The spy who disliked me : 2003 : Eva Koekelbergh, The Radio Authority

 “Do you know who I am?” my workplace colleague shouted down the phone. “Do you know who I work for?”

I suspect customer service personnel at Fortnum & Mason (which promises “everyone remembers their first encounter with us”) endure similarly haughty conversations with their upper crust clientele day in day out and follow a scrupulously polite script such as:

“Yes, madam, I can read your name on the order for wedding guest name cards and I can tell from your posh accent that you are a member of the British elite who since 1707 have purchased ordinary things from our Piccadilly shop at extraordinary prices, BUT …”

Perhaps private school timetables schedule one period per week of ‘Privilege Studies’ during which pampered Torquil’s and Persephone’s confidently acquire the skill of always getting their own way in life by addressing the 95% of Brits who they consider not ‘one of us’ as inferior beings … though I fail to recall my state school reciprocally teaching ‘deference’. Whether the harangued employee at Fortnum & Mason (“committed to delivering a sense of pleasure”) on the other end of the call had heard of The Radio Authority I doubt. Our government quango was so marginal that there were probably people toiling in radio stations who had never heard of it.

My colleague was usually more softly spoken until an issue arose with ‘service’, at which point the inherited gene that had probably balled out ‘the help’ in centuries past suddenly emerged on the radar screen like the tip of an upper-class iceberg. On a previous occasion, a phone charger left permanently plugged in under the same colleague’s desk had burnt out with a bang while she was sat in our crowded, unventilated office, but without injury. No eavesdropping was necessary to overhear how forcibly the manufacturer would be complained to, sued and adequate compensation secured for her having suffered this apparent near-death experience.

Our office proved the ideal place for my colleague to spend most of the year meticulously planning her spectacular wedding in the grounds of a hired West Country mansion. Months could pass without management delegating any work to us ‘development officers’ to do. The pay and conditions in this public sector agency were undeniably rubbish, but never have I been required to do so little work for a salary. If I exited the office even ten minutes after five o’clock, it would be my duty to switch off all the lights and lock the Radio Authority front door. So much time, so little work!

Evidently, no run-of-the-mill wedding was being planned from the desk next to mine. Its scale and lavishness would easily have triumphed in a ‘Radio Industry Wedding of the Year’ awards ceremony. Like all historic royal weddings, this was not a purely personal affair. It celebrated the alliance of two established ‘houses’ that since 1973 had been at war with each other, fighting innumerable battles over every issue known to the broadcast industry’s opposing armies. The bridegroom was a board member and director of a significant British commercial radio group. The bride worked for the government regulator of the very same commercial radio industry. It was a match made in conflict-of-interest heaven.

I had already observed that, as soon as something of even minor significance occurred at The Radio Authority, the bride-to-be would unhook her mobile phone from its charger and march to the ladies’ loo where she might remain a good while. Maybe she just suffered a weak bladder exacerbated by radio industry events. Whatever, by dint of a mysteriously indirect route, such news would magically appear within the pages of the next ‘Radio Magazine’, a weekly publication brimming with insider gossip that naturally was rabidly consumed by The Radio Authority’s staff.

Normally I would have remained coldly detached from such workplace intrigue but, this time, my life was impacted by the whiff of in-house espionage. Bob Tyler, a good friend for as many decades as I have attended radio conferences, was then news editor of the Radio Magazine and had a habit of phoning The Radio Authority switchboard and asking to be put through to me for an innocent chat. Having signed some kind of Official Secrets Act on my first day of work, I told him absolutely nothing confidential. However, his calls may have sowed seeds of doubt with my boss, David Vick, who one day discovered me alone in his office after I had entered to retrieve a document I had mistakenly left on his desk minutes beforehand. As the only employee with hundreds of published articles about the radio industry to my name, the fickle finger of fate appeared to point directly at me and, without explanation, Vick started to lock his office door when he was absent. Subsequently, I was the sole employee not to be awarded a Christmas bonus and my annual review was unremittingly negative.

“My father worked as a spy for the Dutch government,” the bride-to-be would tell the rest of us in the office, as if addressing an interviewer for a place at Oxbridge. I wondered to myself whether such an occupation passed as a ‘family business’ amongst her peers. Could her employment with The Radio Authority be merely an undercover mission in a quiet backwater for an MI5 agent? Suspicions were further aroused when our boss David Vick insisted he vet and approve each of her wedding guests, the list apparently resembling a who’s-who of everyone who presently worked in the British commercial radio industry. Not that I ever saw it. 

As the Big Day approached, it became apparent that all who worked in our office had received an invitation … except me. In fact, everybody in our department had been invited … except me. Indeed, I suspect that just about everyone employed by The Radio Authority had been invited … except me. Not that Eva Koekelbergh ever told me to my face that I would not receive an invitation to her big fat Wessex wedding. My desk was only six feet away from hers so the ‘oh dear, it must have been lost in the post’ excuse would have been wholly redundant. I had endured almost a year of aural torture, forced to listen to every minor detail concerning the biggest day of her life being phoned through to dozens of contractors and then chased up relentlessly from her desk, yet now I was being treated as if I might deliver a homemade bomb as my gift-wrapped present.

