At My Mother's Knee (36 page)

London was a marvellous place, I thought, as I watched her
vanish. It really was a Wonderland where anything could and
obviously did, happen. I desperately wanted to be part of it.

I
DIDN'T FEEL AS ENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT VIRGINIA WATER OR THE
Wheatsheaf Hotel
. When the coach dropped me off on the
other side of the busy road, the hotel hardly lived up to
the glowing reference that T. Brailey had given it; it was an
unimpressive and slightly neglected-looking coachhouse-style
pub/restaurant. It also looked disturbingly deserted. The place
was in darkness.

Two Scousers, a boy and a girl not much older than me, were
hanging around outside. They'd been ringing the bell for half
an hour with no success and were starting to panic.

'D'you work here?' the girl asked. 'Cos if you do, get this
door open. I'm freezin' me tits off standing here.'

'I think the dump's closed down,' the lad said, blowing on
his hands as I tried the bell. 'That mad cow from that Lifeline
must be taking the piss.' Two more suckers of T. Brailey's, I
thought to myself, giving the door a few good bangs. A light
suddenly came on and the door was flung open.

'Where's the fuckin' fire?' said a large podgy man with no
shirt, standing hands on hips in the doorway, glaring at us in
the overhead light. He looked us up and down, and sneered.
'We don't serve gyppos.'

'We're from Lifeline,' I answered in my best St Anselm's
voice, speaking for all of us. 'We're the new staff.'

'Oh, are you now? Well isn't that just tickety-boo,' the
podgy one said, scratching the nipple of one of his pendulous
man boobs. 'God help me,' he sighed theatrically, 'the deadbeats
of the north that woman sends me. Well, you'd better
come in.' He took us through the entrance hall with its faux
wooden beams and hunting prints to a dark flight of stairs
marked
Private
. 'I was having my hair blow-dried,' he complained
as we followed him up the stairs and into the
staff
room. 'The hotel doesn't open until five, you should have
known that. This really is most, most inconvenient, you know.'
He had a big fleshy backside and hips that swayed from side to
side, and I hated him on sight. Let's call him
Paul Finch
. He
told us, with a smug expression on his pink shiny face, that
he was the deputy manager and under no circumstances were
we to refer to him by his Christian name in the public areas. In
those sacred places we were to call him Mr Finch and nothing
else. 'In fact,' he added grandly, 'until we get to know each
other better you are to address me as Mr Finch at all times.' He
had the girlish complexion of a eunuch and a pursed snapdragon
for a mouth. He obviously fancied himself, sat there on
a kitchen chair, his belly spilling over the top of his shiny black
trousers, having his blond-streaked hair blow-dried by a
creature in a padded blue dressing gown who turned out to be
called
Carol
.

She was from Liverpool and had spent most of her working
life as a live-in barmaid. She'd worked everywhere, chasing the
seasons from Butlins holiday camps to the Isle of Man and
Blackpool, but for the time being she'd given up her peripatetic
lifestyle to spend the winter months at the
Wheatsheaf
. She
was an odd-looking woman, prone to wearing short, girly
pinafore dresses that were far too young for her. She was what
my ma would call 'big-boned' – broad-shouldered with chunky
thighs and thick ankles. She had a mournful face and large
watery cow eyes set a little too far apart in her head. What with all this and a heavily pronounced overbite, even the most
charitable person couldn't have called her pretty. She wore her
mousy hair in a tight little beehive with a slide either side of
her fringe, making her moon face look even fuller. She spent a
lot of time on this hairdo, but only on the bits she could see in
the tiny little dressing-table mirror in her cupboard of a room.
She was forever asking 'Is me hair all right at the back?' to
which I always replied yes even though it looked like a collapsed
bird's nest.

Paul summoned a minion to show me to my room. I was to
be sharing with a guy named Chris, which I wasn't very happy
about as the manager had promised me my own room. Paul
roared laughing when I told him this, and then turned on me.
'Who the bloody hell do you think you are?' he said scornfully.
'You're lucky to have a roof over your head at all. You're all
the same, you bloody whingeing Scousers. Piss off.' He paused
in his tirade to light up a Consulate. 'Don't worry, though,' he
went on, throwing his match at the overflowing ashtray and
missing, 'you won't be spending a lot of time in your suite.
You'll be working hard, I'll see to that. Now pick up that
match.'

