I was never very gifted academically and my 6th Form years were a bit of a joke. I left school with ‘A’ Level Art and General Studies, Grade C, and my Oxbridge options were limited. My friends, who were of a similar capability were all off to 4 years of Teacher’s Training College. Not one of them had the slightest aptitude to be a teacher, but four years of shagging your brains out while living away from home on a Government grant seemed like a pretty good life. These were the pinnacle years of Socialist Britain, we could actually get paid to go to Colleges where there were girls. College applications were based upon the male:female ratio of any given College. We had been at an all-boys school for 7 years and we were gagging for it, whatever it was.
I, however, distanced myself from this. Not because I was getting shagged (I wasn’t), but because I hated teachers. None of my friends intended to become teachers but, as I used to argue, after 4 years you finally have to get down to earning a wage and what are you qualified for? And how do you feel you will think about that? Within a year you would become one of those sad, twisted, bitter, misanthropic, evil, bastards that taught me for the previous 7 years. Why wouldn’t you, if it’s not the job that you really wanted to do? Don’t get me wrong, I think that teaching is probably the most important profession in the world. I think there are people who ought to be teachers, who love their work and are good at it. It’s just that I had never met any of them.
So I declined. I signed up for Night School to try and get the ‘A’ Level English that I had failed, in the hope that a third might get me into a half decent Uni to do a course in…. what? I had no idea. So in the meantime, the imperative was a job, as my Mother was not in a position to support me.
My first job was at Lyons’ Bakery in Wakefield. This was one of these friendly, yeasty places where wholesome ingredients are lovingly worked into scrumptious and healthy comestibles. Not. It was a great big shed, designed to produce chemical stodge that had, in fact, never been touched by human hand. Unfortunately for them, in order to get Planning Permission, they had to provide a quota of jobs, so they took out some of the machines and employed humans, or in some cases, what passed for humans and hand-touching was definitely involved.
My first training was in rolling Swiss Rolls. Upstairs in the big shed, a machine sprayed 3 lines of sponge batter onto a continuously rolling conveyor belt. This belt only stopped for Christmas. The belt rolled through a very long oven and by the time it came out, the sponge was cooked. It then rolled down to the floor below, where it passed through the coolers and was then mechanically spread with jam or cream and cut. At this point, the Swiss Roll earned the epithet “Hand Made”, because I took 2 pieces, squashed the far end, rolled the slice towards me, turned and placed them on a secondary conveyor as the next 2 slices passed by to where my partner sat. There were 7 of us and we rotated around the 6 positions so as not to get bored. The 7th man in the rotation was off having a fag break. The hardest positions related to the central line of sponge because you had to stand up and lean across. It took me the best part of 10 minutes on my first day at work to be going stark raving mad.
The ‘Lads’ were as big a bunch of social misfits as you were likely to find anywhere inside of a dole queue. Fortunately, I remember very little about them apart from Tommy, who should not have been allowed anywhere where there were real people and Gordon who was a lovely lad but not quite a full shilling. Gordon came in one Monday with a great red bump on the back of his head, massive. He had been at a cricket match the day before and this bloke hit a six and it came straight at him. If he hadn’t have turned away, it would have hit him right in the face. We all thought about this for a minute and then someone asked, “Did you not think to duck?” And sure enough, he hadn’t. Gordon’s Six became the new topic of conversation for the next week or so, interspersed with the continuing banter about that fit bird over on Fairy cakes.
For entertainment, I liked the position closest to the jam spreader, it was still about 10 feet from my station, but I could speed up and work my way up the line and then take an unscheduled 30 second break before the sponge train caught me up. But that soon palled and I found that I could use the 30 seconds to sprint up the side of the coolers, lift an inspection hatch, mash up the hot sponge and get back to my place. 3 minutes later, the mashed sponge would hit the back of the jam spreader and, instead of passing under it, it would climb up its back face and fall backwards, creating a supersize Swiss Roll, but without the jam, which was oozing all over the conveyor belt and completely screwing up production. This involved the line Manager, tearing round the place to clear the wreckage, while we all had an unscheduled break. Oh halcyon days!
