Spring was in the air: low cloud and faint drizzle alternating with drenching showers and biting winds. Leaves. Here and there a few chinks of light in the dull armour of the sky.
Travel Research and Information – the market research company that I worked for from time to time – was organising a huge survey over several rail routes in the south-west of England. They needed forty additional staff and Steranko, Foomie, Carlton, Freddie and I were all taken on. We had to interview passengers on trains and since some of these trains started from places like Truro, Exeter and Penzance at six in the morning the company put us up in an assortment of hotels in the region. Freddie and I stayed in a vast hotel in Taunton where the towels were thick and white, the carpets silent, and the taps eager to fill clean baths with steaming water. Staying away from home was thought to be a great hardship so they paid eight pounds a day expenses. Once that was used up we loaded as much as possible on to the hotel bill: drinks in the bar, room service, twenty quid dinners, newspapers; even things we didn’t want like salad sandwiches at two in the morning.
None of us cared about the actual survey and for most of the week we simply ran riot in unspecified parts of southwest England. By careful manipulation of our rosters – suddenly the word roster loomed huge in our lives – Freddie and I managed to meet up with Steranko and Foomie for a lavish meal in Plymouth where they had a double room in the Fitzwilliam hotel. Another day we completed our quota of questionnaires quickly and hopped on a train to Exeter where we wolfed down a couple of cream teas for lunch and strolled round the Cathedral.
So far the weather had been dull and overcast but bright sun over the south-west had been forecast for the following day. As Freddie and I tucked into a five-course meal at the hotel that night, he said that in the circumstances we were virtually obliged to take off to some coastal resort and spend the day lying on a beach, eating ice-cream and making up answers to the questionnaires. The next day we did a few interviews and then caught a train to Teignmouth where we’d arranged to meet Carlton. By lunch-time the three of us were on the beach, jackets folded up in plastic shopping bags, sipping cold beers and using questionnaires to keep the sun out of our eyes.
‘Paradise,’ said Carlton, speaking for all of us in a voice that was drowsy from the heat and the beer. ‘Three quid an hour for doing fuck-all.’
‘Not quite fuck-all,’ I said. ‘There’s still the questionnaires to make up.’ Inventing answers was not as simple as we thought; it was very easy to make some little slip which had your imaginary respondent making an impossible journey or travelling on a non-existent ticket. In a way, as Freddie explained from his deckchair, it was a bit like writing a novel: you had to invent a character – a retired school teacher, a business executive – and think yourself into his itinerary and probable opinions.
‘We’d better leave it to you in that case then Freddie,’ said Carlton, as we rolled up our trousers and paddled in the grey-green ocean.