The Co-Op's Got Bananas

by Hunter Davies

  My mother met him, felt sorry for him, thought, well, I have a spare half-bed, now that Hunter is away, can’t let it go vacant when there is someone in need, so she said yes. I don’t think she was doing it for the money, though presumably there was a small payment. It was mainly that she felt sympathy for the orphaned, homeless lad.

  She forgot to tell me. So when I came home a bit earlier than I originally intended, I climbed into my bed and found two bodies already there. He was called Tony McMynn, a tall, gangling, ever-so-cheerful, good-natured lad. Once he started his job, he was not always there, as he worked on long-distance lorries, but everybody in the family liked him and he loved my mother.

  I demanded my own half of the bed when he was there, and he slept on a mattress on the floor, but he moved back in with Johnny when I returned to Durham, or was away somewhere. He stayed for about a year, but even when he got married, and had his own children, he regularly came to visit us, bringing my mother a present. My mother loved him. ‘Poor Tony,’ she would go around saying. ‘I feel sorry for Tony.’

  That first Christmas vacation as a student, I got a job with the Post Office. I did it several Christmases, the most popular job with all students. It was always a bit of a skive, a laugh, you met all your friends, and it didn’t last long. The Post Office would engage hundreds of casual labourers four weeks before Christmas, and hire lots of extra vans and lorries. This happened all over the country, not just in Carlisle.

  I was usually on one of the parcel lorries, much better than door-to-door deliveries where you had to walk a lot. There was a regular postman in charge of three or four students and he knew all the tricks. We would rush round, get it all done in an hour or so. Instead of going back to the depot, we’d either sit in caffs or go to a pub or even home.

  The first day at the Junction Road sorting office, when you got allocated your jobs and rounds, it was a like a school reunion. All the boys and girls just down from their first term at varsity would turn up wearing their college scarves, sometimes even their blazers. People were proud of wherever they were studying, wanting to show off their university colours and badges. Nowadays, I think you would be laughed at if you ponced around your hometown in any sort of student scarf.

  I always wore my maroon-and-white Castle scarf – well, it was winter, and winters in Carlisle were always freezing. It seemed the normal, unselfconscious thing to do. I think it took me another year to realise how naff and pathetic it was to wear any sort of college gear.

  One Christmas on the post I got an awful shock. I walked into Junction Road and came face to face with my mother. Oh Lord, the shame. She was in her usual old and ill-fitting clothes and ‘bauchles’, a Scottish term for any old shoes, fit only for the dustbin, which you wore in the garden or following a horse and cart down the street to pick up the horse shit. She had assumed she would be trailing round in the rain delivering post, so obviously wasn’t going to wear her best designer shoes.

  When they discovered what a slow walker she was, with no sense of direction, they moved her inside, sorting the post. She had to sit in front of large cubbyholes, read the address and plop the envelopes into the appropriate slot. Fat chance. She scarcely knew her own address.

  She loved it, getting out of the house, earning some money for a few hours a day. And she loved meeting people. Her biggest disappointment whenever she went anywhere, on the bus to town, on the train to Motherwell, in a queue at the shops, was if nobody spoke to her. She was desperate for a chat, for temporary intimacy and friendship, dying to know everything about everybody, desperate to share. A bit like me.

  Getting a few weeks at Christmas with the Post Office was easy, but finding something in the long vacations was hard. I so envied those friends who had parents with contacts, who could fit them up with something cushy. Ian Johnstone’s father was the bank manager of Martins Bank in Stanwix. One summer he managed to get Ian a job as a luggage handler at Carlisle airport. I didn’t know we had an airport, assuming it was a mythical creation, like Atlantis, or a Cumbrian joke, like the World’s Biggest Liar story about a whole village made out of giant turnips. It kept the villagers dry and warm and they ate the insides when they got hungry.