Though there may be eight million eligible bachelors in the naked city, the universe of Britain’s 5% appears more akin to the gene pool within a rural Mormon village. The bridegroom just happened to be the former Radio Authority line manager of the bride, and he also just happened to be best man at her present line manager’s wedding, and both men just happened to have attended the same university. For the cherry on top of this cake of coincidence, one of the six people working in our office was the daughter of one of the bride’s teachers at her former private school. When people casually comment ‘it’s a small world’, do they realise what a truism it is for a certain stratum of society?

One week before the Big Day that had necessitated a year of planning, including its own internet domain with gooey photos of the couple and a lengthy wedding gift list, the bride casually asked me if I wanted to attend her post-wedding evening soiree, but not the main event. I was tempted by an appropriately pithy two-word response but instead feebly explained that I was already busy that weekend. The few friendly staff I knew at The Radio Authority had already asked me privately why I had not been invited and all I could do was shrug. I had no idea. Anybody who was anybody in the British radio industry seemed to have been invited. I could only surmise that I must be ‘nobody’, despite having planned and executed London’s most successful large-scale commercial radio station launch during the previous decade.

Naturally, the wedding juggernaut did not come to rest abruptly at the end of the Big Day. Afterwards there were still the communal experiences and the photos to be ooh-ed and ah-ed over by colleagues in the office … and the gossip. Who did what, who saw what and who said what occupied many of the staff for several weeks afterwards. I just sat at my desk pretending to be deaf, dumb and blind. All I learned was that everybody seemed to have had a good time. The wedding had at least not cost me a penny. No present, no card, no car hire, no petrol, no hotel, no tuxedo hire. Even if I had received an invitation, I might have proffered a public explanation that I could not afford all these costs on my meagre salary (particularly as I was commuting to London by train from Brighton), even whilst harbouring the private reason that the wedding’s scale and ostentatiousness seemed to be drawn from the pages of ‘Emma’.

A few months later, The Radio Authority closed and the majority of its staff transferred to a new regulator named Ofcom where we worked in a huge, open plan office overlooking the River Thames. I was relieved that my newly appointed desk was no longer next to the post-honeymoon bride, not because I disliked her, but because during my eighteen months at The Radio Authority she had insisted on running a powerful electric fan on her desk, whatever the season. It might have had the effect of making her feel like Kate Winslet on the bow of ‘The Titanic’ but the airstream had simultaneously played havoc with my sinuses. I had asked her repeatedly to adjust the fan’s angle but somehow it had still subjected me to painful headaches.

I had only transferred to Ofcom in the desperate hope of being offered some proper work tasks to tackle after having been required to do so little at its predecessor. It was not to be. My new boss Neil Stock gave me nothing to do. When the BBC called unexpectedly to offer me contract work in Cambodia, I accepted the challenge. During my last afternoon at Ofcom, I bade a fond farewell to the few lovely colleagues who had been so good to me. On route towards the exit, I passed Eva’s desk. I considered stopping to say farewell but then reflected on my experiences and resolved to walk on by.

The unmagical mystery tour : 1973 : Piggott’s Manor, Letchmore Heath

 There was a loud knock on the front door. Who could be visiting unannounced after dark? Certainly not Mr Dickinson from ‘The Pru’ who always called during daylight hours to collect monthly premiums in cash for our insurance policy. The opened door revealed two men in uniform whose van parked outside had a strange aerial on its roof. What had my father done? Was he about to be forcibly dragged away from our suburban Orgonon? No. The men said they were from the Post Office’s Radio Interference Service and were investigating a recent spate of complaints from residents in surrounding streets of strange patterns interrupting their television viewing. Could they come in and inspect our equipment?

My parents’ enthusiasm for modern gadgets had equipped our living room with one of Camberley’s first state-of-the-art Bush colour televisions to receive the ‘BBC2’ service launched earlier in 1964. It had required the installation of a different aerial on the roof and an amplifier to successfully receive the UHF signal from a far transmitter. Although our own television reception had been fine, the men from the ministry believed that the amplifier must be faulty, transmitting interference instead of receiving signals, a problem they had sleuthed to our house. We were required to switch off the amplifier and temporarily refrain from watching BBC2. Hullabaloo and Custard had sold us a technicolour dream though I was now to be deprived of my daily look through the square or round window with Big Ted and Jemima.

The technical problem was eventually fixed and our BBC2 viewing resumed, even after the annual Licence Fee was doubled to £10 in 1968 for the 20,428 UK households that owned a colour TV, a dismal figure that betrayed the initial failure of the technology’s launch. We missed the first black-and-white BBC1 transmission of ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ on Boxing Day 1967 because we always spent the holiday at my grandparents’ house next door, stoically without a television. Instead, we gathered in our living room expectantly on 5 January to watch BBC2 repeat the programme in colour. This film premiere had been trailed as an artistic triumph for the world’s biggest pop group.

