MY EMPLOYMENTS
1963 - 1976
I started "work" at the very early age of eight.
My Mother was then working part-time at W H Smith, Croydon, in the Book Department. This was mostly to earn some extra money to pay for me to go to a "private" Catholic primary school, Laleham Lea, in Purley. The hope was that with this extra tuition, I would pass my 11+ and then go on to the affiliated John Fisher School (a grammar school) on the local council's ticket. However, suddenly, my father was taken seriously ill.
A few days after freezing in an immense cinema queue to take me to go and see the film "In Search of the Castaways" he was brought home from work by a colleague, he was in agony and having a heart attack.
I was home with a bad cold and could hear him in the next room calling out in pain while waiting for the ambulance. After this, he was in the hospital for many weeks and then in a convalescent home before coming home and eventually going back to work in a less strenuous position.
During this time, Mr. Packham, the assistant manager at Smiths, very kindly agreed to let me help in unpacking at W H Smith on Saturday mornings and during the school holidays so that my mother could keep working, a practical sort of childcare and it was very useful that it just sort of continued on after my dad was home.
I worked in a little back room, opening the famous WHS orange skips, checking and pricing things with the lovely Mrs Cornwall. That first year I also spent ages pricing all the calendars in pencil, then the government changed the tax on them so all the prices had to be rubbed out and rewritten with the new price. My reward was a 10/- note each day. This was all "unofficial", and I paid for many plastic model kits from Model Time in St Georges Walk.
At age eleven I was even able to get a special certificate to allow me to work legally a few hours a week- it was designed for paperboys but I squeezed in as W H Smiths was a Newsagent.
I remember moving all the massive amount of Christmas stock that arrived in the summer up in the lift to the first floor, then pushing the trolley along a covered corridor, over the roof, to the old part of the shop, and then up to a stockroom on the 3rd floor by stairs… as Christmas approached it all had to be taken back down into the shop to sell.
I think that is where I got most of my exercise and developed any strength and endurance I have, It certainly didn't come from school, where I sneakily skipped P.E. and games after year two. It also helped me in organising things into piles and fitting the most stuff into a small area while mostly knowing where each thing was..
!My other jobs at Smiths were largely in the Book department and then the office, counting the takings. For a while, I "Roneo'd" envelopes for the bills that were sent out for special-ordered or delivered newspapers and magazines - and there were a huge number of them - Smiths was very busy in those days. The Roneo machine was again on the top floor, and the work was accomplished in solitary fashion with loud cassette music, often borrowed from the record department.
Mention should also be made of the kindness of Mrs Mobsby, who ran the book department, and her son Piers. On a couple of occasions when my dad was back in hospital, I stayed with them at their large apartment in a grand house in Warlingham. Piers was a keen naturalist, and his room was full of his own taxidermy and plants. He happily gave me guided tours of the local nature reserves. The garden had a huge hutch and a run of guinea pigs.
There were also two occasions when a lot of us staff "worked" on the appalling adverts W H Smiths had for Christmas, and for this, we got handsomely paid. I can still remember the director repeatedly saying "Action Mandy" in a particularly irritating tone to the poor girl who had to act as if she liked the dreadful toy assortment that Smiths was promoting as presents. The other involved happy dancing teenagers filmed prancing around in towns all over England but then actually entering the WHS in the Whitgift Centre to select some truly dire records - is it true that in those days W H Smith sold more records than any other shops?
During my time there, they expanded into a new shop in The Whitgift Centre, and I worked there on the order desk at the back dealing with special orders - using "Whitaker's Books in Print", its supplement, and the issues of the Bookseller. These were in print to start with then on microfiche.
We also sold the horribly popular Panini football cards and Book, Record, and Gift tokens - a nightmare at Christmas with constant HUGE queues. I worked there with my mother and with Carol - ( subsequently a student of David Bellamy) and Fiona, among many others.
I started to earn some extra money by coming in very early in the morning to unpack the newspapers and magazines or to do the cleaning with Mr. Payne, whom I almost killed by accidentally closing the loading bay door on his neck while he was peering outside to check if the milk had been delivered. That was very scary, made worse by the emergency "Stop" button not being intuitive.
While at Uni in the holidays, I often worked back at W H Smiths during the short winter and Easter breaks.
However, for most of the summer breaks from University, I went to the Labour Exchange and got sent to a job from there - seemingly at random. The first summer, I was sent to Boyden Data Papers – they made the rolls of paper tape that some Computers still needed to have data input or output. The computer programmers punched holes in the tape, and light shining through the holes in patterns would get software and data information into the computer.
I worked there for Ethel Trout as part of her team with Saba Moussa from Syria. One bonus was that we could use the Phillips canteen next door and buy things in the Phillips shop at a low price.
