It’s Not What You Think

Dad was hardly ever ill. In fact I only ever recall him being ill twice. Once with the thing that eventually killed him and the other time when he had earache.

I remember the occasion when he had earache as if it were yesterday. I was attending the grammar school when out of nowhere one morning, Dad said he would be able to give me a lift, something he had not been able to do since my leaving the juniors. I usually took the bus.

He had taken the morning off work to go to the doctors and found himself with half an hour to spare. This was another one of those all-round cool situations—a total win-win, it meant I got to be with Dad for an extra fifteen minutes, plus it spared me the bus fare, which gave me extra sweet purchasing power—whoopee!

Dad drove us both proudly on our journey in our usual car mode of near silence. We didn’t talk much. For my part I didn’t feel we needed to. I have no idea of Dad’s thoughts on the matter. Was I the quiet one or was I quiet because he was quiet? Dad didn’t do car radios either—‘They only attract attention,’ he would say—hilarious!

Three miles later and there we were pulling up outside the main gates of the grammar school in our big, old, navy blue Vauxhall Victor. What a fine motor car that was—there’s nothing like the smell of vinyl in the morning.

After bidding each other farewell, Dad drove off to his doctor’s appointment while my mind turned to focusing on the far more important task of sweet selection with the spare cash I now had in my pocket.

The doctor duly examined both Dad and his ear but to no avail, he could find nothing wrong with either. Consequently he did what most doctors do in such circumstances and ordered a series of ‘tests’, a phrase I learnt to dread. It was the same doctor who would fail to spot Dad’s bowel cancer.

Mum had noticed Dad was acting a little strangely, especially when it came to his private business. She confronted him one day, at first he was embarrassed, but being a nurse she persisted and discovered that things were not at all as they should be.

Dad said he’d been to see his doctor, something that Mum was furious about as he had not told her this until now. They were a couple that had few, if any, secrets and this revelation did not go down well. Dad went on to tell Mum that he had been sent for more tests but the results had proved inconclusive. His doctor’s prognosis therefore was simply that Dad had an irritable stomach and so was prescribed Epsom salts.

This last piece of news sent my mum into apoplexy. She was more than aware of how easily things could go wrong as the result of a misdiagnosis, having seen such episodes at work. She ordered Dad to go and see her doctor immediately.

Mum and Dad had always had different doctors. It was the one thing I never understood about them. All us kids went to Mum’s doctor as in her opinion he was the best in town; now it was Dad’s turn.

Our doctor referred Dad straight away. As a result he was admitted to hospital. Upon further examination it transpired that Dad was riddled with cancer and there was nothing anyone could do to help him.

Had he been diagnosed in time, there was a good chance he could have been saved.

Mum was absolutely livid. She was told in no uncertain terms that within six to eight weeks, the man she had loved for her entire adult life would no longer be alive.

She is still justifiably very angry about it to this day.

Dad was a good man, a saint in her eyes. He had never wronged anyone, he had always put his family first and now here he was lying in a hospital bed unaware that he was dying.

Mum wanted him home. She wanted him home and she wanted him home now. The first night Dad had been admitted to the hospital the man in the next bed had died. As they wheeled away his body one of the porters gestured to Dad, who he thought was asleep, and whispered, ‘He’ll be next.’

This broke Mum’s heart, she could see that for the first time since she had known him, her husband was frightened.

Dad did come home and somehow Mum managed to turn those six to eight weeks into eighteen months, that’s how long Dad lasted with her tender love and care.

The irony of it all was that Mum and Dad never discussed the seriousness of his condition. Mum thinks Dad knew it was terminal but she can’t be certain. She says that the only time he ever alluded to the fact that he might not be around for much longer was when he once told her, ‘If anything happens to either of us, we will always be there for the other in the eyes of our children.’ Still one of the most beautiful things I have ever heard.

As much as Mum didn’t discuss the inevitability of his condition with Dad, nor did she discuss it with either my sister or brother and I. As far as we knew Dad was very sick, of that there was little doubt, but we had no idea he was so sick he was going to die.

Dad had been ill for over a year when one evening Mum, who had just finished attending to him, came down to the kitchen which I was currently using as a workshop for my bike. It was a dark night and cold and wet outside so Mum said I could tinker indoors. My bike now upside down, I was busy cleaning the spokes, oiling the chain, and carrying out other vital maintenance when she came in.

‘Oh hi, Mum,’ I said, still focused on what I was doing.

‘Hello luv.’ She sounded down, really down. I looked up to see she was absolutely shattered. Not only that but there was something else wrong. She closed the door behind her, leant against it and looked up towards the ceiling, half as if to plead for some kind of intervention and half to stop the tears, which were now clearly visible welling up in her eyes.

Immediately I began to feel both panic and fear. I had never seen Mum even come close to crying before.