I lay on one of the single beds in my dismal little room. It
had a sloping attic ceiling that I knew would give me concussion
every time I sat upright in bed. The carpet was
threadbare, its original pattern now undistinguishable under
greasy patches and dubious stains. Apart from a few photos of
page free stunners torn out of the
Sun
and stuck unevenly
with Sellotape on the wall over what I took to be my
cellmate's bed, the room was bare and painted a depressing
shade of light blue. In one corner stood an old-fashioned
wardrobe whose door, if not fastened properly, had an unnerving
tendency to swing open in the middle of the night. It
reminded me of the landing cupboard in Lowther Street. In
the other corner was a sink which had come away from the wall and hung drunkenly to one side. Underneath it, the
patch of carpet was damp and heavily stained and there was a
slight whiff of pee. Obviously the former occupants of this
hovel weren't averse to taking a leak in the sink. I was
exhausted. The last time I'd slept properly was Thursday
night, and it was now Saturday afternoon. I'd just close my
eyes and have forty winks . . .

'Come on, wake up.' A hearty rugger type was shaking me
forcibly. 'We've got to go down for dinner. Hurry up – you
don't want to be late.' The rugger bugger introduced himself as
Chris. There was no shade on the light and even though the
bulb couldn't have been more than ten watts it hurt my eyes,
which were burning and heavy for want of sleep.

Like me,
Chris was a trainee manager
, and he'd been at the
Wheatsheaf
for over a month. He was a real jobsworth and a
crashing bore, and he looked upon the management as gods.
He kept up a running commentary in his West Country accent
as he changed his shirt. 'After you've eaten, Paul – that's Mr
Finch to staff when we're downstairs in the bars – wants you
to collect litter from the garden.'

'But it's dark.'

'There's a torch by the bins. Then he wants me to show you
round before leaving you with Carol in the upstairs bar. She'll
show you what to do. Then just before we close he wants you
to help out in the kitchen.'

'Doing what? Cooking?'

'Washing glasses and helping with the dishes. The restaurants
are always fully booked on a Saturday and the bars are
packed. The Wheatsheaf is a very popular hotel, you know, so
there's lots to do. Come on, then, shake a leg – and don't forget
you have to wear a shirt and tie and black trousers. They'll
give you a waistcoat to wear downstairs.'

The red nylon jacket at the RAFA club had been bad
enough. I couldn't wait to see
Chef and Brewer
's badge of servitude. I rolled grumpily off the bed and unpacked my
now heavily creased managerial suit and a few shirts from
my holdall.

'You'd better iron that,' Chris said, looking disapprovingly
at my dishcloth of a shirt. 'Chef and Brewer send inspectors
round from time to time and you never know when one might
turn up. They just appear unexpected like, and a creased shirt
could mean instant dismissal. The iron's in the staff room. You
know where that is, don't you?'

He droned on and on like an old woman. I wanted to beat
him to death with the wobbly leg of the solitary chair that
stood under the curtainless window and then hot-tail it back to
Holly Grove.

'I want a bath,' I moaned. 'I've been travelling all night and
day.'

'No time for that,' he trilled. 'Just time for a quick wash and
brush up.' He sounded like an old-fashioned barber. I mooched
off sulkily in search of the iron.

The kitchen staff and waiters were mostly Spanish. They
responded to Chris's introduction with a bored nod. Many
faces came and went at the Wheatsheaf and as far as they
were concerned I was just another bit of flotsam passing
through. I sat in silence as I chased my meal of lamb
chop and boiled potato around the pool of grease it floated in
on my plate. I was usually fussy about food but tonight I
didn't care. I was so hungry I'd have eaten anything.
Looking around I could see that my spud wasn't the only thing
swimming in grease. The kitchen floor and worktops positively
ran with it. I smiled at the waiters but they totally ignored
me and carried on jabbering among themselves in Spanish.
Fuck you, I thought, wolfing down half a spud. Over by the
stove a strange creature, like a ghost, with a shock of white
hair that matched his apron, stood stirring a huge pan and
staring at me.

'Where you from?' he asked in a broad Irish accent, pausing
to scratch the papery skin of his cheek.

