In the end, I jumped before I was pushed. I told the factory to shove it. Well, to be honest, I handed in my notice, which, thankfully, was only a week. I was beginning to think I had made a disastrous decision leaving university, but a week later I found the best job in the world.

Marlborough House is the most prestigious department store in Cheltenham. Established in the 1850's, it has framed enlargements of Victorian photographs on the walls of its main stairway, illustrating its illustrious past. Only the very rich can afford to shop there, but Cheltenham is a town full of very rich people who like nothing better than browsing around its many floors lavishing useless gifts upon themselves. After they tire of their frivolous spending, they like to refresh themselves in the Garden Restaurant and chat to the charming working-class people who work there, entertained by their colloquial expressions and quaint tales of unrefined living. And it was in this restaurant that I secured employment precisely one week after leaving Bastard & Co. in Tewkesbury.

My new boss, Mrs Mead, was a kind sort. She'd been doing the job for years and was only a couple away from retirement. She introduced me to Spike, whose job on the wash-up I would be taking over, and Pete, the storeman, and then left me in their hands. Spike was a couple of years older than me and, as I soon discovered, a very unlikely sort of chap to be working washing-up in a restaurant. He had completed his degree in Philosophy and was considering taking a Masters in Analytical Psychology. He was currently reading 100 days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade. He said he enjoyed doing 'real jobs' with 'real people' and told me that the majority of dustmen were actually very well read. Over the course of that day he expounded his philosophy in more detail. He was interested in gaining insight through excessive sensory experience, a route espoused by, among others, the French poet Rimbaud, who believed that "the true poet becomes a visionary by a systematic derangement of the senses". Spike would also often quote Blake's aphorism that "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." Spike really did walk as he talked, and that lunchtime I went to the pub with him and Pete and he knocked back six neat scotches.

Spike was also the first vegetarian I ever met. When I asked him why he didn't eat meat, he retold me the story of his conversion, which he spoke of like a Damascuscene epiphany. He was walking through a field of cows one summer and the inquisitive beasts came over to check him out. They licked the salt from his hands and he noticed their beautiful long eyelashes. He'd never really appreciated the connection before between these gentle creatures and the food that was on his plate. After that walk he could never eat a piece of meat without remembering the cows' eyelashes, so he gave it up.

Pete made the perfect foil to Spike. Short instead of tall, round instead of skinny, he seemed a good deal older at twenty-six, particularly as he was already balding. Pete's philosophy also pivoted around a requirement for sensory pleasure, but for him this was the goal of existence, not merely the method to obtain it, and he soon educated me in all the best places in the restaurant to get a good 'leach'. His favourite spot was near the entrance to the kitchen from the staff restaurant; he taught me the technique of kneeling down in front of the fridge and pretending to count the milk in order to get an unobstructed view underneath the tables of the restaurant. Pete would go absolutely berserk whenever he was able to get a glimpse of a lady's stocking top or panties, and he would run into the wash-up to tell myself and Spike to come quickly for a look.

Pete's other favourite leaching haunt was at the delivery entrance. This backed on to a busy street and Pete would spend up to 80% of his day leaning against the doorframe watching people walking by. He classified himself as an "arse man" and his gaze would follow the posterior of any attractive woman until she was out of sight. I soon got the hang of it and it wasn't long before I too had adopted the habit of saying "yeah" or "nah" in relation to all the women that walked by, as if we could have had anyone of them, were we so inclined. In reality, not even the most desperate of them would have given us so much as a second glance dressed as we were in our dark green kitchen uniforms – mine with half-mast trousers and covered in tea and custard; Pete's with his flies broken and his top threadbare with the effort of constraining the globular tummy beneath.

