My first job makes a surprise appearance

I don’t know why it has popped so vividly into my head, but my first ‘proper’ job was my Saturday job at 'Williams & Griffin' when I was 16. I remember leaving my relatively untouched CV with the H.R Dept and after radio silence, my Mum, never one to be deterred, forcibly instigating a meeting with the head of HR, insisting all he would need to do is meet me to want to hire me. Her fierceness is my greatest heirloom, always pressed close to my heart. She was right of course; after a nice little chat, I got offered a job.

'W&G' was a curious delight. Think ‘Are you being served?’/mini provincial 'Harrods' hybrid. It was obvious that at this time the store stood beautifully and yet precariously on a threshold between the past and the future of retail and there were staff members who I could well imagine reciting Mrs Slocombe’s lines and equally young ones like us for whom class and opportunity were altogether different propositions. Somehow, although mainly out of good nature on both parts, their resignation rubbed along as well as could be expected with our guileless irreverence.

I was a ‘floater’ which meant I got assigned to different depts. After a time, Menswear and Cosmetics used to compete for me, which brought conflicted feelings of squirmy unworthiness and fizzling joy, but as much as I had a raging crush on a lad in Menswear and they were also huge fun, I loved playing with make up and spraying myself in expensive perfume, so Cosmetics usually won and lead to my first *proper* job as a makeup artist for Benefit uk.

Before the departmental scrapping, I could be anywhere! Gifts was mortally boring, as was Hosiery/Accessories, Womenswear at least meant customer service and Accounts was HEINOUS (imagine putting me in charge of large amounts of money! Folly alley!) but you got the opportunity to rotate to Switchboard and make announcements on the tannoy. I LOVED the tannoy and used to pretend I was on ‘Hi! Di Hi!’ and if I made a mistake I’d giggle and the ladies used to tell me it made them all smile.

I was very much one of the babies and often treated endearingly as such. The bountiful staff canteen was subsidised and I used to have a cheese scone the size of my head with butter and strawberry jam as a treat at 'teabreak', of which we had a very necessary feeling two a day.

I was the tardiest little sod every week, but my boss was completely sweet and always asked about my singing and dreams and used to praise me if I was 'only' 10 mins late. This used to very palpably piss off the women in H.R.

I used to sing in the favourable echo of the staff bathroom acoustics and you could see the council car cark next to the Town Hall from the locker room, so I used to be able to see if my Dad’s car was parked and loved that he was working too, only a stone’s throw away. On the days I felt lonelier, it was like being held somehow. A metaphor for our relationship; always close by, but never stifling.

Sometimes, customers were insanely rude, but sometimes they were by turns, gorgeous. I learned very quickly to never judge a book by it's cover, as if I hadn't already. We had a regular old gentleman who used to kiss my hand (in a very chivalric way) and we once had the ‘Marlborough man’ in menswear and he looked just like James Dean. I used to help measure men up for suits/trousers, which is a really nostalgic slice of innocence or something ripe for mishandling, depending on your personal point of view.

One Saturday, I watched a man shoplift in Menswear right in front of me. He opened his jacket and slid a designer item inside, maintaining a very disturbing, slightly threatening, direct eye contact. I stared back, frozen, the way the small birds in my parent's garden used to act when they realised one of our crew of cats was stalking them. The sudden introduction of menace in a formerly benign space felt like an electrical jolt. I had to call security in an adrenalised jangle and got sent for my tea-break early. It created quite the stir that morning.

I remember so vividly how the store smelled. Of 'newness'; leather, plastic, floral air freshener and glade polish, mingled with expensive perfumes and paper wrappings that all created an olfactory melee that smelled of 'comfortability' in the truest sense. Voices were never raised over piped music; a gentrified sense of decorum was maintained and only ever broken by boisterous kids, creating looks of disdain at the temporary disturbance of order.

I used to eat lunch from Mark’s and Spencer (in the days when it was called ‘St Michael) in the Square and feel really grown up. Sometimes I would choose a walk to the childish familiarity of the park, walking past a castle that had seen civil war executions, incarcerated witches and Romans slain by Boudicca, with me, sat in their dust, unwrapping a pesto sandwich from a plastic wrapper; damp, cool, tickly grass on my seat.

Walks home in the summer in low, golden sunshine, always choosing the coolness of the alleyway behind the Main road, 'the secret route', hidden from the sun by buckled old trees whose roots cracked through the concrete like fingers. My legs felt cast from lead from standing all day but it was alright, because I knew I’d be flopped like a seal from 6pm, unless my Dad waited outside the staff entrance to drive me home, as he often did when it was rainy or cold.

It was such a simple time. I felt the fullness of all my hope; with large, distant dreams that hung thickly like cumulus clouds and ever present, constricting fears of my own inadequacies, squeezing me sometimes too hard, like a rubber band left on a wrist. I had a strong, screaming sense that although I could acknowledge this was all 'ok', if it was to become my life, I would certainly go horribly mad, like a caged bird.

I don’t know why I’m posting this. Consider it a chat to the void.