To Bed on Thursdays

TO BED ON THURSDAYS is Jenny Selby-Green’s delightful memoir of life as a newspaper reporter in the 1950s. Jenny entered the idiosyncratic world of the English provincial press by answering a ‘Sits Vac’ ad for a reporter (conveniently ignoring that they were looking for a young man). She quickly learned that being the sole female on her weekly newspaper’s 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 Sophia 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 celebrates a simpler, slower-paced age when news-gathering was still an honourable trade and newspapers were impartial observers of life.