Origins

[wraymond]

Thanks Phil. Ep 2:

I applied and had to attend Liverpool Employment Exchange for interview. Remember those miserable fields of dreams of a job? Well I got it. A very kind elderly chap looked over his pince nez, blinked, and asked to look at my hands. That’s all, no oblique questions or risky phoney chat, just my hands. He wanted to see my nails. Most odd, but affable.

The job was for trainee butchers to live over the shop (J. Sainsbury Ltd) and learn the trade with the opportunity to study Public Health at day release. I started two weeks later, travel voucher and a cheque for the first week’s pay, at Gants Hill. It was 1961 and I never even looked back.

The Barkingside shop was a traditional one with a pavement window that opened upwards so passers-by could be served in the old fashioned way whilst still on the pavement. After I’d been there two weeks, on a pleasant day in May and not unlike present conditions, the lovely girl who worked in another shop along the pavement was in the queue and wanted just one pig’s kidney. For her father, she said.

This happened several times and, once you learn how to play and ‘manage’ a queue, you can pretty much serve anyone you want to whilst your colleague serves your rejects. Ask any greengrocer. Chats begin, and the old story unfolds.

It was then I realised it was me who had been played. Having given her the wrapped kidney and seen her smiling, I couldn’t resist leaning over the slab and out of the open window to watch her walking away. I remember thinking ‘great legs’. She got as far as the bus top and the kidney was tossed into the ticket bin.

The next time she came in a date was organised and we went to Hammersmith Palais. Joe Loss and his orchestra were resident with the Dave Clark Five filling the interval and Feeling Glad All Over. Well I was, certainly. We married in December of that year, Christmas week in fact, ‘62.

10 years, two gorgeous daughters and two promotions later I was bored. With the job that is. Not the burgeoning family of course. Then there came my first car. It was a blue and cream 1958 Austin Cambridge A55, reg. 388 RMH. I had by that time joined another supermarket as a district manager. My patch was from Southend to Croydon. I was fed up and frequently far from home. Tesco bought that firm out and the climate for imported managers went into the chiller overnight. Jack Cohen was a difficult man to please.

One Friday night the Insurance man, ‘Old Septic Knuckles’, knocked to collect the premium on Celia’s endowment from childhood and asked how I was doing, as they do. I told him I was ‘looking around’.

The Man from the Prudential said their office had a vacancy and their boss, a rather grand gentleman called Arthur Levesque, cigar ash covering his corporation and gold watch chain with twiddly fob, would be in the office the following morning. Worth a shot, I thought. I unexpectedly got the job of District Agent and achieved respectability at last. That job, one I had never dreamed of, filled me. I loved it. Shiny shoes as well.

The Staff benefit of cheap car loan and preferential mortgage rate was, er, attractive. My governor retired and said he was about to buy a new P6 (Yellow) 2000 TC. So I bought his old one. My first of many Rovers was an Arden Green 1968 2000 TC reg. UOY 961F that had been nursed from new. Wonderful.

Frequently topping the new business sales lists, until then I hadn't realised what competition was, brought promotion to manager with the added responsibility for training the new agents and occasionally the so-called experienced ones. Then I reached 50.

On my birthday, the boss called me in for a chat, like they do. He said the company was reorganising and my job was changing. He asked if I would like to accept retirement. It would be on a full term pension. That’s 15 years credit. I looked at him and asked which hand he would prefer to have bitten off. Two weeks later we had a month in America. Then Thailand, and then Italy.

Ep. 3 in a while, big day tomorrow.