Working for pocket money

Like a lot of men of a certain age, I am prone to exaggerate. Particularly when I’m mentioning my childhood, I do have a tendency to suggest a harsh upbringing akin to that of a Dickensian waif. Nothing could be further from the truth. So don’t give me any sympathy for what I am about to write even if you do by any chance happen to feel any.

I have just read a Facebook post by my best mate from University, in which he responds to the news that children are not having the opportunities people of our generation had to experience paid work in their most formative years. Me, I had a choice. Get jobs or have no money. Not strictly true. Get jobs or make do with your meagre pocket money would be more accurate.

Looking back, I started with delivering a local advertising paper called The London Market. You had a number of local streets to cover and had 500 copies to deliver once a week. It took two weekday evenings and after you’d given a cut to your Mum, then there wasn’t a great deal of money left. To be fair she did fold all of the papers for ease of delivery. From there, when I was 11 or 12 I progressed to a milk round. I was fortunate that at the end of Leighton Road, the street adjoining ours, was the Ealing branch of Jobs Dairy, and you could usually find a milkman to help on weekends. When I started with Stan, we would work from 6:30am until about 4pm on Saturday, because that was his day for collecting most of the money. Then on Sunday we would work from about 6:30am until about 10:30 am. Would you like to guess what I was paid? £2 for Saturday and £1 for Sunday. Now, admittedly this was the mid-late 70s and money went a lot further, but even so! This was the whole year round, too, and if you have never spent a winter in London let me tell you it can be a lot colder than you might think. Essentially the only thing that Stan did on a Saturday that I didn’t was driving the milk float. I would have done that too if he’d let me, but he was, thankfully too sensible for that. By about 1979 I was working for Paul, who collected money all week, so we’d be finished by midday on Saturday. He paid me £5 for the weekend. If we finished at noon, it also meant that I could go out and help another milkman for the afternoon and get anything up to another £5.

I turned 16 in 1980, and after my birthday I started to work a couple of evenings a week and all day Saturday in the local Budgen supermarket, while I was doing my A levels. I transferred to the Coop after about a year. I can’t remember how much I earned, but it had to be more than the milk round(s) or I’d never have done it. In the summer holidays after securing a place at the University of London Goldsmiths College I joined a temp agency in Ealing Broadway for whom I worked every holiday until graduation. The money really wasn’t great or even good, for that matter. But occasionally the jobs you got were quite interesting. My first was working in Hoover in Perivale putting together repair manuals. I also had a stint on the delivery vans for Harvey Nichols, where a woman in Kensington called in a glazier to take out then replace her front window so we could get a huge sofa bed into her front room. For the most part I ended up washing up in the kitchens of various BBC canteens across West London. Looking back, the temp agency were actually pretty terrible people. They used to hold off paying you and then joke that this was all a way of helping you save. We finally fell out for good when they told me to go to a hotel kitchen to do a spell as an under-chef. I’m not a brilliant cook now but back then I was worse. I point blank refused to be part of what was so obviously an act of deception on their part.

They never offered me another job again.

I‘m going to end this with a recollection of my old Nan. This was my mum’s mum and it was her house that I grew up in. I loved her dearly, but I have to admit lying to her on one occasion. After I qualified as a teacher and was appointed to my first teaching post, her reaction was – Oh, lovely, you’ll be able to pick up some temping work during the long summer holidays!- My head said – I should cocoa!- but my mouth said, “Oh, Nan, didn’t you know? I’m paid a 12 month salary in 12 installments so I’m not allowed to work in August even though I’m not in school.” Did she buy it? Well, she didn’t argue and that was good enough for me.