About the Book
About the Author
Picture Credits
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
PART ONE: SOME PEOPLE
How to Stay Married
How to Survive from Nine to Five
Men and Super Men
Women and Super Women
PART TWO: THE RICH MAN IN HIS CASTLE, THE POOR MAN AT HIS GATE
Class
INTERLUDE: THESE YOU HAVE LOVED
Intelligent and Loyal
Picture Section
PART THREE: URBAN VILLAGE
The Common Years
PART FOUR: RUSTICS AND NOUVEAU-RUSTICS
How to Survive Christmas
Turn Right at the Spotted Dog
Copyright
IT ALL BEGAN in 1968, when my husband Leo left Hamish Hamilton to start his own publishing business, and I left Collins to adopt a baby. Shortly afterwards at a dinner party I met Godfrey Smith, the enchantingly jocund and ebullient editor of the Sunday Times colour supplement. As he was planning an issue on women, I expounded at length on the traumas of being a young wife, which included making love all night, getting up at dawn to race to the office, followed by those shopping scurrying lunch hours, then rushing home weighed down by carrier bags from the office at 5.30 pm to clean and cook one’s husband’s dinner, then making love all night before crawling off to the office, until after six months one collapsed from exhaustion.
Godfrey Smith invited me to translate this invective into a piece which appeared in the Sunday Times colour magazine in February. As a miraculous result I was offered a Sunday Times column the next week, and Michael Turner, a director of Methuen, still my publishers today, asked me to write a book called How to Stay Married.
I was so ecstatic at the prospect of becoming a real author, I didn’t fully appreciate the hubristic nature of the title of the book. Today, 22 years later, I have been married for 28 years, and as marriages collapse around me, and all marriages are under siege, I feel the book should be re-titled: How to Stay Married as Long as Possible.
Also, because the book was produced amid the chaos of looking after a small baby and my husband, and trying to turn our Fulham house into a home, as well as writing a weekly Sunday Times column, my sorely neglected husband complained that it should be retitled How to Get a Divorce.
Nothing can describe the joy however of holding an early copy of one’s first book in one’s arms. On the front of the dust jacket of How to Stay Married, Leo and I stand back to back. He smoulders Byronically and has jet black hair. I have dyed blond hair and to match my roots am wearing a black dress which was so short that when I once wore it in Bond Street an ancient American clapped his hands over his eyes, saying ‘Oh my God, can they go any higher?’
My husband, however, forgave me for the neglect, and when I went North to promote the book, returning exhausted in the small hours, I found he had put all our son’s teddy bears, one on each step, up the stairs to welcome me home. These are the things that help a marriage to last.
In many ways How to Stay Married is a period piece. It was written before the advent of Women’s Liberation when wives automatically did all the cooking and housework and looked after the children, even if they had a full-time job. It is full of advice about avoiding rows by always having a clean shirt ready for your husband in the morning, and not forgetting to pass on his telephone messages, and that as long as you please a man in bed he won’t worry about the mountain of dust underneath.
The extracts we have chosen deal mainly with adjustment in the early days, and how to diffuse rows. But even 22 years later, I still think that kindness, humour and a merry heart are the secret of a good marriage.
This is blast off – the day you (or rather your mother) have been waiting for all your life. It’ll pass in a dream and afterwards you won’t remember a thing about it. It helps, however, if you both turn up. Dope yourself with tranquillizers by all means, but watch the champagne later: drugs mixed with drink often put you out like a light. And don’t forget to take the price tags off your new shoes, they’ll show when you kneel down in church.
Brides: don’t be disappointed if you don’t look your best, far more likely you’ll be scarlet in the face and piggy-eyed from lack of sleep.
Bridegrooms: remember to look round and smile as your bride comes up the aisle. She’ll be too busy coping with her bouquet and veil to notice, but it will impress those armies of guests lined up on either side of the church.
Coming down the aisle’s more tricky – you never know where to look, that radiant smile can easily set into a rictus grin, and there’s bound to be one guest you know too well, whose eye you want to avoid (like Tallulah Bankhead’s remark about one couple coming down the aisle: ‘I’ve had them both and they were lousy!’).
If you look solemn, people will think you’re having second thoughts. Best policy is to settle for a cool smirk with your eyes on the door of the church.
Be careful what hymns you choose. People like a good bellow at a wedding, so don’t choose anything obscure. Equally, be careful of hymns with double meanings like, ‘Jesu – the very thought of thee’, which will make everyone giggle and spoil the dignity and repose of the occasion.
First there’s the line up, and you’ll get so tired of shaking hands, trying to remember faces and gushing like an oil well, you’ll begin to have a real sympathy for the Royal Family.
Don’t worry when you circulate among the guests afterwards if none of them will speak to you. They’ll all feel you’re far too important to waste time talking to them, and you’ll wander round like a couple of wraiths.
If you must make speeches, keep them short. Thank everyone in sight, and tell one stunning joke to convince your in-laws you do have a sense of humour after all. Never let the best man either speak or read the telegrams.
