[Life before work: June 1983–February 1998]
I was born in The City of a Thousand Trades, in the West Midlands of England, on St John’s Day 1983—about a fortnight after Margaret Thatcher won her second General Election. Three quarters of my grandparents came from local coal-mining families; but my father’s father, whose surname I grew up with, was a West Slav whose life was turned upside-down in 1940—the year before he was supposed to go to university—by the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States.
Six weeks after my birth, my parents left their suburban West Midlands home for North Wales, following the advice of my father’s oldest sister, who had already moved there. My father, nearly thirty, jacked in his Job as a trainee accountant to pursue a fully funded history degree in The Oldest City in North Wales. My parents packed their belongings (or some of them) and their three infant sons (of whom I was the youngest) into a black second-hand Mini and headed up the A5 toward a small village on the western slopes of Snowdonia. My earliest memories are of eating grape hyacinths in the back garden of The Terraced House With the Red Door—built for workers in the closed-down slate quarries—beside a slate-grey lake, nestled among misty mountains. Four years later we moved to The Rented Cottage by The Big House belonging to a professor of archæology, outside The Wooded Village on The Island. There I went to The Little Welsh School, where I existed In The Shadow of My Brothers, and began to learn Welsh—albeit with a Speech Impediment.
My youngest brother was born when I was five. And on his first birthday, which we were celebrating on a narrowboat on the Avon Ring, we learnt that my father's father had died, leaving me nothing more than nicotine-stained memories of his handsome, serious face—and a surname that stuck out among Joneses, Davieses and Williamses like a jay among jackdaws.
We’d move twice more before I went to The Big School on The Mainland, again to exist In The Shadow of My Brothers. First we moved to The Terraced House by The Haunted Woodland in The Seaside Town, where the trees concealed a derelict 17th-century mansion, gutted by an accidental fire started by allied soldiers during the Second World War—whose ruins we explored in awed silence, with suspicious whispers about ghosts. Next we moved to The Villa: a Victorian stone house built for the manager of a (now abandoned) limestone quarry, whose only near neighbours were The Partly Ruined Mediæval Priory where an old woman lived alone, and The Farmhouse on The Beach kept by an old man who—it was rumoured—once rammed a police car into the sea with his tractor.
Parents
My father was studying for a PhD on Gerald of Wales’s criticism of monastic culture by the time my mother—kept busy by four sons for a decade—became a mature student. She’d worked in a bank and an office before marrying my father at the age of 18 and becoming pregnant for the first time. In North Wales she worked at the admission office in The Castle in The Seaside Town, and would take numerous other part-time Jobs over the years. My father would remain in higher education for the rest of his Professional Life—with occasional side-lines in private tuition, a few spells as a seasonal tour-guide for elderly Americans in Ireland and Scotland, and a stint as a puppeteer for Punch and Judy shows in The Seaside Town. His Career began in earnest during his PhD as a lecturer; but over the years he gradually moved into administration—for more Remuneration, and less Job Satisfaction. My mother volunteered in The Little Welsh School, but was unable to pursue a Career in primary-level teaching in North Wales due to her lack of Welsh language ability. She would later work in local government in The Hog County in England—in the legal office, and in economic development—and would go on to be a bid-writer in various sectors. I learnt from my parents that the more you got paid for a Job, the less you were likely to enjoy it. But that you had to work, whether you liked it or not: because rent needed paying; and bills kept coming; and the fridge kept being emptied; and there’s only so long one pair of school trousers will last, passed down through four boys—even if you do know how to sew, at which, as with so many practical things, my mother was proficient.
Brothers
By the time I had to think about getting paid Work, I’d developed the impression that my brothers didn’t much like it, or else that it didn’t much like them. But, with hindsight, that impression was not quite fair. My older brother hadn’t had many Jobs. My mother once approached the owner of A Sports Clothing Shop in The Oldest City in North Wales, having seen a sign in its window, to see if he would employ my older brother and me as Saturday boys. He chose the former (then 15) as a test case. But my older brother threw in the towel after his first day at The Sports Clothing Shop, complaining that customers kept messing up the clothes he’d tidied. So I was not invited to replace him.
