Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson Page A

found, whereas in my day Christchurch Road was an open-air litter bin.
Around the corner from the old vanished bakery on Richmond Hill were the splendid, vaguely art deco offices of the Bournemouth Evening Echo, where I worked for two years as a sub-editor in a room borrowed from a Dickens novel - untidy stacks of paper, gloomy lighting, two rows of hunched figures sitting at desks, and all of it bathed in a portentous, exhausting silence, the only noises the fretful scratchings of pencils and a soft but echoing tunk sound each time the minute hand on the wall clock clicked forward a notch. From across the road, I peered up at my old office windows now and shivered slightly.
After our marriage, my wife and I had gone back to the States for two years while I finished college, so my job at the Echo was not only my first real job in Britain, but my first real grown-up job, and throughout the two years I worked there I never ceased to feel like a fourteen-year-old masquerading as an adult, doubtless because nearly all my fellow sub-editors were old enough to be my father, except for a couple of cadaverous figures at the far end who were old enough to be their fathers.
I sat next to a pair of kindly and learned men named Jack Straight and Austin Brooks, who spent two years patientlyexplaining to me the meaning of sub judice and the important distinction in English law between taking a car and stealing a car. For my own safety, I was mostly entrusted with the job of editing the Townswomen's Guild and Women's Institute reports. We received stacks and stacks of these daily, all seemingly written in the same florid hand and all saying the same numbing things: 'A most fascinating demonstration was given by Mr Arthur Smoat of Pokesdown on the Art of Making Animal Shadows', 'Mrs Evelyn Stubbs honoured the assembled guests with a most fascinating and amusing talk on her recent hysterectomy', 'Mrs Throop was unable to give her planned talk on dog management because of her recent tragic mauling by her. mastiff, Prince, but Mrs Smethwick gamely stepped into the breach with an hilarious account of her experiences as a freelance funeral organist.' Every one of them went on and on with page after page of votes of thanks, appeals for funds, long-winded accounts of successful jumble sales and coffee mornings, and detailed lists of who had supplied which refreshments and how delightful they all were. I have never experienced longer days.
The windows, I recall, could only be opened by means of a long pole. About ten minutes after we arrived each morning, one subeditor so old he could barely hold a pencil would begin scraping his chair about in an effort to get some clearance from his desk. It would take him about an hour to get out of his chair and another hour to shuffle the few feet to the window and finagle it open with the pole and another hour to lean the pole against the wall and shuffle back to his desk. The instant he was reseated, the man who sat opposite him would bob up, stride over, shut the window with the pole and return to his seat with a challenging look on his face, at which point the old boy would silently and stoically begin the chair-scraping process all over again. This went on every day for two years through all seasons.
I never saw either one of them do a lick of work. The older fellow couldn't, of course, because he spent all but a few moments each day travelling to or from the window. The other guy mostly sat sucking on an unlit pipe and staring at me with a kind of smirk. Every time our gazes locked he would ask me some mystifying question to do with America. Tell me,' he would say, 'is it true that Mickey Rooney never consummated his marriage with Ava Gardner, as I've read?' or 'I've often wondered, and perhaps you can tell me, why is it that the nua-nua bird of Hawaii subsists only on pink-shelled molluscs when white-shelled molluscs are
more numerous and of equal nutritive value, or so I've read.'
I would look at him, my