UNDERGRADUATE PAGE
Welsh and Chips
By E. F WILLIAMS (Girton College, Cambridge)
THE café was not slick nor was it " class " like the place opposite ; it did not sell ice-cream, but it had the best cakes in town. The best prices too, but what was that to me ? I was on the right side of the counter. I could eat as many as I liked.
I had gone to the town intending to get a job in an ice-cream parlour, but as these had only vacancies for washers-up I became ti counter-hand at the cafe. For £3 a week and my midday meal I stood behind the bar in a white overall, from nine till six, serving tea, coffee and lemonade, cakes, sandwiches and toast, biscuits (under the counter) and cooked snacks. The work was varied and interesting but hard on the feet. There were usually about three counter-hands—the number varied according to people's days off —serving at a time. In the rush hours, ten to eleven-thirty and three- thirty to five, there was no time to think, everyone got in everyone else's way, each customer thought he ought to be served first, and there were never enough clean cups. At other times there was ;ink to do, one could chat with the customers and the other counter-hands, clean up the bar and have a cup of tea.
Most of our customers were holiday-makers, but we had our regulars too. These were mainly bookies, commercial travellers and waiters, and they came during the slack periods. Scorning our cakes they stuck to " the usual "—tea and toast.
The favourite topic of conversation among both the regulars and the staff was divorce. Many of them had had, or were about to have, experience of it. Irene, a counter-hand aged eighteen had married at sixteen, separated the year after and was seeking a divorce. Irene did not like the work. " I'm really a comptometer," she explained, " but there are no other jobs here." She wanted to go in the cash-desk when the " old dear " who was the present cashier and always on the verge of being sacked finally disappeared. Whenever trade was slack the " old dear " would sidle out of her desk and say: " I want you to make me the nicest cup of tea you've ever made in your life." Then she spilt the nicest cup of tea I ever made all over the pound notes.
There was a service lift running between the kitchen, the counter and the café upstairs. We would shout " Welsh and chips twice " down the shaft and soon two welsh rarebits would come trundling up. The kitchen was in the basement and was hot, dirty and dark. There was not much cooking done there because there was not much to cook. The month's meat ration had been used in three days by the previous chef who had been sacked for that reason, so the customers had to make do with fish and chips or spam and salad. For the staff there was only fish and chips, and we could not stand that for long, especially after seeing the way it was cooked. The chips were made first thing in the morning and tepidly kept until lunch-time, when they were warmed up and shovelled on to the plates by hand. The chef's mate had a grudge against the world in general and the boss in particular. ” I told 'im I'm 'aving my Tuesdays off reg'lar. If 'e don't like it 'e can give me me cards. I'm taking me orders from the cook and no one else in future, I says." That had its effect on the boss. The next day cook and kitchen-hand had changed places.
That is the way things work in the catering trade. It is all a matter .of being " in with the boss." There is no trade-union spirit ; the rule is each man for himself. No one helps anyone else for fear of getting the sack. If you get the sack someone is waiting to step into your place. The workers grumble among themselves about the pay and conditions but they do not combine to do anything about them. They think they can do better on their own. It is difficult, in any case, to keep to what regulations there are. All female employees are supposed, by law, to be provided with seats for use when they are not working. Owing to the small space behind our counter this was obviously impractic- able. The essential transience of the work, especially at a seaside town, means that both employer and employee work on the assumption that if they can find anything better they will take it. At the height of the season the employee has the whip hand. There are plenty of jobs going and he can pick and choose. As the season goes off there is less work and more people to do it. If you want a job for the winter you must, by threats or obsequious- ness, keep in with the boss.
Irene found the work degrading. She did not like sucking up to the customers. I asked her once why, in that case, she was so nice to them. " Because," she said, " if I wasn't, the boss'd be down asking why the customers were going and, next thing, it'd be me that was gone." So, however tired and hot we were, however much our feet swelled and ached, we had to be pleasant to the panting women and their whining children, to the people in a frantic hurry and those who kept changing their minds, and to the fresh, middle- aged men. How I hated those large parties of people who all gave their orders separately and each wanted a separate bill. What a comfort were those masterly men who reduced all the surrounding chatter to a firm " Four teas with and two without," and remem- bered afterwards how many cakes had been eaten.
We put the cakes on the counter and let the customers help themselves. They were supposed to eat more that way 1 doubt if they did. We did not get many tips on the counter, but if one of us made the bill up wrong and one of the others spotted it, we would keep the difference. We did not see why the boss should profit by our mistakes.
The boss sat upstairs all day in his'office hiding from his creditors. The floor was a sea of papers, cardboard boxes and lengths of wood ; the desk, marooned in the middle, the only furniture in the room, was littered with cigarette-ends and dirty teacups. Downstairs we were instructed to tell anyone who asked for him that he had " gone to Blackpool."
" You do make a nice cup of tea here." To a counter-hand that is the highest praise. The counter-hand sees perfection in a good cup of tea properly served, gets satisfaction from the easy movement between cup and counter, the swish of the tea, the sizzle of the sugar, takes pride in quickness and accuracy, feels authority in the writing of a bill. She looks out from behind the gleaming black bar on a world in which she takes no part, watching the people there as though in a theatre. Behind the counter there is another world—a world of rush and lethargy, of feuds and fun ; cups of tea rolling down to the kitchen for the " poor old cooks" ; long crisp sandwich loaves all to be cut before ten ; cakes eaten hastily on the stairs ; a world where Monday is always a slack day and " Fancy, you should have seen the crowds in here last week " ; trays of cakes gradually diminishing, the tea-leaves mounting in the pots ; " Upstairs have pinched all our crockery " and " Wasn't that my Welsh ? "
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