My parents owned all The Beatles’ albums to date and had watched their films at the Camberley Odeon. Earlier that decade, my father had bought a second-hand Uher reel-to-reel tape machine and had recorded the group’s performances broadcast live on the BBC Light Programme with a microphone held to the speaker, while his family was ordered to remain silent. The resultant tapes were played repeatedly in our house at high volume, years before homemade audiocassette compilations became possible and decades before Spotify would offer the same outcome at the press of a mouse button.

Once the 52-minute film of embarrassingly indulgent pop icons acting sillily in and around a bizarre coach trip had ended, we looked around to gauge each other’s reactions. It had been an incomprehensible and barely entertaining viewing experience, we agreed. The next day at school I wrote a short account of our evening in my ‘day book’ and drew an accompanying colour picture. No classmates had watched the film. My female teacher likely presumed my parents to be hippies. Our home’s complete collection of Beatles albums came to an abrupt halt. My mother transferred her musical affections to non-stop Herb Alpert.

After this artistic disappointment, The Beatles faded from my childhood. I learned that John Lennon had moved into a mansion (‘Tittenhurst Park’) in nearby Ascot when one of my father’s clients was appalled to discover the identity of his new neighbour. I recall our family being dragged along by my father to walk around Bruce Forsyth’s house on Wentworth Drive as a possible home, the estate agent spouting that a Beatle lived nearby (Tittenhurst Park is 1.6 miles away). I was excited by our potential neighbour but appalled to contemplate a home adjacent to a golf course in the middle of nowhere. Luckily it never happened.

Years passed during which our family circumstances changed irreversibly. One morning in 1973, my father turned up unexpectedly at our home and insisted I accompany him on a trip. I adamantly refused but my mother insisted I go, hoping I might learn something about my father’s current ‘circumstances’. Only months earlier, he had quit our home for good and since had done his best to humiliate and impoverish his former family. He had even gone to court to demand regular access to his two-year-old daughter whom he had never wanted in the first place. One Friday a month, he would turn up and drive off with my baby sister, leaving my mother fretting inconsolably the whole weekend as to whether we might ever see her again. What ‘childcare’ my father provided at weekends we never learned, as he had been notably absent in his other children’s upbringing and his new lover was a mere teenager.

There was no conversation during our car journey. Not LITTLE conversation, NO conversation. My father talked though I said absolutely nothing. He still drove his left-hand-drive American Motors Javelin AMX sports car as fast and recklessly as he ever had, breaking speed limits, overtaking on blind corners and generally terrifying me. Only the air conditioning kept me cool. I hated being there. Since leaving our home, my father had ignored me, ignored my birthday, ignored Christmas and sustained his total disinterest in my life. I had no respect for him because he had never done anything to earn respect from me. He seemed not to have the faintest idea of what a father should say or do for his children. Tellingly, after he had left, I never missed my father at all. Rather than tears, I felt relief. Why would I miss someone who had only ever used my talents to further his own greedy ambitions?

After an hour and a half of stoney silence, we had travelled past Elstree and arrived before a huge mock-Tudor mansion in extensive grounds. He parked facing the front of the house and its luxurious lawns, telling me he had to go inside for a meeting and would leave me in the car for a while. I was just pleased not to have to suffer any more of my father’s dangerous driving and not to have to be in the company of someone who had always felt like a stranger to me. I switched on the car radio and listened to music.

I saw lots of people all dressed in similar orange medieval-style robes coming and going from the mansion and walking along its driveway in singles and in groups. I had never seen anything like it. Not in Britain anyway. I had seen photos of Buddhist monks in picture albums of faraway lands. But it felt eerie to be seated in a car in deepest rural Hertfordshire, surrounded on its driveway by people who looked as if they had materialised en masse from another dimension and a different time. What was I doing here and, more to the point, what was my father doing here?

Only later did I learn that Beatles member George Harrison had recently purchased this property with its seventeen acres of land, then known as Piggott’s Manor, and donated it to the Hare Krishna religious movement that had outgrown its Hindu temple in central London. The property was renamed Bhaktivedanta Manor and immediately attracted a huge volume of visiting devotees, the religion’s membership having been boosted by Harrison’s very public advocacy since The Beatles years. In the present day, 60,000 visitors annually are reported to attend its religious festivals.

For me, the irony of our visit that day was that my father’s life could not have been further from the altruistic philosophies of the Hare Krishna movement. I knew he had no interest in religion and had probably never even visited a church. If he was here, it must have been for his professional advice as a quantity surveyor. Perhaps modifications were necessary to this mansion as it had functioned as a nurses’ training college since 1957, owned by St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London. How could he have hustled this appointment? We knew from my father’s court papers that he claimed now to be living in the gated, 420-property St George’s Hill estate in Weybridge, home to many pop and entertainment celebrities, including John Lennon (before his move to Ascot) and Ringo Starr.

Did I meet George Harrison? No. Was I invited inside the mansion to hold the end of my father’s tape measure, a task required of me since I could walk? I honestly cannot remember. What happened next? I know he drove me home … again in silence. I was so consumed by the pointlessness of our father/son ‘road trip’ that almost everything else that had occurred was immediately eclipsed in my mind. Why had he insisted I accompany him? Was he trying to impress me? Was he trying belatedly to demonstrate his credential as a father? Or had he imagined I could help him secure a new client? I have no answers. It became our final day spent (un)together.

