The "Real World"

In Stevenage there was an industrial area, which was located on the other side of the railway tracks to the residential part of town. The largest factory made Polaris nuclear missiles. I remember quite clearly when they brought one newly assembled out into the open air, a long, sleek black-and-white tube that gleamed ominously in the sunlight. They were sent to Australia and exploded in the desert, where no doubt they irradiated the indigenous peoples.
My first serious contact with the industrial area came when I graduated and had a few months to wait before I started my doctorate. It was summertime and the local Kodak camera factory took on temporary unskilled staff, mostly students and graduates. Indeed, a veritable pot-pourri of subjects was represented: an art history graduate was driving fork-lift trucks, English and other language graduates were tending the injection moulding machines, while engineers and architects were working in the stores dishing out the camera components. I must have looked rather studious and technical at the interview because they assigned me to the computing department. It was a period when computers were vastly less developed than they are now, and I spent most of my time playing a primitive word-game called 'Bull's-eye' on a teletype terminal.
Occasionally, just to relieve the monotony, they sent me down to the stores to count nuts and bolts and do other edifying tasks. Indeed, monotony was the name of the game. Eventually, one of the other students became so bored with shifting pallets of cameras around that he tipped one straight into the plastic-grinding machine and twenty thousand dollars-worth of Kodak Instamatic cameras became plastic granules again, mixed in with a few wood splinters derived from the smashed-up pallet.
At university we were continually told that there was a difference between the cloistered life in an academic institution and that vague, menacing, formless place outside that our teachers liked to call "the real world". Ever since my undergraduate days I have harboured an aversion to that phrase: as if the world in a university were any less real! Life at Kodak was a good deal more surreal than anything we could dream up at King's College and the London School of Economics. For instance, a siren would sound at 10.30 a.m. and everyone would stop work for ten minutes to drink tea and coffee. The lads in my section would open copies of The Sun and The Daily Mirror, grotesque parodies of newspapers which to be fully understood required a reading age of only seven. Both were famous for their 'Page Three', on which there would be a girl with a good figure and large, naked nipples. Along came Dorris, the tea-lady with the urn and cups on a trolley. One of the lads waved his 'Page Three' at her and asked "Hey Dorris, can you match that?" The poor lady was about 55 years old and couldn't think of a suitably crushing retort.
Eventually, a few years after I had gone on to other things, the Kodak factory became a victim of the transfer of manufacturing industry to the Orient; its workforce was made redundant and the whole plant was swept away, the site laid bare as if it had never existed.
When I had finished both the doctorate and a post-doctoral fellowship, I was left with a few months to kill before setting off for a new life in America. I moved back to London with my southern Italian girlfriend and took the only job I could find--in the catering industry. I started working in a kitchen that produced Traditional British Food, a curious ritual of massacring essentially good ingredients to make a wholly inedible dish. Several things disgusted me about this. The first was that I had to scour out the pots after this dastardly act had been perpetrated and it was far from being a pleasant task. The second was that I went home each night smelling of cabbage, and that was thoroughly unpleasant too. Finally, I was completely revolted by the fact that when the miserable products of our labours were served up people on the other side of the counter evidently longed for this stuff and ate it with gusto. Truly, Britain is a place where people do not understand the concept of quality.
So I continued to cast my net around. After a very few days I found a temporary job in an up-market vegetarian restaurant. Again, it was full of unemployed graduates, washing floors, chopping vegetables, clearing away the dirty cups and plates, discussing Alfred Lord Tennyson and Emmanuel Kant. It was part of a long-established chain called 'Cranks'. A signboard at the entrance said that a 'crank' is a person who prizes his or her individuality. A quick look in the Oxford English Dictionary gave a less flattering definition: an eccentric person or monomaniac. All of this came from the time, in the early 1960s, when the restaurant chain was founded and to be a vegetarian was considered infra dignitatum and a possible sign of mental illness. In 1980 when I worked at Cranks two million Britons had stopped eating meat and vegetarianism could hardly be described as a fringe activity any more. But Cranks felt it had to preserve its individuality. In the modern world, once something has existed for a few years it is described as 'traditional', for traditions are manufactured overnight.
The branch of Cranks I worked in was situated (for it is no longer there) in a famous department store, Heals, of Tottenham Court Road in the heart of London's Westminster shopping district. Heals sold--and still sells--breathtakingly beautiful Scandinavian furniture at vertiginously high British prices. The clientele consisted of the rich (film directors, actors, business leaders and company) and people who simply came to look and imagine what it would be like if they could afford such luxuries. In any case, I was bound by the rules of my employment to reach the restaurant not through the store but by the back stairs, where there was an ancient and faded announcement, painted on the wall many decades ago, that informed Heals's employees that if they were found loitering out the back of the shop they would be "subject to instant dismissal". During the worst, most fraught times at the restaurant, "instant dismissal" seemed quite an enticing prospect. At least it was a painless way to go.
