside me.”

The girl’s enthusiasm as she spoke, her words now a rhythm of the rails, revealed that she was perhaps younger than Bentley. Her enthusiasm betrayed a shyness that suddenly emerged with a nervous giggle.

She giggled again after she told Bentley she felt she had acting inside her, and now looked down at her book. She held in low in her hands with her head bowed to read it so Bentley could not see her face. Bentley thought she might have been blushing and looked away, not wanting to embarrass her further.

An silence descended on them amid the clank and roar of the train, the pitching and rolling and passengers streaming along the corridor, forcing both Bentley and the girl to press themselves against the rail.

Bentley couldn’t resist continuing the conversation. He plucked up courage to speak again

“Know what ya saying, know it exactly. I got that same feeling. I think I was born to do this, as you say. Yeah people born to do things.”

Waterloo approached and the young woman put away her book of plays.

“Well, great talking to you,” she said as she made her way to the nearest open door.

“We’ll talk again, exchange notes. See how we are both getting on.”

As she hurried down the platform, she looked back at Bentley and paused.

“Sorry, never introduced myself. Lilly Thomas,” she shouted.

“And I’m Don …” Before Bentley could finish Lilly Thomas had vanished around the end of the platform, behind a ticket booth and onto the main concourse of the station.

Bentley was to see Lilly one more time on the Basingstoke semi-fast. He had wondered why she came to London on the days he saw her, and she offered a clue when she said she had been trying to enrol at drama school, which was proving difficult.

“ ‘Come back next year’, they keep saying but I don’t want to come back next year. I want now,” she said with a weak smile, a look of disappointment. She stayed silent between stations, Surbiton and then Wimbledon whipping past, before she looked at Bentley, a stern, intense expression replacing the smile.

“Have you ever seen a film, The Red Shoes?” she asked. Bentley hadn’t been prepared for the earnest tone. The Red Shoes? He thought for a moment, hoping that he might recall it, recall seeing it, might even have heard of it, to impress her, but he hadn’t. He thought about lying, trying to wing it, but he came clean.

“Sorry. That’s new on me?” he said.

“Well it was a long time ago, before our time I suppose. There is this scene in the film. This young girl wants to be a dancer and a dance teacher turns her down. The girl, instead of just leaving the stage, like with her head bowed, she turns and confronts the teacher. And she says, ‘I was born to do this. It is what I was put on the earth to do.”

“And how about you and getting into journalism?” Lilly Thomas asked Bentley, as if suddenly realising the conversation had been all about her. Bentley had been pleased to let it go that way.

“Oh, I’ve written to a few papers, telling them all about me. No outright rejections. Funny, but that ‘come back next year’ line also keeps coming up in my world.”

Bentley and Lilly walked to the ticket barrier and Bentley hoped that perhaps Lilly would suggest they meet again, by design and not just by accident on the Basingstoke semi-fast. Bentley was too shy to suggest it himself, leaving the ball in Lilly’s court and she did not run with it.

“Well, gotta dash. Nice to chat, hope we’ll meet again,” she said making not for the tube station, where Bentley was headed, but turning to cross the concourse in the direction of the Old Vic Theatre.

The budding theatre reviewer

Riding his cycle along the lanes of Surrey, well on the route now to becoming a journalist, Bentley had much to occupy his mind but his thoughts, at least in the first few months of his new career, never strayed too far from Lilly Thomas.

He wished now he had asked for her telephone number, just to keep in touch, but was aware that it would have sent the wrong message. The ball had been in her court and she had not responded.

At the time he was confident he would see Lilly Thomas again, somehow they were destined to meet. Doing the rounds in suburban and semi-rural Woking with no reason to venture further afield to London that now seemed improbable.

Would Lilly Thomas ever come to Woking, her lithe and beautiful body swaying as she walked the High Street? Bentley doubted it and would he have reason to catch the 8.15am semi-fast to Waterloo in the faint hope of perhaps bumping into her again? Although it had crossed his mind to do just.

Bentley had been accepted as a trainee reporter – for a sixth-month trial period – by the Woking News and Mail and if he was eventually taken on to the staff the town of Woking would be the only world he would know for the next three years.

He hoped Lilly had found her world, was at the centre of it now, and Bentley vowed over the next three years to scour the entertainment pages of the London evening newspapers for any mention of Lily Thomas in fringe theatre productions, the ones that occupy fledgling actors starting out in the theatre business.

The editor had noticed Bentley’s eagerness to be the first to read not only the London evening papers when they arrived late afternoon, but also be first to grab the more serious national newspapers each morning.

“This boy will go far,” the editor would mutter to himself, returning to his office, especially noting Bentley’s interest in The Times, Telegraph and Guardian, beyond his orders to scour them for obituary notices that might involve Woking residents, to be clipped and followed up for a local story.

For some years there was nothing, then Bentley came across the name of Lilly Thomas in a production of an obscure play written by an equally obscure London playwright.

Bentley bought himself a train ticket to London one night, and went to see the play. He was tempted to linger afterwards, to try and see Lilly and congratulate her. He stood by the stage door which led from the reception area where the box office was situated and hoped that she would come out. After 10 or so minutes an usherette asked what he was doing, and Bentley’s nerve ran out. He was waiting to see Lilley but how could he say that when Lilley was not expecting him.

“Oh, just waiting for a friend to come out of the loo,” said Bentley to the usherette. “She seems to be taking quite a time.”

As soon as the usherette had entered the stalls again, to check for stragglers among the audience, Bentley made a quick retreat through the main doors, and headed back to Waterloo.

Bentley saw Lilly again, a year later. This time at the Yvonne Arnold Theatre in Guildford. She had a minor part in a play there which, coincidentally, Bentley had been sent to the theatre to review. The review formed an assignment as part of his part-time journalism studies at Guildford Technical College. Bentley had given Lilly a glowing review. He was marked down, however, by his lecturer in journalism for concentrating on a minor part and not directing the thrust of the review to the main characters and the actors playing them, and the direction of the play overall.

Bentley had hoped that Lilly might recognise him in the audience, might come running into the theatre foyer directly after the curtain fell to seek him out, but it was not to be.

The play had run for a couple of weeks at the theatre, a fill-in between major productions and Bentley thought about sending the review he had written to the theatre, marked for Lilly’s attention. This would be silly, he decided. It had not appeared in a real publication, just as an assignment for journalism studies and what would it prove?

Bentley’s professional reviewing, and the chance to perhaps advance Lilly’s career with his work, would have to wait.

Wheels of fate

After four years on the Woking News and Mail Bentley stepped several rungs up the career ladder when he landed a position as a holiday relief sub-editor on a national newspaper, the Sun.

Within a week Bentley had doubled his salary, to a princely $30 a week, with a promise of a full-time job if he made the grade during his four-month contract that covered the period when most staff journalists took leave during the months from June to September.

On the Basingstoke semi-fast back to Woking wanted to announce his arrival in the Street of Adventure, Fleet Street, not first to the parents eagerly waiting to hear how the interview had gone but to tell the girl he had met on the train four years in the past. Lily Thomas would be impressed, he told himself as the train sped towards Woking. He looked about him, at the scattering of other passengers in the carriage, searching for the face of Lilly Thomas. Bentley had a romantic notion that she might be riding the train that day, romantic in the literacy sense of two people with a passion for life coming together, meeting by chance, the wheels of fate and fortune carrying them on the next stage of their journey. A young man finding his feet in Fleet Street, the street of adventure, a budding journalist looking to a world written in headlines and bylines and datelines was entitled to think that way, however clichéd these thoughts might be.

Bentley so desperately wanted to meet Lilly Thomas that day, by chance, and share his news and hear of hers.

Bentley continued to scour the Stage theatre newspaper, and study the entertainment pages of the London Evening Standard and London Evening News for references to Lilly Thomas, and one day found a brief item which mentioned her name.

What was described as an experimental play, a “kitchen sink” drama about the impact of lost jobs in the London docklands on families of dockers, had opened at a theatre club in North London and an actress named Lilly Thomas was among the cast.

Bentley’s job on the Sun required him to work nights and he pencilled in his first available day off later in the week to travel on the Northern tube line to see a performance.

Bentley had intended to book in advance but was told that this would not be necessary because there were plenty of seats available for each performance of the play’s four-week run.

Bentley felt a growing sense of excitement as the days passed before the performance, even though a brief review in the Evening News described it as “kitchen sink filled with dish water”.

The reviewer spoke of a confused plot, murky plot that drifted from the lives of dockers to those of playwrights trying to prove their working class credentials. The message of the review was lost on Bentley, but a reference to Lilly Thomas was not.

“A docker’s wife who is a delicate yacht when the script demands a tug,” said the review.

Bentley never got to see the play for himself. The Evening Standard reported on the night Bentley was about to travel to see it that it had closed.

The review appeared not to harm Lilly or the playwright, Adam Wright’s careers. The London newspapers reported over the next year that he had written two new plays, each with starring roles for a young, up-and-coming actress, Lilly Thomas. The Stage also reported that Lilly and Wright had become “an item”.

Lilly Thomas appeared more frequently now. Beyond her new partner’s productions there were small parts here and there, once a part in a Harold Pinter play at the Hampstead Theatre Club. Generally, though, the plays were by obscure playwrights, most in the provinces.

But one day, walking down Drury Lane on his way to the Sun, Bentley was halted in his tracks by the sight of the name, Lilly Thomas, on a billboard. She had a small part in a musical about miners, Close the Coalhouse Door, playing at the Fortune Theatre. Bentley went alone one night. Lilley had a singing part and Bentley thought she was impressive. He did not linger afterwards, however. Lilly was an emerging star now, with a West End part, and what would she want of him? Bentley may have been a journalist, in Fleet Street, but could be describe himself as a writer. The job of sub-editor would certainly not fit Lilly’s job description of what a journalist should be. When he had chatted to her on the train a few years previously writing had been central to the dream. How could he explain he was now merely a sub- editor, it would take too much explaining that editing was merely a means to an end.

Apartheid’s stage

Bentley looked out over the railyards from his desk in the sports department of The Star, Johannesburg. The puffing and chugging of steam locomotives provided a backbeat to the rhythm of a newspaper office, the clatter of telex machines and the chatter of typewriters, the squeak of the tea trolley wheels echoing down the passageways and corridors.

The beat of the steam locomotives, wheels spinning when they took hold of a full loads of trucks, reverberated against the windows of the sports department situated in an office at right angles to the main newsroom. It overlooked the city abattoir and meat and vegetable market, and the railway lines serving them, and Bentley was constantly drawn to the window to watch the locomotives at work.

It was not only the rugged but magical beauty of the shining black locomotives, harnessing steam and fire for power, that fascinated Bentley. The locomotives carried memories of his start in journalism, dreams forged behind the power of steam as the young messenger travelled to London each day with his book, How to be a Journalist. It was a dream she shared with Lilly Thomas and each reverberating beat of steam exhaust brought memories of Lilly with it.

Bentley worried at times about what appeared to be an obsession about a girl he had hardly met, hardly knew; someone he had merely had a brief conversation with on a train all those years ago.

It was not about sex, as obsession and infatuation so often were, but these stirrings also played a part. Bentley would be foolish not to admit it. Along with Lilly’s face and personality, Bentley remembered her form. He glimpsed the shape of her pert breasts just once, moulded in a green woollen jumper under an unbuttoned coast and they caused a sensation deep within him that he had never felt before. Like the memory Lilly Thomas stirred often in his mind, something stirred in his body that he had no words to describe.

A tingling, a trembling, a floating? The thought of Lilly Thomas left Bentley speechless, and he would merely sit in silence, trying to find words for a sensation that washed through his body.

Steam trains were not the only throwback to the past. Bentley’s interest in film and theatre brought with it a connection, a link, with an actress whose image straddled the present and past. Because there was no television in South Africa in the early 1970s, the movie theatres were a vital part of South African lives, at least for the white population. They were a vital part of Don Bentley’s life, too. The movie house was at the heart of both suburban and rural communities, much like the dream palaces had been in American villages and cities in the 1930s and 1940s, before the arrival of the television set to people’s sitting rooms.

A visit to the cinema was not just an occasional night out, it formed a routine as regular as two or three times a week. Cinemas dotted both the Johannesburg city centre and the suburbs and because of the demand for films they could cater for different audiences. Bentley generally eschewed the cinemas and drive-ins showing the latest mass-appeal releases and went to a movie house in one of the older suburbs that showed art-house films, mainly those produced in Britain.

Living in Africa as part of his first overseas adventure after leaving Britain, Bentley enjoyed films that took him out of the continent, and back to his homeland. Bentley always lived in hope he would see Lilly on the screen in one of these generally low-budget movies, because he had long given up looking for Lilly’s name among the cast of a film on general release.

Lilly’s name might not have featured in the world of popular entertainment, but it suddenly emerged in a news story that came across Bentley’s desk, now that he had moved from the sports department and was general news reporter.

The South African Government was financing a television series, Nguni, and this had become big news in Britain. British actors signing up for parts in the series were accused of sanctions busting, of supporting the apartheid regime and were being urged to reconsider.

There were several big-name theatre and movie starts reported to be travelling to South Africa. Among the names listed in the newspapers were some minor actors, among them Lilly Thomas.

Over the weeks the controversy swirled. South Africans were all for it, of course, along with segments of the British population who believed cultural ties with South Africa should be maintained. The actors heading to South Africa also argued for cultural ties and pointed out film and theatre was above politics. Black and white actors working alongside each other would do more for integration than any ban.

Bentley made moves to be assigned the story, to fly to Cape Town where the film was being filmed to interview Lilly Thomas himself, to show her that he had made it as a reporter pursuing his dream.

