It’s a phenomenon of the current global macroeconomic and geopolitical situation that Braidwood is suffering from a shortage of good staff for its various pubs and eateries. Our town is well-served by some excellent places to grab a bite, but one has already been forced to close due to a lack of a chef. Good waitstaff are like gold.
Which, in typical egocentric fashion, reminds me of the time I ventured into the F&B sector as a barman and general dogsbody at a pub in deepest Devon in the UK Southwest.
This was a common occupation for Commonwealth kids availing themselves of their two-year working visa. My own dear sister had made a great success of her time as a barmaid and, as the ever-following younger sibling, I opted for the same profession when first arriving in the UK in 1992.
It was a no-brainer as a job — and I don’t mean you don’t need a brain to do it. It made economic sense: theoretically, you were given bed and board, so your cash salary could be saved up to fund your travels during the summer.
In fact, the Devon set-up was a bit more complex than a simple bar job. The proprietor, an ex Royal Marine we shall call Mr. T, owned two pubs about two kilometres apart — I’m going to call them the Dog and Bone and the Prince of Wales. To service these two establishments, he hired five people: Arielle, a French school-leaver; Gerard, a New Zealand panel-beater; Bella and Carmen, a travelling Aussie couple (Bella being, confusingly, male); and your author, a Zimbabwean lit grad with noplace to go.
On our first day Mr T. told us, “there’s five of you, but I only want four — so the first one who screws up will be out.” Guess who rose to the occasion? But let’s not pre-empt this inevitable denouement — there’s so much delicious detail to impart!
Our routine was to rise early in our flat above the Dog and walk the country lanes, narrow and bounded by tall hedgerows, to the Prince for breakfast. It was early autumn and Dartmoor reared up from the green patchwork hills like a Tolkien movie set. But this is where Sherlock Holmes encountered the Hound of the Baskervilles, and Dr. Watson’s description is spot-on:
Rolling pasture lands curved upward on either side of us, and old gabled houses peeped out from amid the thick green foliage, but behind the peaceful and sunlit countryside there rose ever, dark against the evening sky, the long, gloomy curve of the moor, broken by the jagged and sinister hills.
After brekkie we would clean the Prince from top to toe, including a restaurant and ‘ladie’s bar’, then the six bedrooms upstairs at breakneck pace — hoovering stair, nook and cranny, changing bedlinen and polishing the bathrooms to a shine. The building dated back to the 13th Century and contained more crannies than nooks; at any one time I sported a minimum of three tender bumps on my head from violent encounters with low beams.
Then, while Gerard went into the kitchens to help the proprietor’s wife prep for the lunch crowd, Bella or Carmen would open the bar at the Prince, and I would hurry back to the Dog to bottle-up, run a hoover over the place, and open for lunch. (Arielle, it transpired, was not good for much — after a series of disasters, I think she was put on light duties somewhere).
Weekdays were generally pretty easy to handle. A local woman — Jessica sounds good as a pseudonym — would arrive to handle kitchen duties and I would pull pints and, if someone particularly la-di-da arrived, mix a gin and tonic or two.
One regular visitor was referred to as the Lord of the Manor. I’m not sure what his exact title was, but it seemed he was the freeholder of the Dog and Mr. T the leaseholder. Whatever — the Lord was dropped off in a battered Land Rover by a member of his staff and would occupy the same small table every day, lugubriously sinking a couple of pints of bitter and masticating a steak & kidney pie with no sign at all of enjoyment.
Evenings were busier. A number of regulars would attend the Dog: ‘Dad’, a pensioner holidaying from Slough; Brenda, a hardened bottle-blonde lady in a denim jacket; the local vicar; and Dan, a youth who did odd-jobs in the area.
Usually a bunch of roadworkers who were building a new bypass on the nearby A30 would come in for drinks and dinner. They were generally a cheery lot, spending liberally and creating a hubbub in the place — but Mr. T was just a little too fond of playing mine host, and often, as the night wore on, he’d stage a lock-in, keeping the bar open and dishing out free curry and chips as the lads sat around sharing tall stories and witty badinage.
