Yet how can he turn the offer down? He is within inches of having a real job, and in England too. He need only say one word — Yes — and he will be able to write to his mother giving her the news she is waiting to hear, namely that her son is earning a good salary doing something respectable. Then she in turn will be able to telephone his father’s sisters and announce, ‘John is working as a scientist in England.’ That will finally put an end to their carping and sneering. A scientist: what could be more solid than that?
Solidity is what he has always lacked. Solidity is his Achilles’ heel. Of cleverness he has enough (though not as much as his mother thinks, and as he himself once used to think); solid he has never been. Rothamsted would give him, if not solidity, not at once, then at least a title, an office, a shell. Junior Experimental Officer, then one day Experimental Officer, then Senior Experimental Officer: surely behind so eminently respectable a shield, in private, in secrecy, he will be able to go on with the work of transmuting experience into art, the work for which he was brought into the world.
That is the argument for the agricultural station. The argument against the agricultural station is that it is not in London, city of romance.
He writes to Rothamsted. On mature reflection, he says, taking into consideration all circumstances, he thinks it best to decline.
The newspapers are full of advertisements for computer programmers. A degree in science is recommended but not required. He has heard of computer programming but has no clear idea of what it is. He has never laid eyes on a computer, except in cartoons, where computers appear as box-like objects spitting out scrolls of paper. There are no computers in South Africa that he knows of.
He responds to the advertisement by IBM, IBM being the biggest and best, and goes for an interview wearing the black suit he bought before he left Cape Town. The IBM interviewer, a man in his thirties, wears a black suit of his own, but of smarter, leaner cut.
The first thing the interviewer wants to know is whether he has left South Africa for good.
He has, he replies.
Why, asks the interviewer?
‘Because the country is heading for revolution,’ he replies.
There is a silence. Revolution: not the right word, perhaps, for the halls of IBM.
‘And when would you say,’ says the interviewer, ‘that this revolution will take place?’
He has his answer ready. ‘Five years.’ That is what everyone has said since Sharpeville. Sharpeville signalled the beginning of the end for the white régime, the increasingly desperate white régime.
After the interview he is given an IQ test. He has always enjoyed IQ tests, always done well at them. Generally he is better at tests, quizzes, examinations than at real life.
Within days IBM offers him a position as a trainee programmer. If he does well in his training course, and then passes his probationary period, he will become first a Programmer proper, then one day a Senior Programmer. He will commence his career at IBM’s data-processing bureau in Newman Street, off Oxford Street in the heart of the West End. The hours will be nine to five. His initial salary will be seven hundred pounds a year.
He accepts the terms without hesitation.
The same day he passes a placard in the London Underground, a job advertisement. Applications are invited for the position of trainee station foreman, at a salary of seven hundred pounds a year. Minimum educational requirement: a school certificate. Minimum age: twenty-one.
Are all jobs in England paid equally, he wonders? If so, what is the point of having a degree?
In his programming course he finds himself in the company of two other trainees — a rather attractive girl from New Zealand and a young Londoner with a spotty face — together with a dozen or so IBM clients, businessmen. By rights he ought to be the best of the lot, he and perhaps the girl from New Zealand, who also has a mathematics degree; but in fact he struggles to understand what is going on and does badly in the written exercises. At the end of the first week they write a test, which he barely scrapes through. The instructor is not pleased with him and does not hesitate to express his displeasure. He is in the world of business, and in the world of business, he discovers, one does not need to be polite.
There is something about programming that flummoxes him, yet that even the businessmen in the class have no trouble with. In his naïveté he had imagined that computer programming would be about ways of translating symbolic logic and set theory into digital codes. Instead the talk is all about inventories and outflows, about Customer A and Customer B. What are inventories and outflows, and what have they to do with mathematics? He might as well be a clerk sorting cards into batches; he might as well be a trainee station foreman.
At the end of the third week he writes his final test, passes in undistinguished fashion, and graduates to Newman Street, where he is allocated a desk in a room with nine other young programmers. All the office furniture is grey. In the desk drawer he finds paper, a ruler, pencils, a pencil sharpener, and a little appointments book with a black plastic cover. On the cover, in solid capitals, is the word THINK. On the supervisor’s desk, in his cubicle off the main office, is a sign reading THINK. THINK is the motto of IBM. What is special about IBM, he is given to understand, is that it is unrelentingly committed to thinking. It is up to employees to think at all times, and thus to live up to the ideal of IBM’s founder Thomas J. Watson. Employees who do not think do not belong in IBM, which is the aristocrat of the business machine world. At its headquarters in White Plains, New York, IBM has laboratories in which more cutting-edge research in computer science is performed than in all the universities of the world together. Scientists in White Plains are paid better than university professors, and provided with everything they can conceivably need. All they are required to do in return is think.
Though the hours at the Newman Street bureau are nine to five, he soon discovers that it is frowned upon for male employees to leave the premises promptly at five. Female employees with families to take care of may leave at five without reproach; men are expected to work until at least six. When there is a rush job they may have to work all night, with a break to go to a pub for a bite. Since he dislikes pubs, he simply works straight through. He rarely gets home before ten o’clock.
He is in England, in London; he has a job, a proper job, better than mere teaching, for which he is being paid a salary. He has escaped South Africa. Everything is going well, he has attained his first goal, he ought to be happy. In fact, as the weeks pass, he finds himself more and more miserable. He has attacks of panic, which he beats off with difficulty. In the office there is nothing to rest the eye on but flat metallic surfaces. Under the shadowless glare of the neon lighting, he feels his very soul to be under attack. The building, a featureless block of concrete and glass, seems to give off a gas, odourless, colourless, that finds its way into his blood and numbs him. IBM, he can swear, is killing him, turning him into a zombie.
Yet he cannot give up. Barnet Hill Secondary Modern, Rothamsted, IBM: he dare not fail for a third time. Failing would be too much like his father. Through the grey, heartless agency of IBM the real world is testing him. He must steel himself to endure.
Six
His refuge from IBM is the cinema. At the Everyman in Hampstead his eyes are opened to films from all over the world, made by directors whose names are quite new to him. He goes to the whole of an Antonioni season. In a film called L’Eclisse a woman wanders through the streets of a sunstruck, deserted city. She is disturbed, anguished. What she is anguished about he cannot quite define; her face reveals nothing.