And he already had an explanation for his decision to work in South Africa. It was merely a stepping stone, he was certainly not a supporter of apartheid; he worked for an anti-government newspaper. It was an adventure, as no doubt Lilly Thomas would describe her own odyssey.

Bentley lobbied hard for the assignment in Cape Town. His reporting beat was now the black African countries to the north, exploiting his British passport which allowed him to get to country’s his South African colleagues could not travel to, but his pleas to be sent to Cape Town were rejected. It was a story for both the entertainment writers on a sister newspaper in Cape Town, and the national political staff based in the city because it had a political dimension.

Bentley’s friend Peter Simpson had more luck with the assignment. Simpson worked for a British television news channel and his head office in London determined the film story was firmly on his diary of events to be covered in the coming weeks.
Bentley even thought about asking Simpson to sign him up as his sound man for the assignment. He then reasoned this would be silly, if he actually got to meet Lilly Thomas and Lilly Thomas recognised him. How would be explain that away, him standing there with microphone covered in fluffy jacket to cushion the wind. It would be a ridiculous, surreal moment, worthy of some of the avant guard films be had been watching at the Park Town Cinema in Johannesburg.

No, the Lilly Thomas encounter would have to wait until another time, and Bentley would have to content himself with viewing the latest instalment of Lilly Thomas’ struggling acting life from a thousand miles away in Johannesburg.

It was clear Peter Simpson planned a hard-hitting, confrontational approach to his story, The notion of sanctions busting would be prominent in his questioning, not one of harmony and advancing the black cause through art, in this case film.

“They’re taking the South African Government’s money, it’s as simple as that,” he would say when Bentley tried to argue the actors’ part.

“Don’t be fooled Bentley. This is about money and furthering their own careers in a big production which will get an airing in America and Britain, just as all the anti-apartheid campaigners say.”

Simpson pointed out that there were only one or two recognised, big-time actors and the rest were acting journeymen and women, “hacks,” trying to keep their careers afloat, to stay in the public eye. The publicity over the film might even be doing them some good.

Bentley mentioned a young actress in the film, someone who had great dreams of making stardom who had not seemed to have made it until now.

“There are people who just need a leg up, to steal their chance,” he told Simpson. “They may not support apartheid, they might really believe in multi-racialism and this is the way. And at the same time advance their careers.”

“We’ll if they’re so great why haven’t they made it before now. Why come down here and take the South African’s Government’s money?”

Bentley decided not to pursue the matter any further. Simpson had a story in mind, exposing what he called hypocrisy and that was the news line he would pursue.

“Look here Bentley, the story is about actors breaking sanctions. There’s sanctions in place, South Africa is a pariah. People avoid coming here. And these people are taking the money. That’s all there is to it. And I will ask them why. They can defend themselves, say it’s not about apartheid or whatever. Don’t worry, Bentley, I’ll give them their say.”

Bentley remained silent about knowing, or at least being an acquaintance of a little known actress called, Lilly Thomas.

Bentley had already made up his own mind about Lilly’s motives for coming to South Africa. It was not just about money, getting her name in credits but also about principle, looking at the bigger picture, proving that blacks and whites could work together, could break down the rigid rules of apartheid that divided races.
Yes, that’s Lilly’s motive, Bentley decided.

A few years previously he had interviewed Arthur Ashe, the black American tennis star who had defied the sporting ban on South Africa by playing in the South African Open. Ashe had told Bentley he could achieve more by coming to South Africa, by showing black people that a black man would rise to be a star, than by staying away.

Bentley watched television over the coming days, South African Government television, which gave a favourable treatment to the stars arriving in the country. How they were just pleased to be part of a great production, which was about art and not politics

The newspapers followed the same line. It appeared the actors had been schooled to say certain things, to avoid politics and just to speak of contact and dialogue, and art.
Peter Simpson’s news report told a different story. He had nailed the lead actor with the questions, “How do you feel about breaking sanctions and appearing on apartheid’s stage?” The lead actor handled himself superbly, was as quick on his feet as he would be if he had forgotten his lines in a West End play momentarily and had to ad-lib.

A young actress interviewed was not so sure-footed. She jerked back her head in surprise to be asked such a leading question, when she thought it would just be about her part.

“Well that’s an unfair question,” she said immediately. “How dare you bring politics to art.”

Peter Simpson rolled back in his chair, looking at Bentley smugly, when he showed Bentley the tape.

“Got that actress,” she said. “Unfair question indeed.”

Bentley studied Lilly closely in the interview. She was indeed beautiful. The hair that had fallen around her face in two inverted crescent moon shapes was straight now. It was still parted down the centre of her head, but it was longer and fell in yellow cascades on to her shoulders. Before the direct, penetrating questions about apartheid, she had engaged in banter with Simpson. She giggled at one point, and as she did so the laughter sent ripples through her hair.

Off-Broadway

Don Bentley sat in a darkened theatre off-Broadway in New York waiting for the curtain to rise.

The term “waiting for the curtain to rise” was not entirely correct in the context of Bentley’s meticulous attention to detail, and accuracy, when performing his profession of reporter.

There was in fact no curtain in the small, cramped theatre that in a previous life had been a clothing factory south of Houston Street, in SoHo.

Bentley was not paying too much attention to detail, however. He was not working, did not have his mind firmly focused on the play to come as a theatre reviewer would do. They might say a journalist’s mind never sleeps, but Bentley’s was sleep mode. He did not have to put a journalistic cliché to what he faced in the theatre as the non-existent curtain was to rise – and that was a dilemma.

Bentley was in the theatre not so much to see a performance but to see a specific actress performing, and then possibly to go for drinks with her afterwards.
Bentley’s dilemma stemmed from the fact that he could not remember what the actress looked like.

He had met her at a party, had subsequently spoken to her on the telephone but he couldn’t for the life of him remember what she looked like.

He arrived at the theatre, after racking his brains for a picture of her all the way downtown on the Lexington Avenue subway line, confident that the programme for the play would contain a picture of her to prompt his memory. Unlike his usual stamping ground of Broadway this theatre did not issue a glossy programme with pictures, any programme, and Bentley was no nearer registering the image that had made such an impression on him at the party.

Perhaps the set would hold a clue, because the actress as far as Bentley could recall had gone into great deal of detail about the play, and her role within it. Although none of this, like her face, could be retrieved from recent memory.

Bentley scanned the stage, merely a raised platform a few feet in front of the first row of seats, trying to make out features of the set. This remained as big a mystery as the circumstances of Bentley’s being in the theatre far to the south of the neon lights of Broadway, Bentley’s usual environment in the world of theatre.

The set appeared to be a jumble of wooden packing cases and cardboard boxes and Bentley could just make out the shape of what looked like a sofa draped in blankets at one end of the stage.

The jumbled, chaotic state of the stage could have been a metaphor for the state of Bentley’s mind at that moment. His predicament was put down to too much drink on the evening of the party – the source of most of Bentley’s predicaments – and this predicament was compounded by the dilemma that Bentley was now mulling over in the near-darkness of the off-Broadway theatre which went by the name of the “Sweat Shop”.

Bentley had vague memories of the evening in question. He had met the actress and in order to impress her had gone on at some length about theatre and plays, and how he loved them. The frequency of his visits to the theatre was somewhat exaggerated as was his stated preference for experimental plays, something he detected might be in the oeuvre of the actress he had spent so much time talking to.

“Off-Broadway, that’s where it’s happening. Forget the musicals in Times Square, all that glitz and sing-along tunes,” he said joyously after yet another glass of red wine during the party.

Whose party it was, and for what, was also something of a mystery as Bentley thought back to the evening. He was trying now to picture the actress. He had a vague idea of what she looked like; small and petit, blonde with grey-blue eyes, bubbly, enthusiastic. She spoke with a trace of a southern accent, which Bentley put somewhere between Virginia and Georgia. Her outgoing personality, in fact, had distinguished her from her sister, an identical twin, who seemed to Bentley to be more reserved.

Perhaps it was the sister’s party. She was a journalist after all and perhaps they had mutual friends, that’s how Bentley got to be there.

The evening was still a blur when unexpectedly Bentley received a phone call from the actress twin. She was confirming that he still wanted to see a play she had opened in, at a little theatre on the fringe of Greenwich Village.

“Seeing and all how you said you just loved experimental theatre I thought this might be just up your street,” she said to Bentley on the phone, adding, “That’s what you say in England, isn’t it? Just up your street.”

Bentley said indeed it was.

After putting down the phone Bentley racked his brains to picture the caller and to determine why she said he was so interested in experimental theatre. As it happened Bentley quiet enjoyed the musicals playing just over the road from his office in Times Square. Bentley also loved the buzz of Times Square, and the exposure it gave him to the world the theatre. It was a world that had opened to him the morning he met Lilly Thomas on the semi-fast from Basingstoke all those years ago and without that meeting he wondered if he would have paid actors and acting, and plays and the theatre, and film, so much attention.

Plays in village halls in Surrey, in provincial theatres in Britain and Africa, small cinemas screening “art house” films in the sultry heat of Johannesburg on summer nights, slow fans swirling steam and cigarette smoke… Bentley had a wonderful string of memories and experience and it was all down to a chance encounter with an aspiring actress named Lilly Thomas. And now New York. This was the beating heart of theatre, as he knew Fleet Street in London to be the beating heart of journalism.

At lunch times Bentley wandered from his newspaper’s bureau on Times Square to mix with the people of the theatre in bars and delis. He stepped aside to let hurrying gypsies pass, dancers rushing to rehearsal, or audition, in summer wearing floppy T-shirts and shorts, in winter denim jackets with fur collars, and track pants. It was not just slim athletic bodies that identified the gypsies rushing along side-streets and alleyways, before vanishing into stage doors; the young women carried giant canvas bags slung low over the shoulders, bags that always appeared too heavy for them, bags that dragged them down.

Stage hands, producers, directors, front of house staff, actors the public could recognise, and many they couldn’t; they strutted the stage what was Times Square and its environs.

All the while the stately headquarters of the New York Times towered over the comings and goings, and bore witness to hopes dashed and dreams realised. There was a tradition that actors and directions gathered in Sadi’s over the road from the Times to read the first reviews of a new production after the lights had dimmed, and the newspaper’s first edition hit the streets just after mid-night. When Bentley could afford it, when his pay cheque had been cleared by the bank once a month, Bentley would visit Sadi’s himself, eschewing his usual “shrimp with mayo to go’’ sandwich for a lunch of fillet of beef, washed down with a good Californian red.

Gazing down at him from the surrounding walls would be the cartoon depictions of famous actors Bentley had seen so many times in films and television – actors gathered in Sadi’s, plotting and discussing and urging, had become as strong a cliché for the acting professions as a journalist agonising over a story in a smoky bar was for journalism.

What Bentley loved about Times Squares was that the worlds of journalism and acting collided. It was almost a metaphor for the lives of Bentley and the budding actress he had met on the Basingstoke semi-fast all those years ago. The thought brought a smile to Bentley’s face.

This collision of two seemingly romantic careers had never occurred in Fleet Street. The area of newspapers offices just a little too far – a hard walk – for there to be an intermingling between the two in pubs, bars and cafes. Like journalists, actors would not endure a walk beyond the nearest pub for a drink, time was too precious.

Bentley, however, had been lucky that his first Fleet Street newspaper, the Sun, gave him exposure to actors and the acting profession. He didn’t know it at the time when he wrote for a job but the Sun was not based in Fleet Street at all, but the theatre district of Drury Lane and Covent Garden and the journalists’ haunts – the appropriately named Sun pub and the Cross Keys a little towards another theatre district, Shaftesbury Avenue – had a sprinkle of theatre people on any given night, both before curtain up and after curtain down.

Bentley rode the Lexington Avenue Line, express to Grand Central, where for once he would not change for the connection to Times Square. He was headed downtown to 4th Street and a theatre called the Sweat Shop. The name of the actress he was supposed to see just would not come, though, even when he collected the tickets at the box office, which were contained in an envelope with his name neatly written on it.

No clues in any program, no pictures on the wall of the current cast, but as the lights slowly began to illuminate the stage, Bentley felt more confident now that he would recognise the actress immediately. He couldn’t have been that drunk otherwise she would not have contacted him and invited him to the performance.

As the lights came up, and members of the cast drifted onto the stage, dilemma turned to predicament for Bentley. The play was clearly about street people, hobos on the Bowery, and all the cast were dressed as such, most in caps or floppy hats, with their faces blackened to resemble dirt and soot. There was no hope for Bentley that he would recognise a face among them.

As the actors made their entrance Bentley studied each face to see if one stirred recognition. It was not to be for the entire performance. What was more, Bentley could not understand what the play was supposed to be about, there was no clue to plot in the rambling speech of the actors. This presented another problem, one looming for Bentley with every word as the play progressed. If he did finally identify the actress, and went for a drink with her afterwards, what would they possibly talk about. The point of the play was entirely lost on him.

After what seemed Bentley’s own lifetime on the mean streets of New York the play drew to a climax, ending in some sort of fight between two of the protagonists.

Bentley could only sense that it had actually ended because the handful of people in the audience leap to their feet and applauded rapturously. The actors line up across the stage to make numerous bows and Bentley hoped that one would look in his direction and wave or smile or do something. It was not to be.

Bentley pondered his next move. Was the invite designed just to let him see the play and there would be no meeting afterwards? He decided to linger in the foyer anyway, near the box office just in case a drinks were intended, and after a whole a petit woman emerged with a heavy shoulder bag, a gypsy dancer bag, and gave Bentley a greeting. Now Bentley recognised her at last.

“Well…” she said, with what appeared to be a deliberate pause. She was starting conversation with an expansive gesture of the arms, making an entrance as she would start her lines when she took the stage.

“Well… what you think?”

“Well… I thought it was good, thought-provoking. Brave, yes brave.”