Don’t flirt with exes. One girl I know, whose husband spent the reception playing ‘do you remember’ with an old girlfriend, refused to go on the honeymoon.
Try not to get drunk – you may feel like it – but it will cause recriminations later.
Originally, the honeymoon was intended for husbands to initiate their innocent young brides into the delights and mysteries of sex. Today, when most couples have slept together anyway and are already bankrupted by the cost of setting up house, the whole thing seems a bit of a farce and a needless expense. You probably both need a holiday, however.
When you arrive at your destination, you’re likely to feel a sense of anti-climax. You’re exhausted and suffering from post-champagne depression (a real killer). For months you’ve been coping with squabbles with the caterers, bridesmaids’ tantrums over their head-dresses, parcels arriving every day, the hall littered with packing straw, writer’s cramp from answering letters, traumas with the dressmakers – every moment’s been occupied, you’re wound up like a clock, and suddenly it’s all over and you’ve nothing to do for a fortnight except each other.
For the wife in particular, everything’s suddenly new and unfamiliar, her spongebag and flannel, new pigskin luggage, a whole trousseau of new clothes, dazzling white underwear instead of the usual dirty grey – even her name is new.
The thing to remember is that your wife/husband is probably as nervous and in need of reassurance as you are, like the wild beast surprised in the jungle who’s always supposed to be more frightened than oneself.
The first thing to do on arrival at your honeymoon hotel is to search the bedroom for signs of sabotage. Jokey wedding guests may well have instructed the hotel staff to make you an apple pie bed, or wire up the springs of the bed to the hotel fire alarm.
One couple I know reached their hotel to be confronted by the manager waving a telegram from one such joker saying: ‘My wife has just run off with my best friend, I believe they are booked into your hotel under the assumed name of Mr and Mrs So and So. Could you refuse to let them have the booked room until I arrive.’ Whether you’re heading for the Bahamas or Billericay, the best way to scotch honeymoon saboteurs is not to be coy about your destination. Simply tell everyone you’re staying at the Grand and then book rooms at the Majestic.
Then there’s the problem of getting used to living together. Here again the wife in particular will be worried about keeping up appearances. Before marriage she’s relied on mud packs and rollers and skinfood at night, but now her husband’s going to be with her every moment of the day, and the mystery’s going to be ruined. When’s she going to find time to shave her legs? And she’s always told her husband she’s a natural blonde, and suddenly he’s going to find the home-bleacher in her suitcase.
She’ll soon get used to it all, just as she’ll get used to sitting on the loo and gossiping to her husband while he’s having a bath, or to wandering around with nothing on instead of discreetly changing in the bathroom.
If she’s ashamed of her small breasts and mottled thighs, he’s probably equally self-conscious about his narrow shoulders and hairless chest.
If you’re worried you look like a road accident in the mornings, sleep with the curtains drawn, and if you’re scared your mouth will taste like a parrot’s cage when he bends over to kiss you, pretend you’re going to the loo, and nip out and clean your teeth.
DON’T PANIC if you get bored, or have a row, or feel claustrophobic or homesick. These are all part of growing-together pains. They won’t establish a behaviour pattern for the next fifty years.
A vital honeymoon ploy is to go somewhere where there is plenty to do. It’s not sacrilege to go to the cinema or watch a soccer match or even look up friends in the district. Take lots of books and sleeping pills.
DON’T PANIC if you get on each other’s nerves. My mother, who’s been happily married to my father for almost fifty years, nearly left him on honeymoon because he got a line of doggerel on his mind and repeated it over and over again as they motored through the cornfields of France.
We drove round Norfolk on our honeymoon and I nearly sent my husband insane by exclaiming: ‘How lovely’, every time we passed a village church.
I’m not going into the intricacies of sexual initiation – there are numerous books on the subject – I would just plead for both parties to be patient, tolerant, appreciative and understanding. Temporary frigidity and impotence are not infrequent occurrences on honeymoon, and not to be taken too seriously.
Take things slowly, you’ve probably got a lifetime in front of you – all that matters at this stage is to get across strong that you love each other, and you’re not sorry you are married.
DON’T WORRY if, unlike the girl in The Carpetbaggers who wanted to see nothing but ceilings on her honeymoon, you don’t feel like leaping on each other all the time. As I’ve already pointed out, you’re probably exhausted and in no condition for a sexual marathon.
Do take a red towel if you’re a virgin, or likely to have the Curse. It saves embarrassment over the sheets.
Even if you’ve been sleeping together for ages beforehand, and sex was stunning, don’t worry if it goes off for a bit, or feel convinced that it can only work in a clandestine setting. You haven’t been married before, and may just be having initial panic because the stable door is well and truly bolted.
One friend told me he was woken up in the middle of most nights of his honeymoon by his wife staggering groggily out of bed, groping for her clothes and muttering she must get home before her parents woke up.
