The Jeremy Lewis Prize: our first winner writes about her first job – at Butlin’s
The first winner of the writing competition in honour of our late and much-missed Deputy Editor is Janet Bettesworth’s Butlin’s memoir
My first job, as a student, was in 1961. Middle-class Charlotte, Barbara, Judy and I had finished our course at art school in Canterbury and were all headed for London colleges in the autumn. Although our grants were generous and free, we needed spending money and fancied a plunge into the kiss-me-quick world of Butlin’s holiday camp, Margate, now defunct. We easily got waitress jobs there, at £3 a week.
I had fallen obsessively in love with the librarian at Canterbury, Mr Hatt. He’d opened a world to us far beyond provincial Kent – Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the Beat Generation. At Margate, in gaps between waitressing, I’d stare out to sea in an erotic haze of longing. Our squalid dormitory, with its bunks and a tattered poster of Billy Fury, added to the sense of doomed romance. We were all virgins.
Health and Safety had yet to be invented. On the long plastic tablecloths you could score a line through the grime. The turnaround between the two meal sittings was so rushed that waitresses used their spit to clean a smeared plate or fork. The happy campers in the vast dining hall never noticed – distracted by the cry of ‘Hi-de-hi!’ from the Redcoats, to which they yelled back, ‘Ho-de-ho!’
Carrying a metal rack, each with six food-laden china plates, in each hand, we shouldered open a spring-loaded swing door to reach our work stations of long tables with 24 diners. It was a hot summer and the kitchen was an inferno. Once, near the end of a week, with perspiration dripping into my eyes, I misjudged the door, which crashed into me and sent the china plates smashing onto the floor.
Billy Butlin complied with the law that 10 per cent of kitchen staff were employed from mental hospitals’ day-release programmes. These amiable, lethargic men leant against the kitchen wall, flies open, gently scratching; the food, scrambled eggs included, was dolloped on the plates by them by hand, to save time.
Prominently displayed on the kitchen wall was the ‘Either/or’ choice for breakfast: ‘Three Prunes’ or ‘Two Tablespoons Cornflakes’.
These were the days of the Knobbly Knees and Glamorous Granny competitions, arranged by the Redcoats. They sang and organised ballroom dancing, in the hope of a showbiz career. They were allowed to join Equity; Des O’connor, Jimmy Tarbuck and Michael Barrymore were all Redcoats.
To acquire more funds, I signed up behind one of the Butlin’s bars – which almost caused my death. The bar, with all windows firmly closed, was presided over by a laconic, middle-aged woman who barely glanced up at my arrival.
‘Just stand over here,’ she snapped. It got hotter and more airless as time wore on. When she went to the loo, I poured myself a squash from a bottle of Robinsons Barley Water, and took a grateful, greedy gulp. Instantly, my throat seized up and I was fighting for breath. At that moment, my boss returned. Doubled up, I croaked, ‘Help! Help me! I can’t breathe!’
She sighed and said, ‘If you’re not feeling well, love, go to the doctor,’ before picking up her Daily Express. I drank a lot of tap water and read the small label on the bottle, written in Biro: bleach.
Janet Bettesworth, 73, is a stand-up comedian and retired art teacher