Ambitions, Hopes and Plans

Story · all 20 words

The Third Application

When I was twenty-three I told a friend in a pub that my ambition was to work in museum conservation – the people who repair the objects, not the people who write the labels. She said, “So apply for something.” I then explained, for about eleven minutes, why I could not.

The reasons were excellent. I did not have the right qualification. I could not afford the diploma, which cost more than I earned in four months. I did not know anybody in the field. Every one of those was true, and together they let me put off doing anything at all for two more years.

I applied for the first time at twenty-five and was rejected in a letter so short I thought at first it was about something else.

The second time was worse, because I got to interview. I sat in a cold room in Manchester and was asked what I would do with a water-damaged photograph album, and I gave an answer that I still think about occasionally at two in the morning. That rejection took longer to arrive and hurt considerably more.

So I decided to give up. Not dramatically – I just stopped. I stayed in the job I had, I was reasonably good at it, and I told myself I was being realistic, which is what people say when they mean something else.

What changed was small. I decided to take up bookbinding at a Tuesday evening class, purely because it was near my flat and I was bored. It was not a plan. But the woman who ran it had spent nineteen years in a university library, and after about four months she said the sentence that moved everything: “You do know they take people without the diploma, if you can show the hands.”

I did not know that. Nobody had told me, because I had never asked anybody who would know.

She let me use the studio at weekends. My progress was slow and completely invisible for the first year – I have a box of ruined practice pieces to prove it – and then somewhere in the second year it stopped being slow. I set myself one goal, which was a portfolio of twelve finished repairs, and I did not aim at anything beyond that, because twelve was already frightening enough.

The third application went in when I was twenty-nine. Same institution. Almost certainly the same panel.

I got it, and the thing nobody tells you is that I did not achieve it through being more motivated than the other candidates. Half of them wanted it more than I did. I got it because a bookbinding teacher in a church hall knew one fact about how the profession actually recruits, and told me.

The opportunity was there the whole time. I simply had no way of seeing it from where I was standing.

I ended up specialising in paper rather than textiles, which was never the plan, and it worked out far better – there is more work in paper and I am better at it. I eventually did the diploma anyway, at thirty-four, paid for by the employer, which is the correct order and the one nobody ever tells you about.

If you had asked me at twenty-three whether six years of failing was worth it, I would have said no. I would have been wrong, but I would have said no.

I succeeded in the end. I am aware that sounds tidy. It did not feel tidy at any point, and I am still not certain I would look forward to doing it again.