by Mark Dapin
I was not deeply concerned, however, because I had convinced myself that capitalism was about to collapse, and we would soon be living in a socialist utopia where people would only have to work two hours a day.
I don’t know where I got the two hours from, or how I expected to spend mine – in the fields, maybe.
The Conservative government was taking apart the welfare state, which I had been brought up to think of as the highest achievement of British civilisation. It was shredding the guarantees that workers would have free health care and education, council houses, cheap public transport and a decent dole, in exchange for paying their taxes and fighting wars for the rich. If all that the people were left with were the taxes and the wars, it could not be long before they stormed the House of Commons and hung the Conservatives from the lampposts, I reasoned. Instead, they kept voting Conservative, until good medical care became a privilege, and our common property had been sold.
Jo and I moved from Leamington Spa to Coventry, to be closer to the night-shelter for alcoholics where she worked. Coventry was a sour, resentful city. Its heart had been bombed out by the Luftwaffe, its historic buildings replaced by a dour, paved shopping precinct, ringed by sulking suburbs of tower blocks and terraces. Its industry had wasted away, as heavy manufacturing drifted across the world in search of lower wages, less taxes, and a meek and docile workforce. Coventry attracted immigrants – first West Indian, then Indian – but it never welcomed them, and sometimes it killed them. An Indian youth was stabbed to death in daylight in the precinct. An Indian doctor was murdered outside his home in middle-class Earlsdon. The city despised students and ex-students, young people with prospects and accents, and I wish I had never spent even an afternoon there, but we lived in Coventry for almost three blank years.
My experience of employment until the age of twenty-two had convinced me business was crime. As a kid, I had worked briefly in factories, once with my grandad who, in retirement, joined the ghosts of other cabinet-makers in a shuffling, early morning procession to a timberworks, where we laboured, off the books, making slats for bedheads. At fifteen, I was a canvasser for a double-glazing company. They gave me no training and no information about the products, and told me to knock on people’s doors and say whatever I wanted. It did not matter, so long as I persuaded them to make an appointment to see a salesperson. Once he had the lead, a gaudy-tongued, wide-tied highwire walker would unfold himself in the victim’s living room, and smooth away any misconceptions an overenthusiastic schoolboy might inadvertently have fostered.
I told old ladies that double glazing would protect their homes from nuclear attack, and one or two agreed to have a man come around and show them how it worked, because they were lonely. One night when I turned up for my shift, the double-glazing company’s office was empty except for a disconnected telephone on a bare wooden desk, and my supervisor had disappeared.
Guy, Jo and I did a similarly shady job while at university, for a company that sold ‘micro-electronic control systems’ for central heating. The ‘system’ was a microchip in a box that was supposed to save the average householder several hundred pounds a year on fuel bills – I can’t remember how. It cost twenty quid to make – as several electronically minded householders told me – and we sold them for twenty times that.
We pretended to be doing a survey to find out how much people were spending on heating, and the last question was something like, ‘How would you like to see somebody who can help you cut that bill in half?’ Old people, isolated people, stupid people, greedy people and kind people would say yes. If the lead was converted into a sale, we got a bonus. It was not a bad job, on a sunny evening in Stratford-upon-Avon.
When I graduated, I applied for a post as ‘trainee manager’ of a free newspaper. It turned out to be an advertising-sales position. It was a newspaper without journalists – just the ‘editor’, who was the manager; his wife, who was the secretary; and four advertising salesmen. Once again, we were given no training and told to improvise. We rang whoever we could think of, and used whatever argument we could to talk them into buying a display advertisement in a paper few of them had ever seen, because few copies were ever printed.
We were told to lie about our distribution, our circulation, our content. We would ring a hapless pet-shop owner and tell them we were doing a feature about budgerigars, and the people reading it would automatically be gripped by a barely controllable desire to run out and buy caged birds. Where would they find them? From the businesses advertising around this hypnotically persuasive feature. If we gathered enough advertisers around a particular theme, we really would have the article written by a freelance journalist, but the rest of the paper was a contemptuous compilation of unedited press releases, randomly ordered, among lopsided pages heavy with misspelled advertising – often so badly mangled that the customer refused to pay for it.
It was the worst paper I have ever seen. The boss raved about how niggers stank. He hated Pakis, commies and queers. He was the sort of bigoted, twisted, arrogant, dishonest capitalist that I had expected to find managing an office.
We had to be on the telephone all the time. If we were not, the boss – or somebody else – would quip, ‘What’re you doing? Waiting for them to call you?’, which comprises in its entirety the rich humour of telesales.
My boss’s boss was a man called Keith, who apparently ran several other despicable parodies of newspapers from an office in the north-west. Keith came down to check out the Midlands operation, and asked me – the new boy – who I had been calling. I said the last business I had phoned was a computer company, and he demanded the index card we were supposed to fill out after each call. We made scores of calls each day, and only bothered to write on the cards if there was anything encouraging in the response. When I told Keith I didn’t have the card, he lashed out, sweeping everything off my desk and onto the floor. I do not hate Keith any less now than I did then.
