The great headline robbery
AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS
Dusk was falling in Smith Square. It had been a cold, blustering October day, and the yellow- ing leaves that still clung so tenaciously to the branches of the trees rustled and swayed in the gathering darkness, casting mysterious shadows in the pale green lamplight. Over in a corner of the square an old newsvendor, half crippled and muffled in a filthy overcoat, crouched over his little stand, his mittened fingers fumbling with the grille that framed the evening's headline. The slogan was legible from the other side of the road: 'STRIKE: WILSON GRAPPLES WITH RAIL CHIEFS.' The old man succeeded in opening the grille, tore out the poster, and began awkwardly unfolding a new one. The tension grew difficult to bear. Finally he flattened it out and shut the grille again. The second poster was more crudely written than the last, as if it had been com- posed under the pressure of great events. 'STRIKE: WILSON GRAPPLES WITH RAIL CHIEFS AGAIN.'
With a barely perceptible exclamation of annoyance, 'Sweeney' Barber allowed the threadbare curtain to fall and turned back to the table. In the room there was no sound but the ticking of the old Japanese alarm- clock, and now and then, carried on the wind, the faint asthmatic falsetto of the crippled newsvendor: 'Wilson grapples with rail chiefs. Read all about it. Wilson grapples with rail chiefs again.' The men sitting at the table, some of them smoking, some cleaning their finger- nails with the Metropole Hotel paperknives set out beside each ink-stained blotter, winced and avoided each other's eyes. Watching them there in the smoky white light of the single naked bulb that hung from the moulded ceil- ing on a knotted flex—the elaborate soapstone bowl that had once hung below it had been smashed during an argument about drugs and never replaced—Sweeney' realised once again, with a fresh, spine-chilling clarity, that these were desperate men.
He sat down awkwardly on the upturned beer crate at the head of the table—the set of six empire rosewood chaises courtes with the brocade upholstery had been sold some time ago to finance another abortive lob'—and leaned forward, putting his weight on his elbows and cracking the bones of his inter- locked fingers. The strain would kill him, he knew: it would destroy them all. Already 'Mugsy; at the other end of the table, for all his burly physique, was cracking up. The tears ran silently down his cheeks, and he shook his head slowly from side to side, as if he did not understand the world any more. The others were still young, it was true—the carrot- headed child at his elbow gloomily sucking a peppermint gobstopper that he'd brought back from Brighton, wrapped half-eaten in a hand- kerchief, could hardly be more than fourteen —but they would grow old before their time in this state of tragic frustration.
Almost brutally, 'Sweeney' cleared his throat. He leant forward again, his fingers trembling a little, and shifted the scale model in the centre of the table. Perhaps a new angle would inspire them with a new idea, new enthusiasm at least. The little cardboard and balsa-wood model was an exact reproduction of Fleet Street. Dinky vans were parked alongside the black Express building, tiny figures made of lead, complete with little bowler hats and umbrellas, stood on the pavement outside the offices of the Daily Telegraph, and deploy& around the cen- tral model like the towers of a toy citadel, the offices of the Daily Mirror, the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times extended almost into the
Home Counties on the map of England that formed the base of the little cardboard city.
Red arrows leading from Brighton to the model had been drawn on the map in ink, and various little flags were stuck in the buildings .believed to be in the hands of Conservative Elements. 'Just a thought'—he ran a sensitive paler- 7 nervously over his entirely bald head and patted the back of his neck as if to reassure
himself—'how would it be if we held it next
year inside Fleet Street? Perhaps in the Tele- graph building. Inside job and so forth.
Empire Loyalists actually guarding the presses
as the headlines are composed.' He paused, beaten back by the hostile silence. He knew it was hopeless. The loyal Conservatives had tried again and again to get through with the headlines, but repeatedly they had been thrown back by the mercenary forces claiming to be interested in 'news.' What had been wrong with 'YOU CAN DALLY NO LONGER OVER TF11, MATTER SAYS HEATH'? Faintly the voice floated up from the square, wheezy and mocking him: 'Wilson grapples with rail chiefs again. Read all about it.'
Suddenly the carrot-headed boy pushed his chair back, spitting his gobstopper into his grubby handkerchief, his eyes full of excite- ment. 'Golly, I think I've got it.' Perhaps it was the urgency in the boy's voice, perhaps it was his childish innocence, perhaps it was something in the way the shaggy red hair brushed the high Eton collar as he began to speak; everyone leaned forward at once, their old eyes instinctively catching a gleam of the fire in the eyes of the child. The old man 00 his right even laid a heavily veined hand on the boy's arm to reassure him. 'The Labour Rotters always know when the Conference is going to open, because we tell them, right?' Sage heads nodded, and a smile of eager antici- pation began to play about the withered lips of the old man.
'What if we didn't tell them. A Secret Con- servative Party Conference!' Eyes flamed with enthusiasm, and the heavily veined hand clutched impulsively at the boy's knee. 'Heath meets Conservative Ladies at Secret Rendez- vous'—'Conservative Leader in Midnight Dash' =They seek him here, they seek him there—they call him the Elusive Organist t'—'Ted gives them the slip again!' Pandemonium broke out at the table. Shouting headlines, the broken men of a moment before climbed on the table, em- braced their little fairy godmother, and danced about with glee. Only 'Sweeney,' crouching on the bare boards in a corner—the priceless Aubusson 'Scenes de la vie conservative' carpet, once darned by Selwyn Lloyd, had been sold months before—unhappily dialled a number at Albany.
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