Weybridge in Surrey

At last I had achieved a secret ambition - to be in England, living an ordinary life, not being a tourist...New Zealand had been a cultural desert for me, and here I was surrounded by ancient churches, houses, countryside, concerts, art galleries and the strange working practices of the British in 1970. I went to Weybridge because a friend was going there so why not. On the first day of the week I went into the local public library and asked if there were any jobs available, and I was asked to start tomorrow. Strangely, there was difficulty about my proudly presented new qualification- they didn't know what to do with it, so I accepted to work as an ordinary juinior, although I soon discovered all the staff below the librarian in charge had no qualifications at all. I was mildly shocked that nothing was being done to give them any training. I was even more shocked by the job demarkation then prevalent in the British workplace. If a job needed to be done and it wasn't 'their' job, they wouldn't do it.
(at this time British library staff were qualified by either post graduate Diploma, or a course which presented the qualification of ALA. Neither of these were as wide ranging as the one I had followed in NZ, although the Diploma people had deeper experience of other systems of classification.)
After a year of working the odd hours of the public library I transferred to the Surrey County Libraries HQ in Esher and worked in the Book Supply Department. Curiously most of the new books came from Harrods, and their representative called every week with newly published books for consideration by the book selection panel.
After two years of this unambitious work, I decided I needed to earn more money and applied for various jobs as a qualified librarian. Tower Hamlets offered me the job of assistant reference librarian at Bethnall Green so I jumped at it. Didn't know where it was, but the salary was twice what I was then being paid.