I was quite good at selling ads, but I loathed it. Whenever we had a small success, the typesetters would ruin it with their bizarre layouts and idiotic spellings. No thought was given to anything. I sold an ad on the ‘health & beauty page’, which ran below a recycled press release about damp-proofing, under the headline ‘Creeping Slime Kills’. The beautician complained, everyone complained, I made no more money than I could claim on the dole, and I quit.
I assumed all business took money from people with lies, and provided no useful service in return. The working world sustained swarming covens of vampires, who drank the blood of the few who did any real labour (the coalminers, or something). If you did away with the advertising guys, the canvassers and the salespeople, and also did away with estate agents, the insurance industry and the British Army, everybody could share out the work that needed to be done, and we would all get to spend two hours a day down the pit. By the time the elevator had taken me to the pit shaft, it would almost be time to come back up again.
Strangely, it was not the double glazing sales industry that was being destroyed, it was coalmining. Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government was determined to break the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), the best and strongest trade unionists in the country, and was prepared to the annihilate the mines in the process. NUM leader Arthur Scargill came upon a secret list of pits marked for closure by the government, and called a national strike. The government denied the existence of the list, but years later it turned out that it was real and had included ‘pretty much all of them’.
I did a couple of collections for the miners, but I did not do enough.
I had become a communist, albeit a useless one. I joined the semi-Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (slogan: ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow, but international socialism’) and became involved in a series of activities that were highly disruptive to my daily routine of getting up and waiting for the revolution until I fell asleep again. The most onerous of these were ‘factory sales’, for which the party member had to rise at 6 am to be at the factor
y gates for 6.30 am, to sell the Socialist Worker newspaper to bleary-eyed, bad-tempered boilermakers on their way to make boilers, or whatever boilermakers do. At least the boilermakers were used to us, and they either ignored us, muttered ‘good morning’, or – in a few instances – bought the paper. ‘Shopping centre sales’ were far worse. Grocery buyers do not tend to think of themselves as the vanguard of the revolution, and regard young people trying to sell them communist newspapers as, at best, amiable lunatics. In response to our catchy slogan ‘Socialist Worker! Jobs not bombs!’ they would call out ‘Get back to Russia!’
At Cannon Park in Coventry, a quiet, staid complex with a Sainsbury’s and a Tesco’s, where families went to buy bread and milk and meat and not the Socialist Worker, I changed my sales pitch to ‘Socialist Worker! Million-pound bingo!’ It was my first attempt to introduce mainstream media principles to niche publishing. The only good thing about supermarket sales was I didn’t have to get up for them until two o’clock in the afternoon.
Other SWP activities included flyposting – a nocturnal act involving sticking up posters with a bucket of paste and a brush, which I did not like because I got glue on my jeans and kept thinking we would be caught by the police and beaten up – and contact visiting. Contact visiting involved going to see somebody you knew, usually at their house, and gently convincing them to join the SWP. It was a bit like being an atheist Jehovah’s Witness or a pagan Mormon, with a better haircut. Luckily, I didn’t have to do any contact visiting because almost everybody I knew was either a member of the SWP or had already left the party.
The least onerous of the responsibilities of a party member was attendance at regular meetings. I used to enjoy these before I joined because (a) they were often about interesting historical events such as the Spanish Civil War or the Struggle Against Fascism in Germany; and (b) they were held in a pub. Once I joined, however, I realised turning up for a meeting resulted in being given more political work. Paper-selling rosters were drawn up, and other tasks were handed out in relation to the campaign of the moment: supporting a strike or protest, organising a demonstration or picket, marching from somewhere to somewhere else then taking a bus home.
I quickly sank out of sight of the party and back into ‘the swamp’, as the SWP labelled the headless body of non-aligned Leftists who refused to submit to its discipline.
I lost interest in everything. I did not want to be a part of capitalism, the system of raging Keiths and red-faced schoolteachers. I formed a theory that everything people did only made a bad situation worse. It was based on a kind of six-degrees-of-separation argument, that every capitalist enterprise was ultimately connected with the arms race, or the torture trade, or something equally immoral.
Even if I finally learned to play guitar and sing, and put tunes to my protest songs, and formed a band, and signed to EMI so as to reach a mass audience with my revolutionary message, and became a bigger star than Paul Weller, and played world tours and benefit gigs for the oppressed of the earth, I would still be contributing to the profits of a multinational conglomerate that would reinvest the money in its armaments division.
For this reason, I decided not to bother learning to play the guitar and sing. I thought I would do nothing instead.
I cut myself off from my father, cruelly and without reason. I vaguely associated him with Keiths and teachers, because he was about their age and he voted Tory. I blamed him for my being Jewish. Dad had only a passing interest in religion when I was a child. He could not read Hebrew, so he could not pray; he ate bacon sandwiches; and he had married my mum, who was an atheist. When he remarried and we moved away, he suddenly became twice as Jewish. He retired from the local amateur leagues and began training and managing Jewish football teams. His new wife worked for the Jewish community. His house – our old house – became linked in my mind with going to the synagogue, which I despised. He grew concerned that my brother and I would grow up as ‘Yoks’.
