pr of es so r ’s grammes at North American universities, prioritising those that offered generous teaching assistantships. The first to come up with an offer was in Vancouver, where I read a lot, moved from one university to another, and completed an MA in leisurely slow motion (4 years). I also started on a Ph.D., which I eventually brought back uncompleted to England, where I soon found myself at very loose ends. I had an unfunded place at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, and some very marginal part-time media studies teaching at a polytechnic in Coventry. Meanwhile, I was broke and living in a room at the top of an empty clergy house in Holborn, disconcertingly close to a blue plaque marking the site of the garret in which the eighteenth century poet and forger Thomas Chatterton finished himself off with arsenic at the age of 17. It was time, evidently enough, to strike out in a different direction. I was never going to find anyone to pay me to write books, but I could at least produce an adequate sentence, and I had also taught a few writing courses in Vancouver. Armed with these modest abilities, and making no mention of my more intellectual interests (I remember being asked to promise that I was not a “Trotskyist” seeking to foment uprisings in British factories), I got a job teaching ‘communication skills’ for a training organisation called The Industrial Society. A typical week might start with two days on public speaking to mining engineers in Wigan, followed by interviewing skills in a Kent pharmaceutical works, or perhaps letter
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I find myself fighting with words as I think about the question put to me by the editors. Perhaps there are some people who start steadily, pace themselves, and then power on through to a closing burst of triumph, but to me the word “career” seems better fitted to horses and the race track. Neither can I associate my working life so far with a planned and continuous line of advance, like the solid arrows with which military historians like to represent successful troop movements in their maps of battles. I even have trouble with the alternative offered by the headmaster of the last school I attended: unaware that Michael Gove and David Willetts were waiting in the wings of history, this liberal and progressive-minded visionary urged his departing charges to remember that “Life is not a race; it’s a dance”. So how did I get to be doing what I do? My first step consisted of a BA in English and American Literature from the University of Kent, which was then a brand new university. I found it a very stimulating degree: interdisciplinary, ambitious, and outward-looking too. But I graduated with no idea of what to do next. I wanted to write, but had no convincing sense of what or how. I also needed to earn a living. The university careers officer wasn’t encouraging (he turned out to be a poet who had at least found himself a job). After a few indecisive months, I got a job as a supply teacher at a struggling comprehensive school in Whitstable on the north Kent coast. I contributed to its underperformance for two terms, and the experience filled me with a desire to be elsewhere. So I applied to MA pro-
no
“I can’t help it if I’m lucky ”
writing for secretaries in an insurance office somewhere in the south. I saw a lot of towns, cities and cheap hotels, and I gained, sometimes reluctantly, from working with very different groups of people. Whatever I managed to do for those who came on my courses, the job definitely equipped me with communication skills that would prove unexpectedly transferable - not least when I began to present radio programmes a decade or so later. I didn’t grasp this at the time though. Indeed, I threw it in after about a year, thinking that I had earned a period of unemployment in which I might try to get back to the higher pursuit represented by my dormant Ph.D project. I had no sooner quit than something quite unexpected started to happen. I got a call from Dublin, from a person in the management of the Irish Times, whose colleague had been on one of my writing courses, and she wanted to know if I would do some work for another friend at the Irish Export Board, whose advisers were trying to develop new European markets for Irish products. The work I did with them led to a call from a merchant bank, also in Dublin, which was having trouble calling in its loans from farmers in Cork and elsewhere. Money had been lent in better times and the farmers, who now found their repayments impossible, were winning in court on the grounds that the bank’s letters of warning were unclear or, indeed, impossible to understand. The directors of the bank decided it was time to give their secretarial staff some brisk remedial training. On the very first day it emerged that they were actually scapegoating juniors who were quite capable of writing adequately, but had been filling their letters with so many archaic constructions - “heretofore” and “on the aforementioned inst.” - that all meaning disappeared. Far from being badly written attempts at communication, the letters flying westward out of the bank were artfully composed works of obscurity designed to guard their scribes from the accusation that they had said anything that might later rebound on them. I remember explaining to the initially very sceptical directors that the words “author” and “authority” were closely related, and that they had better think about giving their mismanaged junior employees the
Of Cabbages and Kings 1