24.2.70 Mostly about the new job

This letter is out of order in these blog posts, but the list of blogs shows where it should fit.

24.2.70 [Typed on both sides of three and a half narrow and short, pale green, sheets of paper]

Dear Mum, I was all set to sit down and write to you and discovered I seem to have run out of air letters, so I hope the look of this didn’t shock you too much. Still no news from the CIB which naturally enough I’m finding a bit distressing. The stage we’re at, at the moment, is that of the girl making up her mind what she thinks of me from the scanty information she has and the shocking photo. Obviously it’s a difficult task! I can’t contact her personally at all until after she has replied to the CIB to say she’ll have an ‘introduction arranged for her’ and then they write to me again, and tell me I can write to her but still through them ˗ Oh! What a complicated business! It’s only after she then replies directly to me that either of us finds out who the other is and where they live! The more I think about it the funnier it seems. I’m glad I went into that like that because it’s shown me the funny side of it that I’d lost sight of. I read a little CTS pamphlet the other day which had a quotation from a poem by Francis Thompson (whom personally I don’t much care for but who seems in this case to have come up with a very nice little saying). It was:

Is my gloom after all
Shade of His hand outstretched caressingly?

which, once you’ve worked out the slightly upside down grammar is rather to the point, though in our usual way we manage to think God is mismanaging things for us instead of probably (quite definitely!) the other way around.

I had Michael T and a girlfriend of his, Mickey, and Kevin Rowlands up to lunch on Sunday afternoon, and though Kevin bought a bottle of vino with him (I had bought one and so had Mike) he doesn’t drink, and so we other three, possibly a little rudely, but....sat round and drank off one bottle ˗ the other two can now wait for another party sometime! He seems a pleasant sort of chap though not a conversationalist to any degree which makes things a little difficult (and Mike wasn’t as co-operative in this department as usual; he’s getting all introspective lately) but we all survived, and he has returned the compliment and I’ll have to wend my way down to his flat (with two other guys and four cats and three dogs!) sometime when he calls to arrange a date. I hope he’s more at home in his own place. There’s not much of the theatrical about him ˗ he strikes me as one of those totally theatre people whom you could still pass on the street and barely notice. He’s tall, a little heavier than that photo Mrs Leslie showed us, and generally quiet. And strangely enough reminds me a lot of Kevin Flaherty. (Have you ever noticed how people of the same name tend to have certain characteristics [in common]? Or am I just making that up to suit my argument? But even in our family at home the various namesakes are all more than a little alike, whether they would necessarily admit it or not.) (Perhaps it’s just what we take from the name: when we meet someone else of the same name as someone we already know we start to look for similarities.)

Well, I started my new job yesterday, with the worst nerves I’ve had in a long while; though it may also have been the fact that I slept very badly the night before. I had thought I’d grown over all that sort of thing, but it would appear not. I certainly wasn’t the only one ˗ even our instructress, a Mrs Bullitt (would you believe?) seemed nervous, which was rather nice. She’s nothing that her name might imply; it has rather Dickensian overtones, and one imagines a gaunt upright severe person who has a not a jot of patience with dunderheads. She is, however, a littler lady, about 5’2” or 3” with a pleasant though tired expression and isn’t always quite with what is going on, so that her smile tends to follow after the joke, and after everyone else has laughed. She is inclined to not always quite say what she means though generally the meaning is clear, and only needs verification. That is the classroom Mrs Bullitt. The extra-tutorial Mrs B is even more pleasant, not so tired, taller (?), and ever so slightly livelier. I hesitate to think that it’s because she has been doing the job for a good while, but I suspect that’s the case. She is probably in her late forties, though the classroom Mrs Bullitt seems somewhat older.

Did I tell you that we have seven weeks training before we’re let loose on the public? I think they have to have us at some stage before that but I’m not sure. And we’re paid throughout ˗ though 2/- less for some reason, per week. We spend this time round Cannon St or Wren House, which is opposite St Paul’s. So it’s an area I’ve not really spent a great deal of time in before and it’s rather interesting. One of the other men and myself went for a walk at lunchtime today and went over the London Bridge where they are at present building a new one while the other is shipped, stone by stone, to America. The Tower is five minutes’ walk away, and it’s altogether one of the older parts of London. I go to Liverpool St on a real train, not a tube, from the station three minutes away (instead of ten or twenty as they were before) and it’s 6d cheaper than before, and then walk for about seven minutes down to Cannon St. One could go by the main roads from Liverpool St to C. St, but fortunately the ancient residents of London beat pathways between all these which still exist in the form of one-way alleyways, and by following about four of these down, I save quite a bit of time. They all connect to each other practically, so obviously I’m following in the footsteps of some old Londoner who wasn’t bother to spend his time touring back and forth when he could go direct.

