“You May Just Have to Get a Job…” - Andrew Crofts
“So, young man, what do you plan to
do with your life?”
It’s one of the most annoying
questions that well-meaning people ask of the young as soon as they leave
school or university, and at most points before and in between.
It may be annoying, but even the
most innocent, or rebellious, of young people know that finding the answer is
the key to everything. When you get to the other end of your working life and
look back, these people are asking, what sort of path do you want to see stretching
out behind you?
In some ways I was one of the
fortunate ones. From the age of sixteen I had an almost clear idea of what I
wanted that path to look like, but when I described it out loud it sounded
pretty naïve, not to mention vain, so I tended to respond to interrogation by
looking down and mumbling something non-committal like everyone else.
What I knew I wanted was to be free
to follow anything that caught my interest. I wanted to attack life like an
overexcited dog hurtling back and forth along a ripe hedgerow, chasing every
tempting scent and every promising rustle of leaves. I wanted to have learned
as much as possible about as wide a variety of subjects as possible. I wanted
to be in a position to take advantage of any unexpected opportunities that
might be offered to me. I wanted to be able to make my own decisions as to how
I planned my life and spent my days. I wanted to surrender my fate to
serendipity while at the same time being able to make enough of a living to
support myself and whatever family might come along, (something else that would
be in the hands of the God of Serendipity). I wanted to get to the end of the
path with as many good and varied memories and stories as possible – and of
course I wanted to meet girls, as many as possible.
The thing I was most frightened of,
along with possible starvation, was boredom. If I couldn’t continually distract
and stimulate myself with thoughts and adventures that interested me I knew I
would be in danger of sliding into the shadows of despondency, and hurtling on
down from there into the pit of despair.
There appeared to be a few options
that fitted these criteria; the three front runners were writing, art or
acting, all of which seemed to provide the necessary highs needed to stay ahead
of the black cloud of depression, but at the same time they offered the
constant threat of rejection. It required a fair degree of blind, and naïve,
optimism to commit to any of these paths. If I voiced my ambitions out loud I
ran the risk of hearing other people’s opinions on just how likely it was that
I would starve to death if I tried to make any of them my life, so on most
occasions I would decide it was better to keep my own council.
My first year in London after leaving school at seventeen had not gone that brilliantly
financially. As well as writing anything and everything I could think of, and
selling none of it, I had also dipped my toe into the acting world, which
basically meant being a background extra for the odd day’s filming, (including
an appearance as a footman in a powdered wig in a filmed history of
prostitution, my task being to literally “serve up” Cora Pearl, a famous
nineteenth century courtesan, on a platter to George V while he was the Prince
of Wales), and getting the occasional photographic modelling job.
These scraps of employment had paid
the £7.50 a week rent on my room in the shared flat in Earls Court and not much else. It was fun
but it was increasingly difficult to fool anyone that I was ever going to be able
to support myself on this path.
“You may just have to get a job.”
My father’s perfectly sensible
words sent a chill of horror rippling through me. The words he didn’t say, but
which seemed to hang in the air between us were, “like everyone else.”
We were meeting for supper in
London, as we sometimes did when he thought I needed feeding, and were having a
drink in the bar at the top of the Park Lane Hilton, which was then the highest
building in the area, so that we could both gaze out over the city lights
during any lulls that might fall in the conversation. He liked taking me to
places like that and mostly I enjoyed these peeks into the life he led on his
company expense account when he wasn’t at home with my mother. Even going with
him for a drink at the Playboy Club was an interesting, if somewhat
disquieting, experience. I knew several girls who worked as bunnies and was all
too familiar with what their real views were of the club members they were
trained to serve with such bright smiles.
Taking horrified offence at his
suggestion that I should get a job like everyone else, but making a huge effort
to hide it, I vowed to myself that I would demonstrate my disdain by getting
the most obviously boring job going, the sort of thing that George Orwell, Somerset
Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and my other influences would have held up
as an example of the sort of living death that any young creative soul should
avoid at all costs. Then, I told myself, my father would see the error of his
thinking and would be sorry he had crushed my great creative potential.
My father, probably assuming that
he had just given me a sound piece of paternal advice, was by then studying the
menu, apparently unaware of the turmoil his words had caused inside his son’s
head.
