4.3.70 - new job, snow, life, women, fathers, etc

4.3.70 [Two aerogrammes - it’s likely there was a letter between this and the last one recorded]

Where has this wretched year gone to already? I was all prepared for a few more days in February and when I looked around next it was March.

I seem to have mixed up a bit over Kevin Rowlands, though it doesn’t matter at all. Mike didn’t bring him up here, but just said he’d known him at home, though for the life of me I can’t say I saw much sign of recognition! [No idea what that means.]

About the job since you’ll no doubt be a little concerned. We’re all settling in, without any further losses [of trainees, I think], and now have the distinction of not being entirely new ˗ there being another class behind us. We have done quite a lot of time (an hour each day) on the switchboards, consolidating what we learn in class. These are still dummy switchboards, but have the advantage of someone being at the other end (as opposed to our Mrs Bullitt making the appropriate noise beside us in class) turning on the right lights and sound effects.

We spent all last week learning how to cope with connecting up people from overseas to people in Great Britain, and this week are reversing the process and starting to put through calls to overseas places. The whole business is fairly complex, and taken in terribly easy stages, so that none of us can fail to pick it up. When we’re out at these switchboards at these moments, we have an instructor behind us helping us along if we go wrong, and so you’re really mollycoddled all the way. What an incredible system it all is though! You can dial straight to all the places in the world except China on the boards we will use, and though your man in Little-Chipping-on-the-Mud wants to speak to his brother in Afghanistan, all he has do is pick up his phone, and after he has passed through about three exchanges in England, he arrives at us, and we then put him on his way, via another two or three exchanges; the thing is that it’s only at his end, and at our middle section and at the other end that he actually comes across operators; the rest is done by innumerable permutations of numbers connecting him via the unnamed exchanges. Everything, but everything is coded, and no doubt eventually the operators will only be required to patch up mistakes that the machines or the nuisance human subscribers make. Just at the beginning of this week they brought in direct dialling for the man in the street in New York! [China actually came on board while I was working in the Exchange, sometime later; though we waited all the first day for someone to actually want to ring the place.] Just imagine what equipment there is behind it all: satellites, cables, radio links, etc.

That motley bunch of folk in my class that I described to you last week are sorting themselves out. Mrs Rogers and Mrs Ingle remain buddies, and the only things they have in common are their two marriages, and nerves every time before going to the switchroom. Mrs I is a Catholic (though how she managed the marriages bit, I'm not going to ask), and is much more the pleasant of the two ˗ about fortyish, always well-dressed, bright as a button, and with a mad sense of humour; Mrs R is more severe somehow, though not without humour, and is a good example of the permissive society at work; she doesn’t question it, one gets the impression, but somehow agrees with its tenets, and takes advantage of her up-to-dateness. She is not to be argued with as both Mr Levi and I have found out, not because she’s right, but because she thinks she’s right, and there isn’t another point of view. She’s survivable, however, because she is only a shadow in the brightness of Mrs I who has ten times the amount of real life in her. 

Mr Levi and I get on generally very well. He’s only half a Jew and hasn’t any of the mannerisms, and is only different from your average middle-class Londoner in that he is aware of things around him, and has a very good sense of humour: he is quite prepared to have the Mickey taken out of him and more often than not to take it out of himself. He is more sensitive than one might expect at first sight, and keenly aware of his own shortcomings. If it wasn’t for the sense of humour he would have a nasty chip on his shoulder stating that he is a ‘failure.’ As it is he can state this and smile. He is married, strangely enough, to a Catholic (what incredible Catholics there are in London) and doesn’t seem to get on with his wife at all by what he says. I suspect however that there is a good deal more security to his marriage than he would ever let on, and he is probably, paradoxically, secure in his failures. If you know your own faults, that’s half the battle; it’s only the small matter of correcting them then! [This long profile of Jerry Levi is interesting in the light of our future relationship: he was probably an alcoholic, though he had it under control enough to work, and we often went out after a shift and spent some time in a pub (this could be in the early hours of the morning, sometimes. He was a surprisingly open person, and we clicked strongly; he was like one of those slightly irresponsible uncles you have in some families. We worked for some time together (because the people you went through training with tended to wind up on your rosters. I don’t know whether the letters I have cover what happened with him: I went on holiday for a week at one point, some months later, and came back to discover he’d died suddenly, possibly from a wrong combination of alcohol and the medication he was on. I was in complete shock; he seemed to have been snatched out of my life. I never got to meet his family, nor heard what happened to them.]