Half a century later, I was watching the 1969 Beatles footage in the fascinating 2021 ‘Get Back’ documentary when I noticed a Hare Krishna member who had accompanied George Harrison sat cross-legged on the floor of the group’s recording session. Memories of one of the strangest and most unrewarding days spent with my father came flooding back.

The man who mistook his wife for a hat : 2006-2009 : Enders Analysis

 1976. With trepidation, I knocked on the door of the Durham student newspaper to volunteer, opened it and encountered a cacophony of shrill, loud voices in an office no bigger than a two-up-two-down front room. A dozen people in close proximity were conversing at sufficient volume for their voices to project into a distant corner of a non-existent adjacent room. Never had I heard so few people generate so much noise. Not a chummy American loudness, but a commanding-the-troops ‘I’m in charge’ harshness. When one woman spoke, it sounded exactly how I imagined a horse might talk. I had stumbled into toff-land, the privileged world of the privately educated, a parallel universe of entitlement I had observed in television historical dramas but not realised still existed in the late twentieth century. Did I grow accustomed to their gratuitous noise pollution? No.

2006. With trepidation, I started my first day’s work at Enders Analysis. Its location in elite Mayfair, opposite the rear entrance of Park Lane’s Grosvenor Hotel, conveyed ‘class’. I was given a desk in a cramped room shared with colleagues who spoke loudly in plummy accents. The previous occasion I had endured transportation to toff-land, thirty years earlier, at least my commitment had been voluntary. Now I was indentured to spend forty hours a week in this socially hostile environment. Each occasion I opened my mouth seemed to confirm my appointment as the ‘accidental analyst’ to a job usually pre-ordained for yet another privately educated chap. Within days, the questions started.

“Why do you arrive at work so early every day?” asked Ian Watt one morning.

“My wife has to start work early, so I leave home with her,” I replied.

“Your wife is a banker?” my colleague suggested. I struggled to maintain a straight face at such a bizarre presumption.

“No,” I responded with hesitancy. “She works in an NHS hospital.”

There was a gap. I sensed a sharp intake of breath.

“Ooooohhhh,” said Watt with evident disappointment that betrayed a palpable disregard for public service, whether someone worked in a hospital kitchen or the deputy chief executive’s office.

If boisterous office chit-chat (“I’m off on holiday to Brazil next week”) proved insufficiently distracting, it was accompanied by personal phone calls made from colleagues’ desks, sometimes communicating disturbing content. Do I really need to hear you phoning a credit card company to increase the limit on a card in your father’s name for which you had applied and use? We all carried personal mobile phones and could go outside to make calls but, for these colleagues, there was evidently no shame or embarrassment in broadcasting their latest Famous Five-ish japes.

One regularly phoned his wife and, instead of a loving message, he would bark orders to her at the top of his voice as if she were a half-deaf scullery maid in his medieval castle. The tone of his phone calls disturbed me sufficiently to glance around our room to determine if the others had similarly felt they were being forced to eavesdrop on a suspected witch undergoing torture by the Inquisitor. None of them looked up or flinched during his tirades, as I did. I felt so alone in this workplace, observing that such humiliation of a fellow human appeared not only acceptable in toff-land but might be practised by my other colleagues.

“My wife is an opera singer,” he would turn around to tell us once his aggressive phone diatribes ended. I was uncertain whether this occupation was some kind of toff codeword for ‘slave’, or perhaps his entire household was staging a never-ending operetta in the ballroom where he had to phone in his part as the angry, posh analyst husband from Mayfair. His behaviour made me contemplate walking over and committing workplace violence but I was restrained by my poor chances in a pistol duel at dawn.

I soon discovered that ritual humiliation appeared to be my new workplace’s predominant management style. Within weeks of starting the job, I attended my first one-day radio conference at a Mayfair hotel a few hundred metres from the office. During the opening morning session, I received a text from a colleague telling me to return to the office because our boss needed me to do something unspecified urgently. Reluctantly leaving the conference, I returned to the office to be told that our boss was not there but would return soon. By the time the conference ended, I had wasted most of the day sat at my desk waiting for something, anything, to happen that required my presence.

If your private schooling imbued you with the notion that Miss Havisham was an ideal role model, such behaviour must simply propagate down your family money-tree. Many more humiliations followed, all of which I accepted with the uncomplaining resignation that a servant is forced to adopt to remain in the employ of an unhinged ‘big house’. The consequence is that the master progressively ups the ante in order to prompt a reaction, any kind of reaction, to their extensive repertoire of humiliations … and so it was.

2008. In front of my colleagues, boss Claire Enders told me she did not appreciate my work clothes. My suits were too baggy and my shirts were too patterned. I had not changed my dress style since starting work there, so I recognised this as her latest attrition. I wore a black or grey suit, a ‘designer’ work shirt, a subtly patterned tie and black shiny shoes. Once a month, my wife accompanied me on a Saturday hike around local men’s outfitters to peruse and purchase sale items. As a result of my daily cross-country run, my shoulders were broad but my waist was narrow, making any suit look ‘baggy’ on me. It was not my fault that many of my work colleagues were Billy Bunter-like!