Bentley struggled with words to describe the play, words the actress would want to hear. He only hoped he would not have to explain what it was about.

“Brave, yes brave. Don, that’s a wonderful way to put it. Summed up in a nutshell.”

The actress said the rest of the cast, along with the playwright, were going for drinks in a Greenwich Village bar and she wanted Bentley to join them.

It was a difficult evening for Bentley and he avoided having too much to drink. He had to be in commanded of his senses; be quick on his feet mentally in case someone should ask him to discuss the play in depth, and explain its meaning.

He could see now that he was not so much attracted to the actress but her sister, the journalist. He had found it difficult to connect with the sister, however, and so turned his attention to the actress instead.

It was going to be a long evening but there was a sub-plot that would give Bentley an early exit. Although it wasn’t said, Bentley soon gathered that he had been invited not because the actress was attracted to him in anyway, but to make up numbers, and to provide at least one male in the audience.

The playwright was male and had been concerned the play – whatever it was about – would only appeal to women because of its female cast, although he indicated that its “message” applied equally to men. As the playwright expanded on his message, Bentley merely nodded his head in agreement.

It also turned out the actress had designs on the playwright and Bentley was only too happy to praise the writer and give him a boost in the eyes of the assembled cast.

“Brave, that’s how I’d describe this play. Brave when uptown they play safe, they’re cowards in the face of pandering to public demand,” he said.

Bentley received a round of applause for his “brave” pronouncement, repeated just one more time before he made a dash for the Lexington Avenue Line train heading uptown.

The art of obsession

Bentley had returned to London from his travels and found it easy to keep tabs on the career of Lilly Thomas. Parts in British-made films here and there, parts in West End plays; never main roles but consistent, regular ones, work all the same. Lilly might not be a star but she was working and for that she must be grateful. It was now 30 years since the time they had met on the Basingstoke semi-fast and Bentley scratched around for details of her family life: had she ever married and had children? What did her husband do?

One day, reading an edition of the Woking News and Mail someone who lived in the town had brought into the BBC World Service newsroom, Bentley was delighted to find an interview with her. After all those years Bentley discovered that Lilly Thomas lived in the Woking area after all and was not from somewhere along the line towards Basingtoke, Farnborough, Fleet or Hook.

Bentley now felt he should have looked harder for her. Made inquires about her after he joined the News and Mail. He might have discovered she lived locally and perhaps got to meet her again. He could have interviewed her about her budding career. There was regret, of opportunities lost. He had yearned for all those years to be part of her life, in any way, and had missed the opportunity for that to happen.

The News and Mail story was on the lines of local girl makes good although by now Lilly was a woman in her late forties. The actress had been starring in an English television soap for the summer, in a character part as a cockney barmaid, and this had given her some exposure in the British popular press. She was a star, of sorts, at last and had perfected a cockney accent. Bentley remembered the newspaper review of years past when, trying to play a working-class docker’s wife, Lilly Thomas was described as a delicate yacht when she should have been a tug.

There was no hint of marriage in the article. The interviewer noted that she had been linked with various actors and directors over the years, but Lilly would not give much away about her private life. She remained single, however, laughing off one description of her as a spinster. And she lived in Brookwood, one station down the line, in the house where she had grown up. Her parents were long dead and, according to the article, she shared the house with two cats.

“Yes, travelled, lived in many places for short times, but always came back to Brookwood,” she said in the interview.

Bentley tried to determine if she was just saying that for the local press. Bentley had spent his whole life trying to escape the town but perhaps for someone in the theatre it was different. They wanted a quieter life, one where news didn’t happen.

Many film and theatre people, and music stars, had chosen to live in Woking and its environs, including writers of old who included George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, the latter setting his War of the Worlds on Horsell Common at Woking’s fringe. The newspaper took great delight in naming the famous people who had come to live in Woking and its more leafy outer areas dubbed the stock-broker belt, in more modern times the biggest names in pop music taking up residence in Victorian mansions.

Woking and its drab suburbia had held no such attraction for Bentley when he had returned to Britain from his adventures overseas. The leafy reaches of Woking’s rural, western side might be a sanctuary and refuge of sorts for stars of music, stage and screen but for Bentley and his journalist’s salary it could only offer a slice of drab, garden-fence suburbia.

Bentley chose a small apartment in north London from which to build a career with a British news organisation. Bentley had arrived back in Britain at a time when jobs were hard to find in newspapers because of an industry restructure and decided instead to accept a position as a news script-writer with the BBC World Service. Bentley preferred newspaper journalism but the BBC all the same offered an adventure of its own, a chance to work in broadcasting.

What’s more the daily newspapers were moving from their traditional home based on Fleet Street, to offices and printing plants away from the city. Fleet Street as an entity of print and ink, and craic in smoky, noisy bars was no more and much of the romance attached to it had died. A romance of a different kind lingered in the cramped, wood-panelled corridors of the grandiose BBC building on the Strand, a building with echoes of broadcasting’s past.

The BBC World Service headquarters was also at the heart of the theatre district, with two major theatres literally a stone’s throw from its front door.

Walking to work one afternoon, Bentley noticed Lilly Thomas’ name had appeared on the billboard of one of these theatres in the Strand. She had a small part in a Anton Chekov play and Bentley bought tickets that very afternoon to see her on his night off. He had looked forward to the evening for days, a feeling of excitement and anticipation building from deep in his stomach. Would she look the same? Would he recognise her immediately she came on stage? Would she have the same warm, shy smile?

When Bentley got to the theatre there was disappointment. A note pinned in the program announced Lilly Thomas was unwell, and an understudy would take her place.

For thirty years not a week had gone buy in which Bentley did not think of Lilly Thomas. Now he worked in theatreland, she entered his thoughts daily. Sometimes it was just an impression of her, sitting in the train, the smoke and steam drifting by the carriage window. The backbeat of the chugging steam locomotive, the rhythm of steel wheel on rails. Sometimes it felt to Bentley like a heart beat, his heart pulsating in his chest when he thought of Lilly.

He confessed to a girlfriend once about this girl he had met long ago, who had never left his memory.

“How silly is that,” he would say. “We never went out, we never had sex …. Just this lovely girl I met once, on a train, and she is still with me, like on my own journey through life. Does that sound strange? Am I talking clichés and nonsense? We’re still riding the train of hope and dreams, rolling and swaying through life. Signals stopping us here and there, straight stretches, uphill climbs, tunnels of turmoil…..”
Bentley tailed off. He worried at times about what appeared to be an obsession about a girl he had hardly met, hardly knew; someone he had had a brief conversation with on a train all those years ago.

Not that Bentley actually used the term “obsession”. It was more profound than that. Lilly Thomas had entered Bentley’s life at an impressionable stage, when he was moving from being a boy into manhood. Infatuation might be more precise. Even that did not tell the tale. Bentley – with all his writing skills – could not put a word to it, it was an emotion beyond etymology, syntax and grammar. It was part of growing up, the moulding of his personally, his aspirations. His place in the world, and the place of other people in it.

Bentley had never mentioned Lilly Thomas to anybody, not even his friend Peter Simpson when Simpson went to interview her in Cape Town. That was until he met Charlene Peters, a colleague on the Star in Johannesburg who shared his interest in films and introduced him to the Park Avenue Cinema that showed art house movies.

It was Peters who persuaded Bentley to see what she described as the greatest film ever made, Citizen Kane. They had gone not to a cinema but the United States consulate in Johannesburg which had arranged a special screening for South Africans are part of its cultural program.

All Bentley knew was the film was about newspapers, or the life and death of an ambitious man who owned newspapers, and he didn’t think beyond that story line until near the very end.

Bentley had followed the progress of the narrator of the story, a young reporter trying to determine what “Rosebud” , the dying words of the central character, meant. The reporter was interviewing a friend of “Citizen Kane” and in the process expressing doubt on one theory that Rosebud could be the pet name of a lover, that someone from the past could have such a hold on the present. The old man had a story of his own.

“When I was young I got the ferry once from New Jersey and there was this young girl in a white dress, carrying a parasol. Over all the years that girl has never left my memory. Not a week goes by without me thinking of her,” he said.

Moving on from the BBC World Service Bentley had worked exclusively on the foreign pages of the Independent but with the move to Canary Wharf, and cut-backs, editors on the foreign pages were also required to edit domestic copy. Bentley dreaded the late evening when, the foreign pages out of the way, he would be assigned domestic stories on crime, punishment and politics. Having spent a third of his working life overseas, domestic Britain did not hold much interest for him.

One night he dipped into the sub-editors’ basket on his computer screen and there was the name of Lilly Thomas. He clicked on the story and it burst onto his computer screen.

The actress was accused of assaulting businessman and the news agency wire story merely carried a brief mention of the charge, and the date that Lilly Thomas was to appear in court.

Next day the popular press, the tabloid “red tops”, had a more lurid account, fanned by Lilly’s past fame as a star of a soap.

The victim of the alleged assault, the successful businessman, had been her lover and the incident had occurred after he had told Lilly Thomas that the affair was over. According to the red-tops, the businessman’s wife had learned of the affair and she, backed by her grown-up children, had given her husband an ultimatum – he had to choose between Lilly Thomas and his family.

Later when she appeared in court Lilly Thomas had told the magistrate she was suffering from depression. The magistrate bound her over to keep the peace.

The story of the court case had carried a picture of Lilly Thomas arriving at court. Bentley was surprised how she had aged, basing this assessment on billboard pictures he had seen of her in recent years in which she has still appeared to retain her looks. He could still see a trace, though, of the smile that he remembered from all those years ago. The court case, and picture, would be the last mention of Lilly Thomas’ name Bentley would see for 10 years or more.

A fading memory

Bentley now thought of Lilly Thomas less and less – certainly not daily. He was married himself now, to an Australian, and they had started a new life together in Australia, with their son. Perhaps distance played its part in the dimming of her memory but one day while booking seats for a play at the Theatre Royal in Hobart a metaphor of fading ink on newsprint occurred to Bentley when Lilly fleetingly crossed his mind, and it troubled him. It was as though Lilly and her memory were slowly dying in Bentley, like fading ink on newsprint, ink that had once been sharp and clear and now resembled a blur. Words and images were lost to a faint impression within the loose, tatty structure of the newspaper itself, yellow and parched and creased with age. Bentley wanted his first memory of meeting Lilly Thomas to endure, it was a part of him as much as all the experience acquired and accumulated through a lifetime, of discovering senses and emotions and the power to articulate and express them.

That tingle, that trembling, that thing that welled in the pit of his stomach and coursed through his body. It flowed to his extremities so his fingers twitched as though pricked by a blunt needle. Bentley had felt this sensation for forty-odd years and now it was dying. Not only his memory dying, but his whole ability to feel? He had entered his sixties and other sensations, and memories, seemed blunted like the needle that once pricked his finger tips, when the smiling face of Lilly Thomas entered his thoughts.

Bentley had taken a holiday to Sydney with his family. As part of the tourist routine a trip on a Sydney ferry had been booked and Bentley and his family had chosen the longest one, to Manly where the Pacific Ocean meets the Sydney bay. And there sitting on a seat, alone and with a book, was a young woman of 18 or so, in a sleeveless, flowered frock. Bentley tried not to look, to stare but his eyes were drawn to her innocent beauty, her wind-kissed skin and sun-bleached fair hair falling down both sides of her face. And Bentley thought of the old man in Citizen Kane recalling the beautiful girl on the New Jersey ferry whom he would never forget, and Bentley thought of the young, aspiring journalist sitting on the Basingstoke semi-fast, and he thought of that first day he saw Lilly Thomas.

When he got home to Hobart after his holiday Bentley started to search again for all references to Lilly Thomas. Bentley had now embraced the age of the internet, of Google, and Bentley did not have to visit the Hobart State Library to read the British newspapers on file there, to glean information about the theatre and film world in Britain, always in the faint hope that there might be a mention of Lilly Thomas reviving her career.

Bentley searched the internet, but in vain, apart from previous references to the actress, which were scant and few and far between.

At the Chronicle in Hobart one of Bentley’s duties in the twilight of his career was concerned with compiling and editing the foreign pages, a task that gave him a bigger perspective than that offered by the close, tight world of Hobart and Tasmania.

It was obvious when Bentley was editing the foreign pages, and his colleagues often commented on it. Instead of the tittle-tattle, the showbiz gossip of the red tops, Bentley chose stories about the more serious actors of the British and American stage, or films.

Some of these actors might not be known to the people of Hobart, but Bentley was always careful to attribute his stories to a source, like The Times, to reassure the readers that these were important people they should know of.

Bentley secretly looked for the name of Lilly Thomas and lived in hope that he would one day find it among the thousands of words coming over the wires, and hoped there would be good news about a major part reviving her career.

Bentley knew that if he found such an item, it would be given more than its news worth on the foreign pages of the Chronicle, and all the staff, and readers, would know that Bentley was editing the foreign pages that night.

The name of Lilly Thomas did one night appear amid the flotsam and jetsam of foreign news, washed up on a tide of a bigger event, a tsunami of news about the destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York City.

The Chronicle needed some other news to go with its blanket coverage of the New York disaster, what were termed fillers to spread the news coverage from what was shaping up as a one-story edition of the newspaper.

The night editor had been trawling the wires for some light, possibly showbiz coverage and found a brief reference to a former British film and stage star, an item missed by Bentley who was scanning the hundreds of thousands of words on the Twin Towers being transmitted from the United States.

“Seen that story on the British actress?” the night editor shouted to Bentley.
Bentley shook his head.

“Yeah, Lilly Thomas. Remember her? In some film in the ’70s. Give us two pars, quick as you like.”

Bentley hurriedly keyed in the letters L-I-L-L-Y T-H-O-M-A-S and the story flashed on his screen, her name in bold where the search engine had picked it out.

