by Maeve Binchy
The worst thing about life as a waitress was the Out door; it was only rivalled by the In door. One small miscalculation with either and you were on the floor with a tray of broken everything. If it happened in the dining room, the Wing Commanders and the Flight Lieutenants were so mortified that they all looked away and pretended it hadn’t happened. If the crash came in the kitchen, there was more help, but considerably more abuse as well. The head waiter would repeat for the hundredth time that these damn students were more trouble than help, and the evil man who brought the vegetables would remind everyone of the time some unfortunate from St Andrew’s had got his foot caught in the dishwasher and the washing up had to be done by hand for three weeks.
I was there for eight weeks, eight years ago, and I earned £10 a week and my keep. My keep must have been worth another ten, because we all ate huge meals both before and after the meal we were serving, and lived in palatial rooms, where we demanded new releases for the record player every week. We were miles from the nearest town, which was good, as there was no chance of spending all the Big Money we earned, and there were a hundred ways, most of them respectable, of increasing one’s wages.
The greatest problem after the doors was the Catering Manager, who had an unfortunate phrase: ‘I’m not a church-going man myself, but I know what’s what.’
This was invariably said when the occasion least called for it, and we were all puzzled by its significance. He said it to me when I arrived, and as I had done nothing yet except stammer that I would work very hard, it was rather a blow. He followed it up by warning me sternly that the men didn’t marry the waitresses and said that I might laugh now, but many of my countrywomen were laughing on the other side of their faces at the expense of the National Health. It was not an auspicious start.
But I soon got quite good at it all. There were all kinds of new things to learn, like how to carry seven plates without spilling the gravy and not resting three of them on my chest. There was no little crook in my wrist to balance them like everyone else seemed to have, but I practised and found that if you put everything on top of each other regardless and gave them a quick wipe before putting them down it was the best. All the rest of the waitresses wore powder-blue nylon overalls, but there wasn’t one that would fit me and allow me to appear in public. So I wore a dignified restrained navy dress of my own, and everyone thought I was the manageress, and made complaints about 50-year-old waitresses who had been there all their working lives. I accepted these complaints regally and did nothing about them.
It was very hard not to join in people’s conversations. I was severely reprimanded for contradicting a student, who said he had landed beautifully that morning on the airstrip. When I told him very truthfully that everyone in two miles’ radius had thrown themselves on the ground at his approach, there was consternation.
‘You must know what’s what,’ said the Catering Manager disapprovingly. ‘I hope I won’t have to mention this again.’
There was a lot of dishonesty in the kitchen, which was as pointless as it was professional. Everyone was well paid and reasonably happy, but the stealing seemed to be a way of life. There were three dustbins, but one of them wasn’t a real dustbin. Every time we used a dozen bottles of tomato juice or a dozen anything, in fact, one bottle was put in the false dustbin and a mysterious man came every week and sold it all. We got about £1 14s each from the profits, and I was warned sternly that if I didn’t like it I was to shut up about it, because there had been a bit of trouble one year over a student. He had behaved foolishly, and instead of giving the money to a charity like any normal well-heeled student should have done, he wrote a series of letters to everyone, including the Catering Manager, who had been very upset, and this was partly responsible for his strange attitudes and limited vocabulary ever since.
I learned, among other things, that you must never send a knife or fork back because it is dirty. This only resulted in extreme indignation, plus class and racist remarks about it being far from clean forks that the clientèle were reared. The usual method of cleaning the offending fork was to rub it in the under-chef’s hair. His oily head gave it an unparalleled shine, and the complainer ate his dinner, happy to have scored a point, with a piece of cutlery that shone with brilliance, oil and dandruff.
I hated the way we were told to recommend the food that was going off in the kitchen. At a briefing council before lunch we would be told that kidney stew wouldn’t last another hour; it was to be proffered, suggested and even brought in error to anyone who looked as if they might eat it. It was a nightmare to ask those innocent boys, whose stomachs were already turning over at the thought of flying that afternoon, to eat something that we in the kitchen had rejected automatically. The pink blancmange was about the most revolting of all, and I think the only Reserved Sin I ever committed knowingly was to tell a weedy-looking Scot that blancmange was the best thing known to man for building muscles, and he would wolf it down obediently every day.
Sometimes I went for a flight in an aeroplane. The students and air people (the ones who never married the waitresses) were occasionally at their wits’ end for entertainment, and when all else failed would fly me to Cambridge for afternoon tea. They thought it was very jolly of me to be a waitress, and hoped that our economy would recover sufficiently to let me get work at home soon. I made up terrible lying stories about having worked in Kilburn, but moving to the country to meet a nicer class of person, and they were delighted with me.
One of the respectable ways of earning more money was to work in the bar at night. I did this once with disastrous results. You got £3 for the four and a half hours, and, since my only other diversions were having my hair permed into what looked like a Brillo soap pad by the other waitresses, I thought the bar seemed a great plan. I must be the only person who ever lost over £5 by having to work there.
