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The World & Its Infuriating Work

When I hit the Jobcentre in the early ‘70s they found out I had a Degree. It could be useful, even though it was in Latin. So they arranged an appointment upstairs with Mr Geater. This must be the guy who had the key to the Executives' Garden where the parties were held and everything was decided. He rubbed shoulders with the Kingmakers. A chance to get IN was worth a careful shave and a collar and tie.

Mr Geater turned out to be a silver-haired stagey type, a bit like Frank Finlay. In five or ten minutes I’d latched onto his main idea: as a Graduate you didn't look for a job on the cards pinned to the wall downstairs, you went to these companies in the fat handbooks and explained why they needed YOU.

'As a Graduate in -- er, Latin, you have proved that you can juggle ideas and concepts in a way they will find supremely useful.'

'Quite!' I shouted.

'Now Mr Dersley, make sure you've got those addresses well underlined -- and no delay in following through, yes?'

'Quite!'

'And let's not forget that when you're on that management structure level, well, my friend, all sorts of fringe benefits are going to accrue....'

'Quite! ... Quite!'

The truth was, starting at the top and trying to bluff my way in just didn’t appeal. As I left I was already planning to come back after a few days and check out the meat-cutting, carpet-fitting jobs on the cards. They’d do for now.

Some time later I bumped into Mr Geater on the street.

'Take the battle right into their camp, what?' he said, with a thumbs-up.

'Quite!'

Day to day life in the pork-cutting department, at the petrol pumps (the days before self-service) and at ground level in the theatre suite at a hospital can be included among the lowliest and most menial. The long and tedious graft I know, to my cost. People speak about the dignity of work, but I can't see where the jobs up on the Jobcentre cards inspire much of it. There may be those whose hearts rise at the thought of Pipe Fitting, Welding, Panel Beating, Upholstering or an Apprenticeship in Firefighting. I'm not one. I can't subscribe to the proposition that Frank Sinatra, for example, would have lived damned near as fulfilling a life had he secured an honest clerkship in the mills of the Post Office and played around with a pearl-handled microphone in his spare time. At that I, for one, balk.

On the other hand, getting hold of a copy of The Stage and Television Today some flickerings of hope appear. Who wouldn’t be heartened by a periodical in which a self-confessed 'Stooge' attempts to hire himself out?

Many aspects of what is known as the Work Ethic and addiction to 'Grafting' only go back a hundred and fifty years. Many of the generation before mine are, ideologically speaking, the spawn of the Dickensian Industrial Revolution. Our mothers taught us to kowtow to a bowler hat or less on the understanding that if we knew where everything 'hung' everything would be all right because we'd be employed right up to the pension.

As Mum put it on one occasion: 'Money? Get some, it's handy.'

Alas, it was only as I approached my fortieth year that I felt I could spew out some of the things I’d imbibed. However, to blame your parents is odious, and mine never expected me to do what they weren't willing to undertake themselves, I'll say that. Theirs was the toe-nail pie generation. Scrimping and scraping and ready to do anything to shoe-horn themselves into a paid position. To them it was a nightmare during the Depression, attempting to maintain some prestige while drawing the Dole.

But this attitude led to the state where you'd froth at the mouth and get into a state of funk merely to uphold the proposition that you were, as they put it, workin'. If you were getting a wage and it was cushy, so much the better for you. You were still working. (This is obviously an immature attitude so far as actually getting anything done goes--perhaps it’s one of the natural consequences of being paid by the hour. An employee almost never performs a creative act -- at least, not in his actual and proper function as an employee.) You were expected to become tolerable to an employer, that was what it came down to. Whereas such gifts as I felt I really had to give, no one wanted. At school these gifts might have been praised up, but so what? To the big world they were negligible.

Or was it just that through too much book reading I'd drawn the conclusion that I ought to be giving orders, not taking them? My mother and father suspected I was guilty of this ridiculous heresy.

When it was seen that I might become white collar and have a chance at 'management', I’d already decided that these kinds of responsibilities were going to be none of mine so long as there was a length of rope or the deep blue sea between me and the committee room.

This meant I'd be a cleaner, then later on a hospital orderly. My arms would be dug in in up to the elbows. The bills must be paid but a man has his dignity. He can look at a surgeon as if to say, 'Who are you?' (My COHSE membership is a matter of record.)

Still I have never force-fed my soul and satisfied it by saying that (at however high a rate) I am by destiny a panel-beater, a warehouseman or a canvasser for anything but the Fine Arts and my own scribblings.

I never said I was an honest joe, but an artist.

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