I did not understand why he cared. I do not think he had any belief in God. Years later, I realised he wanted us to remain Jewish because he was Jewish – and if we were Jewish, too, even though we lived far from him, we would still have shared something. We would not be lost.
I had always known I was smarter than my poor dad. Now, with the arrogance of somebody who had never raised a child, I felt morally superior to him because I was a revolutionary. As usual, there was no fierce argument, no bitter words. I asked him for some money, he turned me down, and I stopped calling him. I did not have a telephone, so he could not call me. In five years we only spoke once, and then he died.
I wrote stories for magazines. Sometimes I sold them, and if I did not sell them, I nearly did. Editors were always interested and helpful, and I assumed editors were nice, mentoring people with a lot of time on their hands, who went out of their way for everyone.
I looked for other ways of making money. I could not steal anymore. Years before, I had lost the talent and the nerve. I tried to convert my hobby into my work and become a sperm donor. The sperm bank was four miles outside of Leamington Spa. Inevitably, like the hapless hero of a dirty joke, I turned up at the wrong door. When I offered her my sperm, a helpful young sister at a private nursing home told me where to go – back up the driveway, 100 metres down the road and first on the left. I blushed like a purple throbbing head, and followed her pointing finger.
The nurses at the sperm bank were equally young and friendly. They paid me the equivalent of one-third of a week’s dole money just for the blood test, then invited me back to fill a plastic jar the size of a torch battery. A nurse showed me behind a curtain, past a chest of drawers, and into a cubicle. I knew about that chest of drawers. The boys who had gone before me said it was full of pornography.
They didn’t tell me the only thing in the cubicle was a toilet. I stood in front of the bowl, my trousers around my ankles, my eyes tightly closed, imagining I was somewhere else. It didn’t work. I was standing up, playing with myself, in a room that smelled of bleach and disinfectant. Where else could I be? Waiting to see the doctor at a sexual-health clinic? Hiding in the cleaners’ cupboard in jail? I hitched my Levi’s back up to my waist and sneaked out to the chest of drawers. The top drawer was empty. The bottom drawer was empty. There was no middle drawer. There was no pornography. There was only me and the toilet.
It did not matter which punk starlet I thought about – Debbie Harry from Blondie, Pauline Murray from Penetration, Tina Weymouth from Talking Heads, or Gaye Advert from the Adverts – every time I was about to come, I had to slip on the plastic jar, and that was the end of that. Finally, with a great effort of imagination, I managed to squeeze a tear into the receptacle, which I presented shamefacedly to the nurse. These were the days before home banking, but it was possible to contribute to the sperm bank from my flat. Sperm stays fresh for half an hour. I could do the job at home, provided Jo would race me to the clinic in her Mini.
After six donations, the nurses told me not to come back. Apparently, my sperm did not freeze well enough. Basically, I could not organise a wank in my own bedroom.
I enrolled myself in government schemes for the long-term unemployed – sham jobs on short-term contracts, working for the council. I was an unwanted outreach worker for a museum, an unskilled technician with social services, and a never-asked advisor with the environmental health department.
Most of my friends had moved away from the Midlands. For the first time, I was not part of a big gang of mates. My life was shit, but I didn’t want anything better. I was not interested in getting rich, or owning a house, or learning to drive, or going on holiday. I would have liked to write a novel, but I had nothing to write about.
I worked a couple of weeks with Guy in London, as a painter and decorator. I remained on the dole in the Midlands, but spent the weekdays down south.
Every Friday night I went on a pub crawl with Chris, who I had known vaguely at university. We had a project, which was to visit each one of Coventry’s 2
03 pubs. It took us about a year, and when we had finished, we decided to go to every pub in Warwickshire. In the mining village of Bedworth, we were walking across a road at closing time when I saw five white men standing at a bus stop. I said to Chris, ‘It’s the boys we saw earlier.’
The leader, a heavyweight with a boxing bulldog tattoo, asked, ‘What did you say?’
I said, ‘We saw you earlier,’ and they knew we were not from around there, so they battered me down, blacked my eyes, bruised my cheeks burgundy and kicked through my eardrum – because that was the worst thing: not to be born in their slagheap, their scab-filled sore, their pit village, soon to be without a pit.
A few months after I recovered, I got drunk and run over by a car. I wanted to die, and then my dad did. He went into hospital for an operation on his gall bladder, suffered a stroke under anaesthetic, and died on the operating table. The doctors brought him back, but he was a different man. His skin was orange and his hair was white and spiky, like a punk. He was only comfortable in suffocatingly hot rooms. One day, he came out of the bath and was sitting on the bed while my stepmother combed his hair, and life left him again. He died for the second time in a year, this time for good. I saw him during his final year of half-life, but not enough.
At his funeral, we sat on hard chairs my grandfather had made. My stepmother was very kind to us, and she sent out for cigarettes. I had given up smoking for a year, but I started again.
I had nothing to do with what was happening around me. As my stepmother showed me photographs of my father, she said, ‘Of course, you’re not really Jewish.’
She meant that, as my father had feared, I had lost anything I had in common culturally with the people who were my own blood.
