Working on the Roads

One of the things I worry about on behalf of the young people of today is ‘where are they going to get their experience?’ The threat of AI is that, even in the short term, unskilled work is going to disappear. But that was entirely the work which got our generation started in life and taught them right from wrong. Jobs like working in a canning factory or a warehouse for knitted goods, selling records in Woolworths, or serving in a local butchery or bakery, are essential for developing people skills, sorting out how to organise your schedule, and taking responsibility for keeping the ship afloat.

Personally, though I had some of these jobs, they were of the wrong type, and I never properly benefited from the dealing-with-people side of things. Nonetheless, they taught me a lot – and many amusing things came to pass.

My first job was during the long school summer vacation. A neighbour’s brother had a business as the groundsman at local BT telephone exchanges. Cutting the grass and tidying up hedging on a plot perhaps 50m2 didn’t take that long but there was plenty of driving between jobs, so the days were full. Mind you, there were only two seats in the van so, if the man’s father came along, I was relegated to sitting in the back with the lawn mowers. The father was ancient. It was difficult to ignore that he brought a scythe with him, and for some jobs this was invaluable. I complimented him on the tool, to which he replied that it was old and buggered now, like its owner. I got about £15 a week, which wasn’t too bad for a sixteen-year-old.

One day we were working in Summertown, Oxford. The exchange was situated in one of the narrow Oxford residential streets, lined on one side by parked cars. A woman from over the road came to where we were working and asked me to call 999 for her, she was too nervous. She pointed to a commotion a hundred or so yards up the street. Some people were trying to deal with smoke billowing from their car. I was nervous too, but I followed her to her house and called the fire brigade. My excitement turned to embarrassment when the fire engine turned up to help the man put some water in his overheated radiator.

The job seemed to be a steady employment, and I was called up again the next summer. But it wasn’t long before I was surprised by being transferred. I was told one Friday that I’d be working as a builder’s mate the following Monday. We worked all over the area – Abingdon, Wallingford and so on. But towards the end of the Summer, the builder had a job building a pool house at what seemed to me to be a stately home in Guildford. It was hot, so I was stripped to the waist most of the time. The builder thought it highly amusing that I was carrying a roll of glass wool for insulation on my shoulder. He thought I would be paying for this in itching – though I don’t seem to recall this as a problem.

“How would you like to work in this line of business”, he asked one afternoon as we were tacking down roofing felt on the new pool house. “Oh no,” I said, “it’s too hard.” This was intended to be a throw-away remark, but he seemed put out. “Too hard be buggered…” He expostulated, “… you have an easy time of it.” I had to think fast. “Oh no, I don’t mean too physically demanding. But I’ve watched you being a plumber, bricklayer, glazier, electrician, carpenter and decorator. I’m pretty sure I could never excel in all those areas.” His ego was fluffed up, and I’d got away with it. But I don’t remember any pay rise as a consequence.

When I was in my third year of an Applied Biology course at Trent Polytechnic, it looked like there was going to be a problem with my industrial placement. The course was a thin sandwich which meant that for the first three years, six months would be spent in academia and the other six months working in a suitable establishment. I’d already done six months in London working on diseases of bananas, and six months in Warwickshire at the National Vegetable Research Station where I majored in downy mildew of lettuce, but this placement was very much delayed in its announcement. Ann and I were getting married at the end of the summer, so I very keen to be in Wantage. I took the matter into my own hands and wrote to Dr Scott Russell, the head of Letcombe Laboratory, a very highly thought of government facility. It wasn’t that I was the brilliant but overlooked kid who just needed a break in order to become leader of the free world. Rather, I was looking for a piece of arrant nepotism. Scott Russell had been chair of the school governors at King Alfreds School in Wantage, and I was simply wondering if he could look favourably on an old boy and give me a job. It worked. I would be studying the root system of Hordeum vulgare, barley.

It wasn’t that I knew the man. He had given the opening address at a school prize day years earlier. I remembered a bad joke he had told about the Chinese landing some insects on the moon. They were lunar ticks. Maybe that’s why I thought he might be approachable. It was also helpful that Ann’s aunt Peggy was the chief lab assistant in the hydroponics greenhouses.I nearly blew the gaff one day when Scott Russell himself came round the labs during the afternoon and asked me if I knew what I was doing.