Firstly, I didn’t understand about the tips. When people said ‘have a drink yourself’ I beamed with pleasure and gratitude, and refused every drink virtuously on the grounds that I was a bit busy. I never thought of putting two shillings into a glass jar on the shelf, which was what they meant me to do. Then I didn’t know how to work the automatic stopper on the spirit bottles, and a whole bottle of Gordon’s gin flowed down the sink. Worse still, I couldn’t keep up with the washing of glasses and had to send a fevered message to the evil vegetable man, who charged me 30 shillings to help with the washing up.
There was a most attractive-looking Welshman whom I fancied greatly, and even though he wouldn’t marry waitresses, the Catering Manager had said yet again when he saw me getting out of a helicopter with him, I had great hopes. However, I lost him completely the night I worked in the bar. He wanted to arrange some very complicated deal about drinking that night with ‘the old man’. Whenever he bought a drink it was to be a small one, and if by any chance the old man bought one it was to be a large one. I totally misunderstood his intentions and thought simply that he wanted to get the ‘old man’ drunk for some fell purpose. Actually, of course, he just wanted to get drunk himself at the expense of the old man, and when I made the obvious mistake he became very sour. He came into the kitchen next day and fingered the meat cleaver thoughtfully. ‘I thought you were clever,’ he said, and I never saw him again.
There was a sex maniac in charge of the cooking; he was called Pio, and was like a stage Italian. In the middle of most confusing orders, when I would call, ‘Pio, could you give me two liver and bacon and three cottage pies,’ he would put on a vulpine smile and roar, ‘I geev to you if you geev to me,’ and everyone would laugh as I rushed out the In door and back in the Out door, in sheer fright.
But, still, I think I liked it. I liked John, the sad Irish waiter, and I liked Julie, who was described by everyone as a tramp, as they gave her cigarettes and leaned forward breathlessly to hear her latest adventures. I liked all the food, and the fact that I saved £73 in eight weeks, which I never did before or since. I learned a great deal about Life, and, more im
portant, I learned never, no matter how great the temptation, to send back a dirty fork. Not every under-chef might have such hygienic hair as the one I knew.
Back to School
21 August 1969
I have been so long on the other side of the classroom that I almost forget what going back to school was like for the pupils. To me it was always a hectic rush in from the dawn flight or the mailboat, and a total disbelief that the long hot summer had really become a matter of timetables, homework, corrections, schedules and textbooks once again. If I got through the first day without remembering that I had left my suitcase at Milan or that I had lost the address of some sinisterly handsome Yugoslav, it was a miracle. I never had the least sympathy for the unfortunates in front of me. All that came the second day of term when we had more or less settled in.
But then I didn’t have to deal with four-year-olds. All my kids were jaded, yawning sophisticates of 14 and upwards. I had to divulge only the new and terrible text of Livy we would be attacking, and try to pretend that this one was better than the others because Hannibal would be sliding up and down the Alps instead of having endless parleys with everyone at the foot of the mountains. I had to tell them that Otto and Henry the Fowler were really swinging people once you got to know them, and to utter a few hollow remarks about clean sheets and new leaves and all being forgotten since last term. I could never have coped with four-year-olds.
I would see them arriving up to the school door, little hands clutched in the nervous hands of nervous parents. I would see the faces pucker up, the hostility, the forced cheer on everyone’s part, and wonder yet again was there any possible way to make the First Day any less harrowing for everyone concerned. About 20 minutes before school began the first howl would be heard from a cloakroom. It may have been caused by some perfectly reasonable cause like not being able to change one’s shoes or mummy saying something idiotic like ‘Don’t cry now’ to a perfectly happy child, but there it would come anyway, and like brucellosis it’s catching. ‘Why is he howling?’ was the immediate thought that flashed around everyone’s mind, ‘this place must be howlworthy in some way,’ and then everyone would start.
There was one mother that I really admired. She had about five children at the school, and from the time they were three years old, those children were used to the place. They would come in and deliver elder brothers and sisters, they would come and collect them again in the afternoons. They knew when others didn’t know that school was not a place where one would be abandoned forever with a brand new school bag one day by a weeping mother. When this mother had a chance she left her three-year-old casually for an hour in the back of the tinies’ classroom anyway, and said, ‘Get on with your colouring book, I want to talk to the headmistress.’ They were all so well adjusted it was almost frightening.
Then there was the mother I couldn’t bear. She came in like Maria Callas one morning and asked to see all the lavatories. Then she asked to be introduced to all the other children by name, then she took her own frightened offspring out of a car, and with more pomp and ceremony than all the doings in Caernarfon she marched the unfortunate boy into the classroom.
‘These are your new friends, Johnny,’ she intoned as you might address the life convicts of Cell Block B. ‘You are going to have a lovely time playing with them all’; she held the traditional handkerchief to her eyes and left under severe emotional strain. The kindergarten teacher said that it took Johnny six months to get over the shock of it all.
