Earlier in this exhibition I showed you the story of leaving Cheltenham & Gloucester and moving to United Assurance, but how I got to C&G is the next picture I want to show you, because the things we learn at the beginning stay with us the longest, and we rely on them the most.
In January 1989, eighteen months before I was visiting the van Gogh Museum and discovering the Yellow House, I moved from a small general practice law firm at the foot of the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire, to the legal team of a major high street financial institution with three-hundred branches across the UK, known then as the Cheltenham & Gloucester Building Society.
For most of the previous year and having only just qualified, I had not been thinking about leaving, but I knew I didn’t feel settled either. I was making friends and starting to find my way, but I also felt detached from the world I was in. I didn’t know how to be me, and I wasn’t sure if being perpetually grateful for my opportunity was going to be enough to sustain me if the same opportunity was also making me feel unhappy.
Then one day I was flicking through the Law Society Gazette and I saw an advertisement for a junior consumer credit lawyer in C&G’s legal team. Until that moment I had never contemplated becoming an in-house lawyer and it had never been part of any conversation that I can recall. To be honest, I am still unsure why this role appealed to me, I didn’t even have my own credit card.
I wish I still had my CV from that time – what could I possibly have said? My typical week included drunk and disorderly bail applications, County Court advocacy, crushingly sad divorce cases and the occasional trips to Gloucester Prison to take defendant statements.
Memory plays tricks, but when I think back to how it was for me then, I have a strong sense of needing to move on, of feeling closed-in and that this was not the place for me to stay. However I do not want to pretend there was a plan. Hindsight is brilliant at extracting a compelling narrative from scrambled thinking, but there was no plan. That said, I have always known that when dark clouds gather in my life it is important for me to find some light and to move towards it. I definitely needed to find some light, and may be that is why I found the advertisement compelling.
The way I would describe this today is that we are never totally captured by circumstances that make us sad if we can still describe a future where we can be more of our true selves and where we can shine again. However, I don’t want to sound ungrateful for my time in Malvern; while I was unhappy, I also know that without my training contract and without the one chance I had been given to start my career as a lawyer, nothing I have done since would have been possible.
There are other things I am grateful for too. In the relatively short time I was there I learnt so much about people, about listening and being present for those who are sad, worried and confused. Hardly anyone walked through the front door of the office because they wanted to, most people were traumatised, broken or breaking. I was in my twenties without an ounce of real-life to back up my words, but I held their hopes with all the care that I could. Most people who have problems are lonely with them, ensuring that they were heard was the least I could do.
When I found the Yellow House in Amsterdam, I understood how everyone’s story mattered and should be told. I saw how extraordinary we all can be. But, working in Malvern at this time I didn’t have the vocabulary to make people feel valued. All I could do was listen and care, and I wasn’t sure it was enough.
I also learnt how unattractive entitlement can seem and how little respect some people have for other people’s points of views and other people’s lives. I realised that I wasn’t cut out for aggressive letter writing or being the mouth-piece for bullies. I wasn’t streetwise, I wasn’t artful and I may have watched too many episodes of Petrocelli for my own good, but I wasn’t going to be anyone’s hired help to make other people unhappy.
The partners who offered me my place in this extraordinary profession, gave me the chance of a lifetime to start my career, and while I found it hard, uncomfortable and sometimes an ordeal, I will always look back on that gift with humility and gratitude. I posted my CV to C&G with about as much hope as if it had been rolled up inside a bottle and gently dropped into the sea off the end of a pier. This was not part of a thought through career plan, and as the daily churn of jobs and tasks gripped me again, I promptly forgot all about it.
Then one day, weeks later, I took a call from a stranger who would not tell our office receptionist who she was. It was C&G’s Chief Solicitor’s secretary asking me if I might be interested in going for an interview.
I had never been in large corporate building before. It was HUGE. So much bustle, with open-plan lines of desks and ringing phones; lanyards, vending machines, sofas, pop-up banners and a sort of friendly anonymity, and it all appealed so much. There seemed to be so many people in animated conversation, walking briskly to and fro, stepping in and out of lifts, speaking fast and knowingly, and it was all wonderfully intoxicating. I could not begin to imagine what they all did, but it felt sophisticated and important. It was like a campus for grown-ups where people seemed to be enjoying their days and where you couldn’t imagine hearing the sound of sobbing, or violent teenagers kicking doors.
The interview seemed to go ok, but I remember being told that my lack of any consumer credit experience was not ideal. Inevitably, a few days later, a letter duly arrived thanking me for my interest, but declining to take my application further. I wasn’t really that disappointed; I wouldn’t have employed me either, but it was nice to have glimpsed a totally different world, and I knew then that whatever happened, my future would be somewhere else.
I settled back into a world of anxious bail applications and Green Form advice for sad souls. But something else had happened to me at this time as well. For the first time I saw that to be this type of lawyer, and to do it well, was an extraordinary and important vocation. C&G’s corporate headquarters was intoxicating for sure, and it really did feel important, but I also knew that nothing should ever be more important than fighting for someone’s liberty, or keeping children secure in a broken family, or helping the wife of a bastard husband find her way to safety and a future without violence.
I realised that I could do this type of work, and in time I felt I would learn to do it really well. I knew how vital it was that that good people should want to do this work, but I also knew it would take a toll on me. This place, at this time, was not where I belonged. It was time to leave.
About a month after my interview and with my letter of rejection long forgotten, I had another call from C&G, this time inviting me back for a second interview. The only candidate with a nodding acquaintance with the right bit of legislation had decided not to move from their current employer. The process was back on, and I was still in the game. My second interview seemed to turn on one question, “So, Paul, would you be prepared to learn about the Consumer Credit Act?” Given that earlier in the week my only suit was being dry-cleaned after I had slipped in a field trying to serve an injunction on a builder with a nasty temper; the question was not too difficult to answer. And so it was that three months later I moved from the badlands of Barnards Green in Malvern, to the bright lights of an in-house lawyer’s life in Cheltenham.
From the distance of my great age today and the decades that have passed, I know it was not Wall Street or the Square Mile, but this was by far the biggest possible change I could ever imagine in my working life. Of course, I had no idea if I could do the job, but I knew in my bones that I was stepping into a world where I could be more of myself than I had dared to be before, and where I could therefore grow and where I could make my difference. It felt liberating and energising, and I felt lucky as hell.
To be continued…
Take care. Paul xx
