Eilbeck the features editor I quickly got the hang of working at the Mirror. Every morning at eleven we would be expected to cram into Eilbeck’s little office for a features conference, when we either had to come up with ideas of our ‘own or suffer ideas to be thrust upon us. Some of Eilbeck’s own offerings were bizarre to say the least, but he did get results. | had got an inkling of his creative thinking during my initial interview when he had invited me to match his scrawled impromptu headline with a feature. 37| - Some of these brainstorms came off the day's news, some off the wall. About half the ideas worked, a few of them spectacularly. Following a spate of shootings, Eilbeck scrawled ‘THIS GUN FOR SALE’ on his pad, together with a rough sketch of a revolver. Within hours a writer was back in the office with a handgun and a dramatic piece on the ease with which (he did not mention the little help he had had from the crime staff) he had bought it in Trafalgar Square. po Mercifully, none of Eilbeck’s extemporised headlines ed their way to me ~ at least not yet. The pitifully small paper was grossly overstaffed, with half a dozen highly experienced feature writers fighting to fill one page a day, and it was evident that my role was as standby or first reserve. Hanging around the office, where the time was passed pleasantly in chit-chat, smoking and drinking coffee, Iwas occasionally tossed some small task. Bo Another of my little chores was to compose ‘come- ons’ for the readers’ letters columns ~ invented, controversial letters that, in a slow week for correspondence, would draw a furious mailbag. | was also put to work rewriting agency and syndication material that came into the office, including, on occasion, the Sagittarius segment of the astrology column. yz Some years later, when he had directed his talents to another paper, | confessed to him one day that | had been guilty of tampering in this way. He was in no way put out. It was serenely obvious to him that | had been planted on the Mirror by destiny to adjust the hitherto inaccurate information, a — For example, one afternoon | was summoned to Eilbeck’s office to find him in a state of manic ‘excitement, bent over a make-up pad on which he had scrawled “THE SPICE OF LIFE!" surrounded by a border of stars. This, | was told, was to be the Mirror's new three-times-a-week gossip column, starting tomorrow ~ and | was to be in charge of it. BO) Happily the delightful Eve Chapman was deputed to hold my hand in this insane exercise, The bad news was that Eve, who went home nightly to her parents in Croydon, had never set foot in such a place in her life. We were reduced to raiding the society pages of the glossy magazines and ploughing through Who's Who in hopes of finding some important personage with an unusual hobby which could be fleshed out to the maximum twenty-five words. ed The Spice of Life column itself ground to a halt after our supply of eminent people's interesting pastimes petered out.