Percival Latchley

The Artigo and the Honourable Men

 

The slip, the pressure, the sale

  For years the Beacon’s growth outpaced Latchley’s bookkeeping. Favourable rates promised to a charity were extended to tonic-sellers "just this once", invoices were paid twice under initials nobody challenged, and subscription monies went wandering under the gentlemanly title of "promotional allowances". It was not grand larceny so much as the soft creep of custom and hurry. Lydia Quillston read the balances with a colder eye. She asked for a private meeting, brought no lawyer, and said very little. Latchley understood at once that he did not have an argument so much as an exposure waiting to happen.    

The workday now

These days Latchley rises before the gulls and walks to the office while the streets still smell of tide and ash. He tastes the new ink with a sceptic’s frown - it is never as good as last year’s - and checks the formes for broken type. He writes a short "From the Publisher" on Thursdays, usually on matters safely civic: a bridge in need of repainting, a pensioner’s club threatened with closure, a plea for quieter fireworks. He convenes the morning conference, lets the editor and the city desk argue, and plays tie-breaker only when tempers fray. At noon he vanishes to the paper yard to talk delivery routes with Prudence and to slip Hugh a biscuit behind the guillotine. In the late afternoon he walks the top floor and looks in on the composing room, where the younger hands still call him "Mr L." even when ink streaks his cuffs like a junior’s.   Lydia’s presence is felt rather than seen: a margin note in a proof, a red line through an immodest woodcut, a calm question about a source that was not as solid as claimed. Their weekly meetings are clipped and courteous. He resents her control in flashes and is quietly relieved by it the rest of the time. He is, after all, better at papers than paper-work.  

Things he keeps and things he knows

Latchley’s office is a small museum of Bridgeport: ship-chandlers’ bills pinned to a corkboard, the first Beacon masthead in a cracked frame, the brass gavel the Honourable Men once let him hold when he outbid a naval captain for that ridiculous hippocampus pipe. He keeps a drawer of unsent letters to his children, begun and abandoned between proofs; another of apologies to advertisers he turned away after the decency code; and a third - locked - containing a ledger of favours owed on both sides of the water. He knows which councillor will trade a quote for a correction and which constable reads the Beacon aloud to his mother.  

The marriage that steadies the ship

 

What he wants now

He wants the Beacon to outlast him, ink steady, paper paid, apprentices turned into foremen with ten fingers between them and no fewer. He wants his children to choose their own trades without thinking they must shoulder his. He wants, one day, to write a piece of plain thanks to the city that let a handbill grow into a paper - and perhaps to the woman who kept it from going crooked. And on Starsights, if the tide runs kindly and the Artigo rings its bell, he wants nothing more exotic than the warm weight of a new pipe in his palm, a good story attached, and the knowledge that he has won it honestly.  

Pocket Botany for Busy Citizens

Sea Thrift (Armeria maritima), or the Little Lighthouse in a Skirt
By "Hedera"   If you have ever walked the Duke's Downs and seen, at your boot-tip, a tiny globe of pink bobbing as if it had somewhere important to be, you have met Sea Thrift - also called Sea Pink, also called, in my house, "the polite pom-pom". It is a cushion-forming perennial that loves the things most plants disdain: wind, salt, and soil so poor you'd hesitate to bury a coin in it. Thrift thrives where grander flowers faint, which is one reason lighthouse cottages have long favoured it. Another is bees. A thrift patch is a bee's tea room; the hum comes free with the view.   Each plant makes a tidy tussock of needleish leaves, and then - most obligingly - hoists its flowers on slender stems to keep their skirts out of the mud. The heads last for weeks if you do not fuss. (People who fuss at thrift are the same people who stir jam before it sets. Resist.) Water sparingly, avoid fat composts, and give it a sunny spot that feels a little unfair. It will adore you for the neglect.   Bridgeport folklore recommends tucking a sprig of thrift into a coil of rope for safe return from a voyage. I do not pretend botany can out-argue a storm, but there is sense in the charm: thrift's scientific name comes from armarium, a chest or store; it stands for provision, for keeping one's courage - and one's pennies. Children like it because the flowers are perfectly child-sized; dock cats like it because it makes a springy green pillow; editors like it because it spells itself without quarrel.   A word on manners: do not strip it from the cliff paths. Thrift is happy from seed in a shallow pot, or divided, gently, from a friend's clump after flowering. Press a few heads in a heavy book and you will have, by autumn, the most amiable bookmarks in Bridgeport - little lighthouses on paper, guiding you back to your place. If the city must be busy (and it must), let your windowsill be calm. Plant thrift, and give your bees somewhere pleasant to read the headlines.  

Sea Thrift by Tillerz using MJ