The other guy, Hoss (as he’s nicknamed - he resembles in size, anyway, the Hoss of TV: I’m ‘St Michael’ ˗ so is the brand of Marks and Spencer clothes!; both of these are Mrs I’s doing) turns out to be the victim of the mass media mind, with an appreciation of trivia that would be hard to beat. Still, he is immensely good-natured, and on the surface, certainly, doesn’t appear to have a spot of badness in him. [I’m presume the ‘Hoss’ is the character from the TV series, Bonanza. I don’t know this fellow’s real name; it may have been Eric, as Hoss’ real name was, but it could have been something else entirely. Anyway, he was a big boy.]

The beanstalk girl of last week, is twenty, Irene, and gay. [‘Gay’ in the old sense.] She is the surprising product of a divorce but has the advantage of having always, obviously, been reasonably resilient and good-humoured. (It must be that only good-humoured people take on this job!) She is interesting to talk to, likes going round the city in her lunch hour looking at things (churches, what-have-you), reads books (unheard of amongst 90% of the trainees) ˗ there are about fifty or more) and is filling in time like the rest of us, I

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suspect, though it appears she is rather thrown out on the world due to the nature of her parents’ present situations; and is too tall for me. Anyway, she isn’t a Catholic so it matters not!

The other two girls are thick in different ways; one is an inverted snob and thinks she’s always being [There’s a long article online about working in the Exchange, situated at the Faraday Building, across from St Paul’s. You could look out some windows and see the Dome floating above you. Women worked day shifts only ˗ except Sundays ˗ and men worked all the night shifts. So we lost track of the women who’d trained with us very quickly, since our paths never crossed after that.]

got at and tells you to shut up if she can’t cope with you having her on, and the other, who is twenty-one, is just plain dumb, though impressionable with certain facts if persevered with!

...I’m finding life rather more trying than it was. This is no doubt the explanation: life has always been right for me, and I was content to go merrily along saying, Oh yes, I’m a Catholic, can’t you see? But in fact people couldn’t really see, and I think He wants something more from me, not just Mass two or three times a week and patting little children on the head, and giving a couple of bob to beggars, but some statement within myself that shows Him that I’m not only on the right road but am walking along it too ˗ not just sitting in the sun at the side. I’m no doubt being all waffly and vague again, and it all means something to me, but probably won’t by the time it reaches you! 

I haven’t heard from the CIB yet, and no doubt the Good God has that all worked out too, but as usual Crowl thinks he knows best, and says there is something wrong. In the words of me mum, we’ll offer it up and He’ll let us in on it all when He’s good and ready.

It’s been snowing here today (started overnight) and up this way it’s about four inches thick and turning to slush. I was tripping daintily home after work (here we’ve been getting off a quarter of an hour early each night, and tonight three-quarters of an hour, because the weather was bad! Talk about kids!) carefully keeping my feet dry and walking along in the thicker stuff which hadn’t been trampled to muck, when I jumped down off the kerb to cross a driveway onto what I thought was cleared, wet gravel and it turned out to be a miniature Lake Erie; I gave up after that and sploshed along in the best of the slush, with at least one thoroughly sodden foot. (Yes, yes, I was wearing four feet this evening ˗ clever!)

