Seventies Saturdays

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.