1984 was a year full of political unrest. Globally the Russians and the Americans were playing a game of my missile is bigger than yours, nationally Arthur Scargill and Maggie Thatcher went head to head in the battle for Britain's coal mines, and locally I was preparing to begin my last year at school in a futile attempt to not become one of Maggie's Millions (3.5 million unemployed).
It's this last point that I want to focus on. You see, I wasn't really designed for school. My concentration levels didn't really lend themselves to such a regimented organisation. One minute I'd be taking it all in and thinking I was on top of it, and then the next I was desperately trying to copy off everybody else because I realised that I'd zoned out for 15 minutes, and had no clue what I was supposed to be doing. With this in mind, I'd dread Parent's Evening. This was one of the only times that my my poor old mum (God rest her soul) would get dressed up, and put a bit of perfume on. She'd get a bottle of Charlie every Christmas, but Parent's Evening was one of her only opportunities to wear it. She'd leave the house, all smiles and full of false optimism, and return a few hours later, to break the news to me of how bad I was doing (though she never really did). "Mr May says that you're a lovely lad, you try very hard in his classes, and you have lots of friends," was about the best (and worst) I'd ever get out of her. What she didn't tell me is that I wasn't even being put in for O Levels, because I was deemed too thick to do them. "You'll be doing all CSE's then love!" she'd say, with a kindness in her voice that belied how she must have felt inside.
If you think, that given my lack of abilities in the academic department, I'd make up for this with hard work. Then think again! I was a proper lazy little bastard, who made any excuse not to do any task that may have been bestowed upon me. "Can you get the Flymo out and cut the grass love?" my dad would politely ask. "No, I can't, I've got hay fever," would be my reply. Can you wash the dishes please love?" my mum would ask. " I can't, it makes my fingers all dry," I would respond. The list went on. I had an excuse for every task.
As you can imagine, my mum worried a lot. She was mainly concerned with how I was going to gain employment when I left school in the summer of 1985. So, you'd think that she'd be happy when I got my first job, in the spring of 1984. But I don't think she was! The job was that of paper boy for King's newsagents on Helmshore Road. My friend Carl Green asked me if I wanted the job, and like a fool I was lured in by the cash. To a 14 yr old £6.50 sounded like a lot of money, I mean most paper rounds only seemed to be paying £4 tops. There had to be a catch! - should have been the question on my mind. Why would Carl give me the job if it was so good? But this thought didn't cross my mind. All I knew was that I was getting paid £6.50 per week to deliver papers 2 times a day. Now in retrospect I should have really asked how many miles the paper round was, or how many papers I'd have to deliver. But these were questions that never entered my mind.
My mum's fears were not without foundation.
In 1978 a young paperboy by the name of Carl Bridgewater was blasted in the head with a shotgun as he delivered papers to an isolated farm in Stourbridge. It was a case that gripped the nation, and more importantly a case that gripped my poor mum's mind, in such a way that, although she was desperate for me to prove myself in the job market, she was more desperate to make sure no harm ever came to me.
"Are you sure you want this job love? Maybe you could help your dad a bit in his workshop, and we can give you some money!" my mum would say. But alas, my heart was set on becoming a paperboy, and earning the astronomical amount of money that King's were going to pay me.
And so it was that I turned up for my first shift, sometime in March of 1984. I'd been told to get to the paper shop for 6.00 am. Of course this seemed ridiculously early, so I decided to wear my school uniform to bed. This idea served a twofold purpose - 1. I could jump out of bed and go. 2. When I finished my round I could ride my bike directly to school, thus saving time. I had to be a school at 8.45 am, so I assumed I'd have loads of time. Little did I know!
I arrived at the paper shop a little past 6 am. And there was my first mistake! Dishing out the papers into each individual (bright orange plastic) paper bag was done on a first come first serve basis. Since I was the last in the queue (everyday) I was always the last out of the shop. Which was rather unfortunate it turns out, because my round just happened to be the longest by far.