‘What’s up?’ I asked in that kind of uncertain, nervous way a kid asks when he hopes the answer is going to be ‘nothing’.

‘It’s your dad.’

‘What about him?’

‘He’s just so ill, love.’

Well, we knew he was so ill, very very ill, but ill people get better—that’s something we also knew, that’s what had always been the case. Other less fortunate people died but they weren’t ill, they were dying—our dad was not one of those.

‘I know he’s ill, Mum, but he’s going to get better, don’t worry.’ I said.

The tears were now streaming down Mum’s cheeks as if trying to speak on her behalf. There was something she was going to have to tell me, something she had been dreading. She walked over to where I was kneeling down, still next to my bike. She put her hand on my head and started to stroke my hair before whispering.

‘He’s not going to get better luv. He’s never going to get better.’

At this point she completely broke down.

This was the worst moment of my life. Nothing since has come even close to it. When I first heard those words come out of Mum’s mouth, I couldn’t compute what she meant, it had sounded for all the world as if she had said Dad was no longer going to get better and then of course I began to realise that’s exactly what she had said.

Dad was now in that other category of very sick people: he was no longer ill, he was dying.

Life over the next few months or so—up until Dad’s final passing—was much as it had been before, except now we were all much sadder and everything seemed to become much quieter. Dad’s disease and everything that came with it continued to happen but now with more frequency and for longer.

The sooner any human being is spared the indignity of such a living hell the better—I don’t care what anyone says.

In our minds, now that we knew there was no longer hope, it became more and more evident that our dad—once a big, burly, jolly, intelligent man—had long since left us. The frail old gentleman upstairs was little more than a stranger.

In many ways this made things easier, of course the old gentleman was still a welcome guest and to my mum a worthy patient, but our dad, as we knew him, had now very much gone. My sister, brother and I continued to visit the upstairs room to see the old gentleman every day, chatting about what we were up to at school, but we had already laid my real dad to rest. Secretly we had said our goodbyes, our pillows long since dry from the tears.

The old gentleman battled on but the slope was becoming ever steeper. I hope you never have to experience the silent killer, but as cancer grows everything else diminishes. It’s truly awful. We prayed he would be free soon.

The crazy thing is, even when someone is dying, the rest of life has to go on and so it was with us during those last few weeks. We carried on doing the things we were expected to do. You can’t have time off just because your dad’s dying—a bizarre state of affairs. Besides, to be honest, no one outside the immediate family knew Dad was so gravely ill. Mum had asked us to keep it between ourselves. I never told any of my friends and they were never interested enough to ask. Kids don’t care about illness unless it’s their own.

The night Dad died I was cycling home from school. Taking my bike to school instead of the bus was something I had begun to do more recently of late. I had around a quarter of a mile left to go when I came to the last roundabout just before you turned into our road. There was an ambulance coming the other way. Its lights were flashing but there was no siren. I knew it was him.

As the ambulance passed me on my right-hand side, I felt peace more than anything.

There were no tears, just relief. It was over.

*Danny Baker phoned me up on the Sunday morning: ‘Have you heard about Diana?’ ‘No,’ I replied, still half asleep. ‘She’s been killed along with Dodi.’ I immediately jumped out of bed and went downstairs to put the telly on. Fifteen minutes later I was outside the gates of Kensington Palace on my motorbike. When I arrived there was only a single bunch of flowers at the gate, later to become the famous sea of flowers, of course. I don’t know why I went there that morning, I’d never even met Diana. I just felt drawn to go.

Top 10 Favourite Jobs (Other than Showbiz)

10 Windscreen fitter

9 Hi-fi salesman

8 Seafood salesman

7 Golf shop assistant (for about a week)

6 Supermarket assistant (trolley boy)

5 Tarzanagram

4 Private detective

3 Market stallholder

2 Mobile DJ

1 Newsagent

I would begin work as soon as life allowed me to, although ironically it was death that gave me the green light to start work in the first place.

My father’s death when I was thirteen—although obviously devastating for a young boy who loved and respected his dad—did mean that I could, for the first time in my life, take on a paper round. Had my dad still been alive he would never have allowed such a thing.

‘Slave labour! No child of mine is working for a pittance like that,’ I can hear him saying it now. What Dad failed to realise was the fact that a paper round would elevate a kid of my current financial standing, i.e. almost zero (except for my pocket money), to relatively millionaire status.

My first job was for a newsagent called Ralph. He had an innate talent for impatience and was the sternest man I had come across thus far in my life, much more so than Mum or Dad or any of my teachers.

Ralph had just the one shop but if you ran it like he did, one shop was all you needed. It yielded enough for him to have one of the swellest houses in town—pretty damn large.