Bentley scrolled down and began to read. He turned away after reading the first few lines, and then went back to the pulsating electronic waves on his screen.

“Tragic actress dies” said the headline, and then “Former film star Lilly Thomas found dead at her home”.

Bentley read on. Lilly Thomas had been found dead in bed, with an empty bottle of sleeping pills and a bottle of bourbon on her bedside table. An inquest would be held but the report said the police were not treating the death as suspicious, police speak for a suicide in such circumstances.

The report was brief. Just the plain details of the death and a list of films and plays that Lilly Thomas had appeared in. The list was a short one.

Bentley then added a line himself to the story he was compiling: her fans were in mourning.

The popular, red tops in Britain made much more of the story than the brief report carried by the news wires. This was the tortured tale of a once beautiful actress always on the fringe of fame, but somehow never making it.

Bentley thought of Woking now and how a young reporter on the Woking News and Mail might write the obituary. Things had changed from his days, when obituaries ran to great length, but there would be more than enough to give the obit a bit of depth. They’d be no relatives, though, to call on for anecdotes and colour. No door to knock on, no husband, or grown-up children gathered for the funeral, no pictures on the mantelpiece to be given, or to steal.

Bentley looked for details of a funeral. Lilly Thomas was to be cremated in a private ceremony. Newspaper reports did not say who had attended, and he presumed that her partner from the 1970s, the playwright, would have been one of the few mourners.

Then three months later Bentley found another story on Lilly Thomas for the foreign pages.

A group actors she had worked with at Shepperton Film Studios in the Thames Valley in the 1970s had remembered her and had decided to pay their own tribute.

A week later they hired a motorboat and sailed abroad it to scatter the ashes of Lilly Thomas on the Thames.

As a football referee, Tristan Turner flouted the convention that the man in the middle should be unobtrusive and anonymous in ensuring the smooth passage of play.

During games, Tristan Turner would dig the toes of his Adidas football boots into the muddy turf and fling up his arms in an extravagant gesture in the style of Rudolph Nureyev.

Turner brought ballet to soccer, explaining that the game was ethereal, it floated across the turf untroubled by physical contact, unlike those rough and tumble games of rugby union and rugby league.

Most frequently the beauty of ballet was represented by a pirouette performed in the penalty area, often at the start of play, or it might be a petit allegro, an arabesque or even a chasse near the centre circle. The pirouette usually denoted a goal, petit allegro a free kick and croisee, a corner.

Indeed, as Tristan Turner often pointed out, there was nothing in the Association Football rules to forbid the saut or even the petit saut; he was free to bring his own flourish to the bureaucratic role of the man in the middle, the man with the whistle, the man in black.

Turner’s performances on the pitch during schools soccer games did not win over all the audience, however, and soon there were moves afoot to banish him to the wings forever.

Don Bentley, as a reluctant observer of schools football, also found himself an unwitting witness to the unfolding events on and off the football field that ultimately had nothing to do with sport and more to do prejudice and discrimination.

Bentley had only recently been appointed sports editor of the Woking News and Mail, a position each trainee journalist had to fill for about a year, basically to learn newspaper editing and layout skills. Games in the Woking and District Primary Schools Football League did not usually require the attendance of the sports editor whose main focus, besides editing the sports pages, was to report on the team representingWoking in the nation’s premier amateur league. Bentley was not entirely happy when he was instructed by the editor to attend some of the school matches in the mornings. The newly established league had been seeking a local company to donate a cup to be presented to the season’s top team and the editor thought that this might be an ideal way to raise the newspaper’s profile among schoolchildren and their mothers and fathers. First he wanted Bentley to check out the league and its officials, to see if they were worthy recipients of the company’s largesse.

“I see picture spreads in this Bentley, and parents and grandparents buying the paper in the hundreds,” said the editor, always looking for a way to boost circulation.

Bentley was under firm instructions when it came to the cup. It must not cost more than 10 pounds and he was pointed in the direction of a local jewellers, which had over the years been a big advertiser. There he might get a discount. No money could change hands, though, and no commitment to supply a cup be made until Bentley had satisfied himself and the News and Mail’s accountant that the new league could be ongoing, and properly managed, so that year after year the good name of the newspaper, and its commitment to the community, would shine as bright as the polished, silver-plated cup.

The snow lay heavy on the ground as Bentley arrived at the village green in the hamlet of Horsell, on Woking’s fringe, where the children’s game was to be played. Bentley surveyed the surroundings grumpily: a huddle of parents at the touchline, eager boys and girls chattering and laughing, stretching, some stamping their feet in the winter chill to keep them warm. It was much like the scene being enacted at that moment at a thousand soccer pitches up and down the country, in rain or snow; let play begin.

And then the referee appeared or, to be more precise, made an entrance and Bentley immediately realised that this would be a game like no other he had seen.

As required and mandated by the rules of the Woking and District Primary School League the referee was in full referee’s uniform, of black shorts and shirt. Only this referee’s kit had been neatly pressed, with creases down the front of the shorts, crisp creases that looked more like pleats. To Bentley’s untrained eye in the fashion field, the uniform also appeared to be custom made and not one bought from the catalogue of sporting wear that came with the rules of the football league when individual players, their parents and officials signed up. The uniform carried embellishments and refinements not seen before in any league, even at the highest level in the Woking soccer universe, the Isthmian League. This uniform had a white trim to its black shirt and shorts, and the referee’s whistle was attached to a lanyard with an intricately knotted cord.

The children, stripped down to the kit of their respective teams, had already taken to the field and were kicking several balls around in practice. The referee strode to the centre circle and solemnly summoned the captains of both sides, Horsell and Woodlands primary schools. He then produced an impossibly burnished penny for the toss to determine who started play, and from what end, before launching the coin in the air with an exaggerated flick of the fingers of his right hand.

A pirouette and a blast of the whistle, and play was under way.

It was difficult for Bentley to keep his eyes on the passage of play. He was transfixed by the antics of the referee: his precise and carefully controlled steps when measuring the distance of a defensive wall during a free-kick; outstretched arm in frozen pose when awarding a corner; an exaggerated look of disapproval at the sight of a blatant foul like tripping.

The reports of matches in the schools league were usually sent to Bentley’s office by teachers or parents, then typed up in a neat précis to be published in the Woking News and Mail on the following Friday. For the Horsell game, simply because he was in attendance, Bentley decided to write the report himself, and give it a little longer space than was usually afforded by the newspaper to school games.

Despite his annoyance at having to attend the game, Bentley afforded himself a little fun when writing the report, including all the sporting clichés he had been trained not to use. His name would not go on the report and the column inches would provide space for an experiment in sports journalism satire.

According to Bentley’s report, at the start of play the captain winning the toss bad kicked off the sphere and it was not long before the beaten custodian in one of the goals was picking the ball out of the union bag. Horsell Primary had found their winning ways, as one-nil victors, but it had been a game of two halves, with both sides dominating during each half-hour spell before and after the half-time break, or “orange time”.

The game in fact had been marred by an ugly tackle, with the culprit sent to the dressing room for an early shower. That might have been disturbing enough for the parents watching the beautiful game, especially played by youngsters who should be out on the pitch for the pure fun of playing and not be concerned with brutal physical contact, but there was a different kind of menace in the air, one that brushed Bentley like the chill air rustling the collar of his duffle coat.

Although the snow had stopped falling before the game, a black cloud hovered, threatening a blizzard that defied journalistic cliché, sporting or otherwise. Bentley had a meeting planned with the senior officials of the league to discuss the donation and presentation of the Woking News and Mail trophy. The clubrooms at the Horsell recreation ground proved an appropriate venue because the president of the league was also a parent whose young son captained theHorsellPrimary Schoolfootball team.

The clubrooms themselves had an attraction and aura for sports enthusiast Bentley that went beyond the game of Association Football: the Victorian pavilion was also the headquarters of the Horsell and Woking Cricket Club, two of whose members were firmly cemented in the history and legend of the county side, Surrey. They were the famous Bedser twins and Bentley had had the pleasure of meeting them while reporting on the annual general meeting of the Horsell andWokingclub, of which they remained members.

It was difficult to be in the clubrooms without the names of Alex and Eric Bedser featuring somewhere in the conversation, whatever the occasion and whatever the sport so implanted were they and their exploits in the folklore of  Woking  sport. The pavilion and sports ground were the closest that Woking, a Victorian town that grew with the expanding railways servingLondon30 kilometres away, had to a sacred site. Just in case anyone was left in doubt that this was Bedser territory, the pair looked down sternly from countless black and white photographs on the clubhouse walls; their names also embossed in gold leaf on the honour boards for bowling and batting, from the time they first played for Horsell and Woking in the early 1930s.

“I don’t know what the Bedsers would make of it,” said Archie Miller, the president of the Woking and District Primary Schools Football League, to a gaggle of parents and officials grouped around him.

“Well you can be liberal, but this is kids. And what do they make of it all.”

Bentley stood at the sidelines listening to the Miller. He didn’t need to be told of the subject of conservation. It was the referee.

Bentley pushed forward to introduce himself.

“Ah, the News and Mail. Thanks for all your help and I hope you enjoyed the game,” said Miller.

“Good standard of play,” Bentley said politely.

“We were just discussing the referee,” said Miller.

“Well, I mean it’s all right for up inLondon, in the North Circular League, but it’s inappropriate here.”

Bentley feigned ignorance. “Sorry?” he said.

“The referee, all that ballet dancing. Well, I mean, it’s not the bloody Bolshoi. Can you imagine that on the cricket pitch? Umpire would be lynched by the fast bowler.”

The parents and officials standing around Miller nodded, laughing nervously

“Oh the referee,” said Bentley again. “Eccentric, that’s how I would describe it.”

“Bleeding eccentric? Downright disgraceful. He’s got no place on the pitch with kids.”

Any pretence to pull punches, to restrain from open criticism of the referee and his display of dancing had now been jettisoned.

“Well he’s a homo, no doubt about that,” said another parent on the fringe of the group. This was the 1960s and the adjective “gay” had not entered the lexicon to describe a homosexual.

Back at the office on the following Monday, Bentley endorsed the league as worthy of support from the newspaper. It was popular with parents and well organised and he could hardly raise the question of an eccentric referee as being a cause for disquiet. All the same Bentley knew he was going to be drawn into the politics, mores and machinations of the Woking and District Primary Football League. For Bentley it was going to be a long, cold winter.

Because of the newspaper’s involvement in the league, Bentley was instructed to attend at least one game each weekend, fitting them in with his coverage of the major Isthmian League side. He preferred to go to the home games of Horsell Primary, mainly because Horsell was the best team in the league and the team’s games were usually thrilling encounters with a high standard of play from those so young. The parents, under the guidance of Archie Miller, whose son was in the team, saw to that with intensive coaching sessions at least twice a week.

Contact with Archie Miller also served another purpose which improved Bentley’s standing with the editor. Miller was managing director of a new car dealership in north-west Surreywhich was a big advertiser in the News and Mail. The editor told Bentley on more than one occasion that it was the sort of contact with the community the newspaper should be making.

When he was officiating, the antics of referee Tristan Turner remained a problem for the Horsell parents, and slowly opposition to him spread through the league to other teams. There were even letters to the newspaper about him, letters that the editor declined to print. References to homosexuality were oblique and disguised, though, with a frequent theme being the advisability of combining ballet with soccer instruction out on the football pitch.

At the same time the parents of Horsell Primary, led by Archie Miller, did not hold back from direct criticism and matches at which the referee Turner officiated became increasingly tense affairs.

The referee was aware of the controversy that was increasingly surrounding his ballet displays, but he laughingly shrugged them off. It was clear the focus of the disquiet, the children, had no problems with referee Turner or his antics on the pitch. With the children, he was always the preferred referee. He was fair and tolerant, unlike some of the other officials – some of them school teachers – who brought the harsh regimen of the classroom to the pitch.

Bentley suggested to the editor that he write a profile on the referee, to go with the profiles he was writing on each team in the league, building up to the last weekend of the season when the cup would be presented. The editor warned him off the idea.

“Let’s let sleeping dogs lie, lad,” he said one morning. “I’m not having ballet in my paper.” Bentley could not determine if he was joking or not, but he was certainly wary of bringing the schools’ soccer league into disrepute and its locally powerful president.

Bentley decided to meet the referee, anyway. They shared coffee and cake at a local bakery and cafe the next day, Rose’s Tearooms, a favourite haunt of Turner when he was not at the day job, that of a pastry chef at a hotel in nearby Guildford. The question of sexuality never came into the conversation, but ballet featured strongly.

“I just love to dance; dance, dance and dance,” said Tristan Turner, his eyes wide and sparkling as he spoke. He was a fit-looking man in his early 30s, who cycled to games on an ancient blackRaleighbicycle, his long blonde hair and fawn scarf flowing behind him. “And what’s wrong with that, and what’s wrong with a little flourish on the soccer pitch? We’ve got to be free. This is the Sixties, We got to be free, free, free.”

The notion of freedom on the soccer pitch did not cut any ice with the officials of the primary schools’ football league, especially as Archie Miller was outraged one afternoon to see his son Alex, captain of the Horsell team, doing a pirouette after scoring a goal. Another parent, a burley butcher, had dragged his son off the pitch and taken him home for doing the same routine, the son crying as he went.

Towards the end of the season, the name of Tristan Turner began to be omitted from the fixture list issued each Monday ahead of the Saturday or Sunday games. Sometimes referees went without a game, to give new recruits a chance, but when several weeks went by without a game Turner began to suspect he was being squeezed from the roster.

Bentley noticed, too, and phoned Turner to see if there had been official word about his apparent axing. No contact, no explanation, said the referee, but he added that he knew that sooner or later he would suspended from the league.

