An Interlude

Since blogging is about writing, and most bloggers are of the just-short-of-writer's-success status, I thought this insight into how some writers behaved - and got away with it - was interesting enough and funny enough to be included here as a sort of throwaway:-

Sir, – In the 1950s, I shared an office at Punch with Anthony Powell (the subject of Jeremy Treglown’s Commentary piece, January 27). Friday was press day, spent by myself and a colleague at the printers, passing the final pages of the next week’s issue.

Normally we managed to knock off soon after lunch, but not on days when Julian Maclaren-Ross was contributing the lead review, in which case the copy would arrive some time around 5:30pm, brought round by his current girlfriend, not direct from the hotel in Russell Square, close by the printers, where he lived, but by way of our offices in Fleet Street, so that she could pick up his cheque from the finance department – a liberty allowed to no other contributor that I know of. The copy would no doubt have been later but for his need for her to reach the offices before they closed. Powell maintained that the finance department relished this intrusion of Bohemia – the girl certainly looked the part – into their ordered lives.

Maclaren-Ross’s behaviour was just as tiresome for Powell as it was for us, though in other ways. I once asked him why he put up with him, and he told me that one is bound to have to bear a number of crosses in one’s life, and the trick is to choose which ones to bear and then do so without complaint.

PETER DICKINSON
3 Carpenters, Alresford.