Dispatches From a Dilettante (7 page)

5.
BUILDING UP TO BRIGADIER GERARD 1971-1972

The Brook House was a large rambling boozer near Sefton Park in Liverpool and as I no prospect of work my frequent visits to it were lessening as funds were running low. Overhearing the lilting Welsh accent of the man at the next table I got the distinct impression of job possibilities.

Inviting myself over, I soon found that Elwyn Hughes was the proprietor of Langdale Contractors. He proudly showed me his new publicity leaflet which had, “Please note we only employ skilled tradesman” in large letters on the front page. Given that I’d just been listening to his tale of recruiting two men from the dole queue on a no questions asked basis I noted the contradiction but said nothing. When I explained that I too was ‘signing on’ he seemed delighted, told me to keep doing this and recruited me for thirty pounds a week as a general labourer.

Tarmac was where the money was and Elwyn employed a washed up alcoholic ex army captain, whose saving grace was a posh accent, to go door to door in affluent suburbs with the aim of drumming up business. He was known to the six employees of Langdale Contractors as ‘Rubber Gob’ and to add to his other challenges he was a gambling addict who bet on the horses every day.

I never did find out his real name and he left within weeks of me starting. Rubber Gob went on a horrendous bender as a result of another bad day at the bookies, phoned to say that he was sleeping it off, and was never heard of again. The resultant gap in the sales department (!) of the company was filled by me on the basis that I had somehow qualified as a teacher and must therefore be articulate. For those readers who have never attempted to sell anything door to door, my experiences should persuade you never to contemplate such a shallow and soul destroying enterprise.

Armed with some of the publicity pamphlets I was dropped off by Elwyn on the corner of a street in a well heeled district in South Liverpool. It was a dark November morning with the rain teeming down. His succinct advice and my only training for the new role was, “Just get them to agree to me calling and giving them an estimate for tarmac on the drive, or slates on the roof”. As a chance to observe the human condition this was to prove the best practical opportunity a person could have had, but it required a robust spirit, verbal dexterity and the ability to absorb rejection, abuse and tirades of invective on a fairly regular basis.

The first three houses produced no replies and the fourth quite clearly had both a roof and a drive that were in pristine condition. Eventually some doors opened and I was in turn mistaken for a Mormon missionary, a carpet salesman and a representative from the Gas Board. The misidentifications were followed by well articulated dismissals and, on two occasions, before I could utter a word. Pity got me the first result as, soaking and by now shivering, a kindly Jewish gentleman said he would be delighted to get a quote for his drive as it was looking quite shabby.

When we later won this job I remembered his kindness and got the tarmac crew to put the word’ Shalom’ which is the Hebrew word for peace, in white pebbles in the newly laid tarmac at the head of his drive. The kindness of the act was slightly mitigated by the fact that they had run out of decorative stones and therefore missed the letters S and M out, those being the ones that required most pebbles. We did eventually rectify this but for weeks visitors to a house in south Liverpool were greeted with the enigmatic word ‘HALO’ in large letters on the new tarmac.

Without getting into too much technical detail the profit margin in this business was self evidently dependant on ordering the correct amount of tarmac or, in the case of Langdale Contractors, the minimal amount that would create the impression of a covering. An estimate has to be made as to how long a job would take and if it was, say four hours, the tarmac is ordered to be ‘cut back’ to that time. That meant that it is delivered at such a temperature as to be easily unloaded and workable for four hours, after which it begins to set. Thus tarmac crews on small domestic jobs do a lot of hanging around to be certain they are there for delivery, followed by frantic and exhausting work to get the tarmac down in the allotted time. Once we had a couple of jobs in an area, more often followed and this meant that I reverted to labouring.