Margaret and I went and had a meal the other night (she went off to Paris the next day) and sat there for four hours talking! She is incredibly open about herself and inspires confidence in others to be the same. So we swapped stories of ourselves and our troubles and joys back and forth, and spent a quite pleasant evening. However in spite of all the laughter that came of it, I came away rather depressed: Life does seem to be a messy business, doesn’t it? Very few if any folk escape some muck-up, and for all the good it seems to do you, you often wonder if it’s worth it. (I’m not feeling suicidal, it’s okay.) And that in spite of faith. Only goes to show that we’re lacking in faith somewhere, doesn’t it? Marg’s a strange person: she told me things I never thought to hear from any woman (except perhaps a future wife!) and yet it wasn’t sensationalism on her part or anything ˗ she manages to convey the joys and sorrows of things without making them coarse or obscene. I feel actually that it doesn’t do a man any harm to know an older woman very well if she is open like this: it helps him to understand women so much better and to be able to understand a woman of his own age; because one of these will never be so open ˗ it’s a fact of her age. And yet how else are you to understand the females? If not from themselves? [Perhaps thinking I now knew everything about women. I didn’t.]

In your last aerogramme you talked a bit about dad; if it doesn’t hurt you too much, or do anything harmful to you, would you mind whenever you have a spare inch or two of an aerogramme left over and don’t know what to say, just writing some things about him that I don’t know? I have an incredibly incomplete picture of him. Only if it won’t upset you, mind. [It was about this time that I started feeling more and more than there was a hole in my life, in terms of my father, whom I hadn’t seen since I was three. Nor had I had any communication from him since then. He died in 1965, something we only discovered after the funeral was over. At the time it made little impact, but gradually the loss crept up, and eventually took many years to completely dispel.]

I haven’t been cutting my own hair recently, though I’ve only had one haircut since and can now do with another, but thanks for the thought anyway. Tell Des that I tried again to get his trimmer, but they say here that they are such a rarely-asked for item, that no one seems to stock them.  Love, Mike.

18.2.70 - a new job, starting immediately.

18.2.70 [two aerogrammes, both handwritten]

Well, well, well, the order of things in this world does change rapidly. In my last letter I said that I’ll think about getting a new job tomorrow, meaning, in the future, but someone pulling the strings has taken me up literally, and the day after that letter, I was informed of what I’d already heard from Rumour’s mouth ˗ that the powers-that-be wanted some changes made. Examples: two in the pay-box all the time, instead of one, ten more hours work for a pound a week more money (!); complete change of rota, so that we’d be working through from afternoons till the end of the show (instead of just evenings) or from the morning till later than we do, and starting earlier. So after saying I’d let him know next day, I gave him a week’s notice then, and started on the great job hunt.

Well, I tell a lie there, because in the post on the day of the news came a notice from the telephone exchange saying that they now had a vacancy for a part-time telephonist, but, since that pays only £8 or so a week (on which I’d die) I inquired about full-time work: anything between thirty-six and forty-three hours a week, at about $16-10-0 gross (goes up when I’m twenty-five) (plus another £2 or so a week when I ‘qualify’). I’ve got to train for, I think, six weeks in the day time, and then will work evenings and nights (overnight sometimes ˗ that’s when you work fewer hours a week). So I’ve got the job ‘subject to all my filled-in forms being sent to Enoch Powell to see if I can be allowed to work for the British’ ˗ or somesuch! I start on Monday (as long as my great-great aunt wasn’t a Chinaman) and they seem to think I’m bright enough to work in their International Exchange ˗ when I come out of school. Heaven knows how dumb some of the people tested are (as dumb as the tester who insisted I try and read a chart without my glasses even though I told her I couldn’t see a thing glassless. There was a guy at home when I went for my driving test who did the same thing: only there I had to look down some long funnel thing; I haven’t found out yet what was at the end of that!) because it was all incredibly easy; the form-filling-in was considerably more difficult. The tester-lady seemed quite surprised that I should know so many British place-names so well, and eyed me with some suspicion, I felt, when I said it was because I’d read English books, and had seen English films.

About the new management ˗ as I said before it’s all drearily staid, but gentle. The fact of the £1 extra pay for ten hours is that apparently Mr Neilsen had been paying us the total rate already (I’d always thought it high for a part-time job) and the extra hours have nothing to do with it: we ought to have been working them anyway. But it doesn’t matter ˗ I am fed up with the place ˗ Margaret is the only one who has any life in her, much ˗ and I’m also fed up with the people in and the general monotony.