My oldest brother, by contrast, had signed himself up for a paper-round in The Seaside Town at just 12 years old, and still had one (if not necessarily the same one) by the time we moved to The Villa a few years later—despite boasting of frequently dumping the excess weight of the free papers, which he was meant to deliver with the rest, on the beach, over garden walls, and into various bins around The Seaside Town. Once we’d moved to the rural seclusion of The Villa—and when unoccupied by one of his temporary girlfriends, or by his semi-regular attempts to run away from home in the general direction of civilization—my oldest brother would make money out of nothing with ingenious schemes: like persuading local newsagents to stock photocopies of a comic book he’d made (using a character I’d created); or drawing caricatures to order for the busloads of American OAPs who came to look at The Partly Ruined Mediæval Priory each summer; or simply by regularly removing the coins that visitors cast into the pool of The Thousand-Year-Old Holy Well behind the duck-pond. Aged 15, shortly after his last (or rather, last unsuccessful) attempt to run away from home, my oldest brother persuaded our mother to drive him in to The Oldest City in North Wales weekly for his new Saturday Job at The Chemist’s. A few weeks in, he dyed his hair blue and was suspended from The Big School (not for the first time, but this reason was new). Our mother told him he’d be fired from his Job for the blue hair too; but he insisted he wouldn’t be, because they’d said it was fine. About a month later, by which time he was back at school with hair re-dyed to a more natural hue, our mother found out from a friend of a friend that he had indeed lost this Job; but he’d continued to allow her to drive him to town, because he didn’t want to tell her she’d been right. He’d subsequently taken up shoplifting (thus allaying the need for a Job) for which he would soon be arrested. Having failed to prevent the police from telling our parents about his arrest (falsely claiming they were heroin addicts who wouldn’t be interested) my oldest brother declared that he’d been driven to a life of crime by a lack of Pocket Money.
No: we were not given Pocket Money. Our mother said she didn’t believe in it. But I doubt we could have afforded it, even if she did. And if all this seems digressionary, Prospective Employer, I detail my oldest brother’s Cunning and my older brother’s Workshyness only in the hope that my own faults (e.g. a propensity for Rambling, and a proclivity toward Existential Dread) will seem forgivable by comparison. My older brother would have no Job again until he abandoned his A-levels for the second time to start an internet business with a school friend and their former technology teacher at the age of 19. After that first Saturday Job at The Sports Clothing Shop, he never again stooped to Menial Work. My oldest brother, on the other hand, would do anything and everything necessary to propel himself at the speed of a rocket toward whatever destiny he had in mind at that time; but he’d frequently struggle with the Rules imposed upon him by his Employers—just as he’d struggled, and would always struggle, with Rules imposed upon him by anyone.
My youngest brother, the rest of us agreed, had things easier than we did. He never needed a Job until he left The University College in The Harbour Town, and he was by then A Good Graphic Designer and already doing it for money, part-time, and would never appear to have any trouble finding a Job.
So, in truth, I learnt little from any of my brothers about Work—except to be bemused by their behaviour and habits in that regard, since they all seemed so different from mine.
Others
I didn’t know much about my grandparents’ Professional Lives when I was young, except that they’d all lived and worked through The Second World War. Some of my father’s father's family were incarcerated in camps in Siberia following Stalin's incursions west; but he remained in The Jerusalem of The North until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, whereupon (according to one of my cousins' research) he was deported to The City of Squares in Germany to labour as a slave for a manufacturer of agricultural machinery. He was liberated in 1945 and joined the Polish Army, serving with Allied forces in Italy for a while, before moving to the UK in 1946 and—a couple of years later—marrying my father’s mother. I don’t know what she did before or after the war; my father rarely talked about her, and she too died when I was young. My father's father went from driving tanks in Italy to scrubbing tanks in a chemical plant in the West Midlands of England. He never went to university thanks to the combined efforts of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. My father’s parents had four children together, but had been divorced for many years by the brief time I knew them. She remarried, and had fancy leather furniture, and a stuffed toy gorilla. He didn’t.