It’s a good idea to borrow someone’s cottage in the country for a honeymoon. It’s cheaper than an hotel, and you won’t be worried by the imagined chortlings of chambermaids and hallporters, and you can cook if you get bored.
Don’t worry if he/she doesn’t gaze into your eyes all the time and quote poetry. Most people don’t know enough poetry to last more than a quarter of an hour. A certain amount of alcohol is an excellent idea – it eases tension, breaks down inhibitions. Take the case of the girl in our office who on her arrival with her new husband at the hotel was presented with a bottle of champagne.
‘It was wonderful,’ she told us. ‘We shared a glass each night and made the bottle last the whole fortnight.’
Get your thank-you letters written before the wedding. Once the pre-wedding momentum has been lost, you’ll never get down to them.
Don’t beef too much about the presents your partner’s family or friends have given you, even if they are ghastly. No one likes to be reminded that they are related to, or acquainted with, people of execrable taste. Try and keep a list of who gave you what, so you can bring those cake forks out of hiding when Aunt Agatha comes to tea, and you won’t, as we did, give a particularly hideous vase back to the woman who gave it to us, when later she got married.
You shouldn’t go into marriage expecting to change people. Once a bumbler always a bumbler, once a rake always a rake (a gay eye isn’t likely to be doused by marriage). Once a slut – although she may make heroic and semi-successful attempts to improve – always a slut. When we were first married, my husband used to dream of the day I stopped working in an office, like the Three Sisters yearning for Moscow: ‘The house will be tidy, we shall make love every morning, and at last I shall be given breakfast.’
Well, I left the office, and chaos reigned very much as usual. It’s a case of plus ça change, I’m afraid.
Your only hope is that by making people happier and more secure they may realise the potential inside them and develop into brilliant businessmen, marvellous lovers, superb cooks, or alas, even bores. And remember, the wife who nags her husband on to making a fortune won’t see nearly so much of him. He’ll be in the office from morn until night. She can’t have it both ways.
Certain things are bound to grate. He may have a passion for flying ducks and Peter Scott and she may go a bundle on coloured plastic bulrushes and a chiming doorbell.
The wife may also use certain expressions like ‘Pleased to meet you’, which irritate her husband to death; or he may say ‘What a generous portion’ every time she puts his food in front of him.
Now is the time to strike. If you say you can’t stand something in the first flush of love, your partner probably won’t mind and will do something about it. If, after ten years, you suddenly tell your husband it drives you mad every time he says ‘Sit ye down’ when guests arrive, he’ll be deeply offended, and ask you why you didn’t complain before.
Everyone has some irritating habits – the only thing to do when your partner draws your attention to them is to swallow your pride and be grateful, because they may well have been irritating everyone else as well.
I have given up smoking and eating apples in bed, or cooking in my fur coat, and I try not to drench the butter dish with marmalade. My husband no longer spends a quarter of an hour each morning clearing the frog out of his throat, and if he still picks his nose, he does it behind a newspaper.
There are bound to be areas in your marriage where you are diametrically opposed. Compromise is the only answer. I’m cold blooded, my husband is hot blooded. I sleep with six blankets, he sleeps half out of the bed.
I like arriving late for parties so I can make an entrance, he likes arriving on the dot because he hates missing valuable drinking time. I can’t count the number of quiet cigarettes we’ve had in the car, waiting for a decent time to arrive.
Don’t worry too much that habits which irritate you now will get more and more on your nerves. My tame psychiatrist again told me: ‘Those quirks in one’s marriage partner which annoy one in early days often become in later years the most lovable traits.’
My husband and I quarrel very seldom except when we’ve had too much to drink. We both loathe rows and hate being shouted at. I was very worried when I first married because I read that quarrelling was one of the most common methods of relieving tensions in marriage, and was confronted with the awful possibility that our marriage had no proper tensions.
It is very hard to generalise about rows. Some of the happiest married people I know have the most blazing rows, and then make it up very quickly – like MPs who argue heatedly in the House all night, and then meet on terms of utter amicability in the bar five minutes later.
However much a row clears the air, one is bound during its course to say something vicious and hurtful, which may well be absorbed and brooded upon later. Try therefore to cut rowing down to the minimum. It will upset children when they come along, and if you row in public, it’s boring and embarrassing for other people, and you won’t get asked out any more.
We found the occasions when rows were most likely to break out were:
Friday night – both partners are tired at the end of the week.
Going away for weekends – one person is always ready and anxious to avoid the rush-hour, the other is frantically packing all the wrong things, so the first five miles of the journey will be punctuated with cries of ‘Oh God’ and U-turns against the ever-increasing traffic to collect something forgotten.
Weddings – the vicar’s pep-talk in church on Christian behaviour in marriage always sets us off on the wrong foot. Then afterwards we’ll be suffering from post-champagne gloom and wondering if we’re as happy as the couple who’ve just got married.
Television – husband always wants to watch boxing, and the wife the play.
