Joining the workforce
I walked out of school after my last exam at 16. I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do now. I wasn’t stupid but I wasn’t the smartest kid at school. Like most 16 year olds my interests laid in Spurs trying to get into pubs or girls knickers that was all.
Getting a job was on my list of things to do, but not at the top. I had never heard of further education, university was something posh people did. I had only ever heard of two universities anyway Oxford and Cambridge. So for me that was never on the agenda.
I wasn’t any good at anything in particular I had no discernable skills. So there was no obvious job out there for me I didn’t levitate to anything so there was only one thing to do. It’s not what you know it’s who you know. I called in the big guns, family.
My uncle Brian worked as a building inspector in and around North London and so if you wanted your building worked passed you had to be in his good books.
Brian was great he knew a guy who needed a trainee labourer and so I was set to join the ranks of the working man.
My starting pay was £1 per hour for 40 hours per week. The good news was that there was no tax to pay but national insurance would be due. My mum wanted £10 per week house keep (cheeky bitch) and once Id paid out for my buses the rest was all mine! Welcome to the freedom of being a grown up!
As a scrawny little fella hard labouring was not as easy to adapt to as I was expecting. Added to the hard work was the fact that the bosses were three brothers from Northern Ireland.
Their accents was really thick and I had terrible trouble trying to understand them, in fact the actually asked me if I had a hearing problem because I said what so much, they wasn’t even taking the piss they really did think I was mutton.
Needless to say my performance at this job left a lot to be desired, I had no flair for it not being able to understand instructions didn’t help either.
But there are two specific instances in my time with the brothers that sticks in my mind the most.
The first one was when we was working in Pimlico on a large 3 storied house. The main work was being completed on the roof. This house at one time must have been a very wealthy Victorian or Georgian town house. You know the sort set in a mews. It had 3 stories and underneath it had servant’s quarters.
During the 1960s and 1970s these houses had been owned by private landlords and used as multi-tenant housing and had been left to get run down and shabby.
Now in the 1980s this was the time for Yuppies to buy these places up and turn them back into their previous glory.
The servant’s quarters had been made into a separate luxury apartment but the old outside loo and coal bunker was being used as storage for the building work we were doing.
On this particular day the roofer told me to go down and knock up some muck so that he could lay some bricks around the roof edging.
Once I got down to ground level I realised I needed a bag of cement from the store.
So as I have explained this is a basement apartment where the store was so nobody from the road level could see me.
I opened up the store and there was only one bag left and this was flat on the floor.
As I said I was a skinny little lad and so I dragged the bag out into the courtyard and pulled it up onto its edge.
I went down on to one knee and pulled the bag up close to my shoulder. I steadied myself took the strain and pulled the bag of cement onto my shoulder.
It was at this point that I realised that I neither had the strength in my legs nor in my shoulder to actually lift the weight of this bag!
The next I knew I was lying flat on my back with this large bag of cement on top of my upper body pinning me down!
I tried to move but couldn’t I was proper trapped! So there I was wriggling around like a boy possessed desperately trying to get out without anyone seeing.
I was terrified of being seen by the others, they would have never let me forget this.
I must have been there a good ten minutes before I finally got myself free.
By the time I had knocked up the muck the roofer was steaming. “Where the fuck you been you lazy fucker” he said. I took the bollocking it was better than the embarrassing truth.
The second instance that sticks with me was when I was in Finsbury Park. I was working on a house that coincidently belonged to one of my old teachers from school. It turned out there was two married couples sharing the one house. Bit strange but hey each to his own. They only used Earl Grey tea which I thought was fucking gross; I had to put three sugars in just to be able to drink it! Yuk!
They were having new tiles put on the roof and an extension put on the back of the house.
The house was fairly large but what sticks with me here was the fact that not only was the front gardens set back off of the road but they were also six foot higher than the pavement.
Essentially to get to the front door you had to go up a flight of stairs. The problem this caused me was that the skip we were using sat in the road outside the house. (You did not need a licence then and they did not have to go on your land) To access this skip they ran a scaffold board across the pavement to the skip from the front garden, 6 feet in the air!
This was only one scaffold board so it was like walking the plank to tip the waste in the skip.
On this particular January day my job was to pick up the old slate and load it into the skip. January is never the best moth for weather and on this day not only was it freezing cold but it was also drizzling with fine rain. You know the sort the one that makes you soaking wet even though it doesn’t look like it’s that rainy.
I was given some very ill-fitting bright yellow water proofs to wear. The arms had to be rolled up and the trousers kept falling down.
Picking up slate was like picking up razors in the cold, we didn’t have safety work gloves back then.
So once the wheel barrow was full I made the trek out of the back garden onto the front garden down a slope towards the scaffold board and the skip.
The plan was get to the end of the scaffold board and then balance the wheel barrow onto the wheel surround and tip.
Unfortunately for me as the incline from the front garden to the skip got steeper the weight of the wheel barrow became heavier.
As I said as a skinny boy this became more and more of a problem, especially as the drizzle and the cold had made the scaffold board slippery and the wheel barrow handle hard to grip.
The inevitable happened with a crash bang wallop I was in the skip. Not one not twice but each and every fucking time!
Trying the pull the empty wheel barrow out of the skip each time was a mission on its own let alone carrying it up the steps as well.
I’d been on my own most of the afternoon doing this time after time as I headed towards to skip for the last time the same thing happened.
So in disgust I’m standing there surrounded by broken razor sharp slates, wearing bright yellow waterproofs for a man 3 times my size, in the drizzle freezing rain with a wheel barrow at my feet.
At that precise moment standing six feet above me in the front garden of my old teacher there he stood Mr Niall Thompson of Thompson and Thompson brothers builders,
“What the fuck are you doing in there ya fucking idiot? Stop pissing about or I’m gonna tell ya uncle”! (Brash Norn Irish accent to be imagined here)
I had never had to stick up for myself before, never had cause to. I was and still am pretty easy going. I can be pushed and pushed but when I go get out of the fucking way!
“What am I doing in here? Are you taking the piss? I’m not having a fucking party am i? If it’s so easy you fucking do it I’m off stick this fucking shit up your arse”
And with those final words it was over, my building career was done. I was out of that skip as quick as a flash. Off came the yellow waterproofs flung in the air behind me as I was off down the road never daring to look back.
