The Proms are back, hoorah, and along with them the nightly treat on Radio 3 of interval talks: those 20-minute sessions of directed chat, either through an interview or often just one person speaking about an idea, a memory, a transformative experience. It’s the perfect radio format: long enough to have some real content but not too long to permit the invasion of those distracting thoughts that swirl around like angry bluebottles, waiting for the right moment to settle and take over your mind.
On TV such few precious minutes would be gone in a flish-flash of camera angles and tricksy music; on radio you can be taken right inside a person’s head. This year in a weekly slot, My Summer Job, five writers have been talking straight to mike about their experiences of working in the kind of temporary jobs that promise no rewards or star-making potential.
If, perchance, David Willetts is a Radio 3 fan and has heard them, he might perhaps be persuaded to rethink his desperate suggestion (as the Minister for Universities and Skills) that graduates without the prospect of finding a job worthy of their qualifications should set up their own businesses. Such an idea would have seemed laughable to us back in the not-so-distant (ha ha) Seventies. Not for us the now-ubiquitous ‘gap year’, but the chance to pick up a bit of life — and more usefully — work ‘experience’ here at home.
Such jobs were often very ‘menial’, or rather manual. The increasing popularity of vegetarianism in the Seventies could be said to have occurred because so many of us spent our summers stuffing sausages and plucking chickens to pay our way across Europe from Folkestone to Istanbul. It was in these years I first learnt how to handle a floor polisher without cutting off a patient from the life-saving drip beside their bed (not a skill I’ve had much use for since). We needed such grounding after our privileged months of daydreaming out of library windows. It’s always useful to experience how organisations work (or fail to function) from the bottom up.
This week we heard from Joe Queenan, who spent the summer of love (1969 for the uninitiated) on the graveyard shift at his local bubblegum factory in Philadelphia where he grew up. It made him feel, he said, ‘like a man’, or if not a man at least he could masquerade as one. His family was ‘working class’ and didn’t approve of his obsession with reading Tacitus, Euripides, the works of Molière and Guy de Maupassant. Far more understandable was his useful employment at the factory, stamping down a mountain of rotting bubblegum in a trash compactor while fending off the army of hungry rats that flourished in its foothills.
His need to earn enough to sustain him for a whole year away from home at college forced him to take another job during the day, pumping gas at the local filling station. The difference between the two working communities taught him a lot about American society for, at the bubblegum factory, African-Americans worked alongside their white American colleagues, and the atmosphere was much more collegiate. At the gas station it was whites-only and the atmosphere was ridden with class, not racial tensions. Most of all he began to understand why he and his father could not get along, his father trapped in a miserable job going nowhere (as a hospital security guard) and being forced to stand aside watching while his children got the life he so desperately wanted.
Next week the novelist Julia Blackburn recalls a job she once took while living for a few months on the island of Majorca in the late Sixties. She was hoping to write a novel but soon ran out of cash and was forced to become a lexicographer preparing the letters ‘H’ and ‘L’ for a new dictionary, being published by Nelson, to sell to the fast-increasing numbers of international students desperate to learn colloquial, informal modern-day English.
Blackburn now realises that she failed to write her novel because she had discovered she was ‘frightened’ of words, of their capacity to swallow up, or distort, your intentions; of their refusal to be pinned down. Looking back on her dictionary-making experience, she has discovered not just that, as Dr Johnson did 200 years earlier, she began to ‘forgive’ words for their lack of absolute clarity and to enjoy the journey from hazardous to haze and from lop-sided to loquacious. She also wrote into her definitions an account in miniature of her own experiences at the time: ‘They lived together in perfect harmony’; ‘He tended to hang out in the café’; ‘She tried to hide her tears’; ‘I shall be wise hereafter’.
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