Chez Ralph and Mrs Ralph, whom I never met in all the years I knew him, was located in a place called Grappenhall, which is an area close to Warrington on the other side of the Manchester Ship Canal. To get there you have to cross one of two mighty bridges, the first being a huge clumping swing bridge, the second a towering cantilever bridge, both breathtakingly impressive for their time.

Grappenhall was generally accepted as the posh part of town, probably because they had their own cricket team and something akin to a village green, as well as lots of houses like Ralph’s, of course. Ralph’s grand pile, a testament to Victorian splendour, had both a drive in as well as out plus a vast stepped lawn at the rear.

One newsagent shop equals one very big, nice house, I made a mental note.

Ralph was firm but fair, something I have never had a problem with, but he could also be a real old grump—a ‘misery guts’ as they might say, usually at the expense of his own happiness. Don’t grumpy people realise it’s mostly them who lose out as a result of their moodiness?

And why would anyone do grumpy in the first place? Is it because they think it means the rest of us will take them more seriously, be less likely to try and take them for a ride perhaps? I have no idea why a person would choose to adopt such a posture. Surely it can’t be worth it, no matter what the upside. Surely they don’t enjoy being grumpy every day. It must be such a draining way to exist. I have never understood such grumps.

I still know people like Ralph today and it still bemuses me. What’s wrong with these guys? Have they never read A Christmas Carol and thought to do something about themselves before it’s all too late and the grim reaper comes a-knocking? Have they never watched It’s A Wonderful Life and realised we all want to be George Bailey because he’s a good guy and everyone loves him and we all want to be loved because it feels great?

Ralph’s emotional misgivings, however, although observed, were of little matter to me. Ralph had a paper round up for grabs and I was very much up for grabbing a paper round. He needed someone like me and I needed someone like him.

Alright, so having a paper round would mean having to get out of bed while most of the rest of the country was still asleep, but I was only lying in bed waiting to grow up anyway. I might as well grow up on the move and get paid for it into the bargain, then come the weekend I would be able to afford things! I would be able to buy almost anything I wanted, pasties from the pie shop, sweets and pop, tickets to the pictures, space invaders from the arcade—my mind began reeling with the endless possibilities.

I was still only a kid but as far as I could see I would soon be almost completely financially independent. Although I suppose in a way I was already financially independent—it was just that I didn’t have any money to be independent with.

All things considered I couldn’t wait to step up to the employment plate for the first time.

Ralph’s shop was the model of efficiency. A huge glass window at the front was full of children’s toys, most of which had been there so long they had faded in the sunlight. As you entered his hallowed premises, to the left there were four substantial greetings card stands, whilst to the right was a beaten up old ice-cream freezer which flanked the sweet counter. The sweet counter itself was myriad plate-glass shelves laden with sixty or seventy jars of loose sweets. There were crisp boxes stacked high in the corner, chocolate bars and penny mix items at the front. Next to a simple wooden drawer which was used as a till were the weighing scales and numerous different-sized white paper bags tied together with string, hung from a series of hooks.

There were two further counters Ralph had managed to pack into his tiny square footage, each a little goldmine of its own. Opposite the sweet counter was a full-time post office, consisting of two teller positions safeguarded behind double-thick glass screens, which were busy for most of the day. Finally there was Ralph’s stage: the mighty newspaper and cigarette counter. This is where the serious money was taken, buoyed by the additional revenue stream of the legendary football pools.

It was in front of Ralph’s counter that I would ask for my first ever job.

‘I’ve come about the paper round.’

Ralph looked down at me, I looked up at him; that’s when I first noticed how miserable he was. My natural reaction was to smile, but this instantly made him feel uncomfortable. He quickly looked to the side before grumbling, ‘Come in seven o’clock sharp tomorrow. Don’t be late, one week’s trial without pay.’

‘Ah, I see,’ a miserable man, a tough man and now most probably a mean man—often the three go together, Dickens had it right. Surely one day of delivering papers would be trial enough. If I couldn’t do it after that, what difference would another several days of ‘trial’ make?

Of course this was simply Ralph’s way of getting a free week out of a new boy but, as I suspected then and as I know for sure now, one should never allow the terms of a small contract to get in the way of a much bigger one down the line—without the rungs at the bottom of the ladder you’ll never reach those that lead to the top.

Besides, if you feel like you’re really being stung, there’s always the potential for renegotiation in the future but not until after you’ve proved your worth. This is when you will have something to bargain with. At the beginning of such situations all the Ralphs of this world hold all the cards, but if you’re any good, from day one, this balance immediately begins to shift your way.

My ‘trial’ week duly came and went, and I presumed I passed as nobody thought to tell me otherwise or asked me to leave. This, I surmised, meant I had got the job and poor old Ralph would now have to revert to his rather reluctant stance of paying another small boy very little, to make a grown man quite a lot.

