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As time grows short there is much left to say. I sometimes waste whole hours and minutes, but I try not to waste a whole day.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Chapter Twenty - Hot Gossip


The problem of obtaining paid work could be divided into two distinct areas for Gerry and, to a lesser extent his fourteen-year-old brother Glenn. Opportunity and age. There were few places, other than the newsagents’ paper-rounds, where a not-quite-yet thirteen year-old might find paid work without rising at the crack of dawn and trudging the pavements in all weathers at unsocial hours for poor wages. Christmas was not far away and both Gerry and Glenn wanted to obtain some of their own funds to tip the balance in their father’s ruthless negotiations with vendors of electric guitars. Bill Hood was notoriously parsimonious and the boys wanted to avert yet another embarrassing disappointment as his harsh bartering skills reduced yet another prospective seller to a committed collector. The boys were also keenly aware that the arrival of electric guitars would also require the appearance of amplification, a factor that their father had yet to be informed of, so funds were in demand to avoid the frustration of silent electric guitars and paternal outrage.

The solution arrived in the nick of time with the completion of the new supermarket. As its management prepared to open their doors for the long-awaited rush for Christmas bargains they identified a number of staff shortages, principally in the stores. They were short of trolley-pushers and shop-floor workers to clear up the mountain of waste cardboard that had accumulated in the aisles as the shelves were packed with their surfeit of products. Glenn had a friend who had already been made an offer of employment in the stores and as he arrived at the end of another exhausting day wrestling with the cardboard mountain and the temperamental bailing machine that was experiencing significant teething trouble as it chewed its way through the Himalayan range of packaging he confided to Glenn that his employers were literally ‘desperate’ for workers. Glenn did all the talking and the diminutive figure of his younger brother stood slightly behind him as the stores manager, Jock Alexander, detailed their duties in his highly esoteric and therefore only vaguely understandable Scottish brogue. The tiny bald man, with the thickest lens glasses either of the brothers would ever see, had a particular form of myopia that rendered him both virtually blind and apparently stupid, though no-one would fully understand the depth of this delusion until many years later when he left over £100,000 to the local school from the vast wealth he had quietly accumulated in stocks and shares trading.
Whilst the boys were thinking they were slipping easily under the dim radar of a man with cataracts he was in fact exploiting employment legislation which forbade Gerry at least from becoming an employee at all.

There were two tasks required of the boys; pushing the trolleys which the customers would abandon at the remotest corners of the twelve-acre site, and collecting the cardboard outers of packaged goods as the army of shelf-stackers reloaded the shelves. The latter was the ‘cushier’ of the two simply because it was indoors and therefore not subject to changes in the weather. The job of pushing trolleys - up to twenty at a time, but sometimes expanded to huge anacondas of wheels and wire as the boys challenged each other to ever more ridiculous feats - was hard and unrelenting. It also provided the very real possibility of altercations with car-owners who were in the vanguard of motorists now rapidly discovering the vicissitudes of mass-parking and damaged paintwork. Interrupted by the occasional canteen break, the boys would work three or four evenings-a-week after school and all day Saturday in the Sunday-closing world that still prevailed in Britain at the time. Smoking was compulsory and the older workers could all be relied on to provide cigarettes which would be repaid, with interest, on pay day. It seemed like fairly easy money and when Friday arrived the boys would count their gains, pay their debts and, along with their new workmates head off down to the pub!

The local pub, the Plough, was a cosy little boozer in the old village of Wykeham where on Friday evening, around nine-o’-clock the boys and their friends would huddle into a corner and drink as many pints of Guinness as their money would allow and their stomachs could hold. This weekly feast would not have been complete without the consumption of one of the pub’s steak-and-kidney pies, which were consumed in an upside down position, flopped on their paper plates, with plastic cutlery. Epicurean delights of pickled onions and eggs were washed down with more beer and then regurgitated in the gardens and onto fences en route home. Saturdays would dawn in the Hood household where two pasty-looking boys would crawl to work with their latest hangover and indolently shove trolleys and collect cardboard in a haze of still semi-drunken torpor. Their colleagues, an eclectic bunch of school-leavers and men of misanthropically mysterious origins, worked like the crazed crewmen of an ocean-going ship to empty the aisles and clear the car park of all obstructions and as the frenzy of Christmas shopping proper descended on the beleaguered store’s staff, spirits were high.

