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.
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.
He doesn’t say, ‘Get out now.’ But his body language as he continues to write, ignoring my presence, nudges me to leave. So I teeter out in my brown pointy stilettos, through the packed surgery, past the wailing Bash Street kids of Dalston, out on to the grey, ever-depressing world of Sandringham Road, its once proud and splendid Victorian family houses now derelict and war-ravaged, crammed with immigrant West Indian families dreaming of the balmy Caribbean world and the happy life they’ve left behind – having reached the revered mother country only to be ripped off outrageously by greedy, uncaring landlords. And treated like pariahs by most of the population round here.
My parents’ flat is just up the road. But there’s no way I’m going there. I’ve taken the day off work to do this, see the doctor. They’d ask questions if I turned up midweek. Instead, I walk in the opposite direction towards Ridley Road market, thinking hard, pushing myself
