Grub Street Irregular: an extract from Jeremy Lewis’s memoir

An extract from Lewis’s Grub Street Irregular

One day, towards the end of 1996, Richard Ingrams asked me if I’d be interested in a very part-time job at The Oldie. Christmas intervened, and I started work at The Oldie at the beginning of the New Year.

The first-floor office was an L-shaped room, with a long row of metal-framed windows looking over Poland Street in Soho, and I was to share a desk with Richard. Since he lived in the Chilterns and came up every day on the train, he got to the office at about 11.30, leaving at 4.30 and strolling round the corner to

Private Eye when not engaged on Oldie business.

Two things impressed me at once about life on the first floor: the noise, and the apparent chaos. The desks nearest to the door were occupied by two ebullient advertising men, Tony West and Dave Sturge. Tony was a large and heavily moustached ex-policeman, with a paunch straining the buttons of his immaculate white shirt; Dave was a dapper, more reflective figure, keen on American blue-and-white-striped poplin shirts and black slip-on shoes, referred to as ‘idlers’ back in the 1950s; both were extremely noisy, as was James Pembroke, the publisher, who lived in a state of permanent overdrive.

When not ringing up regular or potential advertisers – these included stairlift manufacturers, zimmer-frame merchants, massage parlours, retirement homes and makers of alternative footwear – Tony and Dave indulged in ferocious bouts of tribal chanting, repeating the same name or word over and over again in mock-african voices, and banging their desks in time with their fists.

Early on in the proceedings, they nicknamed me ‘Jezza’, and as soon as I put my head round the door on Tuesday mornings, a hooligan-like cry of ‘Jez-za, Jez-za!’would go up, with much pounding of the desks. Silence would then fall, while we got on with our various tasks; but then, for no apparent reason, the chanting would resume, with some other word or name repeated like a mantra.

The chaos was almost overwhelming; so much so that, when Jenny Naipaul came from the Spectator to work at The Oldie, she went rigid with shock and had to prop herself up against a desk. The epicentre of the chaos was Richard’s desk. I had seen some heavily laden desks in my time, but this was in a different league.

The disorder was deceptive, however: the papers at the bottom of the mound

may have been years old, and composted down to a kind of mulch, but Richard knew exactly how and where to find the items he needed, and the system only broke down if some reforming spirit tried to tidy him up. His desk was larger than most, in that it consisted of two oldfashioned knee-holers pushed end to end, and I was allocated a space at the far end.

I was in the short arm of the L-shaped room, which meant that, although I could hear the tribal chanting, I couldn’t see Tony and Dave drumming their desks with their heads tossed back, like wolves serenading the moon. To get to my seat, I had to pick my way past piles of backissues of the magazine and cardboard boxes brimming with submissions. Once I had reached my chair, I had to step over an obsolescent vacuum cleaner, the nozzle of which trailed away under the desk; and before I could get down to work, I had to clear a space for myself, pushing back the mountains of bumph which rolled towards me from Richard’s two-thirds of our communal desks.

My weekly clearances were ephemeral affairs: by the time I returned the following Tuesday, my end of the desk had been entirely covered over, as if by a fast-moving glacier or an everencroaching Amazonian jungle.

Lunch was a simple affair. Richard was delighted to eat in a greasy spoon or, if eating in the office, drew from his briefcase a giant-sized packet of crisps, washed down with a large plastic keg of orange juice.

My one-day-a-week job consisted – still consists – of correcting proofs, editing copy and, most important of all, looking through the slush pile. The Oldie is one of the few general-interest magazines that welcomes contributions from the general public, and every week I found a couple of possible pieces: memoirs by retired actors, soldiers or schoolmasters, odd encounters of the ‘I Once Met’ variety, travel pieces featuring blocked lavatories and suchlike horrors, diatribes against this or that current absurdity.

Although, as I soon discovered, we never commissioned articles, I was called the Commissioning Editor. I was pleased to be known as such, though it sometimes led to confusion when aspirant Oldie contributors asked if we would be interested in commissioning a piece, and I had to explain our policy.

Despite the years I had spent as a publishing editor, I much preferred the short sprint of magazine editing to the marathon of the full-length book. A thousand-word article could be knocked into shape in half an hour at most, whereas editing a book could take weeks or months; and since there was no question of taking work home after hours, it fitted in far better with my way of life.

Although I haven’t thought of a single new idea in my ten years with The Oldie, I have introduced some valued contributors: Alan Ross, D J Enright, E S Turner, Mordecai Richler, Denis Hills, Stephen Gardiner and David Hughes are no longer around to provide reviews or articles, but Stanley Price, Virginia Ironside, Lucy Lethbridge, Trader Faulkner, Michael Barber, Michael Leapman and my cousin Roger Lewis are – in the words of a regular Oldie column – ‘Still with Us’. I love every minute of it: working on The Oldie has been one of the great pleasures of my forty years in Grub Street.

Abridged extract from Grub Street Irregular: scenes from literary life by Jeremy Lewis, Harper Press

‘As soon as I put my head round the door a hooligan-like cry would go up’