My abiding memory of these evenings was of physical tiredness from cleaning all day, and of perpetual hunger — although technically we received our meals from our employer, they were usually small doses of restaurant leftovers. Heating up those free curries for the road crew was a particular torture.
To my overly literary mind the whole set-up was almost Dickensian — the larger-than-life characters of Mr. T and the road crew; the wearying graft of servicing two pubs every day; the danger of malnutrition.
It was all very new. I had accumulated deep experience of drinking establishments as a patron, but I gained a new appreciation of the sheer intensity of the work, the dawn-to-midnight demands of running the business, and most of all, the people skills required to keep the patrons happy.
Things started to go wrong quite quickly. Mr. T. enjoyed nothing more than berating his staff in front of the patrons, shouting, “there goes the profit on three drinks!” if you dropped a glass. He would leap out from a darkened corner to try to catch us timewasting. And, worst of all, he kept all our tips for himself.
But in his eyes, my greatest sin was that I was not good at balancing the till. As a person for whom numbers hold nothing but horrors, having to take people’s money and dish out change was a nightmare. Mental arithmetic was required, and mine was fuzzy at best. So I ensured I always overcharged, though, so if the till didn’t balance, it was always in profit. I’m not sure why old miseryguts made such a fuss about it.
And then there were those soft skills. I’d always imagined having deep, intense conversations with the punters while I pulled pints or polished a glass, but it was soon apparent that no-one was really interested in what I had to say, beyond what the daily specials were. And I usually couldn’t remember those.
But the straw that broke the camel’s back was a table knife in the waste disposal. This is how it went down: when the lunchtime rush was at its height, I would circulate through the Dog, collecting empty glasses and discarded plates. These were ferried to the kitchen, where an industrial dishwasher — the kind you loaded with plastic pallets pre-packed with crockery and glassware — gurgled and steamed ceaselessly.
But first, all leftovers must be scraped into a tub and cutlery thrown into a plastic basket (and the overworked skivvy could munch down the odd leftover chip or chunk of breaded scampi). Now there was never a shred of evidence to prove this, but Mr. T. later contended that at this critical juncture, I let my concentration wander and scooped a knife into the slop bucket along with some half-eaten lasagne and soggy salad.
Once it was full, one of us carted this slop bucket to an outhouse and tipped the contents into the maw of a large stainless-steel waste disposal unit, there to be macerated into slurry and flushed into the local council’s sewers. A weighty table knife had no place in that environment: apparently, the implement in question sank to the bottom of the machine and wedged itself into the spinning blender-like blades. This caused them to stop abruptly, overloading and burning out the electric motor that drove the whole affair.
Mr. T pulled me off normal duties and tasked me with scooping out the hopper to recover the knife. It was now November; temperatures had plummeted and the outhouse was unheated. I had to reach into the unit’s inlet pipe, full to the brim with freezing water, congealed chips, slimy lettuce and blobs of gelid butter, and scoop it all out. This took a while as there was a lot of this gloop. And may I add, it smelt.
At last, up to the armpit in the bowels of the machine, my questing fingers encountered the knife. After gaining a grip, I was able to wiggle it free. It was bent nearly double, with a deep dint where the blades had bitten into the handle — a clash of steel worthy of Game of Thrones.
After that I was given other outdoor jobs like weeding, and at the end of the week received my marching orders. It seemed to me that perhaps the military mode of man-management wasn’t necessarily effective in the business world, but what the hey, I was out of it.
Still, this is not a sob story by any means. The vicar gave me a lift to Okehampton, where I caught a series of buses to Plymouth, Falmouth, Penzance, and Land’s End. I took with me my rucksack and a Post Office savings book with £250 in it.
And I’d had a crash course in how to mop, hoover and sweep; I could pull a pint and polish a glass. And would never do so again, having gained an invaluable career insight: F&B was not for me. It’s better for all concerned if I stay on the other side of the bar as an enthusiastic consumer.