Exiting the shop I'd head off down Helmshore Road, delivering to the cottages on my way down. Unfortunately for me these cottages were set back from the main road, in an elevated position. This meant that I had to clamber a mountain of stone steps to enable me to reach their letter boxes. By the time I'd reached the sharp left hand bend by the Bridgend Pub I was already knackered. This was a great pity, for it was here that I had to ascend Helmshore Road up the White Horse Pub. This section of the road was inundated with houses on both sides, and they all seemed to want a newspaper. It was also home to a few interesting characters, including Anthony Drake's dad, who had a quiff that Elvis would have been proud of, and who would not have looked out of place in a 1950s film on Teddy Boys. A little further up from the Drake household, on the opposite side of the road was my most dreaded house. It was here that the Rat Catcher and his mother lived.
Until I started the job I thought the Rat Catcher was a village myth. I pictured him to be a cross between the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and the Pied Piper of Hamlyn. A skinny guy in a hat, dressed in black, with an enormous nose, who walked around Helmshore blowing his pipe, whilst luring rats to their demise. When I eventually got to meet him, he was just a normal guy with a pair of horn-rimmed glasses, and a bicycle to keep him company. The rumours were true though, he was indeed a Rat Catcher, employed by the local council to rid the parks of rats. If the Rat Catcher seemed a lot more normal than I expected, the Rat Catcher's mother did not. And it was the mother that filled me full of fear.
I'd dread posting the paper through the Rat Catcher's letterbox. A pungent whiff of damp, dirt, and dead animal would assault my nostrils with force, as I opened the letter box to fling the paper through. I'd already be retching in anticipation before I opened the flap. Then as soon as it was open my stomach would reach new levels of revulsion. In the beginning it was OK, because I didn't know what to expect, but when I knew what lay in store for me it was like hell on Earth. It was probably fear that prompted me to fuck up the delivery on a daily basis.
The first time I fucked it up wasn't too bad. I'd only got a few doors up the road when the door burst open, and out came the Rat Catcher free wheeling his bicycle. "You've given us the Mirror instead of the Express," he informed me quite politely. I acknowledged my mistake, gave him a copy of the Express, and away he rode, off to catch his rats. But when I did it again the next day his mother did not take too kindly to it. "You've given us The Sun instead of the Express," she bellowed from her doorstep, as though I'd just killed her cat. I walked back to her doorstep with my arm outstretched , through a mixture of fear and disgust at having to go near her. As much as I didn't want to face the object of my fear I could not help but focus on the large grey hairs that protruded from her chin. When I was close enough, she grabbed the Express, and threw The Sun down on the ground.
"Now don't be doing that again," she shouted at me.
"I won't, I won't," I replied - (desperately trying not to add Mrs Rat Catcher to the end of my pleas).
But I did! In fact I seemed to fuck Mrs Rat Catcher's newspaper up every single day. So much so that by day 5 she was waiting behind the closed door to receive her wrong paper. As I stuck the Mail, or Today, or whatever wrong paper I put through her door that day, she grabbed it from the other side, and almost pulled me through the door. What ensued was a game of tug o' war, which left the newspaper in tatters. I won the battle, but she most definitely won the war. As I staggered backwards with a ripped up newspaper in my hands, she came bombing out to confront me.
"Mrs King will be getting to know about this," she hollered. "Don't you be coming around here again with my wrong paper!"
I pedalled off as fast as I could throwing papers through people's doors at a furious pace. Quite unafraid that they may be the wrong ones. I was in trouble for sure anyway.
Once I reached The White Horse pub my round took me down Holcombe Rd for a while, before heading back up Holcombe Rd in the direction of Holcombe Village. Beyond The White Horse pub Holcombe Rd became quite isolated (especially at silly o'clock in the morning). On more than the odd occasion I became enshrouded in an early morning mist, where the only thing really visible, was my bright orange newspaper bag. And let me tell you this! On Wednesday mornings that bright orange bag was far from light. For Wednesday was the day that the dreaded Farmer's Guardian came out - and boy did my round have a lot of farmers on it.
