VT Coughtrey - Photographing babies

NOTES	There was no need to admit to my mother that I was not working. During the few days of my disappearance from home she had made enquiries at Hegarty & Merry and had been told that I had not worked there for some time. Fortunately, she seemed to have no idea of just how long it had been. Of course, she demanded to know exactly where I had been and what I had been doing, especially during the days of my total absence. I’m sure that whatever I told her, it wouldn't have been the truth. She put relentless pressure on me to find another job, pointing out vacances in the Barnet Press. Having been footloose for a few months, I really couldn't face the thought of doing some stupid job surrounded by even more stupid people. The problem was that work was very easy to come by at that time, and there was just no excuse at all for not having a job. By the same token, it didn't ring true to say that, having applied for a job, you had failed to get it. That just didn't happen at the lower end of the job market. If you applied for a job, you got it. So I tried on two or three occasions telling my mother that I had applied for jobs and got them, then went off as though to work, with the same old hope that something (but not a job) would turn up. But on each occasion she checked with the alleged employer on the first day, then confronted me when I returned home. It was hopeless - I would just have to get a job.
	I applied to be a door-to-door salesman for Tupperware and was taken on. There was no training. It wasn't necessary, because it was a commission-only job. If you were no good at it you earned nothing and dropped out of your own accord. On the first morning I joined the others at the assembly point where we were picked up by a van and taken to our respective territories. In the van I was told that this job was very easy money. The housewife was pathetically easy prey who could be sold any old junk. All you had to do was to maintain the correct self-image, which was that you were a merciless and bloodthirsty hunter. Any man who couldn't make £5 a day commission (an unimaginable amount then) was not a man at all. I was so sickened by this talk that when I was dropped off in what was to have been my patch, I just went straight home and told my mother there was a limit to how low one should stoop to earn a living. Predictably, she was of the opinion that this would have been a perfectly respectable job compared with the really disgraceful ones, like being a dustman or road sweeper. For my mother, as with most people, it was the status of a job rather than its morality that determined its respectability. To my way of thinking, handbag snatching would have been a more honest way of getting money off women.
	Oddly enough, I then immediately went out and got another door-to-door job, this time canvassing for a photographer of babies. I suppose the reason I found this more acceptable was that, for one thing, it involved working directly with the boss, Sid Fisher, who was obviously not exactly rich himself. For another thing, Sid was an amusing and amiable character, and it was quite fun travelling about with him in his Triumph Herald to various Hertfordshire towns and villages. However, he certainly shared quite a lot of the aggressive and cynical philosophy of the Tupperware men and had the same complete contempt for the housewife.
Of course,this method of selling by implying initially that you're not selling is employed much more widely these days and now seems to be part of the acceptable mainstream of selling gas, electricity, 'phone services - you name it. They often use the technique even more blatantly than Sid and I did, lying rather than merely implying. And men seem no longer immune to it !	My job was to knock on doors carrying a clipboard, ask if there were any babies in the house and say something vague about a survey. If the door was answered by a man, my instructions were to pretend to write something down and leave it at that. Indeed men invariably wanted to know what the survey was for and it could be quite difficult to make up some rubbish that didn't arouse their suspicions too much. If a woman answered, I would ask to see her husband. Of course, in nearly all cases in those days the man would be at work, but you needed to make sure he wasn't in by asking to see him. The woman would readily tell me whether or not she had a baby in the house, and would often invite me in to prove it. I would then exclaim in amazement at the beauty of the baby and say that it really ought to be photographed for the records by my colleague. Quite often, the mother would agree to this, in which case I made a note of the house number and passed it on to Sid when I next saw him coming from a house where he had just photographed a baby. A few days after taking the photographs, Sid would return to the house with high-quality prints and demand payment. The extroadinary thing is that when the mothers saw the pictures they usually paid up without question. If they refused, he threatened to tear up the photographs in front of them. The thought of this was more than they could bear, in most cases. In fact I only ever saw him do it twice. Whenever the husband happened to be in when he went back with the photos, the probability was that Sid would be chased off with threats about the police. One man tried to hit him.
	Only once did we venture into London - to Finsbury Park. At that time it was the main area where West Indian immigrants were settling, and Sid thought that black women might be even easier prey than their white sisters. I had seen very few black people up to this time. In fact a black family had recently moved into Barnet and this had caused quite a stir. When we started knocking on doors in Finsbury Park, the first thing we noticed was that all the front doors were already open and there seemed to be a party going on in every flat. To our initial dismay, it was always men who answered our knocking on the doors, but they turned out to be just as eager as the women to have their babies photographed. Also, there was no need for deception, as they started waving money at us from the start. I think this was all too easy for Sid, because he soon decided to return to harder territory.
	Sid always gave me a generous cut of the profits and I might have stayed with him for some time, but for an unfortunate incident. It was by now January or February 1962, shortly after the first Christmas without my father. We were working in the Hertfordshire village of Codicote. Sid had to go off somewhere on some other business. He was very fed up about this, as we were doing quite well that day. So he gave me about ten minutes' instruction in the use of his very expensive camera and flash gun, then handed over the equipment to me. It was arranged that he would return and pick me up later.
This was written before the blizzards I experienced in Wales in 2013 !	However, some time after he had driven off it began to snow. Eventually, a full-scale blizzard developed, by far the worst I have ever experienced. There was deep drifting in the strong wind and before long all traffic had been brought to a standstill. It was obvious that Sid was not going to be able to return to pick me up as planned. I started trudging through the blizzard in the dark, not even able to see where the road was at times because of deep drifting. Somehow or other, after a long ordeal, I found myself in Hitchin and discovered that the trains were still just about running. I eventually managed to get one to New Barnet. I arrived home very late, saturated, freezing and exhausted. Of course my mother was in quite a state, having assumed that I had decided to disappear again. But worse than that was the sudden realisation that I had left all of Sid's precious photographic equipment on the train!
	When Sid called the next day to apologise for not having been able to pick me from Codicote as arranged I stayed in my bedroom, terrified of confronting him with the dreadful truth, but my mother eventually dragged me out of hiding. I was forced to own up. Sid predictably flew into a rage and ordered me to accompany him to the lost property office for that line at King's Cross. He haranged me the whole way, assuring me that the equipment would not be there and laughing bitterly at my naïve suggestion that someone might have handed it in.
	But when we arrived at the lost property office it was all there! I actually rounded on Sid in triumph. "I told you it would have been handed in" I crowed. He was suddenly all sweetness and light and started discussing where we might work the following day. But he had gone too far in his hour-long bitter recrimination and I simply didn’t want to see him again. To his disappointment I told him I was moving on to other things.