Читать книгу Class of '79 - Chris Rooke - Страница 3

In the lead up to my exams I was left pretty much to my own devices, as had been the case for the preceding few years. I had little restraint or authority at home, and so things began to go slightly awry. Weekends and evenings were spent in the various student bars and pubs around town (which, being the major student hub that was Oxford, there were many to choose from) and my days, supposedly filled with revision whilst on study leave were spent mending an old Mini I had bought. I always loved driving and riding motorcycles and I had taken my moped test at the start of my A levels, as soon as I turned 16, so I could take my girlfriend on the back (the fact that I didn’t actually have a girlfriend at the time was irrelevant! - I lived in hope.) It was the mid-seventies when I turned 16 and the sports moped craze was at its height (before the law changed a few years later to stop 16 year olds going way too fast on ever more powerful machines). The king of the sports moped was unquestionably the Yamaha FS1E, but there was no way I could afford one, so I bought a second-hand Casal moped, a bike that had originally been designed by Zundapp in Germany, but were actually made by a company in Portugal. It was an absolute dog of a bike, with a false neutral between every gear, and an exhaust pipe that fell off every time you hit a bump, but it was fast!

When I finally turned 17 (it seemed like an eternity!) I was old enough to ride a proper motorcycle, up to 250cc (once again, the law on this changed soon after) and I sold the Casal and bought an old BSA Starfire 250 that I paid just £60 for as it ran so badly. Luckily, the one talent that I inherited from my father was an ability to work on anything mechanical, and I was able to mend the Starfire without too much fuss (a bent needle in the carburettor was the problem), and I took my motorcycle test as soon as I could. Taking my test meant that I could ride more powerful bikes and also, again, I could take my girlfriend on the back, as by then I did actually have one: the beautiful Diane. Having passed my motorbike test, I sold the BSA and bought a Suzuki 350 Rebel, which was a revelation when compared with old Starfire in that it was fast, light, ran like clockwork and didn’t leak oil.

Teenager on stationary motorcycle

A short while later I sold the Suzuki, and, together with some cash I’d saved up from my part-time job, I bought a Mini – my very own car!

The part-time job I had was as a cleaner at Debenhams in town, and cleaners began work at 6.00am and finished at 8.00am, six days a week. This meant that I had to get up at 5.30 every morning before heading to work on my moped/motorcycle, doing my cleaning job, and then heading straight off to school. As a result of such early starts I was continually in a state of tiredness and fatigue and I fell asleep at school quite regularly, and it most certainly didn’t help with homework in the evenings. My dad had a favourite expression: ‘Hard work never hurt anybody,’ but a few years later I came to realise that this glib statement just simply isn’t true – how many people have died in the mines and factories of this world by being overworked, ill-treated and exposed to noxious chemicals? Hard work has definitely hurt a lot of people.

Quite apart from having to get up at a ridiculous hour of the morning, the job itself was horrendous, and we (myself and my great friend Gazza) were given areas to clean that should really have been covered by at least two people. My job was to hoover and mop the entire second floor of the department store. This meant that to begin with I had to hoover the sports department, followed by the the main admin offices situated behind it.

The offices were a nightmare to clean as they used copious amounts of rubber bands for some task or other, and they littered the floor every day, and these would regularly jam the roller on the ancient hoover I had been provided with, which then had to be dismantled and unblocked before I could continue. I then had to mop the floor of the kitchens that serviced the café/restaurant, before then hoovering the whole restaurant itself. It was a bugger of a job, and I had to work really hard every day just to try and finish all the work in the allotted time, which made me even more tired. But I made good money: £6 a week! Wow!