After an exhausting week’s hard physical graft we, without fail, went straight to the pub on a Friday evening. Two things happened with certainty at this point. One was that Elwyn paid us individually in cash after asking us to follow him to the gents toilets. None of us knew what the other was getting paid and, as all of us were illegally signing on as well, no one asked too many questions. The second was that most stayed all evening, got thoroughly pissed and tragically spent a good proportion, if not all, of the money they had worked so hard to earn. I had not read Robert Tressell’s epic tome ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ at this point but the workforce of Langdale Contractors would have empathised with the plot and characters.

We had a breakthrough of sorts when, again trading on my genuine Catholic connections and conveniently ignoring my conspicuous lack of faith, I managed to persuade a religious order near Warrington to have their car park resurfaced. This was by far and away the biggest job ever undertaken by Langdale Contractors and greed had added a sparkle to Elwyn’s usual alcohol induced bloodshot eyes when I gave him the news. I had invented an initial estimate which was naively accepted without negotiation and so large profits were assured. However, Elwyn was so unused to this scale of work that he vastly overestimated the amount of tarmac required. This meant that there is a car park outside a seminary in the North West of England with a tarmac layer of such depth that it will be there long after the building collapses and will, in the future, provide a puzzle for both historians and archaeologists alike.

Monitoring my alcohol intake on the payday after the great tarmac debacle so as to be alert when the moment for payment arrived, I had already refused Elwyn’s attempts to buy me drinks and upset my critical faculties. He eventually had paid everyone else and summonsed me to the gents. This had become such an accepted practice that no one ever remarked on how bizarre it was. He dramatically counted out notes and stopped at ninety pounds, which was quite a tidy sum in those days. However I knew the profit margin on the car park job and flounced off in a huff feeling this was scant reward for my selling efforts. The huff lasted just about as long as it took me to get to the bar and recall that I was signing on illegally and had zero bargaining powers.

The day for signing on the dole was, in my case, a Monday at 11am. Inevitably when I got to the dole office, there were huge queues of men several shuffling toward the grilled signing on counter. Whatever the external show of bravado and humour this was a deeply de-humanising experience, not to mention an embarrassing one. Some of the men had clothing covered in paint, building dust and other industrial stains. Such were the numbers of unemployed on Merseyside at this point that there was very rarely a challenge to the ones who had clearly come from a place of work to reaffirm their unemployed status. If a challenge was made by the bored looking drones behind the grill, as it once was to me, the standard answer was ‘decorating at home’.

Even though at the time I never gave this too much thought I was disturbed by it on some level. Men working and signing on were displaying enterprise and ambition, albeit in a way that could only ever ‘work’ in the short time. Put a public school educated government minister in the same life position as those men, taking as read their poor educational background and lack of inspirational role models, and grand larceny of a massive scale to generate income would have been taking place.

Not that the workforce of Langdale Contractors were overly troubled by moral issues. Although genuinely ashamed today of some of the work scams that I was party to then, I laughed it off at the time as par for the course in the building trade. One such ‘enterprise’ still makes me smile today for, although immoral, the outcome did have a kind of poetic justice to it.

We had obtained quite a sizable contract to ‘fix the roof’ at a privately owned nursing home. The owner was a nasty, greedy man who came complete with gold chain and spiv’s Jaguar. He cared not a jot for the old people in his ‘care’ and the place stank of urine. Disgruntled staff looked after deeply sad and unhappy residents. We were there only because the Council had forced the owner to get the leaking roof fixed and he truculently complied. Anything that stopped the money rolling directly into his pockets was regarded as a major inconvenience.

It was a gothic horror of a building, extremely tall and all steep Victorian gable ends. We were replacing a few hundred tiles and were having great difficulty getting on and off the roof and also hooking our roof ladders over the apex in order to move around when we did get on. Needless to say we had added to the already dangerous job by illegally cutting costs and not erecting scaffolding. The one advantage was that with all the gables and chimneys it was hard to spot what work was being done up there from down on the ground.

