It wasn’t long before I was finishing my round before most of the rest of the boys had even started theirs and it wasn’t long before I was promoted to the heady heights of ‘spare boy’.
The roll of spare boy was to be both my first promotion and the first position for which I would be retained. Spare boy was paid an additional weekly fee for coming back after his round every morning in case someone hadn’t turned up. If this happened to be the case, spare boy would rush to the rescue like a paper boy superhero to save the day, all for a bonus payment of course.
There were occasions when I would end up doing not one extra round but two or three in all. If a boy was a no show, I would take on his round and see if I could do it quicker than him. I would sometimes run my rounds—the quicker I delivered, the lighter my bag would be; the lighter my bag, the quicker still I could go. It all made perfect sense to me. I would see other boys trudging their rounds, hating every second, where was their logic? If you don’t like something, either don’t do it in the first place, or get it over with as soon as possible, don’t drag it out, for heaven’s sake.
When old paper boys left, new paper boys replaced them and they in turn would have to be taught their rounds. This was another aspect of the spare boy’s role. In time, I came to know all sixteen of our rounds, something that would stand me in great stead for the future.
The next step up the employment ladder was to get a collecting round. Not only were some people too lazy to get their own newspapers in the morning but some of them, it transpired, couldn’t even be bothered to go and pay their bill once a week.
I found this incredible, I could hardly believe such goofballs existed but more fool them and more money for me. Their lethargy was my lolly.
Being given a collecting round was the first outstretched finger of trust from Ralph to one of his boys. The boys who held the lofty position of collector were considered very much senior to those who did not. Every Friday, after school, the collecting cognoscenti would chase down the same paper rounds as we did in the mornings but this time free of our bulging bags and armed instead with book, biro and a pocket full of jangling coins.
We were each given a two-pound float to take with us in case any customers needed change. Upon our return, we then had to add up our receipts, count out our money, subtract our float from the total and hence, hopefully, balance our books. This was my first encounter with simple but highly effective early business practice. This is how business worked. What could be more straightforward?
The pay for collecting was 10 per cent of whatever you collected, which often turned out to be more than you would get for a whole week of delivering. This was easy street in comparison to the delivery rounds, but you had to deliver to get to collect and the better you delivered the better collecting round you were rewarded with. Ralph was a disaster at social intercourse but he sure knew how to get the best out of his boys. He was like a cross between Scrooge and Fagin.
So, what with my morning round, the hallowed position of spare boy, the collecting round, plus additional evening and the Saturday Pink Final rounds (the Pink Finals were sport result sheets, prepared to arrive half an hour after the final scores had come in), I was bringing home easily over a tenner, more towards fifteen quid a week!
Doing the maths, I figured this meant in six weeks I would have close to a hundred pounds. A hundred pounds to my mind was a small fortune—it was enough to buy a brand new bike and still have fifty quid left. It took my mum a whole year to buy my last bike. On this kind of money I could even afford a secondhand motorcycle, or even, at a stretch…an old car! Not that I had any use for one as I was still three years away from being eligible to drive.
This was simply amazing to me, the concrete of the council estate where I lived was still all around but its greyness was beginning to fade. As I had suspected, working worked.
Some of the houses where I collected from on a Friday were also the ‘nice’ houses. I could see into their living rooms as I stood by the door waiting for someone to come and pay. These houses had a different smell, they had a different energy, there was more going on. The women who answered the doors seemed to smile more, they were prettier, kinder, they even looked younger. What was it with these people? They had something else going on.
Then one day I realised. They were happier.
I made another mental note, bigger, nicer house, equals happier—usually unless you were Ralph or one of the other grumblies.
10 Richard Branson (Virgin Radio)
9 Michael Grade (Channel 4)
8 Andrea Wonfor (Channel 4)
7 Don Atyeo (The Power Station)
6 Timmy Mallett (Piccadilly Radio)
5 Charlie Parsons (The Big Breakfast)
4 Waheed Alli (The Big Breakfast)
3 Matthew Bannister (Greater London Radio)
2 Lesley Douglas (Radio 2)
1 Mike Hibbett (Ralph’s Newsagents)
My newsagency career continued to blossom and with it my bank account. It wasn’t long before I saw my next promotion. Forget the army, there are more ranks to the hierarchical structure of a newsagents than most international organisations.
My next stripe on the arm was a biggy: I was to be elevated to the much-envied post of ‘marker-up’.
The marker-up was the boy who arrived at the same time as Mike the manager. Mike was dead cool, he was forty, which I thought was pretty old at the time but not that old—not in his case at least. To my mind there are young forty year olds and there are old forty year olds, and Mike was definitely one of the former. He loved to play squash, had been a pretty handy footballer in his day and still kept himself fit by going for a run three or four times a week. He was also one of life’s good guys.
Mike is still in the top three bosses I’ve ever had. He was the type of guy that you just did things for, he was always really kind to me. I remember he had a son who I thought was so lucky to have a dad like him.
Mike worked hard and always had a smile on his face, especially when the two girls from the chemist came in for their fags. The girls from the chemist were hot—and I mean really hot. I can still picture them perfectly today. They had huge big smiles, the kind that can take you away to another place. Both of them were brunettes, with bunches of gorgeous shiny hair cascading down over their shoulders and they always came in wearing their white coats, almost always giggling.
Please don’t tell me—anyone who’s reading this—that they ever got any older. Girls like that should be preserved for ever, just as you remember them. One was called Jill, the small one, she was the one I really fancied, but I never found out the name of the other one—I just called them Jill and Thrill.
Obviously I was far too young to stand a chance with either—they were in their twenties and I was only thirteen—but I could fantasise. Boy, could I fantasise.
Meeting and talking to women that I would never otherwise have come into contact with was another big bonus of working in the shop. I could see what made them laugh, what made them sad, how they were so different to the men that came in. Experience that undoubtedly helped me in the rest of my life when it came to getting on with the opposite sex.
If you think about it, boys of a certain age usually only get to talk to girls roughly the same age—their only other female interaction being with members of their family and their mum’s mates or maybe their mates’ mums. This is why so many young boys end up fancying such ladies, it’s a question of needs must. These women are often the only other ‘real women’ young boys come into contact with.
Perhaps this is also why so many mums also