Here was someone trying to be friendly, I thought.
'Merseyside,' I answered brightly, giving him my best forced
smile.

He scowled at me and snarled, 'Fucking Scousers. The place
is crawling with them.' The smile died on my lips and I carried
on chasing the congealed lamb chop around the slippery plate
in silence. I knew now how my dad must have felt when he
arrived in Liverpool from Dublin and received a similar
welcome.

The Wheatsheaf had two restaurants and an assortment of
themed bars. Downstairs in the Cellar Bar the décor was Chef
and Brewer's idea of hip: blue neon lighting that made the
customers' teeth glow, psychedelic posters on the walls, and
loud music. It was where the beautiful young people of
Virginia Water gathered. I hated them because I was jealous
of them. With their beautiful clothes, shiny hair and suntans
they all seemed enormously sophisticated and made me feel
ugly, awkward and very, very provincial in comparison. The
other bars had sporting motifs. The Jockey Bar had a racing
theme, another had a stuffed fox in a glass case, and apart
from the trendy Cellar Bar they all had the ubiquitous
huntin', shootin' and fishin' prints on the walls. Carol's bar
was off the upstairs restaurant. She was extremely territorial
and resented the intrusion of a newcomer.

'You can collect all the glasses, empty the ashtrays, wipe the
tables down and then stack those mixers on the fridge shelf,'
she said with a face of doom, 'and then if it gets really busy
you'd better help serve, but under no circumstances are you to
make the Irish coffees and you better hadn't mess my till up or
waste any stock. Just keep out of my bloody way an' we'll be
fine. I know how this bar
works
, see.' She was an efficient but
surly barmaid, her face like a mournful Jersey cow's as she shuffled behind the bar in her Dr Scholls dispensing gin and
tonics with a chilly smile. I tried to strike up a conversation
with her.

'What part of Liverpool are you from, Carol?'

'Why d'you want to know?' she snapped. 'I left there a long
time ago and have no intention of ever going back. As far as
I'm concerned I'm a southerner now, so don't mention it again,
understand? Now there're some empty glasses on that table
over there that won't wash themselves.'

After the pub closed and I'd washed what seemed like every
glass and plate in Surrey I was finally allowed to go to bed. I
lay there hallucinating from sheer exhaustion, trying to ignore
the list of tomorrow's tasks that Chris was reeling off in the
dark from his bed opposite mine.

'We get up at eight and then after breakfast you have to empty
all the bottle skips. Phew, I don't envy you that. We were really
busy tonight so there'll be millions of bottles to sort. Once
you've done that you go upstairs and clean Carol's bar. Don't
forget to take the coffee machine apart and give it a really good
clean, and when you mop the Gents out don't forget the
disinfectant blocks for the urinal . . .' He rambled on gleefully
until I drifted off, to dream of coach journeys and beer glasses,
too exhausted to remember that I was homesick.

The Wheatsheaf had a pecking order to rival the Forbidden City.

Number one was the big boss, the manager, whom we
very rarely saw. He preferred to stay in his nice spacious
flat with his wife and kids and delegate. Next to God was
Paul Finch; he was assisted by his two henchmen, the bar
and restaurant managers. The restaurant manager could
be affable enough when it suited him, but he was not to
be trusted. Neither was the bar manager, a real creep who
prowled the bars looking for an empty glass on an unwiped
table so that he could tell you what an inept, lazy fool you were and how you would never make it to a managerial position.

I didn't want one. Despite my best efforts I realized that a
career in hotel and catering was not for me. Trainee hotel
managers were at the bottom of the pecking order. We were the
skivvies, exploited and expected to be passively compliant at
all times with Paul Finch's whims, and do every dirty job that
he demanded under the masquerade of 'training'.

'If you want to become management you have to learn every
aspect of the job,' he would preach as he sent me off on yet
another hideous task. 'Now go and unblock that toilet in the
Ladies. You'd think those uncivilized bitches would learn to
put their sanitary towels in the bins provided.'

I was permanently cold. Our garret was freezing. It was too
cold of a morning to do anything but splash your face quickly
with water from the lopsided sink, jump into some clothes and
throw yourself down the back stairs and into the kitchen for a
warm around the stove.