In response, I resorted to wearing a plain white shirt and black tie every day under one of my existing suits. Then, in front of my colleagues, Enders complained I looked like an undertaker and ordered me to go to gentleman’s shops on Jermyn Street to buy new clothes. My patience with these workplace humiliations was wearing thin by my third year there. I neither agreed nor refused. As the only parent in the analyst team financially supporting their child’s university education, I could not suddenly throw my earnings at hideously expensive clothes. I had kept to my employer’s dress code at all times. I hoped that this latest humiliation might blow over … but I underestimated the persistence of my protagonist.

One week later, colleague Ian Watt told me he had been instructed to take me to Jermyn Street to buy new, more suitable clothes. We took a taxi, something I never afforded. During the one-kilometre journey, Watt wittered on about stuff while I shut my ears and stared vacantly out the window. I had decided to go along passively with his mission, as if he were demonstrating his superior breeding to a servant or slave … or wife. I did not lose my temper, argue or contradict him. I was merely a lowly bit player in his ‘Downton Abbey’ roadmap of British society. In my head, I was amused at the ridiculousness of this situation.

Inside the Dickensian shop (“Suits you, sir!”), Watt chose a new wardrobe for me. Bright pink shirts, elastic braces, ugly black shoes. I offered no opinion about his preferences. All I would have needed was a red nose to join a touring circus. He took my ‘outfit’ to the cash desk and unexpectedly asked me to pay. I refused. There was a standoff. Frustrated at not fulfilling the ultimate humiliation of making me fund my own unrequested makeover, he stormed off to replace most items on their shelves, before proffering his credit card to pay for the remaining two. During our taxi journey back to the office, I remained detached even when I heard him bellow at me:

“If you had attended a public school*, even a minor one, you would know how to dress!”

There, laid bare, was his contempt for me. It mattered not one iota that I had started working in radio more than three decades earlier and had successfully launched commercial stations attracting millions of listeners in the UK, Europe and Asia. It mattered not one iota that I had earned more mass media coverage for Enders Analysis with my published reports about the radio industry than all my analyst colleagues combined. All that mattered to him was the type of school I had attended many moons ago. The five-figure sum that his parents must have paid each term for his private school education seemed to entitle him to treat me like … you know what.

Unlike Pip, I harboured no desire to be accepted as a ‘gentleman’ by London society. You could stuff your flouncy shirts, your waistcoats, your pocket watch, your braces, your uncomfortable shoes, your sickening attitude to people like me. I knew who I was and was perfectly content in my own skin. Born in a council house, I attended school on a council estate and was obliged to become male head of my single-parent household at the age of fourteen. That is who I was. I refused to lick your … overprivileged ego.

Back at the office, the clothes bought in Jermyn Street sat in a bag beside my desk. I refused to even look at them. Naturally, further humiliations followed until, within months, I was forced out of my job. When I left for the final time, I placed the bag of new, unworn toff-wear on my empty office chair. There were no farewell drinks. There was no gratitude. There were no goodbyes. One day I was at work, then I had gone. Exiled from toff-land.

Several months later, I received an unexpected call on my mobile from Ian Watt. There was some work Enders Analysis wanted me to do. I knew from experience that Claire Enders could humiliate to the bitter end former employees who had been edged out of her workplace by asking a staff member to renew contact on her behalf. Watt droned on for a while and, though I was sorely tempted to shout an expletive at the same volume he reserved for humiliating people like me, I simply responded ‘no’ and put the phone down.

I don’t wanna go to Jermyn Street … ever again.

[* In British English, 'public school' confusingly means a private secondary school requiring fees.]

Blinded by the light : 1967 : Architectural Drawing Services, 27b High Street, Camberley

 It was a mystery. Questions were asked. Answers were not forthcoming. Nobody could understand what had happened. Evidently something must have occurred. But what? And how? The professionals were stumped. I could not help. I had no answers either. Had I been in an accident? No. Had I hit my head? No. Had my face been hurt? No. I remained as baffled as were they. I had no answers. The whole thing was to remain a complete mystery … for decades.

Once a year, we were told to stand in line in the corridor in our underwear. Boys in the morning, girls in the afternoon. I hated standing around near-naked in public. One by one we were ushered into an office where a nurse rushed through an eye test, a hearing test and pinged our underpants’ elastic for a gender check. It was the result of my eye test that held up the ‘production line’ for processing my classmates. The record card had logged my vision as 20/20 one year ago. How come, now, I was so short-sighted that I could read no further than the second line on the eye chart? It was a complete mystery.

Children tend to join a ‘family business’ once they have finished their education. I was put to work by my father before I started school. Once I could walk, I accompanied him on appointments to measure houses, shops, offices and factories where I held the end of a long tape measure marked in feet-and-inches, wound out from a brown holder the size and shape of a discus. Once I could read, I ensured copies of design periodicals including ‘Architects Journal’ were returned to his office shelves in strict chronological order. Once I could write, I used Letraset sheets to transfer stylised, appropriately scaled men or women pushing pushchairs onto his ‘artist’s impression’ building elevation plans. Such was the volume of graphics and lettering I used that the well-thumbed, thick, ring-bound Letraset catalogue became the closest we had to a Bible in our house.

