When I was on the lovely dole at 16 my mother insisted I got a job. She never cared that I barely went to school but she had some insane idea that I should work. Years later I realised this was something to do with being working class. At the time I thought she was just being a cow.
This is how I became a Trainee Audiology Technician. In an actual hospital. I wore a white coat and everything.
Even now, it’s something I struggle to explain. It never entered my head I would get the job, though I did have loads of science O-levels because my school was a sort of Govian paradise. Only stupid girls did things like English or art.
So there I was in a hospital, having to mend people’s hearing aids.
“I’m getting Radio Caroline, doctor,” some old biddy would say to me. They were not only deaf but gaga if they thought I was a doctor, I reckoned, so I would twerk around with a soldering iron and tell them it was all fine.
The serious part was doing hearing tests, playing different frequencies while they flashed lights if they could hear and I plotted some sort of graph.
Hearing tests can flag up brain tumours. As I made pretty patterns on the graph paper, I only hoped that there would be some other kind of medical indication. Anyway my boss said a lot of it was fake deafness. “It’s all for insurance claims,” he said mysteriously.
A lot of people, especially the old ones, did seem quite deaf as they shouted at me in my white coat.
A better person than me might have enjoyed such a level of responsibility. I merely thought it was better than working in a shop.
The worst thing was having to make ear moulds for the hearing aids. A liquid and a powder had to be made into a pink paste as the patient lay down. Revoltingly, I had to clip the hairs out of their inner ear. You stuck in the paste and moulded it: the trick was to get it out in seven minutes as it heated up and set.
“Try, if you can, not to burn them, Suzanne,” my boss Mr Dryhurst would say.
I didn’t know if he knew that I’d met his son at a Gong gig, where we engaged in lengthy snogging, but certainly he tolerated my utter incompetence with resignation.
One day an old Suffolk boy eyed me up and down with incredulity as I explained the procedure. “The likes of you are not putting that in the likes of me.”
I mixed up the goo and stuck it in his ear, nervously.
Thirty seconds later he was wailing, “Miss! Miss, it’s coming out of the other ear.”
I started screaming. “Mr Dryhurst, I’ve stuck it right through his skull!”
Mr Dryhurst rushed in. “Do not alarm the waiting room,” he said. “Ears are funny things. All sorts of strange sensations can be felt.”
“In one ear and out the other?”
“Indeed.”
What a great boss. I’ve never worn a white coat again, nor been treated with such respect. The NHS is truly a wonderful thing.
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