Desks – the tidy one will be irritated because the untidy one is always rifling the desk, and pinching all the stamps and envelopes.
Clothes – men not having a clean shirt or clean underpants to wear in the morning.
Space in the bedroom – the wife will appropriate five and three quarters out of six of the drawers and three out of four of the coat hangers, and leave her clothes all over the only chair.
The wife should avoid using her husband’s razor on her legs and not washing it out, or cleaning the bath with his flannel, or using a chisel as a screwdriver, or pinching the husband’s sweaters. There are also the eighteen odd socks in her husband’s top drawer, the rings of lipstick on his best handkerchief, running out of toothpaste, loo paper, soap. Forgetting to turn out lights, fires, the oven. Forgetting to give her husband his letters or telephone messages.
Never be too proud to apologise, but do it properly; none of that ‘I’ve said I’m sorry, haven’t I?’, followed by a stream of abuse.
Don’t worry about letting the sun go down on your wrath – it’s no good worrying a row to its logical conclusion when you’re both tired and then lying awake the rest of the night. Take a sleeping pill, get a good night’s sleep and you’ll probably have forgotten you ever had a row by morning.
Try not to harbour grudges, never send someone to Coventry.
A sense of humour is all-important for ending rows. My husband once in mid-row put both feet into one leg of his underpants and fell over. I went into peals of laughter and the row was at an end.
Once when I was threatening to leave him he looked reproachfully at the cat, and said: ‘But we can’t let poor Tibbles be the victim of a broken home.’
Suffered particularly by wives in the first six months after marriage, they usually stem from exhaustion, feeling totally unable to cope, and reaction after the wedding. They are extremely tedious for the husband, but nothing really to worry about unless they linger on longer than a week. Nothing will be achieved by telling her sharply to snap out of it – patience, a lot of loving and encouragement are the only answer.
Should be re-named the blessing. Every row two weeks before it arrives, and a week after it’s finished, can be blamed on it.
Husbands are notorious for forgetting birthdays and anniversaries. Don’t expect a heart-shaped box of chocolates on Valentine’s Day, but avoid a row over anniversaries by saying loudly about three days before: ‘What shall we do on my birthday/our anniversary on Friday, darling?’
I am fully aware of the inadequacies of this book. Some aspects of marriage are covered very scantily and some not at all, and because I was writing about staying married, I have dwelt more on the pitfalls than on the very considerable joys of marriage.
‘For everyone, and particularly for women and children,’ Cecil King wrote recently, ‘the essential basis for security and happiness is a loving home.’
Marriage is not a battlefield, it is a partnership, and married people should be partners not rivals. And although it is important to be a reliable wage earner, a splendid cook, a good manager, and magnificent in bed, the most priceless gift one married person can give to another is a merry and a loving heart.
HOW TO SURVIVE from Nine to Five, from which the following extracts are taken, was written in 1970, only 18 months after I stopped working in an office – so the horrors were still fresh in my mind. Having left a job as a cub reporter which I adored when I was 21, I was then sacked from 22 jobs. They included being a puppy fat model, an account executive for the pig industry and the Tory party at the same time, a P.R.O., copy writer, publisher’s reader, information officer, demonstrator of candelabra, and very temporary typist. I therefore felt I had a wide non-working knowledge of most levels of the office caste system.
This book is based on the shared experience of myself and my husband who has also worked in several publishing firms. Beneath its iconoclastic exterior it has serious undertones. I have always felt that if you seek latterday Hitlers or Caligulas you need go no further than the office round the corner where you will find petty tyrants bullying their unfortunate staff into states of inefficiency, screwing up their self respect so badly they feel incapable of getting another job.
I was the one that got away, but I still, 20 years later, think of all those millions of people battling their way into ghastly jobs every morning.
The first day at any office is absolute hell. When I’m king I shall make it law that everyone starts a new job on Friday instead of Monday. Monday morning, in particular, couldn’t be a worse time. All the incumbents are feeling anti-establishment, ill tempered and are desperately trying to catch up on all those very urgent things that didn’t seem to matter a damn on Friday.
Monday morning is also No Man’s Land, a limbo between home and the office. The staff have been isolated from each other for two days over the weekend, and have lost any corporate enthusiasm, which will only emerge about Thursday. By Friday it will be joined by excitement about the coming weekend and they will feel in a good enough mood to give newcomers the welcome they deserve.
As it is, you arrive about 8.30, sick with nerves, to find the building locked or deserted except for the odd cleaner morosely pushing a squeegee over the floor. You then kick your heels in Reception until a few ‘sekketries’ (as they describe themselves) arrive from the country lugging pigskin suitcases and the pick of Daddy’s herbaceous border (which will either be arranged in jam jars, or block the basins of the Ladies for the rest of the week).