My father’s office was a Portacabin behind the garage in our back garden. As our house was only 300 yards from the town centre, clients could visit him easily. However, my parents were about to move to a house they had been building two miles on the opposite side of town that was reached by an unmade road. It would prove useless for a business. The solution was the rental of a town centre office at 27b High Street on a busy pedestrian alleyway connecting to the Knoll Road public car parks. It had three rooms: a small lobby, a main room large enough for two drawing boards and a desk with an electric typewriter, plus a smaller back room. My father registered a company named ‘Architectural Drawing Services’ and ordered letterheads, invoices, statements and business cards with an olive-green border from Southwell Press in Park Street.

The office windows faced the wall of the Midland Bank building on the other side of the alley. My mother had applied to work there in the early 1950’s, desiring a job closer to home than the administrative role at Elizabeth Shaw’s chocolate factory she had taken after leaving the grammar school on Frimley Road. Thrilled to learn that her application had been successful, she was disappointed to be told she could not work there because no women’s toilet existed in the building where only men were employed. Instead, she was offered the same job at the Midland branch in Farnborough where she could use the female public toilet in the newly built Queensmead shopping plaza … which she accepted and had to commute.

In my father’s new office, I was given three additional tasks. At the end of each month, I typed the invoices, statements and their envelopes. If clients’ payments were overdue, I had a box of green, yellow and red warning stickers I would lick and attach to their statements, printed with progressively strident threats. I handwrote details of each invoice into a large accounting ledger, the opposite page of which my mother updated with bill payments she had made.

Secondly, once school finished at four o’clock, I would pay a halfpenny to catch the number 1 or 2 or 3C bus to the town centre and wait in my father’s office until he was ready to drive us home for ‘tea’ at our new house. He would regularly ‘pop out’ and leave me alone in order to (I learned much later from my mother) spend an hour or so with his current mistress. Clients and potential clients visiting the office late afternoon might find it manned only by a polite nine-year old boy, banging out documents on an IBM Selectric typewriter he had mastered years earlier. It must have seemed bizarre.

Things could have been worse. If I had been born a hundred years earlier, I might have been sent up chimneys as I was appropriately thin and tall (only Pamela Munroe and Marina Hirons were taller in my class of thirty). As it was, I was made familiar with most aspects of running a small business by the time I finished primary school. These were skills that schools (and even university) failed to consider worthwhile imparting, and why girls like my mother had to be sent subsequently to ‘secretarial school’ to learn the practical aspects of commerce about which their male bosses would never need to worry their unpretty big heads.

My third task was to work in the rear office that was off-limit to clients, kept darkened by a venetian blind across its window and contained two printing machines. One was an absolutely massive dyeline printer that used ammonia solution and photosensitive paper to reproduce paper copies of 36- by 48-inch architectural plans drawn onto tracing paper. There was no ventilation from the room as the door to the main office had to be kept shut to keep out the light, as did the one window to prevent a breeze blowing the blind. The second machine was a Rank Xerox monochrome photocopier that used ultraviolet light to print onto photosensitive A4 paper.

During term time, I would regularly do small copying jobs for my father after school on both machines. I hated the smell of the ammonia, the heat generated by the machines and the bright light emitted by the photocopier. During this era, such machines were uncommon outside cities and my father soon realised he could subsidise their cost by offering copying services to non-clients. He was approached by the Associated Examining Board [AEB], the only GCE examination board not linked to a university, which had moved from London to nearby Aldershot in 1966 and was seeking a business to contract for photocopying services. It would mean taking on a lot of seasonal work but the returns would prove significant. The deal was done.

Schools in the UK and former colonies took GCE exams every June, sent them directly to the persons appointed to mark them, who then sent them to AEB. A percentage of papers for each subject were then forwarded by AEB to a different academic whose job was to check that the initial marking was appropriate and consistent. They were sent a photocopy of the student’s marked work to ensure the original would not be lost. Turnaround time for these tasks was critical as exam boards notified students of their results in August before the new school year started the following month.

My mother was occupied at home caring for my younger preschool brother so it fell upon me to fulfil this contract. Most of my school summer holiday had to be spent in the darkened back room of my father’s office, photocopying thousands of examination scripts for days on end. It was hot work and the ultraviolet light flashed around the edges of the document plateau thousands of times. AEB were pleased with the results and renewed the contract to execute the same work for their less busy December exam retakes. Bang went my Christmas holidays too!

The outcome, which everyone had apparently failed to anticipate, was my mother taking me to Leightons opticians at the top of the High Street to purchase my first pair of NHS glasses with thick lenses in tortoiseshell frames. I refused to wear them at school, not because I feared being bullied (something never witnessed at Cordwalles Junior School) but because it was so rare then for children of my age to wear glasses. My stubbornness perplexed teacher Mr Hales who struggled to comprehend why I could no longer copy down things he wrote on the blackboard. Had one of 4H’s brightest students suddenly become illiterate?

