Being a Tuesday, we join with a group of regulars for a coffee and a natter in our local Waitrose cafeteria. We explain to them all what a brilliant little concert we had enjoyed last Saturday morning and we had actually run across a fellow parishioner from our local church despite the concert being held in the large Anglican church which serves as a 'de facto' performance space for the town of Bromsgrove during its annual festival fortnight (which has now ended)
Before I entered my third year at Manchester University, there was the business of the summer vacation to negotiate. he previous year's employment at the cardboard box factory seemed closed to me as they were not in a recruiting mode. So to get a job, one waited until the very first edition of the Manchester Evening News' was published a few minutes after 12.00pm. You then scored the job vacancies column, ran to the nearest telephone box with a pile of 6d and then made one's way to the factory offering employment. So it was, I ended up with a line of about 10 men in the yard of the Greengate and Irwell Rubber company which manufactured the casings for those large cables that carry power supplies and the like. The hiring process was a little like the Biblical take of the overseer and the vineyard as the foremen went down the line indicating who they were going to hire and who not. the man next to me desperately needed the job as he had about 9 children o support but so did I and hot hired at the rate of £10.50 a week which was about half of the wage at the cardboard box factory for much harder work. There was a strange arrangement whereby one had to work a compulsory hour's overtime each time in order to bring the wages up to about £12 which after stoppages came to about £10.50 for the week. As an skilled labourer, we manipulated those huge drums of cables you often see by the roadside when new cables are being laid and to get it around the many corners you had to rock the whole drum, stick a metal pipe under one of the retaining bolts which would make the whole drum judder and repeat until it was round the corner. The factory was practically underground and the machinery in it absolutely Dickensian - I doubt there was a single piece of machinery in it constructed in this century. I also got a job as a cocktail barman at Tiffany's which was a very expensive venue (over £50 admission price at today's prices) but decked out with a fabulous Hawaii sty;e bar that ran down the whole of one wall of the premises. There was a resident band who played the popular tracks of the day - for example, this is where I first heard Procol Harum's 'A Whiter Shade of Pale' which helps to date my period of employment. There was a resident band of one male singer and two female singers who we though were actually very good. In subsequent years, these two girl singers who by now were in their late 20's had joined a band calling itself 'The New Seekers' and as such they actually made it to No. 2 in the Eurovision Song Context which was held in Harrogate in 1972 i.e some five years later. They actually recorded for Coca Cola the song 'I want to teach the world to sing' which was used extensively as an advertising track but the singers themselves made hardly any many out of it. The night club was run by a couple of ex-dancers who had moved into management having won the equivalent of 'Strictly Come Dancing' some years earlier with a rendition of 'Slaughter on 10th Avenue' They were snobbish in the extreme but hired me because they rather liked to idea of employing an 'Old Swan Harrogate' trained cocktail barman on their staff. The turnover of staff was tremendous and in the end I worked there for so long that I became quasi-management, helping with stock takes and the like every two years. I used my earnings to finance the purchase of photocopies o critical articles for my third year studies, arguing to myself that I would never do any academic work on a Friday night so I might as well earn some money. Meg and I got married in the September of our final year which might be a source of some surprise. But I had been working for 3-4 years before going to university and did not go until I was aged 20 rather than 18. Similarly Meg had spent some of her childhood in France and so both of us felt so much 'older' than our actual contemporaries. We rented a modern maisonette over a row of modern shops and two of our flatmates from the previous two years moved in with us and helped us defer the rent. We furnished the whole of the maisonette by frequenting a local auctioneer who was very kindly and looked after us ensuring that his gavel came down at just the right point so that we could secure the purchase for our desires. In fact, one of the captain's chairs we now have was bought from the auctioneers and we furnished the whole house for some £70 which is £1800 in today's money but, of course, we had no debts of any sort. Rather than worrying about our finals, we were more concerned with getting a mortgage from the City Council to purchase a terrace house overlooking Platt Fields Park. This cost us £1995 but we could have secured a cheaper and lesser property not overlooking the park for £1400. What we paid for this house represented twice the average earnings but mortgages were hard to get in those days. However, the ratio of house prices to average earnings was then about 2:1 but must nowadays be nearer to 12:1. Our son was born right at the end of our final year so we both ended up with 2(i)s, a child and a house before we embarked on postgraduate careers, Meg at Manchester University and myself at Salford University where I read an innovative new course in the 'Sociology of Science'. Unfortunately, Meg had to abandon her MA course to look after our son in his early years but thus experience was not uncommon amongst academics who married each other, as we discovered in staff room discussions when working at Leicester Polytechnic.
By the way, this autobiographical exegesis is going to end at this point and my normal style of blog will resume from the next entry onwards.