JANE
OF ALL TRADES
(
Turning My Hand To Any Occupation Over The Years )
| My first experience of working for a living was getting up at 7am to deliver the morning newspapers. For a little extra pocket money I would be up with the larks and walking around the streets of my home town. All this before a full day at school and for seven days of the week as well. |
| From the age of sixteen I’d been involved in helping some older friends with their mobile discotheque. Most weekends during that time you could hear me on the microphone as the records spun at local weddings and parties. I was having fun and only when I moved away from the town did this part of my life disappear. I’m an outgoing person and in some ways love to make a show. |
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The only other venture into the workplace I'd had before leaving school was heading out into the potato fields during the school summer holidays. In the back of a Land-Rover we would all be collected and driven the ten miles to the farm. A day in the fields picking potatoes is enough to give any teenager an experience of working for a living and I admire anybody that works on the land. |
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Even during the summer holidays from college I was out in the workplace. My first summer was spent on the seaside pier at Walton-on-the-Naze. Doing anything from bingo calling to ride operating and cafe work, I had a good all round experience of the holiday industry by the time the season was over. |
| During my second summer holidays, I obtained a temporary job in the clothing factory that my mother worked in. Working in the stock-room counting bales of cloth and matching shades for repairs was my role in this industry. The factory made police and navy uniforms on the whole and dark blue was the main colour. To me blue was blue, slight differences in shades were invisible to me. Therefore I was left to do the stocktaking while somebody with better ability at matching the slight differences in shades did the really technical work. |  |
| After leaving college I needed to find work while awaiting my final results. The summer season at the local holiday camp had just started and I was able to find seasonal employment there. Working again in many fields, I was in the snack bar, cleaning the large ballroom floor and helping backstage during the shows. One time I even went onto the stage to replace the magician’s assistant that hadn’t turned up. For over an hour I had swords pushed through me, caught various objects that were produced from a hat and even got sawn in half. That summer was a fun time but it was only seasonal work and soon the autumn had arrived. |
| I’ve only ever claimed unemployment benefit for two months in my life. This was from the end of the summer season at the holiday camp and before starting a job with British Rail. I soon discovered that a job as a clerk wasn’t the job for me and I hated every minute that I was tied to that desk. Pushing papers around a desk was bad enough but in the late 1970s, British Rail was so overstaffed that there were two people to do every single job. My total workload amounted to two hours in any day and for the remaining six I had to sit twiddle my thumbs. |
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Without a nurse in the family, I have no idea what drew me towards a career in the caring profession. Maybe it was my time with the St John Ambulance Brigade or maybe even a surgeon, dragging a protesting appendix out of my body just after I’d started working at British Rail. Nursing must have looked a lot better than clerking and I was soon accepted for nurse training on the next available course. My final few months at British Rail (Sealink) were consequently filled with reading anatomy books. (Nurse Warner SRN, RGN, RN, RGON) |
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When I decided to join the prison medical service, I was well aware that I would be required to train as a prison officer first. The position was that of a dual roll, I would be a caring ‘screw’. Six months of residential training and I’d been taught everything from how to search a cell to riot control. We even had a mock riot on the parade ground, with shields and body armour. Considering that I was in the service during the mid eighties prison riots, it was a very useful few months. |
| Dealing with the roughest element of any society teaches you how to handle life. I’ve never led a sheltered existence and to this day it still takes a lot to frighten me. Seeing the worst possible side of life will strengthen nearly anybody and it's certainly help me to cope with life. |
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Moonlighting from my full time job in the prison service, I worked during the evenings in a pub in London’s Eastend. To those who aren’t familiar with London, the Eastend is the more down to earth part of town. It was a welcome change from the tension of life behind bars and the landlord appreciated a capable pair of hands to keep the rowdy customers in line. |
| Working in a prison tends to heighten your reflexes. When you’re in a situation of possibly being attacked by a violent mentally ill patient, you appear to develop eyes in the back of your head. It was this reflex reaction that was to be the humiliation of a fellow barman. He'd decided to grab me around the waist from behind in a fit of playfulness. To his surprise he found himself face against the wall and his arm in a wrist lock. “Sorry Roz, I forgot, I forgot”, he pleaded as the regulars to the pub curled up on the floor laughing. My reactions had been instinctive, I was saving my life from a psychotic inmate. Needless to say I never really had any problems encouraging the drinkers to leave at closing time. |
| After five years on the inside, I felt like a change of scenery. I had applied to join the metropolitan police a while back and I’d reached the stage of physical testing and interviews. For the first day I was at Hendon police training school, running around the track and being put through a series of gymnasium test. The second day was medicals, dental checks and interviews. Having a dentist determine if you’re a suitable candidate for a job is remarkably like seeing if a horse was worth buying. I wonder if he was really a vet from the equestrian branch and was there just for that purpose. |
| As it turned out, before I had the chance to join the police, I’d visited America on a holiday and had secured a position in a hospital over there. My ideas for a police career went out of the window as I jetted off across the Atlantic. |
| After returning from America and nursing in Scotland for a year, I embarked on a circumnavigation of the globe. Whilst in Mongolia I spent two weeks living with a hill-farming family, chasing the sheep and goats around the hillside. |
| Willing to turn my hand to nearly anything, I took to this way of life with remarkable ease. Farming is a way of getting involved with nature and the animals in it. I felt more at ease in this lifestyle that any other that I’ve been in. |
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Not only did we milk the goats, as we were living a subsistance lifestyle with our adoptive family, we were also obliged to participate in slaughtering the livestock ready for the pot. A group of families usually got together and took it in turns to provide one animal and during our stay it was our adoptive family's turn. |
| Western culture has managed to successfully breed populations who will happily eat hamburgers and pork chops one moment and be disgusted at the thought of killing cows and pigs the next. The so called civilised societies have blinkered themselves to source of their meals. I on the other hand have now followed the food chain from hearding to slaughtering and then through cooking to eating. |
