Jobs for life: An autobiographical search for identity through employment
A story went round at school that the local newsagent was offering paper rounds that paid well but might be difficult for late risers. I was 15, a boarder at Westminster School, and needed more pocket money.
I jumped at the chance, went round to the shop and got the job. Two pounds a week. Every weekday morning at about 5.30am I emerged from the boarding house, walked about 500 metres past the entrance to Westminster Abbey, across Victoria Street, and half-way down Tothill Street to do a couple of hours of energetic deliveries around Westminster and Pimlico as the odd neighbourhood slowly woke up and came to life..
It was one of the more unusual newspaper rounds, since it was an almost entirely commercial area, with very few private residents, most of whom seemed to be elderly bachelors of the religious variety.
Every morning I completed four or five delivery rounds with a large satchel and on a heavy bicycle that had no gears and not much of a brake. I put single newspapers through the doors of clerical houses in Old Queen Street, Great Peter Street, Cowley Street, Church House, the southern part of Victoria Street, and throughout the whole of “old” Westminster behind Dean’s Yard that verges silently on Pimlico and Victoria, in those days an indeterminate area of scruffy cafes, dusty pubs, boarding houses, small business offices, dark flats and social housing ancient and modern.
The newsagent I delivered papers for was run by an irritable Scotsman with a red nose and his understandably grumpy wife. The couple quarrelled violently almost every morning and were often in mid-shriek when I arrived. When they weren’t quarrelling, they were friendly and even kind to others including me, sometimes paying me more money than they had agreed when I had done more rounds or covered for someone else.
My recently married brother, who lived in Hackney, was training to be a barrister. He was short of money at the time and joined me as he also needed a few more pounds a week. He delivered some rounds on his 50cc bike which was quicker than I could manage on my butcher’s boy ten-tonne trike going on heavy goods vehicle.
However, he more often helped in the cavernous basement of the shop some mornings in the secondary post-delivery task of slicing off the mastheads of unsold newspapers with a razor. The sliced mastheads were sent back to the newspaper office according to the sale or return principle as legitimate proof that they hadn’t been sold. To qualify, the masthead had to show the date.
He got the hang of this soon enough and one day when he had completed a few dozen copies of the Telegraph he realised he had more spare time so he started on a big pile of copies of the Times with gusto and was boasting about it when I came back from a delivery.
I had to tell him that it was only the Telegraph that paid for returns on this basis and therefore only the unsold copies of the Telegraph that needed its mastheads sliced. The Times had a different system. His profound look of helpless irritation was memorable for a younger brother so often reminded by his elder of his inferior status.
The job lasted a few months and lasted across two terms. My schoolmates were queueing up to take over but I didn’t budge from my hallowed position. It was all fine until one Monday I arrived bright and ready at 6am and the shop was shut and even boarded up. There was no clue as to what had happened.
My first ever paid job had given me a sense of current affairs purpose and a fascination for the morning press. I learned to sum up the world from reading all the headlines about the news from all the daily newspapers from the dry Financial Times and the crusty Telegraph through the big-breasted tabloids to the cautious old-world radicalism of the hesitant Guardian and finally the sombre but pointedly contrary Morning Star, then known as the Communist (but not Trotskyist) paper.
Sometimes, when bragging about my tiny sliver of a left-wing heritage, I claimed to have been a seller of the Morning Star. It wasn’t exactly true, as I only delivered it, but in those days, it was almost a reassuring paper, acting as the balancing pole in the wide political range of newspapers, most of which even then tilted very largely to the right. Consequently, multiple copies of it were bought by all the government departments, Church House, and the multinationals, including Monsanto.
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