Subsequent eye tests proved just as baffling to opticians who could not understand why my eyesight had deteriorated so suddenly during one year, but then remained static for years afterwards. It confounded me too for a long time until I finally understood the havoc wreaked on eyesight by lengthy unfiltered exposure to UV light. The only positive side effect was that, in every workplace I have since worked, I have been the one person in the office who can be relied upon to fix a malfunctioning photocopier!

Once I progressed to secondary school in 1969, I became too busy completing mountains of homework to continue the monthly office tasks. Besides, my father was about to upgrade my ‘help’ to evaluating the potential profitability of local property deals for a considerably more lucrative sideline he had discovered. I also suspect he preferred I spend less time at his office because, the older I was, the more difficult it became for him to disguise his dalliances with women.

In 1972, my father left our family forever to run off with recent teenage bride Suzie Anthony who lived a few doors away. The courts ordered him to pay the mortgage on our house and maintenance to my mother and her three children. He avoided payment, claiming he was unemployed despite living in salubrious, gated St Georges Hill, Weybridge. He broke into our house while we were out and stole almost everything he had ever provided for us, including some of my treasured vinyl records purchased with pocket money. My mother had to take both a day job and an evening cleaning job to try and make ends meet.

On my sixteenth birthday in 1974, my father applied to Farnham court to reduce my maintenance payment to £1 per year, arguing that I was now old enough to take a job. The court agreed, despite him already owing thousands in arrears and me about to take eight O-level exams and hoping to continue my education with A-levels and university. I received a letter from the court informing me of its decision at a hearing of which neither I nor my mother had prior knowledge. When the amount owing mounted even further, he fled abroad. Farnham court said it was our responsibility to trace his whereabouts.

In 1976, entirely coincidentally, my first paying job was processing examination papers at AEB in Aldershot. Almost a decade had passed since I had similarly handled thousands of students’ handwritten GCE scripts from all over the world in my father’s office. It was difficult not to believe in some kind of ‘fate’.

My father died in 2013 though I was not invited to his funeral. A handwritten will bequeathed the majority of his assets to my younger brother whose contribution to my father’s business in Camberley had been … zero.

From Russia with lawlessness : 1994 : Metromedia, Park Place, Moscow

 “I am a paediatric doctor,” said the young woman cleaning the toilet bowl in the bathroom of my apartment. “I work at the hospital during the day but I cannot live on my salary, so I have to work as a cleaner every evening.”

I was embarrassed. Although the doctor had been cleaning my apartment nightly, this was the first occasion I had attempted to strike up a conversation. I had mistakenly presumed that my ‘cleaner’ spoke no English. How wrong I was! Maybe she assumed I was a snobby American corporate manager who had just been posted overseas. How wrong she was! I was an unemployed Brit forced to take some freelance radio consulting work abroad, having failed to secure a job in my own backyard. Both of us were having to do what we did to survive.

I felt disorientated here. It was my first time in Russia. I would never have chosen to work here. But it could have been worse. My client, American public corporation Metromedia, had initially told me my destination was to be Nizhny Novgorod. I had had to consult a map to even locate that industrial city on the Volga. Thankfully, instead, I was sent to cosmopolitan Moscow. But looks are deceiving. My surroundings gave the semblance of a modern city but almost nothing actually worked as it should. Here was an incomplete facsimile of Western capitalist infrastructure in which the Soviet state had copied the designs without implementing the mechanisms. It recalled the era when a ‘Made in China’ label was a surefire guarantee a product that might look good would quickly fail.

My one-bedroom apartment appeared quite luxurious, about three times the size of my poky second-floor flat in London, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows on an upper floor that looked out over the permanent pollution rising from Moscow’s busy streets. It was inside a huge, newly built trio of linked office blocks containing office spaces and 330 apartments intended for foreign businesses that required a secure location 14 kilometres from the Kremlin. It was like living in one of those vast complexes portrayed in American movies about the self-destructive life of a harassed corporate ‘road warrior’. Maybe it was designed to offer ex-pats that kind of bland fictional familiarity.

In January 1994, Metromedia had bought one of the least popular FM radio stations in Moscow, planning to turn it into one of the most popular. There was a hitch. The Americans were baffled by the radio market not just in Russia, but in the whole of Europe. They could hear 30+ stations broadcasting in Moscow but they could not fathom what they were doing on-air. This was not simply a language problem. It was a challenge because Americans were accustomed to tightly defined music or speech broadcasters in their commercial radio system. You only had to listen to the vast majority of American radio stations for around ten minutes to recognise their ‘format’. Europe was not like that, largely because ‘public service broadcasting’ had been legislated as the bedrock of its broadcast systems since the invention of radio.

Before my flight to Moscow, I had purchased a Sony all-band radio from an electronics shop in Watford for almost £100. It was now put to service all day while I listened hour after hour to a particular Moscow radio station, writing notes about the music played, the talk, the advertisements, the jingles and anything else I heard. I was used to listening to radio stations in languages of which I had no comprehension, having spent so many weekend nights as a schoolboy DX-ing radio stations from all over the world on a Trio 9R59DS radio receiver. I had also analysed local radio markets in the UK for groups applying for new licences, monitoring existing stations’ broadcasts and tabulating the results. It might be boring work but at least I was being paid to do it!