About eleven o’clock, Miss Hitler from Personnel will bustle up and cause a rumpus because you’ve forgotten your P.45 and your insurance cards. She will then direct you to your office. If you are an executive you will either find an in tray groaning with bucks other people have passed, or even worse, a completely bare desk with empty drawers and an empty filing cabinet, and you’ll sit gazing at a huge sheet of virgin blotting paper, wondering what to write with all those sharpened pencils.
It’s also possible that there’s no job and you’ve just been brought in to swell the shadow Managing Director’s faction in office politics. The sekketry promised you has decided to work for someone else (a blessing because you’ve no work for her anyway) and the rest of the department are wearing black ties and flying the Office Crone at half mast in mourning for your predecessor, whom they consider was unfairly ousted.
Occasionally people will shuffle into your office and say: ‘Oh, you’re the new chap,’ and shuffle out again. Endeavour to appear busy. One man I know brought in at a very senior level wrote a novel during his first three months. Thinking he was writing reports, everyone was deeply impressed. Ask for progress reports for the last year (this will throw them, because they probably don’t have any), or files, or the minutes of recent meetings. Then you can fill in your time, shuffling papers back and forth, frowning and nodding gravely. Soft pedal the hatchet approach: ‘I’m a new chap, just getting my sea legs, perhaps you can help me,’ will work wonders.
If you join as a sekketry you will probably be fobbed off with a desk with uneven legs, and an old battleship of a typewriter which everyone else has rejected and which tabulates automatically every time you press the A key.
Suddenly a choleric, fire-breathing old man will rush out of a nearby office, shout at you and rush back again. Alas, that is the cosy pink-faced, sherry-bestowing old gentleman who seemed such a darling when he interviewed you last month. Bosses are invariably April when they woo, December when they wed. He wants you to take dictation.
Nearby sekketries will not speak to you except to tell you what a snake he is, and that everyone’s leaving the firm because he’s so vile to work for. You daren’t interrupt their Monday morning panic with questions, so you will automatically have to re-type all your letters tomorrow because you didn’t know about the lilac flimsy for the Art Department, or not putting a full stop after the date.
Remember to bring in two large shopping baskets to smuggle out all the botched-up letters you have to throw away. Miss Hitler from Personnel will not be amused by those brimming waste-paper baskets of scrumpled paper.
You will sit crossing your legs wondering how much longer you can hold out because no one has told you the firm shares a loo with Golberg’s Imported Goatskins on the next floor.
At twelve-fifteen someone looks at her watch and says with obvious relief, ‘I should go to lunch now,’ then they can all discuss you.
Not knowing where to go, you will be deceived by the peeling paint and gloomy exterior of a little place on the corner which will turn out to be French and cost you at least a fiver.
Then there’s the ghastly prospect when you get back to the office dead on 1.15 of how you’re going to survive until 5. Although the work is piling up, you’re terrified to type because you do it so slowly compared with the rest of the sekketries, whose hands are moving over the keys with the speed and dexterity of concert pianists. By tea time you’re so grateful to some whiskery old boot for offering you a Lincoln cream that you strike up a friendship you’ll never be able to shake off.
There are, however, advantages in being a newcomer. Everyone expects you to be inoperative for the first six months anyway, and you can blame every mistake you make on your predecessor.
On my father’s first day at Fords, he was sent down to the foundry to report to the chief metallurgist. When he arrived one man seemed to be giving all the orders, so he turned to a nearby workman and asked if this man was the metallurgist.
‘No Buddy,’ came the reply, ‘I think he’s a Russian.’
If you are to survive from nine to five, you must understand that nothing is more rigid than the office caste system, which is based on the premise that subordinates, unless kept ruthlessly in their place, will cheek you when you try to pull rank on them.
It is therefore unwise to risk being seen more than once in the company of a high-ranking member of the firm; people will suspect sexual commitment or political intrigue.
Nor is it done for women executives to go to lunch with the sekketries unless it’s a birthday treat. Also, remember that if one of your old mates is promoted over you, your relationship will never be the same again. In no time he’ll be goose-stepping all over you – power élite swagger and all.
Members of the staff, however, are always trying to wriggle their way up the hierarchy, typists calling themselves sekketries, sekketries calling themselves personal assistants, senior sekketries signing themselves Sekketry to the Deputy Managing Director whenever the Managing Director goes on holiday.
There will also be ridiculous wrangling over whether you are high enough up the ladder to rate a teaspoon or a bone china tea set with roses on it. In some firms they even have a special directors’ lavatory, the only difference being that they have two kinds of loo paper – hard and very hard. If a woman were promoted to the board, it would be interesting to see if she would be expected to use it.
Your actual hierarchy will most probably consist of:
The Office Junior who knows nothing and does everything.
The Sekketry who knows everything and does nothing.
The Office Deb who knows everybody, my dear, and does nothing.
The pink and white Etonian trainee who knows the Office Deb.
The Personal Assistant who knows nothing and does nothing.
The Executive who interferes and prevents everyone from doing anything.
The Deputy Head of Department who panics.
The Head of the Department who signs letters, writes his report and doesn’t give a damn because he’s retiring at the end of the year.
