On getting back from darkest Somerset I thought I might as well get a job to fill in the days and prevent me from getting bored.

I shall now digress. In February 1961 I came out of the Merchant Navy and took a job as a boiler man at the Quaker Oats factory in Southall – there were three of us on shifts, so there was plenty of spare time. I bought a van, an ex “Brooke Bond” Trojan (can anyone remember them?) and I did light removals and haulage in my spare time. I also did a bit of welding repair work. Thinking ahead to the future, I started a City and Guilds welding course at Southall Tech (incidentally my old school). After all any fool, myself included, can weld but I wanted to learn to do it properly and also the technical skills and theory as well.
The “fun” of shift work was wearing a bit thin, with 12 hr shifts to cover Christmas so that the other two chaps could have some time at home and after Easter 1964 I gave in my notice. Easter was the only time the boiler house shut down for major overhaul and tube cleaning, so being Mr Nice Guy, I said I would see that through. The money was good with double and treble time.

Armed with all my knowledge(!) of welding, I decided to get work as a welder and this I did at the “Ealing Welding and Engineering Co” at Northolt - not Ealing. It was interesting work with all types of fabrication which were mostly one off jobs - big and small with a lot of sheet metal as well as R.S.Js etc. In fact. it was good experience.

All good things come to an end, work got slack so it was “last in first out”. I went walkies as far as Taylor Woodrow which I told you about in the “Oily Rag” of Autumn 2007.

Back from my digression. I tried Ealing Welding for a job but no welders were wanted but they did want someone to drive the lorry. Better than nothing, so I took it.

This was an ancient Commer flatbed, with the chassis extended by about 10ft. Some of the loads were still too long and most of them far too heavy and when I questioned the legality of this the answer was, “We are going to buy a proper lorry.” In the meantime, it would be my licence that was on the line, so it was a case of “Stamp my cards please, I’m off”.

Back then when life and certainly the roads were quieter, I used to like driving, so as my house sale was imminent, a driving job for a couple of months would do quite nicely with summer coming on as well.

G. M. Gerrard of Park Royal was a firm of Greengrocers with about 150 shops in London and the home counties. There was a fleet of lorries - each one had three or four shops to service. Most of the produce was delivered to the yard by the wholesalers and growers and this was loaded onto the lorries by a night gang. One job which was a 4 a.m. start for five of us was to take a spare lorry each to London markets to pick up the imported fruit that the buyers had secured during the night. This was brought back to the yard to be distributed among the trucks.

When loading was finished we then performed a bizarre ritual every day. The manager, an old Scotsman aged about 70 ruled that no one could leave the yard without his say so. Dead on 7.58 a.m. he would strut out of his office onto the landing at the top of the stairs and shout out “Tie doon, start oop, moove oot”, and then the fun would start.

Imagine about fifty lorries starting up and heading for the gate at the same time through a dense fog of exhaust smoke. The way it worked was that the first one slowly crept out of the gate with the second one almost pushing him. Sooner or later some vehicle on the road had to give way (chicken out) and then we were off, with the whole lot nose to tail along Coronation Road. The convoy headed for the North Circular and then we were on our own heading for all points of the compass.

Even this was no picnic as rush hour traffic is no joke, so there was no time to be nice. You had to get to your first shop at 9 a.m. when it opened - if you were early you could not unload and leave it in case of pilferage so you parked up on 2 yellow lines or at a No Waiting zone and prayed. Then it was off to the next couple of shops and a cup of tea at the last one if you were lucky. Some of the manageresses were really nice so you helped them out. Others were real harridans with “shares in the company” and were a different proposition. Then the journey was reversed to pick up all the waste and empty boxes and crates, back to the yard to unload, check fuel, oil and water and then finish.

Mondays were hard days as there would be Saturdays' empties to collect as well, to make up for the early finish of the previous Saturdays. And another thing, if you arrived back early you had to sort empties to make up your time. So if I was running ahead of time, I pulled over for a “kip” or sat and read the paper or watched the ducks. Mind you, this was about to come to an end as a start was being made in fitting the drivers friend, “Tachographs” - the spy in the cab.

By now my house was sold and terms agreed with my wife so with nothing to hang around for, I traded in the Bedford C. A. van and bought a new Ford Thames pick up, loaded up the last of my toys, said my goodbyes and headed for Somerset.

So it was back with my Mum Dad and the younger of my sisters at Creech Heathfield. They had moved there in January 1964. I started doing repair work but my main employment was in pig rearing. We had about 500 with a contract to Bowyers of Trowbridge to supply them with bacon pigs and heavy hogs (300lb weight). We also sent pigs to West Somerset Bacon at Greenway Road (another name from the past). Hopkins at Creech also took some and just to show off, we supplied them with a suckling pig for the Lord Mayors Banquet in London each year.

Dear old Mum did bed and breakfast and I picked up work from some of her lodgers, managers and site agents from construction jobs in Taunton. I also met Tom Dominey when he was Transport Chief for Tate and Lyle at Walford Cross as he brought down visitors to us for lodgings.

One good thing that came out of it was that I met Janet when she stayed with us and we hit it off where we were both on the rebound. Then I found the place at Spaxton, brought Janet down from Leicester and we set up home in September 1968.

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