It was the custom of the company who collected the half-ton bails of cardboard to reward the endeavour of its collectors, so when Gerry was presented with a half-bottle of Teacher’s finest Scotch Whisky, the twelve-year-old boy looked for guidance to his elders. Brian - or Brain as his schizophrenic condition had seen him hastily renamed - was already half-way through his bottle and there seemed to be no hesitation amongst the other lucky recipients of this unexpected bonus to consume theirs as fast as possible. Gerry, wishing only to fit-in to this apparently pleasurable camaraderie, raised the flask to his lips and drank deeply from the fluted bottle now clamped to his lips. He was shocked by the acidic burn at his throat but closed his eyes and concentrated on consuming as much of the unusual tasting amber fluid as he could gulp down. A temporary break-down at the besieged bailer resulted in the cardboard from the shop floor being piled-up and allowed to accumulate in ever-increasing mounds as the operatives struggled with the recalcitrant machine which now stood inert and useless. Brain, having drained his own draught dry, was now sitting mumbling quietly to himself in tongues behind the broken behemoth whilst an increasingly hysterical workforce giggled, sniggered and guffawed their way to and fro’ from the overwhelmed store’s gangways, now piled-high with cardboard boxes. The chaos finally resolved itself, at least for Gerry, when in a fit of hysterical laughter he interred himself deep within the largest mound of boxes and detritus and simply fell asleep. Recovering just in time to collect his free frozen turkey from the deep-freeze, Gerry staggered home with his brother and slept the sleep of the drunkard.

The guitars, which had been purchased shortly before Christmas, were beauties. Glenn’s, a copy of the Rickenbacker 6-string electric popularised by John Lennon in his Beatle’s days, had a rich red sunburst body, three pick-ups and a tremolo arm. Glenn set to work, immediately removing the tremolo arm which he deemed superfluous to his requirements and filing down the frets into fat strips of flattened metal in an attempt to ‘improve’ the action, something he almost immediately regretted. Gerry’s was also second-hand but was a well-preserved right-handed edition of the Hofner Violin bass which was also synonymous with Paul McCartney of the Beatles, a fact that had somehow escaped the boys who were not in fact their biggest fans. Gerry recalled how the craze for the fab-four had resulted in a plethora of Beatles branded products which included a plastic ukulele bearing an imprint of the mop-tops which could neither be tuned or rendered playable. He also remembered without affection a plastic wig, based on their iconic hairstyles, which when placed on the wearer’s head resulted in cuts and sores to where the tops of one’s ears met the side of the head. They were rubbish and set Gerry firmly against the exploitation of brand-name products for good and the Beatles for several decades to come.

A single speaker Selmer practice amplifier had also been purchased from one of the vendors which had a volume, treble and bass control knob but which immediately presented a serious problem. It had but one input socket. There was no way the boys could play at the same time! A local boffin was consulted before the simple solution of adding a second socket was decided upon. This was only partially successful however in that it reduced the output level for an individual instrument from the quite loud five watts RMS dividing it unevenly between the two instruments. Never ones to be easily deterred the boys soon found an alternative remedy. Their father’s much-loved valve radio-set had several input and output sockets on its rear and with a few stripped wires Glenn’s guitar was soon demonstrating the truth of those who preferred the warm tones of valve amplifiers. It was when the boys decided to swap instruments to see if playing the bass through the radio and the guitar through the Selmer that the limitations of the pre-war speaker revealed themselves in a distorted low-frequency grunt which tore the radios speaker cone into fluttering fragments before their amazed eyes. Replacing the mortally-wounded machines casing after desperate investigations, the boys left it to their father’s future discovery and made-do with the over-subscribed Selmer although Gerry learned that placing the bottom of his bass firmly against the old wardrobe in the boys’ bedroom created the same acoustically amplified effect and sound of a double bass.

The boys had other older friends who allowed them occasional access to their more powerful gear and the guitars were in constant use from the moment of their arrival until the occasional irascibility of their father decreed silence, usually defined by his turning the mains electricity off in exasperated protest. Top of the Pops continued to dominate the weekly battle for control of the airwaves and as the charms of Pan’s People faded the erotic gyrations of Hot Gossip replaced them in everyone’s affections save for the boys’ father who felt that this was a step too far. It was gossip which would also result, shortly after Christmas, in the boys both getting the sack from their jobs at the supermarket. A rather dour and taciturn man named Cliff arrived on the scene and soon created a discord in the stores department that had hitherto not been evident. The misanthropic Yorkshireman soon convinced his myopic boss that more men and fewer boys were required and so it was that following a particularly dismal day of precipitation Jock Alexander announced to them both in his peculiar and indecipherable contralto “You’re finished!”.
After some discussion in which the boys grasp of idiomatic English was tested to its extreme and the grim realisation that they had been stitched-up by Cliff on allegations of insufficiency, Gerry hurled his now redundant overall into a deep freeze in a fit of anger. His elder brother’s more dignified response resulted in the boys’ father being able to negotiate a second chance for Glenn but there was to be no reprieve for Gerry whose petulant display in front of the store manager proved to be his last act in the firm’s behalf. Unemployed and without any real hope of child-labour elsewhere Gerry had, to use his father’s description ‘shit the nest’ and would now have to look elsewhere for his suddenly-curtailed income.

Little did he know that on return to school and his new friendless class he was about to experience a revolution in circumstances and earning potential that would dwarf his previous aspirations and set him permanently free from the world of wages.

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