[Previous chapter] [Halls Catering: February 2002–March 2004 (Term-time: irregular hours)]
It was evident from the start that I was going to have to work my way through university. By which I mean it was evident from the point at which I reached the bottom of my newly acquired £1,000 student-account overdraft that I’d have to work my way through university—and that was quite close to the start.
My Student Loan would cover my fees, and my parents would cover my accommodation; which for the first year would include most of my food as well. But for anything else beyond the reach of those soon-squandered first thousand pounds, be it booze, books, boots, babes, bands, biros, or balls (or anything else beginning with a B—or any other letter, Prospective Employer) I’d have to earn it by first exchanging my Time and Labour for Remuneration in the form of Money.
For the first year of my university life in The City of Crushed Dreams I’d be predominantly domiciled in The Cell Block: a room in what looked from the inside like a converted 1960s carpark, and looked from the outside like an abandoned Communist barracks in a fallout-contaminated quarter of Southern Belarus. Even though the meals included in our rental fee were of the standard of “turkey dinosaurs, chips, and beans”, an article in The Times that year listed our hall fees among the most expensive in the UK. My neighbours were mostly surplus posh young women who’d failed to get into Oxbridge due to there only being so much room there. I was not to make friends with them, and they made no attempts to befriend me. In fact, they made two formal complaints about the loud noise I made in the mornings while getting ready to go to lectures—even though they frequently made equally loud noises after coming home from clubbing, in the middle of the night. But I never made a single (formal) complaint about them, Prospective Employer, because I Knew My Place.
In the second year I would go on to live in The Haunted House on the edge of campus with three young men I’d met in The Clearing Conference Centre (who we will call Shane, Gilbert, and Tony) and one young man we’d met later (who we will call Charles—but pronounced in a French way, even though he wasn’t French). The Haunted House wasn't haunted, but was frequently subjected to late-night harassment—in the form of vandalism, phantom door-knocking, verbal abuse, requests to use our downstairs toilet, and the use of our garden as a toilet without prior consultation—because the property was inconveniently located between the university bar-and-venue and the City of Crushed Dreams proper, where almost all second- and third-year students lived.
In the third year I’d live in The House of Shit—a neglected student rental property in The Student-Heavy Residential Area of The City of Crushed Dreams—with Shane, Gilbert, and two other young men from The Clearing Conference Centre (who we will call Shandy and Todd). That house frequently suffered from plumbing problems—notably soil pipes backing up into grey-water waste pipes—hence its colourful sobriquet.
Most of my time at university was spent in timetabled study, sleeping, reading, writing, shopping for CDs, watching Neighbours twice a day, drinking too much and being sick, falling asleep after being sick, listening to Bon Jovi in Shane’s room, piercing my own ears, piercing Shane’s ears, not having a girlfriend, and going to clubs and standing on my own, leaving on my own, going home on my own—and being chatted up by creepy middle-aged men as I passed through The Cathedral Gardens on my own—and wondering, as I lay alone in my rented single bed: if these were “the best days” of my life, what then might the worst have in store?
But, in addition to the aforementioned, I also spent a fair bit of time gainfully employed in the catering department of two of the university’s halls of residence—neither of which was the hall in which I resided for the duration of my first year. And I imagine you’ll be more interested in that subject, Prospective Employer.
The Role
My part-time Halls Catering Job in The City of Crushed Dreams was all that stood between me and Financial Ruin over much of the course of my University Life. I kept at it through term-time from halfway through first year to halfway through third year; with gaps for holidays, except for one Easter when I also worked there for two weeks during conference season. I worked as often as I could without the Job impeding on my studies or precluding me from having a social life (or watching Neighbours; ideally twice a day) and turned up on time and did all that was asked of me—no less, no more.
On any given working day, the Job basically entailed three steps: preparing the canteen and the dining hall itself for service; serving food to a couple of hundred students; and, finally, cleaning and tidying the canteen and dining hall once the students’ allotted dining hours were over. We got free food; which was quite the inspiration for seeking this Job—though I’ll not claim it was my idea, because I'm pretty sure it was suggested by my mother. I want to say we ate before the rest of them came in; but it’s surely likelier we had what was left by the time they’d gone? I admit I can’t say for sure. But one way or another, the shifts took about three hours—or five, if one came to clean up after lunch; but then one had half an hour off before starting the prep for dinner. Either way, there was five minutes for a fag-break once every hour if you wanted (which I invariably did) and nobody cared if you had your headphones in by the time the dining hall was clean enough for you to sweep and mop it. There was often someone around to chat with if you fancied it too.
Service was hot and frantic, with massive, heavy metal trays of food being taken in and out throughout. Clearing was messy and busy, with bodies to avoid and gravy or ketchup, inevitably, all down your shirt and trousers, and chips stuck to the bottom of your shoes. It got sweaty behind the heat-lamps, and uniforms could only be worn once between washes. Some of the chefs were moody. Some were quiet. Some could go either way. The students mostly ignored us, but once in a while they might cause trouble, if only by asking a question I couldn’t answer—but a Superior would always step in at that point, because it took a fair few people to run kitchens and canteens of that size, so I was never alone at rush-hour.
