It's Not What You Think (6 page)

10 Richard Branson (Virgin Radio)

  9 Michael Grade (Channel 4)

  8 Andrea Wonfor (Channel 4)

  7 Don Atyeo (The Power Station)

  6 Timmy Mallett (Piccadilly Radio)

  5 Charlie Parsons (
The Big Breakfast
)

  4 Waheed Alli (
The Big Breakfast
)

  3 Matthew Bannister (Greater London Radio)

  2 Lesley Douglas (Radio 2)

  1 Mike Hibbett (Ralph’s Newsagents)

My newsagency career continued to blossom
and with it my bank account. It wasn’t long before I saw my next promotion. Forget the army, there are more ranks to the hierarchical structure of a newsagents than most international organisations.

My next stripe on the arm was a biggy: I was to be elevated to the much-envied post of ‘marker-up’.

The marker-up was the boy who arrived at the same time as Mike the manager. Mike was dead cool, he was forty, which I thought was pretty old at the time but not that old—not in his case at least. To my mind there are young forty year olds and there are old forty year olds, and Mike was definitely one of the former. He loved to play squash, had been a pretty handy footballer in his day and still kept himself fit by going for a run three or four times a week. He was also one of life’s good guys.

Mike is still in the top three bosses I’ve ever had. He was the type of guy that you just did things for, he was always really kind to me. I remember he had a son who I thought was so lucky to have a dad like him.

Mike worked hard and always had a smile on his face, especially when the two girls from the chemist came in for their fags. The girls from the chemist were hot—and I mean really hot. I can still picture them perfectly today. They had huge big smiles, the kind that can take you away to another place. Both of them were brunettes, with bunches of gorgeous shiny hair cascading down over their shoulders and they always came in wearing their white coats, almost always giggling.

Please don’t tell me—anyone who’s reading this—that they ever got any older. Girls like that should be preserved for ever, just as you remember them. One was called Jill, the small one, she was the one I really fancied, but I never found out the name of the other one—I just called them Jill and Thrill.

Obviously I was far too young to stand a chance with either—they were in their twenties and I was only thirteen—but I could fantasise. Boy, could I fantasise.

Meeting and talking to women that I would never otherwise have come into contact with was another big bonus of working in the shop. I could see what made them laugh, what made them sad, how they were so different to the men that came in. Experience that undoubtedly helped me in the rest of my life when it came to getting on with the opposite sex.

If you think about it, boys of a certain age usually only get to talk to girls roughly the same age—their only other female interaction being with members of their family and their mum’s mates or maybe their mates’ mums. This is why so many young boys end up fancying such ladies, it’s a question of needs must. These women are often the only other ‘real women’ young boys come into contact with.

Perhaps this is also why so many mums also fancy their sons’ mates or their mates’ sons. Both parties have an equally limited circle of opportunity; both sides are vulnerable and there is a common thirst to be quenched. Drink up everyone!

My job as marker-up meant I had to arrive at the shop just before 5 a.m. The newspapers having already been delivered in their bundles in the doorway, it was my first task of the day to haul them in off the step, cut them open and count them all out to make sure there was none missing—twenty-five to a quire, eight quires to a bundle, if you were any copies short, you’d make a note and then call and ask for the van to come back later to drop off replacements.

Next we would dress the counter, stacking each brand of paper in order of their popularity, the most popular nearest to hand for efficiency. In our shop it was the
Daily Mirror
first, the
Sun
second, then the
Daily Mail
, the
Star
and the
Express
; we hardly sold any broadsheets, maybe ten each of the
Telegraph
and
The Times
—and no
Guardians
at all! Once this was done we would be set to start, both Mike and I now barely visible surrounded by mini skyscrapers of newspapers.

