Well, I settled down in my new job as “Assistant to the Editor,” and I was given more writing to do and less leg-work, and in due course, after I had been there for a year, I graduated to a by-line, and “Vivienne Michel” became a public person and my salary went up to twenty guineas. Len liked the way I got on with things and wasn’t afraid of people, and he taught me a lot about writing— tricks like hooking the reader with your lead paragraph, using short sentences, avoiding “okay” English, and, above all, writing about people. This he had learned from the Express, and he was always drumming it into my head. For instance, he had a phobia about the 11 and 22 bus services and he was always chasing them. I began one of my many stories about them, “Conductors on the Number 11 service complain that they have to work to too tight a schedule in the rush-hours.” Len put his pencil through it. “People, people, people! This is how it ought to go: ‘Frank Donaldson, a wideawake young man of twenty-seven, has a wife, Gracie, and two children, Bill, six, and Emily, five. And he has a grouse. “I haven’t seen my kids in the evening ever since the summer holidays,” he told me in the neat little parlor of number 36 Bolton Lane. “When I get home they’re always in bed. You see, I’m a conductor, on the 11 route, and we’ve been running an hour late regular, ever since the new schedules came in.” ‘ ” Len stopped. “See what I mean? There are people driving those buses. They’re more interesting than the buses. Now you go out and find a Frank Donaldson and make that story of yours come alive.” Cheap stuff, I suppose, corny angles, but that’s journalism, and I was in the trade and I did what he told me and my copy began to draw the letters—from the Donaldsons of the neighborhood and their wives and their mates. And editors seem to love letters. They make a paper look busy and read.
I stayed with the Clarion another two years, until I was just over twenty-one, and by then I was getting offers from the Nationals, from the Express and the Mail, and it seemed to me it was time to get out of S.W.3 and into the world. I was still living with Susan. She had got a job with the Foreign Office in something called “Communications,” about which she was very secretive, and she had a boy-friend from the same department, and I knew it wouldn’t be long before they got engaged and she would want the whole flat. My own private life was a vacuum—a business of drifting friendships and semi-flirtations from which I always recoiled, and I was in danger of becoming a hard, if successful, little career girl, smoking too many cigarettes and drinking too many vodkas and tonics and eating alone out of tins. My gods, or rather goddesses (Katharine Whitehorne and Penelope Gilliatt were outside my orbit), were Drusilla Beyfus, Veronica Papworth, Jean Campbell, Shirley Lord, Barbara Griggs, and Anne Sharpley—the top women journalists—and I only wanted to be as good as any of them and nothing else in the world.
And then, at a press show in aid of a Baroque Festival in Munich, I met Kurt Rainer of the V.W.Z.
Five: A Bird With a Wing Down
THE rain was still crashing down, its violence unchanged. The eight-o’clock news continued its talk of havoc and disaster—a multiple crash on Route 9, railway tracks flooded at Schenectady, traffic at a standstill in Troy, heavy rain likely to continue for several hours. American life is completely dislocated by storms and snow and hurricanes. When American automobiles can’t move, life comes to a halt, and when their famous schedules can’t be met they panic and go into a kind of paroxysm of frustration, besieging railway stations, jamming the long-distance wires, keeping their radios permanently switched on for any crumb of comfort. I could imagine the chaos on the roads and in the cities, and I hugged my cozy solitude to me.
My drink was nearly dead. I kept it just alive with some more ice cubes, lit another cigarette, and settled down again in my chair while a disk jockey announced half an hour of Dixieland jazz.