I took to the world of employment like a duck to water and I especially enjoyed the quiet of the early morning, the stillness of the air which allowed sounds to carry much further than they did during the day. I marvelled at the absolute calm of everything before the rest of the neighbourhood decided to wake up. I realised for the first time what creatures of ridiculous habit we human beings are. I wondered why more people didn’t seize the day earlier and set about their business when there was no one to get in the way or put them off.

In the summer I would have the sunrises all to myself; in the winter the snow was mine to step in first. I would often witness the best weather of the day. It’s spooky how the elements often started off favourably and then grew a little more disgruntled the more people they had to deal with. ‘The world only likes people who like the world,’ I thought.

Back at the shop, I soon discovered that the earlier you turned up in the morning, the more quickly you were likely to get your paper round made up and hence be out of the door and on the road. This was because most of the boys were still in love with their sleep and left it till the last possible moment before they arrived. In their minds this also meant that they could go straight on to school afterwards without having to go home, if they wore their school uniform that is.

Potentially this may have seemed like a good plan, but apart from having to wear stinky, sweaty clothes for the rest of the day, as delivering papers was no walk in the park, these boys often ended up having to wait for their rounds because they all showed up at the same time—a complete false economy as far as I could see. If, on the other hand, you told the manager you would be in early he would try to make sure your round was ready for you. Bosses like employees who turn up on time, even better if they’re early, they also like employees who make their lives easier.

It wasn’t long before I was finishing my round before most of the rest of the boys had even started theirs and it wasn’t long before I was promoted to the heady heights of ‘spare boy’.

The role of spare boy was to be both my first promotion and the first position for which I would be retained. Spare boy was paid an additional weekly fee for coming back after his round every morning in case someone hadn’t turned up. If this happened to be the case, spare boy would rush to the rescue like a paper boy superhero to save the day, all for a bonus payment of course.

There were occasions when I would end up doing not one extra round but two or three in all. If a boy was a no show, I would take on his round and see if I could do it quicker than him. I would sometimes run my rounds—the quicker I delivered, the lighter my bag would be; the lighter my bag, the quicker still I could go. It all made perfect sense to me. I would see other boys trudging their rounds, hating every second, where was their logic? If you don’t like something, either don’t do it in the first place, or get it over with as soon as possible, don’t drag it out, for heaven’s sake.

When old paper boys left, new paper boys replaced them and they in turn would have to be taught their rounds. This was another aspect of the spare boy’s role. In time, I came to know all sixteen of our rounds, something that would stand me in great stead for the future.

The next step up the employment ladder was to get a collecting round. Not only were some people too lazy to get their own newspapers in the morning but some of them, it transpired, couldn’t even be bothered to go and pay their bill once a week.

I found this incredible, I could hardly believe such goofballs existed but more fool them and more money for me. Their lethargy was my lolly.

Being given a collecting round was the first outstretched finger of trust from Ralph to one of his boys. The boys who held the lofty position of collector were considered very much senior to those who did not. Every Friday, after school, the collecting cognoscenti would chase down the same paper rounds as we did in the mornings but this time free of our bulging bags and armed instead with book, biro and a pocket full of jangling coins.

We were each given a two-pound float to take with us in case any customers needed change. Upon our return, we then had to add up our receipts, count out our money, subtract our float from the total and hence, hopefully, balance our books. This was my first encounter with simple but highly effective early business practice. This is how business worked. What could be more straightforward?

The pay for collecting was 10 per cent of whatever you collected, which often turned out to be more than you would get for a whole week of delivering. This was easy street in comparison to the delivery rounds, but you had to deliver to get to collect and the better you delivered the better collecting round you were rewarded with. Ralph was a disaster at social intercourse but he sure knew how to get the best out of his boys. He was like a cross between Scrooge and Fagin.

So, what with my morning round, the hallowed position of spare boy, the collecting round, plus additional evening and the Saturday Pink Final rounds (the Pink Finals were sport result sheets, prepared to arrive half an hour after the final scores had come in), I was bringing home easily over a tenner, more towards fifteen quid a week!

Doing the maths, I figured this meant in six weeks I would have close to a hundred pounds. A hundred pounds to my mind was a small fortune—it was enough to buy a brand new bike and still have fifty quid left. It took my mum a whole year to buy my last bike. On this kind of money I could even afford a secondhand motorcycle, or even, at a stretch…an old car! Not that I had any use for one as I was still three years away from being eligible to drive.

This was simply amazing to me, the concrete of the council estate where I lived was still all around but its greyness was beginning to fade. As I had suspected, working worked.

Some of the houses where I collected from on a Friday were also the ‘nice’ houses. I could see into their living rooms as I stood by the door waiting for someone to come and pay. These houses had a different smell, they had a different energy, there was more going on. The women who answered the doors seemed to smile more, they were prettier, kinder, they even looked younger. What was it with these people? They had something else going on.