Happy memories of working for the Chichester Observer back in the mid-1970s

“I won’t say it’s a dream because I would never have dreamed that a book of mine would be adapted to be a play at Chichester Festival Theatre,” Philippa says. “I can’t say it’s a dream. It’s beyond a dream.”

The point is that it was in Chichester that Philippa started her working life, as a junior reporter for the Chichester Observer, also working for The News in Portsmouth at the recently and sadly demolished News Centre in Hilsea.

“I was around 20 and I was there from 73 to about 75 or 76, based in the Chichester office which at the time was in South Street. It was really, really fun. I was a junior journalist and I used to pick up the market reports from the estate agents, presumably because the estate agents did the auctions. I was picking up the fat lamb prices and rather than walk around I was incredibly lazy and I borrowed the news vendor’s bike and I'd be wobbling through the streets of Chichester picking up the market reports, the price of fat lambs. I had no idea what I was writing about. But it was while I was at Chichester office that I realised that I was going to go to university. I had not been to university when I left school because I wanted to get a job and get on and I was in a hurry. But at Chichester office there was not a lunchtime drinking culture. Peter Homer (for many years the Chichester Observer's chief reporter) would bring a packed lunch in and sit at his desk and read the newspaper so I would go off to the library and I decided that I would read all the novels in the library one after another – which seemed to me perfectly achievable. I didn't borrow the books. I would just go and read them in my lunchtime. But I had already read Jane Austen and Douglas Adams so I decided that I would start from the Zs. I read the whole oeuvre of Emile Zola and then I thought why am I doing this when I ought to go off and read at university. So I went off to the University of Sussex as a nearly older student at the grand old age of 21!

“But I remember Peter Homer very, very fondly, always in the left-hand corner of the office. There was another female junior reporter there and he would address us with mock formality and say ‘Miss Murray or Miss Gregory, would you be so kind as to go down to the front office and see someone who is wanting to talk about bin collections.’ And I would say ‘But I want to write the big stories!’ and he would say ‘Yes, but first of all Miss Pargeter and her bin collection please.’ He was a very very good journalist and I very much enjoyed my time in journalism. I went from journalism to Sussex University and then into local BBC Radio and I really loved radio journalism and then I went to University in Edinburgh because I never quite knew what I wanted to do until I found historical fiction.”