Knocking-off time

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/rss/-/1/hi/magazine/7671735.stm

Version 0 of 1.

By Laurie Taylor No work talk, please

I still have a vivid memory of pay-day at Littlewoods Mail Order stores.

At five o'clock every Friday afternoon, all the workers in the warehouse would form a shambling queue in the loading bay and wait for the arrival of the cashier bearing the long tray of pay packets.

When your turn came you'd step up to the table on which the tray rested and announce your name and work number: "Taylor L, 1038."

The cashier would then rifle through his tray and hand you an envelope. Not any old envelope. But an utterly distinctive light brown packet dotted with small circular holes through which you could glimpse the colour of the pound notes inside.

As workers left the queue they'd open their packets, tip out the heavy loose change and then check the amount inside against the enclosed pay slip. Was the sum correct? Did the remuneration exactly match the amount of labour they'd expended in the past five working days? If anyone so much as brought up the subject, someone at the table would shout "Ding Dong" and the deviant would be saddled with the next round Laurie Taylor

Half-an-hour later scores of those workers were once again opening their envelopes for the money which would buy a round of bitter at the neighbouring Endbutt Arms. Friday night was drinking night. (On Saturday you might put on your suit and take your missus or your girlfriend into town for a Chinese but on Friday you drank strictly with your mates.)

It was a necessary celebration: a way in which we all tacitly congratulated each other on having survived another week of back-breaking dusty hard work for a very modest wage.

There was only one taboo in the Endbutt - a taboo which was observed right until last orders were called at 10 o'clock. There was no talk allowed about work. If anyone so much as brought up the subject, someone at the table would shout "Ding Dong" and the deviant would be saddled with the next round. Work was over. The graft was in the past. This was now down time. Free from labour time. What is now called leisure time.

Half-crowns

When I started my teaching job at York University, I often used to look back in sadness to those Littlewoods' days. Even as I sat in my room trying to breathe some life into a dull first year seminar, I'd romantically image a cash reward for my labours. How nice it would be, for example, if instead of receiving that official slip of paper announcing a salary payment to my bank at the end of each month, I was paid in hard currency on a piecework basis. FIND OUT MORE Hear Thinking Allowed on Radio 4 at 1600 on Wednesdaysor 0030 on Mondays<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingallowed/">Or download the podcast here</a>

How wonderful if every 20 minutes of my teaching day - I'd done the calculations - I could be refreshed by the sound of a whole half-crown dropping into a tin bucket outside my office door.

But what made me even more nostalgic for Littlewoods was the haziness of the line between work and play in my new job. There were no drunken celebrations on pay day, and if there were any conversations after work, they were almost always conversations about some aspect of work.

Intellectuals, I learned, were supposed to be thinking all the time. Their work didn't occur between set hours. It was a life-time vocation to be as readily practiced at home and on holiday as in the offices and lecture rooms of the university.

I can still remember the sense of shock which ran around members of our departmental board when a new working class member of staff was being given a formal welcome. The Head of Department asked if he had any questions about his new role. "Only one," said the young man brightly. "I was just wondering what time you all knocked off."

Contemporary discussion of what's now called the work-life balance seems to ignore the occasional glories of that division between work and play.

But in the pursuit of "flexibility" perhaps we run the risk of eternally breaking the Endbutt taboo.