  The airport did exist, left over from the war. At regular intervals since then, there have been exciting plans for service flights. Jets to London and Europe get announced in the Cumberland News, but never seem to take off. In the 1950s, there was for a time one flight a day to the Isle of Man. Mostly the handful of passengers did not even bring luggage. So what a doddle that was, being a luggage handler. Lucky beggar, Ian.

  As soon as I was home for the summer, I trailed round knocking at factory doors, as, of course, our family knew nobody. I did get myself a job at Niven’s, a timber merchant on Dalston Road. I was a labourer, moving wood around. I had to lie down when I came home.

  Another time I got an even harder job working for the council. They were building a new council estate at Morton. I think they gave me a job as a hodman out of wickedness, seeing me stripped off, with no muscles whatsoever. A hod is a triangular wooden box on a pole in which you place six bricks and then climb on a ladder, up the scaffolding, to where the building work has reached. The hod carrier’s job is to supply the bricklayer with a constant supply of bricks, as his time is money and he is not to be kept idle. I could only ever carry two bricks at a time, so I had to climb the ladder three times as often and got shouted at all the time by the brickies.

  The interesting part of the job was breaktime, when we had our bait and sat and talked to the other building workers. We perched on wooden benches under a huge tarpaulin that had been put up in a corner of the site. A very old, doddery man, one of the retired labourers, who seemed to live there, kept a large boiler constantly filled with hot water. He would be screamed and sworn at if we rushed in for our break and the water wasn’t ready.

  The older bricklayers seemed so intelligent and wise to me – and their jobs so skilful. I used to stand and admire how cleverly and quickly they could put up walls, go round corners, create windows.

  I tried to keep it quiet that I was a student – and obviously did not wear my Castle scarf on the building site. I didn’t speak unless spoken to, not wanting to stand out in any way, though I quickly realised that my accent had already begun to change, was not quite the same as theirs. But of course they soon found out, and considered me very young, naive and unworldly. All true of course. One of the brickies was always telling me about his wife’s fanny, how last night he had put his hand on her hairy minge, then given her one. I never quite knew how to react to that, or how to set my facial reaction. They all seemed to have nicknames, like Pineapple Balls, or Chunky Cock.

  I became friendly with a young labourer, probably aged twenty, two years older than me, who had a teddy boy haircut. He was also a hodman, doing the same job as me, but he was in it for life, not just the summer vacation. It seemed unfair he was getting the same money as me, yet I was only passing through. He didn’t seem resentful of me. I don’t think he understood what university was.

  One day after work he invited me to his digs. It turned out he had a wife and baby, living in two rooms in a horrible damp and dirty terrace house on Corporation Road, near the castle – a slum dwelling that was later cleared for the new bypass road. I tried to ask him if he was looking for something else, a better-paid job to provide for his family. He wasn’t bothered, he replied cheerfully. Not being bothered is a common and automatic reaction in Carlisle. It was and is not done to show emotion, reveal weakness, vulnerability.

  A lot of the older brickies were clearly intelligent, thoughtful, knowledgeable, and could easily have gone to university, if they had been born at a different time. Yet there was me, given it all on a plate, and I had gone and mucked it up by messing around in my first year.

  I did manage to acquire a new girlfriend, Anne, during my spell as a labourer, though the two things were not connected. I don’t think they would have been rushing at the sight of my
fine torso. I picked her up at a Crown and Mitre dance while in my natty charcoal grey suit, wearing my college tie, looking quite presentable. I didn’t take her home, as she lived miles out in the country and she was being collected and driven home by her dad.

  But we arranged to go to the pictures a couple of times, walked out, had the usual idle chat. She was working in some smart office as a high-class secretary, very well dressed, fashionable and sophisticated for Carlisle, or so it seemed to me. She had only arrived fairly recently in the area, her father having become manager of Binns, Carlisle’s smartest department store. She seemed totally out of my league, not the sort of girl, I mean proper woman, I had ever been out with.

  I assumed I was a passing amusement for her, a temporary chum while she got to know a new city – then, blow me, she invited me to spend the night with her. That was what she said. At her house. With her. All those fantasies of housewives inviting me in when I was delivering their groceries could be coming true.

