What will I do when I grow up? (Says
45-year-old woman!)I have always rather envied those people who have a burning vocation; they knew career they wanted to follow and went for it. If, like me, you have never really known what you want to do, years fly past and you still have to earn a living. But doing what?
I did well at school and it was assumed that I'd go onto university. I wasn't happy at home and being keen to move out I end up leaving school after 5th year to study for a degree in Hotel and Catering Management at Strathclyde Uni. Well my heart was never really in it and I dropped out after 1st year, against all advice.
I went to live with my aunt in north London and found a job in newsagent's kiosk in Strand Palace Hotel. I was very keen to visit Greece. I'd a very romantic notion of it. None of my friends were interested so it was either go alone or not at all. I saved up from my meagre wages and booked an open return on coach to Athens in June 1978. I think it cost £25 return.
I planned to travel down through Peloponese and then do some island hopping. I was not impressed by Athens but had already paid for a 3-night hotel stay in there. The train journey down to Kalamata in Peloponese was wonderful, a narrow gauge railway, carriages had wooden slated seats. I was only tourist on train. I then visited Crete, Rhodes, Kos, and Kalmynos. It was in my next port of call, Samos, that I met my husband. He was doing his 2-year military service. Although I did think that I'd fallen in love, I thought be sensible you have heard all these stories about holidays romances. Suffice to stay I was back in Samos a few months later. He finished his national service just before Christmas 1979 and we were married in Glasgow in February 1980.
We had been so intent on just being together that we hadn't really thought through how we were going to live. My husband had studied at a naval college before his national service but we didn't want him to go and work in merchant navy. He couldn't even work when he first came over to UK, until his work permit was sorted out.
We decided that best way to save up money for deposit for our own home was for me to do a "live-in" job as a housekeeper. We would be provided with a small flat to live in and have virtually no expenses. We managed to stand that for a year and had saved £5000, enough for a deposit on a place of our own. My husband now had a steady job at Hyde Park Hotel, so we could apply for a mortgage.
I continued with a succession of menial temporary jobs. By 1982, I was getting fed up, so enrolled in a secretarial course at a private college. This paid off; I found a job as PA/secretary in a publisher's office. Little did I know but this would be high point of my career to present day. I worked a 32 and a half hour week, was reasonably paid, I had an office junior to do routine tasks and work was great fun. The company published 2 magazines, one was a naturist magazine, Health and Efficiency, and other a bodybuilding magazine.
However we were living in a one bedroom flat with no garden in East London. We couldn't afford to buy something bigger or in a more salubrious area. We were thinking about having a family, so when my husband saw Gleneagles Hotel in Perthshire advertising for staff, we though why not move to Scotland, housing would certainly be a lot cheaper. My husband got job at Gleneagles and he moved up, leaving me to sell our flat in London. He lived in staff accommodation at Gleneagles and started house hunting.
He found a house in Muthill, near Crieff. It was quite large so I decided to try my hand at bed and breakfast and we registered with an agency that sent German kids over to UK to stay with a family and receive English lessons. That wasn't exactly a roaring success. In 1986 I saw an advert for market research interviewers and decided to apply. I did my first survey in Pitlochry. It was quite hard at first but I did quite enjoy being out and about and chatting to loads of different people.
However I discovered I was pregnant in Autumn of 1986 and when I went for my scan was informed that it was twins! My husband was in his 2nd year as a mature student at Stirling University. We thought it would be better if we could move nearer Stirling, as he needed car to get to university and I would be pretty stuck in village with twin babies. Our house in Muthill took ages to sell but we moved to Tullibody, in February 1988.
In spring I went back to work as a market research interviewer. It fitted in well with family life, as I would go out to work evenings and weekends and we didn't need to pay for any childcare. As boys grew up and had a nursery place when they were 4, I thought I should be doing something better than trailing around asking a whole load of questions. I saw places funded by European Social Fund for women to study for an HNC in Admin at local college. They were even offering free creche places. I had been thinking about going back to university and was advised that it would be easier to gain admission if I could provide evidence of recent study.
The year at college was harder work than I had envisaged, then 4 years at university, studying for a business studies degree, were even harder, and I was still doing market research most weekends. Now I hardly thought I was going to be headhunted into a top management position when I completed my studies but I did think I'd be able to find a semi-decent job.
After looking around a bit for a job, I decided that I would try to start my own business. I wanted to work locally weekdays during day. I knew that there was a strong demand locally for domestic cleaners and thought I would try setting up a domestic cleaning service. Sure enough my research was correct there was demand and after a few leaflet drops locally and a few personal recommendations, I started to advertise for staff. After a year and a half I had 7 part time staff. However things were not going smoothly, I was doing cleaning every day myself and there always seemed to be at least one staff member off. The quality began to drop if I was always on hand to crack whip. I was hardly making any profit and was spending around 30 hours a week just cleaning, never mind wages. weekly rotas, leaflet drops. I realised that I would have to expand to be profitable but couldn't find reliable staff to maintain quality. I'd been doing quite a lot of work cleaning rented staff accommodation, between lets for a company that was relocating to Stirling area. They were having a new office custom built for them. The office manager verbally assured me that I would have contract to clean new office. I thought that this would be salvation of business, as I could easily supervise employees while on one site. The logistics of domestic cleaning were very complicated. However contract never came to fruition. The office manager told me that my business was too small to take on contract and her deputy told me that they were legally bound to take on cleaning contractor that whole business park used. Who knows what truth was but basically I was left in lurch. I decided to give up business.
