With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed. Lynne Truss
steering well clear and simply learning never to depend too heavily on the prompt dispersal of correspondence. Lillian’s wont was to stoop and sigh over a heap of letters, laboriously examining each one with the aid of tongs, and stopping chance passers-by with faux-naif questions evidently calculated to drive them mad. ‘Look, this says “John Mainwaring, Editor”,’ she might say, waving the ironware in a wild, threatening manner, ‘but the editor’s name is James Mainwaring.’ Here she would pause to ascertain what reaction she was getting (usually uneasy silence). ‘What do you think? Shall I send it back, or pitch it in the bin?’ No one ever knew what to say to this sort of thing; after all, you don’t argue with mad people, especially when they are equipped to clock you with a pair of tongs. So Lillian got away with it, as she got away with everything else. And in between these bouts of petty tyranny, she would sit quietly at her desk, ignoring the phones, and give her full attention to the smoking of a cigarette – on the grounds, presumably, that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well.
It seemed odd to be in the office on his own. Osborne was assailed by an understandable fear that he had forgotten an important appointment elsewhere – an appointment that his green-ink-fingered friends had evidently all remembered. Even the tireless sub-editors were missing from their work stations, and Osborne marvelled when he peered into their little book-lined room and saw their four empty chairs – a sight, he realized, that few people other than night cleaners had ever previously witnessed. The fabric on one of the chairs turned out to be a jaunty rich tartan – but no wonder he had never suspected it, when a sub-editor’s drab, grey jumper and unkempt shirt (not to mention his drab, grey, unkempt body) had always blocked the view.
Like many writers, Osborne was afraid of sub-editors, the trouble being that they had a disarming habit of changing his prose automatically, without telling him. ‘Ah, the further musings of the giant intellect,’ the chief sub-editor might say, with gratuitous cruelty, as she took his copy each week; and then, the moment he had left the room, she fell on it savagely with a thick blue pen, taking out all the bits he was most proud of. In his more gloomy moments, he wondered why he bothered to write the piece in the first place, when the subsequent contribution of the sub-editor so often outweighed his own. He had been known to quote the lament of Macduff (‘What, all my little chicks?’) at the thought of his innocents, massacred. And you couldn’t blame him. ‘Not in my back yard’ he had once confidently typed in a piece about a politician, only to discover, a few days later, in the printed magazine, that it had been rewritten as ‘Not on my patio’, which was not quite the same.
In the stealthy, unnatural quiet of the sub-editors’ room, dictionaries and half-corrected proofs lay open on abandoned desks. Osborne tiptoed guiltily, like a schoolboy finding himself alone in an after-hours classroom when everyone has gone home. To stay his nerves, he helped himself to an Extra Strong Mint from a roll next to the chief sub-editor’s typewriter (careful not to disarrange her impressive selection of nail varnishes), and peered from an awkward position at the proof she had been correcting, which was covered in tiny blue marks and explanatory notes circled with a feminine flourish. ‘NOTE TO TYPESETTER,’ he read, upside-down,
Far be it from me etcetera, but it seems to me that despite our best efforts a twinge of confusion remains in your mind between ‘forbear’ – a verb meaning ‘abstain or refrain from’ – and ‘forebear’ – a noun denoting an ancestor. May we bid adieu to these intrusive ‘e’s? I hope this clears things up. I have mentioned this before, of course; but how can you be expected to remember? You lead such busy lives, and Radio 1 must absorb a lot of your attention. I do understand. Sorry to take up your valuable time. And far be it from me, etcetera.
Michelle
Osborne gulped in amazement at such erudition, which was an unfortunate thing to do. For the Extra Strong Mint promptly closed over his windpipe, like a manhole cover over an orifice in the road.
Thus it was that when the three subs re-entered the room in wordless single file a few moments later, they discovered their ‘Me and My Shed’ columnist bent double with a gun-metal litter-bin held to his face, making mysterious amplified strangling noises. Since nothing louder than the whisper of a nail file was usually to be heard in this room, they naturally flashed their specs in annoyance. However, having all received the statutory sub-editor’s training (involving, one suspects, the same kind of rigorous football-rattle personality testing undergone by the horses of riot police), they simply resumed their solemn work of skewering other people’s chicks with their thick blue pens.
‘Are you in difficulties, mon cher?’ asked Michelle, the chief sub-editor, archly, adjusting an embroidered collar and seating herself carefully so as not to rumple her dirndl skirt. Osborne shook his head (and litter-bin) emphatically, to indicate that any difficulties were of only passing significance. The sub-editors swapped glances (or did they signal Morse code with those specs?) and sighed. Osborne discharged the mint with a loud ptang-yang sound and fled red-faced from the room, and all was peace again.
It was quite some time before Osborne discovered the reason for the empty office; obviously, if he had asked a few questions, there and then, he might have been saved a lot of the palaver of the ensuing week. Unfortunately, however, he did not. The fact was, there had been a crisis meeting. The magazine had been sold to a new proprietor; a new editor had been mentioned, along with a rationalization of the staff. He did not yet know it, but a cold wind was blowing at Come Into the Garden; his shelter had been torn up and blown away, like so much matchwood.
However, since nobody had yet informed him of this, Osborne merely dragged his airline bag to his favourite corner, and from a safe distance waved hello again to Lillian. She was flicking through a mail order catalogue now, turning each page with a practised insouciant finger-technique not involving the thumb, while a motorbike messenger stood in front of her desk, waiting for her to look up. Above her head, Osborne noticed, there was a new sign. It said, ‘What did your last slave die of?’
He produced his notebook, flipped a few pages and attempted to compose his thoughts. Now, Osborne, old buddy, who have you got for us this week? He typed the words ME AND MY SHED at the top of a sheet of paper, and added a colon.
ME AND MY SHED:
A name ought to follow, but for some reason it failed to come. Osborne frowned. Every week he interviewed a famous person about their shed – Me and My Shed: Melvyn Bragg; Me and My Shed: Stirling Moss. He had been doing it for years. In certain professional quarters people still raved about his Me and My Shed: David Essex; it was said that for anyone interested in the art of celebrity outhouse interviewing, it had represented the absolute ‘last word’. Osborne treasured this praise, while in general being modest about his job, deflecting the envy of non-journalists by saying merely that he had seen the insides of some classy sheds in his time. But today, despite remembering a bus journey to Highgate on Monday morning – despite, moreover, remembering the interior fittings of the shed in some considerable detail – it was only the classiness of the shed that stuck in his mind. He just could not put a classy face to it. The words
ME AND MY SHED:
looked up accusingly from the typewriter. Especially the colon on the end.
He flicked through his notes again, but they offered little help. After twelve years of writing ‘Me and My Shed’ he had come to the unsurprising conclusion that all sheds are alike in the dark. Even when the column’s remit had been extended, in the mid-1980s, to include greenhouses and any other temporary garden structures (such as the ivy-covered car-port), the interviews had always required a masterly touch to bring them alive. Here, for example, was a sample of this week’s notes:
Had shed since bght house. Quite good sh. Spend time in sh. obv. Also gd 4 keeping thngs in. Never done anythng to sh, particrly. Cat got locked in sh once, qu funny. Don’t thnk abt sh often. Take sh for grantd. Sorry. Not v interstng. House interestng. Sh not.
Time was pressing, The official deadline was 2.30, and it was now a quarter past twelve. Osborne typed a few words, hoping that the act of writing might jog his memory. He looked out of the window and tried to free-associate about Highgate, but curiously found himself thinking about Marmite sandwiches on a windswept