You can’t go dressed like that!!
I am sure many of you will have had that said to you by your mothers when you were teenagers. When the mini skirt came in in the 1960s it was greeted by many mothers with shock/horror (you will note I am not saying fathers unless their own daughters were involved)
However the time it was said to me that sticks in my mind was in 1972 when I had joined an agency called Graduate Girls. N.B. there never seems to have been a call for a Graduate Boys agency………I think we all know why. We were a rarer commodity in those days but not much sought after hence the agency would lobby on our behalf to try and get us a job which befitted our status which was pretty low compared to all those graduate boys. The first thing they drummed into you that the world did not owe you a living even if you did have a degree. My husband being one of those graduate boys looks back on that time with nostalgia — he says he had the pick of loads of jobs. Grrrr.
I sat in front of this dragon of a woman who said ‘Oh I think there is an opportunity at the Iranian embassy’…….what this involved she didn’t seem to have much idea…… ‘I am not much of a typist’ I volunteered. ‘ Off you go I have fixed an interview in half an hour’. I got up to leave and as I made for the door she screeched at me…..’you cannot go like that!’. ‘Why ever not?’ I said. I sometimes was outrageously dressed but this was not one of those occasions. I considered myself quite soberly dressed in black trousers and a shortish grey fur coat which were all the rage in those days. ‘ You cannot wear trousers’. I was aware that my generation is probably the first to almost ditch the skirt so popular with our mothers but I really thought having spent four years dressed almost exclusively in blue jeans that the world had moved on. Clearly Iran hadn’t — in fact it may even have been more liberal than it is now. As I raced off to see if I could purchase a cheap skirt at Derry and Toms which was the nearest shop — I flipped through the sale rail thinking of spending a fiver and the only thing I could find was a red pinafore dress but as with everything I try on (being a bit of a shorty) it was too long. I contemplated asking the sales assistant for a piece of string to tie round my middle but thought……. well I won’t be able to take my coat off. Then I had a brainwave — take the trousers off and keep my coat on. I raced off to the embassy getting colder feet by the minute about my brainwave. The fur coat was quite short, it only came about three to four inches down my legs below my bottom..
As I entered the building the heat hit me — maybe the Iranians found London a little cold but the central heating was on full blast. I was asked at least four times if I wanted to take my coat off. My face was getting redder and redder and beads of sweat were beginning to trickle down my neck. I have absolutely no recollection of what was said in the interview. I concentrated purely on keeping my coat on despite the offers of water and to open the window. Needless to say I did not get the job. Perhaps it was just as well in the light of what happened there in 1980……remember the siege.
Older successful people sometimes say…..you can do anything you want, you just have to put your mind to it. Go out and grab the opportunities — anyone can be successful. Celebrities’ mothers seem to nearly always have said to their offspring — You can do whatever you want in life, just believe in yourself …….oh yeah! Accident of birth, talent, grey matter, looks and contacts and of course lady luck — do they not play a part ?………just saying!
But before I realised all this and spurred on by this advice, I decided to break into television. This advice was certainly not from my own parents you understand — far too sensible, cautious and realistic when, for instance, I wanted to be an actress. The best advice my father ever gave me was that life is not fair just do your best. But who listens to their parents when they are 20. I had been told that there was a T.V. studio in Kingsway so I made my way there dressed fairly brightly in a red PVC mac and white PVC boots so I would not be missed. I still had peroxide blonde hair at this time. I marched into the building, confidently approached the desk where there was a bored looking receptionist filing her nails, ‘I have come to enquire about training schemes for graduates?’…… ‘we don’t have any’….. she replied not even looking up from her nails. ‘Oh …………how about unpaid work?’ (the word internships was not used in those days).….. ‘ Nah’.
Defeated but not unbowed I decided to try the other studio I had been told about, I walked about a mile got on a tube made my way to Holborn (you have to take into account I was a little Scottish girl not familiar with London) walked about another mile and then found a studio which looked similar — obviously all built in the same style although coincidentally it was also opposite a W.H. Smith as the first one had been. I marched up to the desk delivered my schpeel and to my horror the same receptionist looked up at me and said…..you have been here before and the answer is still NO.
So that advice about going out and just grabbing all those opportunities…..forget it!
