Читать книгу Now This is a Very True Story - Jimmy Jones - Страница 12
ОглавлениеA bloke visiting Dagenham docks sees a docker on the floor writhing in agony.
‘What’s wrong with him?’ he asks.
His union rep says, ‘He needs a shit.’
‘OK,’ says the stranger. ‘Why doesn’t he just go the toilet?’
‘What?’ says the union rep. ‘On his ’kin’ dinner break?’
MY FATHER WAS back on the scene by now working up at the Ford Motor Company’s Dagenham plant and so I got a job up there as an arc welder. But I was still only 19 and you weren’t supposed to work there until you were 21. After a few weeks a guy came up to me with a sob story saying that his wife had had a heart attack and he needed to do day work would I mind doing a spell of nights for him? I said I didn’t mind swapping for a while but after a month of it I’d had enough: working nights I couldn’t go out and sing and this bastard wouldn’t swap back. It was driving me nuts.
Well, Dagenham docks was just down at the bottom of my lane so I thought I’d pop down and see if they had any work going there. As I turned the corner I see a bloke standing at the bus stop and I offered him a lift. It turned out he was going to Samuel Williams, which was the lorry firm at Dagenham docks, so I said ‘Well jump on.’
After I dropped him off, I parked up the bike and asked at the gate if there were any jobs going. The fella told me to go and see the personnel officer, who just happened to be the bloke I’d given a lift to, and he said, ‘What are you after?’
It turned out the only job vacancy was in the oil farm, loading tankers and so forth. I knew nothing about it but I said I’d have a go. I gave in my notice at Ford and a week later I started at Samuel Williams.
The docks were good to me. The unions were strong and you could get up to all sorts. The boats used to arrive and you could buy bottles of gin for a pound and stuff like that, and of course being the enterprising guy that I was, I started a little trade in alcohol and everything else I could get my hands on.
Also in Dagenham docks they used to have what they called the coal fields, where they would unload the coal. Coal was very expensive to buy at the time and naturally we had a coal fire back at Sunnings Lane. I’d sold me motorbike and side car by now and bought myself a Ford. The back seat used to lift up and of course whenever I used to go over the coal fields I’d lift up the back seat, fill it up with coal and take it home.
I once had a whole barge load of salmon away. I didn’t actually physically nick it but I put the barge where someone else could. Because rationing hadn’t long ended there was a ready market for pretty much anything that we could get our hands on.
I was a right little thieving bastard to be truthful, but a lot of us were. We were a proper bunch of tea leaves. There was one fella we used to call Batman cos he couldn’t go home without Robbin’. It was common to nick 500 gallons of diesel. I needed to because I had kids around me. It was a way of life. Everyone turned a blind eye to it. I even had a Customs officer take me to one side and ask if there was any chance of me getting him a bottle of Scotch.
I was working on the oil installation, the boats used to come in and we’d unload them. I learnt to drive a crane and, after a little while, I became jetty foreman. Being the foreman was great because I could do whatever the fuck I wanted to. But it meant I was responsible for the jetty.
One day we had a boat coming in called the Good Gulf that needed to have so many hundreds of tonnes of oil unloaded from it in a certain time otherwise it would have settled on the bottom. So we’ve got all the cranes up in the air with all the pipes ready so that as it landed we could bolt it up, the tanks were empty and they could start pumping straight away.
So I’m standing there with a crew of fellas and I could see this Good Gulf coming up, and I said to them, ‘It ain’t half coming up fast.’ All of a sudden it started to turn and I thought, that’s never going to be able to turn in the time that it’s got, so I just turned round and shouted to everybody: ‘Get off the jetty!’
And of course the jetty was 50 or 60 yards long so everybody started to leg it. I stood there until the very last minute and then I scarpered and of course the boat hit, and it ploughed itself into the jetty a good 15 foot. Crunch!
The impact was so great it actually moved the offices which were on shore. Anyway, I was in charge of the jetty and there was this boat stuck 15-foot into it, so when the managing director of Samuel Williams, Mr Carmichael, came huffing and puffing along I was the one he wanted to talk to. He could see the cranes and everything else and it was obviously all completely buggered now. He asked for the foreman. I stepped forward, and Carmichael said, ‘Did you see this?’
‘Yes, I did sir,’ I replied.
‘Well, what did you see?’
‘I saw this big boat coming up the river, guv, and I said to the boys, “He’s coming up too fast,” and when I see him starting to turn I thought he’s never going to be able to swing that boat round ’cos he was coming in at high tide and I told everybody to get off the jetty.’
Carmichael shook his head. ‘And what steps did you take?’ he asked.
‘Big ’uns,’ I replied. ‘And fucking plenty of ’em!’
Well, he didn’t think that was funny at all. I got a reprimand over that, and I was suspended for two days even though the collision had had nothing to do with me and I’d probably saved some lives or at least saved men from injury. But all Carmichael was worried about was that the jetty was out of work. People were replaceable, profits weren’t. And profits were all he cared about.
* * * *
I was always singing in the docks, because we had the tanks there that we kept oil in and if you sang in them when they were empty you had the best echo system that you ever heard. And the other blokes always made me feel good with encouraging words like, ‘He’s only fucking singing again’, ‘What a fuckin’ racket!’ and ‘Put a fuckin’ sock in it, Albert.’
All the time I was working in the docks, I never stopped doing my cabaret act. Every other night I’d be out singing and whistling in different pubs all around the area and the East End, only now I would slip in the odd joke between the songs.
The blokes I worked with were a funny crew. One was called Phil the Pram ’cos his wife was pregnant every year. They were all nice enough guys and we had a great time but they were all married and most of their wives were at work too, and none of them wanted to do Sundays because that was the only day they could have with their missus. So I always used to volunteer to do the Sundays ’cos they were a doddle. On a Sunday you had to load ten, maybe 12 lorries. You’d go in at 8am and you’d be finished by midday. Plus you got double time for working on Sundays. So it was a result. And then I’d have Mondays off ’cos my wife was at home with the kids.
But even though I was doing them all a favour, there were complaints made because I never worked on a Monday so I got dragged in front of Mr Carmichael again and he said, ‘I notice you have quite a lot of Mondays off.’ I said, ‘That’s right, I have sir’, so he said, ‘Is there a reason for it?’ I said ‘Yes, I don’t mind working for double time and having single time off.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ he asked. I said, ‘Well, have a look down the list at all the blokes who are moaning about me, none of them will do Sundays, I’m the only one who will come in on a Sunday, so I work Sundays and have Monday off. But you give me double time for Sundays, so I don’t mind working for double time and having Mondays off.’
He thought about it and he said, ‘I’ve got to tell you, I make you right but I’ve got to be seen to be punishing you, so I’m going to put you on four days suspension with pay, starting from today.’ And he told me to go back to my locker, pack and tell them I had the four days suspension but not to mention that he was paying me.
So I went back to this lobby and I said to the crew, ‘You bastards have just buggered up this job. Because of your moaning and groaning, Carmichael will now go to shift work and he will do a seven day a week shift, and that will bugger you up completely.’ And lo and behold, less than a month later he brought in shifts: 6am-2pm, 2pm-10pm, and nights; which meant that I had to do night work again which inevitably interfered with me going out singing, and I knew that it would be the beginning of the end for me and the docks.