Bentley realised he was on to a good story, a scoop, if it could all be confirmed. It might even make lineage in the national newspapers. The referee, however, was not about to complain, he did not want to make an official protest and expose the league to any potential embarrassment.

He knew full well that ballet could be used as a metaphor for homosexuality.

His disappointment, though, was palpable when Bentley met him again at Rose’s Tearooms.

“I just love to referee, and I just love to dance. Does that make me different?” he asked Bentley.

“I told you, stay clear of this one,” the editor said to Bentley went to returned to the office, in what Bentley sensed was an admonishing tone. The banishment of a referee, who may or may not have homosexual tendencies, might be a big story for the nationals but, without a complaint from him or an official confirmation from the league, the issue would only do damage to the Woking News and Mail and its reputation in the town. It would remain rumour.

“The lesson in this is that if the referee complains about discrimination, and writes letters to his MP or whoever, then it’s a yarn but if he doesn’t then we’ve got to let it go,” he said. “Pursuing this sort of thing makes it look like we got an agenda.”

“But,” Bentley protested, “Haven’t we got an agenda to stamp out discrimination, to give homosexuals a fair go.”

“Has he told you he’s a homo?”

“No,” said Bentley.

“Well, you might end up looking as though you’re the one saying it. Being effeminate, anancyboy or whatever, is a long way from being a homo. You remember that son, and make sure you don’t go saying it or implying it yourself, in spite of all your good intentions. You don’t want to be the one calling him a homo, because that’s what it is going to look like if you don’t watch out.”

The editor was drawing on all his instincts honed as a reporter and editor over 40 years. This story promised trouble, the editor had a gut feeling about it but how could he define a gut feeling to Bentley. There were some instances and situations and issues that even a wordsmith of 40 years standing could not find words for.

“Leave it alone, son. When you got some more experience under the belt you’ll be able to spot the ones that are likely to rear up and bite you on the arse, and this is one, believe me.”

Bentley may have seen his prized scoop slipping away but events were to unfold to give him an even bigger story, one not only touching on the subject of discrimination against people perceived to be homosexuals, or “different” in the parlance of the officials of the primary schools’ football league, but one of a nascent tolerance of those who might not fit the social norm or convention.

The absence of referee Turner from the weekly fixtures had not been lost on the players, who muttered among themselves that games were not quite the same without pirouettes and petit allegros. Parents were questioned on the journey to and from games, and between spells of homework during the week, and it became clear that the schoolchildren were not happy with the answers.

Reference by some parents, behind hands held to the mouth, with muttered breath, might have been made to “shirt-lifters” and “bum bandits” , but at the same time schoolchildren were openly and loudly asking where referee Turner was, and wasn’t it about time he refereed one of their games.

Because Tristan Turner was the most expert and experienced of the referees it had been assumed as the season approached its end that he would be the one to referee the final match, involving Horsell and Woodlands again, and the one that would determine   the champion team. But his name did not appear on the roster and a retired and ageing former teacher, who could barely cover the pitch when games were in full flight, was assigned the game.  It also appeared the referee did not have a full appreciation of the off-side rule,  so many contentious goals on break-aways had he awarded, or disallowed, in games under his control during the season.

Bentley had been at home on the eve of the match, polishing the cup he was to present and writing a brief speech in which he was to praise the endeavours of each team. He was a little nervous about his first exposure to pubic speaking and had left a blank space at the end of his speech so that he could quickly insert the name of the winning team just before he presented the cup. He was determined not to confuse the teams and present the trophy to the wrong side.

Bentley’s preoccupation with the speech and cup presentation had taken his mind of the major issue of the day, not the season-ending match itself but the absence of a referee who had won the respect and support, and hearts, of the players.

When he arrived for the game he found the muddy ground mired in crisis.  Archie Miller could be seen running up and down the touchline, urging players from each side change into their kit. The young players, though, sat sullenly on the steps of the Horsell and Woking Cricket Club pavilion.

“We want Tristan,” chanted Archie Miller’s son.

“I had this all last night, I’m not having it now,” Miller told his son angrily. “Get into your kit and play. We got a big match here.”

“Won’t,” said Alex Miller. “We want…”

“Leave it to me,” said the referee rostered for the game. He made the 22 players of both sides stand in front of him and proceeded to give a lecture about endeavour and sportsmanship and listening to, and showing respect for, and obeying, parents.

“Won’t,” the schoolchildren, from both teams, shouted in unison.

“We want Tristan and we are not going to play without him. He should be the referee. He’s fun,” said Alex Miller. “And he knows the off-side rules.”

The stand-off persisted, with Archie Miller finally saying the game was to be called off.

“But perhaps we could find Mr Turner,’’ said another parent, stepping forward hesitantly at first but then raising his voice so everyone could hear. He was a local plumber, who had not been entirely happy with the muttered “backdoor” jibes he had heard increasingly throughout the season but had gone alone with the criticism all the same.  “It’s the last game after all. We’ve all looked forward to it. The kids have and it’s their day and their say.”

“Yeah” said another parent, a mother of one of the girls in the Horsell team. “If myAlicesays she wants Mr Turner to be ref that’s fine with me.”

Bentley, still clutching his polished cup, stepped forward with a possible solution, if it was required. When he had practised his public speaking the night before he hadn’t realised he would be making an impromptu statement.

“Everybody,” he shouted. “Perhaps we could invite Mr Turner to come and referee the game. There would be a little delay but it could be played.”

Bentley said that he might know how to contact Tristan Turner if so required. Archie Miller, in a brief consultation with the other parents, instructed Bentley to try to contact referee Turner and report back as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the children were instructed to run around the pitch to warm up, and the stand-in referee took off his football boots and left for home without saying another word.

Bentley had Turner’s home telephone number and his heart sank when he received no reply there.  He then phoned Rose’s Tearooms, and was told Turner was sitting in his favourite window seat .

“Hi, Tristan,” Bentley said breathlessly, for the first time calling Turner by his Christian name.  “Glad I found you. The kids are rebelling, they won’t take the field without you for the final match. You gotta come quick.”

Referee Turner was soon furiously peddling his cycle to his home, to snatch up his referee’s kit.

“Damn”, he said to himself when he realised he had not pressed it the night before, there had been no need. He looked towards his iron, but realised a spot of ironing would result in added delay. There was no time to lose, crease or no crease.

Don Bentley had been brought up in the hot metal days of journalism but he found something exciting, pulsating about the electronic journalism of the internet. It gave him a buzz. He was thinking about it one afternoon, between stories, sitting at his sub-editor’s desk in the Chronicle newspaper.

Don Bentley’s life-time love affair with newspapers embraced not only the printed word squeezed between pages of newsprint but the purveyors of this arcane and archaic trade, the journalists.

Both were under threat in the rapidly changing environment of electronic journalism and Bentley, never opposed to change like so many of his ageing collegues, looked for plusses and minuses, the good and the bad.

He accepted that the modern newspaper must present a modern face on the net but did the image of the journalist, of eccentricty and rebellion, really require a makeover, a clean-up to resemble something as sleek and functional as the computer keyboard?

His criticism of so much modern journalism, the concentration of its supposed power in just a few hands, and its appeal to a mass audience with celebrity, frivolity and superficiality, was matched by his distaste of a new breed of journalist, clean-cut and sober, keen to toe the corporate line.

It was not so much the changing face of newspapers that worried Bentley, but the changing face of the journalist. Newspaper owners might be worried about the internet poaching both advertising and readers, undermining their businesses,  but Bentley took a different view,  that of the journalist. The internet spelt freedom and liberation.

In cyberspace, Bentley saw a world of journalism that, paradoxically, was not new at all.

If he was writing a headline to his thoughts this day he would type ‘‘back to the future’’. The future that Bentley was travelling back to was not the Fleet Street he had known, but a glorious age that predated this, that of Grub Street. Bentley, sitting at his sub-editor’s desk between stories,  was reaching back and grabbing an evocative name from the past.

In his last year working in London, before starting a new life in Australia with his Australian wife, Don Bentley had touched base from time to time with his craft, wandering down a street that led to the birthplace of journalism as he knew it. On his walk to the offices of the Independent newspaper, just north of the City ofLondon, each work day he would take a detour along Grub Street.

It was not the Grub Street of old, of course, the squalid, over-crowded district brimming with society’s misfits, and the misplaced, in the early 18th century. Then it was a maze of alleyways and lanes, of courtyards overhung by tiered half-timbered, crumbling buildings that had survived the great fire of London 100 years previously.

Bentley could see it had changed beyond recognition. It was not even called Grub Street any more. It now carried the name ofMilton Street and,  after being devastated by bombing during World War II, formed the ultra-modern Barbican complex of apartments, shops and an entertainment centre on the fringe of the city business district.

This may have been the late 20th century but for Bentley ghosts of journalism’s glorious past still stalked Grub Street, as they did Fleet Street, their most recent home. The poets write of place and time, and Bentley always felt, standing on his hallowed ground, that this had been the place and time of journalism. Here was not only journalism’s tomb, but its heart and soul.

As a poor area of London, straddling the walls surrounding the city’s traditional square mile, it attracted writers looking for cheap digs. They were playwrights, poets, pamphleteers and those writers who worked on or published small-circulation journals, men of letters soon to become known as journalists.

By all accounts Grub Street was as magical as it was squalid. Writers tussled and fought to outdo each other, publications sprung up and suddenly died, forever testing still-to-be-defined markets, along with testing the limits of political, moral and religious censorship.

Among esoteric publications to emerge was one called The Night Walker: or Evening Rambles in search of lewd women,  predating by just a few years Daniel Defoe’s Weeky Review, and Jonathan Swift’s Examiner at the start of the 1700s. There was also the Flying Post and Common Sense, and John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury, in which he pioneered the advice column.

Other notable figures to ply their trade in Grub Street at one time or another were Dr Samuel Johnson, the author of the first dictionary, Anthony Trollope, Alexander Pope, and Henry Fielding. And there were artists, too; among them William Hogarth who depicted the plight of the under-paid and under-nourished Grub Street writer in his work The Distressed Poet.

Their endeavours were not always noble and honourable. Some of the reporters, poets and playwrights also doubled as speech writers and political propagandists, writers of small reputation willing to sell their labours to the highest bidder, for whatever cause. They became known as ‘‘Hacks’‘, after the transport for hire, the Hackney carriages, but they all had one thing in common: they were wordsmiths and relied on their command of the English language to earn a crust. Words and grammar were the tools of their trade.

There might have been dreams of plays, or of starting a newspaper to change the world, but the reality often remained a damp and musty loft, and a hungry stomach. Journalists were forced to take on work to pay the bills, to prostitute themselves. It troubled some, to the extent they felt compelled to use their skill at writing to publicise their plight.

Wrote one of the Grub Street fraternity, Ned Ward in 1698:

The condition of an Author, is much like that of a Strumpet, …and if the Reason by requir’d, Why we betake our selves to so Scandalous a Profession as Whoring or Pamphleteering, the same exclusive Answer will serve us both, viz. That the unhappy circumstances of a Narrow Fortune, hath forc’d us to do that for our Subsistence, which we are much asham’d of.

Grub Street may survive to this day as a pejorative term for journalism but it had possibly a greater influence than the latter Fleet Street and certainly left a far greater mark in the annals of English literature than the ‘‘street of adventure’‘, whose literature was mainly concerned directly with the newspaper industry and reporting the news, with Evelyn Waugh’s newspaper satire Scoop’ among its heritage.

To be a called a Grub Street author may have been viewed as an insult in some quarters, but another writer, James Ralph,  defended the trade of the journalist, contrasting it with the supposed hypocrisy of more esteemed professions:

A Man may plead for Money, prescribe for or quack for Money, preach and pray for Money, marry for Money, fight for Money, do anything within the Law for Money, provided the Expedient answers, without the least imputation. But if he writes like one inspired from Heaven, and writes for Money, the Man of Touch, in the right of Midas his great Ancestor, enters his caveat against him as a man of Taste; declares the two Provinces to be incompatible; that he who aims at Praise ought to be starved. The author is laugh’d at if poor; if to avoid that curse, he endeavours to turn his Wit to Profit, he is branded as a Mercenary.  

* * * * *

A decade after visiting what remained of Grub Street, Don Bentley now looked at it from afar, from his new home in Australia. He thought of writing about it once, and without reference books at hand, turned to Wikipedia for an account of it there. And there an irony struck Bentley, an irony that, 300 hundred years previously, would certainly not have been lost on the great, emergent satirists of the 1700s.

When Bentley looked at the internet, of blogging and of what the internet meant to the journalism of the future, he suddenly saw a Grub Street there, of writers with an individual voice. In the old days – before the media was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands – all a writer needed was a friendly and patient printer willing to give an author a little credit and a readership eager for information and words. And now, in the 21st century,  all a writer needed was a laptop and a domain to broadcast his creative effort, and his views, out to world.  ‘‘World’’ was perhaps the wrong word. Bentley considered ‘‘universe’’ more appropriate. What was happening out there was infinite.

The internet and websites and blogging was not confined and constricted, as newspaper journalism was, between the pages of newsprint. More importantly it was not tied to the rich and powerful who owned newspapers, or chains of them. It had economic freedom, not only free of the expensive resource of newsprint, and the need to pander to advertisers, but free of the reliance on a retail and transport infrastructure to get the ‘‘product’’ out there in the marketplace.

A website carrying news and views did not have to be termed a product as newspapers were by big business, but if it made money through advertising, that was, of course, to the good and would enable those wanting to write to be paid for it.

At the time of his own ramblings inLondon, Bentley had lamented the past and the characters who had died with it. His own world of Fleet Street had died more recently with newspapers removing their offices and printing operations to new high-tech plants in the London Docklands. What had been Fleet Street was now scattered across dockland office blocks offering cheaper rents than those in the central business district.

