CHAPTER NINE
The exchange was a dismal house in a side street. I rode up, dismounted, and started to walk in the entrance. “Want your bike stolen?” asked a voice behind me. I turned to the speaker. “Surely the unemployed do not steal from each other?” I asked.
“You must be new around here; put a lock and chain
round the bike or you will have to walk home.” With that
the speaker shrugged his shoulders and went into the building. I turned back and looked in the saddle-bag of the machine. Yes, there was a lock and chain. I was just going to put the chain round the wheel as I had seen others do when a horrid thought struck me—where was the key? I fumbled in those unfamiliar pockets and brought out a bunch of keys. Trying one after the other, I eventually found the correct one.
I walked up the path and into the house. Cardboard signs
with black inked arrows pointed the way. I turned right
and entered a room where there were a lot of hard wooden
chairs packed tightly together.
“Hello, Prof!” said a voice. “Come and sit by me and
wait your turn.”
I moved to the speaker and pushed my way to a chair
beside him. “You look different this morning,” he continued. “What have you been doing to yourself?”
I let him do the talking, picking up stray bits of information. The clerk called names, and men went up to his desk and sat before him. A name was called which seemed vaguely familiar. “Someone I know?” I wondered. No one moved. The name was called again. “Go on—that's you!” said my new friend. I rose and walked to the desk and sat down as I had seen the others do.
“What's the matter with you this morning?” asked the
clerk. “I saw you come in, then I lost sight of you and
thought you had gone home.” He looked at me carefully.
“You look different this morning, somehow. Can't be hair
style, because you haven't any hair.” Then he straightened
up and said, “No, nothing for you, I'm afraid. Better luck
next time. Next, please.”
I walked out, feeling despondent, and cycled back to
Hampton Court. There I bought a newspaper, and continued on to the banks of the Thames. This was a beauty spot, a place where Londoners came for a holiday. I sat down on the grassy bank, with my back to a tree, and read the Situations Vacant columns in the paper.
“You'll never get a job through the Exchange!” said a
voice, and a man came off the path and plonked down on
the grass beside me. Plucking a long-stemmed grass, he
chewed it reflectively, rolling it from side to side of his
mouth. “They don't pay you any dole, see? So they don't
get you fixed up either. They gives the jobs to them as what
they has to pay. Then they save money, see? If they get
you a job they have to keep somebuddy else on the dole and the Gov'ment makes a fuss, see?”
I thought it over. It made sense to me, even if the man's
grammar almost made my head swim. “Well, what would
you do?” I asked.
“Me! Blimey, I don't want no job, I just goes to get the
dole, it keeps me, that an' a bit I makes on the side, like. Well, Guv. If you really want a job, go to one of them Bureys—here—let's have a look.” He reached over and took my paper, leaving me to wonder blankly what a Burey could be. What a lot there was to learn, I thought. How ignorant I was of everything to do with the Western world. Licking his fingers, and mumbling the letters of the alphabet to himself, the man fumbled through the pages. “Here y'are!” he exclaimed triumphantly. “Employment Bureys —here—take a look at it yerself.”
Quickly I scanned the column so clearly indicated by his
very dirty thumb mark. Employment Bureaux, Employment Agencies. Jobs. “But this is for women,” I said disgustedly.
“Garn!” he replied, “You can't read, it says there men
and women. Now you go along an' see 'em an' don't take no old buck from them. Oh! They'll play you up and string you along if you let 'em. Tell 'em you want a job, or else!”
That afternoon I hurried off to the heart of London, climbing the dingy stairs to a ramshackle office in a back street of Soho. A painted woman with artificially blond hair and scarlet talons of nails was sitting at a metal desk in a room so small it might once have been a cupboard. “I want a job,” I said.
She leaned back and surveyed me coolly. Yawning
widely, she displayed a mouthful of decayed teeth and a
furred tongue. “Ooaryer?” she said. I gaped at her blankly. “Ooaryer?” she repeated.
“I am sorry,” I said, “but I do not understand your
question.”