ABSTRACT
I could have had a job for life with Wiltshire County Council. That was certainly how my parents relished my prospects when I got a start as a junior clerk in the Health and Welfare Department in Swindon at the age of 16. As the first person in my extended family to enter the world of ‘white-collar’ work, I had already reached the zenith of their ambitions. Much of the job was clerical work of a style that would have been recognised by Dickens, such as the handwritten certification of deaths in enormous ledgers. But I enjoyed travelling around the schools and baby clinics, keeping records of hearing tests and immunisations, issuing supplies of orange juice and Ostermilk to families deemed to be in need.