The Independent had emerged has the new face of Fleet Street, born of an age when it was possible to out-source printing, but Bentley had found it did not have a history, a tradition. A team of competent and experienced writers who had been recruited was no substitute for the layers of history that had gone before.

Bentley had spent two decades lamenting the end of tradition, not just of journalism but the journalists, the characters who forged this strange trade. From far way inAustraliathe pain of journalism’s loss had been even more palpable. It was an ache, a mourning, mixed with the homesickness he sometimes felt when he saw pictures ofLondon.
In the years he had spent inAustralia, Bentley had forgotten that journalism was an evolving, changing thing; a fragile bird that could change its shape and song to meet a new environment. It was a creature that would have done Charles Darwin proud.

Amid the much-feared death of the newspaper in the internet age, reflected in the countless closures of American newspapers, and the cutbacks to hit newspapers inBritainand nowAustralia, Bentley had not paid attention to the evolution of the internet itself. Like many journalists of his age, entering their sixties, Bentley had been suspicious, nervous about the rise of the internet, not so much about this means of communication but about what it was doing to his beloved newspapers.

But Don Bentley had become a blogger, recalling tales of journalism past on a website. It gave Bentley a thrill,  the sort of thrill he had experienced four decades earlier when he got his first bylines in the Woking News and Mail. Bentley had realised the internet and blogging contained the seeds of not just a revival of journalism, but was a Grub Street reborn.

In its day, what made Grub Street important was the number of publications that embraced every political opinion. For one viewpoint there were others to give another side of the story. Could Bentley say this of the press – newspapers, radio and television – today?

The emergence of the internet had not only crept up on the journalists of the old school, but the traditional media owners. They had previously amalgamated, rationalised and controlled to such a degree that there was little variety left and the internet had moved into the vacuum. There had also been vast profits to be made from single publications. Now it was not so much loss of circulation hitting corporations,  but loss of profits from advertising, the vast profits they had built on the annual expansion and growth so beloved of shareholders.

As newspapers had been absorbed into bigger and bigger groups – and publications had withered, died or been killed off to create one-newspaper towns – balance and ethics had vanished with them. What had happened to the great divide, the firewall, between editorial and advertising on a newspaper’s pages where Bentley increasingly saw paid-for stories and pubic relations press releases pushing a company line masquerading as news? There was an ever greater reliance on the press release to fill space. Journalism had become ‘‘churnalism’’ in the modern age.

Newspapers, especially, might be scrambling to catch up, to transfer their newspaper brands onto their websites, but they were confronted by a competing philosophy – profit over a notion that information should be free.

The worldwide-web had been founded by academics at universities who wanted to share information. This mantra or philosophy stayed with it. People had gotten used to free information and would not want to pay for it, unless it was very specialised, like in the form of financial newsletter which would give them some financial benefit.

Newspapers had initially responded to the internet by setting up their own websites to carry their brand but Bentley believed they had made an error in diverting resources from newsrooms to fund them. Staff had been assigned to website desks without being replaced in newsrooms. Newspaper owners appeared to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. They were stretching resources to pay for their websites and at the same time reducing the scope and quality of the publications that drove their profits.

Could newspapers really make websites pay when their readers had so many sources of news and information open to them? Bentley thought not.

The shortcomings of net-based journalism in its most raw form had been, paradoxically, exposed by newspapers themselves. There were aspects of newspapers that made them unique, the letters page among them. Not to mention the editorial. Television and radio had tried to replicate the letters “page’’ and it never worked, and now newspapers, in Bentley’s eyes, had devalued the experience, by allowing not only two and three-line emails on letters pages, but readers comment on web sites.

A letter traditionally required thought and reason, not to mention attention to good, concise English, spelling and grammar. It was not a flippant, spontaneous thing to be written as an email message. Making matters worse, ‘‘letter writers’’ to newspaper websites were allowed to use pseudonyms, to hide their identity.

It exposed a bigger concern about web journalism, or citizen, journalism in particular. That question of accountability. Where were the experienced, senior journalists to filter the news,  to weed out the inconsequential and trivial and harmful? There was also no training for website journalists, no mentors as in the newspaper newsrooms of old, in the practice of journalism, its history, its ethics and law.

The internet represented an economy the size of Germany’s but it had a default value of zero for existing newspaper owners. To make involvement with the internet pay, they needed a new business model. Newspapers had lost precious classified advertisements to the web – the rivers of gold as they were once described – but there were other forms of advertising that only worked in a newspaper. On a local scale, specials on offer by supermarkets; on a national one, the branding of products and new products. There was still money to be made from newspapers, as long as profits were lower but the big media corporations were not prepared to lower their sights, or the expectation of their shareholders. Perhaps it was time for newspapers to return to local control, with government support in the form of tax breaks under a policy that would recognise the vital role of newspapers in the democratic process.

Bentley’s conversion to the web made a major talking point in the sub-editor’s room of the Chronicle. He was a brazen, unabashed convert but colleagues of his generation were not totally convinced. They looked to retirement and an end to journalism in their own day-to-day lives, not only the journalism that they had known.

Conversation about the web and newspaper websites was not new, of course. Many hours had been devoted to it, and many angry words. In the early days it had been discussion about websites themselves as an extra platform for newspapers to broadcast their wares, then the arrival of iPads and other reading devices that might spell the end of the newspaper in its traditional form.

‘‘Can’t swat a fly with a fucking iPad,’’ said a journalist one night, after discussion in the office had spilled to the journalists’ watering hole, Mahoney’s.

‘‘And can’t wipe your fucking arse on one, either,’’ said another of Bentley’s colleagues.

Bentley was unswayed, unaffected by doubt. He didn’t want to see the end of the newspaper, but added:  ‘‘So what if does go, and it is read on iPads instead?  It would take its place in a truly brave new world, alive with opinion and information, enough of it to allow the reader to make up his or her own mind.’‘

The world of an electronic Grub Street might have arrived but all the same Bentley felt a little sad. It was a silent world, probably a sober one, conducted at home, in studies and backrooms.

Now Bentley was thinking again of Grub Street ale houses and coffee shops, and smoky brothels, and grubby lofts and garrets where guests carrying a cheap bottle of claret, or port, or gin, would be invited to read tatty manuscripts and page proofs. The internet cafes that Bentley passed on his perambulations around Hobart were not quite the same.

CHRISTMAS approached, but Don Bentley was thinking not of the Chronicle’s annual staff party at a local brewery, or the Christmas parade down Liverpool Street in Hobart. Sitting in the Chronicle newsroom late one evening he was thinking of a white Christmas long ago, one in South Africa during the apartheid white-supremacy era.

The singing of ‘‘I’m dreaming of a white Christmas’’ had become an ironic joke in the newsroom of the Star, or at least some sections of it. It was not that snow was ever expected on the Transvaal Highveld at that time of year, summer. The song was a commentary on the office Christmas party that excluded the journalists’ black colleagues, by law.

In the white-ruled South African of the 1970s, apartheid was something you learned to live with. It troubled Bentley, of course, but it was not his problem. He salved his conscience by asserting he was a visitor, an observer, and it was not his fight.

But the fight would come to him one Christmas in the most remarkable of circumstances.

The owners of the Star prided themselves in their opposition to apartheid, voiced in their newspaper group’s publications each day, and one year took steps to break down segregation’s barriers within their own building. The office Christmas party, a time for all colleagues to get together at the end of the year, was the obvious setting for this experiment in South African social policy.

Looking at the fine print of the apartheid legislation it became clear there was nothing to stop the Star from having a social gathering of black, coloured, Indian and white staff on its own property, and provide alcohol at that. So the party was given the go-ahead with much anticipation, but even then its significance in the context ofSouth Africawas lost on Bentley. He was merely looking for a good time at the company’s expense, but at the same time looking to avoid all the women who had landed him in trouble in previous years.

Bentley had already spent three Christmases inSouth Africa, but the annual wetstone had presented problems of its own for the young reporter fromBritain. It had nothing to do with politics and racial ideology, more to do with drink and sex. For the previous three years Bentley had gotten hopelessly drunk on the free booze and ended up in bed with not so much strangers but women from other departments he did not know by name. He couldn’t remember the detail of these encounters but after each Christmas party an embarrassed Bentley had spent the next 12 months avoiding departments in the Star building where the women in question worked.

One year he had to keep his head down as he passed classified advertisements, the next he avoided accounts, sending someone else to collect his out-of-pocket expenses. After the third party, steering clear of the cuttings library proved particularly difficult for a young reporter with stories on the go. Bentley’s work began to suffer, and he was under instruction to go easy at the wetstone, to stay, if not on his own his feet, in this own bed.

*****

From a single African reporter to cover black politics, Harry Tshabalala, the black staff at the star had grown in the early 1970s after the newspaper had launched an edition for the townships. And this fuelled a growing agitation from the white journalists at the Star to have more contact socially with their black colleagues.

By law, Africans could not visit white-owned restaurants and bars and so there was no social contact between black and white reporters, except for the occasional party at a private home. These could present problems for black reporters who had to travel home to the outlying townships ofSowetoandAlexandria, where there was no public transport at night.

When it came to partying, segregation certainly made an impact on the lives of both black and whites. The journalists had already managed to circumvent, or bend the laws to make their union a multi-racial one, and meetings of the South African Society of Journalists had become another contact point between black and white.

*****

The wetstone, although now open to all Star employees, was an institution rooted firmly in the traditions of the printers, practitioners of an ancient craft known for its clannishness and exclusivity. When Bentley thought of printers, the word tribalism came to mind. To reinforce this exclusivity inSouth Africa, the trade of printer was reserved for whites.

The printers, a large proportion of them from the Afrikaner white tribe that supported the government, were not entirely happy about the multi-racial wetstone when it was announced. On the day of the party, however, if there was any tension in the air, Bentley had not detected it. He was more concerned about avoiding trouble of his own, the South African drinks that had caused him so many problems in the past, Mellowwood brandy and Natal cane spirit. He stuck to the safer ground of Lion and Castle beers and, on another front, avoided the women of the classifieds, the library, accounts and circulation; circulating instead with his black colleagues.

A main player in the integration of black and white had been Lambert Prentice, the Star’s religious affairs correspondent. Befitting his role on the newspaper, Prentice carried the air of a Church of England country parson about him. A youngish man in his early thirties, he strolled between desks for a chat, as though on pastoral rounds.

When he first joined the Star, Bentley had been a sub-editor, and among his duties was to work among the printers on the stone, the wide metal tables where lead type was assembled into pages. The stone took is name from the polished, flat slabs of stone on which print was originally assembled.

Bentley, like the other sub-editors, had drank with the printers in their waterhole in a pub near the Star building after work, a tradition he continued into his reporting days. In the pub he had heard grumbles about Africans being invited to the wetstone, but had not taken them seriously. So it was something of a shock when Lambert Prentice rushed up to him at the wetstone, agitated and upset.

‘‘We got big problems with Harry Tshabalala, Don, you gotta get over there quick.’’

‘‘What gives?’’ asked Bentley.

‘‘It’s Big Vic,’’ continued Prentice, referring to one of the printers, Vic Smith, a towering man who had been a formidable rugby union player.

Bentley was only half listening, the drink now – even if it was only beer – beginning to take its toll, to blunt his senses, his concentration.

‘‘Don, this is serious. It’s Big Vic …’‘

‘‘What about Big Vic? He’s okay, he’s my mate.’‘

‘‘Don, Big Vic’s got a gun. He says he’s going to shoot Harry Tshabalala.’‘

Bentley looked across the crowded floor of the Star canteen, where the wetstone was held, the tradition of it being held in the print shop, with beer spilled on the stone, long consigned to history.

‘‘Fuck,’’ said Bentley.

He put down his beer can and headed across the floor, looking for Big Vic and Harry Tshabalala.

Although he had an English name, Big Vic Smith was of Afrikaner stock, growing up in the white working-class districts ofJohannesburg’s southern suburbs. He views on segregation found support among English-speakers in the print works, many from the former northern and southern Rhodesias.

‘‘Fuck,’’ said Bentley again. When he reached Big Vic, he could see a huge bulge under his coat, that of a Magnum. Tshabalala had not seen the gun’s outline, looking Big Vic straight in the eyes, but he did not have to be told it was there.

‘‘No kaffirs, no kaffirs at our party,’’ Big Vic shouted in a booming voice.

Harry looked scared, but stood his ground.

‘‘And this one, he’s a cheeky kaffir,’’  said Big Vic.

‘‘It’s okay, Vic, calm it. It’s only a party,’’ said Bentley.

‘‘But it’s our party. It’s not for kaffirs’‘.

Bentley put his arm around Harry Tshabalala, and steered him away. Big Vic had his hand under his coat now, and he was joined by another group of printers, half of them drunk, no doubt some of them armed like Big Vic. They stood in silence around Big Vic, staring in Tshabalala’s and Bentley’s direction.

‘‘Fuck,’’ said Bentley to Prentice.

‘‘We gotta get Harry out of here.’‘

‘‘How about the other Africans?’’

‘‘No worries with them,’’ said Prentice, looking about him. ‘‘They have kept their distance. I just think Harry gave something back, gave Big Vic a bit of mouth. You know, Big Vic said something to him at the bar, and Harry didn’t just avoid him, go about his business. Harry’s got to say something. Nothing serious, but Harry’s not going to be intimidated. It’s his party, too.’’ 

Bentley agreed, and was now thinking about how they were going to get Harry out of the party, and out of the building without any more drama. 

‘‘Back stairs,’’ Bentley whispered to Prentice. ‘‘Back ones, down to the car park. Not front stairs that go near the works.’‘

Prentice looked towards the rear doors of the canteen, which indeed led directly to the underground car park, three floors down. There Harry would be safe. The rear of the underground car park was the preserve of the African drivers, who had rest-rooms there. They were Zulus and even the printers with guns would not venture there,  looking for Harry.