That whole area was slightly "mystical" to me from indistinctly remembered early walks on Sunday mornings with my dad when I was 4,5, or 6, the railway lines, old steam trains going to the power station,
and the remnants of lavender fields that used to be at the bottom of Commerce Way.
In the present day, if you explored far enough past the electricity substations you could still find a flooded, ruined mansion with grazing gypsy horses, and views of the rubbish dump with dustcarts tipping tons of refuse and millions of gulls picking it over far in the distance.
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| paper tape |
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Boydens factory to the left
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Next Summer I worked at Croydon Electric Motors (on the same road as Boyden Data Papers). I had various jobs, such as putting the bearings onto motors for dentist's chairs and tank six-barreled mortars (those that are fixed to the side of the turret). I also burnished and polished the metal cases of large “hair dryers” that telephone engineers would use to dry out underground electrical cables before they could safely work on them. More scarily, grinding down brake shoes (asbestos?)Also working in their paint shop, spray painting bits of the huge electric motors with silver speckled paint.
Then the summer after University Hillary and I applied for work at Thorganby Farm Produce – in the aptly named Rothole Lane, Thorganby, that was freezing peas 24 hours a day. (the lane was first named Rathole, then Rothole, now Roth Hole)
I was very lovelorn that first year after University and anxious to stay in York for another year as Fiona (the reluctant object of my affection) was a year below me and still studying History. The job at Thorganby Farm produce was rather surreal. I was living in a shared house on Huntington Road on the opposite side of York to the University. The shifts at the Pea Factory were 12 hours long and started at 6:00 am or 6:00 pm with a minibus picking folks up from Derwent College car park at 5:00 am (or more easily 5:00 pm). This meant getting up at four and cycling through a deserted city and then a drive through the countryside in clapped-out Transit vans to the Factory
It was the summer of the famous long British drought, and the days and nights were hot and dry and the "very air seemed to throb"....
The job itself was standing by the hopper where peas freshly picked from the field arrived, tipped out from huge trucks. A conveyor belt lifted them up to a shaking sieve-like washing machine that separated out any stray pea pods (the picking machines also shelled and disposed of the majority of those on the field) and seed heads from weeds, but more crucially also insects and that summer was also the summer of Ladybird swarms and the trailer that all the rinsed out detritus ended up on was just covered in huge piles of soggy bewildered Ladybirds.
One day the trailer was delivered to us already containing rotting vegetables, and became the the inspiration for my poem "Standing next to a trailer full of putrid Brussel Sprouts and thinking about Fiona". Which I seem to have lost.
Other notable events - the 24-hour music played over the tannoy.At 3:00 am I remember listening to a rendering of Cliff Richard's "She Is Just a Devil Woman" as dawn broke. Also getting to the pub in Heslington after a 12-hour shift and hearing on my little radio about the Viking lander arriving on Mars - a numinous feeling.
The Occasional rabbit that was delivered with the peas and jumped around the hopper, scared out of its wits, till we could get it to leap out and disappear into the fields beyond.
Later jobs there included boxing up the Frozen peas in 20 lb boxes and labeling them with stencils. It was possible to subtly change the text by deft use of the stencils from 1 x 20lb GARDEN PEAS" to 1 x 20 lb SHIT PEA - which was not popular with the management when discovered.
Also fun high-speed maneuvers with the 1/2-ton pallets of peas or beans on tricycle forklifts on the icy floor of the frozen store. Most folks there swore, sometimes using two swear words to every noun, making speech exhausting, boring, and sadly contagious...
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| Sterne House, beautiful but chilly |
After the Pea Factory myself, Ian and Hillary searched for a house to share. Their year in France made their course at York a four-year one. The amazing commune-type place Hillary and I had lived in on Huntington Road was getting its old crew back again, and we had to move out. What we found was Sterne House in the village of Sutton on the Forest about 9 miles from York. It was a grand house, with a dairy and an Aga, and my goodness, later on in the winter, it was chilly more than a few feet from that Aga.
Ian also had a job, he was working with "motorcycle" Frank Hayes from Hutington Road at a FINA petrol station on the A64 halfway between York and Malton. When holidays began he left and I managed to get the "position". The garage was set on a corner with filling stations and pumps on both sides of the road. There was also a restaurant, run by Tonk Stroughair, and a mechanics shop.
