Country Mouse

My dream job? The office Romeo with blondes on tap

giles wood

John Betjeman was born into a middleclass family in Edwardian Hampstead. His parents, Mabel and Ernest Betjemann (with the extra ‘n’), had a family firm which manufactured the kind of brown furniture and ornamental silver gadgets loved by the aspirational classes of the day.

A sensitive, lonely child, he knew early on that he would grow up to forswear his participation in the family business, in favour of poetry and his love of architecture. A mixture of snobbishness and guarded affection for the world of commerce is a recurring theme in his verse:

‘I have a Slimline briefcase and I use the firm’s Cortina./ In every roadside hostelry from here to Burgess Hill/ The mâitres d’hôtel all know me well…’

I too was a sensitive – and musical – child who suspected I might grow up to forswear my own participation in the family business, SA Wood & Sons, Hanley, Stoke on Trent, tile merchants and fireplace manufacturers.

Now, in what Violet Bonham Carter called ‘the fifth act of life’, I wonder what I missed out on because I never got the chance to forswear it. My father wound up the business in the early 1970s, stripping its assets and, in the process, disinheriting me of my birthright.

According to my public school’s prospectus, I would be brought up to be a ‘leader of men’. How I would have fared leading a team of slabbers, a foreman, an office junior and sundry ledger clerks – as well as an attractive young blonde secretary – is anybody’s guess. But it wasn’t to be.

As it was, the only part of the job that my father really enjoyed was driving the lorry when he was delivering fireplaces.

Yet, while I was at school, the family firm gave me a sense of pride and identity. I blubbed when Healey minor callously snapped in two one of my collection of hexagonal slimline pencils with the name SA Wood inscribed on one face in tiny letters. ‘Tile manufacturer est 1774’ was inscribed on the flip side. They were HB office pencils.

I was blissfully unaware that the game of tiles and fireplaces would soon be up.

Central heating was delivering the coup de grâce to open fires and fireplaces. Moreover, my father also designed those hideous tile or mosaic fireplaces with their mean Baxi grates. Come the eighties, when open fires came back into fashion again, people would be levering off the walls to replace those grates with stripped pine, or the more upmarket, reclaimed, Edwardian, grey marble fireplaces.

My father turned heads in the sixties. The double of Simon Templar – later Richard Burton – how touchy-feely he was with his secretary, I noted from an early age. She was kind to me and ushered me into a showroom displaying sanitary ware, emblazoned ‘ETRUSCAN VALE’, where I got down on my hands and knees in the dust and created an assault course for my various Dinky toys among the ceramic U-bends.

No natural light reached the dust fest except for one beam of sunlight, which penetrated where someone had once smeared a grimy window pane – no doubt out of curiosity.

My mother made the best of the closing of the works. She sealed my future as a non-office worker by telling me, with the great authority she has always had – it’s earned her the nickname the Oracle of Delphi – that ‘some people dress up in suits and ties and go to the office and others wear polo-necked shirts and that’s the tribe that you belong to; people like Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore, Ben Gazarra and Simon Dee’.

Never one to be pigeon-holed, I never wore a polo neck again.

‘Nor did you ever work,’ observes Mary.

The other day, one daughter told me there was a pile of office furniture in a skip outside her artist’s studio, as the business next door had gone bust.

It was almost midnight when she told me but I leapt to my feet, saying I must go and get as much of it as I could. I have always dreamed of a high-back executive swivel chair with oak-effect wooden arms where, in my dreams, I could hire or fire to my heart’s content. An office desk to put my feet on while I puffed a cigar or played with an executive toy.

‘But why do you want office furniture?’ chorused Mary and my daughter in disbelief. ‘We already have far too much ordinary furniture in the grottage. We can hardly move and it would completely spoil your new shed – all that leather and metal.’

Bright as a button, as always, Mary diagnosed that I was now feeling I had missed out on office life and wanted to try to recreate one within the cottage.

She explained that, even if I got a job in an office now, the days of Dolly Birds and Benny Hill-type office Romeos are truly over.

Nevertheless, would I have been a more effective person in the milieu of the cut and thrust of office life? Have I ever exercised my risk-taking muscle? – as the financier Crispin Odey once asked me.

Not often. But then remember the adage: who, on their deathbed, has ever wished they had spent more time at the office?

Well, there is an exception to every rule.