Seventies Saturdays
Occasionally, when they aren’t asking for money, my
kids ask what things were like when I was young. I tell them that the world was
dark and dangerous and there was a lack of quality television. We only had
three channels and most of those were off air most of the time. There was
nothing to watch over your sugar-enriched breakfast cereal and children’s
programming ended just before you got home from school. There was Swap Shop on
Saturday mornings, which was good as long as your only other option was doing
your homework or having rickets.
Thus, when my dad occasionally had to go to work on
a Saturday morning he used to take me with him as a treat. A very inexpensive
treat too. Now you're stuck with taking them to soft-play for a tenner or the
cinema for a fortune. Different times.
I didn’t really know what my dad did for a living.
Ten year old me just knew he was in charge of lorries and a warehouse. In
the warehouse was wood, but my dad called it timber and so I did too.
We drove there, probably in his Vauxhall Viva, with
Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart on Radio Two and me in the front seat. I may or may
not have been wearing a seat belt. If we had to stop suddenly my dad would put
his arm out across me, keeping me perfectly safe. There was a tin of
hardboiled sweets covered in icing sugar in the glove compartment. That’s how
we rolled.
I should tell you about my dad. He was born in
South London a few years before World War Two and he tells me stories of
watching Spitfires dogfight and searching bombsites for shrapnel. For me my dad
is Clint Eastwood's character in any of the Spaghetti western trilogies that
we watch. He is often silent, he smokes cigarettes (not cheroots but
close enough). He has a wicked sense of humour and takes no shit,
least of all from me. He has never shot anyone; but I did see
him deliberately trip a boy who scared away the pigeons I was trying to
feed in Trafalgar Square. When I was a bit older my friend Fred told me
that my dad scared the living shit out of him. My dad once took me to the
Lord Mayor’s parade and I sat on his shoulders.
My sense of direction being what it is I have no
clear idea where my dad worked to this day. Somewhere in Twickenham in
what was then Middlesex in what is still South West London is all I can tell
you. There are orange and blue chain link gates in a wooden fence. My dad
unlocks these and we drive into the expanse of the loading yard. There are
lorries in orange and blue company colours, their flat beds sheeted over
with tarpaulins. Old fashioned lorries really, but I don’t think there
were curtain-sided cyclist-crushing artics on the roads in those days. I
remember the yard being windblown and desolate and my dad would lead the
way to the single storey office building that sat on its own in a sea of tarmac.
The smell of the office is a strong blend of coffee
and tobacco. Underneath that is the chemical taint of what I think was the
ink they used in the telex ribbon. Every empty desk, cluttered with papers
in files and on spikes, was just as its owner had left it on Friday
afternoon. Most have a little tin ashtray and a large blotting paper mat
marked with stains of mug rings and odd little scribbles, sums and notes. There
are pink haired trolls, newton's cradles (which I set going) and metal stick
men on metal stick horses balanced on metal cylinders (which I set going).
At the weekend the place is silent and empty like
one of the ghost ships found abandoned in the South China Seas that I’d
read about in my comic (The Victor - teaching young boys not to trust
Germans, Italians and the Japanese since 1961). First things first my dad
buys me a hot chocolate from the machine. Press the button, clunking and
whirring, then a plastic cup appears and a mixture of boiling water,
sugar, sodium benzoate and chocolate flavouring froths into it. Brilliant.
A machine that automatically makes you a hot drink. I'm IN the future. Could
not get enough of that. When I could I poured the hot chocolate away in a
plant or outside; I didn’t really like it but I didn’t want him to know
that.
Along one side of the yard, away from the office’s smell
of smoke and ink was the cavernous warehouse and a completely different
smell. The smell of raw timber. You can smell this too – walk down to the
back aisles of your local DIY megastore where the joists and fence posts
are stacked. Breathe in. That my friends is one of the smells of my
childhood and I love it. Anyway back to the cavernous warehouse. We have
rows of metal pillars supporting a corrugated roof. Asbestos didn’t become
lethal until 1982 so that’s probably what the roof is made of. Up there
are skylights and these cast a dim beige-tinted light between the towering
stacks of timber down to the concrete floor. The palleted towers of
plywood, joists and doors reaching up to the roof form canyons that echo
to the clackers that I am probably cracking together as I poke around. This is
the seventies. Small children are allowed to roam freely through the industrial workplace.
Lurking in the canyons like sleeping dinosaurs are
abandoned forklift trucks. There are two types, front-loaders and
side-loaders. I am proud that I know this. They are huge and dirty and
fantastic. I can climb up into the seat and push the levers. I am ten and alone
and all bets are off.
If I was lucky the driver would have left the forks
off the floor when he’d knocked off on Friday evening. This meant, and I
can’t stress how cool this was, that I could make a massive yellow-painted
powerful machine work On My Own. I push a lever forward and the great
metal forks sink to the concrete with a satisfying clunk. That’s probably
still one of the top ten thrills of my life to date. After I had eked as
much fun out of forklift taming as was available I would saunter back to
the office on the off chance of another hot chocolate.
There were pictures of topless ladies on calendars
in the office. I am ten and am interested only in the mechanics of this.
My working assumption (much like the earth being at the centre of the
universe for a medieval pope) is that no one is going to let anyone take
pictures of them in the nude. That would be just so weird, no one would
let that happen. But there they are. Ladies with their bosoms showing. So,
to keep things in line with my worldview these pictures must be faked. The
ladies must have clothes on – maybe a t-shirt or a vest top, and they must
put on a fake boob-suit so that it looks like they are topless but
actually are not. And very nice they looked too, although once I had my
theory of the boob-suit I didn’t pay much more attention to them. Once you
know how the trick is done you lose interest. This was a hypothesis I
remember holding on to through for some time. James Bond’s attractive
girlfriend couldn’t be naked under the sheets; she was an actress
after all. She couldn’t be naked with Roger Moore could she? There must be
a clever skin-coloured suit that she was wearing. I don’t remember any
later epiphany of actually realising that nudity was “real”. There was no
slack-jawed realisation of “oh my god she’s naked”. It probably happened in
secondary school in front of my classmates and I’ve blocked the trauma of
it all.
One last thing – desk calculators. Not everyone had
them. Sometimes there was a slide rule on someone’s desk. I had no real
idea how to use a slide rule either then or now. But I liked the satisfying
engineering of the slide, the complicated gradations and the way it
slid smoothly out of its groove. But sometimes, there was a calculator.
Slightly smaller than a cash register. You could turn it on at the plug,
and click the switch at the side and a bright green “0.” would glow on the
screen. If I pressed a button the number would change. I would add up
numbers, big numbers to make bigger numbers until the display was full up.
If you went too far you got an “E”. For Error.
You might have noticed the satisfaction I get in
this story from pressing something “here” and making something happen “there”.
A recurring theme that I didn’t notice until I got to the end here. I
loved that feeling then and I love it today. Hence my later work for NASA
when I invented the red button that launches things into orbit. I never
thanked my dad for giving me the time and space to find that out. If I had
he would have thought me daft; so it’s probably best that I didn’t mention
it.