Life lessons from the year I smelled like fried chicken

I was 15 when I announced I was getting a job. My parents were bemused, to say the least, given I had spent the last decade buried in a book and didn’t know what a chore looked like. I also had no need for money. The teenage girl obsessions of the ’80s – Sportsgirl T-shirts, Dolly magazines, Country Road canvas totes, Impulse deodorants with names like Temptation sprayed half a can at a time in the high school change room, Swatch watches and electric blue mascara – were yet to make much of a dent on my radar.

But I was driven by a force far more potent than materialism: the fear of missing out. My best friend had a part-time job working at Wendy’s, a soft serve icecream store, and it seemed to me she already had one foot in the adult world while I was still stuck in the schoolyard avoiding kids who called me square.

“It’s not that easy to get a job, darling,” Mum said gently. But I knew better, which is to say I knew nothing at all. In year 10, I spent the winter school holidays wandering around Adelaide’s food courts. I hung back, diffidently waiting for every customer to be served, before taking a deep breath and asking really, really quickly whether the store needed a part-time worker. To everyone’s astonishment, the owner of a takeaway chicken shop said yes.

The Chicken and Ham House was in the food court of one of Adelaide’s now forgotten arcades. It sold chicken in multiple variations – fried chicken, chicken schnitzel, chicken and chips, chicken vol-au-vent, chicken burgers et al – and not a lot of ham. Every Friday night and Saturday morning I would emerge, blinking, from the tissue-thin pages of whatever dour tome I was reading at the time, into the humid kitchen of The Chicken and Ham House.

The store was run by three generations of a tight-knit, voluble family of Greek Australians. God knows what they made of this Skip who didn’t know how to mop a floor. But they patiently taught me how to scrub clean the stainless steel trays from the bain marie, remove giblets from frozen chickens and make a cappuccino.

I read once that we are all mosaics of everyone we have ever known and we find fragments of people in our playlists or the way we make our tea. My first – and most implausible – job is now part of my DNA. I will never mop a floor without hearing The Chicken and Ham House owner’s voice in my ear: “Use one foot to balance the bucket, squeeze out the mop, don’t slop water on the floor.”

It was hard, unglamorous work. By the end of the shift my apron was soaked in dishwashing slurry and I smelt like a rancid chicken. But after a few months I grew used to the rhythm – the tense peak hour on Friday nights when the queue would be several people deep and someone would bark “Move your κώλος! (bum)” and the mellower times, when I learned about the family’s backstories while they helped me dry dishes. Life, I discovered, with all its drama and tragedy and tedium, also happened outside of a book.

It would be a cliche to say I became part of the family, but my parents and I were certainly invited to the youngest daughter’s wedding. I remember her looking like Princess Di with leg-of-mutton sleeves, but she probably wore nothing of the sort, and I am conflating my memories of the only two weddings I had experienced at the time.

For all my bravado in getting the job, I was too scared to quit. But year 12 exams were looming, so I enlisted my once-again bemused father to resign on my behalf. I figured (I wince as I write this) that The Chicken and Ham House would take my resignation better if it came from Dad. They were typically gracious, for in truth I would have been no great loss.

In 1998, the food court where The Chicken and Ham House was located was shut down following the closure of John Martin’s department store. For years the arcade was abandoned; one of those ghostly stripped-down buildings beloved by graffiti artists and photographers. Maybe it was haunted by my memories.

But when I went back to Adelaide, I would sometimes see, in my mind’s eye, a young girl trudging up the steps to Gawler Place at the end of her shift. She was bone-tired, shoulders hunched, apron sopping wet, reeking of chip fat. “Thank you,” I wanted to tell her. “You taught me a lot.”

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