A middle-class revolt? I was the face of Gail’s — I’ll never forget the smell

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Having worked at Gail’s for three months in my gap year, I can no longer bear to go in there. One of the reasons is that once you have eaten free cinnamon buns, you simply can’t cough up the almost £4 that you normally have to pay for one. The main reason, however, is that all Gail’s branches have the same distinctive smell. You probably won’t have noticed it — but, believe me, I have. It reminds me of washing jam and tissues from little white condiment ramekins or stacking mile-high loaves of Waste-Less sourdough bread at 6am. My mum, who goes in every day, asks me to accompany her sometimes. I tell her I simply can’t. The smell brings back too many memories. Now, there’s a middle class furore over Gail’s opening a bakery in Walthamstow (cries of gentrification), but trust me, I won’t be a patron.
Shamefully, it was my mum who got me my job there. I was a layabout 18-year-old on my gap year; she was determined to see me succeed or, rather, determined to find me a job that would get her free coffees. She went along to this particular London branch and asked the manager (with whom she was naturally on a first-name basis) and they hired me right there and then. Mind you, I think they were obliged to give me the job. If they lost my mum’s custom, their profits would have never recovered.
One of the first things I was mandated to do was attend a training day at the Gail’s Brook Green academy in Shepherds Bush. This was the only place I graduated from with first-class honours. I excelled in their lessons on fire safety and customer service. They taught us how to smile at each customer when they walked in and ask them how their day was. This was something I executed with aplomb. Frequently customers would return my maniacal smile and ebullient “How are you?” with a groan, roll of the eyes and the words “soy latte, no foam”.
Nevertheless, I usually got on with the customers because, my manager told me, I sounded middle-class. The yummy mummies in running gear and suited businessmen liked the idea that they were being served by someone who could have been their son. The other people who worked there were mostly from different parts of Europe, a lot of them with degrees. Their English, despite their other talents, was not so good.
Indeed, there was an interesting cast of characters at the Gail’s I worked at. The manager was a tall, muscular man from Hungary who had a degree in computer science or something, and a penchant for science fiction. Despite the fact that he was engaged to a woman, he had a fan club of men who would come in and ask after him. One time, someone left him flowers. “Tell them I’m not here,” he would brusquely tell us at our staff meetings.
On another occasion, my dad came in to have coffee with my mum. I was washing dishes downstairs when one of my colleagues, a middle-aged Moroccan man, came to tell me: “Charlie, a man upstairs says he is your father,” as I scrubbed out the last morsels of a ham and cheese croissant someone had crammed into a glass. “So, I says to him, who cares. Who cares!”
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I worked as though I was getting a chief executive’s salary. It was my first job and I had no idea what to expect. This wasn’t helped by the fact that my deputy manager, an Italian woman who took up every possible shift she could, would constantly tell me that I was the slowest member of the team. So I scrubbed extra hard, stayed extra late, smiled extra warmly. I still couldn’t keep up with my industrious colleagues. They always managed somehow to do things two times faster than I could, despite being triple my age and sometimes triple my weight. But this didn’t stop me from trying.
To my surprise, then, head office recognised my efforts. The district manager came in one day with a camera crew and asked if he could take a picture of the food display. It was going to go on the website, he told us. They took photos of the neat lines of cinnamon buns, then asked me to pose in front of them. I suppose they liked me because I was young or because I was always smiling maniacally at the tills like they had told us to. Before I knew it, I was signing a release form and they had plastered my face all over some London job fair. Who needs Balenciaga when you are the face of Gail’s?
But I thought that I was a bad worker, right up until my last day. When I was leaving my deputy manager mournfully said to me: “Charlie, I thought you could’ve gone all the way, right to the top. You could’ve gone to Cambridge, to head office.” It was well known among the workers that the company diktats were issued from central command in Cambridge. That my colleagues deemed me worthy of such a prestigious post was quite touching.
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I could go on and on about Gail’s. It was a very unusual time in my life, when I was in a slight stasis before going to university. My letter of acceptance from Oxford University arriving coincided nearly to the day of me starting work at Gail’s. (Cue the insistent questions from my colleagues as to why I was working there, why I wasn’t prime minister yet, or at least in the cabinet.)
I left the job just as lockdown started. I was convinced there wasn’t going to be a lockdown and I didn’t want to cat Covid and infect my parents. The job gave me experience of the wider world. Would I go back? Not on your life. But still, I look back and smile maniacally.