My patron

My years as a part-time salary man

In 1988, I was thirty-one years old. I was a writer in all the senses that count, apart from one: I hadn’t sold a thing, and there seemed to be no real prospect of me selling anything, either. I was working as a teacher in a language school in Soho, London; it was, I feared, exactly the sort of job you drifted into at that age, when you had no real chance of doing the work you really wanted to do. I was afraid of the future – of telling younger colleagues in the year 1998 or 2008, aged forty-one or fifty-one, that I was a writer, but a writer whose stuff never got made or published. In the kinds of jobs I had been doing, I met people like that all the time, writers, actors, the occasional ancient musician. They scared me.  It looked like a hard life. Meanwhile, the friends I had made at university were all on a career ladder. They were academics or diplomats or journalists or accountants, and they were starting to make money. When I arranged to meet them, I was embarrassed by my own lack of advancement – embarrassed, too, that evenings out couldn’t involve food, because restaurants were too expensive.

If someone had told me that I was a couple of years away from being given a book contract that would change my life, then of course I’d have been happy enough to sit and wait it out. (And I’d have been amazed, too. I’d hardly written a paragraph of prose – all my efforts hitherto had gone into scripts, terrible things intended for the movies but which could just as easily have been performed on the radio, consisting as they did of a handful of conversations between two people.) But I didn’t know that. My suspicion was that I was kidding myself, and that the smart thing to do would be to give up the writing and find myself a proper teaching job, if only so that I could pay for my own pizza sometimes. The constant question I was asked was, What are you really going to do?