An Elephant of One's Own

I think it was Christmas 1980. Might have been 81 or 82 but I'm going for 1980. I was a painfully shy, painfully thin bearded Modern Languages student who smelled of Old Holborn rollies and peered at the world through a pair of habitually dusty National Health spectacles. It was the holidays so I needed a job. Through a stroke of good fortune I landed a stint as Lift Attendant at the Café Royal in London, which was about the easiest job going: you simply turned up, slipped into your uniform (jacket with copious braid and epaulettes and gold buttons, white gloves which had to be draped over shoulder), then spent the evening accompanying people up and down in the lift and doing the flunkey thing: "your floor, sir", "your floor, madam" and I forget the rest of the spiel. I knocked off around midnight, or a bit later, depending. Since at that hour there were no buses back to High Wycombe (my mum's house, where I didn't actually have a room but could kip on...