The Farmer's Guardian for those that have never seen it (most of you I reckon) was (maybe still is) the thickest magazine you'll ever encounter. Think Yellow Pages before the Internet came along, and you'll have an idea of the thickness. Now, stick 10 of those in a bag, along with everybody else's papers, and you'll understand my pain. By the time I'd reached the dog kennels a mile up the hill, I was almost dead from exhaustion. Thankfully the dog kennels owner had the decency to leave a plastic tube at the top of their enormously long driveway, so that I could just stick their daily paper in it. I think that a trek down their drive and back would have just about finished me off.
Next up was the worst part of all. I had to leave the road altogether and follow an ancient Pilgrim's path up to Dowry Head Farm. This was the path that monks would take on their way to Whalley Abbey in the 12th Century. God, how I hated this ride at 6.45 am! My only solace was that I'd already offloaded all my copies of the Farmer's fucking Guardian.
This was well before mountain bikes became a thing, and my BSA Javelin was not designed for such rugged terrain. To be honest it was more of a hinderance than a help. Not only did I have to lug my bag up the hill but I had to push my bike as well. In the distance I could see Dowry Head Farm through the fog, although it never seemed to get any closer. To be honest I didn't really care, because all I could think of at this point was poor Carl Bridgewater getting his head blown off in 1978. Although the odd thought of the Moors Murderers (Brady and Hindley) did cross my mind.
The local MP David Trippier was purported to live at Dowry Head Farm, although I never saw him, so I can't confirm whether this was true or not. What I can confirm is that I practically shit myself every time I entered the grounds of the place, and was very happy to jump on my bike and bomb off down the hill in the direction of Sunnybank Cottages, once The Daily Telegraph had been delivered.
Before I reached Sunnybank cottages I had to deliver to a posh court-yarded mansion, whose garden was bigger than two football fields. I don't recall the name of the house now (maybe the Old Stables), but what I do remember is that it was split into two halves. One half was owned by a couple called Ted and Lorraine, and the other was owned by the local mayor, Shelia Oldham. Ted and Lorriane were famous locally for owning a Rolls Royce, and Shelia Oldham's enormous garden became famous for a while in the mid-eighties when an enormous sinkhole opened up in it. This led to much speculation that an alien spacecraft had landed in her garden.
A few papers through these doors, and on to Sunnybank cottages. Beyond Sunnybank cottages was a massively steep hill, which meandered its way to Great House, and the Experimental Farm (better not to ask what happened here). The hill was so steep that I had to leave my bike parked up at the bottom.
Once back down the hill my arduous journey continued through the old Porritt's factory site, and former Sunnybank Mill. These had long since been knocked down - the enormous chimney the last thing to go in 1977, when the eccentric steeplejack Fred Dibnah (my dad's hero) blew it up. The whole site was kind of eerie at 7 am, with old pieces of apparatus and bricks semi-hidden in the overgrown grass. I'd cycle through this at pace, on the homeward stretch, back to the bottom part of Holcombe Rd, which was home to The Grot Shop. A shop that you'd only go in if you were extremely desperate. Which was most unfortunate since it was the only shop for a long stretch. And that was basically it. Once past the Grot Shop, it was homeward bound. Drop down the hill, past the four-storey buildings the locals called the Grandstand, round the bend by the Bridgend pub, and back up Helmshore Road to King's paper shop, where I would invariably get a rollicking for delivering all the papers to the wrong houses.
After one week, my mum would take pity on me, and come and collect me half way around my round. "Come on love!" she'd say, "throw your bike in the back of the car, and I'll take you to school." And it's a good job that she did, or I would have been hours late.
And that was it, my first job. It felt like I did it for years, but in reality it probably only went on for a few weeks. All in all it was an early warning that I wasn't really cut out for the world of work. Sleeping till 8.15 am, jumping out of bed, and dashing across Rossendale golf course to Haslingden High School, was far more enjoyable, than a four mile trek around the moors of Rossendale at 6 am. If one good thing came out of my paperboy experience though, it was that I realised that I could gain a few extra minutes in bed the next morning if I went to bed in my school uniform. Well, they do say that ever cloud has a silver lining.
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