The little card I’d picked from the rack in the Job Centre was for a labourer to work at the Lakeside Club in Frimley Green. The job paid sixty-five pence an hour and was a good half-an-hour bicycle ride from home, but I accepted the job and started to earn a living.

The Lakeside Country Club was a nightclub in the sense that it only operated in the evening and in the night. There was a central stage, a dance floor, and on three side of that, tables, chairs and booths. At the back of the club was ranged a number of bars, and behind them, the kitchens. If you’re British and into darts, then you’ll know the Lakeside as it was home to the darts world championship for many years. When I was there, though, it was dinner and cabaret six nights a week. Not for me the nightlife, though, I was strictly a day-time worker.

The first thing I had to do was to negotiate the time clock, something I’d only ever seen in films. Punching time in and time out on a piece of card, for pay purposes I was told, but it was also a management tool for attendance. I was assigned to work with a man who looked like he should have retired years before, but he was sympathetic to a greenhorn like me, and directed me to do my daily tasks, the primary one being vacuuming the whole darned place! My memory is a little hazy now, and I can’t believe that I did that, day-in-day out. I do remember sitting out in the yard behind the bars, sorting empty drinks bottles into their respective crates. Completion of that task was the ultimate in job satisfaction, from the chaos of the bottle bins to the tidiness of the crates. It wasn’t, though, intellectually stimulating, which is why I didn’t stick the job very long; I needed to get a better job.

While that employment instilled a little of the idea that I was going to have to work if I wanted to live, its regularity was an eye-opener, having to do the same tasks every day, week after week. School had not prepared me for this, but I knew there would be better.

Some years after I left, the original Lakeside had a fire and the entire place was rebuilt with accommodation, pool, sauna, and the rest. The darts world championship only arrived after the rebuild.