My sliding doors
We all have sets of sliding doors. Trains we missed. Car crashes we avoided. Dates we went on. Those we skipped. Bugs we inhaled, and those which floated by.
Some changed our lives a lot. Others just a little.
A couple of mine concern untimely deaths. The deaths of two lawyers. If either had not died my life would have been different. No proofreading, copy-editing, publishing. Different wife. Different children. If any! Certainly no editorial training courses. No Chapterhouse.
Early ambitions
I decided to be a solicitor. My ambition was to be a warm-hearted, kindly partner in a provincial firm perhaps in Devizes. I had never been to Devizes but it seemed to be the place. So law degree and law school. And what were then called articles of clerkship. Traineeship.
But fate intervened. In my midland town the Town Clerk was famous. A brilliant lawyer and great administrator. He wanted an articled clerk. I got the job. We got on well at the interviews. I would have had brilliant articles with him.
He died just before I arrived. Rapid cancer, totally unexpected. His successor took me on. I doubt he really wanted me there. In the two years at the Town Hall I saw him rarely. I worked in the legal department with a lovely bunch of people, but learned almost nothing.
Try to escape
After a year of mind-numbing boredom I decided to jump ship. I learned that you could transfer your articles. A firm in Sussex just like the partnership I had conjured up in Devizes agreed to take me. Four partners, good local client base, mixed practice. Just what I wanted. And maybe I’d acquire some practical skills. A charming man, the senior partner, would be my principal.
Have a holiday, he said, find somewhere to live and join us in April. I took the holiday and returned to my midland flat. A letter from Sussex. He was dead. Heart attack.
So back to the Town Hall to ride out my dreary year.
Sliding doors shut
If the brilliant Town Clerk had lived I’d probably have been a local government lawyer. If the charming Sussex solicitor had survived his heart attack I’d have slipped into the bucolic life of a country lawyer.
But after a couple of false starts I settled into publishing. I remember sitting with my first copy-editing job and thinking: “This beats drafting a will on a wet Thursday.” And for me it did.