Storyboard Read Free Page B

grey with dark blue cords. P.A.’s desk was conventionally large and leather-topped , and there was seldom anything on it but a ceramic ashtray, an ivory telephone, and sometimes a letter-book of red leather. There were chairs in the room and a sofa, and a dark blue carpet. On one wall there was a painting by Sir Winston Churchill; on another was a large board covered with asbestos felt, on which advertisements could be pinned. Those who attended meetings in P.A.’s office tried to arrive early enough to avoid having to sit on the sofa; it was difficult to look alert on so comfortable a piece of furniture, and anyway, as Donald Wallace of Marketing once remarked, you felt too much like one of the Three Little Maids from school.
    When Sophia arrive with her Copy Group Head, Hugh Grover, she saw that the other people in the room were all members of the Glo group—Glo was a washing powder made by Hoppness, Silch & Co., who also made New Fiz, Super, Shining Blue and Gentle (which were also washing powders) and Coppelia, Kingfisher and New Dream (which were toilet soaps). Each of the Agency’s accounts was under the general charge of one of the directors, and under him there was the team which actually worked on the day-by-day conduct of the account—an Account Manager and his Assistant, a Marketing Group Head and his Assistant, a Copy GroupHead and a copywriter, an Art Director, a TV Director, and someone from Media Planning. All these people, unless the claims of the account were very heavy indeed, would also work on other accounts, but usually with a different set of work-mates, so that the temperamental stresses set up in one group were not carried over into any others—Sophia herself worked under Hugh on Poppity Pops (a breakfast food) and Ambergris Shampoo , but none of the other members of the Glo group worked on those accounts.
    These were the members of the Glo group: Keith Bates and Tony Barstow (Account Management), Don Wallace and Peter Wicklow (Marketing), Hugh Grover and Sophia Last (Copy), Fidge Randolph (Art—he was the son of Sir Burton Randolph, who had painted the portrait of every Lord Mayor in the Midlands between 1900 and 1915), Desmond Bast (Television) and Harold Hartley (Media). They sat uncomfortably in P.A.’s office, waiting for P.A. to arrive, for it was one of P.A.’s characteristics that he was never there when you came to his office for a meeting. Nobody knew where he went—perhaps, as Simon Purvis had suggested, it was only to smoke a cigar in the Directors’ loo—but he would always allow time enough for everyone to become unsettled before walking briskly in to start the meeting.
    Hugh sat like a cat on the sofa, and folded his paws in front of him. He was a little gray comfortable man, grown senior in the Agency simply by staying there. “Just in time,” he said. “I am glad.”
    Stacked together by Don Wallace’s chair were a number of charts—pieces of heavy cardboard, on which parti-coloured columns indicated, on one chart the different market shares held by competing products, on others the different sorts of people, by age, sex and social class, whobought these products, on yet another the amounts spent by each of the products in press and television advertising. An easel was propped just behind the door of the office. Obviously Donald was to deliver a lecture. The meeting would go on for a long time, and Sophia hoped there would be tea. The tea served to Directors was better than the tea brought round by trolley to other members of the staff.
    “What’s it all about?” she said to Peter Wicklow.
    “Foundation Soap.”
    “Yes, I know. But what about it?”
    “P.A. won’t say.”
    P.A.’s secretary opened the door, and P.A. himself entered the office. “What—late am I?” he said. “I’m always late for meetings. Let’s get started.” He sat down, looked round the room as if checking them off in an Attendance Register, nodded to Donald, and said, “Donald, you