The Managing Director, who can’t read anyway.
Let us now look more closely at a few members of the hierarchy.
Work hard and you will be rewarded by the promotion of your superiors.
Some bosses are good, some are not. Try very hard to give yours some responsibility. Bosses with nothing to do will always poke their noses into your affairs.
Here are some typical bosses:
He can’t leave his staff alone and bullies them into a state of jibbering inefficiency because it makes him feel superior. Stress is transmitted down the hierarchy until even the messenger boys are on tranquillizers. Like the circumlocution office, the bully is always beforehand in the art of seeing how not to do things. Stand up to him, or leave immediately before mental paralysis sets in.
He certainly won’t want to make you, you’re not important enough. He’ll be far too busy sucking up to senior sekketries and the Managing Director’s wife. He will take credit if anything goes right, but you will carry the can if anything goes wrong.
A favourite expression will be: ‘I’m going to give you a free hand with this one’ (but he’ll keep a free foot to boot you out if you make a hash of it). Or ‘You’re going to have rather fun with this’, before he hands you 20 pages of figures to type.
You’ll spend your time sewing on buttons, collecting brief cases from the lost property office and rushing in with the fire extinguisher when he sets his wastepaper basket on fire. When he dictates he will probably eat his biscuits, then your biscuit, then drink his tea, then your tea. He will carry his washing round in his brief case, and suddenly pull out his underpants by mistake and say: ‘Would you possibly mind typing this for me?’
Work for him and you’ve got a cushy number. He will wear tweeds on Thursday for going to the country and he will not return until Tuesday morning. He will also be inoperative during the summer months, going to Ascot and Henley etc. Your time will be spent answering invitations, ordering caviar from Fortnums, and finding out how to address Duchesses and Earls on envelopes.
Moving down the hierarchy we come to:
Avoid thought, it inevitably clouds the issue.
The executive has nothing to do except decide what is to be done, tell someone to do it, listen to reasons why they shouldn’t do it, or why it should be done differently, and think up a crushing and conclusive reply. A week later he will follow up to see the thing has been done, discover it has not been done, ask why it hasn’t been done, and listen to excuses from the person who didn’t do it.
He will then wait another week before making further investigations, and avoid the temptation to wonder why he didn’t do it himself in the first place. It would have taken him five minutes, instead it has taken a fortnight to find out that someone has taken at least a week to do it wrong. He then sits back and decides it’s good for subordinates to learn by their own mistakes.
Nothing ventured, nothing lost.
A step further down the hierarchy you will find the men the bosses hang their coats on – poor old dodderers in their late fifties, their false teeth rattling with nerves. Loss of pension hangs over their heads like a sword of Damocles. Knowing that they won’t get another job if they’re fired, they refuse to stick their necks out.
Weighed down by megaworries, the Dodderer will be convinced that people who couldn’t even plot their way to the loo are conspiring against him. Shut doors will drive him into a frenzy, and every time he hears a typist whispering, even if it’s only asking her next door neighbour if she can borrow a tampax, he’s convinced she’s whispering about him.
At lunchtime, he takes a packet of home-made fishpaste sandwiches out of a shabby brief case. Occasionally at weekends, he gets drunk on Guinness. He often develops crushes on ugly typists.
Beneath this trembling exterior, however, lies a knight of the festering grievance, who can generate quite a force of discontent around the office.
Avoid antagonising him. He sneaks like wildfire.
Piggies exist in most firms. They are sly, insensitive, unimaginative and always eating, particularly toffees, which they suck noisily and never offer to anyone else. Piggies never rise to the top of the tree, but they never get ulcers. They irritate subordinates and superiors equally, but are never fired because they are moderately efficient. Never work for a Piggy. Once you are directly below one in the hierarchy you will never rise to the top of the tree either.
Usually manned by a mini-bitch, who goes round measuring skirt lengths and calling sekketries by their surnames. Often she’ll crouch for hours in the loo waiting to catch staff in indiscreet gossip.
Personnel are supposed to help you to hire people, but most of their day is spent forcing the squarest pegs into round holes. Whenever a new sekketry is required, they produce two identically grey, ugly, characterless girls to choose from.
Personnel departments are always having pointless economy drives. Even executives have to waste a ridiculous amount of time cajoling another biro out of them. In one office I remember the Personnel director hanging two rolls of lavatory paper, Bronco and Andrex, out of a top storey window to see which was the longer.
In another, the four members of the Personnel department decided to go to Ireland together for the weekend on a special outing but insisted on flying on separate planes like the Royal Family, as the loss to the firm would have been so immeasurable if they had all been killed off in one go.
She usually runs the typing pool. As soon as she arrives she puts on her mauve office cardigan to stop her ‘good’ clothes getting dirty. All her energies are channelled into bullying the typing pool like galley-slaves, and satisfying her insatiable appetite for new office equipment: dictaphones, electric typewriters, roller towels and Imperial Leather in the Ladies.
