White Boots & Miniskirts (4 page)

Essentially, the job involved a bizarre corporate cover-up. I was hired as a sort of personal assistant to a director of a chain of shoe stores. No one ever bothered to explain to me beforehand that the job mostly involved pretending to be a man. A man who did not exist. OK, it didn’t go as far as me donning men’s clothes or doing impersonations. But essentially, for the time I worked in those dingy offices, I and I alone acted as a man of power and influence within the company, signing letters and documents bearing his name and often pretending to be a direct conduit to this non-existent individual. I have his ear. I am his official right hand, as far as the customers are concerned. His name: Mr Kirk-Watson.

To this day, I have no idea if this man ever existed. All attempts to grill my boss and other colleagues about The Real Kirk-Watson lead nowhere. No one ever actually knew him or anything about him. But in the minds of the shoe chain’s many customers, he is a significant presence indeed. And for the endlessly harassed store managers – the fast-expanding chain consists of about a dozen shops, all under consistent pressure to sell, sell, sell the fashionable shoes – he is their sole backup. Because Mr Kirk-Watson is effectively, a one-man customer service bureau, the person to whom all serious complaints about the shoes, mostly imported from Italy, are to be directed if the store manager cannot satisfy a complainant on the spot.

‘Madam, I’m sorry but I will have to refer you to Mr Kirk-Watson at head office,’ the manager would say ruefully, offering the often irate customer my office phone number before they stomped out of the store, muttering all sorts of threats involving the police, their family, the newspapers and so on. (TV consumer programmes such as the BBC’s
Watchdog
didn’t surface until the 1980s.) Consumer power – and legislation to protect the consumer – has not yet arrived.

Let me explain exactly why the customer frequently – and justifiably – loses the plot. The problem is that at a time when young, fashion-conscious customers with cash to spend are being courted like crazy, some retail outfits, focusing on turnover rather than quality or customer service, do not see themselves as being under any serious obligation to offer cash refunds if the goods are not up to scratch for some reason (and often they’re not, being produced in a mad rush to cash in quickly). Nor is there any widespread public knowledge showing, quite clearly, what the deal should be – what the retailer is legally obliged to offer the customer if the goods are undeniably faulty.

As for the shoes, usually at the cutting edge of fashion – stiletto heels with pointy toes, Chelsea or thigh-high boots, flat shoes with amazing trims – they are, as now, priced to tempt the weekly pay packets of the office girls and boys thronging Oxford Street and the surrounding shopping streets of central London. Yet
these shoes are sometimes badly made. Heels fall off after one or two wearings. Sole and upper sometimes come apart within days. Trims or buckles just drop off.

The company import these shoes because they’re both ultra-fashionable and carry an extremely high profit mark-up. In Italy, still struggling to get its post-war export markets going, labour is much cheaper than here. So head office decree that the inconvenient issue of shoddy workmanship and angry customers is one for store managers to resolve, primarily to the advantage of the company. With the help of a man who does not exist. Looking back, I suspect that the use of a double-barrelled name was an attempt to impose some sort of intimidation on the lower orders. If so, they got it wrong because, by the late 1960s, cap-doffing and knowing thy place is on the wane – especially in the West End, the epicentre of all change. Though the quaint domestic service habit, where the servant employee uses the prefix ‘Mr’ before the boss’s first name (‘Mr Jack’) still prevails in this particular office.

In extremis, a credit note could be offered by the manager. Or even a replacement pair of shoes, if in stock. But shop managers, mostly, hold back from making these offers because credit notes affect their takings – and their commission. Head office policy ensures that they can hardly ever take any money out of the till and hand it back. The policy around complaints is to take the offending shoes back, offer to send them for repair and,
if customers are still not happy with this, offer them Mr Kirk-Watson’s number to get them out of the store. A really furious or persistent phone call to Mr Kirk-Watson might – just – result in a credit note being issued direct from head office and not affecting shop takings. But a cash refund? Not on your nelly.

So the real Mr Kirk-Watson – a mini-skirted, mouthy, peroxide blonde with back-combed, lacquered flick ups and serious attitude to all comers – spends much of the working day fending off the stream of Kirk-Watson phone calls from angry or disgruntled customers. Now and again, the odd customer might venture into the premises to confront the elusive man, but once directed to the grungy ground-floor entrance at the back of the building, the only target for their ire is a lone receptionist, a tough blonde from the far end of the Metropolitan line called Babs. I am three floors up, safe in my tiny cubbyhole off my boss’s somewhat larger office. I never actually see a customer face to face.

