RaDical MiDDle - ColdType

3
High Fashion
Radical Middle | 17
under Hal Miller’s brand of open-door dictatorship I’d
known everything that was happening at The Star. By quirk, in
fact, I knew more than my four seniors in the manager’s office
and thus more than anyone on the 900-strong payroll.
How? I received the manager’s post, as the new boy at the
bottom of the pile. There were 100 or so documents per day. I
extracted what I could handle and routed the rest to fritz Bauer,
the finance man; Dave Murray, technical; Jolyon Nuttall, the No
2, or Hal the boss (annotations were fB, DM, JN and Mr Miller).
all of us saw each other’s outgoing correspondence, which, in
Hal’s translucent manner, often included replies to things that
had arrived as Personal. I was staggered by how much I was
exposed to and more staggered by how much I could achieve.
One day, Hal’s outgoings included a memo authorising the
demolition of the company’s Diagonal Street properties, 15 or
20 Indian shops with the proprietors’ families living upstairs.
This shook me, not least because Diagonal Street was a slice