My mother’s father shot a donkey in Burma, but I can’t recall how or even whether he was provoked. My mother’s mother was in the RAF, stationed in West Wales; but she ran away with her best friend twice because, like my oldest brother, she always struggled under the imposition of Rules. My mother’s father had retired from his Job as a security guard by the time I knew him, but he still took an active interest in horse-racing. When we boys visited him in the West Midlands, we’d walk together into The Needlemaking Town, and we’d sit outside The Bookie’s while he placed his bets. Then he’d take us to the library to get Asterix comics, and take us back to feed us ham sandwiches and sliced Battenberg cake. When my mother’s mother came into our lives (and back into hers) my mother’s father would frequently ask us if she ever talked about him. But she never did. She’d walked out on them both when my mother was still a child, to pursue a dream—and a man—that would ultimately prove elusive. Her second husband had been a different man altogether; and when he died, she learnt that he’d used a false name for the duration of their acquaintance. Following his death, my mother’s mother moved to North Wales to be near my mother and my uncle (the younger two of her three children). At first, she seemed incredibly old to me; but she was always working—mostly as a cleaner—and the older she got, and the older we all got, the younger she seemed, in her incessant activity, by comparison.
My mother’s older brother (and only brother) had joined the RAF as an electrician. He married and had two daughters, got divorced, and went to university as a mature student in North Wales at the same time as my mother. We enjoyed visiting him in The Seaside Town because he had better computer games than us. We all acted together in The Amateur Dramatics Group in The Seaside Town until my RAF uncle became a teacher and moved to England with his new partner, who he’d met at The Amateur Dramatics Group. My father’s oldest sister, who had moved to Wales before the lot of us, had three children with a man I barely remember and later divorced him. She became a French teacher in The Big School on The Mainland where her new partner was an Art teacher. They both taught me, and I was as fond of their subjects as I was of them: very. I hardly knew my father’s older sister and husband, who lived in England—but I was given to understand from our handful of brief early visits that they were richer than us. His younger brother was a friendly policeman, with a policeman’s moustache, two daughters, and a wife. But we rarely saw them either because they too lived in England.
Finally—and thank you for bearing with me, Prospective Employer, because this is all relevant you know—we come to my West Midlands aunt and uncle. My mother’s sister was old enough (like her brother) not to have suffered The Rupture that was their mother leaving their father; at least not while she was still at home. She married a man I don’t recall and had my oldest cousin, then divorced that man and married my West Midlands uncle, who was the man I always pictured when I pictured A Working Man. I remember him clearly from my younger days, when he was the age I am now; he had a proper Job—indeed, a Career—working for a manufacturer of aircraft parts. He’d been doing it since he was 16, and he kept at it till he retired at the right and proper age to a life of permanent holidays. When we visited them over our summer holidays, he’d come home from his Job for lunch, check his shares on Teletext, and doze in front of “Sesame Street” before heading back to his Workplace. He had hobbies too: fishing, dog-training, coin-collecting… My West Midlands aunt worked in a DIY Shop in The City of a Thousand Trades. But she was able to give that up long before state-pension age to focus on her true calling, which was—much like her mother—cleaning everything in sight to within an inch of its life. Since we rarely saw my father's older sister's (allegedly) rich family, I thought of this aunt and uncle as our rich relatives; but they weren’t really rich, because of course nobody we knew was rich—except perhaps our aristocratic landlord, who’d owned The Terraced House by The Haunted Woodland in The Seaside Town, and The Villa, and The Partly Ruined Mediæval Priory, and The Thousand-Year-Old Holy Well, and all those shut-down quarries… but we didn’t really know him. I think he waved to me and my older brother once, when we were out in the woods. Maybe he’d driven down to look at The Derelict Mansion built by (or at least for) his ancestors. Or maybe that really was a ghost…
So, my West Midlands aunt and uncle were not rich; but I knew they’d voted for Margaret Thatcher. And why would anyone vote for Margaret Thatcher unless they were rich—or evil? That was what my parents said; or, at least, what I inferred by the conversations I overheard. But I knew they couldn’t be evil, because they were lovely. And even if they were rich, I reasoned, I didn’t envy them; because they could barely fit the lot of us into their house, and their garden had no old cottages or abandoned quarries or derelict mansions in it; and, what was worse, it was surrounded by other people’s gardens! This situation was a source of mystery to me; but I learnt from my aunt that if your partner earnt enough money you could do what you wanted, more-or-less. And I learnt from my uncle that if you worked really, really hard for years and years, then you could go on holiday for as long as you wanted, and as often as you wanted, once you’d finished. But then, they’d always gone on holidays. Our holiday was usually going to stay at their house in England, or a day at The Holiday Camp on The Mainland; except that one year when my RAF uncle’s Lada broke down, so the rest of the family—who’d already set off in our Daihatsu Charade—had a holiday that year, but I didn’t. By contrast: our West Midlands aunt and uncle went “abroad”, where I’d never been. Having never been abroad, I didn’t much miss it; but they thought we might like it, so they took me and my little brother abroad when I was 12 and he was 7—to America! For a month! And we hadn’t even worked hard to earn it.
