To Bed on Thursdays

Jenny Selby-Green entered the idiosyncratic world of the provincial press by answering a 'Sits Vac' ad for a newspaper reporter (conveniently ignoring that they were looking for a young man). She quickly learned that being the sole female on staff brought few advantages. Even in the 1950s, it was a business tied up in archaic practices, driven by deadlines and a despotic editor called 'God' by his staff. In the course of her work, Jenny was bullied by Robert Maxwell, snubbed by President Eisenhower, entranced by Sophie Loren and stalked by a delusional actor named Nigel, but mostly she worked valiantly to bring order to the chaos of provincial life and its assortment of anonymous characters by writing about it. Set in Aylesbury and district, To Bed on Thursdays is her delightful memoir of a simpler, slower-paced age when news-gathering was still an honorable trade and newspapers were impartial observers of life.