![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Within days there, I discovered that I loved working with words and, despite a meagre salary, employment on a glossy magazine had its perks. But, just as the course was finishing, I was taken on as a sub-editor at Harpers & Queen. What would have happened had a job not fallen into my lap, I hardly dare think. As I emerged at lunch-time, and wandered towards Soho Square to eat a sandwich, surrounded by shoals of down-and-outs and drunks, I kept thinking of that line from The Waste Land: ‘I had not thought death had undone so many’. Secretarial instruction was delivered over headphones to classrooms full of women, and, as I tried to follow the disembodied tutorials, my fingers kept slipping and jamming between the keys of a hefty, black manual typewriter. It was not a good move.) Facing what felt like a futureless future, I signed up for a ‘Sight and Sound’ typing course on the bleak first floor of a building next to the Garrick Theatre. (In a panic, as university came to an end, I had started my working life as a graduate trainee in a City bank. ![]() In one fell swoop, I had lost my fiancé, my flat and my job. In 1988, when I was 23, I spent the most miserable three months of my life there. I thought I could never feel fond of Charing Cross Road. ![]()
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