Making a fresh start

PERSONAL COLUMN ALBERT LODGE

Chucking up your job when you're forty years old with no specialist line is like a woman of

that ace dismissing a lover. It looks heroic but you both know at heart you're the wrong age for a fresh start.

For a few weeks I'd kept an eye on the posh jobs in The Times and Telegraph, but I either strove with none for none was worth my strife or, if they were, you had to be under thirty-five to enter the lists. As the final day in the office approached I was loosing off

applications like a full quiver of arrows but I still found myself at the labour exchange on

the first Monday. Vanity made me put down 'demolition worker'—I had done a bit a few years back and it seemed a likely trade for a quick start—but there were no vacancies so I accepted the clerk's invitation to sign on.

This meant that they wrote to my employer to find out why I'd left. Being too proud to admit I was fed up with him and being at the same time a philanthropic toff who knew no more of the realities of the fat-and-bread existence than that lot do, he told them I'd left for more money. This from a £20-a-week job— to support an application for £4 10s-a-week dole. The result was predictable—`The claimant is disqualified from receiving unemployment benefit for the period (six weeks) because he voluntarily left his employment without just cause: Never mind. 'Demolition of West London vicarage, labourers wanted, apply on site,' said hat night's Evening Standard. Although I was there for eight next morning, the beachguard ook of the young men loading a lorry, and the accent in which one of them told me the fore- man was that joker over there, confirmed that a gang of Earls Court Australians, with or uithout work permits, had got in first. Still, the oreman was helpful: try at another job the rm had—in Carnaby Street. Demolition in arnaby Street! A common enough dream own Savile Row, I suppose, but for the oment I just couldn't associate the two ideas. was reminded of labouring in Paris when we re sent to a house in the chic Etoile district. d thought the 'CD' picked out in white pebbles the lawn meant we were working for a plomat. I'd been liming the cellar for three ays before I discovered it was Christian Dior's. Having dealt with him in broad strokes, the ovelty of setting about today's world of haute uture with a crowbar appealed, and off I ent. But Carnaby Street stood firm; there asn't a start.

Now I did know one way in London, if ou want to earn a few bob quickly and walk ome with them in your pocket, no nonsense bout tax or stamp. You go first thing in the orning to a labour exchange near the City r the West End and wait till the restaurants the neighbourhood start ringing up for ual hands as their regular staff fail to turn 'Come early,' the clerk had said. 'There'll some more ... a bit of a mixed lot.'

On arrival there was already a queue of enlY, ever* one of them looking as though, metime during the night, he'd added a digit the census of those sleeping rough. Three re drunk, from the contents.of a sauce bottle eY kept thrusting at each other. 'When the

doors opened we all trooped in and filled two wooden benches facing the counter. To take the parade, on marched a powerful, red-faced glarer, bald, big moustache, type-cast for one of Sassoon's 'scarlet majors of the base.'

He shuffled thiongh his files, looked up and barked 'Anyone want a permanent job?' The effect of this cliché of social security uttered as a challenge was interesting. Most of them stared straight ahead. Their business was further down the agenda. Some of the more sensitive ones looked distressed, as though he'd sworn foully in church. But nobody spoke. So much for Beveridge and the planners.

The phone rang. The major jotted down details, shared a joke with the caller which you felt, by his deprecating laugh, was about the quality of us waiting there, then he looked up and his eye travelled slowly along the rows. He was obviously selecting for a special job. I hurriedly looked down, for although I'd made a point of leaving tie off and two day's growth on, confidence in this prole kit had faltered ever since presenting myself similarly disguised at the door of a Lisbon brothel, to hear the madam immediately bawl over her shoulder, `Senhoras! urn gentleman ingles!' Fortunately, the major was less perceptive. It was a relief, for to have jumped the queue that way would have been a deficiency of spirit of the corps to which I now felt I belonged.

It was quarter to ten by the time I was up before the major and posted. Walking to the job, I wondered what sort of kitchen work I'd get. A naive approach, this. The chef simply shuffles his staff round so that the casual hand is always the washer-up. A huge negro chef grinned me a welcome, called me 'amigo,' asked me if I was in love and waved me toward the sink.

Some consultant had installed a bulky, metal flue over it, so that every washer-up over five feet four was forced into the posture of a scrum-half about to put the ball in. The thought of how much the pipes expert would get for putting it up, compared with how much I'd get for putting up with it, angered me. Up to about one o'clock there was time now and again to pull out, stretch up and step down off the half-inch dais of old fat caked with vege- table matter, but then the plates started coming down the hatch so fast it made you feel like Chaplin at his conveyor belt in Modern Times.

There was no longer time to change the water. ' and the saffron-coloured scum clogging the hairs on my forearm confirmed that the curry was going down well upstairs. Aching back, flying plates, sloshing water . . . the afternoon held no other memory.

At four o'clock, stooping like a grammarian. I knocked off. 'Money at the cash desk, amigo.' said Big Samba. A pound note and two florins were put into a hand. pink and wrinkled like a washerwoman's. Reckoning in plates, I worked it out ha'penny a dozen, scraped, cleaned and dried. 'Tomorrow?' I asked hope- fully. The chef shook his head but looked at me curiously. What did I want—a permanent job?

I lined up another half-dozen times but I've got bored with it now. So I sit here in my Colombey-les-deux-Eglises up near Clerken- well Green. waiting until la patrie or ie patron realises that the current write-off age of thirty- five gets dafter, as we live longer and keep fitter. Anybody want a permanent job-less?