One morning I received an email requesting my presence at an important staff meeting to be held in the Metromedia office within Park Place. This surprised me for several reasons: I was not an employee, I had never previously been invited to such a meeting in Moscow and, most astonishingly, nobody had told me that Metromedia even had an office within the same building where I was living. I had to call the phone number on the message to ask where precisely this office was located within the complex.

After spending so many days alone in the apartment listening to my radio and writing copious observations, it was an adventure to walk through the building’s labyrinth of anonymous floors and numbered doors to eventually locate and knock on the Metromedia office. After weeks of perpetual solitude, it felt like coming out of prison to be greeted by a surprise party. The room was full of Americans of whom I had never been aware, let alone met, all chatting away noisily. None of them had the faintest idea who I was, requiring my explanation that I too had received THE email. They were very welcoming in the American way, despite probably wondering why on earth this unknown, scraggy Englishman was present.

The meeting started soberly with an update on Metromedia’s progress attracting paying subscribers to its broadcast television service ‘Kosmos TV’ and mobile phone system it had apparently launched in 1991 in partnership with the state’s ‘Moscow Television & Transmitter Centre’. I had no idea that Metromedia had been operating in Moscow several years already and had been investing around US$5m annually in that particular joint venture business. The good news was its success in building a growing subscriber base. However, the reason for this meeting was the bad news that the Russian who had been appointed manager of the business had just disappeared with all its funds and had proven untraceable. There were long faces. Oh dear.

Welcoming the variation from my usual lonely routine, I spent the remainder of that day in the office chatting with some of my newly discovered Metromedia colleagues. At that stage, it seemed unclear whether the television business could continue and whether the office would even remain in operation. I met the corporation’s financial analyst Muema Lombe who shared my interest in pirate radio and he generously introduced me to the basics of Excel, the software that has been the mainstay of my analysis work ever since. We remain close friends since that chance introduction in Moscow.

On the way back to my apartment, I called in at the ‘Garden Ring Irish Supermarket’ in the Park Place lobby to buy my regular supplies. It was a smaller satellite branch of the bigger shop in the city centre that had opened in 1992. I was surviving on breakfast cereal, milk, bananas, tea and snacks, particularly American ‘Oreo’ cookies which I had never seen before. There was no cooking equipment in the apartment beyond a kettle, probably to encourage residents to eat in the complex’s vastly overpriced restaurant. Lacking a corporate expense account, I only ate there when my American line manager John Catlett was in Moscow, enduring hour-long waits to be served the simplest meals.

Although the Park Place shop’s range of food was limited, it felt too dangerous to shop outside as a foreigner. Russians bought provisions at kiosks where they could ask for the items they wanted, whereas foreigners like me had to frequent self-serve retailers where they became easily identifiable targets. In 1993, more than 7,000 crimes against foreigners had been reported in Russia, including the editor of the English-language ‘Moscow Times’ newspaper who had been robbed of cash and a laptop by men with knives outside the city centre’s Garden Ring Irish Supermarket. I had watched a ‘CNN’ report that Russia’s murder rate was three times higher than the United States’ and was only surpassed by South Africa.

Due to its success attracting foreign customers, the Irish Supermarket itself soon became a target. After its owners resisted a takeover by their Russian partner Dmitry Kishiev, there were reports of an alleged overnight explosion at its city centre store. The ‘Moscow Times’ reported: “Apparently fearing for their safety, the Irish partners then fled the country, urging their more than two-dozen expatriate employees to do likewise.”

Once Russians took over the ‘Irish’ supermarket, I noticed food on sale in Park Place marked with long gone expiry dates, the prices increased, customers deserted and eventually the shops closed altogether. Like everything else in Russia, ‘business’ was not considered a product of entrepreneurial spirit or managerial prowess. Instead, it was considered a lucky lottery ticket permitting almost anyone lacking relevant skills to intimidate, bully and exert power to enrich themselves over others.

Russia during the 1990’s was frequently referred to as the ‘Wild West’. There was a sense that just about anything you could imagine might happen there … and it frequently did. My corporate apartment felt like a haven of relative ‘normality’ within a crazed parallel universe. I cannot recall anyone being murdered at Park Place during my initial stay, unlike subsequent visits to Russia when I was given accommodation in hotels of variable quality and security. Never did I value boring old Britain so much as the days I would thankfully walk on the tarmac of Heathrow airport after yet another prolonged stay in Russia.

“A powerful bomb blast in the city’s centre on Saturday afternoon took the life of a Moscow student. The bomb which, according to police, had power equivalent to approximately 400 grams of TNT, had been placed inside a large metal dumpster on ul Bolshaya Spasskaya not far from Leningradsky train station. According to eyewitnesses, at the time of the blast, the 23-year-old female student of farming was walking by the dumpster. The strength of the explosion tore off one of her arms and blew out most of the windows in neighbouring buildings … Witnesses reported that just a few moments before the blast, several men had tried forcibly to enter a building next to where the explosion took place, but that after a doorman refused to let them enter the building, they threw a package into the dumpster.”

Small story on PAGE SEVEN of the ‘Moscow Tribune’, 30 January 1996