12.9.69 - more about the job

12.9.69 [handwritten]

Dear Mum, Well, well, the woman who was supposed to have come to take over from me seems to have changed her mind ˗ whether she’ll change it again or not I don’t know ˗ shouldn’t think so, but you never know. Anyway, at the moment, I’m on the full payroll, so they tell me (‘they’ being the Relief Manager who seems to know as much about it as anyone else), and all seems to be right ˗ except that it’s damned hard work! You’d never believe it; I guess it’s the hours. Anyway, I’m getting used to it and seem to be coping. This week I’m earning two whole days of cash I didn’t expect, so!

I’ve asked about the Edinburgh business and even that seems to be no problem. [I’m not sure if this means them letting me have time off to go to Edinburgh.] We’re still losing money ˗ to a variety of amounts, but until they get an adequate system, they can’t really tell who’s fault it is! I did put one pound in the other night as I had a horrid suspicion that I’d given away too much in change but otherwise they take it out of petty cash. Anyway, they’re making a hell of a lot of money ˗ the new film which started yesterday has been bringing twice as many people and we were fairly busy before!! The odd minute or two of it that I’ve seen don’t seem to be any better than those odd minutes in the previous week! [To go to the toilet, as I recall, staff had to go past the open cinema door, so glimpsing the movies wasn't uncommon.]

Berwick St Market, today.
Courtesy of Positive Dialogues

Moneywise I seem to be okay ˗ I actually put some cash in the bank this week. Yesterday I bought myself two ties ˗ equally colourful and bright as the 30/- one, but 27/6 cheaper, each! I got them in the Berwick St market, just round the corner from the cinema ˗ like a miniature Petticoat Lane. I’d better go back to work ˗ it’s my half hour break, and I’m writing this in a little Sandwich Bar down the road.

Later. Actually I seemed still to have some break left so I had an apple and talked to one of the ticket collectors. Remember how I said I had got some food off the ticket collectors ˗ apparently as gifts ˗ well, they asked me for it [the money, presumably], in each case, even though when I’d previously offered they’d refused!! Odd, isn’t it?

We all seem to be getting on well at the flat ˗ now that David has got all his stuff in, it’s really looking lived in. Not that any place I go to doesn’t; put Crowl in a room five minutes and he’ll seem to be at home!

Dave, the Trinidaddy doorman, here, has nothing to do but stand all night ˗ and he sez he doesn’t get bored, but spends the time sorting out his problems, and just looking at the passersby. Admittedly it is interesting, though I still like to have something to do. The variety of customers we get in here is quite surprising ˗ they’re not in the least all of a ‘type’. You’ll never be able to read this, I think! Love, Mike

P.S. Tonight, we tried a new system and tonight we balanced!

Sept 1969 - filming for TV in Edinburgh

30.9.69

Dear Mum, just got your letter in which you mention your many history-making exploits. I hope while you’re concentrating on making history that you’re also concentrating on getting well. I don’t know if you will still be in there when you get this ˗ I’ll send it to the hospital anyway, and put a wee note on it where to send it if you’ve gone home by this time. Glad to hear however that as usual you’re enjoying yourself thoroughly, though I do think it’s about time they found someone else to pick on for their experiments ˗ they always seem to find you such an interesting case, don’t they? Wonder why you’ve been given so many little peculiarities? Glad to see also that everyone is looking after you so well; funny, isn’t it, how both you and I seem to be considered quite helpless and everyone seems to rush to help. I often have dear old ladies helping me to buy things in shops, and others seem to find a good old sounding board in me for all their troubles. I know more about complete strangers’ troubles than anybody else’s! It’s nice also that you’re in hospital in the Spring;  you’ll be able to see all the trees and flowers coming out into bloom from your own private window.

We’ve had our first touch of Winter today; I was staying overnight at Mike’s (it was his birthday yesterday, and he invited me around for a meal ˗ and very nice it was too, and we just spent a very quiet evening sounding like two under-under-graduates according to Lindsay!) and when I went last night it was quite pleasant and mild, and I only had a jacket on over my shirt. This morning however there was a distinct chill in the air ˗ even though the sun is still shining quite pleasantly, and it looks very pleasant as long as you’re indoors, but I was feeling a little like a slightly refrigerated person by the time I got home.

