The Fourth Estate

Keith lay on a neatly laid-out mattress of old pads in the slips cradle, and began to wonder what Betsy would look like in the nude. He decided that this was definitely going to be the last time.

As she clipped on her bra, Penny asked casually, “Same time next week?”

“Sorry, can’t make it next week,” said Keith. “Got an appointment in Melbourne.”

“Who with?” asked Penny. “You’re surely not playing for the First Eleven.”

“No, they’re not quite that desperate,” said Keith, laughing. “But I do have to attend an Interview Board for Oxford.”

“Why bother?” said Penny. “If you were to end up there, it would only confirm your worst fears about the English.”

“I know that, but my…” he began, as he pulled up his trousers for a second time.

“And in any case, I heard my father tell Mr. Clarke that he only added your name to the final list to please your mother.”

Penny regretted the words the moment she had said them.

Keith’s eyes narrowed as he stared down at a girl who didn’t normally blush.

* * *

Keith used the second edition of the school magazine to air his opinions on private education.

“As we approach the second half of the twentieth century, money alone should not be able to guarantee a good education,” the leader declared. “Attendance at the finest schools should be available to any child of proven ability, and not decided simply by which cot you were born in.”

Keith waited for the wrath of the headmaster to descend upon him, but only silence emanated from that quarter. Mr. Jessop did not rise to the challenge. He might have been influenced by the fact that Keith had already banked £1,470 of the £5,000 needed to build a new cricket pavilion. Most of the money had, admittedly, been extracted from his father’s contacts, who, Keith suspected, paid up in the hope that it would keep their names off the front pages in future.

In fact, the only result of publishing the article was not a complaint, but an offer of £10 from the Melbourne Age, Sir Graham’s main rival, who wanted to reproduce the five-hundred-word piece in full. Keith happily accepted his first fee as a journalist, but managed to lose the entire amount the following Wednesday, thus finally proving that Lucky Joe’s system was not infallible.

Nevertheless, Keith looked forward to the chance of impressing his father with the little coup. On Saturday he read through his prose, as reproduced in the Melbourne Age. They hadn’t changed a single word—but they had edited the piece down drastically, and given it a very misleading headline: “Sir Graham’s Heir Demands Scholarships for Aborigines.”

Half the page was given over to Keith’s radical views; the other half was taken up by an article from the paper’s chief educational correspondent, cogently arguing the case for private education. Readers were invited to respond with their opinions, and the following Saturday the Age had a field day at Sir Graham’s expense.

Keith was relieved that his father never raised the subject, although he did overhear him telling his mother, “The boy will have learned a great deal from the experience. And in any case, I agreed with a lot of what he had to say.”

His mother wasn’t quite so supportive.

* * *

During the holidays Keith spent every morning being tutored by Miss Steadman in preparation for his final exams.

“Learning is just another form of tyranny,” he declared at the end of one demanding session.

“It’s nothing compared with the tyranny of being ignorant for the rest of your life,” she assured him.

After Miss Steadman had set him some more topics to revise, Keith went off to spend the rest of the day at the Courier. Like his father, he found he was more at ease among journalists than with the rich and powerful old boys of St. Andrew’s from whom he continued to try to coax money for the pavilion appeal.

For his first official assignment at the Courier, Keith was attached to the paper’s crime reporter, Barry Evans, who sent him off every afternoon to cover court proceedings—petty theft, burglary, shoplifting and even the occasional bigamy. “Search for names that just might be recognized,” Evans told him. “Or better still, for those who might be related to people who are well known. Best of all, those who are well known.” Keith worked diligently, but without a great deal to show for his efforts. Whenever he did manage to get a piece into the paper, he often found it had been savagely cut.

“I don’t want to know your opinions,” the old crime reporter would repeat. “I just want the facts.” Evans had done his training on the Manchester Guardian, and never tired of repeating the words of C.P. Scott: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred.” Keith decided that if he ever owned a newspaper, he would never employ anyone who had worked for the Manchester Guardian.

He returned to St. Andrew’s for the second term, and used the leader in the first edition of the school magazine to suggest that the time had come for Australia to sever its ties with Britain. The article declared that Churchill had abandoned Australia to its fate, while concentrating on the war in Europe.

Once again the Melbourne Age offered Keith the chance to disseminate his views to a far wider audience, but this time he refused—despite the tempting offer of £20, four times the sum he had earned in his fortnight as a cub reporter on the Courier. He decided to offer the article to the Adelaide Gazette, one of his father’s papers, but the editor spiked

it even before he had reached the second paragraph.

By the second week of term, Keith realized that his biggest problem had become how to rid himself of Penny, who no longer believed his excuses for not seeing her, even when he was telling the truth. He had already asked Betsy to go to the cinema with him the following Saturday afternoon. However, there remained the unsolved problem of how you dated the next girl before you had disposed of her predecessor.