‘‘Ja, back stairs,’’ said Prentice.

Bentley instructed Prentice to usher Harry Tshabalala to the back of the canteen. Meanwhile, he wandered over to Big Vic and the printers gathered around him.

‘‘Yes, kaffirs at the wetstone, I know it’s hard but it’s what they call progress.’‘

Bentley cringed at using the word kaffir but it was the only way he felt he could communicate with the printers, to cover the retreat of Harry Tshabalala.

‘‘Ja, kaffirs,’’ said Big Vic again, ‘‘Kaffirs at our wetstone.’‘

Bentley glanced behind him and could see that Prentice and Tshabalala had vanished. He hoped they were running down the stairs at that moment, heading to the basement and the safety of the Zulus. Bentley still had the printers’ attention, and was relieved they had not given chase.

Bentley left the printers, now gathered among themselves in a corner of the canteen, to their grumbling and cursing and went to the bar. He was in need of a drink, a strong drink, not Lion or Castle lager. He asked the barman for a cane spirit, and looked about him.

Bentley’s eyes fell on a rather attractive young woman from the Star switchboard. She was flashing Bentley a smile …

He was described as a kindly and good humoured man who delighted in company but Don Bentley had seen a wicked side to the great foreign correspondent, Chris Munnion.

Don Bentley was thinking of Munnion, and talking of him, in the Chronicle’s newsroom.

Bentley had just learned of his death.

Bentley mourned Munnion with a sense of loss that only journalists, and possibly soldiers and others who live with danger, know.

The foreign correspondent covering wars gets used to death, is cynical about it, can laugh it off in the same way he or she washes off its stench from their clothes after an assignment, but in their quieter moments, away from the newsroom or what used to be the telex or cable office, it creeps up on them and they still feel the pain.

Bentley felt that way this night in the Chronicle newsroom, sitting quietly at his keyboard and shrugging off invitations to the office pub.

Bentley had learned of Chris Munnion’s death from the obituary page of Britain’s Daily Telegraph, a newspaper Munnion had served asAfrica correspondent for 23 years.

Bentley knew Munnion well from his days inAfrica. They met inJohannesburgand met up again in the former Rhodesia and it was in the Rhodesian capitalSalisburythat the playful Munnion had sprung a ruse on Bentley the size of Africa itself.

Bentley and another foreign correspondent, John Edlin, had been bitching about the wine sold in Rhodesia, produced in a country not suited to viticulture as a way to beat international sanctions.

Covering a bush war, and accepting the depravations that went with it, were one thing, but to go without a good red was too much to bear for Edlin and Bentley, especially as there was plenty of it just over the border in South Africa.

Even the Rhodesians didn’t like their wine, but in the name of self-sacrifice were encouraged to buy and drink it, to lie back and think ofEngland, and the damage the English were doing to Rhodesians’ political aspirations, to white rule.

Bentley and Edlin, on assignment to theVictoria Falls settlement, had discovered that the embattled Rhodesians there were mixing the local red with soda water, then adding fruit to produce a Rhodesian sangria. To Bentley and Edlin’s surprise the mixture was eminently drinkable, palatable to the discerning journalists’ palate, and they had decided to introduce it to the journalists’ watering hole, the Quill Club, when back in Salisbury.

To the amusement, and curiosity of the other journalists, Bentley and Edlin came one night armed with a giant, handled jug and bag full of fresh fruit bought that day from a local market.

The African barman, an affable gentleman nicknamed “the bishop” because of his resemblance to a black political leader, Bishop Abel Muzorewa, was handed the jug and fruit and given instructions on how to mix the drink.

All night long, taking giant gulps of their new-found drink, Edlin and Bentley extolled the virtues of sangria, announcing ever more loudly that the Spanish certainly knew a thing or two about alcoholic beverages, to say nothing of the Rhodesians living at theVictoria Falls.

It proved a night to remember. Sometimes the Quill Club could be flat, predictable and mundane with the foreign “hacks”, as they described themselves, locked in conversation about the Rhodesian bush war, and the difficulties of reporting on it to the exclusion of all else. Bentley and Edlin, however, had discoveredSpainand, at the bar and drinking sangria, were seeing themselves as heroic figures in the Ernest Hemingway mould, covering if not the Spanish civil war but one in a far-flung corner ofAfrica.

Munnion had so often held court in the Quill Club, with stories of the Congo, Biafra, Idi Amin in Uganda, and “Emperor Bokassa” in theCentral African Republic, but this evening he was happy to give the floor to the ebullient Edlin and Bentley.

Like Munnion, Edlin – a New Zealander who worked for the Associated Press news agency – had spent most of his adult life covering Africa’s wars. And like Munnion, he was a kind and personable reporter who could balance stories of the horrors of war with the foibles of the people covering African conflicts for the world’s press. But this evening Edlin’s asides and jokes brought more laughter than usual and even the jokes of the young Bentley, always feeling a little overawed by the other, more seasoned foreign correspondents, got a laugh. The assembled company, who had assembled around Bentley and Edlin in ever great number, even laughed at Bentley’s Tommy Cooper impersonations.

It seemed that nothing Bentley could say was ignored, resulting in peels of laughter. Edlin loved it, too.

More sangria was ordered, jugs and jugs of it, as the laughter spilled and flooded across the floor. It seemed more and more foreign correspondents, alerted by their colleagues, were arriving to watch the spectacle and Edlin and Bentley realised they had hit on something with their Salisbury Sangria, although no one else appeared to be drinking it.

At midnight, the fruit gone, and the crowd breaking up, Bentley and Edlin made their way out of the Quill Club and down the stairs of the hotel in which it was housed. Bentley’s legs buckled beneath him at the final step of the flight of stairs leading to the hotel foyer and he fell flat on his face. Edlin laughed uproariously and made his way out to the street, tripping himself and clutching at the brass handrail at the hotel’s entrance.

Bentley realised Edlin was making for his car. He was going to drive home and even in his lost state Bentley realised this held dangers. He tried to catch up with Edlin but this legs would not obey the command to move. It was too late. Edlin had driven away, swerving and weaving along Rhodes Avenue into the African night.

*****

Bentley sat in the canteen of the Rhodesian Herald on Rhodes Square, a building in which his newspaper rented an office. His head pounded and thumped. It roared like theVictoria Falls in summer, in full gushing flood. Bentley had never experienced a hangover like it. He had already determined to go home and go to bed.

His hand shook, spilling the black coffee from the cup into its saucer. Bentley sat there in silence, trying to steady his hand. He did not notice one of the Herald’s reporters enter the canteen and sit at his table. Finally, he looked up to see a young woman, slightly out of focus, but with a sympathetic smile on her face.

“Christ,” said Bentley after a while, whispering the words so they would not reverberate around his head. “Christ, what a night that was. I can only remember bits of it. But Edlin got home okay. His wife’s phoned to say his car is all smashed up, though. It’s had its hubcaps ripped off in a collision with the round-about up the street from their home. He’s telling her he was attacked by terrorists!”

“I’m not surprised you’re in a bad way,” said the reporter. “You should have seen yourselves.”

“Were you there?” asked Bentley, trying to remember those present.

“Yeah, and I’m not surprised you’ve got a hangover. Chris Munnion persuaded the Bishop to pour a half bottle of brandy into each jug of your sangria. I’m amazed you didn’t notice.”

His shoes splashing in pools of blood, Don Bentley climbed the stairs leading to  Le Coq d’Or nightspot in the heart of the Rhodesian capital, Salisbury. Out there on the street were three young soldiers with bashed-in faces and broken noses. Bentley looked at his mate, Peter Sharp, and whispered: “Do you think we should go on?’’

The stairwell was dimly-lit and gloomy but there was no mistaking the dark blood dripping down the steps.

“Well, why not?’’ answered Sharp, and they pressed on to the entrance to the club.

On Baker Street, one of the main drags dissecting Salisbury, the soldiers didn’t look too good. Bentley was surprised they were still on their feet, particularly one whose nose was clearly broken, bent to one side and distorted. He was the soldier bleeding the most.

“What the fuck happened to you?’’ Bentley inquired before entering the building.

“Only fucking asked the DJ to play Abba, that’s all,’’ replied soldier with the broken nose, nasally.

In the Rhodesian bush war, there were two areas out of bounds to foreign correspondents. One was the bush at night, especially areas where the black nationalist guerrillas were in control. The other was the waterholes of the RLI, or Rhodesian Light Infantry, in Salisbury, and the country’s second city, Bulawayo, to the south.

Le Coq d’Or was one such place, along with the Lion’s Den bar attached to the Windsor Hotel a little further along the street. Bentley had been to the latter with an American correspondent who had covered the Vietnam War, who had won the RLI’s respect. It was less threatening because it opened during the day, and if things got heavy with the troops there was an easy escape into the street.

Le Coq d’Or was a different story, and Bentley and his mate Sharp were taking a chance going there, fuelled by the Dutch courage of a few beers at a watering hole of a different kind, the journalists’ hang-out, the Quill Club.

Even the police didn’t attend incidents at Le Coq d’Or. It was safer for them to let the soldiers just in from the bush fight it out themselves.

Bentley and Sharp were wearing suits, unusual for journalists inRhodesia, who usually wore jeans and khaki, instead of collars and ties, for forays into the bush.

The two journalists had just interviewed the Prime Minister of Rhodesia, Ian Smith, and were full of bravado. They’d pose as businessmen from South Africa at Le Coq d’Or and if rumbled as journalists, they’d drop the name of the soldiers’ great leader, their ultimate chief of staff, saying they had just been to meet him. The mention of the name Smith, a former Battle of Britain pilot who was steering the former British colony on a path of independent white rule, would no doubt guarantee their safety.

Bentley and Sharp had observed the tough and battle-hardened Rhodesian soldiers at war, now they wanted to see them at play, in that private zone where they no doubt would let their defences slip. At the soldiers’ watering hole, there could be stories about the war, first-hand accounts and not the massaged, sanitised information fed to the press by the Rhodesian Government.

Bentley and Sharp had paused at the top of the stairs at the entrance to the club where a bouncer of sorts had let them in.

They went to the bar and asked for a beer but immediately a man in an expensive suit came running up and he told the barman to give them Scotch, on the house.

International sanctions had crippled the Rhodesian economy and Scotch whisky was not a commodity termed an essential item for the war effort. It was a luxury, precious; something to be hidden away and only brought out for special occasions.

“Give ‘em Scotch,’’ said the man in the suit and he was off immediately to discuss something or other, with someone on the other side of the dance floor.

Bentley downed the drink and looked about him at a scene that was bawdy, boozy, bare-knuckled and bra-less. The soldiers, most drunk and merely swaying to the music, or clutching girls not so much in a dance but to stay on their feet, would have left the bush war far behind, it would not have been in their minds. Bentley and Sharp soon determined it would not be worth the effort to talk to them, even if they could hear what they were trying to say. It was head-thumping, reverberating, pulsatingly noisy in there, the DJ putting on record after record without a pause.

Le Coq d’Or was located in a relatively modern, 1960s building that had no doubt started life as an office block. It was constructed of concrete and glass, instead of the bricks and mortar, and sandstone of an earlier period and had sprung up inRhodesia’s boom times following World War II when the world wanted the country’s minerals and tobacco. The building, like the people fightingRhodesia’s relentless bush war, and fighting sanctions, was looking a little jaded, in need of a rejuvenation, a freshening up. It was owned by a religious sect that had pulled out of the country whenRhodesiahad decided to defy the world and go it alone with white rule. The sect had laid down strict conditions that banned the selling of alcohol and tobacco. Dancing was proscribed. The sect was told the building was being used as a library.

Over the years the Le Coq d’Or had became a symbol of resistance to the external forces trying to dictate the future to Rhodesians, as powerful a symbol as the armoured personnel carriers on the streets, and the mine-proofed vehicles in the farming districts.

Standing at the bar, drinking expensive Scotch, in expensive suits, Bentley and Sharp were beginning to be noticed by the troopies. The strobe lights bouncing off the dance floor caught and illuminated the journalists’ crisp white shirts; the raising of their tumblers of expensive whisky captured in a slow-motion freeze.

It was time for Bentley and Sharp to go. One objective had been achieved, though; to actually venture inside the Le Coq d’Or and see what went on inside. They would at least have a story to tell at the Quill Club.

As they were preparing to leave, the barman offered them another drink. They tried to decline, but he insisted, saying the DJ wanted to have a word with them. Again the drink was on the house. As they knocked it back, the DJ left his cabin situated above the dance floor and came over to them.

“Look what the fuckers did?’’ he said, shouting above a Rolling Stones’ number and pointing to a rip in his gaudy shirt.

“The fuckers got heavy because I wouldn’t play their tunes. Fucking Dancing Queen.’’ 

It was clear the DJ was referring to the beaten and bloodied soldiers outside.

The man in the suit arrived again, clearly the owner of the club.

“You boys okay? Rodney looking after you? More Scotch? Don’t you pay no attention to the boys outside. Fucking troublemakers and we don’t want trouble. We run a trouble-free business here. You know that.’‘

The owner left with the DJ, who had vigorously nodded in agreement with him as he spoke.
“Why the fuck are they telling us all this,’’ Bentley said to Sharp, as they downed their third, expensive whisky, on the house.

They wanted to ask the barman, Rodney, but he was busy berating his African bar-hand about beer glasses that had not been washed.

The African glanced at Bentley and Sharp, periodically, as though wanting to make conversation but Rodney the barman constantly got in the way. But he seized the opportunity when the barman left his station and crossed the dance floor to talk to the DJ in his cabin. The barman appeared to be discussing Bentley and Sharp. As he spoke he turned to them, the journalists half hidden behind the swirling, gyrating dancers. The DJ could see them clearly from his vantage point and fixed them with a stare.

