Mirrors
Harry Fieldhouse Mondays, Thursdays Keith Waterhouse (Michael Joseph £4.50)
It is more than six years now since Keith Waterhouse took over Cassandra's old space in the Daily Mirror. He soon showed, as this collection confirms, that he is a much more entertaining writer than his honoured forerunner, whose ideas were never as interesting as his invective. An established humourist (Billy Liar), Waterhouse expanded during his Monday and Thursdaycolumns into a natural essayist. Nostalgia is his prevailing pattern. Where Cassandra offered occasional reminders of his humanity with discursions on soups, cats and Christmas cards, Waterhouse, as he says, 'has made a cottage industry of childhood reminiscence'. He looks back fondly here on trams, Tizer, Christmas stockings, anniseed balls, blackberrying, holidays at home, wartime wireless, the Button Fair, picnics, Ilkley Moor, cowslips, all with what seems like total recall. But such topics between hard covers give a misleading reflection of the Waterhouse column. Where are all the anti-authority outbursts and the intrepid
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contributions to class warfare?
Waterhouse remains the brightest star in the Mirror, which started him in Fleet Street in its surer days. Echoing its present uncertainties, he alternates schizophrenically between upholding penurious grievances of thirty-five years ago and revealing middle-class complaints about delivery vans that let him down, youths who can't speak the Queen's English, and laundries that spoil his pillowslips.
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