Biggs - All Day Long: A Portrait of Britain At Work

Joanna Biggs is an editor at the London Review of Books. She has written for the New Yorker, the Guardian and the Sunday Times.

ALL

A PORTRAIT OF

DAY

BRITAIN AT WORK

LONG

JOANNA BIGGS

A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request

The right of Joanna Biggs to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Copyright 2015 Joanna Biggs

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published in 2015 by Serpents Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3 Holford Yard
Bevin Way
London WC1X 9HD
www.serpentstail.com

eISBN 978 1 78283 014 6

To Mum

IRINA: A time will come when everyone will know what all this is for, why there is this misery; there will be no mysteries and, meanwhile, we have got to live we have got to work, only to work! Tomorrow Ill go alone; Ill teach in the school, and Ill give all my life to those who may need me. Now its autumn; soon winter will come and cover us with snow, and I will work, I will work.

Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters

CONTENTS

IN DOVER

IN THE COLD BACK ROOM of a charity shop, a group of volunteers are working. Eve steams clothes with an orange hoover-like machine, eating sweets from a bag in her pocket as she goes. Every so often the steamer foghorns and she tops it up with water. Its March 2014, and three times a week she works a morning shift; on the other days she goes to English and maths lessons. Ive done my ones, twos, threes, fours, fives, sixes Im on my seven times tables now. Eves 50 and grew up in a childrens home; her best job before this one was sorting potatoes on the back of a tractor. Shes shocked I have never eaten Kentish gypsy tart, and offers to make me one. Is it like Bakewell tart? Its more whipped, she says.

Eves paper bag of sweets came from Sarah, who she met at literacy classes. Sarahs 23 and had just done a trial at a supermarket I couldnt read the products and one for a cleaning job They say Im not suitable for doing the paperwork to be a cleaner. That is so How do you need paperwork to work, to be a cleaner? but she wants to work in a nursery. Thats why Im doing my English. She receives Disability Living Allowance and comes here four times a week, brings sweets, makes cups of tea. Today she arranges an armful of plush cats and dogs on a shelf, after Karin, the shops manager, has pierced the ears with a price.

If you ask people why they work, most will say for money. Eve and Sarah work without getting paid; Karin gets the minimum wage of 6.50 an hour, but works so much overtime she earns 3.27 an hour. What we do for money seems like the essential but dull part of our lives in tired phrases such as worklife balance, work is set against life, as if it were lifes opposite but its also where we make friends, exert power, pass the time, fall in love, give back, puff ourselves up, get bored, play, backstab, bully and resist. And as the days slide by, it changes us almost unobserved. Jane Eyre goes to Thornfield Hall as a governess but by the end of the book, shes its mistress. Bronts novel is on one hand a love story: a plain, far-seeing girl gets beneath the rough surface of her master. On the other its a Bildungsroman: a friendless orphans work gives her the confidence to brave the rattling attic.

Karin runs a covertly Communist system; from each according to his talents and to each according to his needs. Karin began volunteering in charity shops when her children were small, worked in a dress shop when they were bigger but didnt like it (pressure selling) and then managed the charity shop in aid of the Peoples Dispensary for Sick Animals in Ashford for twenty-three years. Now that she runs the Dover branch she takes a sporting pleasure in surpassing Ashfords daily earnings; last week they managed it twice. She chose the PDSA because the family dog got sick once when she was a child: her mother sent her from their council estate in South-East London to the local PDSA. She held the money, her sister held the dogs string and their little brother followed behind. The vet handed over an envelope with white pills inside, and the dog got better. What needs does work meet for Eve, Sarah and Karin? I love working here. Its well nice, Eve says. You meet new people, Sarah says. Here, animals suffer if you dont make money, Karin says. Sorting through bin bags of donations is one of Sarahs friends from school, Kayleigh. Are you a journalist? she asks. I cant speak to you then, she says and listens instead.

The radio plays Simply the Best by Tina Turner. I can see the board game Battleship, a Cadbury Collection 100-piece puzzle, a tiny blue satin Chinese tunic on a hanger, embroidery hoops in different sizes, books by Alan Titchmarsh and Barbara Taylor Bradford, childrens plastic sunglasses with coloured frames and a box of Ladies Microwave Slippers. Katherine untangles costume jewellery. Shes wearing a gold key volunteer badge and says we used to go to school together, but at first I dont recognise her. Shed wanted to be a librarian, but when she became one for Kent County Council the dusty life shed hoped for no longer existed. Being a librarian now meant helping people get on the internet and extinguishing burning loo rolls in the toilets. She left and worked here and there, trained to determine the clarity, cut and quality of diamonds at a jeweller, the reason shes given the necklace tangle to sort out, then had seven months off work. It hits me: her red hair used to be brown in the sixth form at Dover Girls Grammar School. I can picture her waiting for Latin while I waited for my French lesson. She works a Saturday morning at the PDSA even though she has a new job in planning at a perfume company. Anyone can do my job. I do enjoy it and I get on with my colleagues and that, but I do it to pay the rent. If I had a choice If I won the lottery, Id just study, and volunteer here. Theres a lot more pride in what Im doing here. And I feel a lot more loyal to the PDSA than I do to work. Works just work. I can work in Tesco if I have to! I dont want to, she laughs, but, you know

At five I told my mother I wanted to be an actress, at nine I said a dancer, but later I more wisely said I wanted to go to university (my parents hadnt gone). At 22, just graduated from Oxford, I hoped to do something meaningful, absorbing and perhaps also glamorous, like Esther Greenwood going to work on a womens magazine in Sylvia Plaths The Bell Jar. Work I might love. I had babysat, delivered newspapers, helped my mum with Avon orders, washed cars, worked in the office of a translation agency, sat on a till in WHSmith on Saturdays, stuffed envelopes for one miserable half-week, assisted the manager of a Christmas card factory (who used to say were cooking on gas, and were cooking on gas which I still hear in my head in his voice), took payment for water bills and logged car crashes in a call centre. I came to London to study for a Masters degree in eighteenth-century literature, still not quite knowing if I wanted to be an academic or not, and moved in with two girls I knew as an undergraduate: one was starting work on a national newspaper, the other at a literary agency. In the evenings, we sat on the floor of the mostly empty two-bedroom Hackney flat we were using as a three-bedroom one, shared a plastic bag of prawn crackers from the Chinese around the corner and talked. I heard about worries, colleagues, expectations; who sat where, what happened at lunch, what everyone wore. It was a way of finding out what we wanted to avoid and who we wanted to be. University had made us employable, but hadnt prepared us for work. The novels we had studied were about love and depravity; they werent set in offices.