A career in a thousand words

Where did the last forty years go?

© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans

As regular readers will know, I recently called time on my other career. I worked in IT for forty years, more if you count the school holidays I spent writing software for my dad’s clients from the age of 14.

Forty years is a long time, but strangely I have clearer memories of the early years than more recent ones. But it clearly all happened: the HMRC website tells me I’ve made all the National Insurance contributions necessary to draw a full state pension when I reach 67.

My career comprised just five ‘proper’ jobs, plus a couple of years taken off between various of those to write.

The first was at the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign, where I started out as a volunteer. Back in 1986 the British Government, at that time helmed by one Margaret Thatcher, was rather more beneficent than it is today. Not only did it pay my rent in full, but I also got the dole (unemployment benefit, for younger readers) which was just about enough to live on.

All I had to do was show up at a drab building in Woolwich once a fortnight to ‘sign on’ and the state would keep me in beer while I devoted my energies to changing the world. Don’t think too badly of me, though: I only scrounged off the tax-payer for three months or so before working my way into a paid post at £8,500 a year.

At that time, Nicaragua was the lefty cause, and drew immense support. I recall struggling to the NatWest bank on City Road with buckets full of carefully counted coins, donations received at a benefit concert or some other fundraising event.

Not to mention the wads of cheques I used to bank almost daily. Each time I entered the bank, usually only a few minutes before closing, the first member of staff to spot me would issue a plaintive cry of ‘Nicaragua’s in’ - the signal for colleagues to rally round and help, hundreds of cheques having to be manually tallied and reconciled to my paying-in slip before the bank could close for the day. It does occur to me that nobody born after 1986 will have any idea what I’m taking about.

One other thing I should mention: at the time, Daniel Ortega (then, as now, President of Nicaragua) was someone to be admired - I even named my cat after him. Alas, like so many revolutionary leaders, Ortega (the human not the cat) subsequently became an autocrat, prepared to do anything to stay in power. Back then though, he and his Sandinista Party did remarkable things for ordinary Nicaraguans in the face of immense pressure from the United States. Anyone remember Iran-Contra and Oliver North?

It was an exciting time for a 22 year old: one highlight was a benefit performance offered by the Royal Court Theatre. As usual, I volunteered to stand in the foyer holding a bucket for patrons to toss coins (and notes) into as they entered the building. Imagine my delight when I discovered the other volunteer was Julie Christie.

Needless to say, her bucket was considerably fuller than mine by the end of the evening, but I like to think Julie and I made a good team, though I don’t imagine she remembers the experience quite as clearly as I do.

As peak Nicaragua passed, and the A-list celebs began to switch their allegiance to the next big cause (Palestine, I think, it comes round most decades); after seven years in a house share, I wanted to get a place of my own.

Once again, younger readers will think I’m making this up, but in 1989, for anyone with a reasonable degree and some skills to offer, there were plenty of well-paid jobs around; jobs that paid enough for a 25 year old with little in the way of a deposit to get a mortgage on a two-bed flat. We’ll gloss over the fact that within six months I was paying 12.5% interest on my mortgage repayments (it wasn’t all plain sailing, even then) but I found a lovely flat not far from Charlton Station, for an easy commute into London and my new job in the IT Department of a large insurance broker.

It was a big change, and while I learned an immense amount which would stand me in good stead subsequently, my idealistic young self hated working in ‘the City’. So after two years, when I saw an job ad for a post with Save the Children in Mozambique, I duly applied.

Six weeks later I was on a flight to Lisbon for two months of intensive language tuition. The only time I spoke English during that period was when I phoned home to speak to my parents. Then it was on to a direct flight to Maputo to begin my new job, and what felt like a new life.

I subsequently learned that the overnight flight from Lisbon to Maputo was made on the only DC-10 still in service. Goodness knows how many hours it had flown, but it got me there safe and sound. As I emerged into the blinding light and the chaos of Maputo airport that Saturday morning, I began to get an sense of how life would be for the next three years.

The very plane. Photograph by Michel Gilliland.

I’ll never forget that first day: many of my new colleagues turned out to greet me, and several took me to lunch at a restaurant on the beach, where they quickly persuaded me to abandon my strict vegetarianism and try the squid, which I’d never eaten before. It remains one of the best meals I’ve ever had. If you ever get the chance to eat two-hour-old Indian Ocean squid, you know what to do.

That evening, they took me to the Costa Do Sol, a restuarant of considerable repute among people who’ve spent time in the region, where we danced the night away to the fabulous Ghorwane. Having barely slept on the creaky old DC-10 the previous night, the sun was coming up by the time I finally got to bed.

The next morning it was straight into a meeting with the Deputy Minister of Health, and a stern test of my Portuguese.

Three years later, on a trip to Brazil, the landlady of the pensão where I was staying in the beautiful town of Paraty, asked me about my Portuguese. ‘You speak so well,’ she said, ‘but I can’t work out your accent.’ When I told her I’d been working in Mozambique, she said 'of course, you have an African accent, but you are white,’ before retreating to the kitchen in fits of laughter.

I returned from Mozambique in 1994, taking some time off to travel, write, and care for my newborn nephew, whose arrival at precisely the time my sister was studying for her Masters, meant she was in need of free childcare. Returning to London from Kansas City, where she had made her home, I joined Shelter, the homelessness charity, where I spent a rewarding if exhausting few years running their rapidly expanding IT function.

As well as having to replace legacy systems for finance and fundraising, and develop software to support Britain’s first 24-hour telephone helpline for homeless people, all at the same time; people were also demanding access to all manner of new-fangled technologies, such as email. But I look back especially fondly on that job because it’s where I met my wife.

It was after Shelter, and another brief writing sabbatical, that I was hired by Mary Evans Picture Library to help them navigate the rapid changes that digitisation was about to wreak on the image licencing industry.

The quarter century I spent there flew by. I feel considerable pride that, at a time when many independent picture agencies were being gobbled up by the likes of Getty Images, Corbis (backed by Bill Gates) and Shutterstock, we managed to remain independent and compete on pretty much equal terms, despite market conditions that constantly forced prices down while costs inevitably went up.

I hadn’t anticipated it lasting 25 years, but it turned out to be a great move. It was a ten minute walk from home - the absence of a commute was worth so much. It was flexible and so afforded me some time to write. And I enjoyed the company of great colleagues, many of whom were supremely knowledgeably about aspects of history about which I knew very little.

For fifteen of those years I was able to take our beloved and much-missed cocker spaniel, Missie, to work with me, where she earned the honorary title of Staff Morale Officer. And, for the last nine months, her replacement, the irrepressible Lottie, a quite different character who didn’t really have enough time to graduate beyond causing chaos.

I also attended the funerals of four colleagues: Mary Evans in 2010, and her husband Hilary the following year. Two remarkable people who had founded the library back in 1964, the year I was born. Then last year, that of my friend and colleague of 23 years, Gill Stoker, whose amazing hidden life I wrote about here. And finally this year, Shirley Evans, Mary and Hilary’s sister-in-law, who, during her long retirement from teaching, was a constant and cheery presence in the library, helping out with all manner of administrative tasks and making sure nobody’s birthday was ever missed.

I haven’t retired of course; I’m only 61 after all. No, I’m just enjoying one final, late career change, as I described in this recent post.

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ps: apologies for the slightly deceptive headline. This post does indeed run to something over 1000 words, but ‘A career in 1,347 Words’ doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.