The following day I resigned myself
to the fact that I was now officially a failed actor/writer/artist and set
about job-hunting with a heavy, angry heart. I bought an Evening Standard and secured some interviews. It seemed a good idea
to exaggerate a little to these potential employers as to the A level results I
had achieved. My former Head Master gave me a generous reference, accompanied
by a kind letter assuring me that this change in direction might prove more
rewarding than I was fearing. I was grateful for this attempt at consolation,
but remained convinced he was mistaken.
I was offered three different jobs,
but only one of my interviewers failed to ask to see any evidence of the exam
results I was claiming. That was the job I therefore had to accept. Thus,
within a frighteningly short time, I found myself a shipping clerk for the
United Africa Company in an office in Blackfriars, spending my days filing
bills of lading and my evenings in the company’s amateur dramatics club. I was
eighteen years old and it felt in the darkest hours of the night as if my life
was at an end already. There seemed nothing to do but hope for some sort of
miracle.
Within a few months I realised that
no miracle was coming and no-one was ever going to notice that this was a
gesture of defiance and not simply a sensible career move. I had backed myself
into a corner and was now lost in an office which held little potential for
anyone wanting eventually to earn a living as a writer. Rather than realising
that they had caused me to ruin my life, my parents actually seemed fairly
relieved that I was now earning a steady salary. It dawned on me that if I
didn’t want to spend my life filing bills of lading I was going to have to do
something about it myself.
To quote the blurb on the back
cover of my battered Penguin edition of “Keep the Aspidistra Flying”, the story
of Gordon Comstock who saw the aspidistra as the symbol of the artist
selling-out to the comforts and security of dull, middle-class respectability;
… “in his mulish determination to embrace the full agony of poverty, he walked
out of one “good” job after another, to the despair of his friends. For him the
Embankment was nobler than the aspidistra, symbol of spiritual death.” I think
that was pretty much what was going on in my head, although I lacked even Comstock’s
courage because I intended to do all I could to avoid ending up sleeping on the
Embankment.
In my desperation to escape this
self-triggered trap, I contacted everyone I had met in my first year in London,
begging for any possible ways out and, to my amazement an
agent who had got me a couple of modelling jobs the previous year, asked if I
would like to be his assistant since he had to be out of the office a lot
producing fashion shows during “the season”.
Run a modelling agency? Did I have
to think for even a second before accepting?
The money was about half whatever I
was earning as a shipping clerk, but the decision still seemed like an absolute
no-brainer as one of my most urgent priorities since leaving my single-sex
school was to meet as many young women as possible in as short a time as
possible. Had there ever been a place more tailor-made for providing such
opportunities in abundance?
Soon after I took up the new job,
based in a room off a photographer’s studio in Charlotte Street, my boss was
invited to merge his agency with a large modelling school in the middle of Bond
Street, providing me with still more opportunities to meet young women and at
the same time opening up any number of opportunities for finding material to
write about.
Within a year I was back on course towards
being a full-time freelance writer, mainly selling my services for public
relations purposes, with the modelling school as one of my clients. Public Relations
was still a fledgling industry, which is the only explanation I can give as to
how a twenty year-old with virtually no experience was able to make a living
from it. I even used to lecture on the subject for the modelling school’s
rivals, Lucie Clayton, a secretarial and finishing school that had become
famous in the sixties for producing the most glamorous models of the day, although
I can’t for a moment imagine that I had any wisdom worth listening to.
By this stage I had decided that
being a writer really was the only way I could see that I could ensure a
satisfactory level of personal freedom and variety, and hopefully earn a
living. But what should I write about? There were plenty of interesting stories
and people to choose from but I couldn’t see how to turn them into a living
wage.
I tried every possible road that a
writer can take and there were many times when it seemed impossible that I
would ever be able to earn a steady living from such a precarious profession.
To public relations I added business writing and then travel writing, and in
every spare moment I was trying to write books. I only ever took two full-time
jobs after that, one in a public relations consultancy and the other on a media
trade magazine. Neither job lasted more than a few months and I eventually had
to admit that I was probably never going to be capable of holding down any
permanent position. I was now set irrevocably on a course where self-employment
was the only option. Had I realised quite how choppy the waters I was sailing
into would turn out to be I don’t know if I would have had the courage to do it
….who am I kidding? I had no option.
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