My boss – Tom, the Oxbridge-educated son and heir to the booming business built up by his canny family in swift response to the ever-growing demand for fashionable gear for swingin’ Londoners – is rarely there. Nor does he ask much from me if he is around. Skinny, abrupt and often strangely distracted – it’s obvious that the demands of retailing are not really his thing, though I never discover what is – he is a timid sort of man, a weed really, in a crumpled three-piece suit that could
easily have been slept in. It does not trouble me to take the endless stream of Kirk-Watson calls. The alternative is chatting to my friends on the phone or typing the odd bit of correspondence that, for some bizarre reason, Tom usually scribbles out for me in a disgusting scrawl – had he trained as a doctor? – on the back of old shoe boxes, a recycling habit he surely picked up from his mum during the war.

Tom’s fiancé, Helene – a French glamour puss – occasionally wafts into head office, reeking of Arpège and smothered in expensive Jean Muir or sporting ultra-fashionable short, pricey Jean Varon dresses (the designer’s real name was John Bates, the man who designed the clothes for the TV series
The Avengers
). Worldly and snobbish, she clearly overwhelms titchy Tom in every way. In her presence, he is a stuttering, gibbering wreck. An odd couple indeed. Tom has some strange habits. One involves light bulbs. When a new bulb goes in, he writes down the date. Then, when it pops, he carefully notes how long it lasted – a futile exercise as far as I could see, unless he planned to spend his life chasing Osram, the company making the bulbs. Letters are under careful surveillance too. If a letter misses the franking machine and needs a stamp, only second-class post may be used. And so on.

The Kirk-Watson scenario would at least prove to be good training for a future life as a journalist on the phone, talking to people who mostly don’t really want
to talk to you – or alternatively, have a particular axe to grind. My phone routine is to politely present myself as K-W’s sidekick, explain that he’s away in Italy on a shoe-buying trip and offer to hear out their complaint. (If the customer has flatly refused to have the offending shoes sent off for repair, they are sometimes sent round to head office by the store manager, who phones me in advance to warn of an impending super-stroppy caller.) I have one available option (which rarely works) and politely offer to have the shoes sent off to the official body governing Britain’s shoe trade if the customer is willing to wait for a third-party decision on their complaint. This they mostly reject. So as a final resort, in what is clearly a hopeless case, I am empowered to offer a credit note – but usually after consultation with Tom and/or a manager.

Tom never argues or queries it when I put a credit note request in front of him. He lets me authorise and sign them, as Mr Kirk-Watson, in his frequent absences. With my East End background, acutely aware of fiddle potential, I could have expanded my personal shoe wardrobe considerably this way. Yet I don’t give in to this particular temptation, not because of any inherent scruple, but because it seems too easy to bother with and anyway, I get a good staff discount. As for Tom, he just wants a quiet life. After all, I’m taking the crap from a daily stream of angry customers who are mostly justified in thinking they’re getting a rotten, totally unfair deal.
The shoe trade body do their bit, examining the shoes sent to them, explaining what has gone wrong in a polite letter, offering the customer a repair plus further advice on looking after their shoes. But of course, most customers don’t want this somewhat protracted deal, which takes weeks. They want their hard-earned cash back. Now.

And so I get used to people yelling at me, threatening to expose my company’s underhand ways, calling me a variety of unpleasant names because they can’t get their money back. Mostly I can’t reason with them (there is, of course, no training whatsoever for my customer service role, no direction on how to handle the unhappy customer), so I devise a neat trick. If the yelling and abuse goes on – and sometimes it continues for a few minutes, which is a real time-waster – I simply get on with my work, type my letters, carefully placing the phone beside me in the top drawer of my desk. That way I let the yelling, screaming customer give vent to their feelings without the irresistible temptation of answering them back or telling them to ’eff off. It gets a tad repetitive being told for the umpteenth time what a bitch I am, that my boss is a criminal, my employers thieves who deserve a good thumping. I discover a distinct pattern to their abuse. For once they’ve exhausted their vocabulary, run out of epithets, they frequently stop – and just slam the phone down in disgust.

