
[The Kitchen Porter: Summer–Autumn 2004]
Toward the end of my English degree I’d been having conversations with my mother and Girlfriend # 2 (when she was still a thing) and—on occasions when they were both unavailable—the mirror in my box bedroom, about what exactly might become of me once I Graduated. Doing a PGCE was out, because I’d already experienced Teaching-Related Opportunities and discovered that UK schools made me Anxious and were thus not conducive to the allaying of Existential Dread.
Doing an MA in something literary might have been my next choice, because English at university had turned out to be something I could do. But I wasn’t sure what area of study would suit my Talents or Interests, because I wasn’t sure what they were. My best single mark during three years of English Studies came from an essay I wrote about “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. I proposed that most of what occurred between Act 1, Scene 2 and Act 3, Scene 2 (inclusive) was best understood as an Anxiety Dream experienced by Theseus (The Duke of Athens) in anticipation of his marriage to—and subsequent conjugals with—Hippolyta (the sexually threatening Queen of the Amazons). The lesser folk apparently “shared” his dream (or, according to my thesis, nightmare) because he was their Bossman, and thus all of his Anxieties would be indirectly passed on to them via his Rule, or Misrule, of their domain. So maybe I could have done a whole MA in projecting my Issues about Sex and Class onto Shakespeare plays? I don’t know; I probably wouldn't have been the first. But I suspect my model wouldn’t have worked as neatly on Richard III or Cymbeline. And it would cost me at least £8,000 to find out. And I didn’t have £8,000. I had…
About -£13,500.
At the time of writing (despite being nearly forty) I still have about £5,000 of my BA student loan to repay. It really is the gift that keeps on taking. You’ll find out, Prospective Employer, by what happens in the next few years of my Working Life, why I was unable to start repaying my Debt sooner. But the short answer is that in order to be required to begin repayments, I would have to be earning a decent Salary—and I wasn’t about to do that any time soon. It became apparent even before my Graduation that there was no obvious way for me to make the leap from “writing satisfactory (or, for that matter, excellent) essays on Shakespeare plays” to “Gainful Employment”. And I certainly wasn’t qualified to be a social worker like The Posh School computer had suggested I ought to be. Having at some point found out what one of those was (because one of my North Wales cousins was one) it turned out I didn’t want to do that anyway. Stupid Posh School Computer...
But in May 2004, while I was preparing for my final exams at The University (by smoking a spliff and playing Pro Evolution Soccer with Gilbert) the European Union expanded to include 10 new member states: Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. And as luck would have it, a Language School in one of these places would harness the publicity generated by this fact to drive an advertising campaign in the UK for trainees for their TEFL course (Teaching English as a Foreign Language). My mother would see the advert—while searching the internet to try to find out just what her third son was actually for—and would subsequently forward the advert to me, discuss it with me on the telephone, and persuade me that if I found the idea of applying for the position to be appealing, then I should do that. So I did. And my application won me a telephone Interview with the course leader, who warned me that some of the food I might usually expect to be able to eat wouldn’t be available to me in The Former Communist Country where the Language School was based. He asked if I thought I could handle that. I replied that I reckoned I could. I’ve handled a lot worse! I might have added, but probably didn’t. Like what? he might reasonably have been expected to ask in response, had I actually said that. And I’m glad he probably didn’t say that; because I probably wouldn’t have known what to say by this point. So let’s assume he didn’t, so that we don’t have to unnecessarily extend this paragraph any further.
I was accepted onto an intensive TEFL training course, with the guarantee of a Job at The Language School to follow in January 2005 if I passed, and with a choice to start in August or December. I chose the latter because that would give me the time to back out in the event that I unexpectedly suffered a bout of Existential Dread, or simply got Cold Feet; but also because this choice would give me the Time to raise all or possibly just some of the necessary Course Fees by taking on a part-time Job as a Kitchen Porter in the staff restaurant at my mother’s place of work in The English Cathedral City; which opportunity—you will be shocked, Prospective Employer, shocked to learn—was made known to me by my mother.