The catering business is a struggle and is very badly paid. It is very far from the pervasive myth of endless hospitality and bonhomie and is instead dominated with sudden rushes of hungry people demanding to be fed while the staff battle with endless rivers of food and landslides of dirty dishes. Cranks had pretensions to be folksy. It had deal tables and flagstone floors and its crockery was made by John Leach, a master potter from Somerset (I have various of his creations at home and they are truly beautiful). Indeed, the ceramics were clearly the most appetising part of the meal, because every day our fine, upstanding, staunchly middle-class customers pilfered large amounts of the crockery, especially the smaller pieces that could be slipped into handbags and carrier bags discretely without members of staff noticing. "Oh, I am so sorry! It must have fallen off the table into my bag. How odd!"
It was a self-service restaurant, but despite that its prices were sky-high. The food was organic and was dominated by stone-ground wholemeal flour, brown rice and such things. It was distinctly heavy and the majority of customers bought far more than they could eat. Either it was gluttony--which was more than likely--or it was a tendency to underestimate how filling such food actually is. As a result when we cleared the tables we ended up throwing away about half of what was purchased (but not consumed). Yet the great middle classes are always the first to decry poverty and hunger in the world and demand that other people be more frugal. The worst such cases were the young middle-class mothers. Their offspring systematically plastered food and drink all over the walls, floor, furniture and furnishings until someone was sent out from the kitchen armed with cleaning fluids, rubber gloves, buckets, mops and brushes. The young mothers would look at all of this with doe-eyes and shrug as if nothing could be done to avoid it. Working at Cranks did nothing for one's faith in humanity. However, on one occasion I was able to get my own back. A lady customer found a hair in her salad and protested to me as I was clearing a nearby table. She was quivering with rage and affront. I was able to trot out the old chestnut "don't shout about it, everyone will want one". It is a wonder I was not sacked, but anger had made her too inarticulate to inform the manager.
I shall always remember one warm Saturday lunchtime when a customer piled up his tray with a huge amount of food, but when at the end of the line the bill was presented to him he had what appeared to be a heart attack. First he went white as a sheet, then he went blue. He collapsed and as he fell over--stiffly, like a Scots pine being felled by a woodcutter--he instinctively put out his hands to steady himself. With his right hand he grabbed a potted geranium that was intended to add ornament to the cash desk and with his left he grasped a tray full of cutlery. He ended up flat on the floor covered with a large heap of knives and forks surmounted by a geranium with bright red flowers and the fragments of its pot. As he was quickly taken away in an ambulance we never found out whether he lived to tell the tale or not.
Meanwhile, someone had left the door to the fire escape open and one of that great breed of pests, the London pigeons, had waddled in. We found it next morning in the cold store, shivering but extremely well-fed. It had pecked holes in several large blocks of cheese.
Occasionally the monotony of constantly clearing tables, washing dishes and chopping vegetables would be enlivened if someone tripped while carrying armsful of plates, dishes and cups. There would be an almighty crash as the crockery hit the sturdy flagstone floor and another fortune's worth of John Leach's creations would have to be swept up and thrown away. Once, I tripped and fell when I went down to the store-room to fetch two large bottles of expensive wine. By dint of fast action with a bucket of water and a mop I was able to clear away the evidence before anyone found out, but the floor remained suspiciously sticky for days afterwards.
During this period I lived in a part of London called Little Venice. It was situated around one of the junctions on the old Grand Union Canal, a place where various long-boats were moored, the characteristic English canal transport with traditional, bright ornamental paintwork. It was the only apartment I could find on a short let and the rent was more than I earned. Had I not had savings to live off I could not have survived; and ours was the only house in the street that did not have a Rolls Royce parked outside. And to think that I was earning the sort of wage that ordinarily, or for long periods of time, would not have been enough to exist on in central London!
The one perk that Cranks allowed us was that we could eat the food that it sold. Most of us rapidly became heartily sick of it. However, we were not allowed to eat cream cakes, so many of those were consumed under the counter and in odd corners when the manager was not looking, more out of spite and vindictiveness than appetite.
We were only paid for half an hour after closing time. It was extremely difficult to finish washing up, tidying and cleaning in this period of time. First the last remaining customers had to be removed. Some of them became very obstinate about lingering over their cold cups of coffee. It soon became a psychological battle to get them to move, ostentatiously upending the chairs onto the tables and swabbing underneath with the mop, rattling the chains that were put around the front door, and eventually demanding that they leave. Eventually, the last customers would depart, giving us a look of wounded offence, and we could finish off and go home. After a while we became so fed up with finishing late that we started throwing the crockery and cutlery into large black polythene waste bags rather than waiting until it had been through the washing-up machine and stacking it away on the shelves. Anything was legitimate providing the manager did not get to know about it.
The plus side of this experience was the opportunity to take long, lazy walks in St James's Park or stroll around the London art galleries. But like so many periods of my life it was a time of transition, a period of waiting, before something quite different took place.