ADMISSION: I am piggy-backing here, inspired by
and whose vivid transports to moments, relived through the medium of 'the worst job I ever had...' have made me laugh out loud and cringe in equal measure, reading 'then' through today's eyes. I will be 68 next week.The right to work's a liberty I've always taken for granted, and work, still yet comes with all forms of peril, ritual and expectation. Until you name something, well. It can't happen, can it, if you don't have a word for it?
I'd been grateful to Germaine Greer for turning up just after The Pill, and just in time to help me have 'it all' but I also used to wonder what all the bother was about. Having 'it all' seemed to mean that you had to always do at least two jobs: go to school and work or, go to work but unblock the kitchen sink first and sand down the front door where it's sticking when you got home. I had other ideas. Once I'd finished my A' levels I was going to go to Art College to do a Foundation Year, or to Drama School, or to Middlesex Poly which was hot in arty circles, to do The Humanities which sounded far-out but I wasn't really sure what it was. The war, just gone, had been reviewed at school in the same breath as all that stuff about the Vikings, proving my people invincible. We'd been reborn and set free again over and over again. Wars had been the making of us and we could do anything at all, if we tried and if we had the talent. There were caveats but the war had saved us all from all that was never discussed.
My mother used to say, 'I had a lovely war' which jars now as it did then but she meant that it had set her free to find meaningful work in a man's world. Her friends, covering old ground to join us for her funeral, confessed, 'we were at Bletchley, weren't we Mon?' and a Mon nodded and added,
'Tap tap tapping, just across the county boundary. We didn't want to go home in the end, did we Mon?'
'No, Mon (they were all called Monica) but we had to. I've done nothing but washing up, since. It's grandkids' kids now. I'm done in.'
'Well, Mon. It'll be us next. Us soon. Me first, I'd guess,' she said, reaching for a slice of coffee and walnut cake. 'Delicious Cherry Darling. Your mother would be proud.'
'But I didn't bake it, it's from … '
'Shush dear. Don't give away all our secrets. Geoffrey won't eat a thing if he thinks it's shop bought and I'm dammed if I'm mowing the lawn.'
There's trouble, some say, with Gen Zee. They're working to live and to rule. They've read their contracts of employment if they've read anything at all. Rumour has it they are fully genned up on the importance of the work/life balance. They'll not fall prey to the 80's cruelly termed 'Yuppie Flu' of Thatcher's live to work Britain. The Boomers, meanwhile, those of us who've had it all, haven't even got a word for having nothing left. We're not hyped mid-lifers, cramming a Prius full of digital kids, dropping them off at breakfast clubs, rushing on to the gym and living on green-drinks for the perimenopause. We're not the bloated, brain-fogged, hot-flushed-woman's-hour-generic-menopausal-sandwich-generation-ers, doing our parents' shopping and confiscating the teens' vapes. So what are we if we're not quite over going shopping in Top Shop but haven't menstruated, or had it all, for a decade or three? After the menopause, Google says, you're postmenopausal. Just that. You might grow a beard but even if you don't, you are still postmenopausal. Not post-post-peri-menopausal but plain and simply post-menopausal, till you die. You are, if anything at all, quite simply, peri-dead.
The worst job I've ever had is coming to terms with this new role; this post-post 'being it all and having it all at once' role. People glaze over when I say, 'I used to ....'. The 'what I did' part of my life is silenced. My status on forms is either retired or semi-retired (I like to think of myself as peri-retired) but there is never any inquiry asking 'what from?'. I struggle. It's not just that I'd like to fall in love, have a few babies and do it all right this time with the benefit of hindsight. I look at ads for jobs. There was an ad today on linked in; someone's looking for a junior. An office junior in an editorial office. I thought, I could start there before I remembered, just in the nick of time, I'm very much post-pre-peri-girl-Friday. I'd also like to get out of gaol free without having to pass go again. (I'm quite lazy - the cover-up for indolence and I am already anticipating a flurry of 'it's never too late' replies - I remind myself - is that I am writing and writing is working and that makes it important. The resigned (I don't mean people who jumped ship before redundancy - I mean those who accept this after-life’s impotence) seem content to slide backwards down their own CVs. They're babysitting - I did that first when I was about 12. They're working in shops - my second job was a Saturday job selling cheese in the now famous Major Pat Rance's Wells' Stores. Rancid we called him. There was talk about rats. I climbed up the ranks of our local psychiatric hospital, working as a Nursing Assistant at the weekend and after school and that's a novel in itself but now I am asked if I'd like to support those in need of care in our community.
I made a point of adding, 'being a single parent concurrently’ to my CV, alongside Arts' Admin, Microwave Cleaning, Dinner Lady and Caterer to the stars in that time between somehow managing and returning to University in my very early forties, and concurrently working in admin, nursing my mother, debugging the teens, un-nesting and hollowing, airless grief; qualifying somehow - surviving my own near death (September is Sepsis Awareness Month www.sepsistrust.org) to finally retire from Lecturing in English to Undergraduates 27 years later: to be invited to babysit, to sell cheese, and walk dogs. I can hear someone singing, ‘The Circle of Life’ from the Lion King, next door. You believe me don’t you?
This piece is cheating really - it's hardly about work and I promise to write next or at least quite soon about the psychiatric hospitals - places, like small towns, dotted about the countryside, breaking the monotonies of village lives, providing employment, love interests and much, much more.
Here now and instead is an early contemplation, seeking purpose. My mother, dying said, 'we are our histories'; she was quite certain that who we are is the sum of all we've done, which worried me. Unpicking threads of doing, choice, regret and history, I find I am a collage, quilted, resewn in part from every decade's lost and found.
Cherry Coombe
Brilliant, Cherry. Incisive and brutally funny. So many bright spots I don’t know where to start. And thank you for the mention.
Loved reading this. Particularly enjoyed that last image that we are all quilted collages. And all the best folk went to Middx Poly!