So there I sit, a one-woman call centre with a timid
boss and a rather odd game of passing the buck. It’s the lively, hyped-up shop managers, mostly, who keep me in stitches when we phone each other about the worst of it: the husband who pleads with us to refund the money because he’s so terrified of his wife’s vitriol, the screaming mum whose teenage daughter is in floods of tears because she wanted to wear the new stilettos on Saturday night, the posh woman who believes it’s her right to order ‘you shop people’ around and who claims all sorts of political connections with Churchill’s family to get her
£
10 back.

So there they all are, frustrated consumers in a world where there are no other means of redress other than firing their verbal bullets down a big black Bakelite phone on an unsteady wooden desk. And a 20-something girl in a thigh-high dress who doesn’t give a toss, feet up on the desk, as the frustrated customer screams themselves hoarse. Into an empty drawer.

CHAPTER TWO

A SECRET TRIP ON THE CENTRAL LINE

I
am facing a shocking moment of truth. There is no escape from this. I have been stupid, careless and, typically, blindly convinced that it couldn’t possibly happen to me.

But right now, in this miserable, freezing cold surgery, with its slippery vinyl couch upon which I have just been probed, eyes glued firmly to the cracked grey ceiling, small fists clenched more in anger than fear, I am stunned into silence by the doctor’s words. And he isn’t bothering to be kind. Or sensitive. Why should he? I’m an unmarried young woman who has fallen into an old trap: I am pregnant. A heated, immensely pleasurable but nonetheless speedy exchange of bodily fluids, deshabille, on the rear seat of a parked car near Haverstock Hill, has led me here. Into the pudding club. Many women
dream of this moment, this amazing discovery of the creation of life. But some don’t.

‘You’re probably about eight weeks gone,’ Dr King says, coldly, not even bothering to look at me as he scribbles on the beige card in front of him. I have come here, to the NHS GP’s surgery in Dalston, a 22-year-old who doesn’t know where to run, what to do. I left home many months before. But officially, I’m still on King’s ‘panel’ because I haven’t bothered to sort out a doctor near my new flat. In 1967, despite all the brouhaha around the ‘permissive society’ there were no over-the-counter pregnancy tests available, purchased from Boots, to conduct in privacy. If you missed one or two periods, your breasts started to swell and you felt overwhelmed by lassitude in the middle of the day, there was only one route ahead for confirming what your body was already telling you: the NHS GP. And mine, while a respected man in the area, is no moderniser. He’s not on side with the politicians already looking ahead to actually changing the draconian laws that made pregnancy termination or abortion an illegal and often dangerous practice for women.

In fact, King is very much a religious man, born in regimented Edwardian days when the very worst that could befall a young unmarried woman was pregnancy: whatever the circumstances, even rape, society insisted then that the man was never ever culpable, held to account. A child born out of wedlock was a complete
no-no. To this man, I’m a fallen woman, a social disgrace. ‘You can make arrangements for adoption,’ he tells me. ‘There’s plenty of Jewish families wanting to adopt.’ I stare at him. He stares back, the iceman. To him, I’m a just an irresponsible girl, all the stuff the papers allude to in the dawning of flower power and psychedelia. We might be reading about it all, yet such fantastic American notions as ‘Make love, not war’ haven’t yet made it across the pond to Dalston. Nor are these ideas likely to affect this man’s beliefs.

If he could, I think fleetingly, he’d probably throw me out. My parents, like so many older people who thank their lucky stars for the still relatively new NHS, think he’s God, not King. Until today, even I thought he was OK, old fashioned but… he knew his job. ‘But… there
must
be something I can do,’ I plead. ‘I can’t have a baby, I can’t.’

Even now, in the midst of my turmoil, what he’s suggesting about adoption is anathema to me. I just don’t want to have a baby. Full stop. Go through with it? He must be crazy. Yet at this point in time, he’s my only hope in the world: this grim, ageing figure of rigid authority in his stiff, three-piece suit, the remnants of his dark wavy hair plastered carefully to one side, his hateful rubber gloves now lying in a steel bowl on a side table. I detest him, his judgement from on high, his power over everyone round here. Yet he and he alone has the knowledge, the power to help me. I ask him again, what
can I
do
? ‘No. There’s nothing,’ he says, his words clipped and curt. ‘Girls like you should be grateful for whatever help you get when you have the baby. You can to go to the hospital and get it all checked out in two weeks time.’ More furious scribbling on the beige card.