2023/03/27
I left school at age 15, just before my 16th birthday. I was in the upper fifth (a sophomore in America) and had been looking forwards to being in the lower sixth, but my father insisted I leave early, as, in his opinion, I wasn’t doing anything there, so I should leave and begin contributing to the household.
Since I was 14, I’d been working part-time at Woolworth’s, in Kingston, on Saturdays, but now, leaving school, I got a full-time job at Goblin Vacuum Cleaners 1 in Leatherhead, a half hour bus ride from home. I was hired as a Junior, working in the office, which looked out onto the factory floor. I was responsible for keeping up the wall of dented, floppy, and sometimes not labeled manila folders. This mess and took me two weeks of constant attention to organize, and then iw was just a matter of keeping it up-to-date. I got so bored! The office manager was amazed, saying he had never seen it so tidy, he didn’t think it was possible.
Evening classes started that September and I enrolled in typing and shorthand, and that’s where I met my best friend, June—we quickly became inseparable. It took me a few weeks to learn how to type 80 words a minute, as I’d gotten permission to practice at work, and then, predictably, boredom set in. Shorthand I never got the hang of.
Those first few months of working there, having some funds available to me for the first time in my life, after I paid my father most of my earnings, I saved up and bought a pair of red shoes—this was when shoes were only black or brown, and a plaid skirt, and I got my first boy-friend, who worked on the assembly floor.
Within about six months, I was promoted and was sent to work in another section, typing letters for the manager there. I learnt the job and then got bored. I started running errands for some of the various sections, which helped a little, but not much. One of the places I went to was the shipping office, where the guy there, an older man, would talk with me. We had long chats about life, and I would give him a quick kiss on the cheek before I left, the kind of kiss one gives a favorite uncle, but then one day he hugged me. It felt different, odd, not uncle-like, and I never went back.
I began saving for a holiday. The next summer I went pony trekking 2 for a week in Kingussie in the Scottish Highlands. It rained most of the time, and I loved it, this even though my clothes were soaked through every day, and had to be dried in front of the small gas fire in the front room of the cabin, together with everyone else’s, the whole room smelling of damp wool. I cried the day I had to leave. I didn’t want to go back home.
In my second year, I saved up for two sailing classes. The first trip was at Walton on Thames 3, a quiet and tree-shaded part of the river, north of the Teddington locks, a family part of the river, with skiffs, and small sailing boats and the occasional motor boat. It wasn’t tidal. The second week, I went to Portsmouth, to a camp on another body of water, the River Hamble 4, a very different working river with tides and all sorts and sizes of commercial and private boats, plus a prison hulk from the 18th century that, at high tide, we would sail by.
In June, in the mid-summer, in England, the light takes hours to go from the sky, and the moon feels very close, and one evening, as my sailing group was lying around on the grass outside the cabin where we were staying, someone began musing about the moon, saying he wondered what was it made of. I took up the challenge and said it’s made of cheese, different kinds, Wensleydale, Red Leicester, Double Gloucester, Cheddar and Worcester, and others as well, Caerphilly, Stilton and Cheshire 5.
I went on, embellishing the whole idea. The darker areas were Red Leicester or Stilton, the lighter areas Caerphilly or Cheshire. The areas in between were Cheddar, Worcester, Double Gloucester. For the next hour, maybe longer, I answered questions about the moon. I told them about the mice who made the cheese; that there were rivalries between the various farms that produced the specialized cheeses, Stilton, for instance, was the aristocrat of them all, and lorded it over everyone else. Cheddar was more working class, not so elite, but had the most output. There were competitions between cheese makers, with blue ribbons being given out to the winners. Cheshire was the oldest having been made for over 900 years which gave that faction an edge, even though they didn’t produce a lot. I went on, embroidering and embellishing and going off on other tangents as other members added to the story, talking, inventing, entertaining the group until the light finally left the sky.
The next morning one of the young men in our group came up to me expressing concern about my story telling, saying he found it disturbing and he was worried about my mental health. This was the same young man who told me my shorts were too short, that when I went up the gangway, people could see the hairs on my upper legs. Well, yes, I was quite hairy then with stray hairs down to my mid-thigh, and prior to his comment it had never occurred to me that that was a problem.
He, of course, was one of the popular boys, tall, dark-haired, brown-eyed, a perfect, and desirable, young man. I ended up pairing with the sandy, red haired one from Birmingham, shorter than me, wearing glasses, and very earnest.
I didn’t tell any more stories to the group after that, neither did I wear shorts again.
1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goblin_Vacuum_Cleaners
2 https://www.clubs4uk.co.uk/sailing/surrey-walton-on-thames-sailing-club.html
3 https://www.visitscotland.com/info/see-do/highland-horse-fun-p1390041
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River_Hamble
5 https://www.tasteatlas.com/england/cheese