After struggling for a day we abandoned all safety on the roof and scrabbled about the steep gables as best we could. There were three of us on the job. Lionel was the original ‘scally’ in all respects and knew no fear. I was very nervous of moving around up there and the third guy John who had just started (‘Paul, go down to the dole and get someone for this job’) was downright scared. Just before finishing on the second day John lost his footing and started to slip down the roof. He involuntarily emitted a squeal of terror and then tried to slow his descent by digging his nails into the roof tiles, but to little effect. It was an eighty foot drop and he was sliding slowly but steadily towards the edge.

Lionel glanced over and immediately started singing ‘Climb every Mountain’ from the Sound of Music, as mercifully the gutter held and saved John’s fall. I know Liverpudlians are famed for their humour but……

This had the galvanising effect of forcing us to come up with a better way of doing things. I was dispatched to go and buy several cans of slate grey spray paint and told to being them back in a plain bag. Thereafter we sat on the roof smoking and occasionally making contrived banging noises, after which we would spray the old tiles rather than replace them. Nothing was detectable from the ground. We’d chuck an old tile off now and then for authenticity, but even then we’d take the same tile back up on the next ascent and throw it off again. The miserable bastard of an owner was getting his comeuppance as we told ourselves.

Consequently we saved money, made a handsome profit on the job and I like to think played a significant part in helping put him out of business. He went broke weeks later when a Council inspection found the roof still leaked and they stopped placing people in his home.

Back at work Elwyn’s way of courting favour, in the hope that I would continue the good run of getting work for the firm, was to invite me to accompany him to the races at Haydock Park one Friday afternoon. I had not really, until this point, displayed more than a passing interest in the sport of kings. Nonetheless it didn’t take me long to accept an offer that was clearly preferable to shovelling concrete on the current house project we were bravely, and with no previous track record in house extensions, undertaking.

Haydock Park is a lovely little race track just off the East Lancashire road and in the crowd on Friday meetings there were usually a fair smattering of footballers and priests. In these pre-Premiership days footballers were still well known but not earning the vast salaries of today’s top stars. They mingled happily with the rest of the punters and some of them clearly had both a keen knowledge and genuine love for the sport. The priests were a different kettle of fish altogether and looked like prisoners on parole, who had been given a couple of hours to enjoy themselves.

On that first afternoon I recognised a priest who had been a lecturer at the Catholic teacher training college that I had attended. I accosted him at the very moment he was about to place a substantial bet. Although he was rightly a tad impatient, wanting to get his money on before the odds changed, he was not remotely embarrassed about the financial scale of his forthcoming wager. After he completed the transaction we continued our small talk and he laughed at my preferred choice of horse to bet on for the next race. He proceeded to give me, with all the authority of the Church clearly behind him, what was certain in his view to be the winner. I dismissed his tip failing to realise that he was an experienced punter, and if memory served me right a drinker of distinction, and a priest who regarded the vow of celibacy as an optional undertaking. Needless to say my horse lost and his won in a canter.

As these Friday race days became regular outings, I could hardly help but pick up a bit of knowledge. Ultimately I never had the nerve to be a regular or serious gambler but for a short period became totally absorbed by horse racing. What quickly became apparent was the folly of most punters who didn’t put in enough, or indeed any, work into researching form or applying some basic principles. Previous form, the course, the going (state of the course), the draw, the jockey, quality of opposition on previous outings, the weight, and the condition of the horse in the parade ring would be just a few of the things any serious better on horse races would take into consideration.

For example Chester, which was a tiny little course with tight bends, was a completely different proposition from the wide open spaces of Epsom. However it was the small northern courses like Pontefract, Wetherby and York that we frequented all those years ago. Haydock Park was a favourite and amazingly the older I get the more wins I seem to remember there. The fact was that I was barely breaking even. I became a regular in betting shops and once won so much on a double that the betting shop owner announced loudly that he would have to go to the bank to get more cash. I was terrified that, when he returned with it, I would be mugged. My biggest win was a sizable ante post bet each way at thirty three to one on Morston, who won the Derby in 1972. Immediately I went to a boutique and purchased a ridiculously expensive, flash and ill fitting coat which I left on the bus two days later, never to be seen again.