Back at Downing after my respite at Gerrards Cross I was starting my last term as a student. Certain things had to be faced. I arranged an appointment with the department of the university which gave advice about careers, the Appointments Board (but universally known as the Disappointments Board), and had a good meeting with someone called Bill Kirkman. A delightful chap, obviously very taken with me. He kept saying that it was obvious I’d be ‘quite excellent’ at something, if we could only work out between us what it might be. Somewhere in the cosmos there was a jigsaw puzzle missing a piece of exactly my quite excellent shape — but not necessarily in the Cambridge area.
Bill Kirkman had obviously sat on his glasses at some stage and bent the stems out of true, because he couldn’t make them sit on his face properly — one side or the other was always sticking up at an angle, however often he adjusted them. He asked me if I thought the UKAEA might be my thing. I gave it a lot of thought, tilting my head this way and that as if I was trying to make sense of the world through my own pair of lop-sided glasses.
There’s no denying the glamour of a set of initials. Perhaps UKAEA was some sort of cousin organisation to AMORC, the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis. I said it to myself: You-Kay-A. It sounded like the name of a Maori god. I said that I thought this might indeed be my thing, though in fairness it did rather depend what the UKAEA actually was.
‘It’s actually the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority.’
‘You know,’ I said, ‘I don’t think the UKAEA is going to be my thing after all.’ The isotopes of glamour can have a short half-life.
His second suggestion seemed more promising. A firm called J. Walter Thompson was always interested in snapping up Cambridge graduates. I managed to get quite excited about that. ‘Do you think they’ll want me?’ I asked.
‘I don’t see why not. Do you want me to set up an interview?’
‘I don’t see why not.’ I had heard of J. Walter Thompson as a giant in the advertising game, but until I had phoned Malcolm Washbourne I hadn’t realised quite what big boys ‘JWT’ were in his world.
He was impressed despite himself, even while he warned me frantically against his whole line of business. I had no inherent interest in advertising, and Malcolm had warned me against it any number of times as a living death of the spirit — but sometimes when the inner and the outer voices coincide, it becomes a sacred duty to disregard them. Perhaps there would be a little niche for me in this baffling industry. Perhaps I would clinch the coveted Margaret Erskine Dream-Cloud account.
I would dance with the devil. I would give J. Walter Beelzebub a whirl.
On the morning of the interview, all the same, I found I wasn’t looking forward to it. I popped a Fortral or two into my mouth before attending, thinking this would make it more bearable. Always a risky assumption.
The interview was held in some sort of meeting room in the Blue Boar, the town’s GHQ of meat-eating on Trinity Street. The first thing I was told was that I should ignore the camera — but I’d never seen one like it before. It was an enormous piece of apparatus, hardly smaller than what they had used when they filmed The Pumpkin Eater in Bourne End with Peter Finch, years before. They explained that it was the newest thing, a great breakthrough, and it was called a video camera. Soon they would be used in every interview, enabling employers to make entirely objective assessments of the candidates on offer.
I managed to ignore the camera, but only by dint of staring at the lady who was doing the interview. She was American, had a pointy nose and wore a smart suit — but she had a hair-band in her hair. I hadn’t seen a grown woman wear such a thing before, but perhaps she’d seen it advertised and thought it looked smart.
She started off making kneading gestures with her hands, as if there was a ball of dough on her lap, and her voice was soft and crooning. ‘Our goal is to get our audience to relax … we massage them … we let them know that they’re in safe hands … they can let down their guard …’
Shamanistically delving
It seemed to me while she was saying all this that her nose was getting longer (by several inches) and even more pointed. I tried to decide whether this was to do with the hallucinogenic effects of pentazocine, or if I was shamanistically delving into her inmost soul and putting together a portrait, a Photofit like the ones on the news, of the culpable demon of lies I found at her core. These are probably just two ways of looking at the same thing. It stood to reason, though, that if I got this job my shamanistic talents would be fully engaged. They’d be working overtime.
Then the lady said, ‘When consumers are thoroughly at their ease, completely relaxed … that’s when we Plunge in the Knife of Advertising!’ She thrust her hand forward in a completely savage gesture, and I won’t even begin to describe her facial contortions while she did it. It was the most vicious display imaginable, and I gave a little scream.
That wasn’t technically the end of the interview, but after that there was really nothing to be said. Why did I want the job? I didn’t. What did I have to offer the company that would set me apart from the other applicants? Well, let me see — I was on the phone.
Somewhere in the archives of J. Walter Thompson there may exist video footage of the Knife of Advertising being plunged into the psychic flesh of an innocent bystander. I hope my scream on the soundtrack seeps into a thousand executive nightmares.
So I declined Maya’s invitation to help change the fuel rods on nuclear reactors or to perforate consumers with lies about the things they were supposed to buy. My contemporaries grappled with similar choices, though I imagine they had a wider range of possibilities open to them.
The good people of the Disappointments Board disappointed every body impartially, of course, but I rather felt that they had saved up something special for me. A bumper setback. Ridiculous of course for me to expect third parties to find me a place in life. The vichara is not to be delegated.
It was fascinating to see that people went on asserting the values of the counter-culture right up to the moment they betrayed it. I have known students who talked about the underground press, the whole-food co-operative and those blasted kibbutzim right up to the day of their final interview with Unilever, and then suddenly started invoking the need to grow up and make a contribution to the economy. Youthful ideals being all very well and nothing to be ashamed of, but there being a real world out there which had to be dealt with sooner or later.
The disconcerting thing was not how abrupt the transition was but how smooth, not how much people had changed but how little. They behaved like actors who find, after auditioning for Marat/Sade, that they have been cast in The Admirable Crichton, but are too polite to make a fuss. Barely a shrug of the shoulders, and on with the show.
Of course change in nature can also be abrupt. The continuity between the caterpillar and the butterfly is anything but obvious. Sometimes the larva is physically bigger than the mature butterfly. Pupation, though, is a correspondingly laborious process. In these human cases pupation took no more than a moment, and the wings of the imago when they unfurled from the tie-dyed chrysalis bore pinstripes of grey.