My other goal, involved Chocolate Swiss Rolls. It was my ambition to write on the Brown roll in White cream “Help am trapped in Swiss Roll factory”, but the cream was very thick and I didn’t have access to icing sugar, so there were a lot that went out with just “Help” written on the side. That, at least was innocuous. Despite metal detectors on the packing machines, we had a number of rolls returned with angry letters complaining of lead shot and needles. That was not me. Inevitably though, someone grew suspicious of the number of logjams occurring when I was on station. They could never catch me and so I was asked if I would like to work in the stores. You betcha!
The Stores position came with night shift work which was more money and much more freedom. I learned to drive a fork lift truck and move great mountains of pallets of flour and enormous canvas bags of sugar. The main job involved stripping sacks of flour into the sifters and then loading it into the great wheeled bins that fed the machines. It was hard work, but if you went for it you could prepare a good 4 hours worth of materials and then find somewhere for a lie down. At the top of one of the flour mountains (Soy as I remember, bought by some health nut in management and then forgotten about) I shuffled enough sacks so that I had a small living room with a day bed. Nobody could ever find me and it was not uncommon to spend the evening in the Pub, get a shifts’ worth of work done and then sleep it off before clock-out in the morning.
The yard outside was used to park the delivery vehicles and part of the evenings routine was to check all the doors. Woe betide the errant driver who didn’t lock up properly, because once I had lifted what I wanted, the lads on the Swiss Roll line would take turns to strip it bare. Inevitably, Gordon would leave with half a dozen Swiss Rolls. “Gordon, you just made them!” “Yeah, burra don’t like the other stuff”.
My other joy was driving the fork lift. I needed this to move the endless pallets of flour and the bags of sugar that sat up on the great hopper. But I used it to build elaborate obstacle courses around the vehicles parked in the yard and then me and one of the other lads would take turns to race round to a stop watch. At night, this made quite a racket and the Police were called several times by irate neighbours whose houses backed onto our yard, but they could never catch us at it. One particularly frosty night, we were racing round some metal bins, I cornered a bit tight and crashed sideways in to a bin. I heard a window go up somewhere and expected to hear a string of obscenities. Instead, I heard a bang and the clang of lead shot as it hit the bin next to me. Someone was having a go with a 12 bore shotgun.
My forklift bounded off and I careened back into the stores. Unfortunately, I had the forks up high and the wheels were still slippy with frost. In my haste to avoid being made into a teabag, my XJS Forklift did another slight slip sideways. This time, the left hand fork cut a slash in a 2 tonne bag of sugar and I was engulfed in an avalanche of sweetness.
I had 2 hours to dig out the forklift, sift 2 tonnes of sugar into the wheelie bins, lose the canvas sack and hack the melted sugar off the overheated gearbox. There may have been a tad of axle grease in the Swiss Rolls coming out the next day and there was strong smell of toffee coming from the forklift which, for some mysterious reason, ground to halt around noon. Racing was postponed indefinitely.
When the pre-Christmas chocolate log hiatus was over, I got laid off.
After leaving the Bakery I did a short stint as a ‘Supermarket Management Trainee’ at one of the big chains. This title was a cunning ruse to employ 8 very keen young men and work them to death in competition with each other, for less than minimum wage, with the vague promise that one of them ‘might’ be selected to apply for the opportunity to enter into a regional run-off for a sponsored management training course at an unspecified University. ‘Regional’, in this case, meant the entire United Kingdom and the course was run once every millennium. “Oops! Sorry! You just missed the last one”.
Of course none of this came to light at the interview but, on day one, I met my fellow Management Trainees, who all looked like they had spent the night with Vlad the Impaler. I handed in my notice at lunchtime. The Manager took me to one side and was somewhat surprised that I would question the integrity of this scheme, but then confessed that having spotted this scam in the first 5 minutes must surely mean that I had Management Potential. If I would just drop my trousers and bend over, he was sure that he could put in a good word for me.