I don’t think I told you any more about Edinburgh, did it? (I’ve written to Hazel who is away at the moment, and I think it was her that I told the rest of the story to.) Anyway on Wednesday morning when we were supposed to work solidly for about three and a half hours we arrived and rehearsed (after about half an hour’s wait) with the cameras, and then went and sat about and then were made up and then sat about, and then filmed it quite casually in about ten minutes! And it was apparently so right (a piece of commentary had to be fitted over the last part of our performance and it was so well timed that it ended exactly as we did!) that we didn’t even have to do it again, which they’d expected to. I think they felt they wouldn’t get it right again if they did do it.

So we finished quite early in the day, and after we had a huge salad each in a place that Ande Anderson (the producer) knows, we went our separate ways, and I wandered off to see some more of the place that I hadn’t yet taken in. I wandered around the East end of the town, I think, and this brought me to Holyrood House [Palace] eventually, which I investigated. Unfortunately they didn’t really show very much of it to us ˗ only about one floor, out of three or four, and not all of that I suspect. Still it was interesting, though like many other things it no longer exists as it did when it was first built, and only parts of rooms are as old as the entire establishment. A ceiling here, a or a door here, or a staircase here. Still the room where Mary Queen of Scots was having dinner with a couple of friends the night her secretary Rizzio was murdered about two rooms away is there, and the spot where he was left dying ˗ though the little private dining room (about as big as our kitchen!) has a telephone in it these days! And the bed her husband slept in is still sitting in his room, made up, as though he were just away in England for the day.

There are lots of fascinating little curiosities, and even more that we couldn’t see, I think ˗ you seem to have to go around with one of the guides who only shows you what they think is necessary. Though they are fairly knowledgeable about the place, and conversation with them is rather more fascinating than actually listening to the talk, which leaves dozens of little details out.

The setting for the House (like that of the Castle, which had about the magnificent setting possible on top of a sheer rock) is fabulous. It’s at the other end of the Royal Mile ˗ walk straight up the road and you eventually come to the Castle gates ˗ and is sort of the end of the world; all at the back of it is a great roll of hills, with a huge scar down the side of the closest. I first saw the House from above, in the sort of park area (Calton Hill ˗ correct spelling incidentally) which is full of overpowering monuments to long forgotten leaders of the town, and up there you can really see the setting. Everything is heavily built in Edinburgh; one imagines it would take an atom bomb just to shake the foundations let alone knock it down.

Since I got back I’ve had to work all the four remaining days of the week; Thursday through to Sunday, morning noon and night. I was nearly up the wall at the end of it. Fortunately I’ve had two full days off to compensate. Still, as employers they’re fairly good, in that I only seem to need to ask for a certain time off and they say, Oh, I think that can be arranged!

Lots of love and keep progressing!

4.9.69 - my new and not very salubrious career

4.9.69 (midnight)

Billy Graham preaching outside
the Compton in the early 60s

Dear Mum, I’d better write now, because I haven’t really the time during the day at the moment. I’m trying to organise myself fairly thoroughly, and so far things are going quite smoothly. I’m just home from work, of course; six hours of selling tickets to men who obviously haven’t much else to do with their time. This club as I think I told you shows pretty grotty films: what they call X films here (which is why the cinema is licensed as a club, and must function according to police regulations) and which they wouldn’t bother showing at home. [In NZ, I assume I meant.] Quite why men want to come and see them I don’t know ˗ for the same reasons that striptease clubs make a nice profit I guess. [As far as I knew at this time, pornography, in NZ, was barely visible, though it presumably existed in some form.] Old Compton St, where I work (it’s just off Wardour St, which is very famous as the English film industry’s street, as you no doubt know) has two or three strip clubs in it ˗ one practically opposite the cinema, and a variety of restaurants of greatly differing quality, a Cinerama theatre, several clothes stores ˗ the ones who can’t make Carnaby St, which is also not far from there ˗ and the usual number of pubs. (The Soho average is slightly higher than elsewhere in London, about three a street I should think!)

