Episode 2 - A long, long time ago

I swerve a career in the civil service and land a job tearing tickets at the National Theatre.

Photo by Samuel Hagger on Unsplash

How does anyone ever get paid to write.? And, having got that first pay cheque, how do they keep getting paid to write? 

In scriptwriting for TV and radio drama, there’s no such thing as a career path.  No accredited training that gives you a qualification to walk into a job.  It might help to study creative writing and get used to having your work critiqued, but there are no guarantees. It’s a question of getting noticed. Some (very few) people are noticed because they’re geniuses; some because they’re well-connected; some happen to hit a certain zeitgeist. But for most of us who manage somehow to scramble aboard the merry-go-round, we get there through persistence and thick skin and a lot of luck.  This Writer’s Journey is about how I managed to clamber aboard. I have no magic answers to offer, only a story to tell about a certain young woman at a certain time.

As an aside, the title of my Substack, as many people will I’m sure have noticed, is in homage to Christopher Vogler’s classic analysis of story structure, The Writer’s Journey. It’s a fairly dense piece of work, but if you’re interested in what goes into making a good story, you could do worse than take a look.

Back to the plot.

In the seventies – right through my childhood, actually - my happy place was sitting in a room making up stories, scribbling them down, shoving them to the back of a drawer. No internet back then, no easy way of sharing my work, even if I’d wanted to. Which I didn’t. I was far too shy. At eighteen, sitting in my college room writing stories was a way of making sense of things. It never crossed my mind I might ever get paid for it. An army brat from a broken family, the first person in my family to go to university, I knew no professional writers. People like me didn’t get to do that sort of thing. In fact, people like me didn’t generally go to university. After my parents separated, my mother’s extended family had assumed that, on leaving school, I’d get a job and earn money to help support her. That I was able to take up the place I’d been offered was only courtesy of the 1944 state education act that gave me a full grant to cover all my expenses and my mother’s tenacity and love.

Having a mum like her was a piece of luck.

I was studying Economics and Politics. Politics, because I was (and am) interested in what might constitute a good society. Economics, because economics and politics can’t really be separated, right? Also, I had (somewhat to my embarrassment) the sort of brain that found the subject, if not easy, then straightforward. I liked the academic side of university well enough, and was doing okay, but enjoyed much more the stuff I was doing round the edges. Writing, I’ve already mentioned. And there was student theatre too - working on the edges of funny little plays in the university’s dusty little performance space; environmental work - going on bottle dumps and other demonstrations with Friends of the Earth; student community action projects - having cups of tea with elderly people, painting community halls. That sort of thing. 

One day, towards the end of my second year, there was a note in my pigeon-hole. The university careers office was inviting me in to discuss my future. I knew by then the things that caught my imagination (the extra-curricular stuff) and what didn’t so much (my studies). I also knew that I didn’t want to follow any of the obvious routes for a person with my degree, such as the higher civil service, banking or the law. I hoped that a careers specialist might have a vision that could inspire me.

The careers officer sat behind his wooden desk in his boxy little office with its scuffed walls and peeling window frames.  In his forties - thick-rimmed specs on a red nose, long, greying sideburns and a wide, friendly smile - he offered me coffee and a biscuit. We chatted a bit about the weather and what I enjoyed doing. He said he understood where I was coming from, he’d dabbled in student theatre himself. And then we got down to business.

I have some ideas for you, he said. I think you’re going to like them. He leaned forward, elbows on desk, hands clasped. He allowed the pause to lengthen. How about the civil service, he said, or banking? His eyes shone with the anticipation of a parent about to offer a child a special gift. Or maybe, he added, you could try the law.

No disrespect to the civil servants, bankers and lawyers who might be reading this, but my twenty-year old heart did not leap with joy. But here’s the thing. Scraping by on a tiny income, my mum had made real sacrifices so that I could be sitting in that room with that man. She was proud of me. She nurtured hopes for my future. I didn’t want to disappoint her. So, when he went on to suggest I might spend a week of the long summer vac doing five days civil service work experience in Whitehall, I smiled back at him and agreed.

I was placed in the Ministry of Defence.  I had to sign the Official Secrets Act.  I lasted three days.  It felt like a lifetime. 

Maybe do a postgrad teaching certificate, my mum suggested.  But I don’t want to teach, I told her.  It’ll give you something to fall back on, she said.

My mother was a lovely woman, and she’d been through some tough years.  I wanted to make her happy.  So off I went to another university, where I learned about the history, philosophy and sociology of education, wrote more secret stories, did a heap of student theatre, and emerged a year later with my teaching qualification.

I’d learned that I was genuinely interested in education.

I’d also learned that I still didn’t want to be a teacher. At least, not yet. 

While at the second university I’d had a romance with a boy whose mother was a romantic novelist. Suzanne Ebel was the first professional writer I ever knew. She was glamourous and warm, wise and witty, unsentimental and encouraging. I fell in love with her. I stayed in love with her until the day she died. She allowed me to dream, she urged me to dream. Why not spend a year trying to write, she suggested, before you settle down to being a grown up? 

Meeting Suzanne was another piece of luck. 

However, I had to earn a living. 

At the second university, I’d started writing plays.  The dramatic form felt natural to me, almost welcoming. So, I migrated to London, found a flat in Brixton, and landed a job as an usher at the new National Theatre on the South Bank of the Thames. In the daytimes I wrote plays, in the evenings I tore admission tickets, sold ice creams and caught the performances while perching on an uncomfortable pull-down seat at the back of the stalls. My job was to raise the alarm if a member of the audience fell ill. My privilege was to watch, for free, all the shows in the repertoire.

I caught some wonderful productions that still live in my memory. My favourite was Playboy of the Western World by JM Synge, directed by Bill Bryden and starring Stephen Rea and Susan Fleetwood.  As I sit at my desk today and close my eyes, Susan Fleetwood is there, in the dying moments of the play, as Pegeen Mike, standing bereft and alone in the centre of the Olivier stage, utters her final bleak lines. 

‘Oh, my grief.  I’ve lost him surely.  I’ve lost the only playboy of the Western world.’ 

The memory makes me shiver. If there’s anyone reading this who saw that production, I’m guessing you’re shivering too.

I write a play. I write another. And another. 

Eventually I have a script that I feel - very tentatively - might be getting somewhere.  Another usher at the National tells me he’s heard that BBC Radio Drama are wanting new writers to submit their work.  I make a copy of my play, I slide it into a large brown envelope and post it off to Broadcasting House. 

A week passes. Then another. And another.

I start a new play.  I don’t forget the script that’s languishing at the BBC, but I abandon all hope that I will ever hear back.

And then, I come home from work one night to a letter from the BBC.  A script editor has read my play. He wonders if I’d like to come in for a chat.  He’s added a phone number. 

Next morning, first thing, I call him.