My gap year adventures with Kevin the Mortician and a Brazilian duck fancier

Middle class youngsters are being encouraged to take a gap year, starting about now. It’s a knock-on effect of the 2020 university admissions train wreck. Oversubscribed places will go first to the disadvantaged, the advantaged being vividly encouraged to hold off until 2021. The gap year beckons. This is being received in some quarters as a catastrophe. Fiddle-de-dee. It is anything but. I had two gap periods, one abroad and one in Britain. They took a gangly 19-year-old caught between over-confidence in some domains (irregular French verbs, causes of the Russian revolution) and crass incompetence in others (romance, paid labour practices) and moulded him into the rounded individual he remains.

In short, they taught me things. These included wariness around the forces of law and order, wisdom acquired after being approached by two policemen at Mexico City airport. I had just arrived from London. My hair was so long that short-sighted people called me “miss”. The policemen gave me to understand that they didn’t want long-haired men in Mexico City – which, given some of the people they already had in Mexico City, was surprisingly fastidious of them. They brandished scissors. The chap waiting to meet me, my future host, had spotted the interception. He bustled up, took the policemen aside and, in Spanish, enquired about the police orphans’ charity. There was a brief rustling of notes and we left for my host’s house. I had a haircut the following day, obviously (This was all years ago. Mexico City airport is legendarily virtuous these days.)

That – 36 hours into a gap year – was the last time I relied on anyone in authority to pull me through. A transition phase, then. Schoolboys get told what to do, put right when they go wrong and usually have someone around to cushion the consequences. A gap year kicks away the support structure. You’re 19, for heaven’s sake. Get on with it. All you need is money, so get a job.

So I got a job teaching English at the British Council’s Mexico City centre. I learned, two days in, that the education profession was more complex than expected. The first day had introduced me to my class – mainly students at the city university seeking extra English. They were all older than me, and a lot cooler. Some wore black turtlenecks. We covered “I am Pedro”, “He is Zapata” and “where is the cemetery?” before they told me that the following day was Mexico’s National Teachers’ Day. There would be no work. They would bring in tequila, paper cups, nibbles and a portable record player.

By 10am, we had a jamboree going. I could still stand straight enough to lead a conga, snaking and whooping, through the council’s other classrooms where teachers’ day celebrations had not yet started. These classes were heads down or looking at the blackboard, not noticeably in festive mood. The party animals weaving behind me echoed “Shake that funky thing”, correctly using the imperative and placing the adjective before the noun. Conga completed, we returned to our class, finished the tequila and parted. I passed by the staff room to pick up my bag. The other English staff were all there. “National Teachers’ day, eh?” I beamed, gripping the door handle. They looked at me as at six feet of slime. “There is no such thing as teachers’ day in Mexico,” said a fellow in a sports jacket. “Oh,” I said, then a light-bulb moment: ”Oh! the cheeky little tykes”. Then I left. It transpired that most of the other teachers were from Hull. None spoke to me for the rest of my months-long Mexican teaching career. I’ve subsequently boycotted Humberside.

This gap year indicated that private teaching was also a blind alley, career-wise. It peaked as I threw myself round the garden of the Brazilian ambassador to Mexico in pursuit of a duck. I’d been hired to instruct the ambassador’s 10-year-old son in English and maths. I was in the library. The boy – Carlos, conceivably – came in. He was carrying a duck. “They will not be separated,” said his mother. She left. Carlos and I sat on opposite sides of the long wooden table, the duck between us. Before we’d got beyond niceties – “my name is Anthony” – the duck had stood up, jumped off the table, waddled between the bookshelves and through the French windows into the garden. “The duck has left,” I taught. “Cães,” cried Carlos, hurtling as fast as his plump little body would allow towards the French windows. Dogs. Fearing thievery or insurrection, the Brazilian ambassador had large dogs roaming his grounds.

Cometh the hour, cometh the man. I rugby tackled the duck at the fourth attempt. I’d like to say that this saved it from the slavering jaws of colossal, blood-crazed hounds. But the grounds were the size of central London. We never saw the dogs. Carlos was nevertheless traumatised. “We will not more lesson,” he blubbed. “Oh, yes we f*****g well will,” I said. I needed the money. Strangely, though I could get almost nothing into his head, he remembered that sentence and apparently brought it up at dinner with his father. This contributed significantly to the ending of a career in private teaching.

At other times, I travelled up and down the country by bus, train, plane and bike – astonished that I could decide something and actually have it happen. No-one higher up the hierarchy was saying “hold on, matey”. I booked tickets and went. This was gap-year-as-oh-crikey-liberation. I passed through the house of British ex-pats who, in June, still had a Christmas card from Edward Heath on their mantelpiece (“I don’t think he ever got over me,” said the wife). After we successfully landed in Oaxaca I contributed to the whip-round for a Mexican airline pilot organised by a Texan fellow passenger (“The boy done good”). And I holed up with a working family in Orizaba when hit by exploding bowels. Their son, about my age, spotted me suffering in a park and took me home. His mum looked after me for three days. Imagine that. Imagine a random Mexican bloke walking round Nottingham, falling disgustingly ill and being taken in by an English family who had never before met a Mexican. The woman refused money, so I left some under the pillow. Since then, Mexicans have had to do something appalling to get out of my good books. (Clearly, some are gifted at “appalling”, but I never met them.)

Back in Britain the curve continued. I learned, firstly, that there was room in the NHS for all sorts but, secondly, probably not for me, not for long. This knowledge sometimes accrues to hospital porters. Back then, the job consisted of sitting in the porters’ room, smoking Woodbine or Capstan Full Strength and, when the phone rang, saying no-one was available. When standing up could no longer be postponed (usually, late morning) the worst task was emptying the surgeons’ lounge of empties and fag-ends. The best was pushing stuff about: lunch trolleys, patients to X-ray or theatre, amputated legs from theatre to Sid the Incinerator. (“Here, Sid! Catch!”)

Or entire dead bodies to Kevin the Mortician. First time I wheeled a stiff in, around midday, the smell was unusual, a cocktail of offal and disinfectant. I retched slightly. “Do you mind?” said Kevin. “I’m eating.” With that, he reached for his next sandwich, from a packet placed on top of a male corpse awaiting his attention. Kevin would occasionally place himself upon the stretcher trolley and cover himself, top to toe, with a sheet. When a student nurse came in to pick up something from the mortuary, he would wait a moment, then slowly raise an arm and groan: “Cheese and ham on white, please, love.” Student nurses generally visited the mortuary only once.

Working people like Sid and Kevin – but especially Sid – instructed a middle-class dilettante in the arts of calculating working hours to the nearest nano-second and of analysing the various elements on a payslip faster than a mainframe computer. The lessons didn’t stick, but they could have. These fellows were equally tenacious in the matter of taking the correct amount of time off. So I had the liberty to write letters, then post them. Thus, outside the town’s main post office, did I bump into a teaching assistant from France. She later hit the jackpot and became my wife. Had I not been on a gap year, we’d never have met. I wish you such gap year luck (finding your own spouse, I mean, not mine).