Workaway, that repository of all things ecological, hippy, and neo-fuedalist, is, as far as I am aware, rarely a force for bad. And while my first encounter has done nothing to dissuade me of this belief, I wasn’t expecting quite so psychologically combative an environment on entry into what I had assumed was generally a sandal-run world. 

My first interview was over zoom. A wiry man presented himself. We shall call him Philip. With eyes closely resembling minnows in flight, and a talking style suggestive of the regular application of weak adhesive to his lips, he cut an odd figure. He was an artist. A good one, too. He showed me a recent portrait of his wife. Even through my laptop screen, her face contained the clarity and frigid elegance comparable to that of Brullov’s portrait of Natalia Pushkina, Pushkin’s wife. It was, in a word, beautiful. This slavic execution was unsurprising, for he was Ukrainian, his wife, Russian. The family, himself, his wife, and their three children, lived in England throughout the academic year, and spent their summers in Paris. 

He asked me what I did, and I responded with a level of ambiguity appropriate to the newly-graduated. I, in turn, asked what it was that I would be doing. The work, had I got the job, was to edit his youngest son’s diary. This son, whom we shall call Henry, was fourteen. 

My understanding of the role was weak, as was my grasp on why Philip was engineering this level of intervention into something as personal as a diary, his child’s no less. I decided to head to Paris. Once there, I would stay with friends, and bank on being able to join the Workaway soon after the second interview, which I requested to be in person. Philip had agreed, and a date was set.

I traveled to the arrondissement, and waited outside of the Metro. French is not my language, nor is Paris my city, and generally, painful though it is, I am not welcomed by the People. While I am aware that this is nearing lapalissade judgment, I do present awkwardly there, more so than most. Though tenuous, I put this down to the uniformity of the city. The architecture is known the world over for its aesthetic straitjacket, and those without the antidote, a firm sense of self, can fall prey to its inert, bidding pressure. And so, as Philip rounded the corner and saw me there, shuffling, ill at ease, eyes almost as jittery as his own, it no doubt set the tone for what would become one of the odder conversations of my life. 

We walked a little and turned off the main drag, entering onto a residential street, resplendently green. A banner had been drooped between the opposing houses, it read ‘Thermopylae’. An apparent nod to the street’s narrowness, aping the pass that Leonidas of Sparta briefly defended from Xerxes’s invading forces. We entered his building, a disordered, warren-like space opened up - an artist’s, no doubt. He gestured around and said they referred to it as ‘le Territoire’.

Henry spoke French, Russian, German, and English; the language in which he wrote. He had shown literary promise from a young age, writing several novels aged eleven. Detective stories at first, in the style of Conan-Doyle, then a few poetry collections, and, more recently, upon discovery of Waugh and Wodehouse, his style had taken on their manner in epistolary form. This diary, written over the course of his first year at an English private school, was done so at the direction of his father. 

Philip billed my would-be-task as a creative endeavour. Copy-editing and typing up the text aside, there was room for experimentation and the exercise of imagination. Philip did not say how this would be so. I asked if I should ensure Henry’s style remained true in his bid to mimic Waugh and Wodehouse. To Philip’s mind, youth borrows so glaringly, so consistently, that such a measure would be redundant. 

Philip himself mentioned how resistant Henry was to the maintenance of the diary, what with his other academic commitments (and his sporting prowess, naturally), it was proving to be an unnecessary source of stress. I asked Philip why he continued to encourage Henry in full knowledge of this burden, his response was matter-of-fact, he is a child -he couldn’t possibly know how much it will benefit him. 

As far as I could tell, Philip was in the habit of arranging a team, his own word, of Workawayers to tutor Henry over the summer holidays. He appeared to be cherry-picking those who had either received offers, were attending, or had just graduated from prestigious universities. My own, brief presence immediately discounts this theory, but I suspect it was contingent on our short discussion about Turgenev appealing to his and his wife’s heritage. In any case, if I remember correctly, Henry was to receive maths tutoring from a Swiss woman, fresh from ETH Zurich, and essay-writing direction from a recent Oxbridge graduate. It was in this way that Philip provided Henry with free, prestige-based education.

Philip spoke of his other two sons sparingly. I must make room for the fact that my presence there was dependent on Henry, therefore why would he touch on the others? But his manner, the near-brutal fixation on speaking about this son, done so with quiet verbs - Henry is, Henry will - was laden with intent and authority. Take, for example, the preordained line - when Henry is a famous English writer - issued during a monologue on his son’s trajectory. 

He even mentioned, in all sincerity, that this diary could be used in conjunction with the upcoming anniversary of the school that Henry attended. Philip felt that the account would provide a highly unique profile of school life, what with Henry’s precocity. This was said mere minutes after I had obligingly grumbled ‘interesting’ in response to some other bizarre and close-grained statement, to which his response was, well, no, it’s not interesting, is it? You’d be editing a fourteen-year-old’s diary.

There would be periods where we would simply stare at each other. Gone were the just-met quirks, moments of silence would transition from plain awkwardness into foolish games, who would speak first, who would break eye contact first - this was psychical chess at its most ham-fisted. Toward the end of our meeting Philip conceded that he made his decision, on whether to welcome the Workawayer into his home, based on his intuition. I wondered if what I was witnessing, and reluctantly partaking in, was his usual interview approach. I left soon after this. 

I emailed a few days later to ask after the verdict - Philip had intuited that I was wrong for the role. 

I know that I am limited in my understanding of Philip, Henry, and their family dynamic. Not once did I meet the brilliant, ascendent son and ask him how he felt about his father’s conduct. However, based on what little experience I have, I propose a new term - sacerdotal hothousing. The crux is that the brilliance of the child is intertwined with the parent. To the parent’s mind, one without the other is nothing, the offspring’s ability can be traced back to themselves. The shape of their child constructed and conveyed by the prospect of future prestige, and, crucially, their own place alongside them. 

I left Paris by coach. The Frenchman seated diagonally to me had at some point decided to embrace the rallying call of the Francophone world, the ribbit, in the form of his ringtone. The woman seated to my left felt that an overnight journey was the ideal time to repeatedly thank a man for her life over the phone, eventually shifting onto the recitation of scripture in a divine steady-state fuck you to the rest of the coach. In briefly removing the phone from her ear, ‘The Power of God’ flashed on her screen, a contact I claim no envy in lacking. This continued for three hours. At some point, a man over the aisle took it upon himself to prod me and indicate that I should do something about it. Naturally, I baulked. He grew steadily incandescent. And there I was, sandwiched between God’s humble servant and a quietly seething man. Oddly enough, I preferred this mania. At least I knew where the fuck I stood, hands outstretched.