First Job
Saturday, and sometimes after school, job
Saturday Job
It would have been better to have gt a job away from the parents. Start making an independent path. But the choice I made was the lazier, easier one. Working for my parents I could roll out of bed just before I had to start, eat breakfast whilst I waited for customers, learned how to juggle stock figures so I could steal cigarettes and chocolates.
I had almost got another job. We had been in town shopping. Mum had sent me into this little grocer's store. It was dark but sold all sorts of treasures that in the 2020s we take for granted but back then, the 1970s, they were seen as slightly exotic, especially in a small rural town in Somerset where the most exotic food my mum would cook was spaghetti bolognaise with extra long spaghetti. We were still living in an era of meat, potatoes and two veg. Though I do remember there was a potato shortage and Blue Peter1 taught us how to make scones Shepherd's pie topped with scones instead of mash. That was seen as pretty daring.
So I'd gone into the slightly scary, dingy grocer's shop. Whilst searching for the items I'd been sent into buy a disembodied voice called out “Are you looking for a job?”
I stuttered and stumbled, “No. No. I need some sun-dried tomatos.”
“On the right,” came the voice.
I picked up the jar and went to pay.
“Shame you don't want a job. I need someone right now,” said a small dark haired lady from behind the counter, her hair encased in a red patterned scarf.
“I'm fine. Thank you,” I said hurriedly picking up my change and the jar and rushing out.
Later I did tell my mum and she gave me a long talk about how I should have taken it followed up with how it would have been almost impossible for me to get there so it was probably for the best I worked with them. This was very similar to what happened to me a couple of years later. My mum told me, when I'd finished my 'O' levels that if I didn't get a job over the summer then I needed to go back and take 'A' levels. I didn't look that hard for a job but she then found me one with her accountant. A job I really hated and left after four months. But by then I was in the working world and saw no way of going back to do 'A' levels. That's my mum, a mass of anomalies and contradictions.
So here I was every Saturday morning in my jeans and sweatshirt with my red Esso hat waiting for a car to pull up at the petrol pumps.
It was a grey concrete forecourt that sloped down from the large dark blue double doors of the workshop. To the left was a glass fronted showroom where my dad kept the cars he hoped to sell. If the weather was nice he would drive out these Jaguars and Mercedes, sometimes the odd MGB or Daimler, and they would stand sentinel between the workshop and the petrol pumps.
There were two pumps; one for four star and one for two star. In between the petrol pumps were two oil containers; one a larger pump action one for four stroke and the other smaller for two stroke. There were oils that were added to petrol to help with the running of certain engines, especially small mopeds and motorbikes.
The mornings were busy with everyone rushing to fill up before going off to do the weekly shop or to beat the rush, as they said. I had my regulars that I knew how much they'd have. Many would just hand me a ten or twenty pound note out the window and I would put in the required amount. There were also those who had accounts and would pay at the end of the month once my mum had sent them their bill. Sometimes this meant a driver would have to follow me back to the office and sign for what I had given them.
Many people did come into the office because we sold cigarettes and sweets and cans of drink which my mum had bought from the cash and carry in a larger town along with our discounted weekly food shopping.
For most of the older people I would be polite and just do my job but I'd try to look cool and swing my hips more when the older boys from youth club came in on their motorbikes, pimply faces and greasy hair hidden beneath full face helmets as they sat on their putting two-stroke 125s. And would stand extra tall when Nigel and Kay, his girlfriend came in all in black leather and long blond hair. I'm not sure now which one I was most in love with.
I liked afternoons best because my parents would go out somewhere and I would be left in charge even though I was only fourteen or fifteen. This gave me chance to steal a packet of 10 Number Six Kingsize and a Mars bar and spend my afternoon alternating between smoking and eating. There was an ashtray in the office where I sat looking out of those huge glass windows which was full of holes to shove cigarette stubs into so they didn't burn out. My dad had got it because he said it was safer than a regular ashtray. The only place no one could smoke was close to the petrol pumps whilst anyone was getting filled up.
In those quieter afternoons when I wasn't gazing out the window on to the steady stream of traffic racing up and down the road I would get lost in a book and know I was earning money for smoking and reading. The idea of being in charge of such an integral part of our family and of village life never struck me as anything special. It was just what I did.
By the time I was sixteen, dating regularly and working Monday to Friday my parents decided to remove the petrol pumps. The cost of buying petrol from the supplier had risen considerably and the profit margin was minute. More and more people were going to the large forecourts who could buy larger discounted amounts of fuel and still make money.
During the seven years we had owned the garage petrol prices had risen from around thirty pence a gallon to around eighty pence a gallon. I remember when I was about thirteen and had just started working on the forecourt lots of complaints and moanings from people as fuel cleared the fifty pence mark. For a rural area it was a huge rise and yet instead of people driving less they would go into the bigger towns so buy from cheaper places adding miles to their journeys.
This village that once boasted a petrol filling garage, car repair workshop, lorry repair workshop, two shops and two pubs now has many more houses but only the one pub, which now serves food and has lost its public bar and our garage has reverted to being just a car repair garage now.
1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Peter
I found this an interesting piece to write as I can remember so much about much of my life at this age but it was like the job was just an inconvenience or an add on. Though it is an interesting historical piece. There was no diesel cars back then, selling large cars rather than small cars wasn’t see as odd, I had to read as I had no phone to play with, and it was ok to leave a teenager alone with inflammable materials money. Most things were paid for by cash, although there were a few credit cards whose details were written out then pulled through a swipe machine!
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Meat, potatoes and TWO veg! My, you were fancy!
Also, I forgot to say, cool hat!