From washer-up to waitress - a step closer to nursing?

Whilst I was still at school, I got my first job  in a hotel in London Road, St.Albans. It was run by a couple called Paddy (Irish, sharp as glass) and Elsa (Swedish, peculiar as hell), and catered mostly for travelling sales and business men. It was a no frills establishment; a bar, a restaurant and a trouser press in every room. Elsa and Paddy managed the hotel in equal parts; Elsa, oversaw the kitchen and Paddy, ran the bar. Their only son, Mark, had the run of both but did nothing in either.  

The job came about through my father, who had done various jobs for Paddy over the years and knew him quite well. I don’t remember being interviewed for it, I think it was more a case of ‘can she wash up?’, ‘yes’, ‘fine the jobs hers.’  So I worked as a dish washer in the hotel kitchen, standing in the corner of the kitchen, mistress of two large stainless steel sinks, one for washing, one for rinsing and a metal draining board for stacking and drying. It was a hot and greasy job which required little skill but it was a job and I was paid 70p an hour for doing it. 

The chef was a hairy, heavy-faced italian, the father of a boy in my class at junior school. He was irreverent , loud and lazy (the chef, not the boy in my class). He might have been talented but he was rarely allowed to cook anything more than boiled water into which was dropped whatever boil-in-the-bag meal the customer had (unknowlingly) ordered. ‘Duck a la orange’ and ‘Chicken Chasseur’ were particularly popular. The menu offered what was, in the early 1980’s, fairly standard hotel fayre; a mixture of English and French dishes with boiled side vegetables or mixed salad. Elsa also liked to bring a little bit of Sweden into the restaurant on occasions. A particular favourite of hers was to drop half a hard-boiled egg in the (powdered) tomato soup before serving. Sometimes, the waitress would flick the egg out again if Elsa wasn’t looking but mostly it would sink out of sight only to pop up and surprise the unsuspecting customer as they dipped their spoon in for their first mouthful.  

I worked 2-3 nights per week usually finishing by about 10.00pm with the occasional late night if a ‘works’ party came in. The senior waitress was called Edna, an older woman, who kept everyone else in order. The youngest were a year to two older than me, two sisters called Carla and Paula. When Carla left to attend University I was promoted into her place and given a small pay rise. I was also given ‘The Grange Hotel’ waitressing uniform to wear, a dark blue skirt and a light blue nylon shirt (nice). I enjoyed the customer contact and it was certainly better than washing up although it wasn’t as easy as it looked. In my first week of being ‘out front’ I pushed a laden sweets trolley over the carpeted floor in the restaurant and it caught on a ridge and tipped over. There was a landslide of creamy desserts including the Black Forest Gateaux and the English Trifle, both of which ended up on the floor. Fortunately, the restaurant had yet to open and Elsa just swept in, scooped the trifle back into the glass bowl, added a flurry of whipped cream on top plus a couple of cherries from the bar and popped the whole thing back on the top shelf of the dessert trolley. Not sure that the means justified the end but still, it was an impressively, nordically cool, disaster aversion.

Apart from giving me a healthy wariness about what really happens in restaurant kitchens, waitressing taught me that I enjoyed and had a capacity for working with people. The long hours and repetitive work also taught me that I didn’t want to work in the hotel trade, either as a waitress or anything else. A year or so later I switched from waitress to domestic in my first hospital job, just roads away from where I lived. 

 

Next week, seeing it from the floor up - in a hospital at last.