Autobiographical

So back to that short and succinct job ad in the Evening Standard. “Wanted: sales assistants at book store. Graduates preferred, Saturday work mandatory.” I seemed to meet the requirements. The employer: Foyles. I applied and was offered an interview slot at the end of the week. I actually had the “good” fortune to be interviewed by the owner, the elderly Miss Christina Foyle. I was asked three questions: what I had studied, what interests I had and whether I would work on Saturdays. I duly answered: French and Russian, travel, reading and yes. Location-wise it was perfect as Robin and I were now renting a bright and modern studio flat in Bloomsbury, in other words, just walking distance from the store located on Charing Cross Road.

I assumed naively that I would be allocated to a department aligned to my interests or degree. Of course, that was very presumptuous. I ended up in Sports and Military, assisting Adrian who had been there for years and was a music graduate. Naturally. So far, so good. However, in addition to the unpleasant need to check in and out with a pass card every day, with anyone late to work or taking a minute longer than permissible on their lunch break sacked, the sales assistant had to deal with customers driven hysterical by the arcane bureaucratic process, to all intents and purposes engineered to render book buying intolerable, and inevitably leading to parallels with shopping in the Soviet Union. 

It goes without saying that Christina Foyle and her minions not only didn’t trust staff to work a full shift or appear at work on time. They also didn’t trust them with money (most payments were made with cash or cheques back then) and didn’t believe in anything as complex as an electric till. When customers would go directly to pay the cashier, who tended to be trapped in a wooden booth with protective glass somewhere on the each floor of the store, they would be sent back to the desk where sales assistants were standing or sitting. Some of them also thought foolishly that they could expedite the process by choosing the easier option of settling the bill with sales assistants. However, they would soon be brought to their senses and slowly understand why massive queues would form in front of the booths and the sales desks and why we were the ones placing books in plastic bogs before other incandescent individuals. 

No, trust in the world of Christina Foyle had its limits. The customer would first have to queue and hand over the books they had acquired from that department and perhaps other departments to sales assistants like yours truly who would use a calculator to add up the price owed and write it down on a chit. Then the bewildered soul would have to take the chit to the booth, pay and come back with the paid invoice and stamped chit, handing over the latter in exchange for the book or books. Naturally, if they then saw a book they needed on a different floor, they would have to adhere to the same scheme again. I suppose you might term it socialism with a human face.. Everyone was treated in an egalitarian manner. No perks regardless of your background. Meanwhile, the returns process was also complicated in a bid to prevent any unacceptable action on the part of the customer!

While such a system clearly would not work these days, given the online alternatives, Foyles was able to leverage one particular competitive advantage: the breadth and extent of the titles it stocked, crammed as they were on book shelves over five floors with dust an occupational hazard, and representing an encyclopaedic coverage of every possible topic. In addition, the store would be ready to order any books requested by a customer. And here fair due should also be paid to the patience and expert purchasing of new and popular titles by department managers and the expertise of the sales representatives of book publishers traipsing around on a regular basis and checking inventory or proposing new releases with modern flashy advertising material that looked incongruous and tended to be dumped once the rep had left.  

And yet, despite such managerial input and concern, notwithstanding the bureaucracy, this was not a socialist state. The workers had no rights whatsoever, with dismissals occurring on an almost weekly basis for no rhyme or reason, regardless of whether they were managers or had been employed there for years dedicated to the cause and loyal to a fault. They were culpable by senior management if they had the temerity to take a Saturday off. I know of occasions where employees had been absent due to the death of a family member or to attend the funeral of loved ones, only to receive their marching orders when they turned up at the store on the following Monday.  As you can imagine, Miss Foyle was universally disliked, a dictator who couldn’t be toppled.

By contrast, tall and slim, in his late 30s with thinning dark hair, Adrian was a really decent bloke with a good sense of humour. He was a Thatcherite, but at the same time kind and generous. We would sometimes pop out for a drink in a local pub on Saturday nights. In addition, the combination of sport, which included flyfishing, chess, backgammon and other games, as well as all things military, turned out to be lucrative compared to the languages, music and arts departments that would have appeared a better fit. And Adrian let me take a fair share despite his seniority. Looking back, it was a memorable experience that still seems unreal today. 

However, the bizarre Kafkaesque environment had its challenges and was emotionally draining: you never knew when a customer might explode in frustration and shout at you for something beyond your control. At the same time, the job itself offered no security whatsoever and ruled out the possibility of weekends away. I was to spend six months there until I had the good fortune to hear about a position from a friend and fellow Russian graduate and Nottingham University alumnus David Rowson whom I had got to know well in Voronezh. But that is another story…