At this point, I observed to him that coincidental to my appointment and that of most of the other Trainees, was the fact that Britain was switching to decimal currency in 2 weeks and that my guess was that he wanted the entire stock re-priced with the least amount of expense and that it was my intention to get this point across to the other ‘Trainees/Abusees’. He then offered me a 50% pay rise, with no overtime involved, if I would stay for the 2 weeks it would take and not talk to anybody. Result, I got decimalised.
Supermarkets, however, were not very macho and I had a hankering for something more manly and by some freak of happenstance I actually managed to talk my way onto a building site. The Woolley Edge Service Station on the new M1 Motorway South of Wakefield. I was reasonably tall by this stage, but hardly of Charles Atlas proportions, however, under a Donkey Jacket, who can tell?
My first job on my first day was to take the pneumatic hammer and break out a line of concrete curbs that had been set in the wrong place. Confidently I lifted the hammer out of the stores and staggered to the job location. I worked out how to connect the air hose and then connect the air hose to the compressor. I worked out how to start the compressor and by this time it was almost lunch, but I was feeling confident. What the heck! I’d always wanted a go with one of these and now I was being paid to. Might as well have a quick shot. I positioned the bit on the first curb and pressed the trigger.
What I had never noted before, was that all jack-hammer operators have a huge gut. This gut hangs over the handle of the hammer and provides the necessary stability and resistance, such that the hammer stays in place and noisily vibrates its gigantic weight up and down until the desired object is smashed. The gut acts as the bodies’ shock absorber.
With one single pull of the trigger, my jack-hammer exploded up off the ground and into my chest, knocked me to the ground and landed on top of me. They don’t show that on ‘Bob the Builder’. I lay, stunned and trapped for a short while, until the rest of the lads traipsed past me to the canteen for lunch. “If you are trying to fuck it, at least use a Johny! Fuckin ‘Ippies” was probably the most constructive comment that I received. Fortunately, the Foreman needed grunt labour for some very nasty jobs involving hot tar. He took pity on me, lifted the jack-hammer off me, showed me the ‘Gut Technique’ and suggested I have the Pie and Chips if I wanted to “Ride that bitch”. I got transferred onto the hot tar duties, amongst other things, and used the time to observe and learn, in order not to suffer an early death or, worse still, further embarrassment.
Woolley Edge was soon complete and I was laid off again but the Fates were with me. The Site Agent had also been fired, for incompetence, and he was now running a job for another outfit. Recognising an old comrade in arms, he hired me on the spot and now I was building Old Peoples Sheltered Housing, just up by Pinderfields. I had all of 3 months experience by this time and in a moment of insanity they made me Tea-boy and Dumper Truck Driver. I could feel my forklift truck experiences were going to come in useful.
Tea-boy duties involved getting in to work first and lighting the gas boiler trying not to blow the place up. This was more difficult than it sounds. There have been several cases of the Tea-boy turning on the gas and lighting it, only for the pilot to go out the moment his back is turned. He steps out to the shops to get the milk and somebody walks in with a lighted fag and let’s face it everybody on that site, except me, had a lighted fag. “Do you smell Gas?” could clear that tea cabin quicker than a pit shaft.
Other jobs involved unloading delivery trucks, by hand. This was before the days of palletized deliveries to building sites. 5,000 facing bricks have to be unloaded and there’s 2 guys up, 2 guys down. You slide out 5 bricks, lift, drop and let go, the guy on the ground reaches up, captures, swings and stacks. If you get it right, it’s a very fluid and gracefull combination of movements. If you get it wrong, it’s 5 bricks in the face. Either way, the skin on your finger tips and backs of hands is gone in the first 2 minutes and after that it’s blood and curses until you toughen up.