The Role
A kitchen porter is what you’d probably call a pot-wash; unless you’ve worked in a kitchen. But The Kitchen Porter’s share of the Division of Labour in the kitchen is better exemplified by the other term. I mostly washed pots. Having worked in kitchens on and off since I was 18, I was shocked by the discovery that I liked pot-washing even better than any of the other Jobs I’d done in kitchens. You didn’t have to deal with Customers or make eye-contact or small-talk, or any of that nonsense. And it didn’t matter if you were Nervous or Anxious or Fearful about anything, because there was nobody there to witness it or care about it or exacerbate it. And the chefs were going to shout at you whatever mood you were in, because chefs are, almost all of them, always cross—which I knew already.
Okay so I didn’t only wash pots. I also washed trays and utensils and machine parts. And I dried all of the above, and wiped surfaces down after the chefs had made a mess of them. I was even trusted to make toast in the mornings. The chefs were cross, like I said. But they were different from the chefs I’d worked with in the Halls Catering Job because they were women instead of men. I didn’t see all that much of the rest of the kitchen Staff or the canteen Staff. I mean I must have, but I can’t remember them. Every time I try to place someone there—and I’m sure there was at least one woman near my own age who I got on okay with—my mind just replaces them with Loretta from the Halls Catering Job in The City of Crushed Dreams. And she wasn’t significant enough in my Curriculum Vitæ for me to have mentioned her existence in that part; so that says enough on that matter.
But there was one guy I made friends with, whose Job was to fill metal trolleys with teas and coffees and snacks and take them out to conference rooms, and to serve the drinks to people then clean up and come back. A very similar Job to what I’d done at The University College in that city a few years before, and in my view something of A Nightmare Scenario. He hated it. It was amusing how obviously he hated it. I’d never dared to hate a Job so much—much less to keep my hatred no secret from my Colleagues and Employers. I found it refreshing. There was no need, after all, for anyone to enjoy such a Job. Why should he? As long as his hatred didn’t affect his performance or reveal itself to his Customers; which, as far as I saw, it never did.
He was saving up to move to Paris. He was half French and half something not French—maybe English. We’ll call him Jacques after Jacques Chirac, who was President of France at the time. Every time Jacques talked to me, one of the chefs would come over to move him along. But just as there were some naturally busy times in which, I acknowledge, such behaviour would have been Problematic from a Productivity perspective, there was natural Slack in our Jobs—and theirs—so, try as they might, they couldn’t prevent us from forming a Workplace bond. After a week or so’s acquaintance, we got on to talking about personal stuff. I mentioned that I’d split up with my girlfriend of six months in the spring, and that I wasn’t generally much good with “the ladies” anyway. I asked him how about him. He stiffened, and—following what I could see was a snap judgement as to how to address my question—he told me that actually he was gay. It wasn’t a surprise as such; but neither was it not. By which I mean I was well used by then to the notion that people might be gay. In the first few weeks of university, two of my all-male core friendship group (Olaf and Virgil) had come out, at separate times—and both times to me, Prospective Employer, which confirmed my suspicion that I was A Good Listener. A third man from our group (we’ll call him Pedro, even though I might already have called him something else) would later come out—some months after university ended; this time not to me personally, but to four of us at once—having known us all already for three years. So maybe I wasn’t a good enough listener, after all.
Jacques was therefore—at that time—the third person to have "come out" to me privately. But knowing, because he told me, that Jacques had told his parents and a few of his friends before, it occurred to me for the first time that “coming out” wasn’t just something you did once, to one person—unless perhaps you were famous and picked a journalist who wrote for a popular newspaper. Because as long as society (or even merely The Kitchen Porter in your Workplace) works on the assumption that heterosexuality is The Norm (which assumption I gather can be summarized using the handy word "heteronormativity") gay people will be forced to feel like they have to come out to any given person (or Kitchen Porter) who wants to be inappropriately familiar with them about their Personal Life in the Workplace. I do think he started that conversation though, Prospective Employer; so I hope I didn’t make him feel uncomfortable—at least no more uncomfortable than I typically made any other people, with my Shyness, Social Awkwardness, Speech Impediment, and Weirdness, real or imagined.
