Starting
2014 with a memory of a long time ago (it seems!) when I used to work with my
dad during the school holidays. Like all
memory it’s part story!
I worked for my dad during the summer
school holidays and the day would always start with a yawn and an early morning
stroll past the salivating wolves next door to my dad’s factory.
Of course they weren’t really wolves, only two
of the biggest Alsatians I’d seen in my sixteen year old life. All hunched and stalking muscle. Teeth in a
permanent snarl, and eyes that never left you as you past them by. I can’t remember ever seeing a human being
unless of course the wolves weren’t wolves but werewolves.
The two monsters stalked the Scrap merchants
and weren’t chained. They roamed the broken up cars and machinery that lay
scattered amongst the yard. The dirty
black and rust brown of their coats a perfect camouflage amongst the mashed and
broken backed machinery.
Sometimes when I walked along I would be
drawn into thinking that they had been taken away in the night, that my dad’s
complaining about them roaming free had finally borne fruit.
Then the rush of black and brown muscled
fur would kick the heart into fifth gear.
So every morning I strolled past them,
mouth dry, eyes straight ahead, trying to stop myself breaking into a run. Every morning it was past them to the loading
bay where that morning’s papers where getting loaded onto vans to be
distributed to the various Menzies shops in Airdrie and Coatbridge and beyond. Every morning it was into the office
alongside the loading bay, and Mrs Simpson, with a good morning, and what year
would I be going back to after the summer holidays; this while she handed me my
dad’s papers—the Glasgow Herald and Daily Record—and took the money if it was
that time in the month for bringing the account up to date.
She was like something out of the sixties,
or maybe it was the fifties. Hair lacquered into a bowl shape; make up that
creased and cracked as she struggled to work the skin underneath; her eyes huge
under black pencilled eyebrows. She
could have been anything from thirty to sixty.
The walk back to the factory was just as
nerve wracking and it never got any better.
Still I always volunteered to get the
papers and was disappointed if I was late and someone had gone before me.
A test of nerve?
I delivered the papers to my dad who was
sitting behind his beech desk; grey telephone sitting to his right, those days’
orders in neat piles on the desk.
He would read the Herald and I would take
the Record out to Jim and Eddie in the Ducat.
The kettle would be whistling, cups already milked and sugared; bacon
would be sizzling on the ancient stove. Rolls would lay open all buttered and
ready. Bottles of sauce, both red and
brown, and grimy with use, would sit waiting on the small table by the
window. The sixteen inch TV would be on,
the sound low.
In a space that could barely squeeze in
two, never mind three, I watched the TV, Jim read the Record, and Eddie sat his
sixteen stone frame in the leather seat marked and cut with age.
After the tea and rolls I would know if I
was spending a day in the factory, or going out in one of the Lorries. If it was the Lorries I would hope it was up
to Perth, or down Ayrshire way. That
would take the whole day.
No farm roads though. Hospitals; factories; high street shops.
And let the sun shine.
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