300 bags of cement? Drop them off the side of the truck onto your shoulder and walk. Within 2 minutes, your ear-drums are burnt out and everything stings. I was turning into quite the long-haired Hippy by this stage, and on my right side the hair was bleached white-blond by the lime. But I did get fit and considered myself to have finally achieved the state of ‘Macho-ness’. Not that this impressed the other lads. As New-boy and Tea-boy, I was generally accepted as the butt of most jokes and when they discovered, to their utmost delight, that I had been to QEGS, it was like Christmas all year round. They were all called Paddy, or Spud, or Tank, or Tich and so, due to my complete inability to undertake even the Suns’ Quick Crossword, I was called “Brains”. “Oi Brains! Nip down to the stores and ask for a long stand”. It seemed that wherever I went, I was destined not to fit in, but at least here the bullying was done in a friendly way.
After lunch one day, I was sitting on the front bucket of the JCB, enjoying a bit of sun and reading the Paper. Paddy, the JCB operator, came out of the tea cabin, climbed into his cab and started the engine. But I was feeling my oats and didn’t want to be disturbed so sat there and kept on reading. So he lifted the bucket and I kept on reading, So he set off across the site and into the middle of the pond that formed around the standpipe and I kept on reading. By this time, everybody was at the tea cabin window, this was a game of chicken, but silly me there could only be one winner and he was sitting nice and dry in the cab.
Paddy raised the bucket as high as it would go and still I sat there, trying to act cool. So he started to tip the bucket back and at this point I had to drop the paper and move, but I had 2 options. The simplest was to climb into the bucket, but then he could easily tip it back and throw me out, so I clung to the lip of the bucket and draped myself around the outside edge. I wasn’t looking cool anymore, but I was hanging on. So he tipped the bucket as far back as it would go and now I was hanging on and dangling. Then he gently nudged the bucket back into my gut, just enough to knock the wind out of me and loose my grip. Accordingly and, to the massed applause of the entire site, I fell the fifteen feet into the mud and slime of the standpipe pond.
“Yah’ll roight dere Brains?” enquired Paddy. “Okay”, I spluttered. “Good man y’are then” and he drove away.
2 weeks later, he saved my life. I was working in a very deep trench clearing out spoil before the concrete truck arrived. Fortunately, Paddy walked past. “Brains. Would yez be comin up here an all”
“Busy Paddy. The truck’ll be here in five and I have to have this out.”
“Naw. Come on son. Oi’m needin a hand. Bring yer shovel an aw”
Reluctantly, I made my way back to the ladder, climbed out and joined him above the corner of the trench I had been working in. “What’s up?” I said. “The Foreman’ll kill me if this in’t ready”.
“Naw. ‘Tis goin to have tae wait son. Just look a minute”.
I turned to see what he was looking at and couldn’t see a thing when suddenly, and without a sound, the entire corner of the excavation collapsed into the trench. I would have been under that.
“There now, Oi’ll be gettin the digger.” And he walked calmly away. I looked at the several tonnes of collapsed dirt, and puked my ring up.
There are many ways to dice with Death on a building site, but my favourites were the Dumper Trucks. We had an articulated 2 tonne dumper that had some real punch and a feisty little half-tonner. To this day, I have no idea why they ever let me near these things.
One day, the lads had all gone in for tea-break and I was cruising the site in the 2 tonner. We had a nice muddy slope at one end and I decided to gun down it and then go into a tight turn. Too much gun and too tight a turn. Even with massive grip on the tires, the crank on the mid-axle caused us to slip sideways and then the speed brought one side off the ground and we were starting to roll. Somewhere in my dillusional state I thought that by leaning out I could bring 2 tonnes of barreling steel to heel. So there I was, fingers gripping the wheel, toes gripping the side of the dumper and the rest of me hanging over the edge as we careened towards one of the in-construction houses. Suddenly, something bit, the wheels slammed down and we turned away with a glancing blow to the scaffold, which caught for a second and with an almighty screech pulled itself away from the building façade, before letting go of the dumper. As the dumper and my heart decelerated, I decided to take a break, drove back to the cabin, parked neatly and went inside for a cup of tea.