So!! I don’t know that I greatly care for the eventuality of working all night but it may be interesting ˗ there will shortly be no time in the twenty-four hours that I haven’t worked! It’s all experience cont...

P.S. Good Grief; don’t buy a David Copperfield: £3.50 [or possibly this was meant to be $3.50] is far too expensive. Hope we’ve sorted all these out now; sorry to have confused you.

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And I think it may have the advantage of finally giving me a job which I can actually fall back on! 1970 may yet turn out to be the year at least when I finally set my life in order. It is fitting that it should be done in my (good grief) 25th year, isn’t it?

Have you started your new Rite of the Mass yet? Our Parish Priest said Mass this morning and we had bits left in and things left out and he seemed to know as little about the whole proceedings as anyone. He’s left the Offertory Prayer out a lot lately which means that you have half the congregation waiting for it and half ignoring it altogether. I rather like it all (but as you no doubt know I’m rather prone to change!) though the depleted Confiteor is a bit disquieting just yet, and only saying, ‘Lord, I am not worthy’ once is positively upsetting ˗ I always said it several times more anyway because neither the Good Lord nor I have any illusions about my worthiness!

We have a new guest in the flat (and when he leaves will have Chris, Angela’s sister, back!), called Andrew Tansley ˗ seventeen, and a very pleasant young guy. Recommended to us by Hazel with whom he’d worked. He’s there till he finds a flat, and is working in a new mystery play (with Anth ony Quayle) as a props man. [The play was probably Sleuth.]

I went to see some Ionesco plays done by the Tower (amateur) Theatre on Sunday night. This is the group Ian and Angela and Rod are all associated with, and their standard was surprisingly high. After the plays, on the way back Ian and I got into a discussion which eventually lasted till two in the morning (Ian is out of work, again, just now ˗ oh! these artists) and in which we tried to reconcile his argument that he puts up a barrier to protect his ‘inner’ self from new relationships and mine which was that hiding oneself in oneself is not as much use to one as risking getting to know people better, quicker ˗ even though one may be hurt. There’s always the chance one may be helped. (Sorry about the preponderance of ‘ones’ but I’m not allowed to use ‘you’ once I’ve started, so I’m told!) We did reconcile it all eventually (with help from each of the others as they came and went ˗ to bed), after covering the same ground about fourteen times; because I still put up my own barriers (though I’m getting past them more quickly) and Ian knows that what I said has its own value if he cares to apply it.

I have this crazy urge of late to know everybody ˗ properly, not just superficially the way I often have before. And I think I’m even going to the extent of appearing to pry ˗ I hope not, as I don’t really intend that.

Kingsley came up for lunch on Sunday (dinner, I mean) and seemed all right when he left. Now he had something on his mind, and while he told me a lot that surprised me, and interested me, and showed that he too as matured (and has a Lenin-style beard!!) I couldn’t somehow get past the barrier?!!?

On this Sunday Mike is coming up with one of his innumerable collections of ladies, Mickey, by name, and guess who? Kevin Rowlands! And Mike knows him apparently. So that sorts that out!!

Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you what time I’m starting at the Telephone place. 8.15 am. Love (yawn), Mike.

P.S. Still nothing further from CIB ˗ you can have an unlimited number of tries for the price of one! (I think ˗ certainly more than one; after too many goes I should think they’d advise giving up and doing something else!!)

15.12.69 - Shopping, family, operas, Catholicism

15.12.69 [Typed with a new ribbon on two aerogrammes]

Dear Mum, it shouldn’t be hard to guess what I’ve finally bought myself. And what a job it was to get one! It was hard enough finding a typewriter shop (and of course there turned out to be a much closer one) but then it was one of those places where they expect you to find everything yourself, and in the end I had to give up and get the assistant. This is one of the more annoying things over here about the shops ˗ it’s okay if you’re just browsing, but if you’re in a hurry, and want something, they still ignore you. Foyles, that great and renowned bookshop, is the worst I’ve struck. There it takes you ages to work out who the assistants are, and then they turn out to be all foreigners with only limited English, and once you’ve got what you want, you have to re-find the assistant, who then wraps the book, but doesn’t take your money; for this you have to find a cashier! And then once you’ve paid your money, you have to find the wretched assistant for the third time and hope he hasn’t given your purchase to someone else!