The process quickly became automatic. Arrival, the donning of work-appropriate clothing, the greetings, the order of service, the prep, the gauging of co-workers’ moods, the allotting of tasks by a Superior, the mutual agreement or resignation, the stationing of staff like soldiers, the drawing of breath and the watching the clock counting down the last seconds, the filling of jugs of water and squash… The rush, the sound, the chatter, the slow-then-fast-then-steady procession of faces you’d see every day, but couldn’t place if you saw them anywhere else; the lulls and the swells of the storm and the streaming of people; the steam and the burning of food, and of flesh; the waiting, the willing, the dwindling custom, the dwindling stock; the dishes and cutlery trays in the trolley; the scraping of scraps into black plastic sacks; the waste; the cloths and the spray and the crumbs on the tables; the dishwasher trays and the pull-out-spray taps; the fag-breaks, the leftovers, unspoken issues, the lonely lone pot-washer lugging the pans; the chefs disappearing, the sweeping, the mopping; the checklists, the signoffs, the lights, and the locks.
How many times? I never counted. I was never counting. Only working.
Working to Live.
Good Job or Bad Job?
There’s no question about Productivity, when considering this Job, Prospective Employer: hundreds of teenagers—technically adults already, but really, do we who have been there ourselves believe that?—came traipsing by the canteens every day I was there, and we fed and nourished them, and saw to it they had to waste no time at all in preparing their meals or cleaning up; at least, to no extent beyond taking a trayful of sullied crockery and slotting it onto a trolley. Some in my position, by which I mean other students, might have considered such Work beneath them. Certainly many in my position didn’t need to Work, and therefore didn’t Work. (For who, Prospective Employer—if you'll forgive my stating the oft-unstated obvious—would choose to work?) But at this stage in my Curriculum Vitæ I’d yet to be Remunerated for any Work and still considered that Work Undignified. I had belief enough that the degree I’d begun—ambivalent though I was as to where it might lead—was a goal in itself that was worth my Time and Labour; and, I hoped, my parents’ Time and Labour, and Money; and indeed the Debt I was steadily accruing, and whoever’s investment that represented—whether they’d accrued it themselves by Time and Labour or by the Extraction of Labour from others, over Time. By now, and by now having read The Communist Manifesto—if probably not having entirely understood it—I was of the opinion that Productive work conducted under conditions conducive to Solidarity was itself inherently Dignified; and thus conducive to the Production of Dignity, in Dignified Productivity. But as to that Solidarity…
The Halls Catering Job was a mixed bag; perhaps inevitably, given the turbulent time that one’s late teenage years can amount to emotionally and psychologically—and the complex Class-straddling I sometimes felt I was undertaking. By which I mean, Prospective Employer, that I was both studying at The University—in a semi-conscious attempt to consolidate my Middle Class credentials and escape my family’s humble Working Class West Midland origins into a bright future of Bourgeois Comforts and Financial Security—while also (by necessity) working a Menial Job among predominantly Working Class Colleagues, who were neither Academically Educated nor Professionally Qualified, in order to facilitate that consolidation, and that escape. I was at once the Student and the Man Who Serves Food To The Student; and thus, I felt, also... I was somehow neither.
Can one claim true Solidarity in such circumstances? I might have been in a similar boat, for a time, to the Chinese, Italian, and Spanish MA students who shovelled chips and turkey dinosaurs and operated the dishwasher alongside me; and I was certainly in a similar boat to Shandy and Shane, who each worked alongside me for a time as well; but could I claim the same of the local middle-aged mother-of-three who left school at sixteen and had worked two Jobs or more for most of her life? Or the fifteen-year-old local girl who was intending to study for a BTEC in Travel and Tourism (but who eventually went full-time at Halls Catering)? Or the twentysomething guy from the other side of the county who worked there full-time and was hopelessly, and—we were all agreed—inappropriately infatuated with the former? Or even the chefs, who’d worked in Professional kitchens and restaurants, or for the Army Catering Corps, or on cruise ships? Was I "one of them"? Were they "one of me"? While working in Halls Catering, whether or not I was actually at Work, I certainly felt more akin to my Work Colleagues than I did to the hordes of first-year students who passed through—none of whom knew, or cared, I presume, that I was at once one of them as well as being one of… well, them.
My Bosswoman’s Bossman was a southern European who’d come to study at The University many years ago, and liked it so much he never left. And my Bosswoman was a middle-aged Working Class emigrant from The Great Wen to The Shire to which The City of Crushed Dreams was A Lesser Wen; and she was a fair and reasonable Superior—even kind. And, as the months I had left of my years in The City of Crushed Dreams gradually blew away like autumn leaves in November storms, my Bosswoman would more and more frequently suggest that any of us who was willing should join her—once we’d mopped the floors and locked the doors—in the nearest empty student bar for a drink. And often with nothing to do at my makeshift home, I often would. And, by the time they worked there, Shane and Shandy always would, so I always would; and the drinks were cheap, so sometimes a drink became three drinks or four. And Bosswoman plied us with rounds of discounted beer, and gave us free cigarettes—not the brand we’d have bought ourselves, but free cigarettes. And one time toward the end of my on-and-off years at the Halls Catering Job, when Shandy and Shane and the by-then-sixteen-year-old girl had somehow each slipped away on their own evening journeys, leaving only Bosswoman and me, she bade me farewell for the night with a much-more-lingering embrace than ever before; and before I knew what to do about that, she was kissing me wetly on the mouth, and drawing back from me and looking into my eyes, saying in a low, cigarette-ravaged and entreating tone: “My husband doesn’t understand me, you know?”