Much of her day will be spent foraging inside her transparent cream-coloured blouse to haul up a bra strap, eating biscuits, and surreptitiously plucking out her beard with a bulldog clip. She will be driven to a frenzy by two things: lateness even if it’s only thirty seconds, and mislaying her fingerette, which is a rubber thimble covered in spikes and looks like some weird Indian erotic device, but is actually used for turning pages quickly.
Sucking up is the only way to woo her. Hold her wool for her, ask her advice on beauty problems, give her the odd bar of Turkish Delight as a present.
One of her arch enemies will be:
Miss Nitwit-Thompson, a decorative quarter-wit who comes wrapped in cashmere and scotch mist on the end of a long yellow Labrador. She is working for a pittance ‘because the job sounded so interesting’, and is always having time off to go to mid-week weddings. She takes long weekends, and invariably rings Mummy on Friday and asks her to ‘stop the train’.
Originally employed for her style and ‘lovely speaking voice’ which would impress clients and Americans on the telephone, she is usually hogging the telephone making personal calls to Jeremy, Caroline or Fiona to discuss last night’s ball.
Another of the Office Crone’s sworn enemies is:
The office sex kitten, who has a lived-in look about her and is far more preoccupied with outgoing males than outgoing mail. The only filing she does is to file her nails, and the only use she makes of the office pencil sharpener is to sharpen her eye-pencil and her claws. She is not to be dismissed, however, for she usually knows a lot of high-level secrets, leaked by chief executives in moments of passion. She is also quite capable of hooking the Managing Director, and suddenly becoming the Boss’s wife.
Who puts sticky buds in jam jars on her boss’s desk, and is always whisking round with a feather duster and percolating coffee. She will spend more time indulging her ‘office beautiful’ pretensions than actually typing. When asked what she does at parties she will call herself a Personal Assistant.
The senior sekketry who will guard her boss with such ferocity that she’s quite likely to keep important clients and the Managing Director away from him until everyone forgets his existence. She will, however, be an excellent chucker-out if undesirables manage to insinuate themselves into his office.
Finally, we come to:
Generally called Maureen or Eileen. Their function in life seems to be to slop tea and type back letters that don’t always make sense. If any of their carbons reach the files they will be spotted with rubbing-out smudges like a Dalmatian. Brainwashed by the system, they generally go to the loo in triplicate.
The Average Typists’ Day, however, will go something like this:
9.10 Arrives generating bustle, hidden behind huge tinted spectacles, and muttering about de-railed carriages on the line. Disappears to the loo to tart up.
9.30 Removes typewriter cover, discusses what ‘he’ did and said last night, what television they saw, speculates on boss’s mood, reads own and other typists’ horoscopes in the morning papers.
10.00 Coffee break. Eats cheese roll.
10.15 Takes spare pair of shoes out of plastic bag in bottom drawer of desk. Changes into them.
10.30 Takes dictation.
10.45 Returns from dictation. Grumbles for thirty minutes about the horrible mood the boss is in.
11.15 Called to the window by fellow typist to ogle comely man who is walking down the street. Snags tights on central heating, fills in hole with brown pencil.
11.40 Goes to the loo to tart up.
12.00 Gone to dinner.
1.15 Returns with carrier bags, discusses dinner, eats yoghurt and Mars Bar.
2.30 Boss comes back from lunch in better mood.
2.31 Goes to the loo to re-do face.
2.45 Tries to read shorthand back, holds book upside down.
3.00 Starts grumbling about non-arrival of tea.
3.15 Tea arrives, eats home-made cake out of paper bag, reads own and other typists’ horoscopes in evening paper.
3.20 Types lethargically.
3.30 Slips out, ostensibly to the chemist’s, so no one can ask why she’s going.
4.00 Returns ostentatiously waving a Boots paper bag, which is actually full of make-up and tights.
4.10 Starts muttering about catching post, tidies ferociously for five minutes. Assembles one letter in large leather folder and gets it signed by boss.
4.30 Grabs floral plastic bag and joins queue for the loo for a good wash to get ‘all the ink off my hands’.
4.45 Tears out of the office, muttering ‘must try and catch the early train tonight’.
4.50 Building deserted.
Office boys – the avant garde of the company – live in the postroom. In my day, they all used to smoke pot, strum guitars, and grow their hair halfway down their backs. Now they’re all punk rockers. Invariably they get into trouble because the photographic machine decides to break down when they are photostating some writhing nude, or the roneo machine gives up the ghost when they are running off 500 copies of an obscene poem.
As an office boy you’ll be paid a rotten salary, but you can make a bit on the side, taking buses whenever you have to deliver anything and charging up for a taxi.
The office boy’s prime function is to give his superiors racing tips, keep them posted on what’s top of the hit parade, and rise eventually to Managing Director, so people can say: ‘I remember him when he was only an office boy.’
When you get to the top, remember to sack all the people who knew you as an office boy. They won’t take you seriously, and will instil lack of respect into their colleagues.
