After work at the newspaper offices in Main Street, Shaun Hollick and I walked up to the Carlton Centre. By late afternoon it was packed with people. Every shop seemed busy.
We went into the CNA. Shaun needed stationery and I probably did too. I remember buying Bic ballpoint pens there. The newspaper supplied us with reporters’ notebooks, so there was no need to buy those. What I wanted was a shoulder bag big enough for a notebook, pens, pencils and all the bits and pieces a young reporter carried around. I didn’t find one that day, but I later found a bag in a luggage shop in the same centre that proved almost perfect for reporting.
We found a place to sit, ordered Cokes and watched the crowds.
Shaun came from Derby in England. He was a year or so older than the rest of us and already had a degree in economics, which made him much sharper than I was on what was happening in the economy. I enjoyed his company because he found something funny in almost everything. He never seemed to take life too seriously. That was a useful lesson, especially given what was happening in South Africa at the time.
He was an avid reader of Private Eye. I had never even seen a copy until I found one later at Estoril Books in Pretoria Street, Hillbrow. Reading it changed the way I looked at politics and the press.
I’d arrived at the newspaper with plenty of enthusiasm but not much else. I had grown up in Cape Town after my parents left Johannesburg when I was two. I still had seawater between my ears from years of surfing and diving, convinced I could get by on instinct rather than hard study.
We talked about the newspaper and the people in it. Shaun complained about one of the sub-editors, a woman we referred to only as WU. She had a reputation for making life difficult. Newspapers seemed to attract people who could polish copy brilliantly but struggled with people. Looking back, I realise how vulnerable we all were in those first weeks, trying to find our feet in a profession that expected you to grow up quickly.
With the spring sun still shining, we caught a bus to Pretoria Street in Hillbrow. We wandered through Hillbrow Records and then into Estoril Books. That bookshop was extraordinary. It stocked magazines and newspapers from all over the world. You could buy Rolling Stone, The Observer, The Times, The Sunday Times of London, and the thick weekly editions of the Daily Mail and Daily Express. There were copies of the Financial Times, printed on its distinctive salmon-pink paper, and the Wall Street Journal. For a young reporter, it felt as though the world had arrived in one small bookshop. In those days they weren’t impossibly expensive. If one caught your eye, you simply bought it.
Shaun gravitated towards the economics pages. I was interested in almost everything else.
When we’d finished browsing, we headed for the Castle Bar. Some people remember it as the Castle Inn, but we always called it the Castle Bar. It was rough around the edges. Men outnumbered women and there was always the feeling that an argument could become a fight. I’d grown up around similar bars in the Cape, so it didn’t intimidate me, even if I never really liked places like that.
Over a beer we talked some more. Young reporters are always working, even when they’re off duty. We watched people, listened to conversations and quietly filed everything away. Nothing escaped notice for long.
By the time we left, the Highveld sun was sinking behind Hillbrow. The light had turned a pale, feverish yellow, edged with a deep red afterglow. We paid for our beers, stepped back into Pretoria Street, and headed home.