I very much didn’t know—and I didn’t know what to say to that; so probably said nothing, and having frozen for a moment, I quickly mumbled a further goodbye and stumbled away. What was I meant to say? What was to be said? What is to say? I don’t know what to say about it today, except that I’m sorry—or rather that I was and still am sorry about what she said; but also that I felt sure that a line had been crossed in that act and by her words between Solidarity and something… less desirable. Less fair. I didn’t know what to call it; but it reminded me of the time a man of about my father’s age emerged from the shadows through which I was passing around the Cathedral at night—on my way home from a club, and alone as usual—to engage in a conversation that began with the beauty of stars, and moved with alarming ease to the works of Oscar Wilde and Plato, and the many different ways a man could love a boy in Ancient Greece, until I was emboldened by the sound of others’ footsteps, and I allowed myself politely to escape—except that my Bosswoman at the Halls Catering Job was significantly older than my father was at that time; and she hadn’t as many baited words as the (apparently Upper-Middle Class) man I met that night in the Cathedral’s shadow with which to tempt me. I didn’t blame my Bosswoman, as such, for how I felt about what she'd done and said; but I didn’t want The Incident repeated either, so I found excuses from then on not to go to the bar with her after Work, unless Shane or Shandy was there as well—and if they were there, I would not be left by them for longer than the time it took to make a trip to the toilet.
One of the young men I lived with was, by Third Year, having an affair with a Member of catering Staff many years his senior. And there were rumours of many such arrangements, past and present, between Students and Staff, Staff and Students. And I do not doubt it: because Class and Power and Sexual Politics and Years and Decades notwithstanding, we were all human together. But she was not to find such solace with me. My Chastity was a source of Shame to me by that age—as I’m sure you can imagine, Prospective Employer—but it wasn’t a ticking bomb to be dispensed with as soon as I was able. I’m sure she was old enough to be my grandmother, mathematically. And if Womankind had shown restraint in her dealings with me by that point, which I felt perhaps she had, I felt it behoved me to do Her the same Courtesy.
A hard Job to rate, Prospective Employer, all in. But I do recall a valuable lesson taught to me by one Colleague—the middle-aged local woman; the mother of three—when I went to her with a plate of a different design from the rest, unaccountably found in the dishwasher tray, and said “This one doesn’t stack neatly with the others. Where should I put it?” She sighed and answered “Just smash it, sweep it up, and put it in the bin.”
A Job, Prospective Employer, that was on balance neither Good nor Bad; but a Job that simply was.
Concluding notes
Shandy came to Work with me (in addition to then Living with me) during third year. Not because he needed Money; but because he’d split up with his girlfriend, because he wanted to start having sex with other women before he graduated from university and—he feared—it would be too late. But breaking Commitments, as with anything else tried once, can soon become a Habit. Shandy worked alongside me for almost a month, during which time he did his best to suffer what he saw as the indignities of not-wholly necessary Labour, right up to the point he realized none of the First Year girls was especially likely to lunge across the metal trays beneath the glass-panelled heat lamps in order to offer themselves to the guy serving her turkey dinosaurs, chips and beans. Then he quit to “focus on his studies” and made me—who’d put in a good word for him—look like A Dick. Shandy would soon find better places to pick up girls, like student clubs: where I would stand all night dropping empty alcopop bottles down a purpose-made chute at the end of the bar, listening to the sound of breaking glass and wondering what, if anything, I was for.
Shane came to work with me some weeks after Shandy left, and Shane was surely there longer, having accrued several times more than the £1,000-worth of overdraft debt I’d incurred myself—by Ingeniously signing up for as many student bank accounts as there were banks to be found in The City of Crushed Dreams. Shane was much more used than Shandy (or than the others, including me, I suspect) to the notion of having to Work one's way through life. Halls Catering was his second—or possibly third—term-time job, and I don’t know how by Third Year he even found Time to get drunk. But get drunk he did. And how…
There was a lot of Other Stuff going on while I was at university, Prospective Employer. Not Fraternities, Societies, Sports or Amateur Dramatics; nothing that glamorous. And I didn’t meet anyone who would go on to be famous. (Although Bill Oddie did nearly hit me in the face with a guitar at the train station when I was visiting the city for a reunion in 2006; he was storming out of W H Smith’s because, according to the checkout girl, she’d vaguely recognize him and asked if he was David Attenborough. He was carrying the guitar in a case on his back, you see...) But in addition to my primary source of disposable income, there were several holiday Jobs, and one or two Extracurricular activities that I ought to mention.
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