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Dou you remember those TEACH YOURSELF BOOKS in their black-and-yellow dust jackets? They were supposed to be able to teach you anything, from algebra to swimming to yoga, including how to teach yourself to teach yourself.
I struggle to think how you could learn how to swim from a book, but I did take a copy of TEACH YOURSELF BOOKKEEPING when I flew to Lüderitz in South-West Africa to take up my first job as an accountant.
The "kantoor" in which I had to spend my entire day for the next six months was something straight out of a Charles Dickens novel: dusty, old-fashioned, and run by an Afrikaner woman by the name of "Mevrou Russo" who "commandeered" two other equally imposing Afrikaner women. What their jobs were never really became clear to me.
My own work was simple and undemanding: keeping a mechanised debtors ledger (on a ledger-machine straight out of the Ark), paying suppliers' invoices, and reconciling several bank accounts. There the TEACH YOURSELF BOOKKEEPING book came in handy. Opened at the page 'How to do a Bank Reconciliation', and surrepticiously placed in my half-opened desk drawer, it guided me through the process of adding deposits in transit and deducting outstanding cheques from the balance on the bank statement to reconcile to the balance in the cash book.
As for "writing up the books of this Company up to trial balance stage" which, according to the above reference handed to me after six months of servitude, I did "in a most diligent and competent manner", I relied on a piece of paper I had placed in the same half-opened desk drawer:
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DEBITS BY THE WINDOW
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For many years and in many jobs thereafter, I always made sure that I was seated in such a way that the window was on my left. As for the TEACH YOURSELF BOOKKEEPING book, it's still somewhere in my library, its yellowing pages being eaten away by silverfish and booklice.
