Income and outgoing

Teenagers can be high maintenance these days, with their designer everythings, iPods, laptops, expensive haircuts, partying and anything else that happens to come along.

It has not always been the case, though as a Grammar school boy, I could have been considered to be that by my parents. In the 1960s there were none of the electronic gadgetry that we take for granted today. Our chief source of entertainment was the old Dansette record player that the youth club owned. Vinyl discs that cost 6 shillings and eightpence were the media of the time and we'd all buy the latest Beatles or The Rolling Stones or whatever new bands came along. So sweet was the feeling that this was something that our parents hated and that we owned it. We'd buy our winkle picker shoes and pale blue skin tight jeans that were so difficult to get on and off.

Anyway, even a lifestyle as cheap and low maintenance as mine, needed to be funded, and it was necessary to find ways of making some money.

The long term job that I first had was as a delivery boy for the village shop. Every saturday morning I'd be up at 7 and be picked up by Eric, who drove an old, green Commer Van with sliding doors and a column gear change. This was already laden with the first batch of cardboard boxes, stuffed with groceries. It was my job to carry these boxes from the van, to the doors of the customers. The van also carried a selection of goods that people could buy as we trundled around the village and its outskirts. We carried, bread, milk and cigarettes, as well as a small selection of canned and bottled goods - it always seemed enough.

The job was undemanding and tedious. Eric would let me do all the donkey work, while he chatted to the customers, took their money and drove us around. 

One enduring memory of that job was a little girl who lived at a farm at the edge of our round. Fay was delightful, she was six and loved to come out to the van and she would play with me while her mother talked to eric. She was always cheerful and had sparkly eyes that could charm anything or anyone.

One day we called at the farm and Fay was not there. She had been taken to hospital. The next day she died, and I still find that upsetting to recall. Her tiny grave is in the village churchyard and I still pause next to her when I pay my fleeting visits there.

Anyway, for the whole day, delivering goodies, loading and unloading the van, I was paid ten shilling. That is 50p in todays money, and I was glad to get it. It kept me in the essentials of teenage life, like cigarettes and the odd magazine. My parents added another five shillings, so I did have a little money. 

In the school holidays, I was encouraged to get other jobs, and living in rural England, it was easy to get work on the land, harvesting fruit and vegetables, depending on the season, and I would work on the farm, sometimes being paid for the work and sometimes not. It didn't seem to matter much. We'd pick apples and plums, strawberries and raspberries, peas and beans. We'd pull beetroot and dig potatoes, we'd haul sacks of wheat and help with haymaking, all of which tended to keep us fit and out of mischief. In those days it was common to do a 12 to 16 hour day and not think twice about it.

Later on work diversified and I worked in bars and hotels as well as in local factories. All of which gave me even more determination to escape and not to spend the rest of my days in manual labour, which although quite satisfying in some ways, can be so dull and mind numbing.