If nothing else, peddling these papers in the pub gave me an excuse to talk to girls like Claire Beesley. She was the sizzling school sex siren, and when Claire was in fourth year and I was in the lower sixth we exchanged notes through my brother Simon who acted as a messenger. Claire would write telling me what music she was listening to – Lou Reed’s Transformer I seem to recall – and how hot and sticky she got when she thought about me. Everyday teenage stuff like that. We’d never actually spoken, Claire and I, but she occasionally smiled at me as we passed in the corridor. One day I plucked up the courage to call her only for the phone to be answered by Mark Barnes. It turned out that Barnes, leader of the local chapter of 50cc Hell’s Angels, was her new boyfriend. I felt humiliated, but not nearly as humiliated as I was the following weekend when Barnes swaggered past me in the Brandling pub armed with a note I’d written to her weeks earlier and read it out loud to all his hairdryer-riding motorcycle mates. Now at last I had a new opportunity to impress Claire and the other girls with my cartoons . . . although why girls should be impressed by cartoons about a young boy whose head falls off, and a drawing of a dog shitting on a dinner table, I hadn’t really stopped to consider.
As the summer of 1978 drew to a close I started looking for a job. I had no career ambitions but fancied working for a year, then perhaps going to college. I applied for twenty-seven vacancies in all, but my solitary A-level meant I was ‘over-qualified’ for most of them. I went for one interview at a bus depot in Gateshead, hoping to get the job of clerk. An oily foreman in overalls interviewed me. ‘You’d have to make the tea, you know,’ he said, as if such a menial task was below someone with a Geography A-level. He was clearly looking for someone with fewer qualifications and bigger tits. But I persevered and thought I was still in with a chance until the final question, ‘Why do you want to work in a bus depot?’ I thought about it for a second. ‘Because I like buses,’ I said, with a hint of rising intonation. I didn’t get the job.
By the time my interview for Clerical Officer in the DHSS came around I’d given a lot of thought to the ‘Why do you want to . . .’ question. It seemed to crop up at every interview. This time I was ready with an answer. ‘And finally, why do you want to work in the civil service?’ asked the chairman of the panel. ‘I don’t particularly,’ I said. ‘I’m just looking for a steady job that pays well in order to fund my hobby, which is railway modelling,’ I told him, trying to look as nerdy as possible. It worked an absolute treat. All four members of the panel smiled simultaneously and I was told there and then that I’d got the job. You had to be pretty fucking thick not to get a job at the Ministry. Even Mark Barnes had got in the year before me. In those days the Ministry was a safety net for school leavers who couldn’t get anything better. The Department of Health and Social Security Central Office Longbenton, to give it its official title, was a massive complex of huts and office blocks spread over several acres, housing upwards of 10,000 clerical staff. It had its own banks, post offices, at least five canteens, a hairdresser’s, and running through the middle of it was the longest corridor in Europe. I spent the first few weeks in a classroom learning about the history of National Insurance, which I found quite interesting, then I was posted to Unit 4, Overseas Branch D1, Room A1301. This was a huge open-plan office, about the size of a five-a-side football pitch, where over 100 people sat stooped over desks, writing letters and filling in forms. My specific area of responsibility was dealing with people whose National Insurance numbers ended in 42 (C or D), 43 or 44.
I loved having my own desk, my own ‘in’ and ‘out’ trays and my own stationery items, but what I liked most was all the forms there were to fill in. In the DHSS you had to fill in a form before you could go to the loo, and if you were having a shit you’d have to send a requisition slip to Bumwipe Supplies Branch at least three days in advance. I liked filling in forms and I enjoyed the daily routine too, although it wasn’t particularly healthy. Stodgy fried food was available in the canteens all day long, and there was a tea trolley serving hot drinks and Empire biscuits. These consisted of two big, sugary rounds of shortbread stuck together with jam, covered in icing and with half a cherry on the top. The tea trolley came every day, morning and afternoon, and with almost the same frequency someone in the office would have a heart attack and fall backwards off their chair. From our window we could see the main gate and the constant flow of ambulances going in and out, carting heart attack victims off to hospital. Life expectancy wasn’t high in the Ministry, and neither were the levels of job satisfaction. You were in big trouble if you stopped to think about what you were actually doing. The majority of the work was putting right other people’s mistakes. For example, an oil worker would write in from Saudi Arabia with an enquiry and some daft sod would send him a leaflet which clearly didn’t provide the information he wanted. So he’d write back, repeating his query. This time he’d get a stock reply asking what his National Insurance number was. So he’d write back a third time telling us what his National Insurance number was. But in the meantime we’d have lost his file, so the person who received his third letter wouldn’t have a clue why he was writing in and telling us what his National Insurance number was. So we’d write to him a third time, this time asking why he was sending us his National Insurance number. And so on. Mix-ups like this occurred every day, in their thousands, because all the filing systems were kept manually by people, the vast majority of whom didn’t give a toss. So the whole place was in effect a self-perpetuating human error factory.
If you could take your mind off the work, and say no to an Empire biscuit, the Ministry was a great place to be. The social life was brilliant and there was a wonderful mix of characters, from Joe the Trotskyite union rep to John the racist nutcase who refused to urinate in pub toilets on the grounds that he’d paid good money for the drink and he’d be damned if he was going to piss it straight back into their toilets. One of my favourite characters was a bloke called Dave who sat at a desk behind me. Dave was the best swearer I have ever known. For some reason only working-class people can swear properly, and Dave was a master of the art. His swearing was never aggressive, it was always done for emphasis and comic effect, and when he swore I found it pant-pissingly funny. Every day I’d find myself scribbling down little things he’d said and expressions he’d used. I didn’t know what I was going to do with them, I just felt an instinctive urge to record them for posterity.
I put my name down for the office football team, but unfortunately the manager was an early pioneer of the squad rotation system, and he tended to rotate me from one end of the substitutes’ bench to the other. I couldn’t get a game, so to pass the time I started writing reports on our matches which I then typed up at home and took in to work the following day. Like my Fat Crusader books these match reports caught on, circulating around the office and causing much sniggering and laughter. But the office audience contained a broader spectrum of public taste than I’d previously been used to, and it wasn’t long before one miserable old bat took offence at some of the language. I’d faithfully quoted our captain telling our centre forward, ‘You couldn’t score in a brothel with a ten pound note tied round your chopper.’ Pretty harmless, you’d think, but this was the civil service and a complaint was made to the Higher Executive Officer. Sending non-official circulars around