| After the nursing work dried up in Hong Kong, I turned my hand to driving for a living. I'd already clocked up a considerable number of miles of driving in my travels around Europe and America but this was my first adventure into being a professional driver. |
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As a driver for a combination of two major Japanese construction companies that were engaged in building a new road tunnel from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island, my duties were pretty varied. Not only would I deliver and collect plans and documents from the highways department in town, a good proportion of my day was spent on the construction site or at the quarry. |
| Up until this time, a good proportion of my working life had been in the medical field. The nearest I’d come to being on a construction site was watching the road workers in England lean against their shovels. To see people actually working was a surprise in itself. |
| By this time in my life, I’d driven in most of the cities of Europe and northern America. City driving is a totally different kind of driving to any other kind. In Hong Kong the situation is twice as bad because of the number of people. It isn’t the drivers that cause the largest problem, although they are bad, it’s the pedestrians that walk in the road that delay any journey. |  |
| To the Chinese in Hong Kong, the difference in height between the road and the pavement makes no difference whatsoever. As you drive along the smaller city streets, you will encounter hoards of people walking along the road and none of them interested in moving out of your way. On one occasion two men were chatting in the middle of a cross-roads, I edged upto within six inches of them before they even realised that I was there. |
| While not actually having a work visa for Australia, to obtain a little extra travelling funds, I spent a few weeks picking peaches in Victoria. It wasn’t long before I realised that the money I was receiving only just covered my living expenses. I was spending ten hours a day picking peaches for no increase in my travelling finances. On top of this, I was risking trouble with the Australian government. My peach picking days were consequently over nearly a soon as they’d begun. |
| Driving was now in my blood and for my second stay in America, I decided to take a job on the road. Working for an agency that delivered new trucks from the factory, I was soon clocking up the miles, trucking across the continental United States. |
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Starting off as part of a team of six, I soon branched out on my own. With the purchase of a car and the fitting of a towbar, I was spending nearly all my waking hours on the road. It’s a great way to see the country and to-date I’ve visited 35 of the states, from Florida to Chicago and New York to Los Angeles. |
| With the use of C.B. radio, I made many temporary friends on the road. An English accent was obviously a novelty to the American truckers and despite only driving the smaller versions of their big rigs, I had many a long conversation as we both meandered along the highways and byways of that country. |
| For six months I lived the life of a Hobo, sleeping in the back of the truck I was delivering or alternatively on the reclined seat in my car. Once in a while I’d check into a motel but there were more than enough showers at the truckstops that littered the highways. I had my C.B. radio and a country music station always on the dial, it was a second kind of heaven to me and I loved every minute of it. |
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Returning to my native England again, I went to stay with my sister in south London. Still content to have a break from nursing, I obtained a job with a local security company. My job entailed driving again but this time to various different unoccupied offices and to perform security patrols within them. My colleagues even tried to frighten me once by hiding in one of them as I completed my patrol. As they jumped out in front of me, the nearest one flew headlong into the second and they both ended up in a heap at the end of the corridor. Needless to say, they never tried that little trick again. |
| It wasn’t the work that finally encouraged me to leave this job, it was the pay cheques made of rubber. I still insisted on being paid cash after seeing other staff receive bouncing cheques, the manager on the other hand was trying to convince me to accept a cheque. I decided to bounce straight out of the door and into another job. |
| My career as a professional driver was soon to span three continents, as I joined the team of drivers the wrecked havoc on the illegal parkers of Westminster. |
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The wheel clamp, or Denver boot as the Americans know it, was an effective way of enforcing the parking regulation, as many drivers found out to their cost. The days of ignoring parking parked his car tickets had gone. |
| In my time with the City of Westminster wheel clamping unit, I've clamped lords, MPs, royals, TV personalities and even a coach belong to the French foreign legion. The regulations were enforced evenly and fairly, although anybody that’s ever been clamped will claim that they were obviously persecuted. This is just a normal paranoia that every driver has. This condition is especial evident in foreign drivers who always claim that they’ve been picked on, just because they have a French or German licence plate. Considering that 95% of the cars clamped in the city have British plates, I find this very hard to believe. |
| The reason why foreign drivers hate the wheel clamp so much is because it forces them to pay their parking fines. Most are on their last day in the city and just about to head for the channel tunnel or a ferry. They know a parking ticket can’t be enforced in their home countries, so they decide to take a chance and skip the country with a pretty little paper souvenir. The solid green metal souvenir with a chunky padlock on it, is usually a lot more than they bargained for. “I didn’t know I had to pay the meter”, is usually the first cry. It seems pretty obvious to me that if you park beside a moneybox on a stick, you have to put money in the box. Even a child could figure that one out. |
| From driving the clamping van, I moved on to issuing the parking tickets. As a parking attendant for the same borough, I was issued a moped and regularly spent Saturday nights writing parking ticket in the West End. It seemed to be that people driving into London for the nightlife, thought that nobody patrolled after 7pm and that they could get away with abandoning their cars anywhere. On that score they were very wrong, as I rode around Soho and Piccadilly Circus, well into the early hours of the morning. My pet hate was people who parked on ‘disabled’ bays. They seemed to think that disabled people weren’t entitled to a social life in the evening and maybe it was the nurse in me that specifically disliked the perpetrators of this display of motoring ignorance. |
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It
all started of as a bit of a joke really. I was on a
boring train journey one day and doodled the outline to a
comedy novel. My friends that I was visiting encouraged
me to persevere with it and consequently I’ve
complete five comedy works already and have many more on
the way. To sample any of my writings please visit the 'Spoken in Jest' Website |
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