Well... I worked hard at school, I suppose. And I checked cross-stitch tapestry drafts at 2p-per-error-noted when my mother was working for a publisher of needlework books. I was paid something like two pounds in the end, which bought a lot of sweets back then—as long as we walked the three miles to the shop in The Wooded Village and didn’t waste the money on bus fare. And we always walked, back then. Because the weather was always sunny in North Wales in the mid-1990s. And because there was nothing else to do.
Me
For my part, I joined in at family car-boot sales, where we were allowed to keep whatever money we took as long as we’d sold something we actually owned. We all chipped in, to differing extents, with the needlework books—except my younger brother, who was too young to do anything useful back then. We also did plenty of Unpaid Work, because my mother said we had to: washing up, drying up, stacking the dishwasher, unstacking the dishwasher, gardening, or walking our border collie up to one or other of the abandoned quarries and back. I hated drying up the most. Gardening was hard work too. My mother claims she paid us by the hour once or twice, to keep us at it longer; but that my older brother just stood there leaning on a spade for twenty minutes at a time—staring into the middle distance—and that I would pull up plants and bring them over to her to ask whether they were weeds. It was okay when the weather was good. Sometimes my mother would let me dig as big a hole as I could manage, in the back garden. I wanted to find out if I could get to Australia—which with hindsight, considering I was already 11 when we moved to The Villa, does not seem to suggest Wisdom equal to my years. I never got to Australia, because The Villa was, after all, a former quarry-manager’s house whose location was chosen specifically for its proximity to a huge underground mass of limestone.
My favourite Unpaid Work was walking our border collie, who had been abandoned with her siblings in a public toilet on The Mainland, and who we got as a puppy shortly after we moved to The Villa. I loved our border collie, and I loved walking. More often than not, I’d not bother with a lead at all; there were rarely any cars or other people on The Toll Road. So I’d go up to my favourite quarry, and watch the dog running all the way down and around the vast expanse of green, grass-carpeted, deindustrialized wilderness, and I’d just sit and daydream. About what, at first, I don’t recall; but increasingly, as a teenager, the subject would be girls from The Big School on The Mainland.
But never, admittedly, about Work. So, back to Work:
I lacked my older brother’s resolute Workshyness. But, in spite of my Obedience, I couldn’t hope to match my oldest brother for Ingenuity. Okay, I once made an attempt with my best friend Mel (not his real name) from The Amateur Dramatics Group—who lived a short walk away from The Villa across one of the farmer’s sheep-fields—to sell some salt-dough models that we’d moulded, baked, and painted, at an outdoor craft fair in The Village We Didn’t Live In. We’d based them on our favourite toys, Mini Boglins; which Mel and I had collected together till there were no more to collect, before proceeding to make our own. Afraid of being sued by Ideal Toy Company for infringing their trademark, we renamed our imitation models “Grimps”. But, alas: nobody bought any. And I think the idea to sell them had itself come from my Ingenious oldest brother. We’d been content just playing with them.
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