Clenton Farquarson: Flat Feet

Transcript

I remember a careers day. Before we were leaving school, we all had to have, all my friends had to, we had a one to one with a careers officer and the careers officer said to all of us, he said, 'The only thing I can see any of you doing, you’ll be lucky to have manual labour jobs and if you’re lucky, hold on to those jobs'. I wanted to go into the army. The army, I thought, would be easy to get in and they stopped me going in the army because I had flat feet. That then made me, you know, I had real issues then, not even good enough to get into the army cos they didn’t even ask me any assessment questions or, it was just that I’d done a physical and they said, 'No you’ve got flat feet' and I remember laughing and saying 'What’s flat feet got to do with going in the army?' And they came up with… and I was like, well if I’m not even good to get into the army as cannon fodder, I think the teacher’s right, the career teacher’s right. So it had a massive effect of how I went into the world of work.

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