  I boasted to everyone, told my mother and sisters, and they could not believe it either. House guest, I said. Did you not invite young men as house guests when you were growing up in Motherwell? I made my mother wash my only pair of pyjamas – though hopefully I would not need them – and find me a toothbrush that was not totally worn and filthy. I cycled to her house on the Saturday evening, as arranged, out on the coast, near Burgh.

  I was worried I would be all sweaty with the cycling, and didn’t want to pong, so I took a spare shirt and put it on when I got near her house. Her parents were there, and all four of us had dinner. Proper cutlery and wine glasses, but of course I was now used to that at Durham. Then we all sat and watched TV. Possibly Dixon of Dock Green, or some awful comedians like Bob Monkhouse or Charlie Drake. As we did not have a TV in our house, that would normally have been a bit of a treat, but I had not come all that way, with clean pyjamas, just to watch some boring TV shows. Then when the TV was switched off we all went upstairs at the same time. I was shown to my bedroom. Anne gave me a quick peck on the cheek, and that was it.

  I slept badly, imagining footsteps down the corridor and a gentle tap on my bedroom door, the swish of a negligee, but it never came. When I got up in the morning, they had all gone to work. Cornflakes and coffee had been left out for me. I ate them then got on my bike and cycled slowly back to Carlisle. I never saw Anne again.

  The best holiday job I had during my student days was as a Ribble bus conductor. This was the most coveted, best-paid job possible. I was on the waiting list for ages.

  Ribble buses were all over Cumberland, Westmorland and Lancashire, part of the landscape with their familiar red livery, part of everyday life, for they had been going since 1919. Their headquarters were in Frenchwood Avenue, Preston, where I had to report to start my induction course. It was a three-day, residential, intensive-training scheme. I thought it was a joke at first, a wind-up. What is there to learn about being a bus conductor?

  It was, of course, more complicated than I had imagined. You had to keep an eye on each fare stage, alter the fiendish mechanism on your ticket machine accordingly, charge the right price, give out the right ticket – and then the right change from your large black bag. You had to know all the fares, where you were, and ring the bell when someone wanted off. The uniform was black serge, rather shiny trousers and jacket, plus a cap.

  At the end of the course, there was a passing-out parade. Can I have made that up? No, I have a clear memory of us all standing in line as our ticket machines were inspected, and then being congratulated.

  Back in Carlisle, you worked shifts, some early, some late, and some split shifts which were the most difficult of all. Often you had one or two hours between, not long enough to do anything else, so you sat in the bus station canteen and ate fry-ups. The food was subsidised, and very cheap.

  The worst time was to be on a city centre route during Glasgow Fair week. The town stopped, completely blocked. The best shift was out in the country. Half the time the bus was empty so you could just stand on the deck and stare at the countryside. Not sit. There were inspectors lurking everywhere and you could be for it. I can still remember the names of remote fare stages, such as Brow Nelson on the road out to Dalston. There was no visible habitation around, but decades ago the Ribble authorities must have picked the name for its fare stages. You altered your machine accordingly when you had passed each one.

  Bagging up at the end of the day, that was always a worry. The cash in your moneybag had to correspond to the total recorded on your clever ticket machine. If you were missing some, you had to pay it, out of your wages. Mistakes were easily made, people cheated, or slipped in some foreign coins when it was a crowded bus. So what you did, as the old sweats soon explained to me, was fiddle it so that you built up a small surplus on every shift, regardless. That way you were covered. When someone gave you their money, and you knew they were getting off at the next stop, you would take your time whizzing your machine. The moment they were jumping off the bus platform, you then issued a ticket from your machine, a blank ticket, pocketing the money.

  The Ribble bus company is no more. It ceased operation in 1989, submerged into Stagecoach, but now it has a cult following, loved by transport enthusiasts and collectors.

