Afterthought
By ALAN BRIEN
TN Monday's Daily Telegraph, there appeared the following news item :
When a 13-year-old girl played truant from school, her mother, who was called from work, found her in bed at home with a man, Mr. Albert Millington said at the Educational Welfare Officers' conference at Sheffield yesterday. The mother told the girl about the conse- quences of her behaviour. But the girl replied : 'I won't have a baby, Mum, because I have been
la •i taking the pills you take.' . Having checked the number of the pills pre- scribed for her, the mother told the daughter she could not have taken any. The girl answered that she had replaced the pills she had taken with aspirin.
The result, said Mr. Millington. was that the mother became pregnant because she had been taking aspirins instead of contraceptive pills. The girl did not. • I have been waiting to see this story in print ever since February 12 of this year (for reasons :which I will explain later) but first I would like to point out a basic weakness in the anecdotal tech- nique employed by almost all newspapers.
The Telegraph reporter, more probably the
Paper's local stringer, was obviously a man with a nicely developed instinct for pointing up a tale. He knew that the pay-off should come at the end and that the surprise twist is immensely im- proved if there can be two punchlines, the second topping the first. Therefore, he gave us the first barrel on the switch of the pills and followed it up with a second barrel on the switch of the preg- nancies. His language was rather prosy, dead-pan and repetitive, but this is the house-style in the Paper's news columns where the reporters are trained not to intrude themselves between the reader and the facts. His, and Mr. Millington's, anecdote lost a good deal of its impact on the
page. however, by the insistence of the Fleet Street sub-editor in heading the report : Girl
switched mother's birth pills.'
Anyone who has ever worked on a newspaper is familiar with this rivalry between the man on the spot and the man at the desk. From the reporter's point of view, the sub-editor seems to take a malicious, pedantic pleasure in diluting the writer's colours, draining his purple patches, erasing his individual mannerisms, telescoping his narrative and concentrating all his cunningly distributed points into a bald, blunt opening Paragraph under a telegraphic headline. The sub- editor believes in substance, the reporter in style. One assumes that the reader is bored after two sentences, nodding off after three and probably ,about to switch to another paper after five. The other is confident that his 'deathless prose' (a sub's ironic phrase, much spat out through his grin, as the thick, black pencil eats up an entire page of your copy) will keep the reader panting for more after a thousand words. It is this continual feud between the farmers and the cowboys of journal- ism, as they squabble across the wide open acres of newsprint, which makes British papers livelier, more readable and more entertaining than those of any other country. It also leads to errors, over- simplifications. accidental libels and anecdotes ruined by beginning them with the punchline like the club bore.
The other papers in which I read Mr. Milling- ton's story mangled it more cruelly than the Tele- graph. The Express had the mother pregnant in the second sentence and the daughter substitut- ing the aspirin in the third. The Mail prefaced the report with a give-away rubric—'he told the conference about a Manchester girl of 13 who used her mother's contraceptive pills and substi- tuted aspirin tablets'—though it did have the nous to keep the mother's pregnancy as a mild, if predictable, surprise for the final paragraphs. But the real piece of sub-editorial spoilsportism was to be found in the Guardian where the guts of the story were spilled out in the first sentence: . . that a I3-year-old girl in Manchester took contra- ceptive pills provided for her mother and substi- tuted aspirin tablets, resulting in the mother be- coming pregnant.' Few anecdotes can stand up to that kind of brutal handling—no doubt the Guardian's review of the Christy Ministrels at the time contained the cross-head 'No Lady, His Wife.'
The reason I had been expecting to see Mr. Millington's cautionary tale in type ever since
the Spectator a round-up of contemporary folk myths sent to me by readers. Along with the apocryphal legends of the grandmother's corpse being stolen after it was smuggled through the custotns, the tins of cat's meat in the yard behind the Indian restaurant, the ashes of the forgotten relative in Australia which are made into soup,
the pregnant woman's specimen of urine in a whisky bottle snatched by the sneak-thief, etc., etc., I received from all corners of the world this story of the teenager who used her mother's con- traceptive 'pills which Mr. Millington told at his conference and the newspapers so credulously and so crudely' retold. It was reported as having been sworn on oath as happening to a friend of a friend in California and New Zealand, South Africa and Hong 'Kong. Mr. Millington's sole contribution to the canon was to make the girl so far under the age of consent as thirteen.
Did it ever really happen? Adults are shame- fully gullible about any horror-comic smutty reportage about the young. I think Mr. Millington, as a member of the national executive of a respon- sible body such as the National Association of Educational Welfare Officers, owes it to us to produce his evidence for its authenticity. We con- noisseurs of such underground folk-lore have not forgotten the doctor who hit the headlines at a conference with the tale of the boy and girl who met for the first time in the surgery and were dis- covered ten minutes later copulating on the carpet. Its initial appearance hit the headlines. Its later withdrawal as a first-hand report, and relegation to the category of fifth-hand rumour, received very little publicity. Over to you, Mr. Millington.
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