Afterwards, I watched as the 2 Brickies and the Brickies’ mate climbed the scaffold to pick up where they had left off, only to stand there and scratch their heads as to how they were now 3 feet away from the wall face they had just built before break. I imagined that there might have been words if my little incident had happened while they were up there, but nobody ever sussed it.
My other steed, the Half-tonner, was also a vast source of amusement. With a dump truck, you don’t work your way through the gears, you put it in 1st if you are carrying a heavy load and you put in 3rd if you are empty. I don’t think I ever found 2nd. I soon discovered that the front bucket end was a tad light and that if you let the clutch off a bit sharpish in 3rd, then it would kick up. Further experimentation led to the discovery that if you really gunned it and dropped the clutch, the back wheels would bite, the front wheels would come up and you could do a wheelie of about 20 yards.
My party trick was to stand holding the wheel, gun the engine, scream “Hiyo Silver! Away!!” and give a 2 fingered salute to the lads as I dropped the clutch and the front end would rear up as I roared away. Brilliant. The subject of much head wagging and “Brains! Fuggin ‘Ippy”. By this time my hair was really long, cement bleached, held back in a flowered head band and I wore a ‘Fabulous Freak Brothers’ vest. Total berk.
One day I was driving into the office compound at full speed, as usual, and the Site Agent jumped out in front of me and I had to slam on the brakes. By this time I had come to understand why he had previously been fired for incompetence. He looked a ‘Tube’, wearing a suit and wellies, he always walked with one hand holding his dangling left nut and he was generally disrespected by the crew, who by this time were all watching events unfold as the Agent unleashed a torrent of abuse about my kamikaze driving skills. They wanted to see how I reacted. Was I still the Tea-boy or was I almost their little man?
Nonchalantly, I pushed down on the throttle and the noise of the engine now drowned out his remonstrations, which made him shout louder. I raised a hand to my ear and mouthed, “Sorry I can’t hear a thing you’re saying Boss”. The lads were having a good laugh and he was starting to turn purple with rage.
But it is amazing how quickly that the purple of fury can turn to the greeny-whiteness of abject terror. I had mud on my boots and my foot slipped off the clutch, the front end reared up and the lads all shouted “Hiyo Silver! Away!!” as I leapt forwards. The Agent dived to the side, but I clipped his legs and he described a beautiful somersault into the mud.
I managed to bring the beast under control and switch off and the Agent picked himself up as the lads fell about in hysterical laughter. I have to give him credit though, he just gave himself a cursory brush down and asked me if I knew what would be on his desk in 10 minutes time. “My Cards” I rightly guessed. And Brains, left the house.
The weekend after I got sacked from the building site, I was playing volleyball on the grass with my 3 brothers. It started to drizzle and the grass got slippy, I went flying and there was an awful tearing sound. That was my knee cartilage separating from the bone. My brothers called me a wimp and told me to get on with the game and, when I didn’t, they went inside in disgust and had a cup of tea. They sat round the Kitchen table at our Bobs’ house for half an hour watching through the window, at me lying in the rain. Eventually our Roger admitted that there just might be something wrong, got me on the back of his bike and drove me to the Hospital, where they had a cursory look and then put me in plaster from ankle to thigh. Try leaving hospital on the back of a BSA 650cc motorbike, with your leg in plaster.
What a bummer. If I hadn’t got the sack, I could have hobbled into work, climbed into a hole, screamed and got 3 months on compo.
As it happened, I had recently been advised by the Matriculation Board, that my attempt to do ‘A’ Level English at night school had failed and my chances of ever going to Uni were receding into the distance. On this last site I had bumped into a gadgy with a set of drawings and got talking to him. Turned out he was a Landscape Architect. Ended up with him showing me round his office and explaining what the job was all about. Finally, this is what I really wanted to do and here’s me failing at the qualifications required to do it.
So I made an appointment with the Education Board at the Local Council and explained to them my predicament. Confessed that I had under-achieved, but that if they were prepared to pay more money for me to get my ‘A’ Levels, then they would be in a position to pay even more money for me to go to college for 4 years to become a Landscape Architect. The pot on my leg helped with the sympathy vote and I was enrolled in Wakefield Tech to do English and Sociology with 23 Police Cadets.
