How I Aquired a Servant

In my consciousness, the endlessness of solitude.

I was born and brought up in a seaside town on the south coast, a place I detested.

My parents ran a bed and breakfast. Before that, my mother had been a nurse; she had moved to England from Ireland to work here. She had met my father who was then a barman. They saved and bought a house with the results of a legacy, and built up the business patiently. It was their escape from drudgery, or so they thought, and a move to another social class.

But the hourse were long and they felt like servants in their own house. They had invested so much in the bed and breakfast, and were borrowed heavily. Pride and stupidity conspired to force them further into the abyss of their small business paradise. They hid their unhappiness away and eventually were no longer even conscious of it.

A loathsome childhood- an only child, haplessly dragooned into the endless servility and pettiness of the bed and breakfast, serving tiny glasses of orange juice in the weird silence of the breakfast room; the constant concern over money; the graspingness of it all disgusted and depressed me -being scolded for failing to charge a guest for extra toast- it was all so pitiful, such a desperate effort to raise ourselves above the herd, a joyless condition of being.

My childhood was filled with two purposes: work and escape.

Work was the chores of the B and B...work was also schoolwork, for I knew that to escape I should get into university, and I was blessed with an Irish virtue: the refusal to cringe, so that though I would be the first in my family to go to university, I did not doubt my right to go there nor arrive with a chip like some of my proletarian peers.

I won a place after working like Billy-ho to read business and economics at Glasgow University: it was as far as I got travel, across this island, and I never went back otr saw my parents again, except to find them at my grandfather's funeral, bickering some years later.

My university years were a doddle and I graduated with ease. I did nothing noteworthy in that time, except once I met a beggar in a lane, who pestered me for change, so I took him by the scruff of his collar and threw him to the ground, and kicked him then, the miserable dog. But perhaps I went to far for he didn't even groan when I prodded him before I left. But what a show-off posing for the front page of the Glasgow Herald with his puffy face!

That was in my third year and it affected me so Ij joined the Christian Union in my fourth on return from the summer recess.

The leader of the Christina Union was a life-hating lesbian and when my guilt hasd dissipated I determined to seduce her for a challenge, so I would hang about after the Christian group meeting offering her compliments and trying to persuade her to come to my house for tea and more scripture. She did succumb to my advances, I am pleased to say, but after we had had sex I felt disgusted with her lack of principle and flung her clothes down the stairs: she crawled down naked after them like a beetle. I did not go to the Christian Union meetings after that.

Those were the only two memorable incidents from my time at Glasgow, thought I did also develop strong feelings for the work of architect Alexander "Greek" Thomson.

I decided I'd had enough of the Scots: a drunken, self-pitying bunch of losers, joylessly narcissistic and completely lacking in style. Their collective failure to impress in any capacity since the war seemed not to lend them any cause for reflection whatsoever, let alone induce the colossal shame it should have brought - far from it! Everything was the fault of the English, why , even the rotten weather no doubt could be blamed on "Maggie" Thatcher.

Glasgow was then a ruined city: a collection of grand buildings defaced by municipal socialism, or that derelict population of unemployable destitutes that people sentimentalise still, perpetually inebriated of repulsive Scottish lager.

I moved to London with the Royal Bank of Scotland, and joined a faceless crew of nobodies in the city, commuting, a stranger to myself, lunching at my desk and controlling my temper with little ease.

I met Brenda from the marketing section at a Christmas party. I felt immediately that she was a sensitive person who understood my needs but, of course, our relationship was ruinous for us both: after one of our rows I found her squatted in the bathroom, a plucked chicken, naked, rocking on her heels. I asked her why she had assumed that position but she became quite bizarrely inarticulate!

Other relationships had more elusive qualities of awfulness: stony silences, unwanted gifts, misunderstandings of a trivial nature.

I earned a decent salary and that allowed me to purchase a house in Stoke Newington, which I filled with antiques and other bric-a-brac. I constructed a library and in my lonely weekends worked on my magnum opus there: "THE CONCEPT OF VALUE IN THE MODERN AGE- An Illustrated Catalogue of Ideals". This was an encyclopaedia organized from A-Z: entries included were from the world of art; the music of Stockhausen; de Chirico's painting; Heidigger; Leotard; but there were also lengthy pieces on the changing conception of time; loss; burial practices; kitsch; technology and abandonment.

But despite my worthy purposes I was filled with a mounting sense of despair. I believed that the solution to my darkening mood, which I knew was certain to lead ,e to a destructive hopelessness, was to find company, ideal that of a woman: there was even a section on that very matter in my tome! But my relationships had been disastrous and I was aware that there was a risk of the failures repeating.

So, against my better principles, I developed a habit of listlessness, engaged in a continual shuffle between the workplace and my house, not knowing quite what to do with myself. I was happy with existence as a war, less so if that meant a war of attrition. I wanted glory. I had lost my way! I began to panic; I had self-pitying thoughts. If only I could be saved.

I ran into a fellow down by the Mall. I had taken a day off work - I seldom took vacations so I had a sort of "credit" with the bank.

Well he was quite a man, more of a creature than a man with his matted hair: a real Robinson Crusoe. Of course he wanted some money, and I was feeling jaunty so I decided not to kick him about ha ha. Instead I said ok, well, enough of this pleading you whinging fool, and try to speak proper English not some bastardy Gyppo patois, and I marched him off the The Dorchester Hotel and hired a suite, and I sent for a chambermaid and had that fellow scrubbed. My! You should have seen the dirt run off him. There were calluses on his back, pustules ruby and bleeding pus, and I had to hold my stomach not to wretch.

I called a doctor who poured Iodine over them - you should have seen that beggar wince - I laughed ‘till my sides ached, let me tell you.

Then I had his things disposed of.

We fed the man on milk and pork pie. He began to look at me with a pitiable hangdog expression. I had him drink some cognac, and we determined that he should be properly fitted out after he had slept.

First thing in the morning, then, we went down to St James to the barbers, he oddly wrapped in the hotel's dressing gown, the on to a men's outfitters. -the staff found it quite a hoot, but by midday there he was, spick and span in a black suit. I told him to go as I wanted to work that day.

He began to panic, I think. He became grateful like some penitent old woman, so I said, go to the Devil with your gratitude, I can't bear your fawning. But he was determined with it, and though I told him to bugger off, would follow me about piteously, insistently, and when I found him outside the lobby of my bank after work three days later I capitulated and said, fine, you can be the servant.

I sent him away to smooth his manners off at a school for servants in Gloucestershire. He prove adequate. I was not ashamed to have my clothes neatly folded on my chair in the mornings, though his cooking was lousy. I had to scold him: he wept wlike a baby, falling to his knees at the burn toasts, kissing my hand and previously pleading.

He would sit outside my office like a sentinel while I worked on reports for the bank, and wait my orders, and although I got used to that, I still wanted some time alone as I was distracted, so I sent him on errands. I put the instructions on notes -I gained scarce pleasure form conversing with the man; he had been in the army, it transpired, where Her Majesties finest had attempted to destroy every vestige of culture the man might once have possessed.

I gave him instructions and did not question why: he was there on his knees counting the flagstones between Stoke Newington and the City, or bent over polishing my change with Silvo so it shone like the moon, or cleaning the leaves of grass on the lawn with a cotton bud, or that old standby, ironing the newspaper.

So that is how I squired that man. He calls himself Ernesto, and he stays by my side. I do not have to chastise him often, but when I do, I do so bloodily.

We have had many adventures together.