It was always a competition as to who could finish marking up their rounds first, pistols at dawn, Bic biros at the ready. Each paper round had a corresponding marking up book. The marking up books were handwritten elaborate affairs, not unlike a cricket scorebook in their intricacy and precise beauty. The drawing up of these books was a delicate and painstaking process and one which Ralph had reputedly evolved over the years. No one was particularly clear exactly how or why his system worked but work it did. If there had been a fire there is little doubt the stack of marking up books would have been the thing that Ralph would risk his life to save, certainly way ahead of any of us paperboys.

Mike and I would split the books, eight rounds each and then get to work. The key to speed was getting used to where each brand of paper was
without having to look up from the book and losing your place, like a drummer with a drumkit. Once a paper had been slid from the top of its pile, a fast firm fold was then required to make it behave as it was stacked on top of the round having been marked somewhere in the right-hand margin of the front page with the number of the house to which it was destined. The first paper for each new street also bore the street name.

It sounds like a laborious process—and I suppose it was—but it could be carried out with relative alacrity. Once a rhythm was achieved you could really get into the swing, I loved it. You could almost make the papers crack if you folded them sharply.

My workstation was based behind the infamous post office counter while Mike would work from the main cigarette counter. He was so fast, the fastest, he would almost always beat me hands down, finishing his half of the rounds a good round or two before me. This was even more impressive considering he was serving customers as well as joking and laughing with them at the same time.

The best thing about getting the job of marker up was that you then didn’t have to do a paper round at all. Sure you had to get up even earlier than before, which some of the lads just couldn’t comprehend, but then again you got paid so
much more
. The financial gain curve was exponential.

Marking up was also an officially recognised shop job which therefore meant it carried a compulsory hourly rate. This translated into me now being paid more an hour for working in a nice warm shop than the paper boys were being paid for a whole week of delivering newspapers, whatever the weather. Again, it baffled me why on earth they couldn’t see the bigger picture.

Working behind the counter was the real deal for me: it was recognition, it was respect, it was civilised and with the marking up complete, it was a cup of coffee for Mike and tea for me. We would take turns brewing up before I took over the shop and Mike went ‘in the back’. I never really knew what Mike did when he went ‘in the back’—he was probably thinking about Jill and Thrill and the countdown to their fag run, not that I cared, I was out front performing my first ever breakfast show.

‘Good morning, how are you today, what can I do you for?’

Real adults handing over hard cash. I used to pride myself on knowing the customers’ different orders. Some would leave their car engines running outside while they popped in to pick up their paper and a half an ounce of tobacco. Others would announce their arrival with a glorious exhibition of uncontrollable coughing and spluttering.

Once these guys started to cough and splutter there was no telling how long it might last, it could go on for minutes and the noises that they used to make were extraordinary—exclusive only to the serious early morning smoker: chesty rumblings, throats sounding like they were gargling with broken glass, coughing so hard their faces would turn a violent shade of purple. Often they would have to excuse themselves as they found the need to go back out of the shop ‘mid-order’ to spit out a huge pavement cracking greeny. A typical order would be:

‘
Daily Mirror
please, sixty Senior Service and a box of Swan Vestas.’

Sixty cigarettes! And non-filtered Senior Service! A day!

Shit, man, that was serious, these guys were hard core. Do you have any idea what just one of these cigarettes would do to the average human lung? Maybe with the exception of Capstan full strength, which were just insane, Senior Service were the strongest cigarettes known to mankind. They would make the ‘Lights’ of today seem like fresh mountain air in comparison. It was incredible the men who smoked these coffin nails were still breathing, let alone going to work every day and asking for more.

Then there were the ‘silents’, a strange breed who only ever pointed to what they wanted and always had exactly the right money so they didn’t have to speak to you. What was all that about?

As the morning developed, the shop would go through peaks and troughs of patronage with the clientele changing according to the schedule of the day. The shift workers would cough their way into the shop either side of six o’clock, depending on whether they were just starting or just finishing.

There would then be a bit of a lull between 6.30 and 7.30 when we’d try to get most of the boys loaded and on their way—if they had turned up by then that is—and then the school kids would start to come in at around a quarter to eight.

