Notes From a Small Island by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online

cash -more money, literally, than I had ever held before. We got six weeks'  holiday,  three  weeks'  paternity leave  and  a  month's sabbatical every four years. What a wonderful world Fleet Street then was and how thrilled I was to be part of it.
Alas, nothing that good can ever last. A few months later, Rupert Murdoch took over The Times and within days the building was full of mysterious tanned Australians in white short-sleeved shirts, who lurked in the background with clipboards and looked like they were measuring people for coffins. There is a story, which I suspect
may actually be true, that one of these functionaries wandered into " a room on the fourth floor full of people who hadn't done anything in years and, when they proved unable to account convincingly for themselves, sacked them at a stroke, except for one fortunate fellow who had popped out to the betting shop. When he returned, it was to an empty room and he spent the next two years sitting alone wondering vaguely what had become of his colleagues.
In our department the drive for efficiency was less traumatic. The desk I worked on was subsumed into a larger Business News desk, which meant I had to work nights and something more closely approximating eight-hour days, and we also had our expenses cruelly lopped. But the worst of it was that I was brought into regular contact with Vince of the wire room.
Vince was notorious. He would easily have been the world's most terrifying human had he but been human. I don't know quite what he was, other than it was five foot six inches of wiry malevolence in a grubby T-shirt. Reliable rumour had it that he was not born, but had burst full-formed from his mother's belly and then skittered off to the sewers. Among Vince's few simple and generally neglected tasks was the nightly delivery to us of the Wall Street report. Each night I would have to go and try to coax it from him. He was generally to be found in the humming, unattended mayhem of the wire room, lounging in a leather chair liberated from an executive office upstairs, with his blood-tipped Doc Martens plonked on the desk before him beside, and sometimes actually in, a large open box of pizza.
Every night I would knock hesitantly at the open door, and politely ask if he had seen the Wall Street report, pointing out that it was now quarter-past eleven and we should have had it at half-past ten. Perhaps he could look for it among the reams of unwatched paper tumbling out of his many machines?
'I don't know wewer you noticed,' Vince would say, 'but I'm eating pizza.'
Everybody had a different approach with Vince. Some tried to get threatening. Some tried bribery. Some tried warm friendship. I begged.
'Please, Vince, can't you just get it for me, please. It won't take a sec and it would make my life so much easier.'
'Fuck off.'
'Please, Vince. I have a wife and family, and they're threatening to sack me because the Wall Street report is always late.'Fuck off.'
'Well, then, how about if you just tell me where it is and I get it myself.'
'You can't touch nuffink in here, you know that.' The wire room was the domain of a union mysteriously named NATSOPA. One of the ways NATSOPA maintained its vice-like grip on the lower echelons of the newspaper industry was by keeping technological secrets to itself, like how to tear paper off a machine. Vince, as I recall, had gone on a six-week course to Eastbourne. It left him exhausted. Journalists weren't even allowed over the threshold.
Eventually, when my entreaties had declined into a kind of helpless bleating, Vince would sigh heavily, jam a wedge of pizza in his mouth and come over to the door. He would stick his face right in mine for a full half-minute. This was always the most unnerving part. His breath smelled primeval. His eyes were shiny and ratlike. 'You're fucking annoying me,' he would say in a low growl, flecking my face with bits of wet pizza, and then he would either get the Wall Street report or he would