The Compton [Cinema] is nearly all underground; I’m in the only bit that isn’t, and I shouldn’t think it holds more than 200, if that. The people who come have to join first, at 15/- a head! ˗ then they pay 12/6 on top of that. No wonder they make money there. The film runs continuously from ten in the morning till (this week anyway) 11.47 at night. There are shorts, but the point is that the place never closes once it’s open. Only men can become members (!) but since they can take a ‘guest’ in, some of them take their wives or girlfriends in. God alone knows what they think of it! We had one man last night who wanted to take both his wife and his dog in. Tonight I had a Czech who spoke no English at all, and as little German as I do, so though he wasn’t keen on the idea, I finally let him in for £1-7-6 (he wanted to go in for 12/6, like some of the English people who can read the signs do), but it was only after innumerable gesticulations on my part that we got anywhere.

Compton Cinema in the late 60s

Lots of the men come in without their cards, and at present the filing system is in a complete state of chaos, so that it’s well nigh impossible to find anything. There is an old set of names with thin strips of cardboard stuck in metal plates that are detachable from their main stand and which should be on the wall but isn’t. The strips fall out whenever you try to find anything, and anyway they aren’t in order except that they’re under A or B or such. There’s a new card filing system which is in perfect order, but lots of the cards haven’t yet been filed, and there’s a list being typed (again not strictly alphabetically) into a book. This will soon be stopped, I think. Or at worst you can look in the daily records book where each name is entered against its membership number. This may only take a good half-hour, depending on whether the guy can remember when he came in before or not!

What amuses me about the place is that nobody [who works there], as far as I can make out, and I think I’ve met most of the staff at one time or another who work there, ever watches the films that are shown! Even the management. Mr Neilson, who as I said is not much than older than me, is going on holiday tomorrow, and Mike ? is taking over. He’s from Jersey, and is filling in time till he can get the right sort of union card to be able to work in the floor management side of TV. He’s done it before, but apparently can’t do it just now. Anyway, I may yet get another job out of it all. There’s a new cinema being opened in Tottenham Court Rd, on the same sort of system, so I may be lucky enough to get the same sort of job. It would suit me fine, because I’m starting to make some headway with what I’m doing in the daytime.

Remember how my foot was damaged? Well, it’s now getting to the repaired stage, and somewhere along the line, I’ve now been bitten (I think) on the other foot, and it all swelled up! I’ve put the Englishman’s favourite antiseptic on it (TCP) and I haven’t yet looked at it since I’ve been home.

The weather today suddenly went mad and shot back up to the 70s, just as we were all putting our winter wooly vests back on. Crazy. Monday was August Bank Holiday, though as usual it fell in September (!), and Hazel and Ian (who is an old friend of Hazel’s) and I went out in Ian’s car for the day. We didn’t go far, only to Epping Forest, where we walked (and picnicked, rather unsatisfactorily on biscuits and apples), and then when we finally found the car again, we went to Hampstead Heath, and had a look at the fair. Actually there were three fairs, but all of them were pretty dull. We went to see Some Like It Hot in Hampstead, at 4.00, [this would have been the second time I’d seen it] and then when we found all the restaurants we wanted to go to were closed we went to a singularly ‘caff’ type place in Soho, and then went to a pub next door to Hazel’s present abode (she’s rented out her own flat, as she leaves London for some time soon), then went to Hazel’s present abode and listened to The Rite of Spring! Very curious day, but also very relaxing. Ian and I got to know each other considerably better too. [Hazel was due to go off as stage manager in another part of the country.]

[Handwritten on the back] Next day. Other foot this morning seems to be calming down somewhat, and is back to its normal size. Call me YS029399C!! from now on. That’s the National Insurance. I wrote to the Post Office about Postmen’s work, and you should see the rigamarole of forms they sent back to fill in ! I was only asking ˗ you’d think they thought I was already joining!

P.S. And I’d have to take a test!! [I’d worked as a Postman in Dunedin, for a couple of months.]