If mothers only realised that going to school is not the severe break for the child as it is for themselves, a great deal of unnecessary trouble could be spared. It is obviously a great milestone for a mother if the only child ceases to be under her feet for the whole day, and is plunged into a new environment for the very first time. But it is only hard for the child if all this tension is built up beforehand. I don’t think it’s a good thing for everyone from Grandmother to the milkman to say how big a day it is for the little darling to be going off to school. The little darling might be tempted to believe that it is. I don’t think it’s wise to make too much fuss about a new school uniform, since the trappings and paraphernalia can become an obsession. A five-year-old is not a good recipient of a long emotional lecture from both mother and father about how much they expect from this giant step.
What is a good idea for parents is to maintain a steady and informed interest in their children’s work and play during schooldays. This will be a hundred times more valuable than regarding the first day as something like a Royal Command Performance and then forgetting the whole thing for evermore. The happiest children I taught were the ones whose parents knew and cared what the actual school day was like. Not necessarily the busybodies, in fact not at all the busybodies now that I come to think of it. The children would often complain that their parents were fascinated by all their efforts when they were at the stage of making pot hooks, but lost interest once it came to conjugating verbs.
‘Well what can we do?’ said one gloomy mother to whom I mentioned this with my sledgehammer tact. ‘Am I to spend the whole day with Teach Yourself Physics propped up on the eye-level grill, so that we can all speak the same jargon?’
Parents should try to remember their children’s friends, their teachers, their activities. They should listen when the children talk. It is all a matter of sustained interest rather than initial histrionics. I remember sitting behind a child aged about nine and her mother on a bus. The child was talking enthusiastically about Miss O’Connor.
‘That’s the maths teacher?’ yawned Mama.
‘NO, I told you it’s the history teacher,’ said the child.
‘I didn’t know you were doing history,’ said Mother. ‘Will you really need another pair of shoes this term, you’ve had three this year already.’
I thought it was very depressing, not because we teachers want to be enshrined between pictures of popes and American presidents in every child’s home, but because parents should care.
There are 20 books to be written on how parents and teachers can do so much for the children by cooperating in spirit as well as in crashingly boring PTA meetings. One of the first steps is to get to know each other. So next week, when you take your four-year-old’s little hot hand and lead him up the steps of his new school, or encourage your 14-year-old to his new senior school, try to get to know the teachers. Forget all that amateur psychology about children reacting to new surroundings and remember all that good old-fashioned idea about your friendly local teacher being a real live human being. If bank managers are busy portraying themselves as normal decent souls, we teachers will have to start the same process. Only the trouble is that we don’t have the money for all that advertising.
Thinking About Underwear Down Under
10 September 1969
At some stage in everyone’s life someone said that you must always wear nice underthings in case you were knocked down by a bus and had to be taken to a casualty ward. I was so frightened by this that I bought new sets of everything and then defeated the whole object by staying well clear of buses. Still, there is a great deal of truth in the statement that you feel much better if everything is snow white and lace-covered from the skin out. I have spoken long and loud before about how difficult this is for anyone who is not a Stock Size, because there is an international conspiracy that large ladies should wear gunmetal underwear decorated and relieved only by huge rolls of elastic and what they call slimming panels. But even so, there are people who can buy attractive underthings and don’t, on the very dubious grounds that they aren’t going to be seen.
I asked a few doctors who have seen women at their most defenceless to comment on our record as regards underwear, but they seem to be what we never really thought they were – totally unconcerned with it all. One said that the only thing he really objected to was nothing at all to do with underwear, it was drainpipe trousers. If you have something wrong with a knee or a calf you have to remove the pants entirely, causing en
ormous embarrassment to patient and further delay to doctor. Another said that people who come to be examined should realise that not only the part you consider to be affected may be looked at, but also a great deal more. He will never forget the mortification of someone who showed him a lily-white foot to be perused about a swollen ankle, but when he asked to see the other one for comparison it was almost covered in moss. He suggested a good bath as the solution, and was surprised that more people hadn’t thought of this before.
I don’t believe all this nonsense about not wearing nylon underwear because it doesn’t absorb sweat. I think it is a lot worse to have all the fabrics that do absorb sweat, and have to be treated like precious fabrics from the Orient as a result. At least nylon knows the pace of modern life, it can be washed, it doesn’t ask to be ironed, and it will be there winking at you in the morning ready to be worn again. It can be dyed a nice bright colour if the original white gets grey, and most of all it doesn’t complain. It costs a bit less than all these prestige fabrics, and they actually manage to make it in a few nice colours and designs. No one who has seen nylon should ever be pitied if they end up on an operating table feeling foolish in long, hairy combinations that belonged to their eldest brother.
But the real joy of living when we do is, of course, the invention of tights. Years ago at the pantomime I saw a Principal Boy in these and thought they would be the end to all problems, and now eventually everyone has come around to agreeing with me. They are more expensive in that if one leg or the middle goes, you are economically minus two legs, but there are all kinds of cunning things you can do about this, like hacking off the good leg and wearing it in the old traditional way with the old traditional apparatus. It means that you must remember to buy all your pantyhose in the same colour, but that shouldn’t be too much for any of us fashion-conscious people, should it?