Our class has already dwindled from eleven to eight in the first two days: two of them never arrived and one middle-aged lady just didn’t come back today. The rest of the class consists of two other men (thank God ˗ one poor bloke two weeks ahead of us got stuck by himself in a class of women) (and spends his afternoon teas alone. He seems a nice enough guy, though not bubbling with personality ˗ how cruel can women be? And anyway I thought they were the predatory sex? What are they doing?) [More to the point, perhaps, what on earth am I talking about?] one of whom is probably somewhere along the line of Jewish extraction and is called Jerry Levi, and seems a not too bad guy, married with a couple of kids, thin (don’t be fooled by the two cardigans, his wife, I have no doubt, has made him wear under his shirt) with a wide grin of a mouth, and a smoker’s ˗ a heavy smoker’s ˗ laugh. About 45, let’s say.

The other guy is Larry Boyles (what a name, I ask you?) ˗ huge, weighs sixteen stone, looks about 25 or so, but an Eastender, which means he has a certain non-youthful characteristic. For example, he talks like an old man, seems to find life just a little on the puzzling side, and never manages to hear what you say in quite the way you say it, because like most Eastenders, he assumes what you are going to say and gives the answer to that, when in fact you may have been a little more subtle. Perhaps it’s me ˗ I don’t speak so good, maybe?

The women are two middle-aged buddies (though I suspect they’d never met before yesterday), both divorcees-again-married, both the bright sparks of the company; a quality of their age more than their personalities, since one who is married to an American (previously to a Chinese!) and who has lived around the world for some years has few of the qualities one associates with a well-travelled person, and the other, who used to work at Scotland Yard (and who claimed she’d heard and seen everything there ˗ I felt like telling here where I’d been for the last six months!!) and who has been nicknamed Fuzz, seems only to be a cynic, and doesn’t really the true appreciation of the funny side of life that makes a cynic bearable.

There are two quite young girls (one named Miss Weller, who, being an Eastender, reminds me irresistibly of Sam Weller in Pickwick Papers) and a girl of I suppose twenty-two or so, who is something like a beanstalk in a mini-skirt, with glasses. But everybody is very friendly in that they return your smiles and only laugh at you because they’re glad they didn’t put their foot in it.

The building is very hot in true Civil Service style ˗ though as everybody is at pains to point out, the Post Office is now a Corporation not a Govt. Dept., and I stopped wearing the t-shirt that I had on under my shirt today in order to try and let a little air in. I always thought that 60o was the sort of comfortable temperature but I’ve seldom struck a place that is as cool as that. (The theatres here, particularly the Opera Houses, are horribly hot in winter.)

About your [Bonus] Bond(s) ˗ I hope that you eventually get something out of them ˗ it would be nice for you to be provided with a decent sort of ‘pension’ as it were for your old age. (I mean when you’re pushing one hundred or so!)

About the books: it seems that we’ve nearly got everything sorted out again. Would it seem like very bad manners on my part if sometime in the near future I made up another little list? You could stop two or three of these postal orders you aren’t supposed to be sending me to compensate, couldn’t you? It’s some odds and sods books which I’ll think about; but one or two may come in handy for the teacher’s exam. Doris had a friend of long-standing over here who died recently and left her all his music. Perhaps I should say that he left me and some other pupils all his music, as this is where it seems to be finally ending up. I have bought one lot from her so far for a £1(quite how the economics work out I don’t know) which in fact would have cost me a lot more, secondhand, to buy and even more new. About £10 at least. So I’m glad. And I’ve bought some other music off her that is old stuff she no longer can use, for very minimal amounts, which will come in handy for sightreading and perhaps teaching music.

Remember Margaret from work, at the cinema? We had a huge chat on the last night, when she stayed right through my working hours sitting just to talk. I’ve given her my phone number and she’s already rung me once since ˗ and I told her she must come up for a meal, because for a start she lives on her own. I don’t think there is any danger of things getting involved ˗ I hope not; perhaps I’m a bit thick where women are concerned, but from what she has said (I’ve had a good deal of her history) it seems unlikely that she is interested in me for any other reason than friendship. Friendship in the quite ordinary sense. Oh dear, I hope things won’t be messy. No, I don’t think they will. What’s this? [the last line ran downhill on the page.] Love Mike.

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

[second aerogramme]

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.