Not NaNo 7 November 7b

I wish I could remember where I got to in the tale I’m telling. I know it doesn’t actually matter in the great scheme of things because this is just an exercise in discipline. I will write the equivalent of a short novel in 30 days even if I don’t want to. You never know, I might edit it one day and turn it into a short memoir. Would anyone want to read it? Probably not, but you never know.

So I think I’ve done secondary school to death and could move on to my later career. I might mention some things that went on before I went away to Sheffield to learn to be a journalist. I was turned down by various universities, for example, mostly because I wasn’t old enough to go, but some because they were in Scotland and I’m English. Scottish universities used to accept people at 17 but most English ones didn’t want you till you were 18. Having passed my 11 plus early I was always a year ahead of my classmates, or a year behind depending on how you looked at it. Most of them were 18 by the time they left upper sixth. But not me, because of my early swottishness. That’s not a word. I know it’s not a word, but I love making them up. It’s part of the creativity.

This leaves me abandoned at 17 with no uni place while my school fellows were off around the country studying allsorts. Liquorice ones.  (Thanks Dad!) I did try to get a place but Nottingham rejected me because my grades weren’t good enough. I can’t actually remember where else I applied. Edinburgh, I think. Maybe Glasgow but I think I’m glad I didn’t go there. Anyway, my UCCA application failed dismally. I thought my life was over, though I didn’t actually want to go to Uni and spend another three years studying at that stage. (That came later.) I also didn’t really want to spend a year doing all kinds of odd jobs across town. There was waitressing, and selling shoes, was that when I worked in the toy shop? Eventually I found a place as a wages clerk as a result of taking driving lessons.

Here goes with another aside. I decided whatever I was going to do in life eventually, a driving licence would help. I began lesson with the instructor from a garage called Parish’s and obviously discussed life in general as I was shuddering around the side streets of Scarborough. I wasn’t a natural driver, though I like to think I’m safer than most these days, forty plus years on.  His name was Bob, if I remember rightly, and he had a rather strong West Riding accent. Well, the day came when he mentioned that he was from Bradford originally and of course I said my mother was too and it turned out that he remembered her, having lived in the street behind hers at Low Moor. He went to school with my uncle Albert. Does everyone in Yorkshire have an uncle Albert?

Well, we got chatting and he came in for a cuppa when we got back to the house and he and mother talked about old times and eventually it got round to did I want a job because the garage needed a wages clerk. Well, I needed employment of some sort because at that time I had no idea what I was going to do. And so I went in to see one of the accounts managers and was taken on rather rapidly. It was an employees’ market back then. I guess they were desperate for someone and it might as well be me, seeing as how I was the only one that offered. I mean – I’m a wordsmith and have never been known for my mathematical ability so it can’t have been for my talent.

It was a good summer and I met some lovely people who were always pleased to see me on Friday afternoons when I went round with the wages packets. I have some amazing memories of the staff but I can’t name names because they might remember me. I remember one of the sales guys showing me a poster one day with the caption “You can do it in an MGB”. I blushed. And I never really lived it down because said sales bod assumed I had done it in an MGB! (Told you I could give Fifty Shades a run for its money….) The car was even yellow.

The only real problem with the job was the fact that I developed a disdain for money. When you were handling a couple of thousand pounds a week and parceling it up into little packets you got so that your own little cash stuffed packet didn’t mean very much.  I can even remember one week when I got to the end of the parceling and there was a fiver missing. I undid every pack and recounted it, to no avail, and eventually decided the only thing I could possibly have done was throw it away. Sure enough I found it, creased up with one of the money bundle wrappers in the bottom of the waste paper basket.

But eventually I realised that being a wages clerk in Scarborough was not where I wanted to go in life. I might settle for it these days because it would be good to be able to walk out to the beach of an evening in autumn and watch the tide come it. Drink hot chocolate at Bonnet’s. Take afternoon tea at the hotel on St Nicholas that I’ve forgotten the name of. All that sort of seasidey entertainment. Anyhow, the dream returned and I realised that I still wanted to be a writer. I was keeping diaries back then, although I didn’t hold on to any. But that was all the writing I took part in. I wanted the real thing. I wanted to write proper stuff. I hadn’t realised that mother somehow knew about all this so I was deeply shocked when I found a press cutting on my bedside table one day. It was about journalism courses. They were one-year pre-entry courses run by the National Council for the Training of Journalists who were a respected organisation back then. One of the locations was Sheffield. So I applied.

Round about the same time a lot of things I was reading about celebrities said that they’d started life in journalism. Most had given up and gone on to better things. So it seemed like a good place to start on the launch of my career. Or rather the relaunch, because shoe selling and waitressing were technically the start.