Pete's other job was to care for the stores. Despite his busy leaching schedule, he knew exactly how many packets of flour, loaves of bread, jars of mayonnaise, trays of eggs, boxes of pasta etc. were in the stores at any one time. The refrigerated foodstuffs were kept in a larder in the yard; the dry foods on the top floor of the building accessed through soft furnishings. At certain times of the day Pete knew he had to be on hand to answer the requests from the cooks for more of this and more of that, but after these hectic periods, when he wasn't leaching, he would 'stock-take'. This really meant sleeping, for Pete had acquired the ability to stock-take the entire upper stores in less than half an hour in order to leave himself at least two hours a day to sit down in his chair and have a rest. I lost count of the number of times I had to go and wake him up before Mrs Mead went looking for him herself. Luckily, she wasn't inclined to climb all the stairs to the top floor too often at her age, and only generally made the effort when she and Pete did the weekly order. The assistant manager, Joanne, however, was only twenty-two, and therefore more of a danger.

Joanne was not popular with the women who worked in the kitchen and on the food-counter because she was young, pretty and, worst of all, qualified; but Pete and I worshipped her. She always wore a blue suit with, generally, a white blouse, of a revealingly see-through variety, and, whether she did it just to turn us on still remains a mystery, but always stockings and suspenders. Not a week would go by without her adjusting her hosiery in the office at a time when we were passing, keeping us in an excruciating state of sexual tension. Pete made it worse for himself by accompanying her to the cold stores as regularly as possible and then following her back up the cast-iron steps always three or four rungs behind.

After my first week, Spike left and we all went to his leaving party at the Beau Bells pub. He had made an enormous impression on me in that short space of time and I was very sorry to see him go. I felt like he'd helped me to adjust the trajectory of my life – and a small matter of degrees has a profound effect over vast distances, I thought. I would later compose a poem about him called 'Comet' because he was living his life at an incredible pace and I think he knew he would burn himself out before too long. His girlfriend was there too that night and she seemed even less grounded than he was. They got through forty-eight shots between them.

"What you gonna do then, Spike?" said Doris, one of the old girls from the Garden. She, like most of the cooks, was tough as nails on the surface, but soft underneath, not unlike her cooking. That was another thing I picked up from Spike. He knew how to handle these cantankerous women. It was no use acting the sensitive flower; they called a spade a spade and a turd something clinically improbable. He didn't patronise them or act like a sycophant, but was genuinely interested in what they thought and was forever running new ideas and theories past them to get their reaction.

"I'm going back to school, Doris. Haven't finished learning yet. Lots more to discover. I need to integrate my anima for a start," he said, with a twinkle in his eye.

"What'd ee say, Vic? Have an enema? Ow d'you do that then, Spike? Does it 'urt?"

"Dunno, actually. Should be interesting. Have you explored your animus?"

"Hey! You leave my anus out of this. That's between me and my old man, you dirty shit!"

"But don't you think Doris that your constant sexual innuendoes may be related to the projection of your feminine unconscious persona onto us lads as symbols of the animus?"

"What's he on about, now? Give us a fag, Spike."

Pete and I very quickly became close after Spike left. He was one of the sharpest witted people I'd ever met. We'd spend ages in the upper stores munching our way through bags of M & M's while Pete taught me karate moves, kicking holes in the sides of crisp boxes. One time we were playing tennis over a suspended strip light when I hit a return too hard and sent the walnut whip straight into it causing it to shatter in an explosion of flying shards.

"You're mad, you two!" cried Harry, one of the porters. "Clean this mess up before I have you reported to Mr Jossket."

"Bollocks, Harry" replied Pete.

Although we occasionally wound Harry up the wrong way, at lunchtimes he always had a seat on our table in the staff canteen. All the restaurant staff and the porters sat on the same table. There was kind of a class thing going on even among the staff. The kitchen staff were looked down on by the other employees in the store as the lower orders. Next in the hierarchy came electrical, stationery, toys and sports; after them, lingerie, shoes and haberdashery, and at the top men's and ladies fashions, china and crystal and fragrances. These latter were the snobbiest. They fancied themselves as super-models although they were really just bimbos with too much make-up. They were always flirting with management at lunchtimes, playing with their hair and laughing too loudly. Doris, in retaliation, would grab one of the manager's arses and ask him when he was going to keep his promise and work a day in the kitchen with her.

"I give you my word, I will take you up on that. I don't mind getting my hands dirty, me" he'd lie.

"Bollocks" Doris would reply.