I’ve been doing some other purchasing too. I was so displeased with the Christmas present I sent you after I’d sent it that when by accident I saw another elephant in the Shepherd Market, in Mayfair, (though what an elephant was doing in Shepherd Market I don’t know) I thought that since it was a much smaller elephant I would send it by airmail, and perhaps it would reach you before Christmas. (Margaret’s birthday, by the way, is the 23rd of December.) [Margaret Crowl, my only English cousin.] I haven’t actually posted it yet, but it’s all wrapped up anyway. When I’ve sent it I’ll let you know a little more about it and its origin.

Re the Crowls ˗ I’ve finally been up again (it was two months since the last time, though I don’t know how the time could have gone like that) and things are sorting themselves out for them. Nina is to move into a room above those occupied by a man who looks after the ‘almshouses’ and will share a bathroom and kitchen with another lady. This room is bigger than what she presently occupies in Woodland Way, so it should suit her reasonably well. She is apparently now happy about the whole idea and glad it would seem to be going out on her own. I didn’t see her all weekend, as for the most part she was in bed with the flu that is knocking down Britishers like flies (but not NZs) and which had a touch of pleurisy with it. And anyway she still, I think, isn’t speaking to Reg!

She and Margaret had been to a concert in Westminster on the night I arrived, and it turned out the soloist had been Peter Baillie, who was Albert Herring in the production I worked on at home! Funny how people pop up again like that, isn’t it? The Crowls were as usual pleased to see me, and spoilt me left right and centre. And to cap it all they gave me my Christmas present when I left because I may now be going to have Christmas dinner with Mike and Kate (the Crowls said I was under no obligation to go up there, which at least lets me know they’d like to have me but won’t force me, so to speak). I went all the way home quite sure in my mind it was a rather large box of chocolates, but it turned out to be a large, beautifully illustrated book called The Wonderful World of Nature. It’s a Reader’s Digest publication, and looks to be rather fascinating. Heaven knows when I’ll get time to read it.

Here’s why: I realised recently that my letters to Francisco were all the same, rather dull, and surmised that I was trying to write to someone whose background I know nothing about. So I made a decision to alter this state of affairs, and set off to my local library to see what I could see. They had next to nothing! I went to the other local library. Ditto. I went to the library in the West End. Ditto. The next day I went back to the first library and discovered that in spite of appearances they were actually the London library that specialised in collecting books on Asia! But they have them hidden away, and you have to ask. There are about fifty on Korea, so I have some reading ahead! Actually, many of them are accounts of the war, and many of these no doubt will cover pretty much the same sort of material. However, I started off with one that gave a general background ˗ the sort of book we used to use at school for Social Affairs (was it?) ˗ and then went on to one written by a social worker, and have now just started one which gives a good number of legends, fairy tales, fables, etc. It seems that the London libraries each specialise in some subject: and I had to go down to Kensington to get a book on the language of Korea.

About the middle book of those mentioned above. It’s called The Never-ending Flower (most books on Korea are called The Land of the Morning Calm) and is by a woman called Susie Younger. She is a Catholic convert, and has been in Korea for nine years as a social worker, living as a Korean in fact. She is absolutely charming, and is as remarkable a woman in her own way as all the other people she calls remarkable in her book. I have got more information from her on the differences and similarities that exist than from the straightforward text books, naturally, and I will go more

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quickly through the book again before I take it back, in order to refamiliarize myself with the details of life and living in Korea and amongst the families.