One office boy I know left a firm, made his packet and came back ten years later as a client. Not realising he had left, the Managing Director met him in the passage, handed him a parcel and asked him to take it to the post office.
‘Our recording machine is broken – this is a person speaking.’ Always chat up the switchboard girls, they wield enormous power. If you get across them they can ‘forget’ to take messages, keep you hanging about for hours waiting for a line, cut you off, and, worst of all, tip off Miss Hitler from Personnel that you’ve been making too many private calls – one of the most heinous of office crimes. They are also the hub of the gripevine and extremely valuable as a source of gossip. I also think that every member of the staff – particularly the men – should spend a day on the switchboard to see what pressures the telephonists are subjected to. I arrived at a temporary job once, and was asked if I could man the switchboard. No switchboard was ever more rapidly unmanned: all those horrible flaps signifying incoming calls came down at the same time, and the discs indicating that someone wanted a line started flickering as well. Flap, flap, flicker, flicker, they went all morning, until I was reduced to a state of nervous collapse. ‘Just putting you through,’ I would say hopefully, cutting off the sales manager’s deal-clinching call to Australia for the seventh time.
On the receiving end there are those terrible occasions when the switchboard closes down and your lover, who’s been soaking in some drinking club all afternoon, suddenly decides to ring you up and gets straight through to the Managing Director, who has to walk down three flights of stairs to find you.
Or those awful personal calls that come through when a meeting is being held in your office, and you hold the telephone very close to your ear so no one else in the room can hear the flood of invective.
Every so often there is a purge on private calls which no one takes any notice of. In one office a circle of paper was stuck on every telephone saying: ‘Please be brief. No private calls allowed.’ Some iconoclast promptly whipped it off and stuck it on the door of the Gents.
A lot of your working day will be spent out of the office:
Never drink black coffee at lunch; it will keep you awake in the afternoon.
Euphemistically called the lunch hour, this interval in the day’s inactivities runs from twelve to three-thirty. This is the Piggies’ High Noon when, snorting with delight, they pour out of their offices like their Gadarene forbears into the café opposite where they eat three courses of soup, shepherd’s pie and chips, and treacle pudding followed by white coffee, after which they waddle back to their office to eat biscuits all afternoon.
The sekketries will reach peak activity during the lunch hour, when they hare round doing their shopping, getting clothes out of the dry cleaners and having their hair done. They also squeeze in three-quarters of an hour to have lunch, sitting in each other’s laps in steamy coffee bars, fat girls eating salads, thin girls eating spaghetti, their dissection of last night’s escapade only interrupted by the hiss of the espresso machine.
Invariably just as they’re getting down to a good bitch about the office, they feel a heavy hand on their shoulder; it will be Miss Hitler from Personnel asking if she can join them.
Office Crones seldom go to lunch, but spend their hour brewing tomato soup in the basement (or, because they’re on a diet, sourly nibbling at cottage cheese and a piece of celery), adding another two rows to their green open-work jersey, and waiting to tear latecomers limb from limb.
Then, of course, there’s the office canteen, with its menu improperly typed by one of the sekketries.
Clean Soup
Boiled button
Stewed rears and naked egg custard.
Unless you want fat meat or the boniest piece of the fish, it’s essential to waste a great deal of time chatting up the woman who runs the canteen. (She’s the only woman in whom the Piggies display any interest).
Meanwhile the directors are roughing it at the Ritz.
If you are to get on as an executive, you must realise that in order to do business with anyone, you must down two large pink gins, a three-course lunch with a good bottle of claret, and two double brandies, not forgetting cigars, at every stage of the deal.
How well I remember those nightmarish business lunches when I was a very junior Public Relations executive, entertaining lady journalists and wondering desperately when would be the right moment to tell them about the product I was supposed to be trying to flog.
Usually I funked it until the coffee stage, then said timidly, ‘Well-er about these fascinating rubber gloves.’ And the lady journalist would glance at her watch, mutter about a deadline, leap to her feet, thanking me profusely for a divine lunch, and disappear double quick out of the restaurant . . .
It always seems a slight anomaly that managements expect their executives to spend at least a tenner a day on lunch, then only issue the rest of the staff with 15p luncheon vouchers. I suppose this ensures wakefulness in the afternoon. No one could sleep on a 15p lunch.
A friendly grocer will usually exchange your vouchers for groceries. I used to buy cigarettes with mine.
The lunch hour is invariably followed by the lunge hour. This is the period of rocketing libidos and octopus hands, when bosses and executives return from lunch swollen with insolence and wine, and make passes at their sekketries and any pretty girls who seem to be around.
Dear Sir Stroke Madam
Offices vary: some are like monasteries, and the only thing you’re likely to get raped by is the spacebar on the long-carriage typewriter. Others out-thrum Peyton Place. As an ex-colleague said: ‘You have to knock on people’s office doors before you go in, not out of courtesy, just to give them time to get their trousers up.’