By this time I knew that the only way to pass English was to learn by heart at least 10 substantial quotes from each book and in the exam just bend the answers to fit the quotes. It didn’t really seem to matter if you understood the book or not, you could be positing a new line that academia hadn’t previously explored. However, Sociology was a subject that I had never done before and here I was jumping in with only half a year to do a 2 year course. I was a bit wary until classes started and I got a look at the material. It was all about extended kinship relationships in working class families, working mothers and latchkey kids. It was thinly disguised Socialist semantics. It was Life as I knew it. It was a doddle.
So here I was, a hippie in a class full of junior Plods. Life was sweet again but I still needed an income and so landed my first bar job. After class was out, I headed down to Yates’s Wine Lodge and started the evening shift behind the bar.
Old man Yates, had died many years before. He was a philanthropic sort of guy who decided that the British working classes, needed improvement. Europeans had loads of class and they drank wine. Ergo, give wine to the British working man and he will instantly get loads of class. Obvious. However, as a member of the British Empire, it was beholden upon Mr. Yates to provide wines that had been grown in the red bits on the map and so he did his patriotic duty and imported from South Africa. At this time, most wines from S.A. were of the rather sweet and sticky varieties and they were pretty strong, but they had one characteristic that Mr. Yates had not yet discovered. Should you imbibe one or two schooners of a South African dessert wine and then follow it with a pint or two of beer, you would be absolutely shitfaced for under a pound. Not only that, you would be fighting mad. What better way to spend a Saturday Night?
This process was so entrenched in the local Culture that, in the days when licensing laws were very strict, Yates’s was allowed to open half an hour earlier than all the other pubs and close half an hour earlier. We never had a fight in Yates’s, but the Black Rock next door was forever spilling out into the street in a melee of fists and boots.
To call it a ‘Wine Bar’ conjures up images of parasols, watercolours and baguettes. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was a very long and narrow room with a long and narrow bar running down one side and a long and narrow banquette (Close, but not ‘baguette’) down the other. The walls were decorated with nicotine and huge printed posters advertising the wines available by the ‘dock’ or ‘schooner’. The comestibles on offer were pickled eggs. There was one electric beer pump for ‘Bass’ but very few people ever drank it. One of the reasons being that we were not allowed to discard the slops. They were put in the bottom of glasses lined up under the bar and, if the customer ordered a beer and did not lean over the bar to watch it being pulled, then we were instructed to slip a slops glass in and top it up. Some of these glasses could be down there for days before we got a busy night. Leaning over the bar was also difficult due to the fact that the floor behind was a foot higher than in front. This made the bar, and staff, look very imposing and discouraged cheekiness.
Cheekiness we had plenty of. The owner, Marjorie, was a widow of several years and had probably been a looker in her youth. Youth alas is transient and she was now looking like an aneamic traffic accident. James, the Bar Manager, was a tad younger, lived with his Mum and appeared to be held together with Brylcreem. Every Saturday night, Marjorie would get falling-over pissed and then get affectionate with me or the other bartender, Billy. Then James would step in and escort Marjorie to her rooms and not return for half an hour, returning looking very sheepish and slightly sweaty.
On the long banquette there would invariably be a line of single ladies sitting close to the door and, whenever a single man entered they would all cross their legs. The price of a shag was written on the soles of their shoes. On quiet nights one of them might get a bit tipsy and then saunter up to the bar. “Ooh yer a luvly lookin lad you are. Giz anuther on’t ‘ouse an al let yer shag us for free out back. Come on luvver, let’s see what yer’ve got.” It’s difficult to refuse a pissed prostitute without her taking a razor out of her bag, but it was a skill I had to develop and which proved useful later in life.
I survived a year behind that bar and managed to stay solvent. Again these were skills which would be useful, particularly as I passed both my ‘A’s and could now go to college.
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