Died and Gone to Devon

‘Liberace?’

‘The singer, girrlie, the singer!’

Betty nodded absently. She was actually thinking about whether to take the train up to Exeter for the annual Pens ’n’ Lens Club party – though it usually ended, like all journalistic gatherings with added lubricant, in backstabbing and recrimination. She hated it, too, when people she hadn’t seen for a month or so asked after the wrong boyfriend. Betty got through men like a hot knife through butter, or it was the other way round.

Ross licked his lips and looked into the middle distance. ‘This deadly winking, sniggering, snuggling, chromium-plated, scent-impregnated, luminous, quivering, giggling, fruit-flavoured, mincing, ice-covered heap of mother love,’ he recited. ‘That’s Cassandra for ye! Sheer genius! Ayyyy, girrlie, have you ever tried your hand at writing something like that? Ye ought, ye know.’

‘The chap who typed that got sued. And his newspaper. And his editor. Are you suggesting we put that kind of stuff in the Riviera Express, Mr Ross?’

The chief sub suddenly found something more interesting to occupy his time.

Just then a heavy thudding noise proclaimed the approach of Rudyard Rhys, bewhiskered editor of the Rivera Express, stalking down the office in his heavy brogue shoes. You could tell that he too had yet to catch the Christmas spirit.

‘Where on earth is everybody?’ he snarled, though he knew perfectly well – they were all off doing their last-minute shopping and his newsroom was a wasteland.

‘Where is my so-called chief reporter, Miss Dim?’

‘She went off with her handbag,’ said Betty disloyally. ‘Didn’t say where.’

‘Anything in the diary for her?’

‘No,’ said Betty even more disloyally. In fact, Miss Dimont had told her before lunch, ‘I’m going over to Wistman’s Hotel to see Mrs Phipps. Back much later,’ meaning opening-time. The newsgathering was over for this week, after all.

‘Well, I’ve just had a call from Sir Frederick’s office. He’s giving a constituency workers’ party and wants someone to cover it. Says his secretary forgot to send the invitation.’

‘That’ll mean the Western Daily Press turned him down. He always favours them.’

‘Rr… rrr!’ said the editor, who hated his more powerful daily rival.

‘Anyway, Judy knows him. I don’t.’

‘It’ll have to be you, Betty, it’s on in an hour. Take that young Skinner fellow along with you.’

‘I thought you said politics was beyond me,’ said Betty, trying to get a rise out of her boss.

‘Six o’clock, Con Club.’ Rhys stumped back up the deserted newsroom. There were days when he barely held control of his newspaper and his best response to the doubters was to retreat into the office and slam the door. That showed them.

‘Better slip on your party frock,’ drawled Ross over his shoulder, ‘Sir Fred likes a pretty girrl ye ken.’

He’s seventy-five if he’s a day, thought Betty with a shudder. On the other hand there were always young people eager to get on in politics hanging around his office and the party was sure to be fun. It solved the Pens ’n’ Lens problem, too.

‘I’m going to make the crocheted Madonna the New Year quiz,’ she said decisively as she picked up her handbag from the desk and headed for the cloakroom.

‘Ay ye would, ye would,’ uttered Ross shaking his head and talking to his desk. If only he could pop out now for a quick drink with old Swaff and Cassandra in the Old Jawbones, what things they’d have to say to each other…

‘He did the most unspeakable things with animals,’ sighed Mrs Phipps, flipping ash into her coffee and throwing her ancient eyes up to the ceiling. ‘Quite reprehensible. We had to send him away.’

Judy Dimont – runaway chief reporter and possibly one of the most accomplished journalists in the West Country with her sizzling shorthand, rat-a-tat-tat typing and fearless interview technique – turned to face the old Gaiety Girl. She’d driven out to join her friend for lunch but now, looking out of the window and watching the snow crawl up the glass with quite alarming speed, she began to realise her chances of escape from Dartmoor were diminishing by the minute.

‘Your son-in-law, Geraldine? Guy? What did you do with him in the end?’

‘Bundled him off to Tangier. With just enough money to keep him away.’

‘Ah yes, I remember now.’

‘They don’t care how they treat their animals there. Beat their donkeys to death, then eat them. Or is it the other way round?’