Rest assured that I’ve made every effort since the day that Jacques came out to me—in every other Job I’ve had, but also in my personal life—not to make assumptions on people’s sexuality based purely on the widely reported ratios; and at least to observe their mannerisms, the pitch of their voice, and the quality of their grooming regime. And then—only if absolutely necessary—to make my assumptions based on the aforementioned—with the ratio taken into account only as a secondary consideration.
Good Job or Bad Job?
Being a Kitchen Porter was the closest I’d yet got to a full-time Job, even though the hours were never more than six a day, because I was working five days a week. It was a physically demanding Job, because Productivity was never in question; and the tools of my trade being heavy metal kitchenware, I was ensured a good workout.
Usually when I start a new Job, Prospective Employer, I like to hit the ground running; but on this occasion I hit the ground limping. The day before I started the Job, I’d been to a party with some old Sixth Form College friends and we’d been physically assaulting each other. The practice was known as “grandadding”, and you were meant to knee your friend or associate as hard as you could in the side of their thigh, so that afterwards they’d walk “like a grandad”. My assailant was the one who’d thought I was into ska, back when I was working at the catering department of my father's university college. He had the same name as a then-ubiquitous pop star—so I’ll call him Jamelia, because she's a better pop-star than the one he shared a name with. Anyway, Jamelia had taken a run-up, and grandadded me so hard in my right thigh that I walked into my new Workplace on that first day with a pronounced limp, and was limping for the rest of that week. I didn’t tell the chefs how it happened because they never asked. But I did tell Jacques, and he was quite rightly unimpressed.
As the Job went on and my Jamelia-inflicted grandad wore off, I would develop new injuries. Mainly burns on my hands. In fact, my fingers and knuckles became so habitually blistered by the near-boiling water I’d use to wash the pots, which I could hardly feel through my thick rubber gloves, that my friends—the little mutually-grateful group of us still in and around The Cathedral City that summer and autumn—started calling me Sausage-Fingers. Most of us were working low-wage Postgraduation Jobs that we felt were beneath our Class, and were feeling a bit “Generation X” in the Douglas Copeland sense (though we were all technically Millennials). Every weekend, we’d go out and get absolutely plastered, and thus I’d stagger into work each Monday, with or without a limp. Hangovers were nothing new to me by this juncture, Prospective Employer. But hangovers and work first thing, especially Menial Work, was (or were) new. I learnt by a process of trial and error that there is no cure for a hangover, except time. And that hard work is the best punishment.
There was Solidarity enough in the brief friendship I had with Jacques to balance the inherent loneliness of the Kitchen Porter Job. (We kept in touch for a while; he moved to Paris a few months after I finished the Job.) The chefs were okay, for people who’d chosen Jobs that would make them permanently cross. The Class Anxiety or whatever it was I felt in the Halls Catering Job didn’t factor—I was simply far too tired to worry about whether my English degree, or my Hopes, Dreams and Ambitions ought to make me feel somehow guilty for planning to leave my Job, and not even having bothered to lie about that plan. Certainly I didn’t let such Qualms diminish the Dignity I felt in cleaning pots and drying pots and presenting the pots to the chefs for them to Professionally soil again. These little things that people are paid to do are what really makes our world—or at least the human part of it—go round, Prospective Employer. If you’re too good to wash up pots once in a while, you’re too good for Life. Or too good for a Lower Middle Class/aspiring Middle Class Life, like mine, at any rate.
One of the chefs—the angriest one—asked me one day where I was going when my tenure came to an end. And I told her I was going to The City of a Hundred Spires, in The Former Communist Country, to teach English as a foreign language.
She frowned—presumably at the notion of “English” as a “foreign” language.
“Tell you what,” she said. “Going out there; it’ll make you appreciate what you’ve got here like you never did.”
Well, I thought. We’ll see.
But I said nothing.
The Kitchen Porter Job was a hard Job, Prospective Employer, but it did the Job, and was therefore A Good Job.
[Next chapter.]
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