A priceless experience
Jeremy Clarke says volunteering broadened his horizons and gave him his first introduction to genuine intellectuals
After I left school I was first an under-aged barman, then a general builder’s labourer, then a machine operator, then a fruit-picker, then I was unemployed, then a seasonal barman, then I was unemployed again. Unskilled work was hard to come by in the late Seventies, but even when jobs were at their scarcest people used to say, ‘There’s always work around for those that want it,’ and to a certain extent it was true. But for a while I had no luck at all. I was what employment statisticians today neatly call a NEET — a young person not in education, employment or training.
At the time the curtain was about to go up on the Falklands war. All else having failed, I presented myself in earnest at an army recruitment office. The recruiting sergeant spoke frankly. At 23 I was over the hill, he said. What he was looking for was fearless 17and 18-year-olds. And happily for him, he said, they were coming forward in droves.
I went to see a careers adviser. She scanned my employment record with a furrowed brow. So what did I really want to do with my life, she said? I really didn’t care, was the answer to that. At that age my featureless mental landscape was innocent of fanciful notions of personal fulfilment or job satisfaction. I was a willing donkey — that was all. I’d train to be a washer-upper or toilet attendant if there was a steady job at the end of it.
What I had to do, she said, was offer potential trainers evidence that I had ‘something to offer’ and that I could ‘stick at things’. As it stood, she said, my employment record told them I was a scraping from the bottom of the barrel. How about getting some volunteer work down on that CV, she said, and give them the impression that I was at least an altruistic bottom-scraper?
So I applied to the Tesco’s of the voluntary sector, the charitable agency Community Service Volunteers. These fine people looked me up and down and offered me a nine-month stint as a caretaker at a community centre in Maidenhead, Berks.
The community centre was housed in an old red-brick primary school. I answered to two fulltime social workers who sat at their respective desks in the old headmistress’s study. My job was to maintain the fabric of the building and set the stage in the main hall for the various groups that regularly held meetings or activities there: mothers and toddlers, youths, pensioners, schizophrenics, alcoholics, obese people, Quakers. For doing this I was given free board and lodging in a children’s home and a weekly pocket-money allowance of £7.50.
Undoubtedly I gained valuable experience right from the start. I was immensely fortunate, for example, to meet intellectuals for the first time. The head social worker, Jacky, was a Marxist, and her chief minion, Steve, from Yorkshire, was a Trotskyite. Now that I’m older, I’m occasionally mistaken for an intelligent person. Nobody made that mistake when I was 23. Least of all Jacky and Steve. They gently mocked me about my lack of intellectual substance by saying things like: ‘So tell us, what’s life all about then, Jeremy? It’s about getting as much beer down your neck as possible, isn’t it?’ I came across an interesting quotation by Bertrand Russell the other day. After a visit to the Soviet Union, the world-famous philosopher and adulterer said, ‘To understand Bolshevism, it is not sufficient to know facts; it is necessary also to enter with sympathy or imagination into a new spirit.’ This would account for Jacky and Steve’s slightly condescending attitude towards me. They shared a golden vision of a New Society, and they subscribed to the magazine. But they didn’t want to share this golden vision with me. Manual labourers are notoriously lacking in imagination perhaps. Occasionally I’d catch one or the other of them looking at me and inwardly quailing at the uphill task that lay in front of them.
My daily round was half-filled with tasks of the most footling sort: not at all what I’d call proper work. Sticking the toddlers’ Fauvist watercolours to the walls with BluTack. Replenishing the alcoholics’ coffee jar. Making minor adjustments to the Weight Watchers’ scales. Soaping and polishing Jacky and Steve’s cars. Shopping. Until I’d resigned myself to it, I found it demeaning.
I also had to contend with being told about the high standards that the previous CSV, an Irishman called Chris, had set for industry, selflessness and innovation. Worse still, he was a refugee from sectarian violence and had a death threat hanging over him. He’d tried to start a non-sectarian youth club in Belfast and been given 24 hours to leave the province. How could I compete with glamour such as that? Jacky and Steve thought him a god.
Funnily enough, I didn’t hate Chris. He was quiet and funny and undogmatic. But he was a hard act to follow. In cabaret terms it must have been like U2 leaving the stage and a George Formby tribute artist coming on. Chris couldn’t go home, so he hung around — a revered talisman in an advisory capacity. So that was another first — my first Irish friend — to add to my tally of new experiences.
Of all the groups we catered for, I liked best the schizophrenics and depressives who turned up each week for self-help meetings sponsored by the charity Mind. Schizophrenics and I hit it off, I discovered. Why not apply to work in a psychiatric hospital? said the community psychiatric nurse who led them. Emboldened, I applied for a post as a nursing assistant at a fortress-like 800-bed hospital in Essex and was accepted. One thing led to another and after just six months as a nursing assistant I was offered the chance to train to become a Registered Mental Nurse. I was jubilant. I’d achieved what I’d imagined to be completely out of my reach — a career — and all thanks to the experience and opportunities afforded by the Community Service Volunteer agency.
Moral of the story? Volunteering broadens the horizon, inspires and opens doors. I recommend it. That I was sacked within a year from the psychiatric hospital for ‘throwing human excrement at members of the public’, and then returned to the treadmill of unskilled labour and dole office, is beside the point.
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