‘Did it do him any good?’

‘It’s a hard life when you have no money,’ said Mrs Phipps, looking round for a waiter, ‘herding donkeys. Anyway, it prepared him for the jail sentence. Shocking for a mother to discover what a contemptible beast her daughter had married.

He had it coming.’

They were sitting at an upstairs window of Wistman’s Hotel and the light was fading fast. Inside, the room was suffused with a magical glow from the fire, the candles, and the reflections from the many gilded mirrors on the walls. As the massive hall clock struck the quarter and the logs settled lower in the grate, the lines in Geraldine Phipps’ old face gently evaporated until she became young again. Though approaching her eightieth year, she was still a beauty.

‘You look lovely, Geraldine,’ said Miss Dimont. ‘Must be all that success!’

‘They were barbarians,’ laughed Mrs Phipps, looking back with relish on her triumphant summer as proprietor of the Pavilion Theatre. ‘They came, they saw, they conquered! Raped and pillaged as well, I have no doubt! Come the spring, the Temple Regis birth rate will quadruple as a result.’

She said it with a joyous lilt to her voice, as if she personally had ordained the unwanted pregnancies which startled and divided Devon’s prettiest seaside resort, in the wake of Danny Trouble and The Urge’s riotous summer season at the end of the pier.

‘Shocking,’ said Miss Dimont, shaking her corkscrew curls in disbelief. Back in the holiday season, Britain’s No. 1 beat group had grabbed the town by the scruff of its neck, shaken hard, and prepared it for the 1960s in spectacular fashion. Their six-week residency at the Pavilion, though marred by an untidy death or two, had saved the theatre from closure, and turned Mrs Phipps into an unlikely national celebrity.

DOWAGER’S DRUM-BEAT DRIVES OUT THE DODOS, yodelled Fleet Street’s headline writers, though Miss Dimont’s own publication, the Riviera Express, was less forthcoming in its support. The editor disapproved of beat groups, and he especially disapproved of lively old dames turning his bailiwick upside down.

The two friends spent lunch hopping from milestone to milestone in Mrs Phipps’ eventful life, and though it was past three o’clock there seemed so much still left unsaid. Geraldine Phipps, who was spending Christmas at the hotel, was enjoying herself immensely and ordered a Whisky Mac for her reporter friend. Her own Plymouth gin had appeared as if by magic, for she was extravagant with tips.

Terry Eagleton, the chief photographer, had driven Miss Dimont out from Temple Regis in the Minor but then disappeared off to Widecombe-in-the-Moor, probably never to be seen again – the snows over Dartmoor now enveloping all and everything.

‘I have the feeling I’ll be staying the night,’ said Miss Dimont as a heavy thud of snow, driven by the Dartmoor winds, hit the window with a crash. It was getting darker by the second.

‘That’s nice,’ said Geraldine Phipps. ‘Because I’ve got something I want to discuss with you.’

‘Tell me first what you have planned for next season, Geraldine. At the Pavilion – is there something I can write about for the Express, since it looks like I’m stuck here till the snow plough comes through?’ Judy looked out of the window but by now there was even less to see, Dartmoor’s snows having seized the day and put it to bed.

The theatre’s proprietress settled more comfortably in her chair, looked around at the darkening room festooned with ivy and fat white candles, and exhaled.

‘Part of me yearns for Pearl Carr and Teddy Johnson,’ she said, ‘sweetly crooning tunesmiths. But frankly, dear, I’ve always adored a bit of danger – and those leather-jacket boys certainly provided that last summer!’

Miss Dimont recalled the singer Danny Trouble, who missed his mum terribly during the band’s turbulent residency at the end of the pier – not too much danger there!

‘But I wonder what my editor will say if you decide to throw a spanner in the works again next summer? Some people got very upset with all that racket you made, Geraldine.’

‘What? That fellow Rhys? The buffoon who calls himself Rudyard?’

‘He only changed his name when he thought he was going to be a novelist,’ explained Judy. ‘Richard Rhys has less of a zing to it. Anyway, if not Pearl Carr, then who?’

‘Before he was arrested, Gavin told me about a young man called Gene Vincent, rides on stage on his motorbike. Revs it up a bit, the girls go crazy! Then he starts to strip his leather off.’