At the end of the book she has a little chapter dealing with herself, as an answer to those who wonder why she remains (a) single, and (b) in Korea. It also gives a little of her history as far as becoming a convert is concerned. While the actual groping towards the light of final conversion is, or was, a fairly lengthy process, the actual awakening of the truths in her was quite a sudden, casual thing. Something that could not have been foreseen, and therefore all the more obviously the work of his Lordship above. I’m mentioning all this, just to bring up again the subject of my own conversion, so to speak. Not that I haven’t been a sort of Catholic for years, as you know, but it’s only since the H business, where I was forced to state my case either for yea or nay, and even more from a follow-up when they held Forty Hours at the parish church, and when I managed to spend, for the first time with ease, an hour each day just meditating (for want of a better word) and also starting to understand, via that marvellously human priest-writer, Father Quoist, just what it is to be a Christian, but more particularly, a Catholic, that I’ve felt I know where I’m going ultimately. I can’t say I much like the look of the road, and it seems a hell of a ˗ or perhaps a heaven ˗ of a long way to go (!), and 99% of me objects to the trip entirely, but at least the other one percent has said that the idea is rather more worthwhile than I would have said a short while ago. This is all a bit vague, and I could do with Susie Younger’s gift of putting it down with proper humour, and better clarity. I’m a bit like one of those faith-healed people who shout “I’ve got religion!’ I know I have more than for any other reason because the ‘it’ helped me through that dreadfully dark patch that came in the wake of the recent chaos, and which is still helping me to push on when part of my mind says, ‘forget all this faith gunge and go back to your girl ˗ why put more trust in something you can’t hold in your hand?’  

In spite of what I’ve said about the help I know I’m receiving, I feel more alone than ever sometimes. Can you understand this sort of rather paradoxical situation? And yet having said that, perhaps I only now realise how really truly alone I was before, and how much more happy and inner-cleansed (!) I feel now when something turns up where I can try and help. Since I opened up my thoughts to David about H that time, we’ve been much closer, and often have long chats and discussions about things and ideas I’ve never talked about with anyone before. We are all the same, yet how remarkably different we all are! We all go through the same process, yet what infinite graduations [gradations, maybe] mould us into the strange, crazy beings we are. And yet in spite of the continual presence of the Good Lord, (and also my guardian angel ˗ I’d carefully forgotten about him for some time) I find it very easy to sink deep into despair when I don’t seem to overcome faults (when I don’t even seem to want to!) and desperately want to cry out for the helping hand that I need to hold to get me through. Still I think perhaps it’s better to be that much more alive than to be vegetating, soul-wise, as I was before.

You didn’t know you’d raised a lunatic; though you must have guessed it by now from all the ravings above. Not to worry, I’ve discovered in the last few weeks just how unbelievably understanding mothers are too!

I’m now about to change the subject entirely, so you can start to relax again. This last week has been rather hectic as it’s been the end of the term for the Opera Centre, and I managed to get to see both their shows as well as going to The Rake’s Progress at the Wells on Thursday night. This is an opera by Stravinsky ˗ set to an English text, and has some very funny moments, and some very tender ones and some very tense ones, and finally some very movingly sad ones. In short all the sorts of things that the best story-tellers have been using since time immemorial. And the music is some of the most melodic and rhythmic that Stravinsky has written. The Wells do it very well too ˗ it happens by chance to be very much associated with them rather than with an American company as one might expect since it was written over there. (But first performed in Italy, incredibly!)

The first of the Centre’s pieces is a rather bitsy affair called The Carmelites [Dialogues of the Carmelites] with, to quote David, some rather curious theology, and which finishes with the guillotining of about a dozen nuns, just off-stage. Not a very good piece really, though with many fine moments, and here with a well performed production. The other was a double bill of The Telephone (again!) [again, because I’d worked on this with the Dunedin Opera Company, and it had been done by the Centre as well], quite well done, and Malcolm Williamson’s four or five-year-old piece English Eccentrics, as a sort of vaudeville of 18th century eccentrics, gathered together to comment on each other and to perform their sad and mad little histories. This is by far the best thing I’ve seen the Centre do, though perhaps not having been in on it has biased me somewhat. But it was certainly a very fine production excellently performed. Love Mike.