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| As it is today, "my" side now has the diner and no fuel pumps, Tonk's restaurant now demolished and replaced with the caravan place. |
My job was mostly serving (New Jersey style) on the far side of the road on the inside of the curve. This meant it was mostly invisible till the last second by motorists on either side of the road who would thus rarely visit it, preferring the visible one. I see that today that is the only side selling petrol - With maybe only 1 in 20 cars calling there I would help or hang out in the hut on the busy side. Along with Frank as staff, there was also the amazing Rose. She had an enormous beehive hairdo, almost Marge Simpson in size, and she was greatly admired by those of Britain's finest, who patrolled the A64 and who frequently called in to be beguiled by her charms. On one occasion, they even rushed off to Malton, with blues and twos just to fetch her fish and chips. The policemen were good fun, except one PC Mick Gnatt who was a tad vindictive. After being snubbed in a bakers in Malton he made sure to stop every bread van he saw delivering baked goods to Malton and issue it with a ticket.
Mention should be made of Tonk's restaurant, despite its proximity, we did not patronise it at all except for coffee. He kept his dogs in it overnight to protect the place and they pooped all over the place, notably and frequently on the tables. One huge dog (maybe an early XL bully?) escaped and ran across the road. It was hit by a little Fiat 500 . The car was written off, but the dog ran off and was later found traumatised and bruised but otherwise OK.
It was a long, hot summer cycle ride from Sterne House to the garage, through delightful country lanes past cornfields and woods and over a level crossing. I had a large old transistor radio with me, tuned to Radio 1 if I was very lucky, The Eagles would be on with Hotel California. If it should be on when Frank and I were working together at the garage we would rush together to our radios, put them to top volume and hoped against hope the full version with guitar solo would be played.
The worst part of the job was checking the level of petrol in the tanks with long brass rods. The smell of petrol on brass transferred to hands was unusually foul and persistent.
Some notable customers:
The farmer who regularly drove up in an Austin Westminster along the grass verge on the wrong side of the road. He always paid in cash, extracting the notes from large, tightly rolled wads that he kept in pockets all over his dungarees, which just bulged with money everywhere.
The large Jag with a rather rich bloke that was there on Sunday morning when I arrived early and took an enormous amount of petrol in its twin tanks as it was almost empty.
The also rich lady with the Rolls Royce who wanted to fill it herself
As the days shortened, the travel would begin to be tricky along the dark country lanes (as I found out elsewhere), so I looked for other work...
Somehow I got a job in Rowntree's Chocolate Factory. It was a straight shot down the Sutton Road from Sterne House to the factory. I had a few bicycles and also purchased a strange moped from my Uncle Lew, with Hillary as its primary user.
Shifts at the chocolate factory ran from 6:00 am - 2:00 pm, 2:00 pm - 10:00 pm, 10:00 pm - 6:00 am.
Only if you worked all the shifts in the week could you get overtime at weekends. The work was soulless, and you only got one 10-minute and one 20-minute break. It was fairly easy to get to work for the early or middle shift, but hard to tear oneself away from pubs or meals for the overnight one.
To start with, I "made" Kit Kats on a long line first by just pushing the wafer fingers down into the chocolate. They then got another coating of chocolate to completely cover them before they took another long trip through a freezer to solidify them. Another job was being 1/4 of a mile down the line, where another machine wrapped them in foil, and then another the red paper wrappers .
They had to be picked up in 12s and placed in a box that you also folded together yourself. That was hard work, trying to keep up with the constant arrival of confectionery .... , I also used a machine to wrap the special 5-finger Kit Kats for vending machines (which thus put finger prints all over them), or the different formula chocolate used for Arabic countries. Then I was "promoted" and worked on the Smartie egg line, sitting where the metal chocolate molds changed direction by ninety degrees on conveyor belts. A machine did that job almost perfectly, but union rules meant an operative had to sit there just in case it didn't - and best it be the lowest paid one.
That meant ffectively sitting for seven hours doing nothing. The old hands however, had clever ways to wreck the machines and the union guy who had to fix them would not rush about his business. The old hands disappeared while this was done, but us minions seemed to get stuck with mopping the floors with boiling hot water and trying to clean the tiny ants nests out of the assembly lines with their chocolate dribbles (the ants were tiny not thier nests - if you ate Kit Kats in those days those ants would have added to your nutrition).
An unforeseen problem developed when I was cycling to or from work in the dark: Blinding car headlights on the almost straight road as oncoming cars didn't see my feeble bike light. It was even worse on the moped, if could I borrow it from Hilary, as the bulbs constantly burned out plunging you suddenly into the pitch black so it was often safer to take the much longer winding back roads route with far fewer cars.
Pinching chocolate was rife and I remember eating about twenty Yorky bars with Hilary in Sterne House one weekend.
Notable events were for a brief time sitting next to the gloop that went into cream eggs which smelt like semen, the huge long Easter egg line the whole length of the factory on the top floor that didn't work correctly for three days with all the overweight eggs going back to be remelted and molded to try again. The incredible flatulence of folks who ate the Mint Aeros.
I ate SO much chocolate - but never licked my fingers and never ate a mint Aero...
Continuedin Part two
