From Air Hostess Aspirations to Picking up Aircraft Trash

“Children see magic because they look for it.” — Christopher Moore

I arched my head back to let the warmth of the sun splash across my face. I breathed in the radiance of that day — the sunshine, my happy tonic. I lightly patted my hair bun, pinning the loose strands up inside my hat with my fingers. I twisted the curved brim to the side and yanked it down, seductively veiling the top of my eyes.

There, I felt ready; I now looked just like an air hostess.

I marched up to the top of the road and all the way back down again. I repeated the march, just as thoughtfully poised as a catwalk model, happy for anyone who happened to be around to take notice of me.

They would see me and obviously think,

‘What a pretty air hostess!’

Despite the fact that I was only seven or eight and just pretending.

^^^

Back then, circa 1975, I was that close to feeling like I was an air hostess. Well, in my mind, donning my sister’s new senior school hat that she’d refused to ever wear. The school removed that item from the uniform list by the time I started in 1979.

Thirteen or so years later, when I was twenty-one, I applied to work for cabin crew at Virgin Atlantic, wanting their high-status glamour, but unfortunately, I didn’t get through the application process. Being in the late 1980s, it was more than likely because I wasn’t blonde. Slightly tanned and a brunette, I didn’t suit their brand image at the time, despite how smart I thought my application photo looked. I was even wearing their mandatory red lipstick.

Fast forward another seven years, when I was twenty-eight, my best friend was working as an accountant for Air 2000. She provided me with an opening to their cabin crew recruitment day. Still, I magnificently failed my geography assessment.

^^^

I never got to fulfil my aspirations of being a flight attendant, but I am able to tell you I did get to work inside an aircraft for a short period of time. Nothing as charming and adventurous as what I had once anticipated as youngster, but without doubt, an important component of air travel.

^^^

Backpedal years to when I was seventeen, discovering a job vacancy through a friend and having no other options but to apply for it. I had just left my commis chef position. The alcoholic, temperamental head chef had strangled me up against the kitchen wall. My feet had quite literally hovered a few inches above the floor. I was too young to deal with his shit and didn’t like the unsociable hours. I had been doing it since I was sixteen, with hardly any time off.

Still, the new cleaning job would be unsociable hours too: Four days on and four off, day shifts, moving over to night shifts once I reached eighteen: 7 pm to 7 am. I also had to get myself up to London Gatwick airside, although luckily, only a twenty-minute drive from where I was living at the time.

I was fortunate, too, because although I hadn’t yet passed my driving test, my male buddy, who gave me free driving lessons in his old Mini, was also unimaginably obsessed with me. He was happy to drive me to and from work.

In all honesty, the job felt awkward. Cleaning wasn’t what I had aspired to do. I had had higher hopes, but needs must. It would have to do for now.

At that time, I hadn’t ever travelled on an Airplane outside of the UK, and so working at Fernley Aeroclean Ltd had been an eye-opener to the airline industry.

There were diverse and colourful characters that worked for the company: the genuinely nice, newly married, ginger-haired man who looked more like an insurance office worker than a cleaner.

The angry, short Scottish guy with a permanent stubble and hangover, who always appeared to sleep in his parked Austin Allegro, which never seemed to move. The empty whiskey bottles — mounting up in the car's rear window.

Then there was the good-looking, blue-eyed cad, who looked like a young Magnum, whose job was to empty the aircraft toilets with an enormous truck. He drove it like it was his art. I loved the way he winked at me.

The too-chilled-out manager, who assumed everyone was smoking ‘wacky baccy’. They usually were.

There were the wide-boys who thought they were too cool for school. The stoners, including one gorgeous French guy who should have really been a movie star.

The older man, who came across as a kind and soft father figure, only to eventually humiliate me in front of everyone. He scarred my young life.

There were only two other female crew members; everyone else was male. Most were older, in their twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. I felt young and vulnerable at times. And more so, especially on the night I knew I would never go back.

Each team would jump into a crew van, drive along airside, and sit and wait for their assigned aircraft that had just landed to taxi in. I learnt the phonetic alphabet off by heart as well as other airport jargon.

A quick turnaround clean meant that we had to grab our black bin liner and move along each row of seats, quickly, collecting any rubbish from the floor, seats, and seat pockets, emptying the ashtrays in the armrests, as well as crossing every seat belt.

This had to be done in under ten minutes.

Sometimes there was time for a super quick hoover down the aisle. But bearing in mind the punters were waiting to board from the other side of the finger.

Once or twice, the engine jets of a Dan Air Boeing 727 were still operating. They were excruciatingly loud as we all raced up the back steps, right beside them. I almost lost my hearing; it took a good hour for my ears to stop hurting.

A deep clean would be carried out when the aircraft had a night stop in an aircraft hangar. The aircraft engineers would carry out line maintenance to ensure safety and compliance for the following day’s flights. This was when we would board to perform a deeper clean.

Lemon-scented cleaning solution to wash the sidewall panels, pulling down every window blind along the way, washing those too. Vacuum every part of the passenger cabin and galley, and even though it was pre 9/11, we didn’t usually get to enter every cockpit. We had to remove all headset covers, replacing them with attachable cloth covers or disposable paper ones. We’d polish the toilet mirrors, taps, and sinks. And clean around the galley area, tasting any leftover in-flight tray meals and spirit miniatures.

It was a monotonous, physically demanding, and short-lived job, but it had its ups. Like the one shift, I got to venture inside Virgin Atlantic’s Flying Lady; we had all excitedly raced up the spiral staircase to view its top-tier upper class deck. We were also able to board an Alitalia Airbus (now ITA Airways) as well as an El Al Boeing, which I would later, in a few years, get to fly on a handful of times.

Another night that made me smile on a deep clean, as I sat washing the walls of a deserted galley, an engineer appeared through an open galley service door elevated by the maintenance scissor lift. He surprised me as he handed me a box of Milk Tray chocolates, just like in the Milk Tray adverts. It was sweet to be admired by a decent man.

And driving along airside on our way back to our base, the sun would be just rising, the sky awash with orange and soft pastel shades etched across the horizon as our Earth moved eastwards. I felt free and caught the reflection of my young face, pretty, smiling back at me in the large side van wing mirrors.

Yet sadly, despite the laughs and banter, too much of it was at my expense. The juxtaposition of that, the teasing me, shaming me sexually, and one joking that I resembled Maradona, to Donna, a female colleague, telling my boyfriend he should drag me up to London to a model agency: I had found a pair of Jackie O’s on a deep clean and donned them as I cleaned the toilet mirrors.

She saw something special in me. But these immature men couldn’t.

They were stoners. And one night, a colleague gave out a huge cheer after finding a lump of hashish hidden in a seat pocket by a scared passenger. So many of my colleagues were druggies.

And it wasn’t until the last night shift that I learnt my boyfriend shared intimate things about me with all the other male colleagues. I had been confronted by the entire work crew, bar the manager, of twelve or more guys, laughing, jeering and gesticulating at the expense of my female genitalia.

Looking back at that time, it taught me a lot about myself and about people. The people I shouldn’t ever trust or let in, and how I needed to protect myself better.

While the job was short-lived, I almost destroyed who I was, believing I wasn’t good enough because of a crowd of emotionally immature and unintelligent men.

It helped me become a strong and protective mother for my own daughter. And in hindsight, we can always take the good from the bad.

Plus, even after forty years, I can still remember the phonetic alphabet.

^^^

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