Bentley and Sharp were growing increasingly nervous. What was it with the free Scotch and the cold stare from the DJ, a stare to freeze the Scotch in their hand.

“Boss, boss,’’ said the African behind bar, shouting the words urgently, all the while looking at the barman and the DJ.

“Boss, they hit them with this.’‘

The African produced a baseball bat from below the bar, still covered in blood. He held it low so only Bentley and Sharp could see it.

“Hit them with THAT,’’  Bentley cried out, and the African put his finger to his lips, telling them to be quiet.

“Why you telling us this? ’’ 

“But you the CID, you come to investigate,’’ said the barman, looking at Bentley and Sharp’s neatly pressed suits and their sparkling, bleached white shirts.

“Fuck me,’’ said Bentley. He turned to Sharp but he was no longer at his side.

Looking to the exit, Bentley caught sight of Sharp’s shadow, vanishing down the blood-stained stairs.

And Bentley prepared to face the music.

 

Don Bentley was one shave behind the world and one drink ahead of it. He sat at the bar in Mahoney’s, half listening to a conversation between a colleague, Michael Cooper, and a friend of Cooper’s who had arrived for drinks. They were talking mobile phones, and comparing their instruments and the different applications they had obtained for them.

Like the radio waves buzzing around him, it all went over Bentley’s head in the Hobart pub. Bentley had initially shown a glimmer of interest in mobiles when Cooper a month previously had produced an iPhone, and spelled out what it was capable of doing. Clearly this was not merely a device for making and receiving telephone calls.

Bentley said he didn’t give a toss about its texting and net-search functions but his ears pricked up when Cooper mentioned in passing that it was possible to hold the phone in the air and identify all the stars in the sky, even indoors, on a cloudy day.

‘’Where’s Jupiter? ’’ Bentley had asked suspiciously, knowing exactly where it was because he had viewed it the night before, to the west of his balcony in the Hobart suburbs.

“Can’t tell you,” Cooper confessed, “I didn’t get that app.  with my plan.”

Bentley’s scepticism and doubt had prompted Cooper to buy the app. the very next day and with his friend he was now identifying the night sky, reading out the names of stars and constellations arrayed across his mini-screen.

“And Jupiter is to our north-east,” he shouted, looking in Bentley’s direction, a look that carried an air of triumph about it.

Bentley merely shrugged his shoulders and ordered another round of drinks for Cooper and his friend, who was visiting from Melbourne. The friend, meanwhile, was showing Cooper an app, the face of a monkey that repeated words spoken at it.

Bentley was now thinking of phones of the past, not mobile phones but those attached to the wall at the back end of pubs, usually near the toilets. These were in journalists’ pubs, newspapermen and newspaperwomen’s watering holes, and these phones always seemed to have a reporter hanging from them, either filing stories or making excuses to wives or husbands for being late for dinner.

The notebook and heavy Bakelite phone were synonymous, they went hand in hand, and Bentley was recalling not just telephones in bars but in public places; he was dialling up memories of filing reports from railway and bus stations, from high streets, and from village greens.

Bent coins, chewing gum in earpieces, phone boxes with the faint smell of vomit or urine, the public phone was the reporter’s curse and went with the turf, like cheap pens constantly leaking or running out of ink. Every reporter of Bentley’s time had his phone horror story, and he noted reporters today did not appreciate how easy they had it. Mobile phones that picked up a signal from virtually anywhere; and BlackBerrys, iPhones and iPads that could access information, vital background for stories, at the click of a button without a search through manila cuttings files – what tools for the modern reporters and Bentley often complained that they could still manage to stuff it up.

As Bentley paid for the round, he fumbled in his pocket for change and drew out the plastic 35mm film container he always carried, which held coins.

Carrying loose change in the container was an old trick he had learned from his foreign correspondent days in South Africa: the round plastic container was big enough to hold South African sixpences – “tickies” – and ensured that a reporter out on the job, in the African townships, amid the gold mines or out in the thornveldt, would always have money for the phone.

He had taken his black plastic container with its grey lid to New York when he was posted there from South Africa and discovered that if was big enough to hold a more suitable denomination for the phones on Manhattan, the nickel. Likewise when he returned to his nativeBritainthe container could safely store a 20 pence coin, and so it was in Australia, with 20 cents. Bentley might have outlived the sixpence and what it could buy, but his trusty plastic container could still give him change to summon a taxi from a public callbox if, after an evening in Mahoney’s, Bentley’s legs gave out on him during his customary three-kilometre walk home.

Bentley was still thinking phones, still ignoring the buzz and chatter around him and the occasional ring-tone sounding out in the bar. He racked his brain for stories of journalists coming to grief in phone boxes. One came to mind immediately. After the presses has started rolling one night in Fleet Street, a young reporter had arrived in the newsroom from an assignment, indignant and angry and with a story of his own to tell. The reporter had found a callbox from which to dictate his story, only to discover too late that someone had smeared dog excreta in the earpiece.

The smell of dog muck followed him down the street until he found a police station and felt compelled to enter and complain. As he approached a burly police sergeant behind the front desk, he said: ‘‘I’m going to tell you something and it’s not funny . . .  right?”

He then told his story to the bemused officer, who immediately burst out laughing, tears rolling down his a face as he tried to apologise for his insensitivity.

*****

Bentley had a smile on his face, too, and Cooper and his friend thought he was merely laughing at the iPhone app that repeated what you said into it.

“Show us your tits,” Cooper shouted to the cartoon monkey image pictured on the screen. When the monkey repeated the words, Cooper and his friend laughed uproariously and the monkey laughed back.

The friend then turned to Bentley.

“And what phone do you use?” he inquired.

Before Bentley could answer, a voiced boomed out from behind the bar. It was the landlady. “He uses this one,” she shouted, holding up the pub phone and gesturing to Don Bentley. Mrs Bentley was on the line.

 

Don Bentley sat in the Hobart Magistrate’s Court, waiting for his name to be called.

The matter at hand was a contested traffic infringement but, as on the day Bentley may or may not have committed the offence, the defendant let his attention drift from the road ahead.

Bentley was surveying the press gallery in Court No.1 and, more specifically, its empty seats. He was thinking of the time when the press gallery would be crowded, like the court itself.

The daily parade of petty thieves, burglars, prostitutes and their pimps, drunks and drug addicts was the staple of the local newspaper, along with the more trivial, non-criminal traffic matters that brought more worthy citizens in conflict with the law.

Many a reporter had cut their teeth on the goings on at the magistrate’s court. On newspapers of the past, being promoted to court reporter – usually under the guidance of a more senior hand – was a sign that the young, cub reporter had finally completed his or her initial training successfully, and was ready to move to higher echelons.

But no more. The newspapers of old might have provided a record of a day in the life of village, town or city – reporting on all events and happenings in minutiae – but now the press tended to focus on a wider sphere, and do it in less tabloid space.

Instead of the flotsam and jetsam of society at the courts, the ebb and flow of life at street level, newspapers now demanded that cases before the magistrate’s court had to be truly newsworthy, or unusual, usually including a celebrity on a minor misdemeanour where name alone gave the story currency.

Bentley was in no mood to speculate on the decline of the court reporter, or indeed those who reported on town and city councils, knowing that the debate with himself would always reach the same conclusions: the newspaper as he had once known it was dying, and with it the organ of public record. Bentley was living in the past.

Bentley was thinking of all those court reporters who once inhabited those empty places in the press gallery, and one name in particular, the price of court reporters, James A. Jones, of the now long-lost London Evening News.

Bentley first stumbled on Jones’ “Courts Day by Day’’ column when he was a schoolboy, as he searched for sports news in the newspaper his father brought home each evening. At the same time, the other reports he found in the newspaper not devoted solely to sport taught Bentley there was another world out there beyond the football pitch. It might have even helped fire his ambition to be a journalist one day, for Bentley had never determined from where that spark had come from.

By the time Bentley had reached the “Street of Dreams’’ in the late 1960s as a journalist after working there as a messenger boy and then cutting his teeth on a weekly newspaper, Jones had retired, slipping away virtually unnoticed without extravagant farewell, in much the same manner he had slipped in and out of the magistrate’s courts for more than for 30 years.

But a half century on from the last Courts Day by Day column, Bentley was delighted to find a homage to Jones on a website devoted to the glory days of Fleet Street, the Gentlemen Ranters. One veteran recalled Jones as reclusive, someone who would slip into the Evening News building briefly and then disappear as silently as he arrived. He was also described by others as an insignificant man in round glasses, You would have thought he worked in a chemists.

All the same he took his place in the pantheon of Fleet Street’s greatest writers during a golden era of the British press from the 1930s to the 1960s. The bald, bespectacled and deferential James A Jones wrote what was undoubtedly the best-read column inLondon. Every journalist venturing into a court tried to copy him, but no one could do it as well. He only covered the lowerLondonpolice courts – Bow Street, Marlborough Street, Old Street, and Clerkenwell – and went in search of not the sensational,  but the humdrum.

He brought humanity to the functional, staid interior of the courts with such descriptions of those standing before the bench:  “She was as insubstantial as a sigh.’’

In a column from 1947, he wrote:

In the 1890s, when hansoms jingled along the streets ofLondonand every City clerk wore a silk hat, John was picking pockets in The Strand.

King Edward came to the throne and motors began to splutter in Piccadilly and John’s hands went on sliding into pockets. He thieved all through the four years of the Great War. Dictators rose to power and maps were altered overnight but John, white haired and venerable, was still standing with his itching fingers amongst the noise and bustle of The Strand.

A detective who had not been born when John picked his first pocket saw that round old figure in the throng by a bus stop. He watched him for a while and then tapped him on the shoulder.

`I’m arresting you, ’ he said.

`All right, ’ said John.

`For loitering.’

`I know.’

John turned resignedly, as he had so often in the years, towards the usual trial and inevitable sentence. He walked on old slow feet towards the dock atBow Street, and he rested his slender old fingers on the wooden rail in front of him. His face was round and pink below the snow of his hair, his eyes had a dim kindliness in them, and his coat curved amply around him towards the ground. He looked a gentle but rather timid old man, an old man unworldly but benign, and he blinked at the solemnity of the court.

`You are charged,’ said the clerk briskly, with being a reputed thief, loitering to pick pockets in the street.

`Guilty,’ said John in an old voice.

`You understand the charge?’

`Oh yes,’ said John.

`Very well.’

Mr Fry, on the bench, had been regarding John with his usual air of grave surprise. Now he spoke to the detective in the witness box. ‘Do you know anything about this man?’  he asked, rubbing his chin musingly.

The detective unfolded a massive sheet of documents. ‘Yes, sir,’ he answered. ‘Unfortunately he has a most appalling record of crime. He’s an expert pick-pocket and has 34 convictions’ 

`Thirty four,’ echoed Mr Fry dubiously. `You could hardly call him an expert, could you, if he’s been caught 34 times?’

The detective glanced at John’s white hair and venerable stoop. `He’s been picking pockets since 1896, sir,’ he explained.

The columns were so popular that a hardback collection of them was published despite wartime paper rationing.

Bentley’s first job, as a messenger boy prior to entering journalism, coincided with the tail end of Jones’ career. Bentley travelled to centralLondoneach day from his home in the suburbs and on the return journey he would see commuters with the Evening News turning immediately to the Courts Day by Day column, after only a glance at the front page.

All the columns followed the same style. No full names or addresses of the defendants, merely a first name and the outcome of the case left until the last.

It was the opposite of everything taught by news desks and journalism colleges. Jones might have broken the rules of court reporting, eschewing brevity and devoting precious column-inch space to detailed descriptions of defendants, police officers, magistrates and lawyers,  but he had much to teach those wishing to pursue the art and craft of court reporting in which exponents needed not only an immaculate shorthand note, but a knowledge of the law and the structure and routine of the court system. 

Jones had an ear for dialogue and utterance and nuance, as well-tuned as that of a playwright for stage or screen. In his shorthand notebook, and then on his typewriter, he bought to life conversations from different worlds – magistrate, police officer and defendant. A Jones story was a prism, capturing three impossibly different views of human existence.

Even Time magazine afforded Jones the accolade of running a profile of him at a time when the News far outsold the other evening newspapers inBritainand theUnited Stateswith a readership of 1.6 million daily. At the end of the war the Evening News sent Jones to cover the Nuremburg war crimes trials.

Evening News crime reporters who worked with Jones said he would get to the courts before they opened at 10am, and sharpen his pencils for the now largely outdated Pitman’s shorthand note, in which different thickness of stroke, and place on the line, indicated different words and phrases. Crime reporters would only be in court for the big story, but Jones would choose his subjects carefully, to get enough colour from his morning stint to head to the office for a lunchtime deadline.  But first he would call into the Press Club, have a stiff drink, and hit the Evening News office at about noon. His copy would be in the sub-editors’ basket by 1.30pm. It was as perfect as his shorthand note, never requiring any work by the sub-editors to hone and sharpen it.

*****

After an hour, Don Bentley was still waiting for his case to be called. Road traffic summonses were left to last, the more serious offences of theft and violence going before, usually because defendants were represented by lawyers and lawyers’ time was money.

The parade before the bench included an anti-logging protester in dreadlocks charged with causing a public nuisance by lying in front a logging truck, a sad old woman accused of stealing underwear from a store, and a forger of cheques to pay a gambling debt.

James A. Jones would have been happy with this material, in a different age, as would the host of seasoned court reporters, shorthand notebook and sharpened HB5 pencils in hand, Bentley had known from theSurreycourts he attended as a young reporter.

Bentley was thinking of those times, and all the court reporters consigned to history as many a repeat offender had been consigned to jail, and Bentley was wondering what they would have made of a press bench with empty seats.