  For many years afterwards, I used to dream I was still a bus conductor. At certain times of the day I could see myself finishing the morning shift, in that smelly, greasy, crowded staff canteen, counting up the money in my black leather bag.

  I did not know what I was going to do in life, when the time came to get a proper job, as opposed to temporary employment as a student. I wondered if all jobs would be much the same, stuck on shifts, endless routines, fierce inspectors about to jump on you, or bad-tempered foremen shouting at you, putting in the hours till breaktime. I assumed all jobs, however glamorous from the outside, must have their own drudgeries. It was quite comforting to think that if all else failed, nothing turned up, I could get a job on the Ribble. I was qualified. I had the passing-out certificate to prove it.

  One day, while working as a bus conductor, I was on the Dalston Road run and realised that Margaret Forster, the girl in the high school sixth form, had got on my bus. She was going home presumably, to wherever she lived. I was on the top deck when she got on, but I spotted her carrying a load of books and then sitting down. I could see her before she saw me, as I worked my way down the rows of passengers on the lower deck. When I reached her, she held out her fare. I pushed her hand away. ‘Don’t bother, pet,’ I said. ‘It’s on the house today.’

  I moved on quickly, giving out tickets and taking money from the other passengers, planning to come back later and smirk, when she recognised me, and bask in her gratitude. The bus was busy, so I did not have time to go back and chat to her till we were near her stop. Before she got off, she came up to me and gave me her fare, watching me carefully while I put her money in my bag.

  ‘I’m letting you off,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to pay.’

  ‘I do not want to be let off my fare,’ she said.

  And she got off the bus, leaving me standing on the platform, watching her disappear. I swung my moneybag, trying to appear not bothered, but decidedly discomfited.

  Back at Durham, I did often think about her, but realised she was out of my league, on a different intellectual and moral plane. From all accounts, she was going to do brilliantly in her A-level exams, or in fact any exams she might ever sit. Unlike me.

  During my second year at Durham, everyone in my year at Castle had to move out to Lumley Castle. So much for boasting about how wholly residential our college was. We were, in one sense, in that we all lived in college, but for one year everyone at University College had to move twelve miles away to Lumley Castle near Chester-le-Street. It was another ancient castle, dating from the fourteenth century, which our college had taken over, as we had run out of accommodation space in Durham itself. It was run like a mini version of the main college, with a Lumley JCR and Senior Man, a residen
t master, Dr Prouse, who was an old boy of the college. There was a Great Hall where we had breakfast and dinners, but we all travelled each day on a coach into Durham City. If you missed the free bus, either there or back, you had to trail into Chester-le-Street and pay to go on the normal bus.

  The food was better in the Lumley Great Hall and the maids who served us were younger and more attractive. High up in the attics of the castle, there was an enormous, timbered and panelled room where we played indoor football, bashing a ball against ancient panels. That would not have been allowed in Durham Castle.

  I have never been back to Lumley Castle since that year, 1955, but I have caught sight of it on TV. I don’t follow cricket but the towers of Lumley are usually in the background when Durham CCC play at home at Chester-le-Street. Durham was not a first-class county in the fifties; in fact, I had no idea there was a cricket club, yet it dates back to 1882. It was not until 1991 that they were admitted into the first-class county game, but they went on to win the County Championship and host Test matches. I rush to the telly, hoping for close-ups, to see if I can spot my old room.

  Lumley Castle is now a hotel, last time I looked it up. Durham students no longer need to traipse out there, as there are so many new colleges and buildings in and around Durham itself. Today there must be getting on for almost 20,000 students at Durham – compared with just 1,500 in my day. At least half of them women. Lucky so-and-sos.

  Being stuck out at Lumley did have one good effect. I must have done some work for once. My General Arts degree course was a combination of ancient history, Roman history and geography. It was probably easier, for I sailed through my exams at the end of the second year.

  So my undergraduate days did not come to a premature end, as I’d once feared they might. And I am sure my mother had feared it as well.