I said, “No. Ha ha ha ha.”

He stood and lectured me for an hour on what I was doing.

But the lab job was only for four months, and that left two months before the wedding. I needed to do something else. My uncle Jim was a quantity surveyor at Amey Roadstone, a local highway maintenance firm. He used his influence, in another spot of nepotism, to get me a job on one of the road crews. Don’t worry, he said, it’ll be raining and you’ll be in a shed the whole time, playing cards. It was the summer of 1976 and turned out to be the hottest and dryest on record.

Now, this isn’t the story about when Tuggy got a JCB to dig a hole and cut through the main power cable to Milton Trading Estate, the largest store of supermarket frozen goods in the area.

No, this one is about the pedestrian underpass we were making on the roundabout where the A34 emerges into Newbury. We would be there for weeks, and I got to know Tuggy and the other guys quite well. They had had another student just before me, a chap called Martin. Although I’d made it very clear that my name was Andrew, they kept calling me Martin. It was an understandable mistake but also quite annoying. I tried for three days to put them right on what my name actually was, but eventually I caved in and became Martin. If somebody said, “Martin” then I would look up and ask how I could help. Nevertheless, there was a nagging doubt at the back of my mind that this situation couldn’t possibly end well.

The other thing that men who work on the roads do is to swear a lot. For them, the word “Fucking” doesn’t imply that they are angry or frustrated. It’s just a filler word, a meaningless adjective. “Martin, run over there and get the fuckin’ shovel.” The word was even applied to my non-name. “Fuckin’ Martin’s alright, but he’s got soft ‘ands.”

Tuggy was telling me that he had once worked at nearby Harwell Atomic Energy Commission. He worked near the reactor and had to wear one of those blow-up clear plastic radiation suits, like a spaceman. Part of his job was to wheel a metal box on a trolley arrangement over to a port in the reactor wall, lock the wheels of the trolly, and then push on a handle to insert the fissile material into the reactor chamber. One day, the wheel locking mechanism had a problem and when he pushed the handle, it forced the box away from the reactor wall and the radioactive material fell to the floor. Alarms were going off everywhere, and every light in the building was flashing. Tuggy knew he was being badly irradiated and so, in the heat of the moment, he bent down, picked up the little brick and threw it into the reactor and shut the door. Needless to say, he was subjected to numerous medical checks and take countless showers. But eventually they told him that he had absorbed his annual quota of radiation and could no longer work at Harwell. He’d had to get a job on the roads.

“Bloody hell,” I said, still an amateur with “Fucking”. “Do you have any children? Any lumps and bumps? Any persistent sores? Flashbacks to the event?” No to all these questions, and we didn’t discuss it again.

One day, some of the lads were sitting in the van, parked at the side of the road and facing what looked like a council estate. I was in the back of the van. I know my place. We were eating our snap. That’s lunch. So called because lunch is always served up in a snap box.

One of them said, “Martin. You’re doin’ that fuckin’ nature thing, ain’t yer?”

“Yes,” I said, “I’m taking a biology degree.”

“Well, look into that garden there, just over the hedge. There’s a massive thing, looks like a thistle. What’s it called?”

“Ah. Not my strong point I’m afraid. I couldn’t even tell you what family it belongs to.”

“Well, you’re fuckin’ thick then, ain’t yer. It belongs to the family in that house.”

I had to agree that there was some logic in what he said but couldn’t muster the energy to explain botanical classification to him.

But all good things come to an end, and all too soon it was time for me to leave. The foreman showed up with the necessary paperwork.

“Now then,” he said, “Name. I’ll just put Martin Gregory, shall I?”

“Er. No. Don’t use Martin.”

“Well, shall I put M. Gregory then?”

“No. My name isn’t Martin.”

“Well, what the fuck is it then?”

“Andrew. My name is Andrew Gregory.”

“Well, why the fuck have we been calling you Martin?”

I said the first thing that came into my head. “Um. It’s a nickname.”

“Well, that’s a fuckin’ funny nickname, isn’t it?”

I thought, “But you gave it to me,” and made my escape.