Eight till nine would see a procession of younger pupils stocking up on their daily supply of sweets and snacks and as the big hand headed
towards nine, in would come the young mums with their little bundles of joy off to playschool. Finally, the pensioners would begin to assemble on parade ready to descend upon the post office for their various benefits and other requirements.

The OAPs often arrived much earlier than they needed to. They used to meet their pals for a chinwag but Ralph made them queue up outside so as not to clog up the shop—even in the rain, even in the snow in the middle of winter. I suppose he had a point but it just seemed so wrong. These people were elderly, often infirm, and most of them had served in one if not both of the wars so we could still have a bloody post office in the first place.

I vowed that, whatever else I did in my life, I had to make enough money never to have to queue up in the rain for my pension. That’s the least well off I ever wanted to be.

As my time behind the counter progressed I would stay on at the shop for as long as I could until the last possible minute before I had to leave to go to school. The shop was now my life, whereas school was quickly becoming the villain of the piece, a place I attended just because I had to, a mere interruption to my busy working day.

As far as I was concerned I was learning more of what I needed to know about life and how to get on at the shop every weekday morning and evening, all day Saturday as well as Sunday up until lunchtime, than I ever could from my lessons. If I could have left school there and then I would have done. School had taught me all it could by now and in my opinion had taken up far too much of my time in the process.

10 Mint cracknel

  9 Ice Breaker

  8 Cough candy

  7 Cola cubes

  6 Refreshers

  5 Black Jacks/Fruit Salad mix

  4 Texan

  3 Merry Maids chocolate caramels

  2 Lyons midget gems

  1 Curlywurly

After walking out of the grammar school that day,
after my altercation with Nutjob the physics teacher, I just carried on walking, I walked all the way home.

For the first mile or so, I was still shaking with adrenaline, I felt no anger or fear, I was satisfied that my actions were justified. I kept going over in my mind what had happened and how crazy it was that one’s circumstances could change so quickly. Soon it was like it had happened to someone else, and as my journey continued, my mind began to clear and it wasn’t long before I found myself thinking about other things.

I had undertaken this three-and-a-bit-mile journey on foot several times before but usually in the summer when I had chosen to spend my bus fare on a bag of fizz bombs or a can of Lilt instead. I had a feeling this might be the last time I might have to consider such a dilemma instead of paying for the bus purchase.

When I arrived home, much earlier than expected, another Curlywurly had bitten the dust. (Who came up with the Curlywurly, by the way? Not only the concept of the funky lattice-shaped bar but the name Curlywurly—it has to be the coolest name in the world of confectionary.)

‘How come you’re home so early, love, has something happened?’ Mum asked, naturally surprised to see me.

I managed to explain as honestly as I could what had taken place at school that day and that I knew I’d done wrong but that I didn’t think a grown man should be allowed to hit a child in such a way. She listened intently, without saying a word. After she’d heard what I had to say, she congratulated me on my decisive action and said she would enquire about a new school the very next day. Her exact words were: ‘You’re not going back there, over my dead body.’

Mum is a very no-nonsense person and once a chapter is closed that’s it—it’s time to move on. Though she has never admitted it, I believe she went back to the grammar school soon after to give the headmaster a piece of her mind and to set the record straight.

Her enquiries as to a new school resulted in my being much nearer to home, albeit at a comprehensive school. Not that I had a problem with comprehensives, but they were generally considered inferior to the much grander grammar schools. Comprehensive schools were where you went if you couldn’t get in anywhere else.

This school was a bit special though. It was a brand new school, where my year, the fourth year, were the eldest—there was no fifth form or sixth form yet. The school was so new that in fact half of it was still being built—hence its reduced capacity and the additional need for Portakabins as classrooms.

This new school was also an altogether much more civilised affair. The classrooms were much brighter, the teachers called you by your first name and their teaching methods were far less draconian, with not a cane nor a slipper in sight—and there were girls!